Summary
Donald Trump appointed billionaires and major donors like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead his new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), aiming to cut $2 trillion from federal spending and dismantle regulations.
DOGE will operate outside federal oversight, focusing on slashing programs and weakening regulatory agencies, including the IRS and Department of Education.
Critics warn that DOGE and broader deregulatory measures will benefit wealthy corporations, aligning with Trump’s agenda to extend tax cuts for the rich and favor oligarchic interests over public welfare, further cementing U.S. plutocracy.
Wait, I thought they were there to lower egg prices!
Americans are gonna get poorer, then they’ll just blame it on the Dems.
Lol, of course they will. They control the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. They essentially can do whatever they want. Something goes wrong while they’re in charge? It’s the dems!
That was the plan all along.
All of the Christian Nationalist jazz was just a cover for the dual purpose of winning the support of the religious right and distracting from their real goal, which, from the start, has been to fully institutionalize a government that serves the interests of the wealthiest few at the expense of everyone else.
Yes - to some notable degree, that’s the system we already have, but with some important distinctions. Under the current system, there are still policies and agencies and programs to nominally limit the abuses of the wealthy and/or protect the interests of the common people. The wealthy can generally manage to get around them, but that requires exploiting loopholes and jumping through complex legal hoops and greasing palms and, if all else fails, paying fines.
The goal is to eliminate all of that so that the wealthy few are entirely unconstrained - so that they won’t even have to pretend to do anything other than expand and protect their own privilege, and there will be no legal recourse at all for all of the people they will exploit along the way.
The department of efficiency is meant to make it more efficient for billionaires to fuck us over.
It bears repeating that the DOGE doesn’t exist and is unlikely to ever exist. A new federal agency can only be created by an act of congress and that’s just not gonna happen.
Therefore, the only power Musk and Ramaswamy possess is the same power any lobbyist with a lot of money possesses: the right to whisper in the ear of representatives who might be convinced to do their bidding.
A new federal agency can only be created by an act of congress
According to who? And who is going to enforce that?
Elon and Trump are not bound by the law. They’ll do whatever the fuck they want and nobody is going to stop them. The GOP is full of spineless bitches we grovel at their feet.
Rule of law is dead. The Justice system is dead.
It doesn’t need to be an official government agency for it to exist. Trump will just rubber stamp anything they say.
This is mostly immaterial given the way Trump seems to want to operate this time around. DOGE does not need to exist; Trump will push for whatever Musk and Ramaswamy say.
This is not the time for suggestions of “well, he can’t do this because X, so we don’t need to worry about it.” We absofuckinglutely need to be worrying about all possibilities, even those which may seem impractical given the law.
The only savior would be if the courts were still legitimate… Which means we are screwed.
The thing everyone paying attention said would happen is happening.
If the stupids didn’t listen then, they sure as hell won’t listen now.
I agree with the sentiment here, but remember that DOGE doesn’t have any actual power. it’s just an advisory board
To everyone that thought we had an oligarchy: You haven’t seen anything yet.
Yeah, I chuckle to myself when I see some bothsiderist doing the WELLACKTCHOOALLY with the tired “leftist” critique about how it was always thus…as if.
The way it’s looking is almost a guarantee that crime will have to increase as well. Which they’ll try to crack down on hard, which just means compressing and compressing anger until it finally explodes with people slaughtering the rich and burning down their houses and businesses.
They’ll act like the people are the criminals, yet the people were the ones being stolen from the entire time, and had no justice being dealt.
Oh it’s going to be horrible, the wealthy will do as they please and flaunt the law, the poor will be worse off year after year.
I simply can’t imagine.
You ain’t seen nothing yet.
B-b-b-baby
Look at Russia
Does Elon have a child riding him at all times for a particular reason, or is it controlling him like Ratatouille?
Luigi protection
I think he’s exploiting his kid to gain public validation that he’s an attentive and proud father because he knows he’s not. Like how he’s using alts on Twitter to compliment himself on being a great father.
A father who gets lots of sex
He’s cosplaying a father.
He’s been cosplaying as an “engineer” for quite some time, so he’s got this cosplaying thing down.
He started doing that after the Adjuster got Brian Thompson.
Slightly more brazen than before
I’m willing to bet a Venn Diagram between cronyism, corporatocracy, oligarchy, plutocracy, fascism, autocracy, kleptocracy, kakistrocracy is almost a circle so I use most of them interchangeably, as debating the variance is splitting hairs. Any one of them will vacillate between the others over a long enough timeline regardless.
The point is our “democracies” are an illusion to varying degrees of blatancy. No matter where you live, the wealthiest individuals and corporations have more power than the rest of the population, and their success is interchangeable with “national security”.
News at 11
Hasn’t every president filled their cabinet with plutocrats? This isn’t new. What’s new is that they’re fascists. Well, at least since Nixon.
Usually there’s one degree of separation from a billionaire with the appointments. This time it’s just straight up billionaires running the government.
