The DOGE Debacle

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

 Elizabeth Williamson at NYT:

President Trump and Elon Musk promised taxpayers big savings, maybe even a “DOGE dividend” check in their mailboxes, when the Department of Government Efficiency was let loose on the federal government. Now, as he prepares to step back from his presidential assignment to cut bureaucratic fat, Mr. Musk has said without providing details that DOGE is likely to save taxpayers only $150 billion.

That is about 15 percent of the $1 trillion he pledged to save, less than 8 percent of the $2 trillion in savings he had originally promised and a fraction of the nearly $7 trillion the federal government spent in the 2024 fiscal year.

The errors and obfuscations underlying DOGE’s claims of savings are well documented. Less known are the costs Mr. Musk incurred by taking what Mr. Trump called a “hatchet” to government and the resulting firings, agency lockouts and building seizures that mostly wound up in court.

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year. At the Internal Revenue Service, a DOGE-driven exodus of 22,000 employees would cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone, according to figures from the Budget Lab at Yale University. The total number of departures is expected to be as many as 32,000.

Neither of these estimates includes the cost to taxpayers of defending DOGE’s moves in court. Of about 200 lawsuits and appeals related to Mr. Trump’s agenda, at least 30 implicate the department.

“Not only is Musk vastly overinflating the money he has saved, he is not accounting for the exponentially larger waste that he is creating,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service. “He’s inflicted these costs on the American people, who will pay them for many years to come.”

 

Decorating the White House

 Carolina A. Miranda at WP:

Every U.S. president has adapted the Oval Office to suit his taste. Franklin Delano Roosevelt placed an animal hide rug on the floor. John F. Kennedy, a World War II naval officer, hung seascapes on the walls. And Barack Obama featured indigenous ceramics on the shelves. But Trump has gone golden, taking the office into baroque and rococo realms typical of 17th- and 18th-century French monarchs. An analysis in the Cut called the decoration “An Interior Designer’s Nightmare.” But the sparkle conveys something more insidious about how Trump views himself. Behold the new Sun King, a wannabe emperor who views his powers as absolute — who governs by executive order, and has been recorded giggling in his gilded chamber with Salvadoran autocrat Nayib Bukele as his administration defies a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that he facilitate the return of a Salvadoran immigrant who was wrongly deported. God save us from the king.

When it came time to choose a design for a presidential residence in the late 18th century, Washington likewise picked one of the more restrained concepts. Conceived by Irish-born architect James Hoban, the White House, as it originally stood, combined the tidy symmetries and boxy practicality of Georgian architecture, a neoclassical style that had been popular in the British Isles during the 18th century. The White House was inspired, in part, by Leinster House in Dublin, which dates to the 1740s and now houses the Irish Parliament — a Georgian structure that is grand in scale but subdued in its surface decoration.

In keeping with the modest tone, the White House’s earliest inhabitants avoided referring to the building as a “presidential palace,” describing it instead as the “executive mansion” or the “President’s House,” the latter of which appears engraved on silver serving objects from the 19th century. It was Theodore Roosevelt who made the informal expression “the White House” the building’s official designation. The U.S. republic’s representative democracy, however imperfect and incomplete, has historically been symbolized by a “house” — not a palace.

Going After Journalists

Many posts have discussed freedom of the press.

 

Attorney General Pam Bondi has revoked former Attorney General Merrick Garland’s policy designed to shield the news media from secret government requests for phone, email and other records.

Text of a new memo obtained by NBC News:

Safeguarding classified, privileged, and other…

— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) April 25, 2025

Polarized Concern About Press Freedom

 

Many posts have discussed freedom of the press.

Naomi Forman-Katz snd Kirsten Eddy at Pew:

Overall, seven-in-ten Americans are at least somewhat concerned about potential restrictions on press freedom – a right that is enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This includes 43% who say they are extremely or very concerned. These numbers are almost identical to the findings of an April 2024 survey, when 41% said they were extremely or very concerned and an additional 29% were somewhat concerned.

But in many cases, it is not the same people who are worried. In 2024, during the Biden administration, 47% of Republicans and independents who lean Republican said they were extremely or very concerned about restrictions on press freedoms. Fewer Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (38%) said the same.

Measles and Polarization

Many posts have discussed partisan polarization.

Arthur Allen at KFF:

While the most serious measles epidemic in a decade has led to the deaths of two children and spread to 27 states with no signs of letting up, beliefs about the safety of the measles vaccine and the threat of the disease are sharply polarized, fed by the anti-vaccine views of the country’s seniormost health official.

About two-thirds of Republican-leaning parents are unaware of an uptick in measles cases this year while about two-thirds of Democratic ones knew about it, according to a KFF survey released Wednesday.

Republicans are far more skeptical of vaccines and twice as likely (1 in 5) as Democrats (1 in 10) to believe the measles shot is worse than the disease, according to the survey of 1,380 U.S. adults...

Some 35% of Republicans answering the survey, which was conducted April 8-15 online and by telephone, said the discredited theory linking the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to autism was definitely or probably true — compared with just 10% of Democrats.

Press Freedom: W and L

Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin at NYT:

CBS News entered a new period of turmoil on Tuesday after the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, said he would resign from the long-running Sunday news program, citing encroachments on his journalistic independence.

In an extraordinary declaration, Mr. Owens — only the third person to run the program in its 57-year history — told his staff in a memo that “over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”

“So, having defended this show — and what we stand for — from every angle, over time with everything I could, I am stepping aside so the show can move forward,” he wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The New York Times.

“60 Minutes” has faced mounting pressure in recent months from both President Trump, who sued CBS for $10 billion and has accused the program of “unlawful and illegal behavior,” and its own corporate ownership at Paramount, the parent company of CBS

...

Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is eager to secure the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to Skydance, a company run by the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison. She has expressed a desire to settle Mr. Trump’s case, which stems from what the president has called a deceptively edited interview in October with Vice President Kamala Harris that aired on “60 Minutes.”

Katie Robertson and David Enrich at NYT:

A federal jury on Tuesday ruled against Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and Republican vice-presidential nominee, in her yearslong defamation lawsuit against The New York Times. The jury reached the verdict after two hours of deliberations.

Ms. Palin sued The Times in 2017 after the newspaper published — and then swiftly corrected and apologized for — an editorial that wrongly suggested she had incited a deadly shooting in Arizona years earlier.

The case became a bellwether for battles over press freedoms and media bias in the Trump era, with Ms. Palin’s lawyers saying they hoped to use it to attack a decades-old Supreme Court precedent that makes it harder for public figures to sue news outlets for defamation.

This is the second time a federal jury has concluded that The Times was not liable for defaming Ms. Palin in its editorial. The case first went to trial in 2022, and both the jury and the judge ruled in favor of The Times. But last year, a federal appeals court invalidated those decisions, setting the stage for this month’s retrial.

Sack the Fed Head?

Many posts have discussed regulation and the administrative state. 

Peter J. Wallison at AEI:

In a 2020 case called Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Supreme Court created a legal foundation for the president’s control of the independent regulatory agencies, including the Fed.

The Court said in that case that in the US governmental system all the agencies of the government must be responsible to the president—the only official elected by all the people—and that the CFPB, which had a single administrator whose term of office the president could not terminate at will, was thus unconstitutionally structured because the president could not appoint his own director.

The Federal Reserve Board is headed by seven directors appointed for fixed but staggered terms of 14 years, and thus cannot be dismissed by the president under current law, unless the Supreme Court holds that the Fed is subject to the same rules as the other independent regulatory agencies.

In creating the Fed, Congress was careful to make sure that the agency was completely independent of the president and Congress. This was because the Fed’s control of the major elements of the economy—the money supply, interest rates, and the banking system—would all be important for a president (and his party) running for re-election. The Fed, for example, could lower interest rates and increase economic growth before an election, with major political implications for the president and his political party.

Accordingly, if the president is to be given control over the independent regulatory agencies, the Court must find some other way to assure that the Fed will remain independent of any president.

In Seila Law itself, before the Court decided whether the administrator of the CFPB could be removed and replaced by the president, it considered whether Congress would have created the CFPB in the first place, if it had known that the president would be able to take control of the agency.

The Court concluded that there was nothing in the legislative history of the CFPB to suggest that Congress cared whether the president controlled the agency or not. Accordingly, the Court allowed the agency to continue operations under the president’s control.

In the case of the Fed, however, the Court’s answer would almost certainly be different. It would be clear from the congressional debates over the Fed’s creation—and the extraordinary financial power of the Fed—that its independence from the president was a key in its establishment.