Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Waste And Fraud

This will be brief, since sitting still isn’t my strong point.

The idiots who believed–or pretended to believe–that DOGE was all about rooting out “waste and fraud” from the federal government will dismiss the truth, much as Trump has responded to economic data by firing the workers who reported it, but numerous outlets are reporting the all-too-predictable facts.

DOGE cost taxpayers a fortune. Far from finding waste and fraud, DOGE was waste and fraud.

Billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump tried to take a chainsaw to federal government spending, but it turns out they actually wasted tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.

The Department of Government Efficiency generated some $21.7 billion in waste across the federal government in the first six months of the year, according to a new report from the minority staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI).

As Talking Points Memo reported,

Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations yesterday released a jaw-dropping report attempting to document the scope and scale of financial waste, personnel upheaval, and human suffering caused by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk’s giddily uninformed strike force of Peter Thiel acolytes. In all, the Democrats, led by Richard Blumenthal (CT), estimated DOGE cost the government $21.7 billion.

“DOGE-generated waste could also have easily funded monthly food assistance for the 5.3 million families losing an average of $146 in monthly food security assistance ($9.3 billion per year) under the new budget; or it could have been used more broadly to support the 40 percent of taxpayers that will see a net increase to their taxes as a direct result of the Trump tax plan,” the report contends….

Neither the buyouts nor paying workers while on administrative leave (costing an additional $6.1 billion) increased government efficiency, as was always obvious and predictable. The report details many other costs, from the petty and pointless (millions of hours of wasted employee time writing the Musk-required email listing their weekly accomplishments) to the catastrophic (the elimination of the United States Agency for International Development, “projected to cause millions of additional deaths globally while simultaneously endangering domestic public health by reducing essential medical staff and programs.”)

There is much more, and you really need to click through and read the depressing details, but this is what happens when people who have absolutely no idea what they are doing–in this case, children in their early 20’s armed only with ideological platitudes–are given entry into sophisticated systems without any understanding of either the missions of the agencies involved, or the data relevant to that mission.

A perfect example of Trump/MAGA….

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Indiana’s Despicable Senators

The Trumpian assault on the rule of law has been unremitting. With the assistance of Mitch McConnell, Trump turned the highest court in the land into his personal lapdog, and now he is aiming to pollute the lower courts that have valiantly opposed his unconstitutional efforts.

The most recent and most blatant effort to replace dispassionate jurists with biased and unqualified sycophants was the nomination of a slimy creature named Emil Bove to a federal judgeship–a lifetime appointment.

Charlie Sykes, among others, reports. He begins with a quote.

Tonight Senate Republicans cast away their Constitutional obligations to rubber stamp [Emil Bove] an outrageously unfit nominee to the Third Circuit. The Senate, the country, the judiciary will suffer for this. And the conservative legal movement will not recover.” — Gregg Nunziata, Exec Dir, Society for the Rule of Law.

Last night, the US Senate blithely ignored the pleas of the legal community, the evidence of multiple whistleblowers, and whatever tattered remnants of self-respect they had, to confirm Emil Bove to a lifetime position on the Court of Appeals. As I wrote a few days back: It’s not easy these days to single out the worst of the worst appointments, but certainly the elevation of the thuggish Bove to the federal appellate bench has to rank right up there. Other churls and chodes will come and go, but federal judges are forever. 

The Senate’s surrender came the same day the Wapo reported: “Whistleblower evidence suggests Trump judicial nominee Emil Bove misled Senate.”

The vote was 50-49, indicating that J.D. Vance once again had to break the tie. Two Republicans defected. But not Indiana’s GOP Senators. If there was any lingering doubt about the lack of integrity–and the lapdog status–of these two “law and order” Republicans, this inexcusable vote certainly erases it. Their fuhrur told them to vote for a demonstrable liar who has made it clear he will support whatever his fuhrur wants, irrespective of the Constitution or legal precedent–and they obeyed.

Banks, of course, is a gung-ho member of the SS. Young, it appears, is just a feckless, integrity-free “Good German.” Neither of them deserves public office or respect.

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The War On Science

A couple of things before I’m unable to continue sitting:

First, thank you all for the “get well” messages. MUCH appreciated.

Second, the outlines of the MAGA/Trump war are becoming clearer every day. It isn’t just an assault on democracy and the constitution–it’s an assault on modernity: on human knowledge and especially science. All science, not just medical science.

As the New York Times (among others) reported yesterday,

In Game-Changing Climate Rollback, E.P.A. Aims to Kill a Bedrock Scientific Finding
The proposal is President Trump’s most consequential step yet to derail federal climate efforts and appears to represent a shift toward outright denial of the scientific consensus.

We’re fighting a war for civilization and a habitable planet.

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Framing

The most important thing I learned in law school can be summed up with the adage “he who frames the issue wins the debate.” The most consequential move a lawyer–or any debater–can make is to define what the argument is all about. (Our idiot-in-chief clearly does recognize that, at least at some subconscious level, since his response to any and all accusations is always to insist that the real issue is whether the accuser is “fake.”)

What reminded me of that old law school conclusion was a recent article in the New York Times, citing a communications professor from Texas A&M, one Jennifer Mercieca. According to the article, her recent book addresses that issue– what she calls “frame warfare.” Mercieca argues that the power to name things is the power to define reality, and she identifies that tactic as Trump’s most potent. As she points out, it’s a tactic that goes hand in hand with his constant assertions that fly in the face of facts and evidence. Redefinitions of reality, she writes, have been central to his success.

As Mercieca explains frame warfare, “What you call a thing determines the contours of the debate around it — or precludes debate altogether. Did you borrow a car without permission, or did you steal it? Was the crush of migrants at the Mexican border an invasion or a humanitarian crisis?”

The importance of framing is obvious in the fulminations of America’s White Christian Nationalists. One of the most obvious examples is the debate about abortion. “Christian” paternalists focus on the “sin” of terminating a pregnancy–on the propriety of the decision being made by a pregnant individual. Civil libertarians insist that the issue is really who decides? In our frame, we ask: is this a decision government should have the authority to make, or is it a decision properly made by the  individual woman? As I used to tell my students, the Bill of Rights is essentially a list of things that government is prohibited from deciding–what prayer you say (or whether you pray at all), what political opinions you hold, whether you have a right to travel without offering justification to authority…

Back when Republicans could credibly claim to be proponents of limited government, many weighed in on the side of  individual liberty. (I remember–back in the day– being part of a group called Republicans for Choice.) Barry Goldwater famously said that government didn’t belong in either your boardroom or your bedroom. (That belief also led him to support gay rights–he even got an award from PFLAG.)

Rather obviously, if we decide that the role of government is to require people to live in accordance with God’s will, we have to decide whose version of that will government should enforce. “Christian” nationalists are fine with giving government that power, so long as they get to be the arbiters of what is “godly.’ They also talk a lot about religious liberty–for them. They aren’t so solicitous about religious liberty for adherents of other (wrong) religions. Their version of religious liberty turns out to be their liberty to use government to impose their particular religious beliefs on those who don’t share them.

It isn’t just the “Christian” nationalists whose framing is perverse. It’s also MAGA. 

Just what makes America great? Or more properly, since “again” is a prominent part of that slogan, what DID make America great? If you listen to Trump’s base, it’s pretty clear that their version of “greatness” requires the social dominance of straight White males. 

Over the past several years, Americans have stopped debating policy–after all, policy debates require evidence, consideration of past experience ….FACTS. It requires respect for people who come to the conversation with a different–but rreality-based– perspective. The reason we can no longer engage in civil discourse is that MAGA has framed control of government as a fight between the resistance of those of us who live in the real world and their right-their need– to impose their “alternate reality”–their preferred frame– on the rest of us.

I think the proper frame for the culture war we are fighting is this: Both MAGA and the “Christian” nationalists want to take America back to a time that never was.

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Political Anguish

For the length of my 83 years, I have been proud of being an American Jew.

My deep devotion to this country has been based upon its commitment to what I call “The American Idea,” the philosophy that permeates our foundational documents. The principles set out in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights undergird creation of an open society–a society in which individuals have the right to live in accordance with their beliefs, so long as they do not harm others. In such a system, minorities thrive. Granted, slavery and various bigotries have challenged that goal of civic equality over our history, but the U.S. was the first country to aspire to a system where government power flows from the people rather than the other way around, and is structured to protect individual liberty.

And even though I’m an atheist, I am a very Jewish atheist, adhering to the values of a Jewish culture that admonishes us “Justice, justice shall thou pursue,” and counsels that–while we aren’t expected to perfect the world in one generation–we aren’t free not to try. The Jewish commitment to community has produced citizens who believe in social justice for everyone, not just the “elect” or chosen, and who feel an obligation to help achieve it.

Everyone who reads this blog knows what is occurring in today’s “Trumpified” America. And most know how far Netanyahu has deviated from the founding beliefs and Jewish values of the State of Israel.

Ezra Klein recently had a lengthy–and excellent–essay in the New York Times, in which he made two important points: many American Jews believe that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, and opposition by non-Jews to Israel’s actions is not anti-Semitism. (Granted, many anti-Semites have gleefully latched on to anti-Zionism, but the opinion that Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza are genocidal has been voiced by Israelis, including Jewish scholars of genocide.)

Klein notes that the American Jewish community is split, largely but not entirely on generational lines, with younger Jews more critical of Israel. I can certainly understand that. I still remember my mother crying as she read the Black Book–a compendium of Nazi atrocities. Like most Jewish families, we had a blue box where pennies and nickels were collected to plant trees in Israel, which was seen as the only place in the world where Jews could be safe. Older American Jews retain their devotion to the “Promised land,” and have enormous difficulty believing that it is behaving in a manner entirely contrary to the most central values of the Jewish religion.

Where do these twin disasters–the disintegration of American governmental structures and norms, and the unbelievable deviation of the Jewish state from the values on which it was founded– leave people who (like yours truly) have made allegiance to those norms and values central to their lives and behaviors?

I practiced law for several years. I spent six years as the Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU. I spent two decades teaching students public policy through a constitutional lens, emphasizing the various ways in which our governmental structure and the protections of the Bill of Rights enable what Aristotle called “human flourishing.” (Not that it was perfect, nor all of its provisions adequate for all time.) Watching the destruction of the rule of law, and the cowardly obedience of what was once my political party to a demented manchild, has been agonizing.

Like most Jews, I felt a special kinship to Israel as it operated as a haven for my co-religionists all over the world. I took pride in the ability of its original settlers to create a vibrant and vital state from the desert, although I did disagree with certain aspects of its governance–especially the settlements policy. (Despite anti-Semetic slurs, that kinship was nothing like “dual loyalty,” any more than my Irish friends’ special fondness for Ireland constitutes dual loyalty.)

I encourage those of you reading this to click through and read Klein’s essay in its entirety; he captures the angst of both  Israel’s defenders and those of us who simply cannot see any honest way to justify what is occuring.

The two main pillars of my philosophical/intellectual life are being erased. I feel the way my friends who are real Christians feel as they watch their faith being appropriated by very unChristian Christian Nationalists.

To define this situation as “unpleasant” would be a gross understatement.

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