It's clear that Trumps sees everything as zero sum. If he can't see that he's personally and directly benefiting, clearly it's a waste of money.

I agree wholeheartedly in this case. But gutting the epa will almost certainly boost the gdp far more than the amount directly saved. At least in the short term. Burning rivers are a lot harder to clean up than tech debt. I think the idea was to free up a bunch of labor to replace the perfectly good spigot of labor we had in the form of legal immigration, and get rid of a lot of regulations that inhibit short term gdp all in one swell foop. The tariffs were always primarily a negotiating strategy to get everyone to allow us to weaken the dollar, which unlike tariffs would outlast an administration and eventually bring manufacturing back for that freed up labor. In the interim there would be a ton of infrastructure spending to employ the labor as the lack is limiting our gdp by 1-2%. It was a decent plan except that long temr it ignored the environmental costs. The execution of the tariffs got screwed up though because while chaos is good for negotiation, it is not good in a sales pitch, which is essentially what this was. Let us weaken the dollar without responding and continuing to purchase bonds and we'll keep buying plent of your stuff, we have consumer demand to spare, and the gdp boost will offset the weakened dollar while making our bonds even safer as we begin to grow the gdp relative to the debt. The reason some allies like Australia and Canada got tariffs despite it not making any economic sense is different. In addition to sacrificing the environment, this plan sacrifices us democracy, and you can't have easy travel to a place with lots of individual freedom or you get the flight of all skilled labor like in Hungary.

Anyway, we are going to get the bad parts of the plan without the benefits now. Not entirely too late but pretty close. We can't all wait until a blatant constitutional crisis to start protesting because the court will back down where it can without openly loosing legitimacy. And once the admin chooses to cross the red line they will be ready for the response. Show support to gop members who want to stand up but are afraid of primaries (and death threats). Even promise cross party primary support where that is possible. Don't go along with illegal stuff. Tell the dnc your only priority is democracy and to stop arguing about the rest. Go to protests. Talk to people you disagree with calmly and do it a lot. Don't flee, this is endgame, nowhere else will hold out all that long. Help people get their voter registration in order with stuff like voterider to combat voter suppression.

Ok that was cathartic to type out all at once. If you don't see it then go read the history of successful and failed takeovers from rome to the present. It is a color by numbers approach that is easy to recognize once you've seen the others, but done super faster and with no visible bloodshed. And with a lot less public support than is normal for such things. Kind of impressive in a horrifying way.

> Deliberately or not you're repeating the Trump / DOGE talking point of government expense

Its a run of the mill libertarian position

It doesn't matter which politician or administration does it from that perspective. Those two do happen to be a coalition with libertarian constituents that they courted for votes, so its more than happenstance that the positions and actions will sound the same.

Regardless, private funding isn't controversial. The US Federal government reaching parity with the same level of apathy of every other government organization in the world isn't controversial either.