From the Tom Woods Letter:

We’ve all been reading that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will head a “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) and that Vivek has withdrawn his name from consideration for US Senate from Ohio in order to fill this role.

This morning Peter Schiff posted rather a discouraging analysis of the DOGE, and I thought I’d see what you all thought.

Peter and I have been friends since 2007 and the first Ron Paul GOP presidential campaign, and in fact a good many of you started listening to me when I used to fill in on the Peter Schiff Show, Peter’s terrestrial radio show, between 2010 and 2013. 33 Questions About Ame... Thomas E. Woods Best Price: $2.91 Buy New $9.99 (as of 07:05 UTC - Details)

We have our disagreements, but I think his cautionary notes are at least with considering, so here’s what he had to say about the DOGE:

I hate to rain on this parade, but the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is not a real department. It exists outside of government and has no authority to do anything. Like any one of a number of independent think tanks that already exist, it’s free to make any recommendations it wants, and the government is free to ignore them all. Even if the Trump administration actually proposes some of the DOGE recommendations, they mean nothing unless Congress votes to pass them, which it won’t.

Since no Democrats will vote in favor of eliminating any government department or agency—except perhaps the Space Force—the House will need over 98% of Republican votes. This is nearly impossible to achieve with so many RINOs still in the House and so many representing swing districts. In the Senate, even if all Republicans vote in favor of the cuts, they still don’t have 60 votes.

Also, regarding firing government workers, the civil service unions make that nearly impossible. The best Trump can do is allow the workforce to shrink naturally through attrition. That will help, but the savings over the course of his term will be minimal.

Of course, the nearly impossible task will become completely impossible after the Republicans lose the House in the midterms. That is normal for the party in power. In two years, Trump and the Republicans will own the economy. With stagflation firmly entrenched by then, disappointed voters will again vote for change. But as usual, there will be no real change until an actual dollar and sovereign debt crisis finally forces our leaders to act.

Now it’s by no means impossible that things will turn out as Peter describes.

But at the same time, Elon Musk can use his Twitter/X platform to publicize particularly egregious examples of idiotic government spending, thereby forcing Democrats to keep defending absurdities again and again.

As for the civil service, here’s what Vivek recently told Tucker Carlson: The Politically Incorr... Thomas E. Woods Jr. Best Price: $1.51 Buy New $8.71 (as of 06:15 UTC - Details)

We actually have a legal landscape with the current Supreme Court that allows us to do what couldn’t have been done in the last half century….

If you literally just mandated that they have to actually show up to work Monday through Friday…a good number of them would quit that way. That step alone…. Just tell them they have to come back five days a week from 8 p.m. to 6 p.m…just show up physically to work. You’d actually have about a 25% thinning out of the federal bureaucracy right there. So that’s an easy first step.

The next step is this: as I noted in an episode on the subject on the Tom Woods Show, the Supreme Court’s overturning of the so-called “Chevron deference” in effect means that much existing regulation has become constitutionally dubious. But if that’s the case, then don’t the people carrying them out need to be dismissed? And this can be accomplished, Vivek said, despite what we’ve heard about civil servants being permanently entrenched. “If it is part of a mass firing,” he added, “what you call a reduction in force, if it’s just like a mass firing, those actually fall outside the civil service rules as they exist.”

Vivek strikes me as an ambitious guy, and the kinds of people he will want to appeal to in the future will want to see results. So I have no doubt he will give it a good effort, and his legal argument, spelled out in a bit more detail in his interview with Tucker, certainly sounds plausible enough.

So I’m not quite ready for the black pill just yet.

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