Musk, Vivek Lay Out Their Plans to Make America Solvent Again

The New York Times ran another hair-on-fire article last week warning of the dangers of Elon Musk's cost-cutting.

See, this Lunatic has a crazy way of cutting costs: He just cuts what he thinks can be cut, then sees if he's cut too much and makes adjustments later.

Or, if he hasn't cut enough, he cuts some more.

It's insane! No company could possibly survive such a regime of cost-cutting!

Except for the several billion dollar companies Musk created, which are flourishing.

Slash First, Fix Later: How Elon Musk Cuts Costs Mr. Musk dug into his companies' budgets, preferring to cut too much rather than too little and to deal with the fallout later. Under Donald Trump, he is set to apply those tactics to the U.S. government.

On a Saturday morning in December 2022, Elon Musk summoned finance executives at Twitter, which he had bought six weeks earlier, to a conference call. Then he drilled into a spreadsheet that contained the social media company's expenditures.

Mr. Musk was angry, three people who were on the call said. Even though Twitter had just shed more than three-quarters of its employees -- leaving it with just over 1,500 workers, down from nearly 8,000 -- the company's spending still appeared to be out of control, the billionaire told attendees.

Over the next six hours, Mr. Musk read out the spreadsheet line by line and asked workers to account for each item. He ordered some items -- such as car services for executives -- to be cut completely. At one point, he confronted an employee who was responsible for a multimillion-dollar contract related to website security and said his electric vehicle company, Tesla, spent far less on the same task. After the employee pushed back, Mr. Musk said she was no longer with Twitter.

The meeting was characteristic of the approach that Mr. Musk has taken to cutting costs. Frugal to a fault, the 53-year-old has been intimately involved in hacking down budgets at his companies, including Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, which he renamed X. Over nearly three decades as a tech entrepreneur, he has honed his penny-pinching by digging into minutiae and cutting as deeply as possible -- often preferring to cut too much rather than too little, according to 17 current and former employees and others with knowledge of Mr. Musk's strategies.

Perhaps most importantly, Mr. Musk has been brutally unsentimental about the cuts, paying little regard to norms and conventions. The tech mogul has been unabashed about slashing costs to the point that corporate processes -- and sometimes even product safety -- break down, philosophizing that he can just fix things later, the people said. And he has been unafraid to offend, stiffing vendors to negotiate better prices and sidestepping traditional suppliers to manufacture cheaper parts from scratch.

"He used to be a deity," said Jim Cantrell, SpaceX's first vice president of business development. "But you know he's just a business guy. And he wants to cut everything to the bone."

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Oh no! He might bring that wealth-generating, growth-spurring frugality to the US government!

They say that they can cut $2 billion from the government's discretionary budget.

It's not nothing.

They say they'll be relying heavily on the recent Supreme Court ruling overturning so-called "Chevron deference" -- the idea that courts must defer to unelected bureaucrats' "rule"-making, treating these non-laws as if they're Congress-passed laws -- to overturn regulations and permit Trump to cancel, or "reciss," spending.

Reciss. You know what that sounds like.

Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government. That isn't how America functions today. Most legal edicts aren't laws enacted by Congress but "rules and regulations" promulgated by unelected bureaucrats--tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren't made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.

This is antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders' vision. It imposes massive direct and indirect costs on taxpayers. Thankfully, we have a historic opportunity to solve the problem. On Nov. 5, voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it.

President Trump has asked the two of us to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal government down to size. The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long. That's why we're doing things differently. We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won't just write reports or cut ribbons. We'll cut costs.

We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden's tenure.

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DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies. DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission. This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.

When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach. In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress. The president owes lawmaking deference to Congress, not to bureaucrats deep within federal agencies. The use of executive orders to substitute for lawmaking by adding burdensome new rules is a constitutional affront, but the use of executive orders to roll back regulations that wrongly bypassed Congress is legitimate and necessary to comply with the Supreme Court's recent mandates. And after those regulations are fully rescinded, a future president couldn't simply flip the switch and revive them but would instead have to ask Congress to do so.

A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy. DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions. The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited.

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Conventional wisdom holds that statutory civil-service protections stop the president or even his political appointees from firing federal workers. The purpose of these protections is to protect employees from political retaliation. But the statute allows for "reductions in force" that don't target specific employees. The statute further empowers the president to "prescribe rules governing the competitive service." That power is broad.

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With this authority,>b? Mr. Trump can implement any number of "rules governing the competitive service" that would curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area. Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don't want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn't pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.

Finally, we are focused on delivering cost savings for taxpayers. Skeptics question how much federal spending DOGE can tame through executive action alone. They point to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which stops the president from ceasing expenditures authorized by Congress. Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute is unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question. But even without relying on that view, DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood

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With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government. We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail. Now is the moment for decisive action. Our top goal for DOGE is to eliminate the need for its existence by July 4, 2026--the expiration date we have set for our project. There is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud.

6-3? I hope you're not counting on ACB or John Roberts.

But if the Court does back them up, we might actually see government spending costs cut for the first time in recent history.

The "Biden" Administration sees the threat of racist recissions to the massive piles of newly-printed Fake Dollars Biden spammed out, largely through the Inflation Creation Act.

Worried that Musk and Vivek might cancel some of the tens of billions of unspent inflationary fake dollars, the Regime has ordered all of its corrupt functionaries to start shoveling it into any stray Democrat's pockets.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is on an urgent mission: get as much high-tech spending out the door before Donald Trump takes office.

The Biden administration is aiming to commit nearly every unspent dollar in its $50 billion microchip-subsidy program before President-elect Donald Trump takes over in January, an effort that would effectively cement a massive industrial legacy before the GOP can reverse course.

"I'd like to have really almost all of the money obligated by the time we leave," Raimondo said in an interview with POLITICO. "That's the goal, and I certainly want to have all the major announcements done as it relates to the big, leading-edge companies."

The effort to spend her department's full CHIPS Act budget would put a capstone on a signature Biden economic policy.

It also speaks to the urgency facing a host of Biden's historic raft of spending programs, many of which could be vulnerable to a Republican White House and Congress eager to pare back the most ambitious Democratic spending packages.

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Raimondo said she recently directed staff to work through the weekend -- and even made personal calls to tech CEOs -- to speed the talks along.

Wow, government bureaucrats working through the weekend. It must really be the highest of high priority missions to piss away taxpayer dollars and aggravate inflation further.

The forthcoming change in administration is "a clear deadline" that "focuses the mind," Raimondo said, but added she's not overly concerned about budget-conscious Republicans clawing back money from the program next year, despite their threats to do so.

posted by Ace at 04:10 PM

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