At some point we have to consider the possibility that these aren’t just cuts to the budget, but an intentional plan to visit each government department and giving it a stab wound to let it bleed out and die over the course of the next year or two.
"At some point"? That point was a few weeks, like when they blindly purged the folks that did maintenance on nuclear weapons:
* https://time.com/7225798/doge-fires-national-nuclear-securit...
Or when they purged people dealing with bird flu:
* https://apnews.com/article/usda-firings-doge-bird-flu-trump-...
The only thing we know is their intent is never to benefit the majority of the people they are meant to be serving.
They know what they are doing is illegal. Or, if they don't, it's because they are actively insisting on not learning it, what shouldn't make any difference.
The incompetent people were hired / appointed[1] as a form of malice against the "Deep State" (read: civil service) specifically, and government and civil society in general.
"These are not the acts of people who expect to lose power any time soon, or ever."
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/pu...
or
Biden has just transferred power peacefully and gracefully, his supporters didn't initiate any coups.
And after Trump's 2020 loss, Biden basically enacted a bunch of sensible policies, including continuing some reasonable Trump policies (some specific tariffs, for example). Trump in 2025 instead decided to ban paper straws (!!!!).
> but an intentional plan to visit each government department and giving it a stab wound to let it bleed out and die over the course of the next year or two.
If your argument is that they're trying to make agencies die, and you're using the above as evidence for this, then you'd have to convince me that they want the government to lose control of nuclear bombs or bird flu.
I'm saying they want to get rid of government:
With their families.
Their security detail: fired. Their logistics team: fired.
No water, no power, no fuel.
Look: sufficiently advanced incompetence and/or carelessness is equivalent to malice.
I don’t care if you WANT to attend to the nuclear weapons, if you are so unserious, or understaffed, or incompetent, or distracted, or whatever to fail to actually do the thing.
Intent is irrelevant. Outcomes are everything.
Sure, criminal negligence vs murder, but do you really care if it’s your kid?
You have been desperately attempting to defend the “intent” of the perpetrators.
That might rub folks the wrong way, huh?
If someone consistently drives extremely recklessly, refuses to service their brakes, allows their tires to become completely tread worn, removes their mirrors, etc. etc.
What could one reasonably infer about their desire to get into a car crash?
Would loud and repeated claims of a desire to drive safely convince you? Moreover, would you consider such claims to be in good faith, especially if said reckless behavior continues?
Besides, the GOP has said time and time again: let’s make the government so small we can drown it in the bathtub.
What private sector entity would find it profitable, or even be able to, control the bird flu or manage the nuclear arsenal.
Much less, do you want there to be a profit motive in those places?
Murder, manslaughter, intent, accident, purpose, neglect. We have many words that try to put a degree of malice on the act of taking a life, but the life is still gone.
At some point, you need to draw a line in the sand and say "They're going where I can't follow.". Right now, it seems like you're drawing the line right after they come out and tell the world that they specifically intend to burn America to the ground and auction off the remains for their personal profit. Where you draw your line is your own personal choice, but it's worth thinking about ahead of time.
What I see is a ham-fisted approach to slashing the Department of Energy. That's the actual goal. Plenty of anti-Trump outlets report it that way. The idea that they actually want the nuclear weapons to lapse is a pretty bold implication, assuming I'm not misunderstanding the argument.
Here's a quote from the conservative political operative and self-described Christian Nationalist Russ Vought, who is both the current and former head of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump:
“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 because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.” [1]
This is a visceral and radical statement which has gotten some airtime on the news recently. However, it's interesting to note that Project 2025, which Vought helped lead and authored key sections of, does not advocate for the dismantling of USAID, rather recommending that its mission be narrowly aligned to national security goals[2]. In 2025, however, Elon Musk wanted USAID shuttered, and Vought was happy to oblige in his position as "the nerve center of the federal budget."
However, Project 2025 advocates for eliminating or defunding the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Education, EPA, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and other government agencies. It's likely that these will also come under fire.
Finally (and this is my opinion), I believe it is impossible to understand this current administration's policy agenda without at least a surface level understanding of the writing of Curtis Yarvin, a software developer and reactionary political blogger. One this topic, Yarvin says the following:
“What is government? A government is just a corporation which owns a country. Nothing more, nothing less. It so happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly managed and there’s a very simple way to replace that, which is what we do to all corporations that have failed. We simply delete them.”
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...
[2] https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FUL... (pg 253-255)
[3] https://apnews.com/article/trump-doge-russell-vought-project...
Curtis Yarvin isn't a libertarian (anymore), he's a monarchist. I also don't think he would advocate for the government to lose control of the nukes.
I am making the argument that the current administration is trying to make government agencies die, but that it isn't one centrally orchestrated conspiracy. I am using different evidence than the parent comment to make that argument.
More importantly, the purpose of my original comment is to inform readers of the thread on highly influential second-tier actors (Russ Vought is well-known, but he's not Elon Musk) and help foster a more nuanced discussion of the current administration, its motivations, and its actions.
Being overly reductionist makes one easier to reject as partisan.
What is new is the MAGA/2025 hijacking of the Republican party to enact its goals. To the extent that the current Republican leadership is essentially a different party than it was 6 years ago.
It should be handled in the way all >4 year payback US problems are: by empowering a commission to do the neccessary unpopular things and give members longer-than-4-year terms.
It mightve been a hijack at one point, but MAGA owns the whole airline now.
What happened next is that various chancers marched into state institutions, usually with private security details made of low-grade armed thugs promoted from street crime, and said "This is ours now."
The US aristocracy saw this and apparently thought "Perfect - let's make that happen here too."
The fact there's been no significant state or media push back against Musk's takeovers is all anyone needs to know. The aim is a kleptocratic imperium drowning in gold, drugs, delusion, and corruption - which is exactly what Russia turned into.
And if report on this, the president orders you to be behaded
I included a link just below to at the exact timestamp he talks about this:
How Brooks sees Trumpism: not conservative, they don't have a conservative or positive vision for society, they just want to destroy the institutions "dominated" by left. In his words, this means, they are astoundingly incompetent. "Elite Narcissicm" leads to the destruction of every thought system it encounters.
For most of its history, the Republican party was fairly anti-populist (defined by whatever populism was at the time).
The Republican southern strategy from 1980+ was predicated on attracting southern white votes by attacking civil rights (explicitly or implicitly), but ultimately focusing on business priorities (with some headline-catching red meat).
However, in the decades since, the explosion of hardline conservative talk radio then dragged the party to answer to its more egregious populist demands.
Hence Trump.
The most recent thing I can think of was getting Clinton to balance the budget, and he was a democrat.
Had they not, PEPFAR or something similar would have existed a decade or more earlier.
Lotsa people died because of that.
By 2003, it was no longer tenable to refuse to fight AIDS, plus, notable GOP family members got AIDS.
Just like Nancy Reagan’s 180 on gay people once her daughter came out.
The entire platform of the GOP is that the government is the problem.
The ACA would have been much better had the GOP not tried to stop it any way possible. Suing to remove critical aspects of it, voting at every turn against it, arguing that there would be death panels for grandparents.
Even once it was law, no attempt to improve, or replace.
A good faith effort would include an alternative health care plan. Where is it?
Two options: either incapable of producing a plan or are at best indifferent to the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of people, if not more.
The GOP has only tirelessly worked to ensure that the ACA would be less effective than it could have been.
Note: not repeal it. It’s entirely too popular and effective for that.
I worry that the solution is a race to the bottom. As long as this shit helps only one party it won't get fixed.
This is such a big tech "move fast and break things" thing to do. The cancer has now metastasized and reached the executive function.
They simply lie to their supporters, and are believed because republicans are indoctrinated throughout life to believe that "government bad, corporations good, taxes bad, money good, collective power bad, individual power good"
trump said before the election he didn't know what project 2025 was. He lied, pure and simple.
There is a secret runbook that goes much further than P25 which the same authors ensured was never printed or emailed anywhere which could be susceptible to FOIA. That is the runbook they have been using since day 1, which likely contained all 74 of his day 1 orders pre-written.
The concept of "electoral fraud" is enshrined in law, so I guess more lawsuits are coming.
> Everyone should watch the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, speak on government workers:
Russell Vought is the architect of Project 2025:
* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c977njnvq2do
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
You know, the thing that Trump publicly said he wasn't part of.
"I haven't read it, I don't know what's in it."
"I know nothing about it."
I absolutely believe he never read it during the campaign, probably hasn't done more than skim a summary to this day. He doesn't need to. None of that matters to him.
Keeping his distance gave him "plausible" deniability...kinda. Anyone who actually thought Trump wasn't going to let Heritage Foundation people take over substantial control of government should take a long hard look at their sources of information, internal biases, and critical thinking capability.
The sheer incompetence of it all is disqualifying by itself.
In my experiences arguing with MAGA, the incompetence argument lands a lot more convincingly than the evil argument.
The goal is to convince other people, not to rah-rah the already-believers.
Trivially: these websites go back up in a few days, is that more convincingly malice or just “these people don’t know how to operate a government?”
There were many dems who remembered Trump as the funny orange man, didn't really care to turn out against him, and fell for the "both sides bad" messaging that was absolutely rampant on the left (esp with regard to Kamala and Palestine). So no, I don't think the most important rally-the-base rhetoric was to ratchet up "Trump is Fascist" so much as suppress "Both Sides Bad" while we had an election to win.
What was Kamala's 2024 campaign slogan?
I saw that slogan and cringed immediately.
Agreed the "both sides bad" messaging was a huge factor here. But that's exactly why we should talk about these fuckups as questions of competence. They are unambiguous evidence of a difference in both sides' ability to actually operate a government!
If it’s malice then it’s an attack. You have react differently to an attack than to incompetence.
The EU made the same mistake with Trump‘s appeasement to Putin. They hoped it’s some kind of clever negotiation tactic but they learned it’s not. It’s just two autocrats teaming up at the expense of Ukraine.
Meh, feel free to disagree. How many MAGA voters do you talk to on a daily basis?
Online? More than enough and they show the same kind of malice like our own type of MAGA: AfD voters
Although I agree with others' sentiment that focusing on incompetence can be more persuasive to certain segments of society.
https://www.ft.com/content/02217acf-ac64-49c2-acd5-ef4f107f0...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/techno-fas...
There can be incompetence and malice together in all this. The malicious often leverage the incompetent to further their goals.
One way to get more people on board with destroying government structures is to render the government structures as ineffectual and incompetent as possible.
If you're in the US, it's time to start asking yourself what you are going to want to be able to say to your kids or grandkids when they ask what you did about it when the constitutional republic was falling.
Alongside these budget cuts, the GOP is proposing massive tax cuts and massive increases in funding for parts of the government related to law and immigration enforcement that will massively outweigh any savings from DOGE destroying entire programs overnight. DOGE is also demolishing organizations that are revenue positive and Trump has fired Inspector Generals, who are responsible for identifying waste and inefficiency in government operations.
It isn't a possibility. It is very very clear.
Also, half of the “law and immigration enforcement” budget increase is actually going towards deploying the military inside the US, which is illegal.
> DOGE is also demolishing organizations that are revenue positive
The revenue will be still be there when the re-org is completed. Are you worried about competitors?
The thing is, almost no one was used to politicians actually following through with their plans and promises. Trump is the first Western leader since I'm alive (other than the current Spanish government) to actually do what he has promised, and I fear this image of him being an "accomplisher" will send him for a wave of support in both the midterms and the next election (and yes, I also believe that there will be no one left to enforce the "two terms" regulation).
I don't want to suggest what Trump himself suggested: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-2nd-amendment-folks-st...
I think that's a bad option.
What I am saying is: Every single time I've seen a headline about school shootings, someone suggests gun control.
Someone reacts that guns keep the government from becoming despots.
I said then, no, the military are the ones who decide such things. Militia don't make a dent, despite their self image.
And yet, Trump, who just narrowly avoided being killed, signed more support of the 2nd amendment.
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20250207/nra-statement-on-pr...
Did he sign because he's afraid, or because he's not?
The same place they were when Breonna Taylor was summarily executed by government agents retaliating for Kenneth Walker exercising his second amendment right to home defense at night (the exact type of scenario they continually grandstand about!) - following the twisted logic and misdirection of their mainstream media so they can continue lazily attacking a strawman of their fellow citizens ("oWn tHe lIbS!1!") rather than reflect on what it would actually take to live their purported values.
At this point the only real question for so-called "conservatives" is when will they realize their leaders have betrayed us and given away our country's future to China?
AND if they are doing this to NIH, imagine what they are doing to food and drug inspection for safety
just assume all regulation is gone or being ignored without penalty, now scale that out for four years
Forget "great depression" it's a dark ages of sorts with smartphones for distraction
I certainly don’t know any that require they be run by the state.
Did you hear what Russell Vought said? “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,”
Anyone genuinely interested in efficiency should start with why the Pentagon has failed audits and is unable to account for tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars
What has bound us together as a people is the massive ocean of cash we collectively float on. Abundance that's actively being slashed and burned as we speak. Apologies for the mixed metaphor.
On the bright side, this might also mean the end of rampaging around the globe in the name of democracy. I think that ship has fully sailed, alhamdulillah.
They're going to a lot of effort, and exposing themselves to a lot of risk, if this is all likely to be undone in a few years time. My worry is that they won't be able to resist trying to permanently lock-in these changes, even if the most obvious way to do that is to abandon democracy.
Could there be a world in the middle where maybe the government is bloated and irresponsibly spending money and republicans aren’t just myopic nitwits and do care for our country? And they’re executing on cleaning things up but in a way you disagree with?
Why is it always malice and ruin? It’s tiring. Twitter BTW pulled 1.25B in profit last year…
Non wasteful things... Such as? Says who?
"Different management" ffs the govt isn't supposed to pivot like a company every 4-8 yrs. That's an unthinking suggestion for a federal govt & heterogenous population.
"Insubordinate"... To a unitary executive?