> The NSC [National Security Council] staff will need to consolidate the functions of both the NSC and the Homeland Security Council (HSC), incorporate the recently established Office of the National Cyber Director, and evaluate the required regional and functional directorates.
> Given the aforementioned prerequisites, the NSC should be properly resourced with sufficient policy professionals, and the NSA should prioritize staffing the vast majority of NSC directorates with aligned political appointees and trusted career officials. - Project 2025, pg 52.
> ... History shows that an unsupervised NSC staff can stray from its statutory role and adversely affect a President and his policies. Moreover, while the NSC should be fully incorporated into the White House, it should also be allowed to do its job without the impediment of dually hatted staff that report to other offices. - Project 2025, pg 53.
The goal is to build up a political organisation to use as a weapon, and to scrap the rest - as a legal excuse to say that the political appointments will be necessary.
> Even my die-hard Republican distant relatives are suddenly shocked because programs they benefited from are being cut. They thought they voted for something different.
They voted for others to be hurt and to lose benefits, not their “in group.” Surprise surprise, they are considered the waste by those they voted for.
Trump in Nevada: 'I Love the Poorly Educated' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpdt7omPoa0
Take DOGE cutting funding to the Mitr Gender Conversion Clinic in Hyderabad, India as an example. The haven't taken control of the clinic, they're not telling them what to do or not to do, they're simply not funding it anymore. If the clinic closes it's because nobody except the previous administration wanted it. There is no reason we should be forcing gender change clinics on people in India; if they want to support it, they should purchase the service themselves.
DOGE has been about fighting corruption and reducing wasteful spending, and that's what America voted for. "Taking control" would be using government funding to support pro-abortion political groups, undoing this control would be fighting corruption.
It absolutely staggers me that anyone can still say this with a straight face. I will ask this, though: as part of the DOGE fight against corruption and wasteful spending how many of Elon Musk's government contracts and subsidies have been cut?
The Moving Goal Posts in Musk’s DOGE Cuts: Why Elon Musk and his team have struggled to make the spending cuts they promised - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/elon-musk-dog... | https://archive.today/GPDNY - April 14th, 2025
Elon Musk dramatically lowers his DOGE spending cut targets (again) - https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/elon-mus... - April 11th, 2025
See How Government Spending Is Up Even as Musk Touts Savings: Musk team’s $150 billion in savings barely dents $6.8 trillion in spending largely on autopilot, WSJ analysis finds - https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-doge-government-sp... | https://archive.today/DGGhX - April 11th, 2025
"A system’s function or purpose is not necessarily spoken, written, or expressed explicitly, except through the operation of the system. The best way to deduce the system’s purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves. Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.” —- Donella Meadows
The purpose of a system is what it does.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
1. Politically-motivated "purge the weak" Nazi stuff - Cutting Medicare, cutting Medicaid, cutting Social Security, cutting education, cutting anything that benefits people who are old, poor, queer, female, etc.
2. Privatization - NWS and NOAA are wonderful public services, and they'd rather profit from the data they produce. This is why taxes in the US are such a bitch to file, tax companies oppose any policy change that would make the paperwork easier for filers.
3. They might actually be Russian assets. Tearing down institutions that took generations to build makes space in the world for Russia to exert more influence. You can tell this is working because Europe is now wanting to re-arm.
It makes me sad. If I had a billion dollars I would still want to live in a better country. These guys only want a better world for themselves, and making everyone else into a permanent servant underclass only plays into that.
You make it sound like poor DOGE employees are being forced to do this on this kind of schedule, which definitely isn't the impression I got. They're all a bunch of incompetent overconfident weirdos who think they know better and what to do. Is there any pressure to do anything quickly?
And the US federal budget is quite easy to trim. E.g. remove an aircraft carrier from the planned construction pipeline and you've saved $15 billion with no actual ramifications.
Out of curiosity, which programs? And is this enough to change their opinion about Trump, or do they still think it'll be worth it?
Like what exactly? I mean the guy ran on cutting the budget by 2 trillion. In his last term he gave tax breaks yo the rich. Where did they think the cuts were coming from?
He ran very hard on raising tarrifs. Which demonstrably raise prices (thats literally their goal.) But now people claim "I didn't vote for this."
In truth they voted for him because he was the Republican on offer and they're die-hard Republican. The Republican party has made no secret of its agenda for decades.
I get it, people are good at cognitive dissonance. But this is the place for blunt truth. They voted for this. I'm not letting Republicans got off the hook here. They voted for this.
Just like to my Republican friends who are upset that CVE is cut. You voted for this. The general public benefit from CVE even though they dont know it exists. Just like you benefitted from dozens of other programs you didn't know existed, but have also been cut.
That's the problem with cuts. They ultimately end up hurting everyone.
Now clearly there's some fat that could be trimmed. Companies do it all the time. Done well its good. Swinging a hatchet in a crowded elevator does not seem like "Done well".
When someone hands you a pencil, you don't wonder what variety of tree the wood came from, or what paint chemistry was used for the coating. It's a pencil. You might have broad opinions on whether the one in your hand is comfortable to use, and sharp - but you leave the details to the pencil makers.
About 70% of the population engage with politics the same way: Leave the details to the people who do this stuff for a living.
Do they expect to be disappointed? Sure, but everyone who engages with politics expects to be disappointed.
> Do they expect to be disappointed?
Aurornis said their relatives were shocked.
If people in the US aren't starting to notice what Musk/Trump are doing it will bode very poorly for the future of the US.
This is actually simply not true. The Republican party before the Tea Party looked nothing at all like this. Trump won the presidency last year riding a wave of distinctly not-your-typical-Republican lower class voters. As he rose the old guard Republican establishment formed the anti-Trump wing of the party until they were forced out one by one.
To put some numbers to this: Bush won the upper income brackets by 5+ points in 2000, with a lead that widened as you went up the income ladder. Trump lost the equivalent brackets in 2024 by 5+ points, a 10 point swing away from what Bush won them by. The lower brackets are even more stark, with a whopping 18-point swing towards Trump in the $30k-$50k bracket (inflation adjusted to $15k-$30k).
These numbers show that Trump is not a Republican in the George W Bush sense and he's certainly not a Republican in the Ronald Reagan sense. He's a populist and won on a populist agenda by putting together a coalition of rabid social conservatives (who probably really did go Bush in 2000) and poor people (who largely did not).
I would agree he's not George Bush, much less Ronald Reagan. Nevertheless those who voted for Bush and Reagan also voted for Trump.
This has been "decades" in the making in the sense that since Obama was elected (in 2008), Republicans have embraced racism at the heart of their populist message. That swing rightward was made palatable to center republicans with a woman democratic candidate in 2016 (one not terribly well liked in democratic circles) and a black woman candidate in 2024.
While racism, and misogyny gather a bunch of votes, long-term distrust of institutions is sown, and fostered. Republican policy becomes protecting white guys, and especially old, rich, white guys.
Reagan was popular and competent, and worked for the good of America. Today's president is nothing like him, but wins because a bunch of people "vote Republican".
There's a component of that, but it's not the primary cause. A lot of former Republicans stopped voting Republican with Trump, including a lot of old rich white guys, and a lot of the current Republican voters didn't vote for Bush. He wins because of the new wave of voters that counterbalanced the flight of the educated core of the Republican establishment.
Starve the beast is older than the Tea Party.[1]
Obamacare and communism are along the same axis too, but the Republicans who claimed they were the same thing were obviously wrong.
They voted for the leopards to eat other people’s faces, not their’s.
This isn't speculation or hyperbole, it's specifically laid out in their published plans: By hobbling or outright eliminating federal agencies responsible for executing the laws passed by Congress, the administration can circumvent the democratic process and impose their extreme vision of limited government on the country, regardless of popular support.
The U.S. system of government relies on established norms as much as it does law. Conservatives realized that they can ignore precedent with impunity if they had an executive willing to do so. They then spelled out exactly how, and are now enacting that plan.
Then SCOTUS's decisions last summer turbo boosted their agenda. The ruling that only Congress can hold the President legally accountable essentially means executive power is unchecked if the legislature is unwilling or unable to Impeach and convict. The President can now confidently ignore the law and judicial orders with a veneer of legality. And this is what he's doing.
(The fact that all this just so happens to benefit Russia after their decade long campaign to destabilize their opponents in the West is a topic for speculation.)
DOGE is about permanently altering how our country works modeled on the right wing worldview, plain and simple. Since that's their overall goal, they're not concerned where they swing the wrecking ball - it's all going to get destroyed eventually.
And it's also happily breaking the law. The Executive doesn't legally have the power to allocate resources (or not), not to mention the power to arbitrarily suspend due process.
You'd think that lessons would incite learning but that has never seemed to be the case throughout history.
There is no rhyme or reason to what gets cut, other than someone under pressure to hit KPIs (dollars cut) was desperately searching for things that looked easy to cancel.
This is happening everywhere the federal government touches. Most people aren't aware of it until they come around and pull the rug on something that intersects with your own life.
Even my die-hard Republican distant relatives are suddenly shocked because programs they benefited from are being cut. They thought they voted for something different.