Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We had a $1.83 trillion budget deficit last year. Unsustainable. Musk thinks he can cut a trillion in spending. Good, let’s see what he comes up with. His experience at Twitter showed him that three quarters of the people employed there were useless at best.

The only way to make a serious dent in spending is to reform OASDI, Medicare, and military spending.

I don't think politicians from either party have the political courage to tackle this issue. A significant reform will be very unpopular, despite the fact it is needed.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Elon Musk is rich because he is a genius and he earned it. He deserves every penny.

I love my President Trump.

Oh, and by the way, I got mine.

- Signed a MAGA 65-year-old white man who couldn't care less about anyone or anything but myself

What does "I got mine" mean? You have some guns and a mail order bride?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Elon Musk is rich because he is a genius and he earned it. He deserves every penny.

I love my President Trump.

Oh, and by the way, I got mine.

- Signed a MAGA 65-year-old white man who couldn't care less about anyone or anything but myself

What does "I got mine" mean? You have some guns and a mail order bride?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’ve seen zero justification for turning over decision-making and control of our government to an unelected private individual. You cannot replace Congress or our co-equal branches of government balances this way. If Congress doesn’t act, I expect a lot of this will be challenged in court (not the best because it’s costly and slow).

What actual legal authority is there for our government to operate this way? Seems to be exactly what the founders sought to avoid (centralized power at the hands of the wealthy few).

Imagine if Biden had installed someone like George Soros inside the US government to start controlling everything. It would be completely unacceptable (and I suspect we’d hear that from GOP members of Congress).

To answer your question the Federal bureaucracy sits squarely under the Executive Branch. It belongs to that one of the three branches of the government, it does not sit under Congress or SCOTUS. Which is why, for example, agencies and bureaucrats routinely deny to answer questions in Congressional probes. It can be legitimately argued by constitutional scholars that some of the laws Congress passed affecting the bureaucracy are actually unlawful. The constitution makes clear the Executive branch runs the government, not Congress or SCOTUS.

That is most likely why there's this state of paralysis and no real confidence in lawsuits doing anything more than temporarily halt the EOs affecting the bureaucracy.

As for OP's question, I don't consider myself a Republican but I approve most of what I see Musk doing if just because all his actions is bringing far more transparency into an extremely opaque system of agencies and unelected senior bureaucrats.

I find it hilarious that folks think Musk is being more transparent about government. Particularly when government undergoes multiple audits, files hundreds of reports, attends and host numerous conferences and presentations and use to have lots of meetings (viewable on C-SPAN) to inform on exactly what is going on. Now things are just being destroyed and folks fired but people have no real idea WHY except because Elon said so or they are Trump enemies.

It’s like because some people didn’t pay attention they believe there was no transparency yet because Trump keeps talking (about nothing) people believe they now have some.😁

Objectivity is useful. I've worked adjacent to the Feds for decades. We have seen and learned far more about various agencies' spending and actions in the last few days than we have in a decade or two. I know how difficult, cumbersome and tiresome it is to find out about spending histories. The FOIA is fighting the bureaucracy to get basic disclosures and quite often a lot of stuff is simply stonewalled off. Agencies are summoned to Congress to testify all the time and regularly say they can't say this or that because it's all protected by secrecy acts or whatever.

By contrast, Musk is posting endless screenshots of his discoveries every day and boasting about his actions. He is telling us way more about what he's doing and agencies are doing than the agencies themselves ever told us in my entire life. It's astonishing what is coming to light. And I suspect we will learn a lot more. But there will be people who will forever bury their heads in the sand because government and bureaucrats can do no wrong. Ever. We understand that's how you think. So I'm not paying much attention to angry people right now. Because the revelations aren't going to stop and I would also advise people to be a bit cautious before being overly defensive. We're going to see and learn a lot more.

Anonymous wrote:At this point it ai beyond obvious that structures and process have been used to entrench the status quo. Congress nor the American voter have the stomach to make needed changes.

An American citizen (immigrant!) is working to improve serious problems. *If* somehow he manages to deliver, it will be one of the greatest gifts ever received by our country. Entrenched interests have had decades to fix these problems. They’ve failed. Might as well try this. Just give him and his team a blanket pardon before Trump leaves office.

Anonymous wrote:We had a $1.83 trillion budget deficit last year. Unsustainable. Musk thinks he can cut a trillion in spending. Good, let’s see what he comes up with. His experience at Twitter showed him that three quarters of the people employed there were useless at best.

Anonymous wrote:Elon Musk is rich because he is a genius and he earned it. He deserves every penny.

I love my President Trump.

Oh, and by the way, I got mine.

- Signed a MAGA 65-year-old white man who couldn't care less about anyone or anything but myself

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’ve seen zero justification for turning over decision-making and control of our government to an unelected private individual. You cannot replace Congress or our co-equal branches of government balances this way. If Congress doesn’t act, I expect a lot of this will be challenged in court (not the best because it’s costly and slow).

What actual legal authority is there for our government to operate this way? Seems to be exactly what the founders sought to avoid (centralized power at the hands of the wealthy few).

Imagine if Biden had installed someone like George Soros inside the US government to start controlling everything. It would be completely unacceptable (and I suspect we’d hear that from GOP members of Congress).

To answer your question the Federal bureaucracy sits squarely under the Executive Branch. It belongs to that one of the three branches of the government, it does not sit under Congress or SCOTUS. Which is why, for example, agencies and bureaucrats routinely deny to answer questions in Congressional probes. It can be legitimately argued by constitutional scholars that some of the laws Congress passed affecting the bureaucracy are actually unlawful. The constitution makes clear the Executive branch runs the government, not Congress or SCOTUS.

That is most likely why there's this state of paralysis and no real confidence in lawsuits doing anything more than temporarily halt the EOs affecting the bureaucracy.



As for OP's question, I don't consider myself a Republican but I approve most of what I see Musk doing if just because all his actions is bringing far more transparency into an extremely opaque system of agencies and unelected senior bureaucrats.

I find it hilarious that folks think Musk is being more transparent about government. Particularly when government undergoes multiple audits, files hundreds of reports, attends and host numerous conferences and presentations and use to have lots of meetings (viewable on C-SPAN) to inform on exactly what is going on. Now things are just being destroyed and folks fired but people have no real idea WHY except because Elon said so or they are Trump enemies.

It’s like because some people didn’t pay attention they believe there was no transparency yet because Trump keeps talking (about nothing) people believe they now have some.😁

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We had a $1.83 trillion budget deficit last year. Unsustainable. Musk thinks he can cut a trillion in spending. Good, let’s see what he comes up with. His experience at Twitter showed him that three quarters of the people employed there were useless at best.

And he cut Twitters value by over 75% in that same period of time. Is that what you want for our government?

Anonymous wrote:We had a $1.83 trillion budget deficit last year. Unsustainable. Musk thinks he can cut a trillion in spending. Good, let’s see what he comes up with. His experience at Twitter showed him that three quarters of the people employed there were useless at best.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:https://bsky.app/profile/sethcotlar.bsky.social/post/3lhejfs7zxk2l

Just as Joe McCarthy did not actually have a list of 57 known Communists, a number that kept changing, Trump just makes up shit like saying we're sending $100 million of condoms to Hamas. It was $50 million just the other day, but propaganda, not the truth, is the point.

Fun fact: Trump’s mentor was Roy Cohn. Yes that Roy Cohn. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240517-roy-cohn-the-mysterious-us-lawyer-who-helped-donald-trump-rise-to-power

If you think the current environment resembles McCarthyism, it literally is bc of this.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:At this point it ai beyond obvious that structures and process have been used to entrench the status quo. Congress nor the American voter have the stomach to make needed changes.

An American citizen (immigrant!) is working to improve serious problems. *If* somehow he manages to deliver, it will be one of the greatest gifts ever received by our country. Entrenched interests have had decades to fix these problems. They’ve failed. Might as well try this. Just give him and his team a blanket pardon before Trump leaves office.

Do you think maybe that Musk himself might have some entrenched interests of his own? Or do you think he’s doing this out of the goodness of his heart?

Of course the potential exists that he has his own entrenched interests. But I’m told time and time again that government employees are not the enemy, but rather noble civil servants seeking to serve the public good. Perhaps Musk can be given the same deference?

Again, does this particularly bother me? I don’t think so (this doesn’t mean I’m a fan of it, either). If he can actually slow down the spending after decades of drunken spending by Congress on both sides, the outcome might be worth the pain. I just know that I don’t trust anybody in Congress to actually be able to deliver on meaningful, impactful government reform.

Less than 100 years ago the British Empire was the mightiest the world had ever seen. Today they are on an apparent irreversible path to irrelevance and inability to care for their own people. I fear the same fate awaits us absent drastic change that cannot be delivered from within the system.

If it’s all going to sh*t anyways, might as well try something unconventional.

Anonymous wrote:If they are so interested in cutting the deficit then they should also be looking at more ways to raise revenues. Biden and the Dems tried to do this by increasing the IRS budget so that the department can actually do its job as well as to crack down on tax cheats. This would raise billions.

But of course, the GOP cut some of the funding in the IRA bill and Trump wants to slash the IRS budget to shreds.
It’s so stupid.

Anonymous wrote:https://bsky.app/profile/sethcotlar.bsky.social/post/3lhejfs7zxk2l

Just as Joe McCarthy did not actually have a list of 57 known Communists, a number that kept changing, Trump just makes up shit like saying we're sending $100 million of condoms to Hamas. It was $50 million just the other day, but propaganda, not the truth, is the point.