Despite its name, DOGE is not a Cabinet-level department, but rather a temporary contracted organization (scheduled to end on July 4, 2026[5])

Oh, for Pete’s sake. We’re going to have a choreographed Independence Day “all waste has been eliminated” set of theatrics, aren’t we?

Donald Trump

swaying to the Village People’s anthem YMCA.

Wait…what now? I don’t listen to them and am pretty out-of-touch with music/fan-identity stuff, but aren’t the Village People a gay-themed thing?

kagis

Huh. Apparently so. Not just me who is puzzled.

https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/01/20/village-people-gay-trump/

Just what, exactly, is going on with Village People? And why are they performing at Trump events?

The decision to perform at Trump’s inauguration incurred the wrath of fans, especially as “Y.M.C.A” and other songs by the band have been embraced as queer anthems.

One angry fan wrote on X: “What a f**king, ungrateful, pathetic sellout! If it wasn’t for the LGBTQ community, the Village People wouldn’t have gained such popularity and “YMCA” wouldn’t have become such a mega hit.”

“No surprise that this guy happens to be the ONLY original group member who WASN’T gay,” they continued, referring to Willis.

Another said: “You would think that as a band founded and focused around queer culture, you’d have a little more respect for queer people. Not to mention a backbone, for yourself.”

To understand what’s currently going on with Village People, and how they ended up performing for a President-elect famous for his “grim” anti-LGBTQ+ views, it’s helpful to look at where they came from.

https://www.out.com/gay-music/village-people-trump-inauguration-explained

Jim Newman, a former member of the band for eight years, put out a video on Threads expressing his disappointment at the current version of the Village People.

“The Village People that were around for about 40 years had a strong, loyal gay following,” he said. “There was a lawsuit about four years ago, they took away the name Village People from our band, the band that had been around forever, a lot of originals still in the band, and they gave it to an ex-member who was fired a couple years in. And he started a new group, and that is the Village People that performs. Or Village People would never ever perform at a Trump rally, we would never give him the right to use those songs, and we would never slap the face of the strong, especially gay audience that made us who we are today.”

I think that part of the reason that Trump’s met with success is that he’s adapted to a social media environment.

Like, historically, messages went out through media. So you had someone who was at least reasonably educated and probably at least somewhat-informed (like, you’d have a reporter that specialized in politics or whatever) as an intermediary. So you see the material with analysis.

When you have maybe five news channels on the television and maybe a couple local newspapers as your prime source of news, the press is really important.

But that’s not the environment we live in any more. Most people aren’t subscribing to paid news media, and Google and some others have absorbed a fair bit of advertisement money, so ad-supported news media is harder than before.

During Trump’s first term, he focused on directly communicating via social media.

He also set up his own social media network; that’ll even-more isolate some consumers.

So in a lot of case, Joe Blow is placed in a position where:

• He may not be in a great position to be able to evaluate the truth of a statement. If he’s not seeing or doesn’t trust conflicting media, it’s possible to push outright lies. Trump has said a lot of things that aren’t even internally-consistent with his own statements.

• Especially for people who have particular issues that upset them, it’s possible to push messages that are more-targeted than in the past. Like, let’s say you care about, oh, immigration. If you read MigrantNewsVlog or something, you can only be seeing material about your pet issue. As long as you agree with Trump on that, at least in sentiment, you might be okay with it.

• He has to identify the actual important information. Currently, a lot of social media optimizes for what gets engagement. Things that make people angry get engagement. So if someone keeps putting out material that produces outrage, anger, and fear, it generates engagement:

  https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources/index.html

  “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told Lewis. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

I mean, he did this through his first term. It was not politically-fatal to him to say very controversial things.

Also, specifically on Ukraine, most Americans just don’t care that much or know that much about foreign policy. It’s not just Ukraine, but in general. Foreign policy rarely plays a huge role in domestic politics. If there’s something that’s gonna really make the public upset, it’s most-likely not going to be foreign policy, but domestic policy.

Also, I’d point out that these political communication issues that are broader issues than just Trump. Like, there’s nothing about this that’s something that only Trump can do. There’s nothing about this that only politicians can do. And there’s nothing about this that only Americans can do. This is something that other places will also run into.

My guess is that there will be a bit of an arms race as communications strategies evolve to deal with our new technological environment. Some of it will be what kind of information people put out. Some of it will be tweaking the recommendations algorithm on social media that does recommendations, I think – I don’t actually think that optimizing for outrage is optimal, because if being on social media is just an unmitigated flood of unpleasant, sensationalist ragebait, users start tuning out. In the short term, it might make people use a social network more, but I suspect that it’s not a good idea in the long term. I don’t think that clickbait titles are the long-run optimal strategy – like, sure, in the short term, a clickbait title will win A/B testing. But in the long run, the publication putting out the material loses credibility – one starts to say “oh, yeah, it’s those guys” when seeing an URL. Maybe something like Bluesky’s approach – which I understand uses distributed curation lists – will become the dominant paradigm on the social, and may be more-resilient to clickbait.

But I don’t think that what we see in 2025 is going to simply be “the future”, because there will be continued adaptation on all sides: by people generating news, people writing material, social media networks, and consumers. When radio was new in America, FDR took advantage of it with the Fireside Chats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireside_chats

The fireside chats were a series of evening radio addresses given by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States, between 1933 and 1944. Roosevelt spoke with familiarity to millions of Americans about recovery from the Great Depression, the promulgation of the Emergency Banking Act in response to the banking crisis, the 1936 recession, New Deal initiatives, and the course of World War II. On radio, he quelled rumors, countered conservative-dominated newspapers, and explained his policies directly to the American people. His tone and demeanor communicated self-assurance during times of despair and uncertainty. Roosevelt was regarded as an effective communicator on radio, and the fireside chats kept him in high public regard throughout his presidency. Their introduction was later described as a “revolutionary experiment with a nascent media platform.”[1]

Roosevelt believed that his administration’s success depended upon a favorable dialogue with the electorate, possible only through methods of mass communication, and that it would allow him to take the initiative. The use of radio for direct appeals was perhaps the most important of Roosevelt’s innovations in political communication.[2]: 153  Roosevelt’s opponents had control of most newspapers in the 1930s and press reports were under their control and involved their editorial commentary. Historian Betty Houchin Winfield says, “He and his advisers worried that newspapers’ biases would affect the news columns and rightly so.”[3] Historian Douglas B. Craig says that Roosevelt “offered voters a chance to receive information unadulterated by newspaper proprietors’ bias” through the new medium of radio.[4]

So we’ve had politicians move to direct communication before, and then back-and-forth adaptation in response. I expect that we will this time as well.

A comment on /r/FedNews on Reddit says – and this sounds plausible to me – that the goal isn’t actually to get a summary of what workers did, but rather to get a user’s manager, as they are also told to CC: their manager.

According to the commenter, DOGE doesn’t have org charts for the federal government. Apparently that’s not centralized – but if they get an email where each person is sending that, they can extract the header information to build a chart.

I don’t know if that’s actually true – I have kind of a hard time believing that there are no org charts in a format that could be pretty-quickly centralized at least on a department level – but it’s at least plausible to me.

It’d also be a good example of why DOGE set up systems to do direct email access to all employees, to bypass the hierarchy, and it’d explain why they demand a response on very short order (like, they don’t want internal discussion in the organization prior to responses going out).

I will never understand how a president can have powers to change any government agency, any aspect of life, change international policy.

So, there are two types of “rules” in the US.

• The first is what in the US are called “laws” or “legislation”. In the UK, this is called “primary legislation”. This stuff is written by the legislature. The President can’t change this stuff.

• The second is what in the US are called “regulations”. In the US, this is called “secondary legislation”. This stuff is written by the Executive Branch, which can change it. By convention, generally Presidents don’t jump in and fiddle with it, but they can tell the Executive Branch to do whatever they want. Basically, Trump is ignoring a lot of convention surrounding what Presidents don’t touch. You could argue that maybe we should change the system to permit for certain things – like, I can maybe see an argument for the Federal Reserve to have some kind of aspect outside Presidential authority, because there are political incentives to fiddle with it the interest rate around elections – but as things stand, that probably would require a constitutional amendment, which is pretty hard to get through in the US.

For international policy, that’s pretty much the Executive. The Senate has to approve of treaties, but most of what we do internationally is the Executive Branch.

any aspect of life

I mean, they can’t. There are a lot of restrictions on what a President can do.

1. Federalism. There are areas where the states have exclusive authority, and the federal government – not just the President – can’t involve themselves in those. That’s why Trump has tried to argue that he should be able to withhold federal funds contingent on states doing what he wants, because the states aren’t doing so on their own. I’m skeptical that he’s going to have a lot of luck with this in the courts. In the past, Congress – which is on much firmer ground than the President when it comes to claiming ability to distribute funds – has managed successfully to use the power of the purse sometimes (e.g. in getting state drinking ages up by withholding highway funds), but has also had its wings clipped, as with the health insurance mandate a while back.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_the_purse

   The power of the purse has also been used to compel the U.S. states to pass laws, in cases where Congress does not have the desire or constitutional power to make it a federal matter. The most well-known example of this is regarding the drinking age, where Congress passed a law to withhold 10% of federal funds for highways in any state that did not raise the age to 21. The law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the South Dakota v. Dole case. Congress was not allowed to change the drinking age directly because the 21st Amendment (which ended Prohibition in the U.S.) gave control of alcohol to the states. In 2009, Congress considered similar legislation regarding texting while driving.

   This power was curtailed somewhat in a case regarding the Affordable Care Act, in which the Supreme Court ruled in June 2012 that the law’s withholding of all existing Medicaid funding for states that failed or refused to expand their Medicaid programs to cover the uninsured poor was “unduly coercive”, despite the fact that the federal government would pay the entirety of the states’ expansion for the first years, and 90% thereafter. It was left unclear what percentage would be considered acceptable.

2. Separation of powers across branches. The Constitution only hands out certain authorities to the Executive Branch. Within the Executive Branch, the President has a pretty free hand, but only within that.

One major benefit Trump has right now is that Congress generally is onboard with what he’s doing – the Republican Party holds a trifecta, control of all three of the Presidency, House, and Senate, so a lot of the restrictions that a President might normally face aren’t really there unless he does something that his own party really doesn’t like. The common case is that the “other” party has control of at least one, so can usually block a lot of actions.

3. Some actions by the federal government are simply prohibited by the Constitution.

But the federal regulations, including auto safety standards…those are federal and in the province of the Executive Branch, so if Trump wants to have them changed, he probably can do it unless some change actually violates the Constitution. If the President wants to listen to Some Random Person, like Musk, as to what to do, he can do that too.

It was only about $300 million.

I think that those are to filter out chaff resumes for people who have a skillset that has nothing to do with the job. I’ve never been in that “first line of filtering”, but I remember two people who were involved with deciding where to put our hiring resources at a company I was at talking about it next to me one day. They were expressing a lot of frustration that even when they hired headhunters to contact people and find relevant people, most of the resumes they got were from people with experience that just wasn’t very relevant to the job. Like, nine out of ten resumes got immediately dumped as soon as they went to our first-line filtering, weren’t relevant to the job.

IIRC their best return on time by a wide margin was from referrals. Like, if they have an employee who knows someone who would be a good hire at the company, they go talk to them (or just have that person contact the company and mention the referrer; they then pay a referral fee). They rarely got irrelevant resumes that way.

But if you are trying to dig through resumes, I could imagine someone training a classifier based on past successful hire resumes versus unsuccessful (or just filtered first-line) hires to try to do some of that “first stage” automatically, get the ratio of desirable resumes up.

In this case, though, my guess is that the DOGE people wouldn’t stand to gain much by doing automated filtering. Like, the people who are doing the jobs are already doing the job, so there’s no real question of them having a relevant skillset.

I don’t think that Musk is doing this for whatever he’s being directly paid. He may benefit indirectly in that reshaping the government in some ways might be favorable for his business or financial interests. But he’s not in any kind of need of money. Anything that the government would pay him would be a rounding error on his other sources of wealth. Just no point.

kagis

https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-doge-paid-donald-trump-white-house-2032709

However, as previously reported by Newsweek, Musk is not receiving a salary for his role, according to White House filings. Musk has been classified as a “special government employee,” a designation that allows individuals to work for the government on a temporary basis.

Yeah.

I wouldn’t do that. The burden of the proof to let someone go isn’t on the DOGE people. If they don’t feel convinced in whatever very-brief time they spend looking at someone that the person needs to be there, I expect that the DOGE people are liable to put them on the chopping block.

I’d treat it as a job interview. The interviewee has to convince the interviewer that they should work there, or else they aren’t going to be hired. Same thing here, just less-pleasant mood in the room.

If I were in the potentially-laid-off people’s shoes, I’d lead with a pretty concise summary of the important stuff that happens because of me doing my job, since I bet that the DOGE crowd isn’t spending a whole lot of time deeply looking at any of this.

It’s an interesting idea. If their thesis is true, it might cause compression of the income range.

I believe that this is just temporary. If I remember correctly from skimming the Reddit FedNews subreddit where a lot of people are talking about this, there’s some legal requirement about layoffs where the Secretary of Defense has to perform some review first to see if the layoffs are problematic, which apparently was not done. The SecDef is Pete Hegseth, who is quite happy to do the layoffs, so…

kagis

Okay, here’s a reference to it:

https://fox28savannah.com/news/nation-world/pentagon-halts-mass-firings-of-civilian-employees-pending-review-of-mission-impact-department-of-defense-secretary-pete-hegseth-military-services-cuts-legality-title-10-section-129a-doge

Pentagon lawyers reportedly started reviewing the legality of the planned firings after CNN reported it could conflict with Title 10 section 129a of the US Code.

According to the law, the secretary of defense “may not reduce the civilian workforce programmed full-time equivalent levels unless the Secretary conducts an appropriate analysis” to ensure the impact on mission effectiveness is considered.

An analysis had not been carried out before military leaders were ordered to list the employees who would be fired, according to a senior defense official.

So I imagine that he’s just gonna do whatever the legal minimum requirement is here and then they’re going to proceed.

They’re claiming that the people are being let go for poor performance in their termination letters, presumably for legal reasons, so I guess that they technically qualify as firings.

But, I mean, that’s not what’s actually driving this – they’re just getting rid of people who they can get rid of without regard for performance – so I’d use the term “layoffs” myself.

If we wind up in a situation where the EU mandates a form of censorship that the US bans, I assume that the platforms in question would have to separate their EU and US users and sites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet

That makes me wonder about Amtrak.

Hmm.

• The Project 2025 stuff seems to mostly align with what’s on the Heritage Foundation website. Looking at said website, they are not happy about Amtrak.

• Apparently Trump tried eliminating federal subsidies for long-distance Amtrak routes at the start of his first term and failed.

I mean, you can probably stick whatever you want in there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mail

In 1959 the U.S. Navy submarine USS Barbero assisted the Post Office Department, predecessor to the United States Postal Service (USPS), in its search for faster mail transportation, with the only delivery of “Missile Mail”. On 8 June 1959, Barbero fired a Regulus cruise missile – its nuclear warhead having earlier been replaced by two Post Office Department mail containers – targeted at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station at Naval Station Mayport in Florida. The Regulus cruise missile was launched with a pair of Aerojet-General 3KS-33,000 solid-rocket boosters. A turbojet engine sustained the long-range cruise flight after the boosters were dropped. Twenty-two minutes after launch, the missile struck its target.

The USPS had officially established a branch post office on Barbero and delivered some 3000 pieces of mail to it before Barbero left Norfolk, Virginia. The mail consisted entirely of commemorative postal covers addressed to President of the United States Dwight Eisenhower, other government officials, the Postmasters General of all members of the Universal Postal Union, and so on, from United States Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield. Their postage (four cents domestic, eight cents international) had been cancelled “USS Barbero Jun 8 9.30am 1959” before the submarine put to sea. At Mayport, the Regulus missile was opened and the mail forwarded to the post office in Jacksonville, Florida, for sorting and routing.

I suspect that the LA Times is not going to get as many clicks your way, and I bet that the article authors get evaluated on the clicks they generate.

It’s true that China is run by a party that uses Communist branding, but it’s just…of all things to go after China on, it’s a weird criticism. I can think of lots of criticisms that I can make, but “they have branding that’s mostly a relic from decades back” is kinda weird.

I’ve only really had one guess that I’d call reasonably-solid.

During the Cold War, there were a number of disparate groups that stayed under the Republican banner. They didn’t agree all that much about some things, but they all had some issue with communism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Leg_Stool_(GOP)

Ronald Reagan coined the term as a way to describe the Republican party as a three part coalition based on the social conservatives (consisting of the Christian right and paleo-conservatives), war hawks (consisting of interventionists and neoconservatives), and fiscal conservatives (consisting of right-libertarians and free-market capitalists), with overlap between the sides.

So, those groups had things that they didn’t agree on, but one thing that united them was anti-communism.

• The social conservatives had an issue with state atheism.

• The hawks had a major military opponent.

• The fiscal conservatives didn’t like the economic aspect of communism (well, and specifically the libertarians had it in for the authoritarian aspect).

But, after the Cold War ended, communism wasn’t really a thing any more, and so the things that united those groups kind of went away. Kind of kicked the legs out from under the major groups in the Republican coalition.

So…maybe the idea would be to try to reunite them. I mean, I can see, from a purely-political level, wanting to recreate that coalition. The Project 2025 documents do mention aiming to reinspire a sense of patriotism, so they’re thinking something about political movements.

The problem is, I just don’t see how there’s a very viable way to do this.

• The hawks are gonna be onboard. Probably more than before – China is, militarily, quite powerful and building out its military.

• You can maybe still get the social conservatives onboard. Today, China isn’t banning most religion so much as it is aiming to integrate it with state control so that it can’t form any kind of political threat. The changes made might be an issue to them, though I think that it’s probably less-objectionable than an outright ban. At the least, that approach is gonna clash pretty hard with US freedom-of-religion traditions. I have not personally seen a major attempt to go after that “state control of religion” aspect, but then I probably don’t read most of the material that social conservatives get. I think that this one is going to be a lot harder than it was during the Cold War.

• And then there are the fiscal conservatives. I don’t see them getting back in. China’s got a larger state role in the economy than the US, sure, has SOEs, has the state influence a number of companies…but so do lots of countries. They don’t have this hard, concrete, explicitly-clashing ideology, and there isn’t the aim to export the political/economic model.

Like, I can imagine someone putting together some kind of domestic political coalition centered around opposition to China. That’s not impossible. But I have a hard time seeing someone doing it centered explicitly around communism. Maybe the one-party state aspect, authoritarianism, something like that. But anti-Communism? In 2025? I mean, the Cold War ended 35 years ago.

There’s also the a thing that I don’t really get on some of the right, involves associating everything with Marxism.

If you figure that the Project 2025 stuff is a Heritage Foundation product, probably on their website.

googles

Yeah, accusations of “Marxism” are all over their stuff. That’d be kind of in-line with hunting for an anti-communist coalition. I just…have a pretty hard time seeing someone successfully building a lasting political coalition around anti-Communism in 2025, though.

EDIT:

“Putin the Marxist-Leninist”

An educated Marxist-Leninist such as Putin accepted that there had been more than 100 million victims of communism, an acceptable price to pay to remodel the world.

Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best explanation. You cannot understand Vladimir Putin and his war against Ukraine unless you understand that he is a Marxist-Leninist.

Wow. That’s amazing.

political explosion

I mean, they had to know this was coming.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/sen-mitch-mcconnell-appears-freeze-kentucky-event-rcna102583

The guy is elderly and was having medical issues.

I was skeptical, but the New York Times agrees.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/27/world/asia/china-fight-club-ending.html

Now I’m kind of wondering how many anti-authoritarian movies out there have altered Chinese versions.

and its ~ 25% of the global economy (un estimate based on gdp),

The world economy is far larger than that. It’ll be something like $100 trillion, IIRC, as the US is currently about a quarter of it and has a GDP somewhere like $20 or $30 trillion.

kagis

The US GDP is $29.168 trillion for 2024.

So, this is gonna be for 2024, and so it won’t include inflation from 2010:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy

That says $110 trillion for the world for 2024.