I live here and i don't know what precedents are helpful at this point. The proposed changes involve the fortunes of my family and friends. Your question of "But what is really needed?" is the right one to ask.

But for me and mine, the question is how do we survive the storm.

So, it would seem the legality of what the DOGE are doing turns on the question of whether or not this is a "time of crisis"? — Janus

I don't think so. In the past, there was a general agreement among the Branches that the shit had hit the fan before such a move. And a lot of that involved bad decisions. The legality of the present decisions turns upon respecting the rule of law concerning the separation of powers. That one of those powers checks out in a rubber room until the outcome is complete is not a question of legality, per se.

If there were no legal mechanism in place allowing this freezing of funds, then how is it being effected. It's a genuine question since I know little about the US system. — Janus

The Executive Branch has the prerogative of writing orders that many times are challenged by Judicial Branch objections. These can come from both Federal and State courts. The question at the moment is whether such restrictions will be respected.

According to the Constitution, it is the Legislative Branch that has power over the purse, and it is only under particular periods of crisis that the Executive Branch can intervene upon the process. Due to the present ubiquity of the GOP over all branches of Government, the jealousy of the Legislative Branch, which has often flared up in the past at their loss of power, has been neutered.

It is a place for Trump apologists to try out their messages. Perhaps it makes them stronger but sometimes they stop saying particular things.

If you read the article I linked you will find the claim that it is congress that will enact Trump's policies, and that the DOGE are only gathering the information re corruption, waste etc that congress needs in order to act. — Janus

The freeze upon funds is happening in real time. That is what some courts are opposing.

What that screed fails to observe is that many actions are being taken that have consequences for actual operations in real time. That is different from a Legislative oversight committee taking in testimony before arguing for a budget.

This just in from DOGE:

The U.S. Department of Education moved to terminate nearly $1 billion in research contracts on Monday, a decision critics said depleted the government of vital data sources on American schooling and all but decimated the agency’s research division. — USA Today

A consistent pattern in the executive decisions is that the means of finding out what happens because of them are being eliminated.

Your view does not include the parts of Nietzsche that recognizes he was a member of the tribe he railed against. The irony of being a philologist who could only serve a few scholars. Reading as an ascetic performance.

Oh well. I tried. — frank

What?

Everything will be ok. — frank

To hell with that. You have just undermined the authority that could promulgate such an assurance.

The mention of a mandate that overrules the preferences of a minority.

I am guessing from this screed that you have little interest in the topic of individual liberty that occupied your forebears.

Then I don't see the importance of insisting upon the essay being germane.

The Australians have left the building.

I am going to hang on until at least the chapters involving Aristotle.

I have been distracted by an invasion from nowhere, if the descriptions are to be believed.

And so you can't be neutral. I understand. Does it hurt if someone seems to be flippant about it? — frank

It does. But how does that element relate to the description of power that Land lays out?

I have my own experiences with divergence and all these different polities being discussed here directly involve my life as I understand it happening. That goes for my family and all the people I love and have loved.

That love extends to people who believe stuff I do not and enemies who wish me harm. That is what Rousseau meant by compassion. I will hurt you if I have to. But no fist pumps and triumphant trumpets.

In one moment, you stand outside of Land's thesis, at another you argue from it. Pick a lane.

Discourse on Inequality. In their most primitive state, humans are supposed to be free, happy, and lacking morality. — frank

He said they had a 'natural' morality, as depicted in the quote given here

I was trying to paint a picture of the Enlightenment before starting Land's essay. — frank

Then we are going to have to compare what those people actually said.

I take your point that the thesis is not based upon "classic" sources. So far, the argument seems to be presuming that all consent is manufactured and being surprised at the conclusion that consent is manufactured.

Is there a secret sauce I am failing to experience?

Rousseau says that all human evil starts with interactions — frank

Where does Rousseau say that?

As the matter relates to Land's thesis, Land seems to be making the same mistake of Oppenheimer in his The State. The source of evil in Rousseau is the idea of private property.

I argued against Oppenheimer's view of Rousseau here.

Well, Niccolo wrote two centuries before Jacques and Robert wrote 3.5 centuries after. Locke is part of the "natural man" debate in which Rousseau and Hobbes participated.

Hobbes can safely be considered "conservative" in his call for Monarchy as the best kind of government.

I got it by using Google Scholar, Try clicking from this search page. The essay is third one down the list.

and some conservative thinker whose name I can't remember. — Arcane Sandwich

You are probably thinking of Hobbes. He is the thinker Nick Land sets over against Rousseau in his essay: The Dark Enlightenment. For example,

For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it
approaches an ultimate imperative. The subterranean current that propels such anti-politics is
recognizably Hobbesian, a coherent dark enlightenment, devoid from its beginning of any Rousseauistic
enthusiasm for popular expression. — N Land

This poorly represents Rousseau's beef with Hobbes who claimed war is man's state of nature. The natural man who lived before legislation and reason is said by Rousseau to be:

Thus, setting aside all those scientific books, which teach us only to see men the way they have made themselves, and meditating upon the first and simplest operations of the human soul, I believe I discern there two principles prior to reason: one makes us passionately interested in our well-being and in our own preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance at seeing any sensitive being perish or suffer, in particular, beings like ourselves. From the cooperation and combination our mind is able to create of these two principles—without it being necessary to bring in the principle of sociability—it seems to me, all the rules of natural right follow, rules which reason is later forced to re-establish on other foundations, when, through its successive developments, it has ended up effectively suffocating nature.

In this way, we are not obliged to make man a philosopher before we make him a man. His obligations towards others are not dictated to him exclusively by later lessons in wisdom, and so long as he does not resist the internal impulse of compassion, he will never do harm to another man, or even to any other sentient being, except in the legitimate case where, since his preservation is at stake, he is obliged to give preference to himself. — Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men, Preface

Yes, I am a fan of both book and movie. The book captures that "don't worry, everything is under control vibe" of the late Soviet era.

Tzeentch is Hungarian? — Arcane Sandwich

I don't think so. I only remember he has spoken approvingly of Viktor Orbán's struggle against the EU and NATO.

Do you share the enthusiasm of your man Viktor Orbán for the "current president"?

The world has been changed in a few weeks by the Trump tornado. An era has come to an end. Yesterday we were the heretics; today we are the mainstream. — Viktor Orbán

I don't think the Constitution will be brushed aside but that considerable damage will occur while the Boy's Club has free rein of the White House. I agree with that State governments and financial consequences will eventually force the GOP to return to their jobs. The situation afterwards is hard to know. It makes me think of the novel, Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. A scientist tries to explain the new anomalies and uninhabitable places on aliens who had a party on our planet and did not pick up after themselves.

What gives me a faint sense of hope is that the movement may become a victim of its own success. The reliable donkey which carried all the past sins into the desert has been put out of its misery.

Bad outcomes will put pressure on the GOP.

Continuing the theme of the relationship between States and Federal budgets, there was a quick response to the NIH cuts from attorney generals: 22 States Sue to Block Trump Cuts to Medical Research Funding. And a federal judge has just put a stay on the order.

The money involved supports local economies in the same way military spending supports regions around bases. Here is one example: ‘This is a death blow’: NIH to cut billions in research overhead funding

People care a lot about the rule of law as it pertains to their situation. Those who believe that the election was stolen from Trump in 2020 saw the system as failing and that vigilante reaction was a reasonable response.

That is a different kettle of fish from looking at Trump's past treatment of contracts and creditors. In NYC, he lost the ability to do deals as his word became null. He found a bigger aquarium to urinate within afterwards.

I think Congress will eventually fight to get the power of the purse back. The loss of institutional knowledge and structure, however, will take decades to repair if the Musketeers succeed.

The willingness of the GOP to go along with the demolition will be tested when their dependence upon federal spending is revealed through its withdrawal. Take, for example, the spending through the Department of Education. Here is a report on how much goes toward Red States. The States want to suckle upon that teat without the anti-poverty goals of the Feds.

The broader problem for the Red States is that tax cuts and deals that make them more attractive to businesses rely on the Federal budget to displace costs. The Balance of Payments shows this asymmetry. The breakdown is not a one-to-one correspondence but does show the close relationship binding States and the Federal budgets together. If the Federal structure goes to the guillotine, The GOP will lose a significant source for dough. As noted in this analysis on expenditures, spending in the tax code includes:

When the federal government spends money on mandatory and discretionary programs, the U.S. Treasury writes a check to pay the program costs. But there is another type of federal spending that operates a little differently. Lawmakers have written hundreds of tax breaks into the federal tax code - for instance, special low tax rates on capital gains (certain kinds of investments), a deduction for home mortgage interest, and many others.

In fact, tax breaks function as a type of government spending, and they are officially called "tax expenditures" by the Treasury Department. Tax breaks cost the federal government more than $1.3 trillion in 2020 – nearly as much as all discretionary spending in the same year. — OMB report

This set up cannot continue if lawmakers surrender their power to Trump.

Good luck with that. Let the supreme court think about it make a decision once the things have been already done. — ssu

Time is a critical factor. If the push to remove personnel through massive buyouts allows a budget to pass that does not include certain costs, future censure will not magically provide renumeration nor restore operations that have been shut down.

Exactly. This is why I see it as easily the most disastrous of his plans. The Feds also benefit from a great deal of prestige. People want to work there. They get to recruit from top schools the way big consulting or law firms do, despite paying a fraction of the pay. They are going to lose that. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Thanks for underlining this aspect. Knowing many excellent government workers, their sense of service in exchange for gain they could have had elsewhere is palpable.

I didn't say anything about efficiency. It's the effectiveness of monarchy that caused every ancient democracy to transition into monarchy. — frank

King-making is a deep seated drive and this has played out in American history and the presidency has evolved from a minor federal figurehead to something like a king in the sense that the whole political tone changes due to presidential agenda. This is not the result of a nefarious plot. It's because over and over, we found that an integrated, centralized authority can solve problems that the competing states simply can't. — frank

Different in what way? — frank

The agencies and bureaus are established through law whereas DOGE has sprung directly from Trump's forehead.

Would you grant that your example of willful unaccountability of an agency, which is supposed be overseen by Congress, is different than the motives behind the formation of DOGE?

How does your question relate to my assertion that monarchy will not provide the efficiency you suggest it could provide?

In this case, Hamilton is addressing decisions that the Executive makes and does not want to own.

I am not saying that DOGE amounts to a plurality of the executive. Hamilton was not saying having such councils were a sharing of power. He was arguing against those who thought such councils would help provide a balance of power. Musk is Donald's dog. My observation is different than wondering whose tail is wagging who, interesting as that may be. The point of #70 is about taking responsibility and how an Executive may avoid it.

Hamilton was undoubtedly a proponent of a strong central government. The Federalist Papers hammers out a negotiation with those who opposed the idea. That is why the rules for impeachment and criminal liability were agreed to in them. The separation of government powers was developed for the same reason. Hamilton uses these concessions to argue against those who wanted to stay within the articles of "confederation."

Ok. Musk is working under Trump's authority, so there is no plurality. — frank

The point of my observation is that DOGE is acting as a council outside the role of "advise and consent" apportioned to Congress. Hamilton was comparing the role of councils in the proposed government with their use in the British Monarchy. Hamilton was arguing that executive councils in a system of checks and balances would obscure the source of decisions rather than make them more democratic. The lack of transparency of the Musk operation is a fair example of Hamilton's concern.

Hamilton was a monarchist. — frank

On what basis do you say that?

I think the quote you posted is an argument for monarchy. — frank

Read the Federalist Papers I linked to. Hamilton constantly contrasts the character of the Executive against the nature of the English monarch.

I'm not quite getting your point. — frank

The context of #70 is that a number of groups were arguing that the office of President should be a plurality of some kind. The Constitution was written only recognizing a single occupant. Hamilton's comparison with the British Monarchy is to note that the Monarch does not have the checks on his power that the President has so the role of councils should not be seen in the same light.

From where shall this anticipated efficiency emerge?

In addition to violating the separation of powers established by the Constitution, the DOGE introduces a plurality of agents where Hamilton argued there should only be one:

But one of the weightiest objections to a plurality in the Executive, and which lies as much against the last as the first plan, is, that it tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility.

Responsibility is of two kinds to censure and to punishment. The first is the more important of the two, especially in an elective office. Man, in public trust, will much oftener act in such a manner as to render him unworthy of being any longer trusted, than in such a manner as to make him obnoxious to legal punishment. But the multiplication of the Executive adds to the difficulty of detection in either case. It often becomes impossible, amidst mutual accusations, to determine on whom the blame or the punishment of a pernicious measure, or series of pernicious measures, ought really to fall. It is shifted from one to another with so much dexterity, and under such plausible appearances, that the public opinion is left in suspense about the real author. The circumstances which may have led to any national miscarriage or misfortune are sometimes so complicated that, where there are a number of actors who may have had different degrees and kinds of agency, though we may clearly see upon the whole that there has been mismanagement, yet it may be impracticable to pronounce to whose account the evil which may have been incurred is truly chargeable.

``I was overruled by my council. The council were so divided in their opinions that it was impossible to obtain any better resolution on the point.'' These and similar pretexts are constantly at hand, whether true or false. And who is there that will either take the trouble or incur the odium, of a strict scrutiny into the secret springs of the transaction? Should there be found a citizen zealous enough to undertake the unpromising task, if there happen to be collusion between the parties concerned, how easy it is to clothe the circumstances with so much ambiguity, as to render it uncertain what was the precise conduct of any of those parties? — Federalist Paper #70

This captures the peculiar way that Trump says "I, alone can fix it" while never being the cause of any problem. The "buck" of Truman is forever on a cruise ship, playing shuffleboard with the other retirees.