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> The president is not king, just chief executive.

Well someone should tell him: https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1892295984928993698/photo/1 !

He literally declared himself king multiple times yesterday. He literally campaigned a promise that we wouldn't need future elections. He literally states he is the one true interpreter of the law with respect to the federal bureaucracy.

This administration's legal theory is that executive power is concentrated entirely in the person of the president, which, to be fair, is because the Constitution says that it is.

That's not conducive to good government and is not the current precedent set by the Supreme Court, but it's been the conservative legal view since the 1980s and to be fair again, is again what the Constitution actually says. It will pretty much certainly be the prevailing view after this returns to the Supreme Court.

If that legal theory is true then Congress cannot create independent executive power and so it is not illegal for the President to fire anyone in the executive branch for any reason, including inspectors general, the chairman of the Fed, etc., regardless of any law to the contrary. Again, to be clear a third time, the effects of this will be bad, but the constitutional language isn't really ambiguous.

Imagine if Obama had given Bill Gates a similar role.

Most people probably don't know what inspector generals are nor what they do.

Do you like them turning up a wasteful $8 billion contract that turned out to be $8 million, but they’re a bunch of incompetent ninnies who can’t even verify they have the right number of zeroes in their figures before they tell the world?

I think what you mean to say is that you like what doge has claimed to have found so far. Unfortunately it doesn’t hold up to even the slightest scrutiny.

It's like we go out to a twelve course dinner and get home and there is one 10 calories carrot on the table and we are tweeting to no end about our genius and our total transparently and robust diet of throwing away that carrot. "Carrots don't taste good anyways" they screen and people cheer.

Meanwhile we are actually losing vision and dying of obesity.

There is plenty to do to get more healthy for real; but that's not where we are heading with these initiatives so far:

https://prospect.org/economy/2025-01-27-we-found-the-2-trill...

There is no rhyme or reason. That's the problem with it. Not that it's out in the open. Not that it's musk.

There is no rhyme or reason, other than stripping off the parts.

I'll bet you. Once the stripping is complete, Musk and Trump have the brilliant idea of replacing the old, "bloated" government functions that were cut with private for profit contractors (that are obviously "more efficiently" run because they're for profit).

A team of kids without the capacity for discernment and bad morals to get through government agencies data is unprecedented. This is not sour grapes, this is a radical shift to how things have been done. These kids talk about bling bling, pull pump and dumps in the crypto world and are now at Elon Musks command. This is pushing any conversation away completely because you cannot have a normal conversation with trolls. What’s next, uncontrolled violence?

Stop being naive. This is an unelected billionaire successfully couping the government and replacing competent people with incompetent lackeys. Musk is fucking you over and you're cheering him on because you've suckled at the teat of propaganda for far too long. Get your head out of your ass and actually think

> Yeah 99% is sour grapes from the other team. I like what doge has turned up so far and will give them the benefit of the doubt.

This is peak ostriching. They haven't turned up anything so far, they've just been making monumental messes and lying about progress.

What’s especially frustrating, if you care about governance being more serious than pro wrestling, is that we have a couple organizations in government that’d happily provide all kinds of ways to reduce the deficit: the GAO and the CBO.

But they tend to say reality-based things like “no, your tax cuts won’t pay for themselves, in fact they’ll cost $1.2T over ten years” or “no, this war won’t pay for itself, lol, what the fuck even” or “no, you can’t make meaningful progress on cutting the deficit by attacking benefits fraud, because there’s not very much of that.”

All things Republicans would rather pretend aren’t true, and certainly don’t want to act on. So what do you do when you need to show progress but are constrained by operating based on fiction? You tout tiny wins and hope the numbers seem big to people who don’t know much; you make things up; and you cause harm or even incur long-term costs or cause waste and call that savings by doing bad accounting.

> See I know something of what actually wanting to fix the government's waste fraud and abuse would look like. It would be beefing up the IRS (where every dollar more than pays for itself), it would be banning people in congress from buying individual stocks; it would be a lot of things that deeply nerdy policy wonks have been saying for years.

Where can I vote for these changes??

This is a great article on finding actual savings. Surprise surprise, it doesn't look like scapegoating and witch hunting the enemy of the week. https://prospect.org/economy/2025-01-27-we-found-the-2-trill...