Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

The Real Reason For Decimating The Federal Government…

I should have seen it.

The Washington Post recently reported on what should have been obvious to those of us who have studied the Right’s constant efforts to privatize governmental functions: Elon Musk’s mass government cuts will make private companies millions. While Trump and Musk are framing the immense and indiscriminate cuts to federal governance as removal of “waste,” they are really likely to provide what the article calls “a boon to private companies – including Musk’s own businesses – that the government increasingly relies on for many of its key initiatives.”

Much of my academic life was devoted research on contracting-out, a/k/a privatization–the decision to provide government services through private contractors rather than government employees.

My skepticism began with obvious misuse of the term.  Actual privatization would mean selling off government operations and allowing them to sink or swim in the marketplace (a la Margaret Thatcher). Americans, however, use the term to mean something else entirely: government “contracting out” with private companies to supply goods and services being financed with tax dollars.

There are certainly times where contracting makes sense, but government hasn’t been a very good judge of when those are. Contracts with units of government are qualitatively different from contracts between private actors, and those differences make it far more likely that the contracts ultimately negotiated will be unfavorable to the taxpayers who are funding them–and that’s even without the predictable “crony capitalism” that rewards campaign donors and favored billionaire sycophants with lucrative contracts at taxpayer expense.

As Musk has proceeded to lay waste to the federal bureaucracy, many objectors have noted that despite population growth, the federal workforce has been flat for decades. There’s a reason: a few years ago, I came across data showing that the federal government was actually paying the salaries of some 17 million full-time contract workers who weren’t technically government employees.

Criticisms of government operations ignore the reality that programs are often stymied by a lack of skilled in-house personnel. That includes–among other things– the government’s inept handling of refugees and the (mis)management of Medicare and Medicaid ($103.6 billion in improper payments in 2019 alone).

Too few critics recognize that passing a law to do X or Y is only a start; the unit of government charged with administering the law or program needs sufficient resources to do so. Those resources include adequate numbers of well-trained employees and skilled supervision– virtually impossible when contractors are providing the bulk of the services.

Back in 2021, I posted about an example from 2004, when George W. Bush turned the job of collecting the hundreds of billions of dollars that tax scofflaws owed Uncle Sam over to private collectors–parroting the GOP insistence that private business would do a better job than federal workers.  Most of what the private firms brought in was from easy-to-collect cases that began running out after just a few months. When the IRS brought the work back in-house, agents collected some two-thirds more money in that same few months, and it came from the harder cases the private companies had avoided. Relying on private tax collectors actually ended up costing the federal government money.

I should note that Republicans’ subsequent actions suggested that “efficiency” hadn’t really been the goal. They slashed 20 percent of the IRS’s budget and 22 percent of its staff. For people making more than $1 million, the number of tax audits dropped by 72 percent—and the money the IRS collected from audits fell by 40 percent.

The Guardian report noted that private firms are salivating as Musk decimates the federal bureaucracy.

Musk’s plans have already excited Silicon Valley mainstays such as Palantir, whose executives praised Doge on an earnings call last week and talked about how the disruption by the billionaire’s strike squad was good for the company. Palantir already has won hundreds of millions of dollars in US military contracts in recent years for AI-related projects.

Musk himself has extensive contracts worth billions of dollars through companies like SpaceX that are set to expand under the new administration.

There are certainly situations in which contracting out makes sense–but we are already relying on private contractors beyond the point of reason. We have contractors who do more or less the same work as civil servants, sitting in the same offices, for years on end, and typically at far higher cost. We have contractors who oversee contractors, contractors who write policy for government officials, and Trump is firing federal contract managers who are already too few in number and too outgunned in skills to manage it all.

The GOP’s persistent attacks on civil servants costs taxpayers and enriches privateers. The Trump/Musk goal is more of the grift.

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When America Really Was Great…

America really has been great–or at least, greater. Of course, a lot depends upon one’s definition of “greatness.” Donald Trump rather obviously confuses the term “great” with the term “much”–in his limited and twisted worldview, rich people are great because they have lots of money, celebrities are great because they command lots of attention, and countries are great if they control more territory.

So–in Trump’s mind, Elon Musk must be great because he has lots of money. Trump himself must be great because the media is paying attention to him (it’s irrelevant that much of that attention is highly critical–it’s attention!) If the United States “acquires” Greenland and Gaza, and takes back the Panama Canal, that will make America great again.  

People with more (and considerably more active) brain-cells tend to define greatness differently. 

Paul Krugman recently considered the “greatness” involved in constructing the Panama Canal, and the greatness–okay, intelligence– displayed by our decision to turn ownership over to Panama.

Yes, it was a spectacular feat of engineering. But even more important, it was a triumph of medical science and science-based policy. To build the canal, America first had to conquer yellow fever and malaria. This meant understanding how these diseases were spread, then implementing widespread preventive measures that ranged from isolating infected patients with mosquito netting to eliminating sources of standing water in which mosquitoes could breed.

The success of these measures was an extraordinary achievement. But then, for much of the 20th century America led the world both in medical research and in the application of that research to public policy. This one-two punch of knowledge and knowledge-based action led to an incredible decline in the rate of death from infectious disease.

Why did the U.S. decide to turn that “spectacular feat of engineering” over to another country? Because it was in our national interest to do so.

America gave up the canal, not out of a spirit of generosity or wokeness, but because U.S. occupation of the Canal Zone had become a strategic liability rather than an asset. By the 1970s changes in transportation patterns had greatly diminished the canal’s economic importance; its military value was almost nil. At the same time, U.S. occupation of the zone had become a flashpoint for anti-Americanism, and it was obvious that defending the canal against sabotage and potential guerilla warfare would be difficult if not impossible.

Of course, weighing the pros and cons of continuing to own the canal requires the application of intelligence to sufficient accurate information–a process clearly beyond the capacities of our egomaniac co-presidents.

As Krugman also notes, quite accurately, America’s real greatness–the attributes that have earned us the global respect and deference that Trump is busily dismantling–relied to a significant extent upon our leadership in science and medicine.

Now Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a crank who rejects vaccines in particular and medical science in general, is on track to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The National Institutes of Health have effectively been shut down. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have stopped releasing crucial data. If you go to CDC’s website, there’s a banner across the top reading “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders,” which mainly means purging anything that hints at concern over social inequality.

This country didn’t become great by bullying other nations (although we have certainly done our share of bullying). It didn’t become a beacon for the rest of the world because of slavery or Jim Crow, but instead for our constant struggle to fulfill the Constitution’s promises of liberty and equality. 

Donald Trump evidently thinks “greatness” requires picking on trans children, reversing the social acceptance and economic progress of women and minorities, and ethnically cleansing Gaza. He evidently thinks that scrubbing all mention of climate change from government websites will stop the globe from warming, that ignoring scientific facts of which he disapproves will make those facts disappear, and that being the center of attention means he’s important. 

Trump spent four years in the Oval Office and still has no concept of how government operates or what the rule of law means, or what American government is for.

We the People will never be able to teach him anything–he’s clearly incapable of learning. But we can–and must–disabuse him of the notion that he’s entitled to exercise unfettered power.

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The New York Times Finally Figured It Out

One of the political facts of life in today’s America is the distance between popular opinion and electoral results. Polls and academic surveys consistently show support for policies that are inconsistent with–and loudly rejected by–candidates who win elections. That is especially true for those who are elected to the House of Representatives.

For as long as I’ve been writing these daily meditations (okay, rants), I’ve attributed that state of affairs to gerrymandering–the partisan redistricting that I am increasingly convinced lies at the very heart of America’s political dysfunctions.

Partisan redistricting–the drawing of congressional districts by legislators who are choosing their voters, rather than the other way around–subverts democracy by enabling minority rule. The practice was dubbed “gerrymandering” to “honor” Elbridge Gerry, who was responsible for drawing districts in Massachusetts that one publication said “looked like salamanders.”  Gerry was born in 1744, so the practice of manipulating district lines is nothing new. What is relatively new is the precision in that line drawing that can now be accomplished with the aid of computers.

In states where one party controls redistricting, legislators can carve out districts with majorities of their voters, and cram the opposing party’s voters into a remaining few.

If you wonder where looney-tune officeholders like Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert come from, that’s the explanation.

The New York Times has just figured that out–and documented it.

A New York Times analysis of the nearly 6,000 congressional and state legislative elections in November shows just how few races were true races. Nearly all either were dominated by an incumbent or played out in a district drawn to favor one party overwhelmingly. The result was a blizzard of blowouts, even in a country that is narrowly divided on politics.

Just 8 percent of congressional races (36 of 435) and 7 percent of state legislative races (400 of 5,465) were decided by fewer than five percentage points, according to The Times’s analysis.

Consequences from the death of competition are readily apparent. Roughly 90 percent of races are now decided not by general-election voters in November but by the partisans who tend to vote in primaries months earlier. That favors candidates who appeal to ideological voters and lawmakers who are less likely to compromise. It exacerbates the polarization that has led to deadlock in Congress and in statehouses.

The result of this practice is the wide gulf between voters’ actual policy preferences and the ideologues who emerge victorious. And–as the Times grudgingly acknowledged–although both parties engage in the practice, Republicans overwhelmingly do most of it.

The Times noted that demographic shifts and “political sorting” — the tendency of like-minded citizens to live in the same community–also have played a role, but the study confirmed the pre-eminent role of redistricting in creating  unrepresentative Representatives.

While it is easy to focus on the candidates, the money, the message or the economy, increasingly it is the maps that determine the outcome. In North Carolina, they may have decided control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Only one of the state’s 14 congressional districts was decided by fewer than five points. A Republican won the state’s next closest race — by 14 points.

In 2022, the State Supreme Court ordered a more competitive map, but it was tossed out after midterm elections shook up the balance of the court. The replacement, which was drawn by the Republican-led Legislature, gave three Democratic seats to the G.O.P. while making nearly every district safer for the party that held it.

It is impossible to know how elections held under the first map would have turned out. But, according to Justin Levitt, a redistricting law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, “had every seat stayed the same as in 2022, those three seats would have made the difference, and Democrats would have had a one-seat majority” in Congress.

The Times article focused on several states where partisan line-drawing has produced results incompatible with the will of a majority of that state’s voters.

Even before Trump’s justices corrupted the Supreme Court, that body refused to put an end to the practice, calling partisan gerrymanders a “political problem” outside federal courts’ jurisdiction. Thanks to that unconscionable evasion, citizens in states which, like Indiana, lack referenda or initiatives, are helpless to correct the situation. Only the legislature–filled with “representatives” who benefit from the practice–can overturn it.

The only hope for Hoosiers is Democratic control of the U.S. House and Senate, and passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Our first chance is 2026, when–hopefully–Trump will have infuriated enough voters to spur turnout.

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No More Rule Of Law

Talking Poiints Memo has been considering what the publication calls “Musk’s Little Green Men.”

The little green men are the Musk operatives who have been taking over the top federal administrative agencies–the Office of Personnel Management, the OMB, GAO, the Treasury Department…).  TPM asks “Who are these guys?” and the answer turns out to be far from comforting. These Musk flunkies are young men between 19 and 24 years of age. Several are college dropouts who left to go into tech and are currently interning at Thiel’s or Musk’s companies. At least one is a “Thiel fellow.”

They know a lot about computers–and nothing, obviously, about the Constitution or the rule of law.

These interns have gained access to the private information of millions of government employees. They have connected insecure computers to the secure ones used by the federal agencies, allowing them access that could allow them to cut off payments to government vendors, Social Security recipients, humanitarian NGOs and state governments.

Like Musk, these young “techie nerds” are unelected, unappointed and unauthorized– and happily violating numerous laws.

As Josh Marshall writes,

In other words, hard right, techno-red-pilled bros, who now have access to things like your social security checks (whether you get them or not), your financial and, likely in some cases, medical records and at least the ability to shut down whole sections of the federal government at will by simply turning off their funding spigots. (Not good!) It sounds crazy and absurd to think that individual people could have that kind of power absent anything the law recognizes. But this is what it means when you’re this far up (or down, choose your metaphor) in the brain stem of the national government. This is what it means when you have access to the central Treasury Department payment network. You can simply turn off a spigot of funding. (I’ve now had it described to me precisely how you do it.) If you have that access, whether it’s legal or not isn’t relevant. The best analogy I can provide is that there’s some person at your bank who could just change a setting and suddenly all your checks and payments would be rejected and your funds would be frozen. Now imagine if “you” is NIH or USAID or … well, Social Security.

Musk is claiming that they’ve “found” $4 billion dollars of “waste” a day, and is threatening to turn it off. Of course, what Elon Musk considers “waste” is undoubtedly similar to the version of “free speech” with which he destroyed Twitter’s utility and credibility. 

Whether Musk’s version of “waste” is accurate or not, however, is beside the point. What he and his band of techie hackers are doing is illegal. Monumentally illegal. 

Senator Ron Wyden has challenged the hacking–noting that Musk lacks a security clearance and has multiple conflicts of interest. (The full text of his letter is available here.) 

To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy. I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems … The federal government is in a financially precarious position, currently utilizing accounting maneuvers to continue paying its bills since it reached the debt limit at the beginning of the year. I am concerned that mismanagement of these payment systems could threaten the full faith and credit of the United States.”

The press has previously reported that Musk was denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets. I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China — a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems — endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.

Americans did (narrowly and with the help of significant voter suppression) elect one megalomaniac, but no one cast a vote for Elon Musk. No voter, no legislative chamber, no public official was empowered to authorize his takeover of vital federal agencies, or the substitution of his opinion about expenditures for that of Congress.

While Trump diverts public attention by undermining what had been the world’s strongest economy, terrorizing immigrants and making the country safe for White Christian Nationalists, Musk is managing the coup.

Neither respects–or obeys–the law.

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About Those Alternative “Realities”

Trump and Musk are engaged in a takeover of the federal government, and MAGA folks have no idea it’s happening or what it means.

A recent Letter from An American— Heather Cox Richardson explained why–explained the peril at the very heart of this time in America’s history. That, of course, wasn’t her point–in her usual, immensely important fashion, she was deconstructing Trumpian propaganda by providing a factual context to yet another “Big Lie.”

It was one relatively small example of the flood of lies being facilitated/echoed by rightwing media.

In this case, it was the President’s recent lies about his threats to Colombia. Trump’s version of events was that, in the wake of Colombia’s refusal to accept two military planes filled with deportees, his threat to impose tariffs on goods from that country had caused an official retreat. His bullying had won! See how great he’s making America??

As usual, with Trump, reality was…different.

It turns out that Colombia and the U.S. had reached an agreement under President Biden, under which it had accepted 475 deportation flights from 2020 to 2024– 124 flights in 2024 alone. The Biden administration had used commercial and charter flights and scheduled them; Trump used a military plane that arrived unannounced.

As Tim Naftali of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs explained: “If a foreign country tries to land its military planes—except in an emergency—without an existing agreement that is an infringement of sovereignty.” Colombia rejected the military planes without prior authorization and offered the use of its presidential plane instead.

Colombia also asked the U.S. to provide notice and decent treatment for its people, an issue that had been raised and resolved in 2023 after migrants arrived in hand and foot cuffs. Colombian president Gustavo Petro noted that the U.S. had committed that it would guarantee dignified conditions for the repatriation of migrants.

Note that Colombia actually accepted the migrants; after the plane landed in Honduras, Columbia sent its presidential plane to pick them up.

America’s Bully-in-Chief not only lied about what had occured, he deported Colombian staff members of the World Bank who were working for international diplomatic organizations in the U.S., and canceled visa appointments at Colombia’s U.S. Embassy.

Not only did he lie and overact–Trump is nothing if not performative-his threat to levy a punitive tariff led Colombia’s President Petro to threaten a retaliatory one. If that occurred, American farmers would bear the brunt.

Colombia imports 96.7% of the corn it feeds its livestock from the U.S., putting Colombia in the top five export markets for U.S. corn. According to a letter written by a bipartisan group of lawmakers eager to protect that trade, led by Senator Todd Young (R-IN), in 2003 the U.S. exported more than 4 million metric tons of corn to Colombia, which translated to $1.14 billion in sales. “American farmers cannot afford to lose such a vital export market,” the lawmakers wrote, “especially when access to the top U.S. corn export market, Mexico, is already at risk.”

Trump’s White House–never tethered to honesty–declared “Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again.”

Really? Do you “respect” the drunken uncle who disrupts family get-togethers and infuriates everyone?

And that leads to the major peril referenced in my opening paragraph. As Richardson put it, “The administration’s handling of the situation with Colombia reveals that their power depends on convincing people to ignore reality and instead to believe in the fantasy world Trump dictates.”

Richardson noted an announcement by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt that “[d]eportation flights have begun.” But–as she also pointed out, in the real world, nothing is “beginning.” In 2024, Colombia accepted more than two U.S. flights of migrants a week on average, and everyone on this particular deportation flight had been arrested and detained by the Biden administration.

Richardson’s Letter provided details of the migration and deportation agreements forged with Latin American countries during the Biden Administration, details which demonstrate the dishonesty of Trump’s characterizations of these events. But most Americans won’t see those details. Most–even those who detest him– will take Trump’s outright lies at face value.

Use of “the big lie” technique comes to us from Nazi Germany. Wikipedia defines it as a “gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique.” The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, to describe how people could be induced to believe colossal lies. He wrote that people would believe big lies because they would not believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Trump and his unelected sidekick Musk consistently demonstrate that “impudence.”

These are perilous times for “non-Aryans”– and for all people of good will.

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