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DOGE Unconstitutionality Index [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-02-15

The DOGE website was empty until Wednesday.

Clicking on the three line menu at the top brings up:

Savings Workforce Regulations Join About

The opening page is currently a feed off the DOGE X account.

Savings brings up: "Receipts coming soon, no later than Valentine's Day," with a heart with an arrow through it. It's past Valentine's Day, so Musk failed. Saturday, it says "Receipts coming over the weekend!"

Workforce shows how many employees are in each agency, how much appropriations they get, average age of employees and how much they get paid, and tenure.

The only way this could have been cobbled together is by using the Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) database, which they should not have access to. Lawsuits galore are being generated by Musk and DOGE's access to it.

The heading for the Workforce page is: "Trace your tax dollars through the bureaucracy." Bureaucracy is bad, is the implication. That oh, so terrible, deep state. Fire everybody and start over. Except you're talking about 2.5 million employees.

DOGE even had put up information on intelligence agencies where information about budgets and headcounts are supposed to be secret. Huffington Post caught it, and now the information has been eliminated.

The page that shows our future is Regulations.

You're presented with an Unconstitutionality Index. "This is the number of agency rules created by unelected bureaucrats for each law passed by Congress in.." and there is a slider for the year. Unelected bureaucrats. The Deep State again. Trump and Musk want to run a government, and hate it at the same time. Get rid of all the people who know how to do the job and replace them with ignorant flunkies. Automatically, regulations are unconstitutional. No debate.

I saw this coming when I saw Trump's Fact Sheet that said for every regulation created, 10 had to be removed. Not only that, but both the removal and the new regulation couldn't cost any money to the government. I covered this in a diary I did called Trump's Deregulation 10-1.

Here's the Fact Sheet for his regulations policy objectives.

Every agency on the DOGE website has a listing for how many words are in their regulations and how many sections there are. This could have been generated by going through the government's Federal Register and compiling it.

The more words, the more sections, the worse that agency must be. It doesn't actually give you the number of regulations on each of those, just how many sections. But somehow they're able to calculate how many rules per law were made.

As I said before, the game plan is to eliminate 10 regulations for every one generated. This is going to be an impossibility for agencies to figure out which 10 have to go in order to get one. That's the point. No more new regulations at all.

Regulations aren't there just for the hell of it. They're there because they needed to be implemented to follow the law that generated them. That's what civil servants do. If regulations aren't created, then the laws are useless.

The attacks that we've already seen to weaken agencies were helped by the Supreme Court when they struck down the Chevron Doctrine. This was a recognition that experts in government agencies knew what they were doing in order to interpret the laws that Congress passed. What the Supreme Court did by removing the Chevron Doctrine is make courts responsible for determining what the law is in detail, which they are completely incapable of doing. They can't be experts in environmental protection, food and drug testing, healthcare regulations, and the list goes on and on forever. Judges are not omniscient. Neither are civil servants, but they are experts in the one field they have to handle.

The executive order inspiring this was called: Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation. It says exactly what the fact sheet said but in more legalese wording.

This is the mandate that Musk has in dealing with government regulations. Musk wants to get rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because it interferes with his businesses. Why he wants to get rid of the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is one that I can't figure out, except that it has control over bank operations. When a bank is failing, they take it over. The depositors get to keep all their money. It's the investors who own the bank that lose. Unless of course we always bail the banks out. Where would that money come from? Taxpayers. The FDIC operates by fees paid by banks You get rid of the FDIC, and there'll be bank failures all over the place with the wild wild west of financing. That's what happened with the sub-prime mortgage crisis that created the Great Depression in 2008.

I expect Musk will go after the Security and Exchange Commission, the SEC. After all, why should we have rules that corporations have to follow in doing business? This is why Trump has put a pause on the Foreign Corruption Practices Act, FCPA. Trump literally wants to be able to bribe foreign countries, individuals and businesses in order to get contracts, or favors.

So, the plan is twofold. First you get rid of the regulations. When the regulations are gone, the agencies that were enforcing them have no reason to be in existence. The agencies get disbanded.

Let's take a look at a couple of major agencies. You've got Lee Zeldin running the Environmental Protection Agency the EPA. You can expect to have every rule that keeps your water and air livable to disappear. Trump talks about clean coal for God's sake. There's no such animal. And, as always, it will be the minorities who are affected most.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB, already has been shut down by Russell Vought. Instead of getting rid of regulations, he just ordered them to stop enforcing them altogether. If they're not going to enforce regulations anymore, guess what? The agency no longer has any reason to exist.

Just to show how stupid Musk can easily be, Musk claimed on Friday that there were 150-year-olds in the Social Security database. Here's what probably happened. Social Security along with a lot of other government agencies have mainframe computers that use an old programming language called COBOL, Common Business Oriented Language. Apparently a missing date of birth causes a default date to be used and May 20, 1875 gets filled in, making people look like they're 150 years old. In order to understand how this could happen, you need to understand ISO 8601, and also the Metre Convention of 1875, according to a real programmer. So the only fraud here is that Musk's child programmers haven't got a clue, as well as Musk himself.

Now you can easily feel superior. If not, then all you need to remember is the Y2K crisis, where dates in data files were kept as 2 digits, instead of 4. Try sorting information on a two digit date then 2000 is 00, and 1999 is 99. Doesn't work. All data files that had a date field had to be expanded to 4, and 19 had to be added in, and coordinate the added digits and the software using it at the same time. The 150 year olds is the same sort of problem. It's literally a bug, not a feature. We have to wait till the year 9999 to worry about the date field again.

The key to dismantling the constraints on corporations is getting rid of regulations.

First, you demonize them so the general public thinks that regulations get in the way of a good economy. With public support, move on to the next stage.

Then regulations are removed one by one, or simply rolled back to previous standards like EPA emissions on cars.

Eventually, the agency has too little to do, and they are swallowed up by a larger agency or disbanded altogether.

Some agencies are tools made for weaponization, like the FCC. Enforce what regulations you need, but to Trump's advantage, as we see from the lawsuits against ABC, CBS and NBC, and then they capitulate. Get net neutrality canceled so ISP's can create a pay as you go system.

Get rid of your opponents and build up your power structure. It's all about regulations and how they're used or ignored. With Congress in tow, Trump can do both.

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