Kevin Drum

In the end, every efficiency doge eventually becomes a micro-manager drone. Here is Elon Musk's latest:

The official follow-up instructions from OPM are even worse:

In the cult world of Office Space, these are the infamous TPS forms that everyone has to fill out weekly. They are practically an icon for insecure managers who prefer paperwork to simply keeping occasional tabs on their staff.

In any case, a few million federal workers are now required to fill out this pointless paperwork and email it to HR—who will do God only knows what with a few million emails. The only good news for workers is that HR probably thinks this whole thing is as stupid as they do.

POSTSCRIPT: I wonder whose idea this was? Elon Musk, who really does want to micro-manage everyone? Or Donald Trump, who has never managed a large organization and came up with a brainstorm that this might help him wrap his arms around the bureaucracy?

As you know, Donald Trump has been recently trying to extort Ukraine out of half its mineral wealth. The odd thing about this is that Ukraine doesn't have very much mineral wealth:

Revenues from Ukraine’s resources would be directed to a fund in which the United States would hold 100 percent financial interest, and that Ukraine should contribute to the fund until it reaches $500 billion.... That figure far exceeds the country’s actual revenues from resources, which were $1.1 billion last year.

Trump has also been nonsensically insisting that Ukraine started the war even though we were all there and saw Russia cross the border and try to run a tank column into Kyiv. And he's been calling Zelensky a dictator even though if there's a dictator around it's obviously Vladimir Putin.

What the hell is going on? It's easy. In 2019 Trump asked Zelensky for dirt against Joe Biden in return for military aid. Zelensky declined and Trump was impeached. Trump has felt aggrieved ever since.

There's nothing complicated here. Trump is motivated by revenge and now he's finally getting it. He's a simple man.

DOGE has published a "Wall of Receipts" claiming to have saved taxpayers $55 billion. The New York Times isn't buying it:

The math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes.... Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted. Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. In at least one instance, the group claimed an entire contract had been canceled when only part of the work had been halted.

The Times is reluctant to estimate how much DOGE is actually saving, but I'll take a crack at it. A blogger's crack, that is, meaning it's the roughest possible horseback guess and not to be taken too seriously.

Contracts: The Times figures that contracts amount to 20% of the DOGE total, but when you account for all the mistakes it probably comes to 10%, or about $5.5 billion.

Lease cancellations: DOGE says this amounts to roughly $100 million. Let's take them at their word.

Staff cuts. The AP estimates DOGE has cut about 300,000 employees, which amounts to 3% of all federal workers. However, many of these took buyouts and most of the rest are probationary, which makes it hard to even estimate savings. But I'm going to anyway: $5 billion for the former and $11.5 billion for the latter, coming to a total of $16.5 billion

GRAND TOTAL: $22.1 billion.

So there you have it. My best guess is that DOGE has saved about $22 billion, almost all of it from firing federal workers. If this is close to accurate, it comes to 0.33% of the total federal budget. You may decide if this is a lot or a little.

Donald Trump has now fired seven senior military officers, including the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff; the Chief of Naval Operations; the Commandant of the Coast Guard; the vice chief of the Air Force; and three judge advocate generals (Navy, Army, and Air Force). All were apparently fired for being a little too DEI. Take a look:

They do look a little too diverse for Trump's taste, don't they?

As we all know, if there's a natural origin for the COVID virus there needs to be an intermediate host. That is, the virus needs to have passed from a bat, where it originated, to some other animal, where it finished evolving into a form deadly to human beings. Today Nature published a longish piece suggesting we've probably found the intermediate host:

Today, mounting evidence from more than a dozen studies point to a person, or people, catching the virus from a wild animal.... And the animal at the top of the list is the raccoon dog.

....One of the reasons raccoon dogs were suggested as a prime candidate early on is because they were probably involved in passing another, related, virus to people. In 2003, researchers isolated close matches of the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in several civets and a raccoon dog at a live-animal market in Guangdong, China.

This finding prompted researchers in Germany to investigate these animals’ susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. They found that raccoon dogs can be infected by SARS-CoV-2, and — despite not getting that sick themselves — can pass on the infection to other animals.

....Further evidence to support the raccoon-dog theory came in 2023. Chinese researchers published genomic data of swabs taken at the Huanan market in January 2020, after it was shut down, including of stalls, rubbish bins and sewage. Studies found mitochondrial DNA of raccoon dogs in several swabs, including those that also tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.

....Most researchers agree that SARS-CoV-2 probably originated in Rhinolophus bats living in Yunnan, southern China.... That’s why it is important to consider the geographic ranges of suspect intermediate animals to see whether they overlap with those bats.... Among the animals at the Huanan market, the ranges of wild raccoon dogs...overlap with that of the bats. Fitting with this hypothesis, the mitochondrial DNA from raccoon dogs at the Huanan market did not match those from farmed animals in northeastern China, and were instead closer to wild-caught animals in central and southern China.

This isn't a smoking gun, but it's strong evidence not just for the zoonotic origin of COVID, but for raccoon dogs specifically as the intermediate host. Adjust your priors accordingly.

Inflationary expectations among consumers have skyrocketed since November:

Thanks to Trump's tariffs and other economic illiteracies, inflation expectations have gone up 1.7 percentage points since Election Day, from 2.6% to 4.3%. Aside from the 2022 inflationary surge, this is the highest that consumer expectations have been over the past decade.

Remember the huge fuss Republicans made over Joe Biden's alleged interference with social media platforms? Naturally they took it to court, where a Louisiana judge went stone nuts:

Mostly his opinion is a long, familiar conspiracy-esque recitation of right-wing hobbyhorses about efforts from public health officers to highlight COVID misinformation, with a bit of Hunter Biden and election integrity thrown in. The key question, apparently, is whether the federal government "significantly encouraged" social media companies to toe the government's lefty line or else, and Doughty has no doubts on this score.

There was never anything to this, which makes it ironic that at this moment Elon Musk really is intimidating an advertising agency to do business with X or else:

A lawyer at advertising conglomerate Interpublic Group fielded a phone call in December from a lawyer at X. The message was clear, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation: Get your clients to spend more on Elon Musk’s social-media platform, or else.

....Interpublic leaders interpreted the communications from X as reminders that the recently announced $13 billion deal to merge Interpublic with rival Omnicom Group could be torpedoed, or at least slowed down, by the Trump administration.

....The push for agency agreements follows a flurry of brands returning to spending on X, including Amazon...Apple...and telecom company Verizon.

....“We now see brands returning in quite significant numbers, because the easiest route is to just spend a minimum viable amount on the platform,” said Ebiquity’s Schreurs. “Not because they want to advertise there and run their ads adjacent to the content on X, but because they are afraid of legal and political ramifications of not doing so.”

For some reason, the judge in this case—Northern District of Texas, natch—seems surprisingly sympathetic toward Musk. Golly, I wonder why?

You've probably seen Donald Trump's precipitous fall in four recent polls:

But did you know that the all-time record holders for the poorest early approval ratings are Donald Trump and . . . Donald Trump? It's true:

Right now Trump is doing slightly better than he did during his first term, but I doubt that will last for long.

The Senate passed a budget resolution last night:

• $175 in new spending on border security.
• $150 billion in new defense spending.
• $15 billion in new energy production.
• No framework for extending 2017 tax cut.

And now for a look at the House budget proposal:

• $4.5 trillion to extend 2017 tax cuts.
• $880 billion in spending cuts on Medicaid.
• $330 billion in spending cuts on education.
• $230 billion in spending cuts on SNAP and agriculture.
• $562 billion in miscellaneous spending cuts, possibly as much as $1 trillion.
• $190 billion in new spending on border security.
• $100 billion in new defense spending.

Summary:

• Senate: $340 billion in net spending increases.
• House: ~$2 trillion in net spending cuts and $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.

The House budget is especially hard to make sense of. In any case, as usual these numbers are over ten years, which means the Senate bill costs roughly +$40 billion per year while the House bill saves about -$650 billion per year. That's a considerable difference of opinion.

Trying to figure out how much we spend on defense is a dog's breakfast. However, once you account for nukes and some other stuff it comes to $895 billion according to CBO and would increase 2% over the next four years for a total of $913 billion by 2029.

Republicans worked hard during the budget cap process to get these small increases in defense spending. But now along comes Pete Hegseth to propose 8% cuts over the next five years for a total of $601 billion by 2030. That's a slash of more than a third.

Do Republicans plan to put up with this? With the exception of the Cold War dividend, defense spending has always increased. It's barely conceivable that they'd accept a $300 billion cut. But even for a bunch of guys whining about Diego Garcia, I guess anything is possible.

UPDATE: It turns out the House and Senate budget proposals both include defense increases of about $100-150 billion over ten years. That comes to an increase of about +$10-15 billion per year compared to Hegseth's -$70 billion per year. wtf?