DOGE Makes Its Latest Errors Harder to Find
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Consider immigration reform: virtually everyone in congress agrees that something needs to be done, but nothing gets done, so everything happens by executive action. DACA, for example, probably never should've been done at the executive branch (and I say this as someone who is basically in agreement with its intent). And then when the administration changes, everything is in upheaval in the form of lawsuits and uncertainty for the actual people on the ground affected by the changes.
None of this is new; it's just gotten more visible through the first Trump administration. Who knew the plural of Attorney Generals was Attorneys General or the name of the Administrative Procedures Act prior to 2017?
Regardless of how you feel about him as president, you can't say he's unwilling to loudly make sweeping changes at the executive level. His supporters seem to view the lawsuits as evidence that their guy is doing what they voted for him to do.
Hint: Inside the beltway, such behavior is considered a for-sure promise that the Congressman plans to not run for re-election.
Fixing the budget is hard. "Waste" is in the eye of the beholder. Every program exists for a reason. There is far, far less actual "waste" in the budget than people have been led to believe.
Hard choices get resolved democratically, and that's not quick. The debt is not yet a crisis; we can afford to continue the entire budget while we figure out what things we actually don't want. That's a matter of months, not years.
That sounds convincing until you realize we're already on a cr from December [0] which created the same fictional premise.
>t's an emergency measure to be used while they set about setting a real budget.
Except they just sat on their hands for months, clearly no emergency, now theyre saying 'yes ditto, much emergency, 6 more months of same.'
[0] https://www.naco.org/news/us-congress-passes-continuing-reso...
It's no surprise that it takes longer than two months. It would be perfectly reasonable to just pass an actual budget, rather than a CR, that continues last year's priorities. The next budget cycle starts in September; make a real budget for the current Congress' priorities then.
A less-incompetent 2025/2026 Congress would indeed have arrived in January with a worked-out plan. Certainly the administration did. I think they were waiting to see how well that plan worked, and are surprised that it has been so effective.