Comment by passwordoops
8 days ago
I think it's more Libertarian extremists feeding the public an excuse to execute the Libertarian dream of minimal government oversight
8 days ago
I think it's more Libertarian extremists feeding the public an excuse to execute the Libertarian dream of minimal government oversight
That's yet to be seen. Going for a limited government would require closing a lot of these agencies down, that requires congress.
If the fear of fascism raised by some is accurate, it seems more likely we'll see these agencies gutted and rebuilt as whatever the Trump administration wants them to be instead. No smaller government, just a different one.
"No smaller government, just a different one"
I live in D.C. and many of my neighbors are non-political civil servants of all kinds. All signs point to a dramatically smaller and weaker federal government without congressional action.
Whether these agencies that congress created and funded for decades will continue to exist in any meaningful way is de facto getting decided by congress right now.
The Vought/Musk group has fired 200,000 employees already, and is offloading real-estate as quickly as possible. That action is consistent with gutting, but not rebuilding, these agencies.
So congress either has to exercise its power over the executive to prevent this in the next few weeks, or the loss of capacity will have occurred and rebuilding will take many years and be dramatically more costly than maintenance would have been.
> The Vought/Musk group has fired 200,000 employees already
Were those full-time employees or contractors of some type?
Normally I would just look this up myself, but things have been moving so quickly that the info I find is all over the place and I haven't found a short list of sources to trust.
My understanding was that they "offered" early retirement, not sure how much of an option it was versus a demand. I had also heard they cancelled a lot of contract work, I wouldn't consider that being fired but yeah it does still impact people similarly.
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> that requires congress
Elon is literally closing agencies like the CFPB and USAID down, in defiance of congress and the law. They are working under a legal theory that the president can do that, and are expecting their stacked supreme court to agree with them.
> Elon is literally closing agencies
Is he? I mean this as an honest question, things have moved quickly enough that its hard to keep up.
My understanding that they have been temporarily closing offices or stopping work. I wouldn't consider that as "literally closing agencies" though, at least for me that reads as closing them down permanently rather than temporarily closing the doors.
I don't ask this to defend what they're doing at all. I think we could be much worse off if they're only gutting the agencies without closing them completely.
The executive branch has been given an immense amount of authority over the last half century or so, if that is used to rebuild different agencies technically still fulfilling congressional mandates for USAID or CFPB we could be in for a rude awakening.
Authority is fine when you agree with it, but as soon as the wrong person has that same power you may find you wish it was never granted in the first place.
Congress will only shut down these services if they don't perform. Musk is making sure they don't perform.
That wouldn't necessarily be true. Congress could better, more clearly define what they require of these departments and services.
Most of them were pretty weakly defined and they were given legal precedent to define what their own authority was (unless specifically defined by Congress). The departments could be kept with more clear definitions of what they need to do and what success looks like.
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I don't see why the supreme court couldn't rule a lot of these departments unconstitutional. The justification for many of them is flimsy at best, and seems to be to be in direct contradiction to the "only those rights specifically enumerated" deal.
"I don't see why the supreme court couldn't rule a lot of these departments unconstitutional."
Because they are, in fact, obviously constitutional. The mechanism for eliminating them contemplated by the constitution is for congress to pass a law eliminating them.
If you disagree with my view on this, perhaps you'll be persuaded by voluminous case law over decades upholding the constitutionality of all of these Federal government agencies in face of challenges of precisely the kind you're motioning toward.
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I wouldn't hold my breath for SCOTUS overturning precedence regarding the interstate commerce clause.
I don't actually think the question is whether a strong argument could be made there. There's no political will to challenge it.