The Manhattan protest march was scheduled to start at 2 PM in front of the Central Library (the one with the lions), go down 5th Avenue, and end at Madison Square. It rained all morning, forecast to taper off in the course of the afternoon, so around 1:00 I put a transparent recycling bag over my protest sign, walked to the train station, took a train to Grand Central (a conductor said "I love your sign" as I boarded), and walked a block to the library, where things appeared to be more crowded than at the last two protest marches. (I use the first-person singular because shalmestere was in Boston, winding up a week at the Early Music Festival.)

Oh, about the sign. In honor of Flag Day, one side had a US flag, followed by the words "with liberty and justice for ALL!", the last two words underlined. The other side said "1775-2025: 250 years and we still don't bow to KINGS".

Chatted with various other protesters around 42nd Street, as the crowd surged forward a foot or two, then stayed in place for ten minutes, repeat. About 3:10 I got to 41st Street, but after that things moved more smoothly, and it wasn't quite 4:00 when I got to 34th Street and peeled off for Penn Station because my lower back was hurting.

The next train to my station was in 45 minutes, but I figured I could happily spend that time sitting in a chair with a back. A couple of white twentysomethings asked to see what my signs said, and seemed quite puzzled that I opposed anything the Trump administration had been doing. We discussed the DOGE dismantling of numerous government agencies, and I suggested that if you actually wanted to reduce waste, fraud, and inefficiency in government, you would start by understanding what the agencies are supposed to do, then identifying particular programs that are working well and others that aren't achieving their goals, then analyzing them to decide whether the unsuccessful programs could be made successful or should be abandoned; you don't start by firing (illegally) all the inspectors general whose job is to reduce waste, fraud, and inefficiency in government, then firing tens of thousands of mostly-competent workers regardless of whether they're doing a good job. Doing things the right way takes months, and Musk didn't have that much time: he wanted to destroy agencies in a hurry before the courts could stop him. The guy I was talking to acknowledged that there might be more effective ways than Musk's to improve government, "but Musk is gone now. You've been talking for ten minutes, and you're clearly very passionate about what Musk did, but you haven't mentioned Trump once.' [I had, in connection with Musk having no actual governmental authority, but not much.] "So what has Trump himself done that makes you think he's a king?"

So I took a deep breath, thinking "where do I even start?", and didn't do a great job of this part, before a middle-aged black guy walked up and told the kid I was talking to that he was full of shit. The kid stood up, they started shouting in one another's faces, and almost came to blows before the black guy's female companion persuaded him to walk away. One of the twentysomethings reported the episode to a cop, then came over and shook my hand before they all went to catch their train.

At which point I looked at my phone to check on my departure time, realized that I'd been looking at the schedule of trains in the opposite direction, and that I had just missed my actual train; the next one was in another 50 minutes, so I took the subway home instead.

Meanwhile, shalmestere had just boarded a train home from Boston. I got home, took an ibuprofen, lay down for a while, applied a heating pad to my back, walked and fed the dogs, ate a little (I wasn't very hungry), then went back to Penn Station to meet her and accompany her home. After which it became a relatively normal evening.

I've heard bits and pieces about "the abundance agenda" in reading Ezra Klein's NY Times opinion pieces over recent months. He recently co-authored (with Derek Thompson) a book entitled Abundance (review here)on the subject, and this Atlantic article sums up the split in the Democratic party caused by this and two other similar books (Yoni Appelbaum's Stuck and Marc Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works). I haven't read any of the three books yet, but I'm intrigued.

We can all see that the current administration is intentionally destroying the Constitutional Republic and the rule of law in favor of a klepto-autocracy. The only way it's likely to stop doing that is if it loses badly in free and fair elections, and the only likely candidate to beat it is the Democratic Party. But the Democratic Party doesn't have a great reputation with the public either: it can run on "stopping the steal" and restoring the rule of law, but to seriously win, it needs to be in favor of something. What is it in favor of?

For most of my (sixty-year) life, the most consistent difference between Democrats and Republicans has been that Democrats believed government could and should work to make ordinary people's lives better, while (starting with Reagan) Republicans believed government couldn't work, and shouldn't work, and that any time government threatened to make ordinary people's lives better, it must be sabotaged to prevent it from doing that. Since it's always easier to break something than to fix it, Republican governments have had an unfair advantage over Democratic ones in proving their respective points.

But even where and when Democrats are firmly in control, whether local, state, or Federal, they haven't done a great job in recent decades of demonstrating that government can work. Public projects like the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge were built a hundred years ago, on schedule and under budget, but anything a government tries to build now takes much longer, costs much more, and accomplishes much less, than initial estimates -- think of the Second Avenue Subway in Manhattan, or inter-city high-speed rail in California. Trump likes to criticize "Democrat-led hellholes" like San Francisco for their homelessness, and he's not entirely wrong: Democratic-led large cities do have more homelessness than smaller cities or than the few Republican-led large cities. Biden's "Inflation Reduction Act" (which was mostly an environmental-policy bill) promised vast increases in solar and wind power, widespread broadband Internet in rural areas, and thousands of new electric-car charging stations so one could actually travel across the country in an electric-only car without fear of getting stranded; in fact, most of the solar-and-wind and broadband projects are still going through permitting and approval, and only dozens of new electric-car charging stations were actually built by the time Trump took office and slammed the brakes on all of that in a fit of pique. By comparison, I think China builds more public transit, solar and wind generation, and so on every year than the US has built in its entire history.

I gather (from the summaries I've read) that in the 1930's and 1940's, liberals in government were successful at using it to build things to improve ordinary people's lives. In the 1960's, liberals started viewing government as the enemy, became more concerned about stopping it from making ordinary people's lives worse, and enacted lots of procedural rules to ensure that all conceivable stakeholders are heard before a shovel goes into the ground. Which is laudable, but in practice it often prevents government from accomplishing anything, even things that would clearly improve most people's lives. The Chinese government, of course, goes to the opposite extreme that Trump would like to emulate: what the President says is what will happen, and other stakeholders might as well not exist.

I don't lose a lot of sleep over the Trump administration demonstrating overwhelming competence at getting good things done, or even overwhelming competence at getting things-I-think-are-bad done. Very simply, Xi Jinping is better at being a dictator than Donald Trump will ever be, and he heads a system of top-down control that's already worked out a lot of the bugs over the past eighty years. But the "abundance" movement within the "liberal-ish" half of the US says "we need to demonstrate that we can make government actually work, largely through reducing procedural obstacles, simplifying and optimizing operations." Sorta what DOGE would be doing if it actually aimed to make things work better rather than just destroying them, if it took the time to understand what current systems aim to achieve and how they currently work before burning them to the ground. Al Gore's Reinventing Government initiative was a related effort; see also this look back at its successes and failures twenty years later.

At the same time, I have libertarian friends I respect who would argue that anything government does to help ordinary people is inherently susceptible to corruption, rent-seeking, and regulatory capture, and we're all better off in general if government doesn’t try to do so many things.

I'm reminded that Frank Herbert wrote a couple of SF novels (and short stories, I think) on the premise that "efficiency in government" proponents had actually succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, to the point that a Bureau of Sabotage was created to slow down the rest of the government; the protagonist is a vaguely James-Bond-ish (and quite efficient) Saboteur Extraordinaire named Jorj X. McKie.

Comments? Suggestions? Have you actually read any of the recent books on the subject?

As Stephen Vladeck at the Times points out this morning, the Justice Department is asking the Supreme Court not to rule on the underlying question of whether the 14th Amendment actually grants birthright citizenship, but "more modestly" on the more-technical question of whether a single district judge can issue a nationwide injunction against a governmental policy. Of course, this is anything but "modest": if SCOTUS rules the way the Justice Department would like, it would be an enormous win for the Trump administration, because the ruling would presumably apply to lots of other illegal and un-Constitutional things the administration wants to do.

Nationwide injunctions really are a concern: both major parties have used them -- together with careful judge-and-venue-shopping -- to impede actions by Presidents of the opposite party. Related is the question of "emergency" injunctions, which when the Supreme Court takes them up as part of its "shadow docket" are usually heard and decided very quickly, possibly with no oral argument at all, and a decision issued without signed opinions. Both of these practices have become increasingly common in recent years, and they both feel like "end runs" around the proper administration of law; it would be nice to have fewer of them.

So here's a question: what constitutes a legal "emergency"? To me, it would be something that's likely to seriously harm somebody who wasn't being harmed before. If you've had a particular right for decades, and somebody tries to take it away from you, especially in a way that's likely to be irrevocable in practice, that could well be an emergency. On the other hand, if something has been happening for decades or centuries, it's hard to claim that fixing it is an "emergency". In other words, the decision whether something qualifies for the "emergency" docket should be biased in favor of the status quo ante: even if a long-standing practice does need to change, it probably doesn't need to change so fast that it can't wait for a proper judiciary proceeding.

And that's why numerous courts have accepted cases about birthright citizenship as "emergencies": the Administration's position would apply a decidedly non-obvious interpretation to the 160-year-old Fourteenth Amendment, reverse a 127-year-old Supreme Court ruling, and reverse various Federal laws written in light of that ruling, so there's a strong presumption in favor of leaving those things unchanged. But the courts accepting those cases have all been lower-level courts. Several of them have issued nationwide injunctions against the Administration's policy, presumably on grounds that the decision doesn't depend on detailed facts of an individual case but on the plain language of the 14th Amendment, which is the same no matter what state or district you live in, and the Justice Department is "modestly" asking the Supreme Court to strike down those nationwide injunctions. Ideally, in the Justice Department's view, a lower-court case would apply only to the individuals involved in that case, and would at most set a non-binding precedent within that court's geographic jurisdiction.

An additional wrinkle is that many of the plaintiffs in these cases so far have been (IIUC) not individuals whose citizenship has been denied, but "blue" states concerned about the policy's effect on their people. I don't understand all the implications of this, or what standing the states have.

Anyway, if the Supreme Court overturned nationwide injunctions for the birthright-citizenship question, several weird things would happen.

1) Thousands, and eventually millions, of US citizens would lose their citizenship because they couldn't afford to file individual cases against having their citizenship stripped, or they didn't know how to do so. (Pro bono goes only so far when there are thousands or millions of similar cases in the system at once.)

2) Perhaps more significantly, thousands and eventually millions of US citizens would lose their citizenship because they're afraid to file a legal case. Imagine that your family consists of a US-born toddler, a DREAMer older child, a parent with a legal student visa or green card, and an undocumented parent, and you put your name on a lawsuit demanding that your toddler be treated as a US citizen. You would probably win the lawsuit, but long before it can even go to court, the rest of the family will have been deported (including the DREAMer and the legal resident). Of course, ICE could have deported the family anyway, but there are millions of such families; filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration will presumably jump you to the head of the line.

3) Thousands, and eventually millions, of US citizens might remain US citizens as long as they stay in the "blue" states where injunctions are in effect, but become non-citizens (and liable to deportation) if they ever travelled to other states. As one of the lawyers pointed out at oral argument, not since the Civil War has a person's citizenship depended on what state the person was in at the moment.

4) Thousands, and eventually millions, of nearly-identical cases would make their way through the judicial system. Probably 95% of these would be settled quickly, in favor of birthright citizenship and following the 1898 Supreme Court precedent, but perhaps 5% wouldn't -- and in those 5% of cases, the administration would have gained a new power (in certain parts of the country) that it hasn't had before. Heads I win, tails we tie: I'll play that game as often as I can.

5) Ironically, that scenario (a handful of rogue judges agree with the Administration in dropping birthright citizenship) is perhaps the best case, because the conflicting rulings allow the good guys to appeal to the Supreme Court, which (even with its 6-3 Republican-appointee majority) is unlikely to disregard the plain language of the 14th Amendment and reverse all those precedents. The alternative is that every single judge who rules on this supports birthright citizenship, but only within that judge's jurisdiction, the Trump administration chooses not to appeal to the Supreme Court and nobody else has standing to do so, the case never gets to the Supreme Court, and in the interim, the Administration can keep revoking people's citizenship as stated in 1 and 2 above in any part of the US where there hasn't been a court case yet.

So those are the effects on birthright citizenship. But the Supreme Court is extremely unlikely to overturn nationwide injunctions only on that one issue: they're more likely to overturn nationwide injunctions in general, on a wide category of legal questions. Such as whether the Trump administration is obligated to obey Federal laws on how and when Federal employees can be fired; whether it's obligated to obey Congressional appropriation bills; whether it's obligated to give due process to non-US-citizens before imprisoning or deporting them; whether it can default on (or "claw back") already-approved grants to universities, libraries, museums, and other non-profit organizations; whether it can penalize and blackmail law firms without naming anything specific they've done wrong; etc. etc. In each of these areas, we could end up in a situation in which the administration is constrained by Federal law in some parts of the country and not in others.

On March 31 (less than a month ago), I wrote

"we've come this far in only ten weeks. What's left for the Trump administration to do in the next 3-3/4 years?

Once you realize that you can disappear legal immigrants without evidence, charges, or legal proceedings, the obvious next step is to disappear US citizens."

And right on schedule, the Trump administration has apparently deported a US citizen to Honduras without even a hearing.

Some details: the citizen in question is a 2-year-old girl, born in the US to a Honduran mother; I don't know the father's citizenship/immigration status. The mother, the 2-year-old daughter, and a Honduran older daughter were taken into ICE detention and the administration decided to deport them. The father petitioned to stop the proceedings, at least insofar as the 2-year-old was concerned, on grounds that she's a US citizen and can't be deported. ICE allowed him a 1-minute phone call with the mother, which wasn't enough to resolve anything or reach any agreement about the 2-year-old. The father's petition was heard by a Trump-appointed Federal judge in Louisiana, by which time the deportation plane was apparently already in the air to Honduras. The Justice Department told the judge that the mother had requested that her daughter go with her, but the judge was unable to verify that. The judge tried to call the mother and was told that she had already been released in Honduras, so ICE had no way to reach her. The judge has set a hearing for May 16 to find out whether the US government actually "deported a US citizen with no meaningful process".

There are a lot of complexities here. It's not clear whether the father and mother are estranged, or whether ICE simply caught her and not him, or whether he's a citizen or legal immigrant. Ordinarily when parents are estranged, it's legally problematic for one of them to take their child across state lines without the other's permission, not to mention going to another country without permission; these things are normally resolved by custody rulings from a judge. It's not clear whether she wanted to take the child with her to Honduras, and whether the father and mother really disagreed about this. It is clear that they were deported under "expedited removal" rules before a judge could even weigh in on the case.

Let's imagine a simpler case as a Gedankenexperiment: father and mother are both undocumented immigrants, they've both been caught by ICE, which wants to deport them both at the same time to the same place, but they have a US-born 2-year-old. What are the possible outcomes?

1. The child is taken away from her parents; they're deported and she's placed with friends, relatives, or a child-protective agency.


2. Mother, father, and child are all deported, one of them in violation of US law (and possibly the US Constitution).


3. Mother, father, and child are all allowed to stay in the US, two of them in violation of US law.


4. Mother, father, and child are all allowed to stay in the US legally.

During the first Trump administration, the preferred solution was a variant of #1: separate children from their parents, deport the parents, and don't bother even keeping records of which child belongs to which parents so they can potentially be reunited someday, on the theory that causing as much suffering as possible will discourage other people from coming to the US illegally. (And they didn't try particularly hard to place the children, instead keeping them in ICE detention for weeks and months.)

The new answer appears to be #2: it doesn't inflict quite as much suffering, but it serves as a test case for Trump's long-standing desire to overturn the part of the 14th Amendment that specifies birthright citizenship. If he does that successfully, suddenly there are millions more people he can deport.

Of course, I'm a bleeding-heart liberal who measures the outcomes by how much they harm or help people. By that ranking, #1 is clearly the worst -- it inflicts a lot of suffering on three specific people. #2 is less bad: the family are still together, but they presumably left Honduras for good reasons, and now they're back there against their will. #3 is slightly less bad still: the family are still together, where they've chosen to live, but they're still living "underground", afraid to report crimes or complain about working conditions, wondering every day when ICE will knock at the door again. And their presence causes generalized harm to American workers, who have trouble competing for jobs against illegal immigrants who are guaranteed not to try to unionize or complain about working conditions. (Their presence probably does not cause a generalized harm through crime rates, since undocumented immigrants statistically commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens.) Least bad is #4: the family are together, where they've chosen to live, they're not "underground" so they're not competing unfairly with citizens for jobs, and they can go back and visit their relatives in Honduras without fear that they won't be allowed back into the US. My ranking, coincidentally, is the exact opposite of the Trump administration's priorities.

Options 3 and 4 do raise real moral-hazard questions: if it's US policy to allow people to stay either quasi-legally or fully-legally by having an "anchor baby", the policy encourages people to do exactly that, which really does feel like "cheating" or "cutting the line", as well as being a terrible reason to have a child. But what if it were US policy to allow (law-abiding) people to stay legally regardless of whether they had an "anchor baby"? What if we simply didn't have a category of "illegal immigrant" (as we didn't until 1875)? Then the moral-hazard argument about "anchor babies" disappears.

I took an hour out of my work day on Friday to join in a family Zoom call with my uncle Will, who had scheduled his death for later that afternoon. He appeared mentally sharp, with the same dry humor as ever, but (whether because of Parkinson's or because of medications) his face didn't move, no expression at all, except when he was actually talking. My cousin and half-brother were there in person, as were his four-month-old grandson, his first wife (whom I hadn't seen in fifty years or so), and presumably an offscreen nurse to manage the assisted-suicide process. My other uncle, my sister-in-law, my brother, and I joined by Zoom from our respective homes. It was good to see all these people, and the prevailing mood was one of tender humor.

After the Zoom call ended, my brother reported by e-mail that Will took his pill, went to bed in the living room facing the window with a spectacular view of Mt. Hood, fell asleep, and stopped breathing two or three hours later.

Saturday we went to another protest march in Manhattan. This one's theme was "declaration of interdepence", with specific emphases on due process for immigrants and environmental protection. I re-used my sign from the last march, which said on one side "The Bill of Rights is not limited to citizens" and on the other "WASTE + FRAUD + ABUSE = DOGE", while shalmestere made a new sign about clean air, clean water, and clean energy. We stood around for an hour and a half in front of the Central Library before starting to walk, ending up at the corner of Central Park. No incidents that I noticed, no counter-protesters even, and we got gestures of support from the tourists passing by on buses and the drivers crossing our path. There was one guy, right at the end of the march, who used his bullhorn to exhort everyone to not patronize the horse-carriages of Central Park -- a legitimate issue to discuss, but not the main focus of the day, and he was unnecessarily insulting about it. Anyway, we took a subway back to Penn Station, and an LIRR to Queens, and walked home with our protest signs. One lady on the street asked what the signs were about, so I showed her mine, and she explained "Actually, the Bill of Rights is limited to citizens."
"It doesn't say so; it uses the word 'person', not 'citizen'."
"Trust me, I've read the Constitution, and even studied it. The whole Constitution is only for citizens."
"But the authors of the Constitution knew the word 'citizen', and used it in other places; they didn't use it in the Bill of Rights. Everyone deserves due process."
"You want to give due process to murderers and rapists who aren't even in the country legally in the first place?"
"Absolutely, because if they haven't had due process, we don't know that they are murderers and rapists."
Anyway, she got angrier and angrier, accusing "you people" of putting the interests of murderers and rapists and terrorists ahead of real Americans and the victims of murder, rape, and terrorism. We walked away.

Then spent the rest of the afternoon recuperating from the physical stress of standing or walking-slowly on pavement for several hours. It was a gorgeous day, high in the low 80's (and three days earlier I was wearing a winter parka!), with blue skies and light breezes.

we sat next to a guy on the train who asked what the signs were about, so we told him.

He assured me that while a few people would lose their jobs in the short run, everything would settle down soon and in the long run it would be good for everyone.

I disagreed politely, pointing out that the cuts are so deep, and in so many agencies, that pretty much every American will be affected by them, soon and with no expiration date. And that the cuts are being made with an axe, not a scalpel. I'm all in favor of rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse, but if you were really trying to do that, you would hire people who know about accounting and government procurement, and who would study what the agencies do before issuing prescriptions for how to fix them. But they don't have time to do that kind of serious investigation: they have to break things as fast as possible, without understanding them, because the longer they take, the more likely somebody is to stop them. Instead, they have a bunch of 20-year-old kids who are good at computer programming but don't know anything else making decisions about shutting down entire government agencies, and they've been given access to your entire financial history, your SSN and birthdate and tax returns etc, without even passing a security background check; I assume they've made copies of all that on their home computers so they can sell it later. He agreed that it would be best to have government fixed by people who know what they're doing.

And then I asked what business he was in. He talked about his efforts to get a mistaken DUI stricken from his record so he can get back his CDL and return to his job driving trucks so he can retire with full benefits before he's 70. Apparently a lawyer he hired to help with this lied to him in order to extract more legal fees from him, and never really pressed his case, but he's still out $30K, and several years of seniority, for the attempt. He was on his way to a job fair, and I wished him luck.

As he got off the train, he said "Y'all seem to be really nice people. You're clearly left-wingers, and I'm not, but it's been nice talking to you." I replied "Yes, we need to talk across these divides, or we'll have two countries rather than one."

We've heard a lot in the past two months about DOGE and the Trump cabinet cutting government waste, fraud, abuse, and "wokeness". These words are usually combined in the same sentence, and rarely distinguished from one another.

There really are several different things that might go wrong with a government spending program, each with a different appropriate response.

Waste and inefficiency

Any government program will inevitably waste some money. There might be duplication of effort, e.g. people hand-copying data from one form to a nearly identical one, wasting both time and money. There might be erroneous expenditures: somebody miscopied a number or approved an expenditure that shouldn't have been approved. Or the whole program might be an ineffective way to achieve its stated goals. All of these are bad things, none of them can be completely eliminated, but all of them can be reduced with careful examination. It takes bureaucratic-process expertise to identify duplication of effort and common sources of error, and recommend how to reduce those things. It takes domain expertise, outcomes analysis, and an open mind to identify approaches that are simply not working, and even more to identify better alternatives. Sometimes there are no better alternatives: based on analysis of past failures and literature review, there is no known way to actually accomplish the stated goals, in which case the program should arguably be shut down.

Vice President Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" program was a relatively-successful effort in this area: it looked at a lot of cases of error and inefficiency, took extensive input from the people actually implementing those programs, and in many cases found simple ways to improve results and save money, such as distributing the dates of payments evenly throughout the month rather than trying to process most of them on the same day.

Fraud and abuse

Any government program that hands out money will inevitably attract fraud and abuse. These are different from waste and inefficiency in that somebody intentionally got something not authorized by the enabling legislation. Fortunately, the lack of authorization means somebody is breaking a law, so the solution is obvious: file criminal charges against the individuals doing it. Shutting down a whole program is almost never an appropriate solution unless the rate of fraud is so high that it swamps the program's legitimate uses.

How many criminal charges have been filed for benefits fraud as a result of DOGE investigations? I haven't heard of any, which suggests that they haven't actually found any fraud to speak of. (Or that they'd already fired the prosecutors who would have brought those charges, or that in their haste to destroy the agency they'd already destroyed or contaminated the evidence -- neither of which is a promising way to fight fraud.)

A related question: how much does it cost to catch and stop fraud? These costs come in two forms.
First, obviously, how much bureaucratic time and paperwork (and how much ordinary-citizens' time and paperwork) is spent just trying to certify eligibility for benefits: if we spend $1,000,000 to catch $100,000 worth of fraud, that's a textbook example of "waste and inefficiency". Second, how many false-positives do we get in exchange for reducing false-negatives? If we kick ten ineligible people off Medicare, but also kick fifty eligible people off Medicare at the same time (whether because of bureaucratic error or because the added paperwork burden causes some of them to miss deadlines), do we count that as a win or a loss?

Programs no longer consistent with administration priorities

Every new administration will have different priorities than the previous one, and will inevitably want to spend more money on some things and less on others; this is perfectly legitimate, because elections have consequences. The traditional, legal way to handle this is to request, and negotiate, a different allocation of money in the next round of Congressional budget bills. If your team negotiate well, they may be able to completely eliminate a program in the next year's budget, not because of waste, inefficiency, fraud, or abuse, but simply because the Administration and a good fraction of Congress don't support it. But if most of Congress does support it, the Administration has to decide whether it's worth a veto fight that also imperils the rest of the budget.

The less-traditional, less-legal way is to unilaterally change the spending in this year's budget, which has already been passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the (then-)President and therefore has the force of law. President Nixon tried to do that (not so much on first taking office, but in implementing budgets passed later by a heavily-Democratic Congress) by refusing to spend money on things he didn't approve of, and Congress responded with the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, saying explicitly that no, the President doesn't have the power to do that. Almost every President since then has sought line-item vetoes or some kind of limited impoundment authority. The second Trump administration has gone farther than any other in this regard, unilaterally cancelling thousands of contracts, whole programs, and even whole agencies without even asking Congress.

So, three different reasons to want to save money on a program, and three different appropriate responses. The first requires careful, painstaking analysis and expertise; the second requires evidence and criminal charges; and the third requires political negotiation and waiting a few months. The Trump administration didn't like any of those requirements, so they skipped the step of identifying waste, inefficiency, fraud, and abuse and went straight to cutting programs that might conceivably contain waste, inefficiency, fraud, and abuse (which is all of them), in "shock and awe" mode, moving fast to change the reality on the ground long before the courts, the law, or the political opposition could catch up with them. Moving that fast, of course, means that even if they did care about which programs are actually problematic, they wouldn't have time to identify or analyze them. Besides, that's boring, tedious work; it's much more fun to just break things because you can and because it makes liberals cry.

Cutting things with an axe rather than a scalpel tends to waste money. If you've funded the construction of a tunnel, or a medical outcomes study, and shut down the program abruptly at 90% completion, you've already spent 90% of the money, but you'll get none of the benefit because you can't drive through 90% of a tunnel, and 90% of a medical outcomes study lacks credibility because it violates the carefully-planned study protocol the researchers selected in advance. If you cancel a signed contract and the other party sues you for breach of contract, you may end up paying court fees and fines, so you're still spending taxpayer dollars but not getting the benefit the program was supposed to provide.

But of course it's not really about saving taxpayer dollars; it's about a jihad against the whole idea of government. The people at DOGE, and some or all of the Trump cabinet, are engaged in a holy war to destroy as much of the Federal government as possible before anybody can stop them. Trump may eventually come to regret this, because if you have no government left, you can't use it to reward your friends and punish your enemies.

Since Donald Trump took office for the second time, he's declared an outright war on "DEI", without clearly defining what "DEI" means or why it's a bad thing. That vagueness is probably an intentional tactic: if people don't know exactly what you're forbidding, but you have a reputation for punishing people harshly for doing it, they'll voluntarily stop doing anything that it might conceivably be.

I'm not an expert on DEI as it's traditionally understood, but I gather it includes a couple of different things an organization might do:

• making (racial, religious, political, socioeconomic, gender, etc.) diversity an organizational goal, and measuring progress towards that goal by counting the representation of various races, religions, etc. in the organization as a whole or in its upper ranks;
  


• recognizing the (past or present) existence of discrimination and the achievements of people who have overcome it;


• allowing or supporting voluntary affinity groups within the organization based on membership in historically-discriminated-against demographics;


• favoring members of groups that have historically been disfavored, so as to achieve diversity and equality of results;


• actively soliciting applications (for student positions, internships, jobs, promotions) from groups that traditionally haven't applied, on the theory that adding them to the applicant pool will give the positions to people who are both more-qualified and more-diverse;


• doing research or public outreach on specific racial, religious, socioeconomic, gender, etc. groups for any reason.

People have made a number of good arguments in favor of diversity as an organizational goal: it'll reduce monolithic "groupthink" and enable the organization to consider a wider variety of solutions to problems; it'll enable a company to perceive and meet the needs of a wider variety of potential customers; it'll prepare students to live harmoniously in a diverse real world.

At the same time, there are legitimate arguments against certain implementations of it. We've all seen mandatory DEI trainings that everybody has to take once a year in order to check off a box, everybody forgets about as soon as the box is checked, and there's no evidence that they make any difference, which makes them a waste of everybody's time. More seriously, it's really hard to measure "how disadvantaged" somebody is and therefore how much special consideration someone should get for being a member of a historically-disadvantaged group; miscalculating this runs a real risk of actively causing exactly the discrimination (on an individual level, based on group membership) we're trying to eliminate. And if there's a widespread perception that members of historically-disadvantaged groups are now getting unfairly-favorable treatment, people will assume that they're less-qualified "DEI hires" no matter how good they are at their jobs. (Naturally, the people most likely to perceive historically-disadvantaged groups as getting unfairly-favorable treatment, and to dismiss them as "DEI hires", are members of historically-advantaged groups who sixty years ago would have said openly that blacks and women were incapable of doing certain jobs: the reasoning has changed but the conclusion is the same.)

The Trump administration's actions on the subject conflate all of the above forms of "DEI", and declare them all to be illegal and unacceptable within government, in organizations that contract with the government, and even in private organizations. Most people I know assume that this "anti-DEI backlash" is actually an attempt to reinstate historical discrimination in favor of straight-white-males, thinly disguised as preventing discrimination (just as anybody on the Trump/Musk team espousing "freedom of speech" is probably actively censoring speech).

But let's imagine, hypothetically, that some people in the anti-DEI backlash were acting out of good, noble motives, and sincerely opposed to racism, sexism, religious or political discrimination, etc. What would they be trying to achieve?

The simple answer is "a race-blind society", in which your ethnic (or religious or whatever) background not only makes no difference in your life but literally isn't recognized. We won't give you any special consideration for the fact that you were born to a group that's been historically discriminated against; the clock is reset at birth, so only your individual achievements matter. Those individual achievements are no more noteworthy for having overcome disadvantages of birth, because there are no disadvantages of birth. We won't make any special effort to reach out to historically-disadvantaged groups, because that would acknowledge the existence of historically-disadvantaged groups. Clubs and voluntary organizations cannot exclude people from membership by race, religion, gender, etc. because recognizing those distinctions perpetuates discrimination. Organizations cannot count how many employees or how many managers are of particular historically-disadvantaged groups because recognizing the existence of those groups perpetuates discrimination. In researching problems that appear particularly prevalent in particular ethnic, religious, etc. groups (e.g. AIDS, sickle-cell anemia, teen suicide, wife-burning), we won't specifically reach out to those groups because that would require the organization to recognize the existence of those groups and ask who's a member of one.

It's an attractive dream: eliminate racism and discrimination at a stroke by decreeing that they don't exist and never have existed. Indeed, racial, religious, political, socioeconomic, and gender groups themselves don't exist and never have existed; only individuals exist, and any other kind of grouping of people is artificial and harmful. We need to treat each individual purely based on that individual's complex of characteristics, not as part of one identity group or another.

Except gender: there are exactly two genders, two sexes (and those terms are synonymous); there are no anatomically or chromosomally ambiguous cases, and believing oneself to be in the wrong bucket is simply a mental illness, a delusion, like believing oneself to be the reincarnation of King Louis XIV. And since this one congenital difference is real and natural, it would be silly and unrealistic to try to achieve "equality" across it, because men and women really are different. There's no reason to assume men and women are equally capable of certain things -- indeed, we know for a fact that they're not -- so if there are an equal number of men and women in a particular organization, a particular rank, or a particular field, it probably took unfair discrimination to achieve that artificial outcome. Some jobs are just inherently male or inherently female; that's the way Nature made us, and refusing to accept that fact is again a delusion or mental illness. (You see the slippery slope we just slid down....)

Now, everybody reading this knows that gender and sex really are more complicated than that. First, almost every difference between men and women is a difference-of-means between overlapping bell curves, not a qualitative and absolute difference: yes, "the average man" has more peak muscular power than "the average woman", but you'll never meet the average man or the average woman, only individuals who can and should be judged on the individual characteristics relevant to the job. Second, maybe 99% of people can be unambiguously categorized as male or female, but the other 1% still exist, despite laws and executive orders saying they don't. And people with gender dysphoria really exist: I've never experienced it first-hand, so I'm not in a position to say what it's like, much less what treatments work for it, but I'm willing to believe that it's a real condition, and that treating it is different from treating the belief that you're Louis XIV.

And everybody reading this knows that no, the clock doesn't reset at birth. Even if society became race-blind tomorrow, your parents' finances, education, religion, politics, citizenship, and home address would still have been affected by their ethnicity, and would all measurably affect your chances of "making it in the world". The people pushing "race-blind" policies are themselves almost all congenitally rich, white US citizens with individual records of active racism and sexism.

So what would work better? Simple answers and wishful thinking don't work. By all means, let's try not to actively perpetuate racist and sexist prejudices, but without pretending that they never existed and don't still affect us. We can try to make schools in poor neighborhoods as good as those in rich neighborhoods, without pretending that they already are. We can acknowledge that some medical problems really are specific to (or manifest differently in) particular races or sexes, and use that fact to deliver medical care to everyone rather than mostly studying and treating straight-white-men's problems. Race and sex differences really do exist, and they really do have fuzzy boundaries: somebody really can be black by one definition and Asian by another, male by one definition and female by another, etc. Clubs and affinity groups (all-female, all-male, all-black, all-white, all-gay, all-left-handed, all-divorced, all-ex-convict, all-Catholic, all-abducted-by-aliens, etc.) serve a useful role, and they can decide for themselves how to handle the fuzzy boundaries, as long as they're honest about their criteria and role.

From this NY Times article ,

“Peter Navarro, the senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, said in a call with reporters Friday that “disastrous” timber and lumber policies “drive up construction and housing costs and impoverish America through large trade deficits that results from exporters like Canada, Germany and Brazil dumping lumber” into the U.S. market.”

Wait: if Canada, Germany, and Brazil are “dumping” lumber on the US market, wouldn’t that drive construction and housing prices down, not up? It might cost some US lumberjack jobs, in exchange for creating more US construction jobs. (Not to mention jobs making things that we export to Canada, Germany, and Brazil.)

Do you...

(a) ask whether the person is hurt, and offer a hand to help the person stand up,

(b) walk by on the other side of the street, not getting involved, or

(c) kneel on the person's back and whisper "How much will you pay me to let you up?"

For the past month, the United States has been loudly and conspicuously in the (b) category.

As of yesterday's show by the President and Vice President, the United States of America has officially moved on to (c). When we see someone in trouble, whom we could help at trivial cost, it's not an opportunity to help a fellow-creature, it's an opportunity to exploit weakness. The weaker someone is, the more we can extort.

President Zelensky has been offered two related deals in recent days. One says he should "make peace" with Russia by allowing Russia to keep all the land it's captured, with no guarantee that Russia won't invade again next year to capture some more. The other says he should give the United States a bunch of mineral rights, with no guarantee that the United States will help it defend itself, now or ever. To put it in terms Donald Trump would understand, "What's in it for me? Why would I take either of those deals?"

I guess the answer is "If you don't take the deal with Russia, they promise to keep killing your people and destroying your country. If you don't take the deal with me, I promise to cut off your military aid and make it easier for Russia."


I suspect that if Donald Trump read the above, he would agree completely that the United States has moved on to (c), and there's nothing wrong with that: what's the point of having power if you're not going to use it for your own benefit? Why would I help somebody who's not helping me? Trump sees himself as a Mafia Don, negotiating with his equals (mostly Putin and Xi) to carve up the rest of the world among them; why would he bother involving the NPC's in his negotiations, or help someone who's inevitably going to end up in Putin's slice of the pie anyway? Much smarter to extract as much as he can from a weak country before handing it over to Putin, just as he always extracts as much money as he can from a failing business before having it declare bankruptcy.

Traditional (20th-century) US foreign policy would say, instead, that we and all of our allies benefit from a rules-based international order, in which wars of territorial acquisition have been mostly consigned to history. So when somebody violates that rules-based international order by invading a neighbor, it's in the interest of us and all of our allies to punish the violator.

And most individuals would like to think of themselves as good, kind people in category (a); it's only at the national level that we're apparently willing to be Mafia-types offering protection rackets. What we want in a leader doesn't always match what we want in ourselves.

Which leads us back to different models of leadership. Confucius distinguished several kinds of kings: in order of desirability, the king who is respected, the king who is loved, the king who is feared, and the king who is pitied. Donald Trump has never aspired to be respected or loved, only feared.

To put it another way, people follow a leader voluntarily because the leader has a reputation for making good decisions that benefit the followers. For much of the 20th century, other countries followed the United States because it seemed to be doing mostly-good things, mostly-successfully, and its people seemed to be mostly happy and prosperous. By contrast, people obey a ruler because they'll be punished if they don't. Countries in the Russian orbit obey the Kremlin because if you step out of line, your infrastructure gets destroyed and your people slaughtered like Ukraine's.

The "rule by fear" approach is fragile: it makes people hate you, so if you stop punishing them for a moment, they start to doubt that you will, and they stop obeying you. So you have to find things to punish people for continually, even if most of them are obeying you; you have to constantly escalate the level of obedience and obeisance you demand, in order to justify maintaining your rule of fear.

By contrast, the "lead by example and competence" approach only requires that you do what was in your and your people's best interest anyway: have a decent, happy society and make decisions for it that actually work. (Not that that's easy, but it's a worthy challenge.)

Do you want your President to lead a country that leads much of the world, or rule a country that rules much of the world?