Round-up: DOGE backlash begins. Trump's incompetent lawyer. Government cuts and the next pandemic

U.S. government cuts affect us all. How much further will they go?

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The DOGE backlash begins

When Elon Musk launched DOGE a few weeks ago (feels longer, right?) he benefited from very permissive conditions. Trump’s political capital was high, most Cabinet secretaries were not installed or even picked, and members of Congress were flush off their own recent victories and not yet stuck into the realities of governing.

All of those things are now changing.

The first factor - Trump's waning political capital - is something I’ve covered before, so I won’t belabour the point here. Trump was mostly elected to tackle inflation, not revolutionize the federal government. There are plenty of signs voters are fed up with his wandering focus, and Musk and DOGE are not very popular at all. (As a side note, a recent survey shows 67% of adults under 30 have an unfavorable view of Musk, which challenges some simplistic narratives about politics and youth internet culture).

Being unpopular is bad, but it’s never really stopped Donald Trump and his allies from doing things before. In reality, Musk will be more constrained by other developments. Now that more Cabinet secretaries are confirmed, there is increasing pressure for them to be allowed to run their own agencies rather than having some outside force calling the shots. That pressure is coming not just from the secretaries themselves, but also from the Republican senators who confirmed them.

Agencies with a head confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate are in a much stronger position to resist Musk than the civil servants he was steamrolling over before.

Of course, they won’t call it “resisting” - they’ll call it working with Musk. But then they’ll start commissioning month-long reviews to study budget cuts. They’ll designate parts of their workforce as “essential” and off-limits. They’ll forge alliances with the congressmen in whose districts they employ people. They’ll get bogged down in litigation and union negotiations. The result will be to drag things out until they die or get dramatically watered down, a favorite trick of bureaucracies everywhere.

Then there are those congresspeople. One of the reasons it’s been so difficult to cut federal spending in the past is that congresspeople like having federal jobs and spending in their districts. Some 80% of federal workers are employed outside the DC area, and the average member of Congress represents thousands of them. Those congresspeople are starting to get flooded with angry complaints at town hall meetings, a time-honored signal of discontent in American politics.

Things have gotten so bad that Republican leaders in Congress are telling members not to hold town halls at all. They’re also telling the White House to cool it on the cuts. The result has been one of the first open breaks between the White House and Musk, with the Trump administration telling federal workers they can ignore Musk’s “what did you do last week?” email.

None of this means we should be complacent about Musk. DOGE has already done damage to the civil service, including through the firing of probationary employees. It will do more damage yet. But we are at least seeing the normal mechanisms of American politics reassert themselves. The civil service and Congress are fighting back and the usual dance of interest groups is resuming.

DOGE has limits, even if we don’t know exactly where they are yet.

Trump’s lawyer can’t stop making mistakes

If you’re not familiar with him yet, let me introduce you to Ed Martin, Trump’s pick for U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. That means he’s the top federal attorney in the DC area, responsible for charging crimes that occur in the district - which, given that it contains the federal government, usually means a lot of high-profile cases. Martin has no experience whatsoever as a judge or prosecutor. But he does have the only the qualification which matters to Trump - he was a member of the “Stop the Steal” movement in 2020 and has been willing to drop all charges against January 6th insurrectionists.

A few days ago, Martin sent this tweet calling himself “President Trump’s lawyer”, which encapsulates how he views his role. Rather than prosecuting federal crimes based on the law, he plans to defend the interests of the president personally. In this case, he’s threatening the Associated Press because it refuses to call the Gulf of Mexico “the “Gulf of America” as Trump has demanded. Frankly, this is one of the most craven and twisted statements to come from a Trump appointee yet.

Luckily, Martin is also kind of bad at his job. To quote Biggy Smalls, U.S. attorneys are supposed to move with silence and violence. They don’t bluster about on Twitter making threats - they bring cases in court and win them. Any prosecutor knows that sounding off about a defendant in public means that their lawyer can argue that those statements tainted the jury pool, leading a judge to throw the case out altogether. In other words, Martin is making it much harder to do what he says he wants to do. It’s certainly a Trumpian way to handle the job - just not a very effective one.

And let’s not even get started on that misplaced apostrophe, which should be a prosecutable offence in itself.

I think all of this tells us something about the pros and cons for Trump of putting inexperienced loyalists in key positions. They might try to do what he wants, but they’re not going to do it very well. If Martin was supposed to spearhead a campaign of political persecutions, he’s got off to a bad start.

On the other hand, there is one thing that Martin can do very well, even if he’s incompetent - and that is to not prosecute Trump administration officials and other Republicans who commit crimes in DC. If you want to get away with crimes of your own, then having the lead U.S. attorney be an incompetent boob who frequently tweets his way into controversy is the perfect cover.

U.S. government cuts and the “crying disease”

A mystery disease is sweeping Congo, sickening thousands and killing dozens within 48 hours of them first showing symptoms. The “crying disease” causes massive internal bleeding and sudden death. Initial tests show that it’s not ebola or another familiar hemorrhagic fever, and doctors don’t know what the hell it is. They’re investigating everything from a toxin in the water to some deadly disease previously unknown to science. And they still don’t know how it spreads.

Twelve months ago, we could have said that while all of this sounds terrifying, at least the U.S. government has a robust apparatus to monitor new disease outbreaks, strong international health partnerships, and pretty good pandemic preparedness at home. Unfortunately, after a month of Trump, these things are increasingly not true.