Showmanship All Around

Plus: Parental backlash, cocaine and whiskey, and more...

Performatively barred: On Monday, a group of Democrat legislators tried to enter the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) building, but were refused entry. On Tuesday, the same thing happened when Democrats tried to enter the Treasury Department building. And then yesterday, a group of Democratic legislators tried to enter the Environmental Protection Agency building. Thrice denied entry. All for what, exactly?

But the stunts will continue until morale improves: "A group of at least 20 House Democrats led by Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) plans to go to the Department of Education on Friday to try to secure a meeting with Acting Secretary Denise Carter, Takano's office said," reports Axios. 

One of President Donald Trump's worst qualities is his taste for petty showmanship—a taste unfortunately shared and even stoked by Elon Musk. Of course, interpreting the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts as symbolic—the American rendition of Argentine President Javier Milei's "Afuera"—more than practically helpful with slashing the size of the deficit is probably the right way to think about them. And if they're symbolic—trying to visibly take a chainsaw to wasteful and offensive (to half the country) spending—then it makes sense to bar Democratic politicians from trying to performatively audit such efforts.

Really, more involvement of Congress—not as stuntmen trying to physically enter agencies, but rather as actual legislators with actual power doing their jobs, debating in committee and on the floor whether certain agencies ought to be dismantled (and how)—would mitigate many of the constitutional concerns that Trump is overstepping his powers. But it would deny them apoplectic tweets and viral videos and photo ops, and the dopamine hits are apparently a lot more fun than the business of actually governing.

Besides, Congress hasn't shown much interest in pumping the breaks on spending; why would they start now? It's possible that the showmanship we're seeing outside of agency buildings would simply migrate to the House floor.

I'm concerned that the House and Senate will fully fund USAID in March, just like we did in December (I voted No).

The argument from Republican leadership will be that they need Democrat votes to pass an omnibus (or CR) bill to avoid a government shutdown.

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) February 7, 2025

More attention paid to procedure and vetting might mitigate the lawsuits: Yesterday, a federal judge restricted DOGE's ability to access the Treasury Department payment systems. The suit alleges "Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent allowed DOGE representatives to illegally access the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which manages the U.S. government's accounting, central payment systems and public debt."

Now, the order has restricted two DOGE employees, Tom Krause and Marko Elez, to read-only access; Elez, though, just resigned after racist tweets were unearthed by internet sleuths (he says he favors a "eugenic immigration policy," in his own words and that "you could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity"). More here.

Wired is wrong to be dragging Musk's savant engineers through the mud, but there does appear to be improper vetting; if the idea is to troll, then everything should continue apace. But if there's a greater, more serious aspiration here, this is a poor way to go about it.

Again: it's not a fiscal project, it's a symbolic one. "Elon and his populist admirers don't care about balancing the budget; it's a mathematical impossibility absent cuts to entitlements," writes The Dispatch's Nick Catoggio, "and it's out of sync with big-government nationalist priorities. What they care about is demagoging and ultimately defunding any entity that might impede the postliberal cultural agenda.…USAID is a scapegoat for America-First-ers who resent foreign aid in principle." Plenty of cases in point scattered all across the Musk web.

Economist John Cochrane sounded a similar note—that this is an ideological or symbolic project—on this week's episode of Just Asking Questions. "DOGE is about reforming what the bureaucracy does," said Cochrane. "It's not about doing the same things more efficiently with less workers; no, it's about fixing all the horrible things that they're doing."

Just because it's not happening according to proper (and thus more durable) mechanisms, or in a way that will actually meaningfully reduce spending and deficits, doesn't mean there's no value at all: Overgrown federal bureaucracy requires some chainsawing, ideally performed every few years. Abdicating this responsibility—which, to be clear, should also involve reforming entitlements if we want to really climb out of this fiscal hole—means setting up some future generation for economic ruin, and in the meantime losing out on some unknown amount of innovation that has been stymied by Washington's illustrious jobs program.

The fact that afuera-ism has entered the zeitgeist at all is promising, but much more must be done. Get to work, Elon!

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Scenes from New York (and New Jersey): Good. (As I was saying…)

Parent backlash against the national education test results is happening in NJ. Steve snapped pictures of these signs at the train station. pic.twitter.com/UbXjjyxbBy

— Laura McKenna, PhD (@laura11D) February 6, 2025

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QUICK HITS

• A decently promising jobs report means interest rates will likely hold steady. More details from Bloomberg here.
• "Cocaine 'is no worse than whiskey' and is only illegal because it comes from Latin America, said Colombian President Gustavo Petro during a live broadcast of a government meeting," per CBS News. Having performed extensive scientific research in my youth, I do not think this is true exactly, but I respect the cojones.
• "I love the idea of Trump going through his enemies list and leaving extremely specific instructions on how to punish each one in the event of his demise," jokes Nellie Bowles in TGIF at The Free Press. "Like, if Rosie O'Donnell outlives him, he demands people throw tomatoes at her once a week until her death. If the Mossad takes him out, every kosher restaurant will be visited by a health inspector. If ISIS gets to him first, then we must parade proud working women through their lands as they weep at the indignity."
• What happens to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Trump's new executive orders?
•  Yes:

This is incredibly stupid. Depriving treasury employees of access to proprietary Bloomberg bond market data to own the libs. https://t.co/D1uThb8GB4

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) February 6, 2025

• Oh no, not more French people! This is what they were talking about when they said pro-natalism?

People say pronatal policy has small effects.

For 80 years, France has had a suite of pronatal policies which boosted TFR by 0.1-0.2 kids per woman.

Small, right?

Today, there are 5-10 million French people who wouldn't exist if those policies hadn't been in place. pic.twitter.com/rnqrV55Q2i

— Lyman Stone SF Mar 10-13, SLC Mar 13-14 石來民 ???????????? (@lymanstoneky) February 6, 2025