Politics Trump Will Remake D.C.’s Culture in His Image This time, there’s no Resistance to lock Republicans out of polite society. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images) The last time Donald Trump won the presidency, there was a lot crowing in Washington’s beau monde about how the new administration would upend the city’s social life. D.C. has never been a particularly friendly town, but in 2016, its residents decided to take a harder stand than usual. The capital’s hostesses linked arms against any top Trump officials seeking invitations to their homes. The region’s restaurateurs, though expected to serve everyone, vowed to make a night on the town for Republicans as unpleasant as possible. And those in chattering classes remarked with much glee that at no point in the city’s recent history had the place been so socially divided.        The result was that, rather than integrate into Washington life, as staffers and officials from every other presidential administration have, Trump’s coterie was forced to build its own parallel society. Soon, largely undeveloped neighborhoods—Navy Yard and the Wharf prominent among them—became hot spots for young staffers. And no wonder. Those places fit well with Zoomer taste: new construction, rooftop pools, parking everywhere. Meanwhile, more senior officials colonized Kalorama, on the grounds that it was just like Georgetown, but even more insulated from the hateful public eye.  Eight years later, the situation is pretty much the same. D.C. exists as two parallel societies stuck within the bounds of late 2016. On one side, the greater part of the city is trapped in an Obama-nostalgia doom loop: Le Diplomate still dominates the scene on Fourteenth Street. The establishments of Dupont Circle are still celebrating Obergefell vs. Hodges as if the decision were just handed down last week. And, in Shaw, you can still find the odd “Chicago” bar, a tribute to the 2008 Obama campaigners who have long since left the neighborhood.  The Trump version of D.C. is no more vital. Those shiny buildings on the river are still obliviously humming along, worlds unto themselves. Mission in Navy Yard is still a hot bar with a certain sort of person, despite, or because of, its vulgarity. Shelly’s Back Room over by the White House has lost none of its luster, in large part because it is one of the only places in the capital that allows the public to smoke inside. The only major change in this world’s social setting from the first Trump presidency is a loss: the Trump International Hotel, which closed down shortly after the president’s inglorious departure in 2021. I can’t say I regret it: Every time I visited in those four years—whether for a gala, dinner, or some other evening event—I was always struck by how hollow, cavernous that main hall was.   How did the city get stuck in 2016 for so long? Typically, each president makes a mark on Washington’s local culture that survives his tenure, usually in the neighborhoods where his staffers settle. Bill Clinton brought in the crew that made Adams Morgan a hip area. George W. Bush oversaw the revival of Georgetown and Glover Park. And Barack Obama’s team gentrified the historically black neighborhoods around U Street. (Obama himself liked D.C. so much that he still lives here.) Trump, as I have said, built his own fantasy version of the city.  But something funny happened when Joe Biden took office in 2021. Rather than making his own mark on the city, here, as in so many other things, Biden was like a ghost, and the D.C. continued to function as if he were never here at all. There are a few possible explanations for the cultural hole. The first is the fact that Biden was elected and took office during a pandemic. He famously campaigned out of his home in Delaware—where he spent much of his presidency anyway—and did not arrive in D.C. with an army of staffers looking for places to live. The second is related to the first: Hardly anyone in the federal government goes into the office anymore, meaning that there is little incentive to form a distinctively Bidenesque after-hours culture. And the third reason is the hazy temporality that surrounds all things Biden. No one was ever going to stick around for him. Now that Trump is back for round two, everything will change. Once again, the city will renew itself. There is no stopping it now. There is no Resistance to lock the Trump administration out of polite society. For better or worse, Trump will remake Washington, D.C. in his image. The post Trump Will Remake D.C.’s Culture in His Image appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Shootout in DOGE City What can the new sheriffs in town actually do to cut government inefficiency? Credit: Frederic Legrand – COMEO The leaders of President-elect Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have been meeting with Republican lawmakers recently. None of those involved shared details from their meetings, which was off the record by design to allow for brainstorming. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) did say, “Government is too big. It does too many things, and it does almost nothing well.” The speaker also indicated that he believed Musk and Ramaswamy will make government smaller and more efficient.  But how will Elon and Vivek actually seek change? What are their tools to bring to bear? In an op-ed laying out their strategy, the duo said they would link administrative reductions, regulatory rescissions, and cost savings. Cutting back on the sheer numbers of government employees is a fine starting point for Elon and Vivek. Using the controversial Schedule F, they hope to do away with the unofficial lifetime employment most civil servants enjoy. Civil service rules make firing for cause extremely difficult, and grind broader layoffs to a crawl, if not a full stop. If Schedule F could be implemented early in Trump 2.0 (the plan was started in Trump 1.0 but failed to get any traction), it would be a decisive tool in clearing out civil service deadwood. They will not go easily, and the terms are tough. “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people,” Elon added. Another strategy for lowering government headcount is attrition. Trump could impose a government-wide hiring freeze, as he did when he took office in 2017, though many feel this may be too blunt an instrument. Musk and Ramaswamy have suggested that the Trump administration implement separation incentives instead, rewarding federal employees who leave on their own initiative. Elon and Vivek also plan to relocate some agencies out of D.C. and to offer generous severance packages to drive workers into retiring instead of moving. An attrition tactic which has widespread Republican support in Congress is to end or curtail telework, back to at least pre-Covid levels. “If you require most of those federal bureaucrats to just say, like normal working Americans, you come to work five days a week, a lot of them won’t want to do that,” Ramaswamy said. “If you have many voluntary reductions in force of the workforce in the federal government along the way, great. That’s a good side effect of those policies as well.” How many feds telework is itself the subject of much discussion; Johnson puts the figure at 99 percent of regular office workers, while the Office of Management and Budget claims that 80 percent of the federal work hours are currently spent in-person and more than half of federal employees do not telework at all. As for regulatory rescissions, the federal bureaucracy generates thousands of regulations and rules each year, another target for Elon and Vivek. Rep. Aaron Bean (R-FL), the House DOGE Caucus co-chair, said that Musk is convinced that the United States has become ” bureaucracy, rather than a democracy, and that reforms are needed to ensure that elected officials, rather than unaccountable bureaucrats, are the ones in charge. Changing things will not be easy. Agencies generally must go through notice-and-comment rulemaking to amend or revoke rules, though Musk and Ramaswamy suggest Trump may be able to revoke some rules unilaterally via executive order. Musk and Ramaswamy also believe Trump could direct agencies not to enforce some cumbersome regulations or those he believes are unlawful in light of recent Supreme Court precedent. The duo says that “we will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.”  “He might get away with it,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Congress’ power of the purse will turn into an advisory opinion.” One obstacle the duo cannot overcome is the math of the federal budget. Roughly 60 percent of the budget is mandatory spending—things like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Trump promised to protect those programs. Another 10 percent of the budget is spent on paying interest on the national debt, also untouchable. That leaves around 30 percent of the budget “discretionary,” though roughly half of that goes to defense spending, which Trump also vowed not to cut. That remaining 15 percent of the budget, non-defense discretionary spending, is already at its lowest level ever as a percentage of GDP. That said, Musk and Ramaswamy identified a number of potential reductions. These include several specific appropriations or federal grants they consider to be wasteful, such as for NGOs, DEI training, PBS, NPR, Planned Parenthood, and $1.5 billion in grants to international organizations. Musk previously advocated removing subsidies from all industries. Ramaswamy said DOGE will closely review CHIPS Act contracts, especially those the Biden administration accelerated. More generally, law firm Gibson Dunn notes Musk and Ramaswamy have said Trump may decline to spend appropriations for which Congress’s authorizations have expired (called impoundment, though confounded by the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.) The Congressional Budget Office identified $516 billion in appropriations for 2024 associated with 491 expired authorizations across a range of agencies, including a number of appropriations administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs, State Department, Department of Education, National Institutes of Health, Federal Aviation Administration, and NASA. Withholding such funds is subject to legal challenge. It would also be politically unpopular to cut a number of these programs, such as veterans’ healthcare benefits and Pell Grants. Musk and Ramaswamy will also scrutinize federal contracts that have “gone unexamined for years,” and conduct “large-scale audits during a temporary suspension of payments.” Ramaswamy said to expect “massive cuts among federal contractors… who are overbilling the government.” Everyone has a list. Sources of potential cuts could also be the Government Accountability Office High Risk List, which identifies programs particularly subject to waste, fraud, and abuse, and a list of thousands of proposed cuts Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) sent to Musk and Ramaswamy. The post Shootout in DOGE City appeared first on The American Conservative.