Mandate to DOGE
Plus: Romanian democracy, FEMA's insane policies, Maher on trans kids, and more...
Does DOGE have much of a mandate? How popular is Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency? And does it matter?
Interesting new poll results from Harvard CAPS/ Harris via Mark Penn show DOGE is popular:
70% of voters say government expenditures are filled with waste, fraud, and inefficiency
60% of voters think DOGE is helping make major cuts in government expenditures.
58% of voters say…— Sara Eisen (@SaraEisen) February 24, 2025
The Harvard/Harris poll cited above (results here) finds that "67% of voters say the current level of U.S. federal government debt is unsustainable" with 77 percent saying "a full examination of all government expenditures is necessary." Though a majority of voters are worried by DOGE employees having access to people's private information, "70% of voters say government expenditures are filled with waste, fraud, and inefficiency (Democrats: 58%; Republicans: 78%; Independents: 75%), and 69% support the goal of cutting $1 trillion of government expenditures." Fully 60 percent believe "DOGE is helping make major cuts in government expenditures." But some polls—like a mid-February Quinnipiac one, in which 55 percent of respondents said Musk has too much power within the government, and a mid-February Emerson College one that found 45 percent of respondents disapproved of Musk's performance—have found more mixed results.
But with 3 million federal government employees, and another 20 million employees in state and local governments who ostensibly fear DOGE-type efforts being replicated elsewhere (not unfounded!), it makes sense that there would be some amount of broad opposition. We all have the luxury of, at present, being insulated from our coming debt crisis, so what incentive do people have to support government auditing efforts? Especially if they themselves are affected, or know someone who is.
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Perhaps the best argument against DOGE is that Musk and his team of engineer-savants are playing fast and loose with the numbers (whether accidentally due to sloppiness or deliberately in an effort to garner support), which for an initiative that prides itself on being "maximally transparent" is a little absurd. "DOGE's website reports a total estimated savings of $55 billion, coming from a combination of canceled and renegotiated contracts and leases, as well as fraud detection, grant cancellations, job cuts and more," reports Politico. "The 'wall of receipts' posted Monday represents only a subset of canceled contracts, the page claims, that amount to approximately 20 percent of 'overall DOGE savings' so far." But these receipts include "contracts that had not yet been awarded; instances where a single pot of money is listed multiple times—tripling or quadrupling the amount of savings claimed; purchase agreements that have no record of being canceled, but were instead stripped of language related to diversity, equity and inclusion; contract savings identified by DOGE that do not match with records they refer to in the Federal Procurement Data System; contracts where the underlying document is for an entirely different contract."
As I wrote last week, "the progress [Musk] has made so far hasn't really been good enough or fast enough to meet his goal [of ideally slashing $2 trillion, or at least $1 trillion]. The headline number is $55 billion; that's what Musk and DOGE claim to have saved already with their cuts. But the total for canceled contracts equals about $16.5 billion—half of which came from one single contract cut which had unfortunately been miscounted as $8 billion when it was in fact a contract for merely $8 million. Still, I am sympathetic to the Randy Barnett idea that we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. The pernicious waste within the federal government needs to be rooted out. Nobody ever said that job would be easy or that the messy process would be broadly supported.
What if we're thinking about government waste all wrong? "Historically, taxes were collected in a few forms: some countries had the kind of economy where there was a tax base that could actually hand over a set quantity of physical coins at some appointed time in order to provide revenue, but in many cases taxes were paid in either goods or labor—a share of the crops, some unpaid labor building a road, etc. The usual term for taxes collected in the form of work is corvée labor, and it's a sufficiently old and persistent practice that the term comes to English by way of French translations of a Roman legal term. Over time, as economies have gotten more market-oriented and the scope of government activity has broadened, we've switched to a system where taxes are collected entirely in currency. Or did we?" asks Byrne Hobart of The Diff.
He continues:
"But, especially when it comes to government spending, it's often helpful to avoid thinking about dollars and to think about real resources instead. Healthcare spending is not just dollars-in and then dollars-out: providing healthcare means paying for the time of people with specific skills, some of which are valuable and scarce. It requires buildings, capital equipment, and consumables. And doing all of this shapes incentives: in the very long run, the impact of government healthcare policy shows up in people's decisions to go into medicine, pharma research, etc., and for companies in that space to alter their R&D spending. This clarifies issues that would otherwise be hard to talk about: no money is directly lost by anyone when student loans are zeroed out. The cost to society is the incentive created to pursue or provide education in ways that are legible to sources of student loans.
So, one large line item that doesn't show up on the Federal budget, but which is a meaningful cost, is the time spent complying with regulations. Conveniently, the US government actually provides an estimate for this: filling out paperwork takes roughly 11.9 billion hours per year (that page is pretty cryptic, but this post, the source of the link, has more). The average US hourly wage is $36/hour, so assuming the time burden is fairly equal, that implies that government spending is underestimated by $391bn (the good news, if you're worried about the deficit, is that this spending is 100% financed by a time-denominated tax."
I think the DOGE discourse, which is currently focused on the government contracts Musk claims to be slashing (which are in some cases inaccurately reported, or the contents misunderstood by those doing the cutting and touting their accomplishments) is missing all of this. And, of course, corvée labor is enormously hard to quantify. But how much time will be saved by all this regulation slashing? What types of projects that would have never gotten off the ground will now be able to start?
Romania watch: "Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Romania's capital on Saturday in a show of support for Călin Georgescu, the far-right populist who emerged as the front-runner in last year's presidential race that was annulled days before the second-round runoff," reported the Associated Press over the weekend.
Here's the timeline: Georgescu won the first round of the election on November 24. The country's Constitutional Court annulled the election on December 6, right before the December 8 runoff.
So was the Constitutional Court acting outside of its authority or attempting to put thumbs on the scale? It's kind of hard to say. The current Romanian president—who skews a bit conservative but is broadly disliked and maybe just a tad authoritarian in his impulses—"declassified intelligence on Wednesday that alleged Russia organized thousands of social media accounts to promote Calin Georgescu across platforms such as TikTok and Telegram," per the A.P. The question is whether that interference warranted the annulment of the results.
Georgescu, for his part, called this an "officialized coup"—and so did Elena Lasconi, of the center-right Save Romania Union party, who finished in second place (and stood to gain from the runoff).
It's not crazy to believe Georgescu might be bought and paid for by Russia. He used to be part of the Romanian right-wing party Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR), but he left in 2022 once he was broadly condemned for being critical of NATO and pro-Russia. He has called Ukraine "an invented state" and praised Vladimir Putin a fair bit in the past. But there's no airtight evidence of any of this, and it's hard to figure out what the burden of proof should be for the high court to throw out an election result. It's very possible the amount of Russian interference was extraordinarily high to the point where the integrity really is compromised (though how exactly is that measured?), but we also surely accept the reality that in a world with free-flowing information—and thus free-flowing propaganda—voters are exposed to plenty of media that's really a foreign actor attempting to put a thumb on the scale. It's a very tough issue—one we're talking about with Matt Taibbi on this week's episode of Just Asking Questions.
Scenes from New York: "A decade after allegations first surfaced that schools operated by New York's Hasidic Jewish community were denying children a basic education, the state government is for the first time cutting off funding for schools it says have refused to improve," reports The New York Times. "The New York State Education Department will no longer provide crucial funding for two all-boys Hasidic schools in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and will ensure that all of their students are enrolled in different schools by the fall. The effective closure of the two schools, which are known as yeshivas, is the strongest action taken in New York to crack down on schools over their failure to comply with education law."
QUICK HITS
- Really good thread on Federal Emergency Management Agency policy and home rebuilding:
FEMA seems to be very confused as to why people in #WNC are so upset about the "50% Rule" for disasters…
Let me explain:
a) You're living in your 150 year-old historic farmhouse with your kids in Asheville NC when Helene floods your home with 5 feet of water.
b) Now you're… pic.twitter.com/tjkbZ41V6U
— Matt Van Swol (@matt_vanswol) December 22, 2024
- Really good exchange between Pod Save America's Jon Lovett and Bill Maher on trans kids and puberty blockers, if you can stand Lovett being pretty insufferable. Here's the study Maher was referencing:
This is the scandal @billmaher was referencing. Our taxpayer $$$ were used to pay for this. Then the findings were suppressed by the doctors who performed the study because they didn't want people like Maher (or me, or more than half the American public) to "weaponize" results. https://t.co/swURBDafKz pic.twitter.com/dAkcCiNVr9
— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) February 25, 2025
- New video essay from Reason's Zach Weissmueller on the killing of United Healthcare's CEO and how Luigi Mangione became an internet phenomenon:
- "President Donald Trump said tariffs scheduled to hit Canada and Mexico next month were 'on time' and 'moving along very rapidly' following an initial delay, even as a US official cautioned the schedule could be less certain," reports Bloomberg. Trump had previously delayed the imposition of such 25 percent tariffs until March 4.
- Interesting:
I don't comment directly on regulation much but I would like to flag an emerging regulatory battle that is happening in D.C.
The soon-to-be revealed stablecoin markup apparently has requirements to shut off access to the treasury market to centralized international stablecoin…
— Vance Spencer (@pythianism) February 24, 2025
- Bloomberg on private credit: "Another corner of finance has become a billionaire factory: the decidedly less glamorous business of making loans directly to companies—often small and medium-size ones, the kind that are squeezed out of the traditional bond market and are often deemed too risky for banks."
