Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

What They’re Breaking

Those of us who are aware of the “shock and awe” assault on America’s governance–and even those of us who are trying not to focus on the details of that assault–tend to shudder over our recognition that the Trump/Musk tantrum is doing immense damage. But few of us possess either the knowledge or the fortitude to enumerate what these know-nothing zealots are destroying.

In a recent Substack Letter, Paul Krugman provided a partial enumeration. He began by noting the difference between breaking ‘things” and breaking government processes.

“Move fast and break things” is sometimes an OK approach if the things in question are just hardware, which can be replaced. But what if the object that experiences “rapid unscheduled disassembly” is something whose continued functioning is crucial to people’s lives — say, something like the U.S. government?

As he points out, the (very) young techies Musk has sent into government agencies (Krugman dubs them “Muskenjugends”) share three characteristics:

First, they all seem to be extreme right-wing ideologues: whenever journalists investigate the social media trail of one of Musk’s operatives, what they find is horrifying. For example, Marko Elez, who had access to the Treasury Department’s central payments system, had in the recent past advocated racism and eugenics.

Second, they don’t know anything about the government agencies they’re supposedly going to make more efficient. That’s understandable. The federal government has around 2 million workers, many — I would say the vast majority — performing important public services, in a huge variety of fields. You can’t parachute into a government agency and expect to know in a matter of days which if any programs and employees are dispensable.

But the third characteristic of the Muskenjugend is that, like Musk himself, they’re arrogant. They believe that they can parachute into agencies and quickly identify what should be cut.

The Muskenjugend attack is compromising important–even essential–government operations. In their haste to “trim” the fedeeral workforce, Trump officials fired more than 300 staffers at the National Nuclear Security Administration, “apparently unaware that this agency oversees America’s nukes.”

The next day, realizing the enormity of the error, the agency tried to reinstate those workers — but was having trouble getting in touch, because the terminated workers had already been locked out of their government email accounts.

The administration also fired 3400 workers at the National Forest Service, which plays a critical role in fighting forest fires, and has mandated large layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (just as alarms are escalating about the potential for a bird flu pandemic.)  The CDC has been pressured to withhold reports, so Krugman notes that we might remain unaware of the next pandemic until it’s well underway.

Large layoffs have also decimated the Department of Health and Human Services. According to CBS, those layoffs have included half the officers of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, who play a critical role in identifying public health threats. There have also been layoffs at the FDA, which monitors the safety of food additives and medical devices.

And according to the union, despite an uptick in air disasters, several hundred workers have been fired at the Federal Aviation Administration.

The list goes on. But peering through the details, the overall strategy is clear: Musk and his minions decided to summarily fire as many federal workers as they could without making any effort to find out what these workers do and whether it’s important.

It’s easy to criticise the growth of government in the abstract. It is a lot harder to explain why government should not be making sure our foods are safe to eat and our aircraft safe to fly, among the many other functions that must be performed collectively in modern societies. It’s easy to point to excesses of red tape, to find fault with systems that seem faulty or have become obsolete. It is much harder to identify and correct the flaws while taking care to maintain essential safeguards.

It seems all too likely that Americans are about to learn the real costs of austerity theater. Many of the suddenly laid off workers were providing essential services. Nor should we underestimate the demoralization the vindictive layoffs have created even among those workers who still have their jobs (so far.)

So when we experience our next wave of devastating forest fires, when significant numbers of Americans begin dying from preventable diseases and faulty medical devices, remember: These disasters will be partly the fault of arrogant, ignorant men who decided to smash up a reasonably functional government.

And don’t get me started on the effects our “Nazification” and bowing to Putin while betraying Ukraine is having on America’s global stature…

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Missing Information

At a recent doctor’s appointment, the assistant began by asking  the routine questions with which we are all familiar, concluding with “have you been depressed lately?” When I responded “Ever since the election,” that opened the floodgates–she confided to being terrified, angry, and desperately worried about the world her small daughter will inherit.

Millions of Americans are having similar conversations.

Given the firehose of rash and destructive assaults on poorly-understood agencies and programs, most of us are worrying about personal effects of the chaos: will my Social Security payment arrive? Will Medicare/Medicaid benefits be cut? What will Trump’s love affair with tariffs do to the stock market and my retirement accounts? Will the confirmation of an anti-science kook with a brain worm invite another pandemic?

Others wonder why we are spitting on America’s allies.

Given the sheer number of things to find appalling, it’s understandable that relatively few of us are focusing on an even more ominous aspect of this effort to destroy the federal government: the erasure of data from government websites. A recent report from In the Public Interest spelled out some consequences of those erasures.

The collection and dissemination of accurate data and findings fuel research all over the nation, in academic programs, think tanks, hospitals, private labs, and in state and local governments. But this isn’t just a problem for researchers whose projects or even life’s work have been interrupted or derailed. It’s the human cost of this loss that should worry all of us.

More than 8,000 web pages across a dozen U.S. government websites were purged, and while it covers everything from a veterans’ entrepreneurship programs to a NASA site, the purge of webpages and datasets related to public health is particularly alarming. The purges, which include more than 3,000 pages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have removed information and articles about vaccines, tuberculosis surveillance, veterans’ care, women’s health, HIV testing and prevention measures, Alzheimer’s warning signs, and overdose prevention training, among many other topics.

The datasets that have disappeared include large-scale national health surveys, indices, and data dashboards that are essential for policy makers and the public.

I spent 21 years teaching law and policy, and a bedrock principle of both was the importance of facts and evidence–the rather obvious connection between an accurate understanding of the reality of a situation and efforts to adjudicate it fairly or remedy its deficits via policy change.

The political disputes that have gotten us to this point have been significantly affected by the vast amounts of misinformation, disinformation and lack of information that have bolstered various bigotries while ignoring reality. (If you accept Musk’s description of programs with which he disagrees as “fraud and waste,” discussion of the merits of those programs–or the consequences of their sudden termination– becomes irrelevant.)

The erasure of data accumulated in rigorous studies–studies we taxpayers have funded and to which we are entitled–is an attack on knowledge and reality. The erasures are in service of MAGA bigotries– efforts to eliminate any mention of gay or trans people, avoid recognition of racial and gender realities, distort medical science and ignore climate change.

A  Guardian essay (link unavailable) noted the ridiculous extent of the purges.

Thanks to Donald Trump’s sweeping executive orders attacking “gender ideology” and DEI programs, the word “women” – along with a number of other terms – is quite literally being erased. The likes of NASA have been busy scrubbing mentions of terms related to women in leadership from public websites in an attempt to comply with Trump’s executive orders, for example. Agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have taken down numerous webpages related to gender in the wake of Trump’s orders – although a federal judged ordered on Tuesday that they should be reinstated.

Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has an internal list of hot-button words (which include “women”, “gender”, “minority”, “biases”) that they are cross-referencing against active research projects and grant applications. The Washington Post reports that once one of these very dangerous words is identified, staff then have to go through a flowchart to see whether a research project should be flagged for further review.

The National Institutes of Health and multiple university research departments are going through a similar dystopian exercise. Researchers at the University of California at San Diego, for example, have said their work is now at risk if it contains language deemed potentially problematic, including the word “women”.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak was the language created by Oceana to meet the Party’s ideological requirements. It limited people’s ability to think critically–after all, if you lack the word for something, does it exist?

Welcome to Oceana.

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More Of This, Please

As rational Americans despair and MAGA cultists applaud, Trump and Musk and their local clones are busily turning federal and Red state governments into kakistocracies, with the unprecedented acquiescence of legislative invertebrates. As the rest of us struggle to determine what actions might mitigate the ongoing destruction, we are seeing the emergence of a few bright spots–the presence of at least some principled public servants who refuse to participate in the wholesale abandonment of truth and the rule of law.

And that refusal matters.

The Bulwark recently cited an observation by Juan Linz, a political scientist who studied the breakdown of democratic regimes.

Linz argued, based on many examples from all over the world, that democracies fail not so much because of the presence of anti-democratic challengers but because of the failure of their elites to stand up to such opponents. These elites often engage in “semiloyal” behavior, which Linz defines as “a willingness to encourage, tolerate, cover up, treat leniently, excuse or justify the actions of other participants that go beyond the limits of peaceful, legitimate patterns of politics in a democracy.” They go along to get along, coming up with excuses all along the way for the authoritarian challengers. They fail to stand unequivocally for democracy and the rule of law, and liberal democracy fails.

We’re currently seeing a lot of that “semiloyal” behavior.

But we are also seeing principled behavior. Numerous media outlets have reported on a recent set of resignations similar to the Saturday Night Massacre following Nixon’s demands to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. 

Donald Trump experienced a Thursday Night Massacre.

“Manhattan’s U.S. attorney on Thursday resigned rather than obey an order from a top Justice Department official to drop the corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams,” the New York Times reported. After the case was transferred to the public integrity section at Main Justice, a total of five more DOJ attorneys resigned. In a blistering letter — one for the history books — former U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon blasted the Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove III’s order to dismiss the case, describing a nefarious quid pro quo and accusing Bove of ordering the collection of notes that would have documented a meeting concerning the matter. Sassoon and other DOJ lawyers have demonstrated uncommon courage in defense of the rule of law.

Sassoon is no “woke” liberal. She clerked for Antonin Scalia, and was a member of the Federalist Society. As Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor who was a former federal prosecutor, said in a statement praising Sassoon, “That the resignation should be by someone with sterling Federalist Society credentials only highlights the difference between the Trump administration and serious conservatives with integrity and respect for the criminal process.” 

As NBC reported,

The top federal prosecutor in New York and two senior federal prosecutors in Washington have resigned after they refused to follow a Justice Department order to drop the corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, multiple officials said Thursday.

The resignations amount to a stunning public rebuke of the Trump administration’s new Justice Department leadership in one of the country’s highest-profile criminal cases.

Justice Department officials tried to move the case to the agency’s Public Integrity Section in Washington, but John Keller, the acting head of that Section, also refused to drop the case and resigned, two sources said. Three other members of the section also resigned, as did the acting head of the department’s Criminal Division, which oversees federal criminal cases nationwide. 

In his resignation letter, Hagan Scotten, who once clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts. wrote

Any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way,

If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

The integrity shown by these public servants is a reproach to the thoroughly corrupt Trump/Musk administration. Trump’s Presidency is an effort to stay out of prison and punish anyone who opposed him. Musk’s conflicts of interest are overwhelming, as a recent letter from several Democratic members of Congress enumerated.

He has a financial stake in ongoing federal enforcement actions; his companies are currently the subject of at least 32 federal investigations, complaints, and other enforcement actions, and his company, X (formerly Twitter), is launching a digital wallet that would fall under the oversight authority of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency Musk is trying to shut down.

Trump and Musk make Nixon look like a boy scout. 

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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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