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Savages Tinkering with Tractors. In the Short Term,They’ll Prevail. Longer Term, It’s Up to Us. [1]
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Date: 2025-02-19
“Savages tinkering with tractors.” When that phrase was coined in the 1970’s, the Savages were lawyers, economists and experts. Tractors were Federal antitrust laws. The Tinkering was litigation over applying broad Congressional standards enacted decades before. (The phraseur was conservative Yale law professor and appellate judge Robert Bork, unsuccessful Reagan nominee for the Supreme Court.)
Sound familiar?
Fifty years later, we are enduring four weeks of Executive Orders to create a lot of new law. Sweeping, ominously vague declarations of intent in Donald Trump’s sharpie driven banner-level prose. They empower Savages, vesting minions selected by biggest donor Elon Musk to do deep dives into the Tractors of most every department and independent agency. These minions are from private industry, unvetted and lacking official status or portfolios, authorized by someone unknown. Their charter is to Tinker, demanding access to levels of detail high level staffers in some of the agencies aren’t cleared to see. (The IRS and Social Security Administration come to mind.)
Meanwhile, a docile Republican Senate majority set about consenting to demonstrably inexperienced nominees, most of whom having expressed opposition to the entities they would lead. Their governing job criteria: unyielding fealty to Donald John Trump.
Purges and budget freezes began. Lisa Desjardins at PBS News estimates 21,000 lost jobs in a dozen Federal agencies including 17 Inspectors General, appointees fired or placed under Stop Work orders. No thought seems to have been given — for examples — to summarily dismissing 300 employees from the agency responsible for safe keeping nuclear facilities, 400 from a personnel-short FAA, 750 from the CDC and almost all of the USAID, stranding tons of grain from American farmers who are as yet unpaid for their work.
These enact Project 2025 promoted by the Heritage Foundation, a 900-page prescription to dramatically diminish the Federal government. It was the screed featured at the Republican National Convention last July, which Donald Trump routinely denied have read or knowing much about during his campaign.
But here and now, cant would connect with reality. No waiting to flesh out details of the mantra of waste-fraud-and-abuse. No analysis that statutes seemingly required. Instead, hammer-handed cutting and slashing without specifics. Congress had to be sidelined. It simply couldn’t be counted on to disempower agencies and programs it enacted in the past or cut funding for programs that would lose jobs and community benefits. After all, Congress had been ignoring years of testimony, even lobbying, by the military to stop funding outdated tanks and maintaining facilities past their useful lives. The military and its contractors had presences in every district in the nation: cutbacks would jeopardize jobs and programs that beneficiaries aka constituents favored.
What can be done? Litigation, to be sure. A flood of lawsuits has ensued seeking temporary halts to Trump/Musk’s frenetic disemboweling and longer term challenges to the ultra-conservative views based on “unitary” (read “plenary”) executive power and finality. But … as Trump learned in the spate of 60-plus lawsuits challenging the 2020 election, courts work slowly. They are process-bound and demand evidence. So out go official directives to Federal employees not to discuss “internal” matters. Resignation offers contain NDAs. Despite incessant visual evidence to the contrary, Elon Musk’s authority is denied in courtrooms by government lawyers.
Even the lawsuits that are initially successful aren’t likely to reverse policy choices. At best, they force reconsideration, which is probably happening immediately anyway via the most recent memo in the stack while time and grindingly deliberate litigation proceed. Example: on Tuesday, DC Judge Tanya Chutkin declined to stop DOGE’s blitzkrieg with wrecking balls in hand through government records at seven agencies.
How about March 15th when new budget authority will be needed? Surely that will give Democrats and a few Republicans opportunities to adjust Trump expectations. Maybe, but Trump — who would not lose sleep over a shutdown he could put on others — has a mighty megaphone and is accomplished doing what he accuses others of. And worrisomely, some Democrats can be bought off by tax relief. Overall, demanding cutbacks in the Trump cutbacks might actually help save Donald Trump from himself if only in a few instances.
The biggest disconnect for us — and one we must exploit — is the Grand Canyon-sized gap between conservative political theology and the street-level impacts of anarchism-style government on constituents. Republican legislators have already started lobbying sympathizers in the Executive Branch for exceptions in their states to freezes of medical research, university grants, local infrastructure projects already underway and to reassign part of the foreign aid program to the Agriculture Department. (At least that would align foreign aid to US domestic interests!) Reporters now delight in locating Trump voters who say they didn’t vote for those specifics. Just wait, folks; this is going to get worse for you, too!
Short term, everything builds to November 2026. (Here, we should nod and pledge active encouragement to the opportunities in 2025 which Reps. Jasmine Crocket and AOC have pointed out in a few districts.)
The learning up until now is that GOP organizations are very strong in 25 or more states. Primaries govern most of the election action there and elsewhere. There are said to be only about 35 truly competitive House districts. As WaPo columnist Charles Krauthammer suggested years ago, politics is played between the 40 yard lines. In the 2024 election, our turnout was saddening. Many Democrats stayed home and Republicans gained vote ground in almost every Democratic area. So we should hope that Donald Trump keeps looming large.
Of course, we must have more going for our campaigning than simply pointing out the faults of Trump/ Musk/ Congress we want everyone to be able to see. But juxtaposing programs Democrats have been advancing since the New Deal in direct contrast with the new Republican “conservative” demolition derby … this can — it should! — have special currency with voters all ages.
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