destroying institutions is the plan. it's a cynical party. the only time "build" is mentioned is border walls. unfortunately "great" countries aren't BUILT on fear and cynicism.
Despite DDoS on the wave length, DOGE will not really gain much in the end, the real matter to balance the sheet will come from selling Ukraine which obviously takes some time to materialize.
That's how you make government more efficient: Scrap the brand new fleet you have and buy another brand new fleet.
We may not end up with a smaller government, just a different one.
The entire party is psychos wanting to kneecap departments just to watch them bleed.
For you, is it the chart of 100+ aged in Social Security and the lies that Mosk et all push about Social Security?
There were the boring "bureaucratic reports" about this issue, which shows there was no fraud. https://apnews.com/article/social-security-payments-deceased...
Don't let reality bring you down tho!
Assuming they're false because they haven't been nearly immediately proven publicly makes it too easy for those concerns and allegations to be written off and ignored.
It's fair to treat everything they say in this realm as a lie until proven otherwise, or until they work to build a modicum of trust.
Even the names they give major bills are technically a lie, any legislator that supports or votes for it is lying. Campaign speeches and promises are riddled with lies and omissions. Presidents lie while in office.
I don't mean to play whataboutism here. I'm all for calling out lying politicians here, but I'd extend that to everyone that fits the bill.
The point is that we can't consider a claim true or false. We need evidence to prove it is true, and we can never really prove its false unless we can see all information that could possibly be related to the question.
I don't personally see the government release all information that could possibly be related to any question of fraud or abuse, so we're left either proving it true or considering it unsubstantiated or unproven.
An untrustworthy person is trying to convince you of something, and has access and control of all the information to substantiate everything he's saying. Why is anything left unproven? Because he's relying on information asymmetry to confound you. It's the same thing he did with the so-called "Twitter Files", where he selectively leaked one-sided information to spin a narrative. He's doing the same thing with Doge and people are falling for it. Probably the same ones who fell for the "Twitter files".
Proven liars rely on credulous people like yourself to continue operating once their lies are widely known. That's why when such a liar has power, the only rational stance is extreme skepticism until, like I said, an independent verification can be obtained. Otherwise you open yourself to be taken advantage of.
> I don't personally see the government release all information that could possibly be related to any question of fraud or abuse
We're not asking for that kind of a standard. I would be satisfied with releasing the necessary information that would be sufficient in proving specific questions of fraud raised by Musk to the public. Trusted third parties with appropriate clearances can handle sensitive information, and it can be appropriately redacted for public consumption.
Not totally relevant here, but I find it interesting that this description is literally how our legal system works. The prosecutor is trying to convince the jury of something and the prosecutor holds all their potential evidence, deciding for themselves what to deem relevant or exculpatory.
> We're not asking for that kind of a standard. I would be satisfied with releasing the necessary information that would be sufficient in proving specific questions of fraud raised by Musk to the public.
Agreed, that was actually what I meant in the other option I gave - they can prove the claim true by making public limited facts. I only raised that all related information would have to be released if the goal is to prove the claim false, which it sounds like you don't want or expect.
I would fully expect them to eventually release proof of fraud claims, until then I consider them claims of fraud that are so far unproven.
How long would you wait for them to provide this evidence before deciding they are trying to hoodwink you by withholding it?
When a strongman figure is in charge yelling one thing, though, I do always look in the other direction. Its like a magic show, look where they want to distract you from rather than what they're pointing at.
I'll be very interested to see where this ends up, and a little surprised if its an honest attempt to find fraud and shrink the government or balance the budget.
Maybe the voter doesn't actually care about fraud, but why shouldn't they appreciate having fewer of their tax dollars being spent on things they don't even agree with?
I agree that's a bad approach in almost every situation, but it is par for the course. That isn't to say its okay, but there are worse examples of short term strategies to take issue with if that's the concern.
Democracy doesn’t mean we all agree.
Assuming we do have a democracy today (I'd argue that's questionable for many reasons), a majority of voters and electoral college representatives voted for Trump.
Trump so far is doing many of the things he said he would do. For better or worse our democracy picked this. If it goes poorly we can only blame ourselves.
It's not a winner take all system. If a bunch of racists get elected to office, they can't just claim a "mandate" and declare the Civil Right Act null and void by refusing to enforce it. The President enforces all the laws, even the ones his voters don't support. If he wants to change them, he can sign a bill into law, he can veto a bill, but he can't pick and choose to enforce just Republican passed laws.
We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system as we don't really believe in the principles of democracy.
I'm not saying its a good thing, just how it works. True democracy is a leap of faith, you need to trust that most people are generally good and are generally well intended.
Trump did not run on "I will anex canada, make inflation higher, order damm release and slash department of education".
Some parts he run at - he promised to harm trans and he is delivering.
He didn't run on annexing Canada, he almost certainly doesn't want to though. Trump is a bully and just likes to play cheap games when negotiating. He raised the idea of making Canada a state while also pushing hard on border issues and tariffs. He was just fainting there to try to gain the upper hand.
Inflation is a joke with him. He's completely contradictory there, though that is pretty common. I don't think Trump understands or cares about inflation, it just polls well. He did run on tariffs though, and any voter didn't understand that leads to inflation can only blame themselves.
If the majority runs on cancelling democracy itself (e.g. that if they're elected there will be no more elections and they will stay in power), and they gain a small majority, is it fine for them to now cancel all elections in the future?
If a party runs on (say) taking the homes of those that voted for the opposition, do you think that it's fine if they do it if they get in power? Maybe put them in jails or camps?
Democracy is not just about majority rule. It's about protection of minorities, different rights like free speech or property rights, free trial and other things. There's a reason why there's are constitutions, courts, legislative branches etc.
For sure, laws limiting power are extremely important. My point is simply that if a person or members of a party get elected in numbers to change that, and were clear of their intentions with voters, its totally within Democratic principles for the laws to be changed.
Abe Lincoln changed the laws with regards to slavery. He was elected by popular vote but that meant he went against a sizeable minority of voters and fundamentally changed laws limiting powers and rights. I don't see any problem with that. To be clear, I'm not drawing any comparison directly between Lincoln and any other politician today.
> Democracy is not just about majority rule. It's about protection of minorities, different rights like free speech or property rights, free trial and other things. There's a reason why there's are constitutions, courts, legislative branches etc.
Democracy is a political model for how to elect those in charge. The ideals built into the US bill of rights are in addition to democracy, not part of it directly. You can democratically elect a bigot for example, but the election was still democratically held.
Not, it's not. If members of a party get elected to remove the ability of their opposition or some of their opposition to vote or cancel the next democratic elections that's in fact undemocratic. Especially in a system like in the US where even without an actual majority of votes you can get the presidency or a majority in the legislative branch.
There are existing laws that limit powers, but with enough support and legislative seats that can all be changed.
Ignoring whether we should choose to defend democracy in that scenario (I would), what do you see as the mechanism built into democracy that stops it?
Yes there are, laws requiring super majority, for example, to change, or counter. You even state so yourself:
> There are existing laws that limit powers, but with enough support and legislative seats that can all be changed.
These changes need "enough support", because there is protection built in the system - so a majority is not enough. Other examples of protection are the Judicial branch having the power to cancel illegal legislation, EOs and other government decisions, the President having the power to veto bills. All of these supposedly provide a checks and balances system, although it is of course imperfect, especially with gerrymandering or the way that the Supreme Court is built (in my opinion life tenure is a bad idea, the court itself needs more members, and the way the members are selected is too politically oriented).
> We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system as we don't really believe in the principles of democracy.
If you have a super-majority that supports extremes that's a whole different ball game. You originally talked about "majority", and how that's the be all end all of democracy. For example, in the US, to change the constitution you'd super majority on the Federal level, as well as (IIRC) majority in 75% of the states.
Nonetheless, everything I've stated is of course based on police/army that will listen to the law and act accordingly. If the people with guns/tanks/advanced weapons act in an illegal way and against the system, of course the law is worthless.
My point remains, though. There is a point at which democracy has no guardrails to prevent a democratic overthrow of the system. Call it a majority, super majority, 60% vote, or whatever the system in place decides. With enough support a democratic system can be thrown out in an entirely democratic election.
We did not, in fact, pick unlimited democracy, largely because never in the history of the country has there been a trust that giving unlimited power to an unchecked, potentially transitory, majority was a good idea. It's why we have Constitutional limits on government. Its why we have dual sovereignty. It's why we have separation of powers in the federal government. It's why we have staggered elections to the Senate. It's why we tend to add additional Constitutional limits on government over time, not fewer.
The history of American involves a fairly intense, often quite violent, debate about these issues. There is no simple settled comprehensive position on what should be within the scope of majoritarian control and what needs to be kept outside of it (and which method should be used to do that.)
Pretending that there is a simple consensus around unchecked majoritarianism, or that the choice is between unchecked majoritarianism and something radically different from the Constitutionally-limited representative democracy the US has had, misguided if not actually dishonest.
Democracy is a process of how leaders are elected, that's it. How our government is structured, our three branches, etc is not part of democracy - those are details of how we implemented a government of democratically elected officials (well, as democratically as it can be considered in a democratic republic with our electoral college system).
They have to do with the actual system of government we've chosen in the United States, which is not naive majoritarianism; either that system is a form of democracy (which it would be by the definitions usually used in modern discussions of real political systems), in which case it disproves the premise "We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules", or it is not, and it makes the full argument, "We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system" irrelevant because, in that case, we have already chosen a different system, and wouldn't need to go back to the drawing board simply because we had a problem with naive majoritarianism -- since rejection of that was baked in from the start.
Trump doesn't see that as a likely outcome.
The "convicted" piece carries a lot of weight here too. Plenty of presidents have done terrible things but were never convicted.
They’re very enthusiastic about rooting out. The fraud is still missing, however.
For example, Musk lied about social security but the records he mentioned were reported by the SSA IG years before. They concluded there wasn’t much fraud because over 98% of the old records weren’t receiving money (and hadn’t made contributions in over 50 years) and it was noted that cleaning them up would cost significantly more than it could possibly save.
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
I believe the number of air incidents has been 2 a week in the last month. Any time now the government just will be ready to declare FAA as a disaster of the previous regimes and that Tech industries will be better at running the admin for the aviation sector.
What part do you think gets built back? Maybe the FBI, when they’re sure it can be weaponized against their enemies.
I wouldn't even begin to guess. This has all moved so quickly that I've yet to find what seems to be a reliable source on what is actually changing.
My point, though, was only that we've so far seen moves to reduce headcount and pause programs. That could be the first step to closing down departments entirely, but it could also be the first step to rebuilding their own version of that department.
There’s nothing to suggest they want to rebuild.
I grew up over that time in a very red part of the country.
In the 90s I always heard of the republican party as the party of small government and individual freedoms.
Starting at least with Bush/Cheney that didn't line up. The party seemed to want a larger military budget, increased federal powers, and a stronger executive branch.
Republican voters I knew largely followed that pattern. They didn't want to see departments closed or authority removed from the government. They just wanted their views written into law. Abortion is a great example, the republican party strongly pushed for regulating what individuals could or could not do, very few were arguing that abortion rights were outside the federal government's authority.
Bush cut funding for education and pushed it to private schools. He cut antipoverty initiatives and pushed funding to church groups. Cut funding for stem cell research. And of course cut taxes for the rich.
The antiabortion response is to cut funds to anything touching abortion (not, say, provide more support to mothers.) And make way for expanded power over reproductive rights at the state level.
The voters I know who vote primarily on this issue want a law on the books banning abortions, they don't want to just defund programs.
By no means does that mean I can extend that view to other voters, but I have yet to hear anyone who feels strongly pro-life argue only for defunding.
The question was will they build back, remember? A ban isn’t rebuilding anything.
That's first order building, there is no need for rebuilding in that scenario.
With regards to the broader DOGE topic, they aren't banning anything yet that I've seen outside of the authority that we already granted the executive branch. I don't necessarily agree with what they're doing, but from the bits and pieces I can pull out of largely political reporting it does seem like they're staying within the bounds of what the executive branch is technically allowed to do.
There will be a legal debate whether there are within the rules to not spend money budgeted by congress. That will come down to an opinion whether the argument that departments are not acting in good faith or reasonably executing their mandate is found by the courts to be reasonable.
That being said, right now there was enough written over years by hard core conservatives and specifically by heritage foundation and in project 2025 to know what they want.
The same people were not to remove abortion protection either, I still remember how everyone and his brother framed that worry as paranoid ... two years before the exact same people did it.
https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/thom-hartmann/two-santa...
And if you believe Project 2025, which I do, however the Trump campaign tried to halfheartedly distance itself from them, lower education:
Project 2025 talks of how children finishing school should be looking more to "buying a house and starting a family" than college. Of course, how the average 18 year old with a high school education and single income (because homeschooling is also a very big goal of Project 2025) is meant to buy this house is left as an exercise for the (uneducated) reader. The important thing is less education and more future "Warriors for Christ" (as someone I know on my FB feed calls their children).
I think a strong argument could be made that an 18 year old with a strong work ethic should be able to get a job that allows them to afford a house in a reasonable timeline.
I don't have any expectation that's actually what 2025 argues, but it would be a good ideal. Why shouldn't a kid out of high school willing to work hard be able to save up for a house and a family in a reasonable amount of time? Should we gate keep that behind college degrees or similar?
But yes, P2025's goal has nothing to do with the wellbeing of said school leaver. They specifically want people to be less educated (easier to manipulate and persuade), and are all about raising as many Christian children as possible to "stack the vote".