Bullish on DOGE
DOGE details: After a week of speculation, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy wrote in The Wall Street Journal of their plans for what the Department of Government Efficiency will actually look like.
“Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but ‘rules and regulations’ promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections,” they write. “This is antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision.”
Basically, it won’t be a separate agency, but rather a collection of people who get put at each agency to identify what needs to be cut. “DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies,” Ramaswamy and Musk write. “DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission.” They’ll identify the “minimum number of employees required” for each given agency to perform its “constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated” function. A massive reduction in headcount looks likely.
This Milei-core buddy duo slashing the size of government amounts to a libertarian fantasy come true.
“When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach,” the two predict, having been around the block enough to know what the haters will say. “In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress.”
Godspeed, fair kings.
Gaetzkeeping: Will we ever lay eyes on the House Ethics Committee’s report into the many purported misdeeds (sexual and otherwise) of former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz?
Here’s what happened. Gaetz attended a string of parties in 2017 in Orlando where there were drugs and escorts. He purportedly had sex with a 17-year-old—below Florida’s age of consent, though all parties claim her age was not discussed—which at least one witness saw. He also allegedly paid for sex, though he frequently used other people to cover for him, as one does when, as a sitting member of Congress with an IQ above 70, one is buying sex from teenage prostitutes.
Naturally, President-elect Donald Trump saw the above laid out—as well as Gaetz’s loyal harassing of people like former Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.)—and thought well, that man looks like a natural-born attorney general. So Gaetz will now be confirmed or rejected for that post, to lead the Department of Justice, and has accordingly resigned from the House in order to do so. Oh, and one very convenient side effect of resigning from the House: the Ethics Committee’s report, which had been—for various procedural reasons—repeatedly stymied, will apparently no longer be released, per House Speaker Mike Johnson, as there is no reason to have an investigation on someone who is no longer a sitting representative.
Now, “Senators fro
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