Saturday, March 08, 2025

The Inspectors General Were Not…

...after all, following the President’s agenda. Which, it turns out, is entirely imaginary.*

N.B., they keep saying things like this, viz.:
The board and staff of the USADF do not recognize Marocco as the legitimate chair and have argued in court that his appointment was illegal. On Friday, Talking Points Memo (TPM) reported that it obtained an email from a senior official in the Trump White House's Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) claiming that Marocco is the legal chair, as Trump has the "inherent authority under Article II" of the U.S. Constitution to put acting agency heads in place without the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate. This would be a clear-cut violation of the Appointments Clause in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution.
But I haven’t heard of the lawyers making those arguments in court. Or at least they aren’t winning on those arguments. Funny, that. Meanwhile, back in real reality: Does the Speaker mean like this?
Speaking with CNN, he warned, "Everything they’re doing is driving this agency to system collapse. It will lead to interruptions in service, and that will ultimately cascade into more frequent system interruptions for the processing of claims, ultimately leading to system collapse and eventually the interruption of benefits.”

According to the CNN report, "... the [agency] overhaul lacks strategic planning, which could have serious ramifications for an agency that has never missed a benefits payment in its 90-year history, according to advocates and employees CNN interviewed. The focus is on swiftly shrinking Social Security’s staff with little thought given to making it function more efficiently or transferring the knowledge of those who depart, several said."

Jack Smalligan, who served in Office of Management and Budget (OMB) where he focused on Social Security, echoed O'Malley's concerns.

“We have a bunch of individuals with no or little experience in the operations of the agency trying to run one of the most important benefit programs in our country,” he explained. "The downsizing is happening in such an unstructured, unplanned manner, it puts the agency at special risk.”
Inefficiency in the name of efficiency is neither. It’s just a good old fashioned clusterfuck. I almost look forward to MAGA explaining that one away.

That Category 5 shitstorm is coming, and it’s gonna make the imminent government shutdown look like a Sunday picnic.


*Trump continues to confound our absolutely bedrock assumptions: that someone with so much popularity and power must know what he is doing, even if his every move displays idiocy and incompetence. Nope. He’s a boob, with no clue, not even “feral cunning.” He’s an old time king: someone other people put trust in because they need someone, and he’s available. Kings didn’t rise to power the competence, and they only kept power by cunning and brutality. Trump understands brutality, but he has the cunning of Winnie the Pooh. He has the intelligence of a sponge. And he persists because we all do. He literally has too much (inherited) money to fail, if by “fail” you mean wind up penniless in the gutter. That’s our wishful thinking. His U.S. that he’s 6’3”, 200 lbs of beefcake, women want him and men fear him, with a genius level IQ, and more money than God. 

Trump exposes all our foolishness, especially Barnum’s dictum about suckers, birth, and time. Face it: we’re a nation of suckers, divided into two groups: MAGA, and those who fear MAGA; and those who think there’s a silver bullet that will banish Trump and make America pure and holy again. Ironically, the same thing MAGA wants.

America never was pure and holy. It never will be. And American government has pretty much always functioned this way. Ask the remaining natives. Ask the former slaves. Ask the children of the immigrants. We’ve never made it easy for anybody. We’ve never wanted to.

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