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    RobF

    RobF

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    I think this topic deserves its own thread, both to discuss generally the topic of government efficiency, and specifically the so-called 'Department of Government Efficiency' and the incoming Trump administration's aims to "dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies".

    The announcements have been covered in the The Trump Cabinet and key post thread, but to recap, Trump has announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will work together on a not-actually-an-official-government-Department of Government Efficiency, which is intended to work with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to "drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before," with the 'Department' to conclude its work "no later than July 4, 2026."

    Musk has previously said that the federal budget could be reduced by "at least $2 trillion", and Ramaswarmy, during his presidential campaign, said he would fire more than 75% of the federal work force and disband agencies including the Department of Education and the FBI.
     
    Carolyn Jones never thought it was controversial to herd her cattle to different parts of her 200-acre ranch in northeastern Mississippi to give the grass time to grow back between grazing.

    “This is really simple stuff we have been doing since the beginning of time,” said Jones, a lifelong farmer and the head of the nonprofit Mississippi Minority Farmers Alliance.

    About 40 percent of U.S. cattle ranchers already use this technique, according to federal data. It helps ranchers keep their grass healthier, but it also helps the environment, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

    Last year, the Alliance won a USDA contract to educate other farmers about these long-standing conservation practices. The project description labeled them “climate resilient farming practices” to appeal to President Joe Biden’s green priorities.

    Now, the Trump administration is considering axing the project, along with hundreds of other agreements “related to climate initiatives,” according to internal USDA documents and two people familiar with the agency’s deliberations. The whiplash shows how farmers have been caught in the middle of a political battle over the language used to describe federal programs.

    An internal USDA spreadsheet and accompanying instructions obtained by The Washington Post show more than $400 million of climate-related projects administered through the department’s Natural Resources and Conservation Service (NRCS) are under review for possible termination.

    It is the latest setback for the USDA’s conservation efforts, beginning in late January with a sweeping funding freeze affecting farm conservation programs worth more than a billion dollars as department officials scrambled to comply with the Trump administration’s priorities.

    For decades, the USDA has paid experts to help farmers implement techniques to keep their land fertile and productive, such as fencing off fields to keep cows from overgrazing, planting cover crops to keep soil from eroding or targeting fertilizer use. Many of these projects also help the environment by reducing pollution or greenhouse gas emissions.

    The spreadsheet of USDA projects under review was attached to a Feb. 25 email that instructed regional and state conservationists to scrutinize each line item for such terms as “climate adaption and resilience planning,” “environmental education/workforce training,” “biodiversity and ecosystem resilience related to climate change,” and “climate smart agriculture and land use that does not directly benefit farmers.”..............

    Under Biden, farmers, companies and nonprofits say they learned to mention climate and diversity to get an edge on their farm aid applications.

    “When we applied for the grant, it was a different environment, so we used all those buzzwords,” said Penelope Nagel, co-founder of Soilytics, a company that measures nutrients in the soil to help farmers target their fertilizer use so they can save money and grow better crops.


    She sprinkled phrases like “climate change” and “nitrogen use efficiency” into her application for $150,000 to demonstrate her firm’s soil measuring technology on seven farms in South Carolina. Now, those words may come back to bite her.

    “Hopefully we don’t get kicked out,” she said, adding, “This is not climate-specific. This is about helping farmers be more productive.”

    But USDA officials seemed to disagree. In the draft spreadsheet of conservation projects under review, the Soilytics project has a note recommending “full termination” because the “entire project is based on climate smart science that will lead efforts in climate change.”

    Another applicant, South Carolina cattle rancher Leland Gibson, didn’t mention climate change — but his $150,000 grant does mention “regenerative grazing,” a fancy phrase for moving cows around the pasture to keep them from chewing the grass down to the roots.

    “They can kill the grass if they do that,” Gibson said. After signing a cost-sharing agreement with the USDA, he fronted the money to put up fencing and add water tanks to different areas of his field so the cows would have a place to drink as they moved from one spot to another. “It has nothing to do with climate,” he said, adding, “I don’t agree with all that.”

    Gibson’s project was flagged for “full termination,” the draft document showed, because the “goal of this project is to combat global climate change.”............

    Farmers called their work climate-smart to get federal funds. Now it may cost them.​


     
    If we can somehow get through this, my greatest hope would be that the working class emerges from it determined to neutralize the power of the super wealthy. At this point, I'd enthusiastically support any effort to effectively regulate and tax billionaires out of existence. Individuals shouldn't have so much wealth-power that they can upend our government.
     
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    I don't know if yall remember the thai cave rescue. That was when I started noticing that he's a complete idiot and jackass. I knew of him as part of Tesla, and for his cameo in the big bang. Other than that, nada. I didn't care to know; till the cave incident. Without knowing the geology of the cave system or anything else, he devised a submarine system that will rescue those boys. Yeah, sure. At one point in the tunnel system, the divers could barely contort their bodies to squeeze through. They literally risked their lives to search for those kids and eventually guided those kids out. These divers were experienced and skilled. For that they were called pedos by Musk. He's an absolute Peice of work of a human being.

    www.theguardian.com

    Elon Musk calls British diver in Thai cave rescue 'pedo' in baseless attack

    Accusation directed on Twitter at Vern Unsworth, who called Tesla CEO’s offer of ‘mini-sub’ to help rescuers a ‘PR stunt’
    www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

    fyi, I'm not gonna look for links, but he uses his companies to self deal routinely. I question his accounting because he would use tesla to hire that tunneling company to do absolutely nothing. Or when he would transfer funds from spacex after they received funds from the us government to tesla when tesla needed money. Or how about pumping and dumping those bit coins. Jackass did a lot of dodgy stuff. He didn't dare say a word publicly till tesla's stock blew up around 2020. Ask him if he dared say anything about china. He relies heavily on contracts and special privileges from china...ie rare earths and china's [comparative] advantage in battery manufacturing.
     
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    ..........U.S. private employers added 77,000 jobs in February, according to ADP, the smallest gain since July of last year and nearly half of the 148,000 jobs expected last month.

    As private-sector job opportunities take a hit, NIH workers aren’t convinced they’d find a job there anyway. NIH labs are often bespoke to their founding principal investigator (PI), meaning there are not one-to-one equivalent positions in the public and private sectors, according to one anonymous NIH employee, working in a lab developing brain-computer interfaces. The employee’s identity is known to Fortune.

    “This job doesn't exist in the private sector,” she told Fortune.

    Government-funded research is instrumental to the development of corporate technologies: The NIH funded and is assessing the efficacy of Apple Watch’s ability to detect atrial fibrillation, a stroke warning sign, for example. However, the employee argued the private sector doesn’t have the same appetite for the slow-moving pace of publicly funded research.

    “The lab does not create a product,” the employee said. “The lab creates an idea that can be transferred into a product in 20 years. No VC is gonna fund that. We don't have output in that way, but we create something that the private industry should be happy to have.”

    The NIH biologist, who was fired and worked for the agency since 2019, said casting a wider net in her job search to look at openings at universities would mean applying to jobs she was either overqualified for or didn’t have expertise in because she spent years pursuing adjacent research.

    “They're not going to hire me as an associate scientist because that's for people with maybe a master's degree or something,” she said. “But they're not going to hire me as a director, which is what my level of experience would lead to, because I don't know how the field works.”..........

    Fired NIH workers fear bleak job prospects in the private sector because their research is too specific to be retrofitted: ‘No VC is going to fund that’​


    fortune.com

    Fired NIH workers fear bleak job prospects in the private sector because their research is too specific to be retrofitted: 'No VC is going to fund that'

    Employees told Fortune finding a job would require them to apply for positions for which they were overqualified or not closely aligned with their years of research.
    fortune.com fortune.com
     
    This hits close to the vest for my family. These are hard working people who love their Country. I hope that some sort of sanity can return before more people’s lives are destroyed:

    Remember:

    A friend of ours was recently fired as a museum technician as a result of the Trump Administration’s sweeping government layoffs targeting archivists and museum employees. They asked to remain anonymous, but they've given us permission to feature their message here… I got fired today. Let me...
    www.raygunsite.com www.raygunsite.com
     
    Incumbent said:
    What Trump’s supporters can’t seem to realize is that what he has ushered in is The Swamp they so adamantly believed they were fighting to drain.

    Projection, etc.
    Click to expand...


    they are so disconnected. They feel its "their SWAMP" - whereas before they werent "in on it". It wasnt "their guy" doing the stealing.

    Now they feel as though its "their SWAMP" since they voted in and now will vehemently defend their actions. Their guy doing the stealing? All good since the "other guys" have been doing for so long.

    insane amount of mental gymnastics.
     
    The big picture is now coming into clear focus. I suspect we will see more and more of this type of “delay” until the chaos of stripping our institutions of any kind of enforcement ability is stopped. Hopefully before Musk, Trump and his billionaire buddies destroy it all.

    www.cnbc.com

    FTC asks to delay Amazon Prime deceptive practices case, citing staffing shortfalls

    The agency cited staffing and budget constraints as factors for why the trial should be pushed back.
    www.cnbc.com www.cnbc.com
     
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