The government is already grinding to a halt

The Musk-Trump assault on the federal government has already created chaos. Employees have already been fired or are not sure if they will be fired. New hires are frozen as no one knows what the policies are. And people are unlikely to look for jobs in the government sector knowing that they will be treated like dirt. The AssociatedPress estimates that about 300,000 workers have been cut so far.

In normal times, the turnover in the government workforce of 2.4 million employees is about 6% or around 150,000 people. Apparently about 75,000 people accepted the Musk offer to leave, and I suspect that many of these were people who had been on the verge of leaving anyway so had little to lose by accepting the vaguely worded offer. But others may be unplanned and leave their agencies in the lurch.

Federal service rules prevent the firing of employees other than for cause such as misconduct. However, those on probationary status may not be covered by those protections which is why Musk has ordered the firing of all probationary staffers. There are about 220,000 such people.. But the label ‘probationary’ is misleading. It may give the impression that these were new employees who are young and/or inexperienced and so their loss is relatively inconsequential. But that is not the case. Anyone who was shifting from one position to another within the government or getting promoted to a higher level is also classified as probationary for a year. So among the probationers who have been fired are very senior and experienced people who just had the misfortune to shift their jobs at this time.
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The courts are the only thing holding Trump back

Trump and Musk seem to think that they can do whatever they want to whomever they want. As far as Congress is concerned, they are right because the Republican majority seems to be quite willing to roll over for the two of them and be subservient to their whims, abandoning their constitutional role of being an independent branch of government to serve as a check and balance on executive power.

It is the courts that can do something and they have, up to a point.

A federal judge blocked President Donald Trump’s bid to deprive federal funding from programs that incorporate “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives.

U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson ruled that Trump’s policy likely violates the First Amendment because it penalizes private organizations based on their viewpoints. And the judge said the policy is written so vaguely that it chills the free speech of federal contractors concerned they will be punished if they don’t eliminate programs meant to encourage a diverse workforce.

Abelson, a Baltimore-based appointee of former President Joe Biden, said longstanding court precedent bars the federal government from “leveraging its funding to restrict federal contractors and grantees from otherwise exercising their First Amendment rights.”
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Real estate scammer now advising on government real estate

That wealthy people are able to exploit all manner of tax loopholes is well known. Most of these loopholes do not occur by accident but are inserted by lawmakers at the instigation of lobbyists. One of the most common areas for such loopholes is in real estate because there is so much ambiguity about valuations that can be fiddled with endlessly. Trump used those loopholes all the time and was found guilty of it in one case but escaped many others.

ProPublica writes about someone who specialized in these kinds of shady dealings many times who has now been made a senior adviser to the General Services Administration, which manages the federal government’s property, even though he pushed a scam that the IRS called the “Worst of the Worst”.
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School marching band as an extreme sport

Military marching bands are common all over the world. But marching bands for schools and colleges vary a lot around the globe. The US and Japan seem to be the most passionate about them, Europe not so much, with some other countries also having them. In the US they are used for half-time performances at sporting events and the choreography on display can be pretty impressive such as this tribute by Ohio State University to blockbuster films.


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What people say about government funding

Cutting government spending has been in the news recently. The Associated Press conducted a poll to find out what Americans thought needed to be cut. While they say they would like to make cuts, their targets are quite different from the Musk-Trump ones.

Many U.S. adults believe the federal government is overspending — but polling also shows that many Americans, including Republicans, think the country is spending too little on major government programs such as Social Security.
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About two-thirds of Americans say the U.S. government is spending “too little” on Social Security and education, according to a January AP-NORC poll. Another 6 in 10, roughly, say too little money is going to assistance to the poor. A similar share say spending is too low for Medicare, the national health care insurance program for seniors, and most also say Medicaid is under-funded by the federal government. About half say border security is not receiving enough funding.

For the longest time, many Americans vastly overestimate how much money goes for aid and think that it is too much.

Foreign aid is one area where there is broad consensus that the U.S. is overspending. The 2023 AP-NORC polling suggests that Americans tend to believe too much money is going to other countries.
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At the same time, polling has shown that U.S. adults tend to overestimate the share of the federal budget that is spent on foreign aid. Surveys from KFF have found that, on average, Americans say spending on foreign aid makes up 31% of the federal budget rather than the actual answer: closer to 1% or less.

31% of the federal budget? This is utterly delusional and shows that people are all too eager to believe that vast cuts can be made to the federal budget without affecting them at all, and so lap it up when politicians rail about foreign aid.

This is complicated by the fact that some foreign aid goes for the purchase of weaponry. Another complicating factor is, as I discussed in yesterday’s post about USAID, a lot of this ‘aid’ comes back to the US in terms of goods and services being required to be obtained from here. A lot of ‘aid’ is more like a subsidy from the US government to US businesses and the agriculture sector, routed through foreign countries.

The complicated history of USAID

The Musk-Trump regime seems set on destroying many parts of the government by firing employees or putting them on administrative leave, and shutting down various agencies, even if doing so breaks the law. Another way they are doing that is by simply cutting off funding to agencies they dislike.

It is illegal for the Trump administration to unilaterally dissolve an agency created by Congress, according to legal scholars, government experts and the congressional research facility.

“For all intents and purposes you are dismantling an agency created by Congress, and that’s a violation of the law,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown Law. “It can’t stand unchallenged, in my view.”

And while a president has broad discretion to make changes to programs and reduce the workforce, the Impoundment Control Act prevents him from withholding money appropriated by Congress, the experts said.

“If it turns out that the president can eliminate or defund an agency on a whim, then ultimately Congress is stripped of all power over the budget,” said Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “That would create a precedent that destroys the separation of powers.”

It will be the courts that decide if and to what extent Trump’s takeover of USAID violated federal law.

Many legal experts in and outside of government believe this was the administration’s plan all along: drag out Trump’s most aggressive and controversial policy decisions in court for so long that by the time any permanent judgment comes down, favorable or not, USAID will be nothing but a memory.

“They don’t seem to care what the statutes say,” said Kevin Owen, an attorney who represents both management and federal workers in employment disputes. “The plan from the employment perspective was to fire them all and make them sue. If the administration loses the court cases, so be it. The damage is done.”

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Tesla buyers’ remorse

When the Teslas originally came out, many people who were liberals got them because they felt that buying an electric vehicle was the right thing to do to fight climate change. Tesla’s were one of the first EVs on the market and it branded itself as a cool, futuristic car and because it was quite expensive, rich celebrities were among the early purchasers and others may have felt that having one also made them cool.

But things have changed. Elon Musk is now seen as a truly awful person who is using his proximity and access to the ear of Trump to advance his personal agenda of destroying the government by slashing agencies and laying off thousands of federal workers. It should come as no surprise that his actions are likely to result in increased profits for private businesses, including his own. This is, after all, one of their main goals, to siphon off expenditures used to provide government services for private profit. The companies eying the money that will come their way can hardly contain their glee.
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The misguided ‘return to the office’ policy

Trump and Musk have decreed that the remote work option that became popular during the Covid pandemic is not a good thing because people are not doing much work at home. Hence they have demanded that everyone return to the office full-time. Trump encourages this belief by attacking federal workers as lazy and that the remote work option enables them to goof off.

A White House official said 65,000 workers have signed up to leave their jobs while being paid until Sept. 30. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt described federal employees who have been working remotely as lazy, saying “they don’t want to come into the office” and “if they want to rip the American people off, then they’re welcome to take this buyout.”

A federal worker in Colorado, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, said the insults directed at the government workforce by members of the Trump administration have been demoralizing for those who provide public services.

Some federal employees are quitting.

Another worker in the Pacific Northwest decided to take the offer on Thursday, even after the judge’s decision. She hopes to use the opportunity to move overseas. But even if the money never comes, she still wants out. She’s unwilling to comply with administration policies such as eliminating diversity initiatives, and she worries that the situation will only get worse for people who stay.

The worker said she opened her laptop, sent her resignation email, and closed it again.

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Creating a government of crooks, fools, and cowards

Danielle Sassoon, acting acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned rather than be complicit in Trump’s demand that she drop corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams.

You wouldn’t think it possible that a Federalist Society member and former clerk for the archconservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would show more grit in the face of Trumpism than the entire leadership of the national Democratic Party, but here we are. Three weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term in office, Danielle Sassoon, a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer whom Trump had named acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has provided the first dramatic check against the Trump Administration’s rampage through the federal government. On Wednesday, she refused her bosses’ orders to drop the criminal-corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams. She offered her resignation, and put her career on the line, rather than do the dirty work Washington directed her to do.

Following her resignation, six other career federal prosecutors in that same office have resigned in the Southern District of New York because they too refused to drop corruption charges against Adams, as ordered of Emil Bove, the acting US deputy attorney general and former personal lawyer to Trump.
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