I think inflation will do it, I don’t think any dismantling of federal infrastructure will harm them. Even if he attacks the DoD or Veterans Affairs, if he does it with the idea that he’s “fighting waste and corruption” or some nonsense like that, they’ll see it as an improvement or at worst a necessary evil. Nothing will bother them until it directly impacts their lives, and the pocketbook seems like the most likely way it will happen.
You might have hit on the one or two sympathetic federal agencies. Otherwise, why are we surprised that Trump started with the civil service/bureacracy when the public has been primed to think of government employees as lazy at best by a couple of centuries of both news media and entertainment (movies, TV shows, novels, etc.)?!
If you put a BB on one side of a scale for every portrayal of a government employee* as a joke or a bureaucrat as a villain, and a BB on the other side of the scale for every portrayal of a civil servant* as a protagonist or hero, the scale would very quickly tip over.
Who will stand up for the IRS when even non-MAGA Joe Democrat types make jokes about it when in a good mood and hiss the name like a curse when they’re not?
*Government employees and civil servants not including military or first responders, who pop culture doesn’t seem to lump the same way. They get their own set of stereotypes, sometimes resembling the white-collar civil service (Sgt. Bilko, cops in a donut shop), sometimes very different.
Which isn’t to say that reasonable people don’t know the value of the civil service when they think about it, they just don’t think about it often compared to how frequently civil servants are punching bags for book and movie/TV writers.
If you ask someone the purpose of paying taxes, there’s plenty of people who’ll give a reasonable answer. Most people when they put their minds to it realize you can’t actually get rid of the IRS. But the popular portrayal of civil servants as unpopular wears thin that reserve of rational thought and makes it easy for those with an agenda (and Trump & Musk aren’t the first) to demagogue.
I tell postal workers how much I appreciate their work whenever I get the chance, and I’m sure this maladministrstion is going to gut the USPS, Constitution be damned.
If Musk really does come after Social Security or disability like he’s been making noises about doing, that would cause a lot of pain to a lot of people very quickly. I wonder how many older folks are one or two Social Security payments away from being homeless? In normal times, I would have thought that even the most conservative of Republicans in Congress wouldn’t sit still for thousands of their constituents losing a huge percentage of their income all at once.
These days, though? Who knows?
Who would guess that with haste an inexperience there would be problems?
Brian
They aren’t going to go after Social Security , at least not to the point where people close to the edge don’t get their payments. Because that would get just about every Republican thrown out of office next election- and the only reason some (many?) of them are going along with Trump is so they don’t have to worry about him funding and endorsing a primary challenger. They don’t have the courage to stand up when it might cost them - but I think the people running things will realize that putting them in a lose-lose situation makes them unpredictable.
But ‘Republicans want to steal your Social Security!’ would make a nice campaign issue. ‘Do billionaires REALLY need your Social Security and Medicare?’
The DOGE site’s “Savings” page promised receipts no later than Valentine’s Day. They have now changed that to “Receipts coming over the weekend!”. Looks like we are getting into “two weeks” territory.
Whenever I ship from UPS Store, unless it’s a serious, over-night situation, I always choose USPS.
Always cheaper and faster. On Monday I mailed a soft package to Gardnerville, NV. I believe it cost me $14, and the recipient got it on Wed. I was kind of shocked.
DOGE is increasing efficiency by not requiring foreign intelligence services to actually have to spy on the US any more…
DOGE.gov was launched Wednesday claiming to give Americans the ability to “trace your tax dollars through the bureaucracy.” The feature allows users the ability to see data from all federal offices and agencies including head counts, budgets, and the average age of staff. But, the website was supposed to exclude data from U.S. intelligence agencies, according to the fine print at the bottom of its main page.
The young whiz kids at DOGE appear to have forgotten that part and included information about the National Reconnaissance Office, which is tasked with creating and maintaining satellites for U.S. intelligence. Much of the agency’s activities, including its budget and head count, are classified and aren’t supposed to be available to the public. Plus, how did Musk’s team get access to that information, anyway? Does it have something to do with Musk’s company SpaceX having a $1.8 billion contract to build satellites for the NRO?
The weekend is over and, surprise, there are no receipts. Having a little problem with their paperwork? I guess no one was around to update the site with the newest deadline. It would actually be a funny troll if it just said “two weeks” but Elon is not that clever.
Top Social Security Official Leaves After Musk Team Seeks Data Access
The title has most of the info. DOGE wants access to everyone’s work history, their families, their disability details…
Apparently DOGE is making absurd claims, like that a lot of ss recipients are older than 150.
This follows DOGE digging its claws into the Treasury department and IRS data.
Musk’s whiz-kids never heard of COBOL.
(I wonder if they ever heard of Y2K?)
DOGE is implying that they’ve identified some $4.7 TRILLION in ‘questionable’ or ‘untraceable’ Treasury payments – coincidentally, just about exactly enough to pay for the proposed tax cuts in the Republican budget:
Which – if legitimately illegitimate – would make the front page of every paper in the US and the majority of the papers in the free world.
So … y’know … maybe there’s a perfectly benign explanation yet to be found/disclosed.
I still don’t understand how musk makes the determinations that this or that is “inefficient” and needs to be cut. WTF does he know about USAID and its mission? That this guy and his anonymous flunkies can run unchecked through the government should be the stuff of surreal political fiction, not real life.
‘Does it benefit me or people like me? Does it benefit people not like me?’, it’s that simple.
The media is doing a horrible job of debunking this, I fear.
Yes, the COBOL thing is a factor, but the bigger misunderstanding seems to be the conflation of the “Social Security database” with “people that are currently receiving Social Security payments”. They vast majority of people in the database aren’t currently receiving payments. I heard 98% somewhere, although I can’t provide a cite, so I’m sticking with vast majority.
Are their dead people in the database? I certainly hope so, because the government should have a record of all payouts, even if the recipient is no longer alive.
They stop paying you after you die, but they don’t delete the RECORD of your contributions and their payments.
I have heard people respond to the COBOL thing by questioning why the persons birth date isn’t in the system if they are receiving payments.
I suspect the answer is “they aren’t receiving payments”. The SS database also tracks payments made into the system by employers, many which were made in the days before computers were tracking this stuff. And employer paperwork isn’t always perfect, and it would not surprise me at all if employer contributions into SS are sometimes made without a valid DOB.
The real question that should be addressed is that if there are a significant number of people that are RECEIVING BENEFITS without having provided a valid DOB. I suspect they aren’t, because everything is carefully checked at the time you apply for benefits and I don’t see how they could approve anyone without a DOB becauase of the way in which benefits are calculated.
However, the DOB isn’t nearly as important when an employer sends in a contribution in your name, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that information is missing, especially if it’s a record of a payment from pre-computer times. This are information deficits that don’t really need to be resolved until someone wants to take money out.
You’re still thinking that he’s legitimately concerned about “waste and fraud”. That’s why you don’t understand his process.
Yes, if “waste and fraud” were really the problem, he’d have an actual process to audit the spending, and figure out what to cut. But that’s not really what he wants to fix, it’s just the excuse he needs to gain access to do what he really wants to do.
And that is, just cut everything that he, personally, doesn’t like. And not cut it like trimming a decorative hedge. Cut it like he’s lumbering off a hillside of old-growth trees.
Stop trying to make it make sense.