Business
DOGE already on the job: How Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy caused the looming government shutdown
Legislators had 24 hours to read through 1,547 pages. Ramaswamy read them. Musk presented an alternative. The process collapsed.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are flexing their muscles even before President Elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, spiking a bipartisan spending bill. The bill was introduced on Tuesday with voting scheduled for Wednesday. Legislators were under massive pressure to approve of the spending bill or risk a government shut down. Problem is, the bill was over 1,500 pages long!
Chances are, the bill would have passed and in the ensuing weeks as details became known the public would have been outraged by all the extra plans to spend / waste taxpayer dollars. Legislators would have apologized by saying they simply had no time to read everything and they were desperate to avoid a shut down.
That’s where the new DOGE comes in. First Ramaswamy somehow read the bill and posted a video to TikTok and X to inform voters what they were going to be paying for in this new bill.
@vivekramaswamy Congress wants to waste your money without telling you, make sure that doesn’t happen
From MXMNews
The newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, successfully campaigned to halt the bipartisan continuing resolution (CR) in Congress. Musk and Ramaswamy took to X, rallying conservatives against the 1,547-page stopgap funding measure they argue is riddled with wasteful spending and unnecessary policy provisions.
Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur and vocal advocate for government reform, characterized the bill as a “pork-barrel” monstrosity. “Unless @DOGE ends the careers of deceitful, pork-barrel politicians, the waste and corruption will never stop,” Musk posted on X, adding that lawmakers who support the bill should be “voted out in two years.”
Meanwhile, Ramaswamy, a former Republican presidential candidate and DOGE co-chair, proposed an alternative to the bulky spending bill. Sharing a draft of his one-page resolution, he described it as a minimalist approach that avoids exacerbating historical spending excesses. “This is what a clean CR looks like,” he wrote, emphasizing the need for fiscal restraint.
Musk and Ramaswamy posted this to X.
Shorter = better. This bill is only 116 pages, instead of 1,500+ pages. Took a LOT less time to read. Glad to see the following garbage from yesterday’s bill removed in the current version: – Congressional pay raise/health benefits – 17 miscellaneous commerce bills – Random new pandemic policies, like funding for “biocontainment research laboratories” – Renewal of the “Global Engagement Center,” a key player in the federal censorship state
In record time, the public was informed, politicians were influenced by outraged taxpayers, and politicians blamed each other for a faulty bill and were forced to go back to the drawing board.
It’s all explained very well in this video presentation from Kaizen Asiedu, a Harvard graduate in philosophy who makes videos informing Americans about complicated political matters.
Friday’s deadline to avoid a government shutdown looms. Musk posted on X that a shutdown would be “infinitely better than passing a horrible bill.” His DOGE partner Vivek Ramaswamy urged Americans to contact their representatives to “stop the steal of your tax dollars.”
And President-elect Donald Trump posted this: “If Democrats threaten to shut down the government unless we give them everything they want, then CALL THEIR BLUFF,”.
Should the spending bill fail, it will mark a significant victory for DOGE and a potential turning point in efforts to reform Washington’s spending habits.
From the Fraser Institute
By Matthew Lau
In the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S.
According to a new Statistics Canada report, government regulation has grown over the years and it’s hurting Canada’s economy. The report, which uses a regulatory burden measure devised by KPMG and Transport Canada, shows government regulatory requirements increased 2.1 per cent annually from 2006 to 2021, with the effect of reducing the business sector’s GDP, employment, labour productivity and investment.
Specifically, the growth in regulation over these years cut business-sector investment by an estimated nine per cent and “reduced business start-ups and business dynamism,” cut GDP in the business sector by 1.7 percentage points, cut employment growth by 1.3 percentage points, and labour productivity by 0.4 percentage points.
While the report only covered regulatory growth through 2021, in the past four years an avalanche of new regulations has made the already existing problem of overregulation worse.
The Trudeau government in particular has intensified its regulatory assault on the extraction sector with a greenhouse gas emissions cap, new fuel regulations and new methane emissions regulations. In the last few years, federal diktats and expansions of bureaucratic control have swept the auto industry, child care, supermarkets and many other sectors.
Again, the negative results are evident. Over the past nine years, Canada’s cumulative real growth in per-person GDP (an indicator of incomes and living standards) has been a paltry 1.7 per cent and trending downward, compared to 18.6 per cent and trending upward in the United States. Put differently, if the Canadian economy had tracked with the U.S. economy over the past nine years, average incomes in Canada would be much higher today.
Also in the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S., and only about two-thirds as much new capital (on average) as workers in other developed countries.
Consequently, Canada is mired in an economic growth crisis—a fact that even the Trudeau government does not deny. “We have more work to do,” said Anita Anand, then-president of the Treasury Board, last August, “to examine the causes of low productivity levels.” The Statistics Canada report, if nothing else, confirms what economists and the business community already knew—the regulatory burden is much of the problem.
Of course, regulation is not the only factor hurting Canada’s economy. Higher federal carbon taxes, higher payroll taxes and higher top marginal income tax rates are also weakening Canada’s productivity, GDP, business investment and entrepreneurship.
Finally, while the Statistics Canada report shows significant economic costs of regulation, the authors note that their estimate of the effect of regulatory accumulation on GDP is “much smaller” than the effect estimated in an American study published several years ago in the Review of Economic Dynamics. In other words, the negative effects of regulation in Canada may be even higher than StatsCan suggests.
Whether Statistics Canada has underestimated the economic costs of regulation or not, one thing is clear: reducing regulation and reversing the policy course of recent years would help get Canada out of its current economic rut. The country is effectively in a recession even if, as a result of rapid population growth fuelled by record levels of immigration, the GDP statistics do not meet the technical definition of a recession.
With dismal GDP and business investment numbers, a turnaround—both in policy and outcomes—can’t come quickly enough for Canadians.
Matthew Lau
Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute
Business
‘Out and out fraud’: DOGE questions $2 billion Biden grant to left-wing ‘green energy’ nonprofit`
From LifeSiteNews
The EPA under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a ‘green energy’ group that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a “green energy” nonprofit that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists such as former Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.
Founded in 2023 as a coalition of nonprofits, corporations, unions, municipalities, and other groups, Power Forward Communities (PFC) bills itself as “the first national program to finance home energy efficiency upgrades at scale, saving Americans thousands of dollars on their utility bills every year.” It says it “will help homeowners, developers, and renters swap outdated, inefficient appliances with more efficient and modernized options, saving money for years ahead and ensuring our kids can grow up with cleaner, pollutant-free air.”
The organization’s website boasts more than 300 member organizations across 46 states but does not detail actual activities. It does have job postings for three open positions and a form for people to sign up for more information.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, along with new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, are raising questions about the $2 billion grant PFC received from the Biden EPA’s National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF), ostensibly for the “affordable decarbonization of homes and apartments throughout the country, with a particular focus on low-income and disadvantaged communities.”
PFC’s announcement of the grant is the organization’s only press release to date and is alarming given that the organization had somehow reported only $100 in revenue at the end of 2023.
“I made a commitment to members of Congress and to the American people to be a good steward of tax dollars and I’ve wasted no time in keeping my word,” Zeldin said. “When we learned about the Biden administration’s scheme to quickly park $20 billion outside the agency, we suspected that some organizations were created out of thin air just to take advantage of this.” Zeldin previously announced the Biden EPA had deposited the $20 billion in a Citibank account, apparently to make it harder for the next administration to retrieve and review it.
“As we continue to learn more about where some of this money went, it is even more apparent how far-reaching and widely accepted this waste and abuse has been,” he added. “It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion. That’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue.”
Daniel Turner, executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, told the Beacon that in his opinion “for an organization that has no experience in this, that was literally just established, and had $100 in the bank to receive a $2 billion grant — it doesn’t just fly in the face of common sense, it’s out and out fraud.”
Prominent among PFC’s insiders is Abrams, the former Georgia House minority leader best known for persistent false claims about having the state’s gubernatorial election stolen from her in 2018. Abrams founded two of PFC’s partner organizations (Southern Economic Advancement Project and Fair Count) and serves as lead counsel for a third group (Rewiring America) in the coalition. A longtime advocate of left-wing environmental policies, Abrams is also a member of the national advisory board for advocacy group Climate Power.
DOGE is currently conducting a thorough review of federal executive-branch spending for the Trump administration, efforts that left-wing activists are challenging in court. The official DOGE website currently claims credit for a total estimated savings of $55 billion.
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