110 Days In, Reformers Need to Step Up
Elon Musk, who famously cut the staff at Twitter by some 80 percent and made the platform better and more profitable, acknowledged a few weeks ago that cleaning up government is a completely different beast. “It’s difficult to reduce the size of the bureaucracy and government spending,” a frustrated Musk acknowledged. “It comes with immense opposition, even when the things that we are cutting make no sense at all.”
Welcome to the party, Elon.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of Musk’s heroic efforts with DOGE. If you haven’t caught it yet, you can watch our Project DOGE series here. But, as I’ve been saying for over a decade, we will have to beat the Republicans before we can beat the Democrats. There is a permanent class in DC that feeds off of all of the spending and bureaucracy, including a stubborn block of Republican legislators who will never reform boondoggles like USAID, let alone desperately-needed entitlement reforms, without being forced to do it under intense public scrutiny and grassroots pressure.
I discussed the first 100 plus days of the Trump Administration—the good, the bad, and the ugly—with my good friend Congressman Thomas Massie on the most recent edition of Kibbe on Liberty. In the nomenclature popular with online kids, Massie serves up Red Pills (realities), White Pills (optimism), and a Black Pill or two (bad news).
Spoiler: the primary roadblock is Congressional leadership’s slow-walking of budget reforms, rescissions, and other legislation that could take a meaningful chunk out the Administrative State. Their game is to wait until we are too close to the election, and then plead politics.
We also talk about very promising things that are coming from the MAHA wing of the Administration, particularly from RFK Jr. at HHS and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at NIH, that could transform the Public Health Industrial Complex for good. The MAHA grassroots model that forced the Senate to confirm these reformers, and others like Tulsi Gabbard, is what offers hope for DOGE and other structural reforms.
