


I don't know what's in the budget, sorry to say.
This was a big vote and a big win for Trump. At least two of the Freedom Caucus members, Chip Roy and Thomas Massie, have some kind of stupid scheme to always vote "no" on any budget. The trouble is, of course, that if Republicans cannot get all of their members to vote for a budget, then Republican leadership has to bargain with Democrats to get support for the budget.
And that will result in even bigger budgets and bigger giveaways, of course.
But Speaker Johnson and, one assumes, Donald Trump managed to bring Roy in line, and the House passed the budget on a straight-line vote, 217-215.
I imagine that maybe Trump's demonstrated seriousness on cutting spending caused them to cast a vote for a budget they would otherwise have voted "no" on.
Massie still voted against it. I guess he prides Muh Princibuhls over actual results.
President Donald Trump's tax cuts, border, defense, and energy promises are one step closer to enactment after the U.S. House narrowly passed its $4.5 trillion budget resolution Tuesday night, officially kickstarting the budget reconciliation process.
Following hours of Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., convincing Republican holdouts to commit, a brief cancellation of the vote, and then an abrupt recalling of all House members, the resolution passed 217-215 and now heads to the Senate.
Republicans have a majority in the upper chamber with 53 members to the Democrats' 45 and two independents caucusing with them.
The passage of the House budget resolution was far from certain.
Both the high price tag and the steep spending cuts worried some Republicans, with centrists opposed to possible slashes to Medicaid and fiscal hardliners revolting against the estimated tens of trillions of dollars the resolution could add to the federal deficit over the next 10 years.
Besides extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts for at least 10 years at the cost of $4.5 trillion, the resolution authorizes a $300 billion increase in defense and border security spending, to be split among the Armed Services, Homeland Security, and Judiciary committees.
To partially accommodate its price tag, the proposal also instructs the Ways and Means Committee to raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion and instructs other committees to find at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years, likely from changes to Medicaid.
Just two Republican "no" votes could have tanked the resolution. Out of the four Republican holdouts who had either indicated or outright stated their intent to vote no, Reps. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., and Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, ultimately flipped after pressure from party leaders. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., was the lone Republican who voted against the resolution.
Trump has ordered agencies to prepare for mass layoffs and to submit plans to lay off large numers of their staffs.
There's no number for the overall cut in federal workers, but Trump wants the EPA to submit plans to layoff 65% of its "workers."
The U.S. government is facing a generational realignment as President Donald Trump directs federal agencies to develop plans for eliminating employee positions and consolidating programs.
Senior officials set the downsizing in motion on Wednesday with a memo that dramatically expands Trump's efforts to scale back a workforce described as an impediment to his agenda. Thousands of probationary employees have already been fired, and now the Republican administration is turning its attention to career officials with civil service protection.
"We're cutting down the size of government. We have to," Trump said during the first Cabinet meeting of his second term. "We're bloated. We're sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren't doing their job."
The ripple effects will be felt around the country. Roughly 80% of federal workers live outside the Washington area, and government services -- patent approvals, food inspections, park maintenance and more -- could be hindered depending on how cuts are handled.
Resistance is expected. Labor unions, Democratic state leaders and other organizations have tried, with some success, to slow Trump down with litigation, while Republicans are growing more concerned about how a slash-and-burn strategy could affect their constituents.
"Once you do this damage, it's going to be incredibly hard to rebuild the capacity of these organizations," said Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan. "It's not like you can turn the switch back on and everything is going to be the way it was before."
LOL.
Agencies are directed to submit by March 13 their plans for what is known as a reduction in force, which would not only lay off employees but eliminate the position altogether. The result could be extensive changes in how government functions.
No specific targets for cutbacks were included in the memo. However, as an example, Trump said the Environmental Protection Agency could reduce its staff by 65%.
Do you remember the media pushing fake stories claiming that "even red state voters are revolting against Musk's vicious cuts"?
Well, I know this may shock you, but those protests were faked by leftwing pressure groups.
Media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CBS News pointed to town hall events, including one hosted by Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA), as signs of growing public opposition to DOGE. These reports highlighted heated exchanges and vocal protests as evidence of bipartisan dissatisfaction with the department's efforts to reduce government spending.
However, the Washington Free Beacon's investigation suggests a different narrative. It revealed that the protests were organized by leftist activists, with Maggie Goldman playing a prominent role. Goldman, who resides in McCormick's district, has a long history of political activism within the Democratic Party. Her background includes coordinating volunteers for Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign and running for local office with a platform advocating for a more inclusive policy agenda. Additionally, campaign finance records show she donated over $1,500 to Kamala Harris's campaign last year.
The report further detailed that protests at other GOP town halls were also organized by liberal groups, notably Indivisible and MoveOn, both funded by George Soros. These groups reportedly helped drive media coverage that framed the protests as evidence of public discontent with the Trump administration's policies, despite the organized and partisan nature of the demonstrations.
Probably paid for by USAID, we'll find out later.
Jeffrey A. Tucker writes:
Jeffrey A Tucker
@jeffreyatucker
I'm concerned that many people do not understand the historical and institutional context in which the DOGE labor reforms are unfolding. They look at this as if these are some random, chaotic, arbitrary, strange, and even cruel measures to impose on a devoted civil service.
The reality is very different, and I'm not even sure that Elon entirely understands this. For more than a century, even dating back to 1883, the civil service has grown and grown without check from the elected branch, either the presidency or the legislature . The bureaucracies have ballooned from a few to 450 or so. The bloat and absurdities have grown too.
Get this: no one has ever known what to do about it. Not Coolidge, not Hoover, not Nixon, not Reagan, not Clinton, no one. No president has been able to crack this nut. The only reforms ever to have made it through are those that make the administrative state bigger, never smaller.
Countless cabinet secretaries have come and gone, always with the intention of making a change but leaving saddened, demoralized, outwitted, outgunned, and ultimately devoured.
No president has seriously taken on this problem because they simply did not know how. The unions are powerful, the intimidation from the deep institutional knowledge is overwhelming, the fear of the media as been powerful, and every single president comes to power vaguely feeling threatened by the intelligence agencies. The industries that have captured every single agency were also far too powerful to unseat or control.
This combination of institutional inertia has blocked serious reform for a full century. No one has dared. No one has even had a theory or strategy about what to do about this problem. It had become so terrible that most people in politics have simply surrendered, like homeowners who know there are rats in the basement and bats in the attic but long ago gave up trying to fix the issue.
All this time, the American people have felt themselves ever more oppressed, weighed upon, taxed and regulated, spied upon, brow beaten, and otherwise overwhelmed. Voting never made any difference because the politicians no longer controlled the system. The bureaucracies ruled all.
The Biden years underscored the point. We didn't even need a conscious and present executive. We only needed a figurehead to pretend to be president, just like the Soviet premiers in the old days. The institutions ran everything and the people controlled nothing.
How to deal with this? Trump alone figured it out in his last term: he simply took charge of the agencies in a limited way. There were screams of horror and plots galore. They performed a long stream of clever schemes to destroy him and show him who is boss, which is not the democratically elected president but the forces behind the scenes.
The job of the president, goes the message from all the insiders, is to PRETEND to be in charge but not actually do anything meaningful. Shut up, mug up, obey, and disturb nothing, let the administrative state do its thing without oversight or disruption, and then you will get your honorary library and bestselling autobiography and go down in history as great.
Trump refused the deal and look what happened.
Four years have gone by and Trump is back again, this time with a determination to slay this beast, one that he knows all-to-well. The efforts of DOGE and MAHA and MAGA are epic in scope, breaking a century of pathetic acquiescence toward the deep, middle, and shallow states, at last using moral courage to confront the problem head on, come what may.
They are profoundly aware that they MUST act fast and with some degree of ferocity, even recklessness, else we will default back to the status quo of leaders who pretend to be in charge while the embedded system runs things behind the scenes.
It has been this way for TOO LONG. The voters this time have demanded change, and mustered the faith to believe that change is possible. This is precisely what DOGE is attempting, to make good on a promise, a promise that for once the voters actually believed was credible.
They simply must succeed. There might never be another chance. The way of failure is the path everyone knows the US was on, toward economic stagnation, political scolerosis, and eventual irrelevance in the unfolding of the next stage of social evolution.