Bullish on DOGE

Plus: ICC goes after Netanyahu, Biden's questionable competence, Gaetz's sexcapades, and more...

DOGE details: After a week of speculation, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy wrote in The Wall Street Journal of their plans for what the Department of Government Efficiency will actually look like.

"Most legal edicts aren't laws enacted by Congress but 'rules and regulations' promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren't made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections," they write. "This is antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders' vision."

Basically, it won't be a separate agency, but rather a collection of people who get put at each agency to identify what needs to be cut. "DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies," Ramaswamy and Musk write. "DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission." They'll identify the "minimum number of employees required" for each given agency to perform its "constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated" function. A massive reduction in headcount looks likely.

This Milei-core buddy duo slashing the size of government amounts to a libertarian fantasy come true.

"When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach," the two predict, having been around the block enough to know what the haters will say. "In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress."

Godspeed, fair kings.

Gaetzkeeping: Will we ever lay eyes on the House Ethics Committee's report into the many purported misdeeds (sexual and otherwise) of former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz?

Here's what happened. Gaetz attended a string of parties in 2017 in Orlando where there were drugs and escorts. He purportedly had sex with a 17-year-old—below Florida's age of consent, though all parties claim her age was not discussed—which at least one witness saw. He also allegedly paid for sex, though he frequently used other people to cover for him, as one does when, as a sitting member of Congress with an IQ above 70, one is buying sex from teenage prostitutes.

Naturally, President-elect Donald Trump saw the above laid out—as well as Gaetz's loyal harassing of people like former Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.)—and thought well, that man looks like a natural-born attorney general. So Gaetz will now be confirmed or rejected for that post, to lead the Department of Justice, and has accordingly resigned from the House in order to do so. Oh, and one very convenient side effect of resigning from the House: the Ethics Committee's report, which had been—for various procedural reasons—repeatedly stymied, will apparently no longer be released, per House Speaker Mike Johnson, as there is no reason to have an investigation on someone who is no longer a sitting representative.

Now, "Senators from both parties who would vet Mr. Gaetz for the position have asked to see the report," reports The New York Times. "Vice President-elect JD Vance and Mr. Gaetz were on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to meet with senators in hopes of smoothing his path to confirmation." Meanwhile, since information wants to be free, "an unidentified hacker has gained access to a computer file shared in a secure link among lawyers whose clients have given damaging testimony related to Matt Gaetz."

Wholly sidestepping whether or not Gaetz is a libertarian hero for flouting age-of-consent laws, information about his possible lawbreaking seems relevant to the senators who will be asked to vote to confirm him.

Rand Paul against mass deportations: "I'm not for really most presidential emergencies because they smack of martial rule…I'm not for the Army marching up and down our streets [to deport people]," said Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) to Newsmax of President-elect Donald Trump's immigration plan. "The American people will be behind him 100% if he goes immediately after the people that have committed crimes…let's go there and start there. There is to my mind some question of the housekeeper who's been here 30 years, and I don't see the military putting her in handcuffs and marching her down the street to an encampment.…There might be an in-between solution where, if they're already working productively, that we allow them to have a work permit. So I would expand, actually, a lot of work permits for people…I think us as conservatives who are supportive of Trump need to caution him about sending the Army into our cities."

I wonder if more legislators on the right will come out of the woodwork and start cautioning Trump to be careful about his deportation approach. Libertarian-leaning Republicans who aren't totally captured by MAGA (like Paul) are an endangered species but surely some number of conservatives agree that industrious people not consuming welfare who have shown themselves to be no threat at all to the safety of their communities deserve leniency and an easier pathway to citizenship.

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Scenes from New York: A long read on the New York City Trump voter phenomenon.

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QUICK HITS

• "The US Transportation Security Administration, the federal government entity that oversees Clear, has enacted stricter rules on it after a series of high-profile security lapses," reports Bloomberg. "As a result, the experience has gotten worse for many customers, some of whom have taken to social media to gripe about how Clear often ends up being slower than TSA PreCheck, the agency's cheaper and less flashy service. Now the TSA is rolling out its own facial-recognition technology, which could make Clear redundant." (Great, TSA in charge of biometric data.)
• "The International Criminal Court on Thursday issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and the former Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip," reports The New York Times. "Karim Khan, the court's chief prosecutor, had requested the arrest warrants in May for the two Israelis, alongside three top Hamas officials. Israel has fiercely contested the court's allegations, which include the use of starvation as a weapon of war and 'intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.'" Many Israelis—even those who oppose Netanyahu or believe he has erred—are highly critical of the ICC's actions on this front.
• Matt Yglesias, on Slow Boring, writes about how "urbanists, including YIMBYs, spend too much time entranced by nostalgia and Europhilia and not really confronting the reality that the increasingly affluent American population wants to live in big homes." He offers up a concept (amusingly similar to Le Corbusier's failed "towers in the park") of how this could look, specifically talking about what building high-rises for families might look like.
• Interesting:

From a piece I wrote on @PirateWires last month, super cool to see this actually starting to play out https://t.co/xQzloRgwF9 pic.twitter.com/7WtMfKwkD5

— Bridget (@bridge__harris) November 19, 2024

• A good point that we've oddly stopped talking about:

Is there any particular reason to assume Biden is competent to be president right now? It's a very difficult job. It's a dangerous world. Extremely high-stakes decisions in Ukraine. He should resign and let Harris serve out the last 2 months.https://t.co/02huFqQT3W pic.twitter.com/ZLWqcbkAYW

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 20, 2024