BLUF:
\nMost importantly, Trump and Musk should keep their ears to the ground, to see what sort of sedition might be brewing among these soon-to-be-former elites.<\/p>\n
Because something will be.<\/p>\n
Smashing the \u2018rice bowls\u2019 \u2014 Why elites are lashing out at Trump and Musk\u2019s reforms.<\/a><\/p>\n Philosopher\u00a0Eric Hoffer\u00a0once wrote, \u201cNothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.\u201d<\/p>\n As President Trump, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency\u00a0get on with their business<\/a>\u00a0of trimming waste, fraud, abuse and graft from the federal budget \u2014 a business that is vitally important, given the government\u2019s parlous financial outlook \u2014 they need to keep this in mind.<\/p>\n Less than two weeks in, DOGE teams poring over federal spending records are discovering\u00a0all sorts of problems<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cCareer Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day by approving payments that are fraudulent or do not match the funding laws passed by Congress,\u201d\u00a0Musk reported Sunday.<\/p>\n Money from the US Agency for International Development and other agencies is\u00a0going\u00a0for\u00a0organizations shipping illegal migrants<\/a> to the United States or paying their expenses upon arrival \u2014 which then oppose, on \u201chumanitarian\u201d grounds, any effort to stem the flow.<\/p>\n Musk and hedge-funder Bill Ackman wrote that the government funded non-governmental organizations to get around laws that are supposed to keep taxpayer dollars out of party politics and dangerous scientific research.<\/p>\n USAID officials even tried to physically stop DOGE technicians from accessing the computers that contained information on payments,\u00a0leading Musk to\u00a0comment<\/a>,\u00a0\u201cUSAID is a criminal organization.\u00a0Time for it to die.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile Trump suspended payments to NGOs and nonprofits until a formal re-evaluation of the nature, purposes and legality of the spending is complete at each grant-making agency.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a safe bet that once they\u2019re re-evaluated, far fewer grants will be made.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That means an awful lot of NGO staffers and executives in Washington, DC, and vicinity will soon be out of a job \u2014 and if Trump slashes the federal bureaucracy, too, many more will be thrown into the DC employment marketplace in a year\u2019s time.<\/p>\n If Hoffer is right, we must brace for a most unsettled social order in the months to come.<\/p>\n It\u2019s impossible to overstate how many people\u2019s careers and incomes \u2014 their \u201crice bowls,\u201d in DC parlance \u2014 are on the receiving end of Trump\u2019s reforms.<\/p>\n The people affected will not take this lying down.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve already seen\u00a0not-very-spontaneous demonstrations<\/a>\u00a0at USAID headquarters and the US Treasury building, death threats\u00a0aimed at the DOGE team<\/a>\u00a0on Reddit and other sites, and hit pieces in\u00a0Wired\u00a0and The\u00a0New York Times.<\/em><\/p>\n One complaint is that Musk\u2019s team is \u201cunelected,\u201d which is silly: USAID, to say nothing of the many NGOs and nonprofits it supports, is unelected too.<\/p>\n More importantly, Trump explicitly ran on stripping the government down with Musk\u2019s help \u2014 so Americans did in fact vote for this.<\/p>\n But people fight hard for their livelihoods, especially when they feel entitled to begin with.\u00a0(Recall that when coal miners lost their jobs due to Obama-era environmental policies, these same DC types suggested they \u201clearn to code.\u201d)<\/p>\n Tech writer Jon Stokes tweeted he expects to see not just protests, but calls for the military to depose Trump and arrest Musk over all this.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t see such calls gaining much traction against a president who won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, and whose policies \u2014 very much including slashing the size of the government\u00a0and its spending \u2014 have broad public approval.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s absolutely true that a lot of powerful people \u2014 or at least, a lot of people who are\u00a0accustomed<\/em>\u00a0to being powerful \u2014 are going to see their livelihoods and positions shattered.<\/p>\n And they\u2019re not going to go easily.\u00a0To quote Gov. Le Petomane in\u00a0\u201cBlazing Saddles,\u201d \u201cGentlemen, we\u2019ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs!\u201d<\/p>\n So Trump and Musk need to have a plan. And I suspect they do, though unaccountably they haven\u2019t shared it with me.<\/p>\n