Tag: billionaires
Elon Musk

Musk's 'DOGE' Cuts Will Hit Red States (And Trump Voters) Hard

Billionaire Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was a major donor to Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, and now that Trump is president-elect, he has picked Musk and MAGA businessman Vivek Ramaswamy to head a proposed new agency called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Its goals, according to Trump and his transition team, include finding ways to cut federal spending and reducing the United States' federal deficit.

In an article published on December 11, Reuters reporters Andy Sullivan and Ally J. Levine examine possible areas in which Musk and Ramaswamy could recommend "deep cuts." And those cuts, they stress, could be the most painful in red states where Trump enjoyed the strongest support.

"Roughly two out of every three dollars is spent on pension, health care and other programs that provide tangible benefits to U.S. residents, meaning that any cutbacks could cause an outcry," Sullivan and Levine explain. "Consider the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare expansion that was the signature accomplishment of Democratic President Barack Obama. Republicans vowed to roll back 'Obamacare' when Trump was first elected in 2016, but they failed to do so. The program has dramatically grown since then."

Like Musk and Ramaswamy, Russell Vought — Trump's choice for White House budget director and a major architect of Project 2025 — has, according to Sullivan and Levine, "called for tightening veterans programs." And this, the Reuters reporters note, "could have an outsize effect in Trump country."

A chart published with the article shows that 63 percent of the United States' "total spending on veterans' benefits" is in states that Trump won in the 2024 election — while only 37 percent is in states that went to Vice President Kamala Harris.

"Trump has ruled out benefit cuts to the two biggest safety-net programs, Social Security and Medicare," Sullivan and Levine report. "The two programs, which provide pension and health benefits to seniors, play a bigger role in the states that backed his presidential bid. Other benefit programs aimed at low-income people may be easier for a Republican president like Trump to tackle."

The journalists continue, "Both the Medicaid health plan for the poor and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, which helps pay for groceries, tend to play a bigger role in Democratic-leaning states. But cutbacks in these areas also would hit hard in poor, conservative states like Louisiana."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Former President Donald Trump

Trump Vows To Suspend 'All Environmental Approvals' For Any Billion-Dollar Investor

President-elect Donald Trump pledged to fast-track permits and tamp down regulations, including environmental, for any entity that wants to invest $1 billion or more in America, while offering no specifics or parameters, including how the federal government could arbitrarily overrule state and local laws.

“Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website.

During the campaign, Trump told oil and gas executives and lobbyists at a closed-door Mar-a-Lago fundraiser that if they invested $1 billion in his campaign, he would scale back or remove environmental regulations.

“Attendees included executives from ExxonMobil, EQT Corporation and the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry,” The New York Times had reported in May. “The event was organized by the oil billionaire Harold Hamm, who has for years helped to shape Republican energy policies.”

Trump has announced his nominee for Secretary of the Interior will be North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.

“Under the National Environmental Policy Act,” Forbes reports, “the federal government is required to conduct environmental reviews before approving energy production plans, infrastructure builds and other projects. How Trump will help investors get around regulations isn’t clear, but Trump has vowed to increase domestic production of oil and natural gas, projects that are often stymied or killed in the regulatory process.”

Critics blasted Trump’s statement.

314Action, which says it is “the only organization in the nation focused on recruiting, training, and electing Democrats with a background in science to public office,” wrote: “To tackle the climate crisis, Congress needs to pass and enforce bold, evidence-based legislation. However, Donald Trump doesn’t believe that billionaires should have to follow the law. In his world, they can pay-to-play and bypass crucial environmental protections. That’s why we’ll always fight to #ElectScientists who will fight back against his anti-science agenda and hold these bad actors accountable.”

“A government of oligarchs that will exist to solely serve the interests of oligarchs while distracting working people with culture wars. Foreign corporations & persons can loot & pollute the US and bypass regs that protect the health of Americans as long as they got lots of cash,” observed MeidasTouch editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski.

Journalist David Leavitt asked, “How many animals will go extinct because of this? How much quicker will this hasten the destruction of our planet?”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Howard Lutnick

New Commerce Secretary Embodies Same Old Corporate Greed

Howard Lutnick wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Then, he intends to eat your cake. Lutnick is another billionaire corporate huckster who was a campaign bagman for Trump, and now he's to become the commerce secretary. But first, he's been tasked with picking hordes of corporate loyalists to be placed in Trump's government as friendly "regulators" of corporate hucksterism.

Convenient, huh? This is what Trump & Company mean by saying they'll make government "efficient." Instead of corporate powers having to lobby regulators to get special favors, corporate officials will become the regulators. That is so much smoother for Lutnick and his ilk, who look forward to four free-wheeling years of devouring our economy.

In choosing those who are to police corporate price gouging, workplace rules, bank rip-offs and such, Lutnick has been calling Wall Streeters, Silicon Valley tech bosses, corporate giants and billionaires, telling them to send their best operatives to Trump's regime. "Let's get them into government," he exults! Notice that he's not calling any union leaders, consumer protectors or other real public interest watchdogs.

By the way, Lutnick himself is in line to profit from the corporate feeding frenzy he's now staffing. He is invested in everything from health care profiteers to cryptocurrency flimflams, and while he's been doing Trump's work, he's simultaneously been pushing Congress to do favors for his personal holdings. But he insists that there is no conflict of interest in his efforts. After all, he says with a straight face, he holds his government policy meetings in separate rooms from his own business pleadings.

And that paper-thin wall of separation is Trump's new ethical standard for protecting us from raw corporate greed.

Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator and New York Times best-selling author who was twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Vivek Ramaswamy

Trump's 'DOGE' Billionaires Aim To Decimate VA, Student Loans, And Health Care

The two right-wing billionaires President-elect Donald Trump has tasked with spearheading a new "government efficiency" commission outlined their vision Wednesday for the mass firing of federal employees, large-scale deregulation, and major spending cuts that could impact antipoverty programs, drug research and development, and more.

For the first time since Trump announced plans to create the Department on Government Efficiency (DOGE)—which, despite its name, would be an advisory commission rather than an actual federal department—Tesla CEO Elon Musk and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy offered a detailed look at how they plan to achieve their stated objective of taking a "chainsaw" to federal operations.

"We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America," the pair wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. "The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws."

Decrying rules crafted by "unelected bureaucrats," Musk and Ramaswamy—unelected outside advisers—wrote that they intend to present to Trump "a list of regulations" they believe should be eliminated. The culling of regulations would, they argued, provide the justification for "mass headcount reductions"—corporate-speak for sweeping firings—across federal agencies, a plan the two wrote would not be deterred by civil service protections.

Watchdogs have noted that the regulatory cuts envisioned by the commission's co-leaders would likely benefit Musk's companies, at least three of which are currently under scrutiny from nine federal agencies.

"Based on Elon Musk's comments, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is poised to make far-reaching recommendations that could have a devastating impact on Americans and enormously benefit insiders, starting with Musk himself," Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman said Wednesday.

"A second Trump term will undoubtedly see a multipronged attack on any institution that seeks to constrain big business, and DOGE will lead the charge."

Musk and Ramaswamy also laid out a plan under which Trump would evade existing federal statutes such as the Impoundment Control Act to cut spending already allocated by Congress.

"DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion-plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood," they wrote.

As The Washington Post's Jacob Bogage recently observed, the federal programs "without separate spending authorization" that Musk and Ramaswamy are targeting "represent more than $516 billion" and encompass key areas including veterans' healthcare, education spending, housing assistance, childcare aid, student loan programs, Head Start, opioid addiction treatment, and NASA.

Musk, a megadonor to Trump's 2024 presidential bid, claimed on the campaign trail that he would be able to identify "at least $2 trillion" in possible cuts to federal spending.

Casey Wetherbee, an Argentina-based writer, warned Wednesday that "Musk and Ramaswamy's admiration of Argentine president Javier Milei offers us a glimpse into their ideal end state."

"Ramaswamy tweeted on November 18: 'A reasonable formula to fix the U.S. government: Milei-style cuts, on steroids,'" Wetherbee wrote for Jacobin. "When Milei assumed office last year, he declared that conditions would worsen before things would get better; Musk similarly warned that DOGE’s recommendations may cause 'temporary hardship.' Meanwhile, in Argentina, Milei's austerity measures have targeted the country's social safety net, causing the poverty rate to skyrocket while only lowering taxes for the country's wealthiest citizens, a troubling outlook for a second Trump administration if DOGE's advice is ever implemented."

"A second Trump term will undoubtedly see a multipronged attack on any institution that seeks to constrain big business, and DOGE will lead the charge," Wetherbee added. "After all, in DOGE's public call for collaborators, it seeks 'super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries'; that's how they see themselves. We can only hope that, by virtue of how evidently insufferable they are, DOGE's relationship with the Trump administration flames out spectacularly."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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