• SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world
    10·
    15 hours ago

    Honestly keep it shut down until Trump is out of office, dead, or the Epstein files get released.

    Our country needs to be hurt badly until we fucking wake up and start removing politicians.

  • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml
    371·
    19 hours ago

    Did they, though?

    A handful of them have spines. The guys pictured in the article are purely cartilaginous at best.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    18 hours ago

    Republicans are responding as they typically do, with bellicose threats to unleash hell on anyone who dares oppose them. Office of Management and Budget chief Russ Vought has been particularly active, telling anyone within earshot that he has been studying shutdowns for years and that he plans to use this one to remake the government in his own hideous visage by cutting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of federal jobs.

    One of the recurring themes of Republican administrations is the promise/demand for a “smaller” government, followed by a corpse-like swelling of the national security apparatus and floods of money going to federal contractors (Booze Allen, Boeing, Amazon, etc) aligned with the administration.

    For all the heat about these being massive Democrat constituencies, we’re talking about millions of jobs that have been created and staffed by Republican Administrations going back to the Nixon Era. The idea that Vought doesn’t already have a largely conservative and Trump-aligned federal system is rooted in this conspiracy mindset of deeply embedded secret socialists. But anyone who has actually been through an FBI field office or done contract work at the EPA or NASA (much less the DEA or ICE) knows these offices are stuffed to the brim with the same basic-bitch conservatives you’ll find in any private sector office job.

    What Trump’s admin is facing down is its own general distasteful leadership choices. Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Steven Miller, Kristi Noem, and David Navarro are clumsy, lazy, ignorant, and vulgar human beings. They’re bad people who are difficult to work with, much less for, and notorious for dissolving institutions in their wake.

    We’ve been playing a cat-and-mouse game of liberal v conservative regulatory capture straight back to the FDR Era. What Trump is doing to the national administrative state is awful, but its not happening in some kind of Utopian liberal system. He’s taking a wrecking ball through a system that was built by Reagan and Clinton and Bush and Obama alike. Hell, he’s working to fire a lot of people who he appointed during his first term.

    This may signal the beginning of the end of an era of strong federal government. But it won’t signal the beginning of a new kind of administrative state unless the Republicans radically change how they lead these large bodies of career bureaucrats. Millions of people working on your behalf - to any conceivable purpose - represents a powerful card in the President’s pocket. Obliterating these institutions won’t work in their favor.