Intuitively, there _must_ be some corruption.

I have zero faith that Musk is interested in finding real corruption. He seems to be more interested in changing budget allocations and calling the removed regulations / "woke" things corrupt.

I also think that corruption was within my acceptance tolerance of wastage. _Think_ is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but maybe that's all that really matters when it comes to something like this.

If a bill contains funding to help fix a main street in a city that was destroyed by a natural disaster, is that corruption?

What if there's 500 other destroyed main streets and that one got picked?

What if it was destroyed by decades of the local gov't neglecting it?

What if it was included because you directly bribed the person writing the bill?

What if it was included because you did some horse trading and gave them something they wanted in another bill you wrote?

The intent there is not to argue that defining corruption is impossible or futile, but that some people might reasonably argue different sides of whether something was corruption without either side obviously being morally bankrupt.

Federal retirement claims are processed by hand by hundreds of workers working in a mineshaft. "The average processing time was 47 to 73 days."

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elon-musk-retirement-mine/

https://www.ironmountain.com/services/vital-records-storage

When will this woke madness stop?

https://edge.sitecorecloud.io/ironmountain-c8dd68e9/media/pr...

So why would it be by definition considered waste that a government has employees working on paper records stored in the same place?

There is absolutely no reason to think this is ridiculous. These types of sites exist all over the world. Yet Elon Musk claims it's ridiculous and people now have to defend that claim?

"Though better known for administering humanitarian aid around the world, USAID has a long history of engaging in intelligence work and meddling in the domestic politics of aid recipients. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the agency often partnered with the CIA’s now-shuttered Office of Public Safety, a department beset by allegations that it trained foreign police in "terror and torture techniques" and encouraged official brutality, according to a 1976 Government Accountability Office report."

Ancient history? No, in 2014, they were caught trying to create unrest in Cuba.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/03/cuban-twitter-and-other...

https://apnews.com/article/technology-cuba-united-states-gov...

US agencies did much worse things in pursue of eliminating communism, in US and elsewhere.

Or does Trump get a pass on what he says he'll do, because it's just trolling to trigger the libs?

The creators of South Park literally made a movie mocking the neocon ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_America:_World_Police

For some odd reason the average liberal is now arguing for foreign interference by the US. The are using the same neocon talking points the Republicans did 10 years ago - "soft power" and "if we don't do it someone else will".

It's wild to sit back and think about.

Also consider how much disruption all of this is causing to the federal workforce and the contractors. People are being forced to upend their lives on very short notice to RTO. They were getting daily emails telling them to quit. It's hard to imagine anyone doing good work when they're scared that some indiscriminate process is going to fire them.

People said the same thing when Musk took a wrecking ball to Twitter. Now it's more profitable than ever.

I don't know how this is all going to turn out, maybe he really is wrecking the government, but it's certainly too early to call it.

The primary owner of X disagrees with you.

"We're barely breaking even" [1]

1. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-says-x-growth-22130...

These are public goods. They shouldn't be run on the basis of "make them as crappy as we can get away with to save as much money as possible".

Even if it is more profitable, it's doing a heck of a lot less. The government being 80% less effective would be a very bad outcome here.

So not only is the DOGE affair not reducing the debt, it is setting the country up for less wealth and more expenses in the future.

> The $2 billion was used for the "decarbonization of homes" in low-income communities and paid for new household appliances, such as water heaters, induction stoves, solar panels, EV chargers, and weatherization, according to an April 2024 press release from Power Forward Communities.

Second, the claim that it was given to Stacey Abrams, from the LinkedIn post cited in the article:

> The coalition includes Rewiring America, Enterprise Community Partners, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), United Way, and Habitat for Humanity International and today, we've applied for $9.5 billion — part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund embedded in the Inflation Reduction Act — to directly fund residential decarbonization and electrification... The application is already supported by 321 partners who have pledged to decarbonize housing units across 46 states and every EPA region. It also includes 156 communities pledging to decarbonize housing units, particularly in low-income and disadvantaged communities, and rural and Tribal communities.

It appears that Stacey Abrams was in some way involved in organizing a coalition of existing nonprofits to apply for congressionally authorized grant money. There is no evidence I can see that she received any of the money or that any other impropriety was involved.

"$2 billion to Stacey Abrams" is a falsehood, even based on the content of the inflammatory Fox News article.

Also, I am booing them because all of the doge line items on their website are in the millions, and our debt is trillions.

Even in the straits you’re in (and I sincerely hope the very best for you), how much effort would you put into saving $0.14? It just doesn’t seem like the best use of effort?

Before anyone asks, no I don’t round up for the Boys and Girls Club at Taco Bell. I sometimes feel bad about it though.

So instead of them giving that money to Americans to pay for productivity (USAID buying corn from farmers, tens of thousands of employees paid to promote American standing on the global stage, paid to look after parks, paid to monitor fraud in the US financial system, paid to collect taxes, etc).. they want to send those people home and distribute their would-be salaries to every American for free.

They have said that 20% will be distributed directly to the population, 20% will be paid to the national debt, and the remaining 60% will simply not be spent.

“1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million million, or 1012 (ten to the twelfth power), as defined on the short scale. This is now the meaning in both American and British English.”

I hope that puts some of these plans in perspective. Musk's millions is wandering the street for loose pennies. Trumps plan to dismnantle the DoED is "saving" the equivent of paying some energy bill, while the US is going into more debt to pay rent.

Edit: and so are a lot of their other efforts

We have since updated it to billion in order to keep pace with the times.

The actual spend on foreign aid? Under 1%.

Americans are systemically and catastrophically disinformed. Expecting us to be able to assess the real impact of the DOGE team's fuckups is a violation of GIGO.

The general public's understanding of soft power, a global economy, and maintaining an economic hegemony is just not there. We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.

Maybe - maybe - a merry band of lily-white slave-owners born hundreds of years before solar power and social media don't know how best to run a modern government.

And maybe we'd be smarter if our government didn't treat schools as a pipeline to factory work, or as a means to make billions from crippling and predatory student loans. "I love the uneducated", etc.

One must also keep in mind that the man of the 18th century achieved the necessary milestones to become a self-sufficient adult by his late teens. He will have already lived a full life at the age his 21st century counterpart crosses the starting line.

And absolutely, rational and knowledgeable is certain. But we seem to treat their edicts as the height of infallible perfection in government, and view it as anathema to even suggest ideas that don't precisely align with their statements.

really? i tried sourcing this and I can see there were only two in their 20s (26 each) out of 56. no teenage. 2 in 20s, 17 in 30s, 12 in 40s, 9 in 50s, 6 in 60s, and 1 in 70s (well, 70 exact - Benjamin Franklin).

"As it turns out, many Founding Fathers were younger than 40 years old in 1776 ... more than a dozen of them were 35 or younger."

Peter Salem was the youngest signatory at 16.

Alexander Hamilton, 21. Thomas Lynch, Jr, and Edward Rutledge, 26. George Walton, 27, and Thomas Heyward, Jr, 29.

That being said, I take the National Archives as a more authoritative source than a Slate article!

I made no such claim, but since you mention it, populism thrives when political power is perceived as disconnected to the common people. You can look up any number of stats on that yourself; they're quite clear that we are in a historic low [0].

What I did claim was that the problems and potential of our day couldn't have been foreseen by the 'founding fathers', so it's silly to hold them as _the_ shibboleth of democratic ideals. I would even say that the more accurate term for them would be the 'colonizing great great great etc grandfathers', which puts things back into perspective a little.

And even so; they explicitly warned that their system wouldn't hold up forever, needed continuous adjustment, and would need some rather extreme 'refreshing' from time to time.

I'm asking in retrospect to the overall well-being on the nation in actual policies and results, not in it's political dominance. As recently as the Cultural Revolution we can see what happens the excesses of the mob are released.

>What I did claim was that the problems and potential of our day couldn't have been foreseen by the 'founding fathers', so it's silly to hold them as _the_ shibboleth of democratic ideals

Well I think you're attacking a strawman here, there will be situtations where their writings are not so relevant, but this situation of populism very much falls into category where their writings are relevant and specfically designed to anticipate for.

If you don't believe that, well then explain what are your alternative solutions to populism and if they are more poltically viable than what the founders proposed. I suspect if you weigh them all, the founders' ideals will come out on top.

Don't underestimate history, don't think you are really that different from our past. Plato might have lived 2000 years ago, but we still influenced by him today precisely due to the timeless quality of his ideas. Same as the Founders, you might disparage them for slavery that was common at the time, but their sincere devotion to republican ideals were acts of extraordinary moral upstanding that were rare both then and today. That's why we greatly respect them, not just in USA but around the world.

Are you familiar with Nicaragua's history? Iran's? Italy, Guatemala, Congo? Chile, Argentina, El Salvador? Brazil, Honduras, Haiti? Bolivia? ...

Internally, are you familiar with the history of gerrymandering? Voter suppression? Disinformation campaigns? The fight against campaign finance reform, or against winner takes all voting? Ballot access laws? Legislative and judicial manipulation against third parties and progressive candidates? Debate exclusion across corporate media, unchallenged smears, media blackouts, expensive lawsuits...

It may be the best of all bad plans. But it clearly does not succeed in producing compromises. At the very least it relies on some kind of good will between constituents. When you lose that you no longer have a nation.

The point of a Republican democracy is so the public doesn’t have to decide the best way to build warships. But what values America should spend its money supporting absolutely are what should be decided by the democratic process.

At the scale of organizations and business, it's probably the most important tool you need to learn if you want to be at all effective. I've never seen a manager who was able to actually "get things done" who didn't skillfully wield soft power. The least effective managers I've worked beside needed to constantly resort to the use of authority and/or bullying to achieve results.

Which also generally pisses off lots of people. Then again some people seem to get a kick out of pissing off others.

It's quite reasonable to assume that a similar dynamic works at larger scales also.

E.g. Biden’s “human rights” push in Bangladesh. How did it help America to undermine the government’s ability to kill Islamists? It didn’t. It simply was ideologically captured Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so.

This is a cynical, but accurate definition of soft power: exerting your will using words.

Your argument is all over the place - you call soft power a "fake concept", and then "bullshit", and here, you seem to suggest that it works, but you don't agree with Biden ideologically? So which is it?

I don't know even where to begin. I hope it's trolling.

Soft power and hegemony absolutely played vital roles since the end of WW2. We seem to have forgotten how much everything relied on them.

For the record, I don't like American foreign policy, and USAID is basically the CIA in disguise. But in terms of furthering America's goal of being the dominant power in the world, it absolutely works, and is _much_ more financially efficient than the cost of military intervention to establish supremacy.

Also in the context of federal budget, 1% is a huge number since most of the budget (like social security, interest payments, and Medicaid) is non negotiable.

~30B a year (USAID budget) is enough to make improvements domestically, e.g free college for 10% of students, transportation, housing, etc.

Should China be left alone on the world stage to take over?

if only that's what they would spend it on. Instead, it's going to go to the military.

Look at the role of USAID during the Vietnam War under CORDS. It funded the "strategic hamlet" program which uprooted rural civilians into barb wire enclosures and provided arms and training to militia.

That doesn't sound like international aid.

Look at the Phoenix Program during the same war. It was an intelligence program which sough to identify "VC infrastructure" within rural villages and "capture or kill".

One can argue that such activities are beneficial to the US, but claiming it's soft and cuddly "international aid" for countries in need is just not accurate.

Providing HIV assistance while undermining political stability is a high price for other countries to pay and I'm sure is a net negative for them.

You're taking that as a prior when in reality US FoPo prefers political stability after the Cold War. You need to get a grip here if you're seeing everything through the lens of dubious paranoia, if not just leftist resentment.

I should rephrase that to "political instability with regards to the perspective of locals".

I agree the US is seeking "political stability" with these activities. But it's on US terms which is often in direct opposition to the locals.

And I'd argue my view is not "dubious paranoia". The purpose of USAID is to use development activities as a cover for interference in other country's politics.

Whatever inefficiencies that exist on the civil side are nearly irrelevant.

I have rarely encountered anyone who thinks the government isn't overspending. And nobody ever agrees on how we should be spending the money.

I realize the comment above paints me as a conservative, I assure you I am not.

However, I guess I can at least sympathize with how we got here (DOGE being acceptable).

And from that I blame almost everyone in politics and every person tangentially related to those in politics.

Everyone would love to spend less money on other people's priorities. But as a whole, the bond market thinks the spending is ok, even if no individual will say so.

US yields at the long end (the part of the curve that is sensitive to long-term stagflation and inflation) don't necessarily indicate that participants believe that the spending isn't a problem either. Once yield started to rise, the U.S. massively twisted issuance back to T-Bills, which are short duration and essentially risk-free. Fragility on the long end is being carefully managed.

To some extent, you are seeing some financial repression, ie the shape of the yield curve is being actively managed. This expectation is built into the bond prices as well. If the long end starts to break down, nobody expects the treasury to start issuing even more long bonds. They naturally would expect them to pull back and start issuing more T-Bills and only term out the debt once the market/liquidity can handle it. There is some conversation right now about leverage limits in the banking system/SLR being expanded, so there is more capacity to warehouse the debt on the banking side. That's pushing in the direction of financial repression (where the banks are "incentivized" to shape the curve in a desired way).

0% interest rates were leveraged against the Fed Put, and it's arguable that there is a Treasury Issuance Put that is currently baked in.

I think that the issue is broader than this though. It's about much more than just the inflationary effects of spending. It's an ideological battle as well. As for bonds, there's also the fact that US bonds are a "there is no alternative" asset to some degree. Remember that bond investors got their faces ripped off in the initial rate hike cycle. There's a good parallel to commodity futures prices here, in that prices of commodity futures are terrible indicators of the actual price in the future. There is a distinction between where a market clears and a bet on future prices. It is a somewhat subtle distinction, but it is grossly underappreciated. That said, of course you can isolate the inflation expectation aspect of the bond market and you are probably correct that this indicator does not red flag inflation driven by excess spending. Of course, growth expectations are also fairly healthy. So it's hard to say what it would look like if inflation expectations stayed high and growth expectations started to fall. Then the bond market might look quite a bit different. We haven't seen a true stagflationary market in 50 years.

If you are a bank (or in aggregate a country full of banks) that takes in a bunch of $USD from your business customers selling products internationally in that currency, then you will receive a bunch of dollar deposits. These deposits can't be magically converted into the local currency, they have to be used as dollars somewhere else or traded with someone else who has a currency or commodity that you want for them. Long-term if there is a net surplus(from the other country point of view) of exports to imports, there will be a net surplus of USD as well.

So what to do with those USD? Make some more! Whatever the going rate for T-bills is is likely better than nothing. Treasury bonds are considered a "risk free rate" in the sense that they are approximately as safe as cash under the mattress.

Inflation is a more accurate measure than treasury sales of the reducing trust in our fiscal future. And that signal is lit.

Those dollars instead seem to be going into the stock market. Too many, I would say, and I think the Fed is making a mistake in trying to lower interest rates. But it does suggest that investors do not anticipate a sudden crisis of the government.

However, the discretionary part of the budget is less than half the size of the mandatory part of the budget. If the entire discretionary budget were cut to $0, between mandatory spending and interest, there would still be a government deficit.

That sleight-of-hand is how $900 billion of military spending becomes "most of the budget" when the full budget is $4.4 trillion.

So when we talk about the "budget", what really matters as far as politicians are concerned, is the discretionary part, which they can control (and which in theory voters have some control over through their election of congressmen), and defense takes up at least half of that.

The discourse of "wasteful government spending" is a smokescreen. It mystifies the basic operation of taking a dollar from a worker, retiree or poor person and giving it to a rich person.

2. we may or may not spend enough. what we don't do is collect enough taxes to pay for it, that is the failure.

That it would like get wrong more often than not. No thanks.

I think this has more a knock-on effect of the recent trend of “bringing your politics to work” and federal civil servants dropping the pretense of political neutrality. It woke half the country up to the fact that 90% of federal employees are putting their thumb on the scale for Democrat policies no matter who wins the presidential election.

Also opening up the border when a majority of Americans have never supported increasing immigration: https://news.gallup.com/poll/647123/sharply-americans-curb-i.... (The number peaked at 34%.)

Those are examples of official Biden policies, and it was his prerogative to pursue them of course. But Trump has the prerogative to pursue the opposite of those policies with equal vigor, and the federal workforce should be working just as hard to implement Trump’s policies.

"Can't" here is not a statement of fact. First off, the US government can and is paying the interest on the debt.

Second, the debt is denominated in US dollars. If congress were to authorize it, the US government could print money and pay off one hundred percent of the debt in a single day. This would have negative side effects, but it's clear that "can't" is not the correct term.

So saying that too much is being spent is indeed a qualitative assessment, not a fact.

I suppose no one should ever be able to take a loan.

Of course there are times when loans are great. However, through boom and bust cycles we have perpetually taken out loans.

So, you need to drill down, are the things we are spending on “capital improvements” for a better future or our operating expenses.

Interest? Military? Medicaid/care? Those will be expenses forever.

If you take anti cyclical view of it, when the stock market is at an all time high we should be paying debt, for when we need it later.

In order to prevent that, the budget must be cut. People must be fired. Promising projects must be discontinued. The question is where to make the cuts and how, because cuts in the wrong places in the wrong way will end up making the problem worse. For me, working in healthcare/science/research, I see the cuts to the NIH spending as a bad cut, because it sacrifices a lot of future revenue from scientific R&D. Same with cutting USAID and losing a ton of soft power that could be used to persuade developing countries to let in American companies. Or firing, say, IRS employees, since they're the ones who actually bring in the revenue. So there are good cuts and there are bad cuts, but the point is that eventually cuts must be made.

This is logically (and in a simple way) false. Incomes could also increase.

I mean things like food, clothing and utilities.

That's not how a reserve currency works. You borrow to fund growth and let inflation take care of the debt.

Inflation might take care of the debt, but it is terrible for currency holders.

Unfortunately, for people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, there's not much to be done besides wait for wages to catch up. And in general, wages don't keep immediate pace with inflation. The net result is that lower-income workers suffer the bulk of the consequences of high inflation.

1) Our debt is above GDP and interest is rising faster than GDP growth. Debt is fine when being used as leverage but we are upside down at the moment.

2) We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment. The government has no money. They are using employee pension funds to meet obligations with a promissory note. We have negative cash flow and have run out of the ability to extend our line of credit until Congress raises the debt ceiling.

If people believe we need what we are spending on, we need to tax the difference. It sucks to pay taxes but we need to do it

For an increasing number of people over an increasing period of time, this isn't an option? Do you think people can snap their fingers and materialize a 6-figure tech salary? I just saw two layed off people on linkedin today, that's two more 5+ years experienced professional software devs on the market...

Being honest, on what should be a great local salary, we can't even afford a starter home, or savings after our monthly grocery bill. The government caused this inflationary Era to devalue the debt, and your suggestion is to take more from families already struggling to stay ahead?

Such a communist. Take from the people at gunpoint, give it to the DC bureuacrats.

Empirically in the US in the last 70 years this just never has played out this why. The government did not cause and rarely causes major inflation either at least in this time period. Usually its the economy explodes due to a private industry bubble exploding or natural resources crunch due to foreign governments reducing oil production or pandemics.

Its pretty childish to use communist as a tag line when I qualified the claim you can believe that benefits should not exist but if you do you have to own saying you want to cut benefits for poor people and give a tax break to rich people (at least that is what happens when you cut taxes in a progressive system)

Mind you, taxed 20%, not 20% extra. Source: https://www.jw.org/en/news/region/turkmenistan/Turkmenistan-...

All spending is authorised by Congress, isn't it? So how is the debt ceiling any different? No federal programs "have money" short of Congress deciding it.

Appropriations is Congressional and specifics how much an agency will get over the fiscal year.

Apportionment is under the Executive and addresses when and how those funds are made available.

They are two distinct things.

Everyone is missing the most obvious way to raise revenue: raise taxes.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...

The debt graph caught my eye. I did not expect it to be that stable for so long. I wonder what happened in 1981, impossible to say.

Total federal income was flat after the early 80's recession, then grew by 60%+ over the next decade, despite the Reagan tax cuts, increasing $400B.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFR

Federal spending continued to grow.

That's what happened.

One, DOGE isn't doing anything to cut spending. Every dollar Musk "cuts" that doesn't get Congressional authorisation is just being borrowed from future litigation plus all the time and expense that will eat up.

Two, if DOGE can supercede the Congress than so can the Treasury in issuing new debt. Trump has said he wants to kill the debt limit. He could just try that with an executive order. DOGE is already shredding contracts and blocking lawful payments--we're already jeopardising the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. (Ironically, in a manner similar to how South Africa trashed itself in modern history.)

Another huge expense is servicing our debt.

Those are what we should be addressing, not cutting NIH research.

By the way, we do have the ability to issue more debt -- because thankfully our debt is USD denominated and we can simply print more dollars. It's the only way we've survived this long as the world's largest debtor nation.

* Bush Jr Tax Cuts

* Useless Iraq war

* Too Big to Fail Bailouts of Banks

* Trumps tax cuts

* COVID spending

When billionaires and trillion-dollar corporations pay episilon to zero in taxes, maybe they should pay their share. Taxing the rich would solve the problem overnight.

Even as a legal matter, the impoundment act only requires rescission notification once it’s clear that the executive won’t use all the money appropriated for a “program.” When Congress is appropriating say $3 billion in a line item for USAID, DOGE can cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession saying USAID won’t use all $3 billion.

What the past few decades did was push enough people to the point of no longer seeing the value in continuing the illusion.

I am terrified of the long term ramifications here. But again, I do see how we ended up here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_v._City_of_New_York

Whether that argument would hold up in court remains to be seen, of course.

Most of what I see being complained about can easily fall under socioeconomic development, which is ostensibly one of the objectives.

IMHO, in situations like this, the State department absolutely should have been able to step in and say "hold on, let's make sure this isn't being treated as a slush fund by anti American terrorists", but that's not really possible under the current structure.

https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/usg-funding-to-gaza-and-wb-i...

As an example.

This is pre-doge, so of course none of their garbage lies show up. Only the actual oversight by regulators that doge is fking up.

There's more going on than what's in the latest news cycle.

Of course, that particular source is vested in the story, but to call the entire thing "totally debunked" is just willful ignorance.

Their financial statements being given in New Israeli Shekels is a bit of a giveaway.

The executive branch doesn't get to interpret what spending is in line with the laws passed by Congress.

Trump is taking a shit on the US Constitution.

> Although one commentator characterizes the case's implications as meaning "[t]he president cannot frustrate the will of Congress by killing a program through impoundment,"[2] the Court majority itself made no categorical constitutional pronouncement about impoundment power but focused on the statute's language and legislative history.

But they don't strictly speaking have to overturn it, just limit its scope of application somehow. For example, Train was about grants to the states – SCOTUS might rule the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 unconstitutional, and decide that the President has the right in general to impound appropriated funds, but they also might follow Train in carving out an exception to that general right for grants to the states.

It seemed pretty clear to (now-Supreme Court justice, nominated by Trump) Brett Kavanaugh:

"Like the Commission here, a President sometimes has policy reasons (as distinct from constitutional reasons, cf. infra note 3) for wanting to spend less than the full amount appropriated by Congress for a particular project or program. But in those circumstances, even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds. Instead, the President must propose the rescission of funds, and Congress then may decide whether to approve a rescission bill."

https://casetext.com/case/in-re-aiken-cnty-2

Though to be fair he wrote this in 2013 when a black Democrat was President so maybe now he feels like things are a little bit less clear for... reasons.

This is not correct.

The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use appropriated funds. Congress can then decide to accept or reject the recission notice. If rejected, the funds remain appropriated, with whatever conditions Congress set.

The argument could be made that this is a new administration with different priorities, so does not intend to use the previously appropriated funds. But, even then, the spirit of the law (and the Constitution) is such that the new administration would engage in the recission process as if the funds had just been appropriated. So, they would submit a recission notice before taking action.

That is, they would not just do whatever they wanted and inform Congress afterwards.

That’s not what the statute says. 2 U.S.C. 683(a) says:

> Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required to carry out the full objectives or scope of programs for which it is provided or that such budget authority should be rescinded for fiscal policy or other reasons (including the termination of authorized projects or activities for which budget authority has been provided), or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation for such fiscal year, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress a special message specifying

There must be a determination and it must be with respect to a program. So for example Congress appropriated $1.7 billion for USAID operations as a single line item. The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process. Then at some point the executive can make a determination how much of the total “program” amount will actually be needed and how much won’t be needed. Only at that point is the recessionary notice required.

From the Code:

>Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required...or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress...

The operative phrase is "Whenever the President determines".

However, your conclusion adds:

>The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process.

The Code says nothing like this, instead, explicitly stating "on determination", not "after action".

This "prior notification" requirement is also both within the letter of the original appropriations process, and the intent of the law overall.

It unambiguously affirmed Congress's sole authority over federal spending.

The Constitution clearly gives Congress the authority over federal taxation and spending, and this power is a key check on executive power. If the executive branch could ignore congressional spending decisions, it would effectively render Congress’s "power of the purse" irrelevant.

It's called the Spending Clause, not the Appropriation Clause, for a reason.

As to the rest of your argument: not spending the full $100M congress specifies in 100M Mars Bars for the Air Force because Mars wasn't able to deliver the last 25 million Mars Bars, is not the same thing as "One person decided Mars Bars are Woke so we just stopped paying Mars Candy yesterday."

Now of course, since the lens isn't objective, we can't say it's an objective statement. And no, we can say that we spend too much and also think Trump is doing illegal stuff.

Congress has abdicated its role, and the rot is now so plain that even a 78 year old can get the idiot masses to vote him in to do something.

The thing about power...it only stays with the people who have the balls to wield it. Congress needs to find their balls or we'll just be back here in another four years.

It's really not that hard to have that combination, i.e., "authoritarian populism".

Some of the GOP tried to do that a few years ago, and went against Trump.

They were all destroyed.

There's no longer an escape hatch from this.

Like shutting all this stuff down or radically cutting it back will surely have some dire economic impacts?

None of those other events had the same depth of damage going on here. America is dead, and doesn’t know it yet.

The only reason people aren’t saying this everywhere, is because this is unbelievable.

Income tax on everyone earning g less than 360K is going up, plus tariffs which are regressive.

They're also cutting taxes for those earning more than that, the top 5%

https://itep.org/a-distributional-analysis-of-donald-trumps-...

All these things BTW do have some limited ability to be controlled by the executive (Clinton did layoffs in the 90s, but kept supporting the same federal services). But ultimately most of this stuff is the mandate of congress and can’t just be canceled by executive order.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tax-cuts-extension-republ...

Is it about funneling this money into their tax cut? Why not just run up more debt?

There are reasons why both parties allowed the system to remain as it was. I find it's increasingly true that new politicians don't understand the value of the systems they are meant to control. They see Chesterton's Fence and tear it down with abandon. Someone like Trump has no clue why politicians act the way they do. He lies and bullshits and does whatever he wants, and it works in the short term, but the long term effect is disastrous. These people are taking a private equity approach to government. Buy it cheap and load it up with debt, then sell as much as you can and let it crash to zero. This is more looting than governing.

(I'm reminded of the Golgafrinchans from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They sent their "useless" third of society into space... The folks who did jobs like telephone cleaner or insurance salesman. The remaining two-thirds of the population died from a plague sourced from a dirty telephone.)