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COMMUNITY United States Politics Thread: Trump's Second Term

@ChicagoFigure

I'm not picking on you but you're the only white person I know that didn't vote despite thinking there was no real difference between Kamala and Trump

I'm asking out if genuine curiosity cause I've seen this suggestion in places online I frequent. This isn't a gotcha or trap and if it's a no, that's fine with me

Do you feel more patriotic to pay more for goods cause of tariffs and Trump's feeble attempt at bullying other countries?
 
AP3.0 said:
@ChicagoFigure

I'm not picking on you but you're the only white person I know that didn't vote despite thinking there was no real difference between Kamala and Trump

I'm asking out if genuine curiosity cause I've seen this suggestion in places online I frequent. This isn't a gotcha or trap and if it's a no, that's fine with me

Do you feel more patriotic to pay more for goods cause of tariffs and Trump's feeble attempt at bullying other countries?
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Nothing these goofies do would make me feel more patriotic
 
I feel like America will become a variation of the 12 districts from Hunger games and how it was in Handmaid Tales TV show.

And we gonna go to the brinks of dictator rule and fascism rule until the people really revolt.

Weirdly even I think the US has to go through a regime of fuckery to kinda learn and grow.

America has never been completely self sufficient and with the constant evolution of technology, natural resources like cobalt we can't source here.

I mean the 25% tariff money ( ie the tax being passed on to the consumers) will fund Trump capital and his billionaire friends.

Side note : major corporations were already preparing for the tariffs.



 
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There are clues​

With that context in mind, consider this startling passage from a report by CNN’s Katelyn Polantz, Phil Mattingly and Tierney Sneed about a standoff between career officials at the Treasury Department and employees of DOGE, the Musk-allied Department of Government Efficiency, which has morphed after the election from the out-of-government advisory panel Trump talked about to a rebranded technology unit inside the White House complex. Mattingly, Polantz and Sneed write:

The top civil servant at the Treasury Department, David Lebryk, is leaving unexpectedly after Trump-affiliated officials expressed interest in stopping certain payments made by the federal government, according to three people familiar with the situation.

According to one person familiar with the department, Trump-affiliated employees had asked about Treasury’s ability to stop payments. But Lebryk’s pushback was, “We don’t do that,” the person said.

“They seem to want Treasury to be the chokepoint on payments, and that’s unprecedented,” the person added, emphasizing that it is not the bureau’s role to decide which payments to make — it is “just to make the f-ing payments.”

Musk claims to be reclaiming government for you, the taxpaying voter​

“This is the critical battle to restore power to the PEOPLE from the massive unelected bureaucracy!” he wrote on the social media platform he owns, pushing people to rally at events opposing the use of taxpayer dollars to fund NGOs, nonprofits unaffiliated with the government that are supposed to do good works.

Think Catholic Relief Services, the World Food Program and Save the Children. There can be a legitimate debate about whether the US should fund those programs in part because we know, thanks to transparency, that the US government is funding those programs.

But his method of taking over the bureaucracy is much less transparent than the bureaucracy itself.

When Bill Clinton offered buyouts to federal workers, in 1993, for instance, he did so after getting buy-in from Congress. Trump’s administration is banking on a slim majority of Republicans in the House buying in to his plan, assuming they get a chance to have a say.

Musk allies now in the government’s HR office​

The New York Times and others reported this week that three former Musk employees have taken top positions at the Office of Personnel Management, the formerly obscure HR department for the federal government. It was OPM that first created a government-wide email system and then blasted it with an offer to millions of federal workers giving them the option to resign with pay until September. The offer caught federal workers off guard and unions and government watchdogs have said it is illegal.
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OPM confirmed to me that Amanda Scales, who used to work for Musk’s AI company xAI, is now chief of staff at OPM. Brian Bjelde, whose Linkedin profile still lists him as a SpaceX employee, is now a senior director, and so is Anthony Armstrong, a banker who worked with Musk to take over Twitter.

The New York Times report included other Musk allies in positions at other agencies, including the General Services Administration, which oversees federal real estate. Despite encouraging workers to return to the office, Musk also sees getting rid of government real estate or leases, and dispersing remaining workers throughout the country, as a cost saving technique.

People are supposed to know about the people who run their government​

That’s why Trump’s nominees to lead agencies have to undergo nomination hearings on Capitol Hill and why top officials are supposed to file paperwork with the Office of Government Ethics disclosing their financial interests and pledging to act ethically.

They’re supposed to know how their government is spending money and who is doing the spending. The mass resignation offer that caught everyone off guard was made under authority granted to the OPM director. Trump’s nominee, the venture capitalist Scott Kupor, has not yet been confirmed, so the agency is operating with an acting director.

What’s next?​

Musk laid out some ideas in the Wall Street Journal, back in November when he was working with Vivek Ramaswamy, who has left DOGE.

Mass firings? That plan presaged an effort to encourage workers to resign. What comes next, according to that Journal plan, is they will “identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions,” after which Trump could suspend worker protections to enforce a “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy.” One wonders how many air traffic controllers is the minimum number required.

Steep spending cuts? They’re hoping to grab new power, with help from the Supreme Court, for the president to simply ignore Congress and not spend money, something called impoundment. They also wanted to cut $500 billion in spending by targeting things like public broadcasting and foreign aid. There’s already evidence of this plan in Trump’s since-rescinded order to halt federal grants.
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web.archive.org

Elon Musk’s Team Now Has Full Access to Treasury’s Payments System

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Mr. Musk’s representatives at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.
web.archive.org web.archive.org

Elon Musk’s Team Now Has Full Access to Treasury’s Payments System​

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Mr. Musk’s representatives at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.
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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency full access to the federal payment system late on Friday, according to three people familiar with the change, handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.
The new authority follows a standoff this week with a top Treasury official who had resisted allowing Mr. Musk’s lieutenants into the department’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. The official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, was put on leave and then suddenly retired on Friday after the dispute, according to people familiar with his exit.
The system could give the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress, a push that has faced legal roadblocks.
Mr. Musk, who has been given wide latitude by President Trump to find ways to slash government spending, has recently fixated on Treasury’s payment processes, criticizing the department in a social media post on Saturday for not rejecting more payments as fraudulent or improper.

It is not clear whether the team led by Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, has blocked any payments since gaining access to the system.
The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is not a government department, but a team within the administration. It was put together at Mr. Trump’s direction by Mr. Musk to fan out across federal agencies seeking ways to cut spending, reduce the size of the federal work force and bring more efficiency to the bureaucracy. Most of those working on the initiative were recruited by Mr. Musk and his aides.

The system could give the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress, a push that has faced legal roadblocks.
Mr. Musk, who has been given wide latitude by President Trump to find ways to slash government spending, has recently fixated on Treasury’s payment processes, criticizing the department in a social media post on Saturday for not rejecting more payments as fraudulent or improper.

The Musk allies who have been granted access to the payment system were made Treasury employees, passed government background checks and obtained the necessary security clearances, according to two people familiar with the situation, who requested anonymity to discuss internal arrangements. While their access was approved, the Musk representatives have yet to gain operational capabilities and no government payments have been blocked, the people said.
Mr. Musk’s initiative is intended to be part of a broader review of the payments system to allow improper payments to be scrutinized and is not an effort to arbitrarily block individual payments, the people familiar with the matter said. Career Treasury Department attorneys signed off on granting the access, they added, and any changes to the system would go through a review process and testing.

Similar DOGE teams have begun demanding access to data and systems at other federal agencies, but none of those agencies control the flow of money in the way the Treasury Department does.
One of the people affiliated with DOGE who now has access to the payment system is Tom Krause, the chief executive of a Silicon Valley company, Cloud Software Group, according to one of the people familiar with the situation .

Last weekend, Mr. Krause had pushed Mr. Lebryk for entry into the system. Mr. Lebryk refused and then was subsequently put on administrative leave, according to people familiar with the matter.
A Treasury Department spokesman, a spokeswoman for DOGE and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
In a process typically run by civil servants, the Treasury Department carries out payments submitted by agencies across the government, disbursing more than $5 trillion in fiscal year 2023. Access to the system has historically been closely held because it includes sensitive personal information about the millions of Americans who receive Social Security checks, tax refunds and other payments from the federal government.
Former officials said the onus was on individual agencies to ensure their payments are proper, not the relatively small staff at the Treasury Department, which is responsible for making more than one billion payments per year.
Mr. Lebryk, the career Treasury official who retired on Friday, had resisted requests from members of Mr. Trump’s transition team for access to the data last month. After Mr. Trump took office, the White House indicated that he should be removed from the job and, according to a person familiar with the matter, Mr. Bessent suggested putting him on leave.

Democrats raised alarm this week that the Trump administration and Mr. Bessent, who was just confirmed by the Senate this week, were compromising the federal government’s payments system.
“To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy,” Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote in a letter to Mr. Bessent on Friday. “I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”
On Saturday, Mr. Wyden expressed concern that access to the payment system had been granted and pointed out Mr. Musk — a billionaire with a vast portfolio — has potential conflicts of interest.
“Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk’s own companies. All of it,” he wrote on social media.
During the transition, Mr. Musk vocally opposed Mr. Bessent being picked as Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary. Mr. Musk, then just an empowered adviser to Mr. Trump, went public with his opinion that he preferred Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street executive, for the role because Mr. Bessent was “a business-as-usual choice.” Mr. Lutnick became Mr. Trump’s choice for Commerce secretary.
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