Power Not Policy

The goal of the Trump/Musk regime is power – complete control of the federal government. It is not, as they claim, to make the government more efficient. If it were they would approach reform much differently.

Ezra Klein in a podcast published by the New York Times on February 16, 2025, explains it well.

If this were about policy, Trump and his team would have tried to go through Congress. They could have crafted much larger reforms using a wider set of powers, and they wouldn’t be facing down the courts.

But they didn’t want policy. They didn’t want to go line by line through U.S.A.I.D. and figure out what worked and what didn’t. They didn’t want to release a package of proposed spending cuts and debate their merits. They didn’t want to think through new civil service regulations.

They wanted power. They are trying to remake our system of government, not our laws. They have identified a weak point in that system, and … that weak point is Congress.

If government efficiency was their goal they would have set up committees of experts to review all the government programs to see what is working (to achieve their desired goals) and what is not. After careful review they would go through Congress to pass new laws and write up new regulations.

Instead what the Trump/Musk regime is doing is gutting the agencies – firing the top level of management and abruptly cutting off funding. This is the opposite of efficiency. It affects both effective and ineffective programs without bothering to determine which is which. Removing the top employees reduces the level of expertise leaving the remaining employees floundering. Abruptly cutting off funding, rather than thoughtful tapering off, leaves people and product stranded. The shutting down of USAID left agency employees in war-torn countries like the Republic of Congo to get out on their own, sometimes with nothing but the shirt on their backs. Food was left in warehouses to rot with no one to distribute it to where it’s needed. Businesses depending on government contracts, including grain farmers, are now facing bankruptcy because when their contracts are torn up without notice. People are dying when the medicine they depend on suddenly runs out. This is not efficiency.

The Republicans have a majority, albeit slim, in both houses of Congress. They could push through legislation to enact whatever policy changes they want. Instead they are doing everything by Executive Order and defying Congress to do anything about it. This approach also picks unnecessary fights with the courts by ignoring laws and the Constitution. Their goal seems to be to control, or sideline as irrelevant, both Congress and the courts.

Senators and Representatives need to fight back or the next redundant agencies to be demolished could be Congress. And if the Supreme Court doesn’t play along, they could be next.

The Trump/Musk approach also alienates all voters except their base. In the same article Klein refers to a poll that shows that in one month Democratic voters changed from 46% wanting their members of Congress to oppose Trump to 65% wanting opposition, after only a few weeks of the Trump regime.

As Klein says “That’s a lot of political capital the Trump administration burned in just one month.” It seems to me that Trump and Musk aren’t all that concerned about the next election. Many people fear that there will not be a midterm election in 2026 or a presidential election in 2028. Or if there is, that the Republicans will have it rigged so completely that votes won’t matter.

When that happens their power will be complete.

Sources

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-congress-audio-essay.html