DOGE was a massive failure. It was run by arrogant people who didn’t think they needed to learn and understand the subject matter. DOGE misdiagnosed the problem. Fraud and waste isn’t the driver of the debt, legitimate payments to people for Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, and military spending, are the drivers. DOGE also broke the law. The executive cannot legally stop spending that has been passed by Congress and signed by a president.
DOGE did enduring harm to research. We lost valuable people who are hard to get back. The standing of the United States and its power to influence people through the State Department, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and foreign aid have been deeply damaged.
Tariffs degrade long run efficiency, but uncertainty caused by Trump’s erratic use of tariffs has a greater negative effect on the economy in the short term.
Putin doesn’t want to use nuclear weapons. If he did, he risks the destruction of his country. Putin, like the Soviet Union in history, uses nuclear weapons as bluster to threaten countries whose leaders and people believe the likelihood of Russia using nukes is higher than it is. Trump is scared. He’s happy to use or threaten military force against countries without nukes, but Russia invades its neighbor in a war of conquest while committing many atrocities, and Trump is obsessed with peace, even, at times, weakening support to Ukraine to appease Putin. Letting Russia gain things with nuclear threats increases the incentive for other countries to get nukes, and one of those countries may be more willing to actually use them.
On the international stage, the United States is acting like brash huns, its president receiving gifts of gold as countries complement him and shower him in gifts in hopes of corruption as they beseech Trump to lift tariffs. In the short term, the U.S. has higher taxes on goods they import and difficulty selling abroad where foreign countries tariff back and where tariffs on imports into the U.S. make U.S. goods more expensive. In the long term, the U.S. reputation is tarnished and countries may never trust the country again as the country already elected Trump twice, and may always elect another one in the future. A world where the United States can’t be trusted is a worse world for the United States and Americans.
“The Trump administration announced Tuesday it would work to shutter the department by transferring critical responsibilities to other federal agencies. The plan revolves around a series of agreements that spread responsibility for administering tens of billions of dollars in school-related spending across the federal government.”
Trump threatens to jail Democratic lawmakers for saying that troops should not follow illegal orders, even though that is true, military men and women shouldn’t follow orders that are illegal. Threatening to jail lawmakers for such statements is yet another dent in U.S. Democracy.