Nuts, crims, and greedy billionaires out to blow up all of government because they don't understand it, privatize everything, and slash Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security while lying about the tax breaks they're going to get out of it.
Many of the mistakes they are making are not being remedied, nor will the consequences be obvious in the short term.
There really isn't any upside for anyone in this whole thing except for Trump, Elon and their buddies. And they are breaking the law.
The farce of this whole thing is that none of the destructive cuts they've made will amount to a hill of beans compared to federal spending. They're jumping over hundred dollar bills to chase pennies.
(That's b/c none of this is actually about making government more efficient)
Shareholders often take the biggest hit from corporate taxes. Consumers can to, but in most cases I think it's primarily the shareholders. But it will vary depending on the business and the market.
R's are much more likely to cut veteran benefits/services and the VA. Some of that is happening now through DOGE, in fact. I don't see this as a likely path for the D's at all.
I think they have plenty of appetite to tax the wealthy and corpos... and we're possibly seeing the first stirrings of a new populist backlash to the billionaire bros. If D's can ride that wave back to power, they'll have a mandate to stick it to the uber rich.
B/c honestly, Musk, Theil, Adreessen, et al, through their recent actions, are making the argument that billionaires shouldn't exist much more effectively than Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders ever could.
> Absolutely, it should be looked at! I don't think it's a trivial problem to solve, but as RFK was confirmed as the secretary of HHS we should expect a lot of scrutiny on big pharma and insurers.
Eh, we're going to see a lot of scrutiny on proven vaccines and other proven medications that RFK harbors a lot of delusional beliefs about, because he's a conspiracy addled pudding-brained nutjob.
DOGE isn't really cutting things to fund others. Many of their cuts are going to be net revenue negative. Many will cost taxpayers more of their money.
It's about gutting the civil service and staffing them with loyalists that will do what Trump or Musk want, despite what the law says. It's consolidation of power and corruption. Musk is also crippling many of the agencies that enforce regulations on his businesses.
The most obvious case is the CFPB, which returns roughly twice its cost to taxpayers. I would argue that's honestly very inefficient, I'd like to see the CFPB returning a multiple of its cost to taxpayers... but nonetheless it is obvious shutting it down will cost taxpayers more.
We only see what it's directly returning to customers, not the damage it prevents to happen in the first place by a) forcing companies to change their behaviour and b) possibly influencing legislation and policy making.
Your point is spot on, but I think it actually does have better returns for consumers on paper than that. IIRC, it saves consumers 10s of billions for < 1 billion of expenses.
The CFPB claims to have recovered $19 billion for consumers, total, since 2011. Which is 14 years ago. So maybe it recovers 1.4 billion a year.
It's budget is around 600 million a year. So yeah, it probably recovers a little over double what it costs to operate.
That sounds okay, but bear in mind the recovered funds are... taxpayer dollars that we unfairly paid. And when you factor in the cost in taxes we pay for CFPB, that means... we're only getting a little more than half our money back. That's certainly better than not getting anything back, but I'd hesitate to call it "efficient".
The challenge is that this doesn’t take into account harm prevented. How many companies changed their policies as a result of CFPB enforcement / to avoid CFPB involvement?
Based on the hijinks we have still been seeing day to day, I am not sure I think the CFPB has been scaring companies into good behavior on any significant scale. I am sure there's some, but I think the penalties are clearly too low if half of the recovery amount is operational costs for the CFPB itself.
Anecdotally, I work for a very large tech company and the CFPB is mentioned frequently as an important regulator. It has (had) an outsized impact where it regulated and definitely caused companies to change their behavior or at least be more continuous.
> based on murders we have still been seeing day to day, I’m not sure prosecutors have been scaring criminals into good behavior on any significant scale.
If the benchmark is perfection, no one can meet that standard. On top of the 20B in recovered consumer relief, they’ve levied another 5B in fines. It’s also important to look at their progress [1] where they’ve taken > 350 enforcement actions since they started. They were on track to be quite successful at enforcement actions until Trump’s first term when he started trying to cripple them. Same with penalty relief btw. Most of the dollars returned were under Democratic presidents.
No agency within the government can do well when the administration is purposefully trying to cripple you in the first place.
Why doesn’t anyone do anything? They risk ending up as the rest of the world according to this, and everything they do is talking 1k+ threads. If everything people say here is true, US is in its own version of Perestroika.
Your question contains a clue to the answer: "Why doesn't anyone do anything". Specifically, what? I've been asking myself this since at least 2016 and I'm sure many other people have too. I've made phone calls, donated money, volunteered for campaigns and gone door-to-door. None of that has made any difference.
The problem is in figuring out WHAT to do.
In 2018 the Democrats retook the house, which threw a spanner in the works of the second half of Trump’s first term. I’m guessing that’s about as much as we can hope for in the current term.
Let's take the other two branches that could theoretically stop the executive from doing what it does:
- the legislative (Congress): both chambers have a Republican majority, and all Trump critics in the Republican party have long since been eliminated or have retired. Democrats are currently debating whether they should use the upcoming funding bill to force the Republicans to make concessions via inducing a government shutdown (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/15/democrats-co...), but many fear this could backfire (e.g. Trump could say something along the lines of "these bad Democrats are forcing me to fire even more people because I can't pay them anymore").
- the judicial: some courts have ruled against some of the actions of DOGE (as well as other executive orders), but Trump is mostly ignoring them. It remains to be seen how the supreme court (with its 6-3 conservative majority) will decide when these cases (eventually) bubble up to them.
Who? the democrats? they are a minority party in both houses of congress ass such they cant force anything through committees bring bills to the floor or call witnesses in official congressional investigations.
the federal workers union? they got told they don't have standing in a recent court case only the workers can bring a case despite the fact that the whole point of the union is to represent said workers.
the workers well being fired and told by the court their union can't help they are pretty much out of luck they don't have the money as they had paid it to the union that isn't being allowed to do its job.
the courts? maybe some but thanks to Mitch McConal leading the republicans to block filling many of the open judicial seats as possible they were left unfilled for much of the Obama administration allowing Trump to pack the federal judicial system with supporters during his first administration.
we are in the middle of an auto-coup
at this point the only thing that can stop in the shortish term is the democrats winning the next three special elections and having a 1 vote majority then having no defectors in any consequential vote. but even then that will only allowing the to block legislation not pass any as the republicans will still control the senate.
> at this point the only thing that can stop in the shortish term is the democrats winning the next three special elections
The two Florida congressional districts holding a special election in April are Trump +34 and Trump +37 from the last election. So yeah, that’s not happening.
It's congresses job to reign in the executive here, but the R's in charge have decided to let Trump usurp their power.
Courts are doing their thing, but they are slow. Republicans are already starting campaigns against judges and threatening impeachment against those that rule against them, and we're still all unsure at what point the Trump admin will defy courts and go full rogue. I think it's inevitable.
It's basically up to us now. If you have any Republican politicians representing you, blow them up on the phone, emails. Confront them in town halls and public appearances. They need to feel the backlash. We're seeing a little bit of this the past couple of days:
The rampage isn't going to save money on net, and even if it did, it would amount to a fart in a hurricane.
Like.. we could just personally tax Elon a little bit more while changing nothing else and recover more money, most likely.
Elimination (or indefinite pause) of the CFPB that was a trade of 21 billion in consumer savings for like 750 million in expenses.
If they wanted to improve efficiency, there's an easy place to start: the IRS. And you wouldn't start by firing, you'd start hiring lots and lots of people.
It's what authoritarian populists do when they get control of governments. They "hack" the economy with short-term stimulus and giveaways to keep the rubes content and happy while they dismantle civil society and the rule of law and entrench themselves.
Economic stagnation and decline usually follow within a couple year, but if they've entrenched themselves well enough, they don't have to care about public opinion very much and can shift to repression.
