Unelected Billionaires Musk And Ramaswamy Think They're Going To Fundamentally Change America

Turning Back Progress Won't Be As Easy As It Was At Twitter

On Thursday, Seth Masket noted that Señor T won’t be sworn in for another month and “he’s already the King of Chaos... Trump doesn’t and won’t have the formal powers to do a lot of the things he talks about doing. He can’t just unilaterally take back the Panama Canal or buy Greenland or make U.S. states out of Canadian provinces. He can’t just toss Liz Cheney in jail. He can’t just end Obamacare and replace it, or lower prices or hand eastern Ukraine over to Russia. He can’t compel companies to end DEI hiring practices or trans-friendly employee policies. And he can’t simply deport 10-20 million residents with the wave of his hand. But he definitely thinks he can do at least some of this. And more importantly, he can create a lot of chaos and panic in the process.”

Masket predicts that Trump is “definitely not going to get everything he wants, or even most of it, in terms of policy. But he’s going to push. And unlike in the last administration, when he had numerous staffers who tried to restrain his worst instincts or distract him from following through on them, he’ll have a party, a staff, a congressional majority, and a bureaucracy that’s far more compliant. And sometimes they’ll just cede ground to him because not doing so will seem worse.” Not compliant… with even worse instincts than Trump himself! “Will he actually successfully remove 10 million undocumented immigrants from the United States? Highly unlikely. But he’ll probably pick a few cities as test cases.” And his henchmen, Stephen Miller and Tom Homan are willing to die fighting on that hill.

One pair of henchmen that Trump was counting on to do a great deal of this dirty work— Musk and Ramaswamy— may already be circling the drain in a messy online fight between them and MAGA over importing low wage, highly skilled tech workers, basically indentured servants, primarily from India. The debate exploded into bitter acrimony on Thursday and Friday with Musk, who has already said he is willing to finance right-of-center Democrats, threatening to “go to war” against “racist Republicans.” MAGA world is flipping out and it may be hard for Trump to salvage this, as much as he wants to stay on the good side of the Silicon Valley billionaire class. He's leaning towards taking their side against his base.

And on top of Musk’s war against the MAGA racists and nativists, he is running up against scared cows in this other war— the one against federal spending. Yesterday, CNN reported that DOGE is already a blundering message that doesn’t know what it’s doing. That $2 trillion Musk has said he would slash from the federal budget— to help finance tax cuts for billionaires— is, to put it mildly, unrealistic. “Much of the money,” reported CNN, “supports mandatory programs, which must be funded in accordance with existing laws. These include Social Security and Medicare benefits and interest on the federal debt.” 

Musk and Ramaswamy want to start by targeting the IRS department that audits very wealthy tax cheats, something that will add to the deficit, not reduce it. They also want to abolish the Department of Education, a very popular initiative among the poorly educated MAGAts who put Trump in office, and to target the FBI (criminals hate law enforcement) and… the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “And, reported CNN, 'they want to take a hard look at foreign aid, defense spending and the inaccurate payments the government sends to Social Security recipients and others.”

Both Musk and Ramaswamy have assailed federal workers as bureaucrats who oversee an ever-growing web of regulations.

“The power of the unelected Federal bureaucracy has grown to become an unconstitutional ‘FOURTH BRANCH’ of government!” Musk posted on Twitter earlier this week. “Especially with the creation of their own internal court system, it has become the most powerful branch of government. We must fix this!”

But the federal workforce is about the same as it was 50 years ago, even though the federal government oversees more programs and provides more benefits.

Under former President Bill Clinton, the headcount dropped by more than 400,000 as he sought to “reinvent” the government according to Elaine Kamarck, founding director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Effective Public Management. Also, he was able to take advantage of the crumbling of the Soviet Union to trim the Department of Defense. But the September 11 attacks put a halt to the downsizing in 2001, and the government has beefed up its intelligence and homeland security workforces since then.

Maureen Tkacik reminded her readers last week that it wasn’t that long ago when “populist outrage was so intense and bipartisan that the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reform bill, which made it a felony for CEOs and CFOs to sign off on SEC filings they knew to be fraudulent, passed both houses with just three ‘nay’ votes in both houses. Better yet, there have been corporate some executives prosecuted, found guilty and punished under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX).

For example, Gregory Reyes of Brocade Communications caught backdating stock options and falsifying records, was the first CEO charged under SOX. He was sentenced to nearly two years in oprison and fined $15 million. Richard Scrushy (HealthSouth) was charged with accounting fraud involving $2.7 billion, was acquitted in 2005and then convicted the following year for bribery and corruption and sentenced to nearly 7 years in federal prison and $267 million in civil penalties. Patrick Bennett (Bennett Funding Group) was prosecuted under SOX and got 30 years in prison. Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom was charged with accounting fraud involving $11 billion, and sentenced to 25 years in prison. 

While SOX prosecutions haven't been as widespread as initially expected, the law's threat of prison time (up to 20 years) for fraudulent certification has significantly increased accountability for corporate executives. It also led to companies tightening their internal controls to avoid violations. Many executives faced civil penalties, fines and SEC enforcement actions under SOX even when criminal cases weren't pursued. The law's broader impact has been in improving corporate governance and deterring fraud— in other words, SOX has been more of a deterrent than a frequently prosecuted crime.

When Musk and Ramaswamy talk about “freeing” America from the burden of regulations, they have things like SOX in mind. I’m guessing the alternative would be the assassinations of more CEOs like Brian Thompson. Interesting: