Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy Reveal Their Plans For New Department

DOGE details: After a week of speculation, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy wrote in the Wall Street Journal of their plans for what the Department of Government Efficiency will actually look like.

“Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but ‘rules and regulations’ promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections,” they write. “This is antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision.”

Basically, it won’t be a separate agency, but rather a collection of people who get put at each agency to identify what needs to be cut. “DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies,” Ramaswamy and Musk write. “DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission.” They’ll identify the “minimum number of employees required” for each given agency to perform its “constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated” function. A massive reduction in headcount looks likely.

This Milei-core buddy duo slashing the size of government amounts to a libertarian fantasy come true.

“When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach,” the two predict, having been around the block enough to know what the haters will say. “In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress.”

Godspeed, fair kings.

Gaetzkeeping: Will we ever lay eyes on the House Ethics Committee’s report into the many purported misdeeds (sexual and otherwise) of former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz?

Here’s what happened. Gaetz attended a string of parties in 2017 in Orlando where there were drugs and escorts. He purportedly had sex with a 17-year-old—below Florida’s age of consent, though all parties claim her age was not discussed—which at least one witness saw. He also allegedly paid for sex, though he frequently used other people to cover for him, as one does when, as a sitting member of Congress with an IQ above 70, one is buying sex from teenage prostitutes.

Naturally, President-elect Donald Trump saw the above laid out—as well as Gaetz’s loyal harassing of people like former Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.)—and thought well, that man looks like a natural-born attorney general. So Gaetz will now be confirmed or rejected for that post, to lead the Department of Justice, and has accordingly resigned from the House in order to do so. Oh, and one very convenient side effect of resigning from the House: the Ethics Committee’s report, which had been—for various procedural reasons—repeatedly stymied, will apparently no longer be released, per House Speaker Mike Johnson, as there is no reason to have an investigation on someone who is no longer a sitting representative.

Now, “Senators from both parties who would vet Mr. Gaetz for the position have asked to see the report,” reports The New York Times. “Vice President-elect JD Vance and Mr. Gaetz were on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to meet with senators in hopes of smoothing his path to confirmation.” Meanwhile, since information wants to be free, “an unidentified hacker has gained access to a computer file shared in a secure link among lawyers whose clients have given damaging testimony related to Matt Gaetz.”

Wholly sidestepping whether or not Gaetz is a libertarian hero for flouting age-of-consent laws, information about his possible lawbreaking seems relevant to the senators who will be asked to vote to confirm him.

Rand Paul against mass deportations: “I’m not for really most presidential emergencies because they smack of martial rule…I’m not for the Army marching up and down our streets [to deport people],” said Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) to Newsmax of President-elect Donald Trump’s immigration plan. “The American people will be behind him 100% if he goes immediately after the people that have committed crimes…let’s go there and start there. There is to my mind some question of the housekeeper who’s been here 30 years, and I don’t see the military putting her in handcuffs and marching her down the street to an encampment.…There might be an in-between solution where, if they’re already working productively, that we allow them to have a work permit.