RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/29/a-top-priority-for-the-musk-ramaswamy-doge-commission-decentralizing-the-federal-government/

One of the best ideas I heard from Donald Trump for his second term is to move as many as 100,000 federal employees to “new locations outside the Washington Swamp” to places “filled with patriots who love America.” This initiative will save tax dollars and help depoliticize federal agencies. There also are important security and fairness reasons to relocate these agencies across the United States.

I speak from experience. In the early 1990s, the late Senator Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia) drafted legislation to move thousands of CIA employees to West Virginia. Bryd proposed closing 21 CIA offices in Washington, DC, and its Virginia and Maryland suburbs and moving them to large campuses in Jefferson County, West Virginia.

My wife and I were CIA employees at the time, and we were thrilled about the potential move of our office out of the DC area. We were unable to afford a house without a lengthy commute on our federal salaries because the large presence of federal workers and contractors had driven housing prices through the roof. (Five of the seven wealthiest U.S. counties are in the DC suburbs.) We also disliked the liberal culture and high taxes of the DC area.

Unfortunately, the Washington establishment, including many well-paid senior CIA officers and contractors, blocked Senator Byrd’s attempt to relocate CIA offices to West Virginia. As a result, when my wife could no longer work full-time because of the disability of one of our children, we ended up buying a house 50 miles from DC with a roundtrip commute of 2.5 to 3 hours per day.

Moving federal agencies out of the DC area to areas with affordable housing and reasonable commutes are two good reasons why the Trump administration should decentralize the federal government. The current practice of locating these agencies within a few miles of the White House and Congress reflects a bygone era before telephones, email, and video conferences. Most federal employees rarely interact with members of Congress and the White House and can do their jobs more efficiently and economically in more affordable and less congested areas of the country.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-forever-tarnished-legacy-of-barack-obama/

Among the many benefits of Donald Trump’s re-election that our nation and the world are already experiencing is the forever tarnished legacy of Barack Obama. In 2028, will the Democrat candidate want Obama to go on the campaign trail for him or her? I doubt it.

Obama’s Un-enduring Influence

When he was elected president (assuming that massive Democratic cheating was not in full swing in 2008), Democrats held a commanding 55- to 45-seat majority in the U.S. Senate and an overwhelming 256- to 179-seat majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

By the time Obama left office on January 20, 2017, Democrats were down nine seats in the Senate and a whopping 62 seats in the House – they lost the majority in each chamber. Among the 50 states, there were twelve fewer Democrat governors. You’d have to look back more than 95 years to see when the Democrats did so poorly at the polls on a national and state level.

For all the mainstream media blather heaped upon Obama as some kind of political savior, at the end of his two terms, he left the Democratic Party in shambles. However, he has personally benefitted financially in extraordinary ways.

Considering the “Obama effect” on the nation’s vote totals, is any sane Democrat willing to extol the virtues of his influence on the electorate?

https://www.city-journal.org/article/doge-theory

One of the most intriguing developments following Donald Trump’s election victory has been the announcement of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The initiative, which hopes to cut up to $2 trillion from the federal budget, has generated notable excitement, momentum, and memes. The world’s richest man and a successful biotech entrepreneur, Ramaswamy, have revitalized what seemed to be a mostly dormant libertarianism, drawing on the inspiration of Milton Friedman and promising to slash the bureaucracy to the bone. But what are its prospects for real-world success?

Elon Musk is our era’s most gifted entrepreneur, having revolutionized several industries and run multiple major companies. But the private sector operates on radically different principles than the public sector, which has a way of stalling or disarming even the most determined efforts. I foresee three potential impediments to DOGE’s success.

First is the problem of authority. While President-elect Trump has dubbed the effort the “Department of Government Efficiency,” it is not a government department at all. Rather, Musk and Ramaswamy will remain in the private sector and preside over what is, in effect, a blue-ribbon committee providing recommendations to the president and to Congress about potential cuts. In practice, though, blue-ribbon committees are often where ideas go to die. Politicians who feel the need to “do something” about a given problem often establish such committees to create the perception of action, which masks their true desire or, at least, the eventual result: inaction.

DOGE’s challenge will be to translate its recommendations into policy. It is almost certain that an entrepreneur of Musk’s ambition will not be content with writing a report. His and Ramaswamy’s task, then, is to persuade the president and the director of the Office of Management and Budget to enact real (and politically risky) cuts, and, if possible, to persuade Congress to abolish entire departments, such as the Department of Education, in the face of left-wing backlash.

The second problem for Musk and Ramaswamy is public opinion. Libertarians and small-government conservatives have long promised to reduce the size of government; one reason that they have never done so is that federal programs and agencies are generally popular. All of the major federal departments, with the exception of the IRS, the Department of Education, and the Department of Justice, have net-positive favorability numbers. Congressional members, even conservative Republicans, fear that slashing these departments would expose them to savage criticism from the Left and backlash from voters. They know that Americans complain about the size of government in theory but oppose almost all spending cuts in practice—the key paradox that libertarians have been unable to resolve.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-taps-jay-bhattacharya-for-nih

Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists.” 

Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom—and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again.” 

As NIH director, he would wield a potent tool to induce reform: money. Stanford and more than a dozen other universities each get more than $500 million annually in grants from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The NIH grants support not only researchers but also their universities’ bureaucracies, which collect a hefty surcharge to cover supposed overhead costs. The federal largesse has helped finance the administrative bloat at universities, including the expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies under the Biden administration, which took into account a university’s commitment to DEI principles when deciding whether to award grants from the NIH and other agencies.  

Those priorities are about to change. Trump has vowed to rescind immediately Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to promote DEI. During his first term, Trump threatened to issue an executive order barring universities from receiving federal funds if they suppressed free speech. He didn’t issue that order, but whether or not he does so in his next term, the NIH director will already have the power to consider a university’s commitment to academic freedom in deciding whether or not to award funds.