Stupid Musk tricks

One of the enduring right wing myths is that if only the government was run like a business, then everything would be fine. Not just any kind of business but a sole proprietorship where one person has the ability to make all the decisions. They think that if this were the case, here would be no waste, no fraud, and all employees would work at peak efficiency all the time. This idyllic state would be obtained by because of the ability to fire people at will, so that employees are in a state of perpetual fear and uncertainty and thus will not do anything other than work. Right wingers believe that employee protections from arbitrary management actions and firings, workplace safety rules, and limits on what employees can be expected to do and how long and when they work, are all things that reward inefficiency.

Musk’s actions since being given so much power by Trump shows that he definitely thinks along those lines. All the summary decisions that seem to have been taken without much thought, such as firing people, eliminating agencies, and cutting budgets all show that mindset.

But perhaps the most emblematic of that mindset, and the stupidest thing he has done was to issue a demand to all federal workers that within 48 hours (and that was also over a weekend) they had to provide five bullet points listing all that they had done in the past week. If they did not do so, they would be considered to have resigned.
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What is Trump’s beef with medical research?

Trump seems determined to shut down research, especially medical research. First he ordered a halt to all scientific research grants awarded by the NIH and NSF and the suspension of all grant review panels, a vital step in the whole process of awarding them. Then after a judge blocked that ban, Trump seems to have searched for a loophole to continue the ban. And he thinks he has found an obscure one, by forbidding notices of meetings to appear in the Federal Register, usually a formality.

The National Institutes of Health has stopped considering new grant applications, delaying decisions about how to spend millions of dollars on research into diseases ranging from heart disease and cancer to Alzheimer’s and allergies.

The freeze occurred because the Trump administration has blocked the NIH from posting any new notices in the Federal Register, which is required before many federal meetings can be held.

While that may seem arcane, the stoppage forced the agency to cancel meetings to review thousands of grant applications, according to two people familiar with the situation, one of whom was not authorized to speak publicly and the other who feared retribution.
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How Musk is benefiting from his government role

Kevin Drum lists all the ways that Trump’s actions so far helps Musk’s businesses. These include getting rid of the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, the body that imposed large fines on his company SpaceX for violations of regulations. Also nearly half of the people at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who are tasked with overseeing the safety of autonomous vehicles and monitoring crashes were fired, thus pretty much disabling oversight of his cars. Trump is also threatening to cut off Ukraine’s access to the Musk’s Starlink satellite network if they don’t agree to hand over their minerals to the US as part of the ‘peace deal’ that Trump wants them to sign with Russia.

One of the mostpetty decisions by Trump is to call for the removal of all the EV chargers at the locations of the General Services Administration.

The General Services Administration (GSA), which manages buildings owned by the federal government, is planning to shut down all of its electric vehicle chargers nationwide, describing them as “not mission critical.” The agency, which manages contracts for the government’s vehicle fleets, is also looking to offload newly purchased EVs.

The GSA currently operates several hundred EV chargers across the country, with approximately 8,000 plugs that are available for government-owned EVs as well as federal employees’ personally owned vehicles.
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“Neither Government Owned Vehicles nor Privately Owned Vehicles will be able to charge at these charging stations once they’re out of service,” it concludes.

At the GSA’s Denver office, employees were told that EV chargers at four federally owned buildings would be taken offline next week.

What is the point of removing chargers that are already installed? Oh yes, now all the GSA vehicles will have to charge at the commercial chargers, many of which are owned by Tesla.

The government and Musk’s businesses are rapidly becoming a single entity.

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.