Last November, when DOGE remained a gleam in president-elect Donald Trump’s eye,  its leader apparent promised, via a post to his favorite (because he owns it) social media platform, that “[a]ll actions of the Department of Government Efficiency will be posted online for maximum transparency.”

On February 3 that same man — Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter — revealed (in the same format and on the same platform) the emptiness of the promise: “With regard to leakers: if in doubt, they are out.”

Meanwhile, over on Capitol Hill, Senators grilled Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, bulldozing her into a 180-degree turn from her former opposition to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Act, which allows the US regime to nose around in American’s communications without warrants in the name of surveilling foreigners.

They also tried to get Gabbard to renounce her prior support for a presidential pardon of American hero Edward Snowden, driven into exile for blowing the whistle on the US regime’s illegal surveillance schemes in 2013. Gabbard gave up less ground there, only going so far as to oppose FUTURE exposure of the regime’s crimes while she might be involved in the commission of those crimes.

Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to direct the Federal Bureau of Investigation, also came out hard against a warrant requirement for Section 702 searches. Previously promoted as the solution to past administrations’  use of the FBI as a cudgel against their political opponents, he made it clear he plans to pick up that cudgel and wield it at least as vigorously, if not more so.

As on many other issues,  The Trump regime is already exposing itself as “new boss, same as (or maybe worse than) the old boss” on issues like government transparency, government surveillance, and government lawfare.

I find neither that, nor the excuses Trump’s supporters trot out for it — he’s “playing 6D chess” or “fighting fire with fire” or whatever — surprising.

While there are good reasons for actors both good and bad to consider Trump an especially dangerous politician, he is and always has been just a politician.

He spent 16 years running for president (starting with his failed bid for the Reform Party’s 2000 nomination) before winning the first time.

Over that period, he transformed himself from a life-long, standard-issue progressive Democrat into a more theatric version of right-wing faux-populist Pat Buchanan.

Not because his core philosophical beliefs changed — there’s really no evidence he ever had any core philosophical beliefs in the first place — but because he craved power.

When he gained power the first time, he used it for his own benefit and the benefit of his cronies, not for your benefit.

Now that he’s gained power again, he’s doing the same thing.

Just like every other president.

The unique danger of Trump is that million of Americans continue to believe, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that he’s somehow different. That gives him a freer hand to act exactly like his predecessors … only more so.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

With the end of January consigning Christmas decorations to cheerful memory, even if northern blizzards and hot-button issues stoked by the incoming Trump administration are less conducive to jollity, is it “time to cut the green tape”?  Lauren Smith thinks that such eco-bureaucracy is “Why Britain can’t build anything” (spiked, January 29).

Solar power is not in fact as much of a real-world threat to England as it was in the hands of Christopher Lee’s fanciful Bond villain Francisco Scaramanga.  Across the Atlantic, red-staters are the ones eager to snip red tape, even if the bounteously bearded fellow in a red hat gracing the Wall Street Journal editorial page was not Kris Kringle but Karl of Das Kapital, illustrating Jacob Berger’s case for why conservatives have more in common than they assume with the original Red (“Why MAGA Folks Should Read Marx,” January 23).

The prospect of a so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” may provoke Green New Dealers, but the original New Deal’s Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman had been promptly inducted into the “Society of Red Tape Cutters” created by Dr. Seuss for the staunchly leftist newspaper PM to laud “Boldness and Directness of purpose” in overcoming “petty bureaucratic detail.”

Even after Seuss became more associated with the amusements of what Dissent‘s Michael Kazin called “lovely nonsense with no discernible moral point” than pointed propagandizing, the lines were not so clearly drawn. In 1982, conservative columnist George Will gushed that “the space program is the greatest conceivable adventure; yet the government scants it.” Will leaves unnamed any particular “Philistine utilitarians” he has in mind who need to be swayed by “such marvels as nonstick frying pans” but must have had in mind the likes of Democratic Senator William Proxmire, who had infamously insisted that NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence “should be postponed for a few million light-years” (or at least “until right after the federal budget is balanced”).

In 1999, Garry Wills couldn’t understand why Americans would “want inefficient politicians to govern us” when “we do not want inefficient doctors to treat us, inefficient lawyers to represent us,” a year after Barry Goldwater’s New York Times obituary reminded readers that his “philosophy was never more simply put” than when he had declared that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient… for I propose to extend freedom.”

The “new, smaller government” promised in Bill Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union address was compromised by micromanagement as well as malpractice — as when proposing deeper involvement “in the workplace, in religious, charitable, and civic associations” or “to cut bureaucratic red tape so that schools and teachers have more flexibility for grassroots reform, and to hold them accountable for results” in ways that were inevitably top-down — and laid the ground for the seemingly endless conflicts and post-dotcom-boom busts of the twenty-first century. Disentangling voluntary cooperation from such astroturfing is necessary to break free from red (and green) tape.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “One Dog, Too DOGE, Red Tape, Green Tape” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, February 3, 2025

“With education funding following the student rather than being assigned to government-run institutions in a growing number of states, ” JD Tuccille writes in his annual “National School Choice Week” piece at Reason, “more families are choosing what works best for their kids — and the majority are satisfied with their decisions.”

On the main metrics Tuccille, and other “school choice” proponents use to measure success, that celebratory tone seems justified.

I don’t have a problem with school choice, correctly defined.

I don’t think those metrics correctly define it, so I’m not celebrating.

More and more state governments are, indeed, implementing or expanding “school choice” programs: Vouchers and tax credits for use at private schools, charter schools and “open enrollment” options for government schooling.

But are those programs “steps in the right direction” when it comes to either educational quality or actual choice?

Government (aka “public”) schools, including charter schools, may offer cosmetic differences, but their curricula and other standards are all set by government.

Vouchers and tax credits can be used at private schools … if those private schools accept those government-mandated curricular parameters and other standards. “School choice” as currently defined effectively turns them into government schools.

And government schools, by most methods of accounting — standardized test scores, parent opinion, etc. — don’t seem to do a very good job of teaching kids to read, write, and do arithmetic.

Suppose the government offered you these choices:

It would provide you with groceries in return for your tax payments, but those groceries would consist entirely of apples, ground beef, and white sandwich bread.

Or, it would give you a partial refund of your taxes in the form of a voucher or credit to spend on groceries … defined as apples, ground beef, and white sandwich bread.

“School choice” as currently defined brings to mind an apocryphal quote, attributed to Henry Ford, regarding his company’s Model T: “Any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black.”

Real choice entails a range of options, not just various ways of choosing the same single option.

Today’s “school choice” regimes actually REDUCE real choice by imposing “as long as it’s black” requirements on the institutions where vouchers and tax credits can be spent.

Do supporters of the current “school choice” paradigm believe the long arm of  “as long as it’s black” won’t soon reach out to strangle the surviving bastions of real choice — homeschooling and cooperative “microschool” projects — too?

We can continue to tolerate government control of education, or we can exercise real school choice. We can’t do both. The former, by its very nature, obliterates the latter.

Real school choice requires separation of school and state.

“National School Choice Week?”

No. “National School Choice: Weak.”

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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