If your head is spinning, you are not alone. Trump issues an executive order, one court overturns it, another restores, another court overturns it. Musk sends a mass email to hundreds of thousands of civil servants, telling them they must respond with a list of five things they did in the past week; their failure to respond will be treated as a resignation. The heads of some agencies tell their employees to ignore Elon’s email. The email is withdrawn. Then the email is distributed again.
If you work for the federal government, this is madness, not good for morale.
Russell Vought, primary author of Project 2025, is now director of the Office of Management and Budget, the nerve center of the federal government. He is a Christian nationalist. He said recently:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “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 … We want to put them in trauma.”
What’s going on? Chaos. Disruption. A calculated effort to make the government less efficient. Why? I don’t know but I have suspicions.
In recent days, the Trump administration issued a list of more than 400 properties that were for sale. The list included the headquarters of several Departments in D.C.
Then the list was withdrawn.
Madeline Ngo of The New York Times reported:
On Tuesday, the Trump administration identified more than 440 federal properties that could be sold off, a list that included high-profile buildings like the headquarters of the F.B.I., Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services.
By Wednesday morning, the entire inventory had been taken down, replaced by an agency web page that said the list of properties was “coming soon.”
The General Services Administration, an agency that manages the federal real estate portfolio, had already revised the list at least once. In the hours after it was published, about 100 properties, including many in the Washington, D.C., area, were removed.
The changes stirred up confusion over the Trump administration’s plan to offload a vast amount of federal property. Officials at the General Services Administration said the “disposal” of the buildings could help save hundreds of millions of dollars and ensure that taxpayers do not have to pay for “underutilized federal office space.” But the list swiftly came under criticism by Democratic lawmakers and some former federal officials who worried about the potential impact on government services across the country.
A spokeswoman for the agency said on Wednesday that officials have received an “overwhelming amount of interest” since releasing the list, and they expect to republish it in the near future after they evaluate initial input. The spokeswoman stressed that it will be continuously reviewed and updated.
The original version of the list included offices of several cabinet-level departments and other large spaces used by the Agriculture Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Those were among the buildings removed when the list was whittled down to 320 properties. Still included for possible sale in that version: buildings used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as well as field offices for the Social Security Administration in areas like western Pennsylvania and Saginaw, Mich.
Federal buildings that were about a million square feet were marked for possible sale in Los Angeles, Atlanta, St. Louis, Cleveland, Memphis and Kansas City, Mo. In New York City, the properties included offices for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, along with two downtown buildings that house offices for federal prosecutors with the Southern District of New York and the Internal Revenue Service.
Though the properties are not formally listed on the market, a spokeswoman for the General Services Administration said Tuesday that the agency would consider and evaluate all serious offers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Another daily reminder of this meme.
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That’s great, FLERP!
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Aaaaaand Trump just said he’s suspending tariffs on Canada and Mexico for another month.
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The markets do not like all this unsteadiness.
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Nor do I!
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From Jesus Christ’s Lips To Russell Vought’s Ears.
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Russell Vought is an evil man. If Christ came back to Earth Vought would be racing to drive in the first nail.
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Causing chaos so that government does not run correctly has been a Republican strategy for 40 years. Having helped to create this paradigm, various recent converts now want to lay the burden of this strategy on Trump, but the constant refrain of every Republican since Goldwater has been that government is evil.
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But that never worked because ordinary Americans liked a lot of those programs. So their strategy has changed. Now they don’t say the government is evil. They say that the government is inefficient, and they can make it more efficient with expert help! And pay no attention to the qualifications of the doge experts behind the curtain, because they are absolute wizards at making government more efficient!
That message works a lot better, especially when the liberal media reinforces it because they believe it is biased not to present that message as a truth that is not debatable.
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I don’t understand how cutting the staff of an agency by 15-50% will make it more efficient.its likely to be less efficient. Then come calls for privatization and we know how efficient that is.
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I watch the John Birch Society closely as I live in Wisconsin, its headquarters and its main funder, The Bradley Foundation. Harry Bradley being a founding member of JBS along with Koch family members and other prominent industrialists made their viewpoints known. Wiki jobs and tell me that we’re not living their dream at this moment
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DID YOU LISTEN CAREFULLY to what Trump said about your Social Security during his speech to Congress?
HE SAID ONLY that Social Security has “lists” of people who are well over 100 years old.
HE DIDN’T SAY that these people are actually getting Social Security benefits.
IF HE HAD SAID THAT, the Democrats could have said: “PROVE IT!”
AND HE CAN’T because those lists are for legal purposes only — just the way that banks keep records of everyone who had ever had a mortgage with them because those records have legal importance for decades after the mortgage is paid off, so too does Social Security keep lists of people who have ever received Social Security, even long after they have died.
WHAT’S GOING ON is that — as they have ever since Social Security began — Republican politicians have been trying to turn Social Security over to Wall Street banks, and in order to do that (they call it “privatizing”) they need to convince ordinary Americans that the Social Security Administration is incompetent and wasteful.
PART OF THEIR PLAN is also to convince you that Social Security is “going broke”, but in fact Social Security’s latest audit shows that it has $3 TRILLION — that’s THREE THOUSAND BILLIONS OF DOLLARS — in surplus money that’s safely invested in United States Treasury Bonds.
AND THAT’S WHAT the Wall Street banks want to get their grubby hands on. They are drooling over getting control of that $3,000,000,000,000 in Social Security surplus!!!
THEY DREAM of putting that money into Wall Street stocks so that they can collect millions of dollars in annual commissions!
YOU WILL HEAR Republican politicians tell you that Social Security’s surplus money is gone and that all that’s left are “IOUs” — but what the Republicans call “IOUs” are actually United States Treasury Bonds that are such a safe investment that even China and every other nation in the world puts their surplus money into U.S. Treasury Bonds.
SO — listen very carefully from now on so that you don’t get cheated out of the retirement security that Social Security provides for ordinary Americans like us.
AND LISTEN TOO to what Trump’s billionaires are saying: MEGABILLIONAIRE ELON MUSK is claiming that “Social Security is a Ponzi scheme” that must be “privatized” by handing it over to Wall Street.
AND Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (another of the many billionaires in Trump’s cabinet) declared on the Fox News Jesse Watters Primetime show that “You know that Social Security is wrong! You know that Medicare and Medicaid are wrong!!! GET RID OF ALL THESE TAX SCAMS that hammer Americans!!!”
IF YOU HAVE ANY DOUBT WHAT’S COMING for your Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the statements by billionaires Musk and Lutnick LEAVE NO ROOM FOR DOUBT.
Why are billionaires being allowed to destroy programs that we ordinary Americans depend on? Why?
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Some clarification:
In 2024, Social Security will collect $1.308 trillion in payroll taxes (and related revenues) and spend $1.459 trillion in benefits. The resulting $151 billion shortfall will be funded by deficit spending that contributes to the national debt. Because the Social Security system ran $3 trillion in surpluses from 1983 to 2009, it is legally entitled to run $3 trillion in deficits until these two figures balance out, which is currently expected to occur in 2033.
Current law mandates that when the trust fund balance hits zero—which is when the $3 trillion in earlier surpluses has been repaid—the system will be legally forbidden from borrowing or receiving any more general revenues. Program spending must then fall to match the system’s revenues, and that will mean an automatic across-the-board 23 percent benefit cut. This is not some hypothetical scare tactic, but rather the law that will be implemented if lawmakers continue to refuse reform.
By design, those surpluses were always going to be mixed with general revenues and spent regardless of any congressional action. The trust fund balance was merely an accounting device that tracked the size of that initial cumulative surplus so that the system would be entitled to run equal-sized deficits later (i.e., drawing down that balance). Yes, those earlier surpluses were invested in Treasury bonds. But that just means the government lent the money to itself to spend. When the lender and borrower are the same entity (the federal government), the net effect is zero and no new financial resources are created. In this case, the bonds are assets to the Social Security Administration (i.e., future retirees) but equal liabilities to the Treasury (i.e., the future taxpayers repaying those bonds). This means the trust fund does not save future taxpayers a dime—all future benefits must be funded by concurrent taxes and borrowing, the same as if no trust fund existed.
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You must have missed that the very qualified Doge hires have discovered fraud and waste in Social Security and Medicaid. The very qualified Doge hires have given their stamp of approval that this will make government work BETTER for “ordinary Americans”. They said so. And on the rare times these qualified experts are mistaken, they immediately correct their mistakes? What’s not to like?
Even the liberal media is saying that this effort is about making those programs ordinary Americans depend on more efficient! It’s not just some politician saying this — it is the VERY QUALIFIED DOGE HIRES who have “discovered” how to do this with their amazing expertise!
That’s why so many “ordinary Americans” are allowing this destruction of the programs they depend on.
Their consent has been manufactured by a constant barrage of right wing propaganda on right wing news media that is legitimized and amplified by the so-called liberal media (which makes it far more powerful). These ordinary Americans believe that these doge experts are SAVING these good programs! These ordinary Americans believe that the goal of the Doge bros is to SAVE these programs. That is not debatable. The idea that the goal might be to destroy those programs is verboten, as is any innuendo that these Doge hires are unqualified and the worst possible people to be “re-inventing” the government.
It’s possible that there are Trump voters who are so brainwashed that if Republicans in unison embraced the latest idea – that Musk was putting all 14 of his kids (including the toddlers and newborns) in charge of weeding out waste and fraud because they are certified geniuses, those Trump acolytes would be awestruck at Trump’s brilliant decisions.
But many others would need a constant barrage where “even the liberal media says Musk’s children are very qualified and brilliant” before consenting to this. And they would never consent if they kept hearing what the liberal media believes is far too biased to mention: That these children are not qualified for the job and any person who wants them in charge wants to destroy the programs they like, not save them.
“I want to build you the best house ever with your money, so I’m firing most people who have a lot of experience building houses because I’ve put in charge some teenagers who are good with computers and we will be following their orders now.”
I suspect the liberal media could make even that “normal.” Because they truly believe it would be “biased” to report that the teenagers have no qualifications at all, and they are absolutely required to remind the public frequently that the expertise of the teenagers to do this is not debatable at all.
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How many stories of the ineptitude of this very commendable activity of “rooting out fraud and waste” does there have to be before journalists believe their “lying eyes” instead of “whatever Republicans say”?
I watched Jake Tapper interviewing Republican Speaker of the House Johnson about Trump’s Congressional address. Tapper brought up the disconnect between Trump’s pride at getting rid of “unelected bureaucrats” and Trump giving unelected bureaucrat Musk so much power. There is nothing wrong with that question, except for what followed, which is what always follows: Johnson brushed off the supposedly very important question of whether or not Musk was also a bureaucrat by simply amplifying how great it was that Musk was rooting out fraud and waste. Tapper’s follow-up to that was to bring up an example of a doge mistake, and Johnson simply said “of course Musk has acknowledged that there are sometimes mistakes, but what is important is that he corrects those mistakes right away!” It all sounds very reasonable, and it would be very reasonable IF the underlying big lie was true. But if the underlying absurdity was presented as the absurdity it was – if Speaker Johnson actually was challenged to defend something that is so absurd that it can’t be defended without Johnson looking like a fool in a clip that could be replayed and replayed – then all the justifications for authoritarianism that the Republicans offer would ring completely false.
And that big lie is that these teenagers and 20 something computer hackers are even REMOTELY qualified to be rooting out waste and fraud! Companies don’t hire IT consultants who know how to program computers (but know nothing about their business) to tell them what is wasteful about their business. It is the height of absurdity that the media hasn’t simply presented this as no one in their right mind thinks that IT professionals should make decisions about anything but how to use computers more efficiently! The proof is that everything they have done so far is a joke! If they happen to cut something that someone with real knowledge and experience about government services would also cut – while also cutting vital services that they should not be cutting – that doesn’t make them good at their job. It is shocking to me that the entire premise has not been presented as the outrageous cronyism it is! Yet the media has actually spent the last month legitimizing the absurd — “being good at computers and having no experience and being 23 or a teenager makes you very qualified to weed out fraud and waste in government agencies you know nothing about.”
Given the lies that the Republicans keep spewing, I am sure Johnson would say with a straight fact that of course a teenager good at computer is the best person to decide how to efficiently run major agencies doing the work that is necessary in a functioning government. But if challenged on that, he’d look like a fool purveying that big lie. Will Johnson accept an teenage computer hacker who doesn’t owe his allegiance to Musk going through every computer at his House offices to find the fraud and waste in how his own offices are spending money? Does he believe a teenager good with computer is the ideal person to go through how his own family spends money and decide whether to cut health insurance or participation in sports that the computer guy decides is “wasteful”?
There isn’t a legit business owner in America that believes their very youngest, least experienced IT employees should be in charge of deciding who to fire and where to cut to improve their business.
And yet the underlying false narrative that Tapper helped amplify is “these Doge people are trustworthy and reliable and excellent hires to be doing the job they are doing, but since they are human, they will make mistakes and fix them.” When the absolutely true narrative is that young computer programmers hired because of cronyism who have no idea what they are doing and whose allegiance is to Musk are being paid by our tax dollars, and their goal is not to make the government efficient, since they don’t have a clue how to do that – their goal is to make the government work for Musk and his billionaire friends. And remind them in every story that every legit businessman knows that a surefire way to bankrupt their company is to put a teenager who knows nothing about what the company does in charge and tell him to fire half the staff. If Democrats “vouched” for an inexperienced teenage hacker chosen by George Soros being the person to make the government more efficient, the narrative would be that the Dems hate America and want to destroy it. But since it is Republicans telling them absurdities, the media reporting reinforces the big lie: “look at these very qualified teenagers with some computer programming knowledge that Musk vouches for who are unquestionably excellent hires to decide how to run government agencies. They may make a few mistakes, but they correct them and what can NEVER be disputed is that they are supremely qualified to weed out waste and fraud. Musk says so. And they aren’t DEI hires. That’s the only story our complicit media believes is “unbiased” to report.
It’s like the Emperor’s New Clothes. As long as the media embraces the false premise – that the Emperor actually has new clothes and isn’t naked – they can do their “fair and balanced” reporting where the allowable debate is whether it’s fair or not fair to say that the Emperor’s outfit could be improved upon or to criticize the colors and materials.
As long as the media embraces the false premise – that an excellent way to weed out waste and fraud in government agencies is to hire inexperienced 20 somethings who know nothing about those agencies, but can program a computer – they can do their “fair and balanced” reporting where the only allowable debate is whether it is fair or not fair to criticize these very qualified Doge people when they make mistakes, especially because they always fix their mistakes immediately!
Tapper’s lousy journalism helps Americans believe absurdities. Next up, atrocities.
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