Vivek Ramaswamy

The second Trump administration has begun as it means to go on: moving fast and breaking Washington brains. Firings commenced immediately, from inspectors general to senior FBI officials to workers who refused to go back to the office (for the federal government, the pandemic never ended). The confirmations blasted through the Senate, with even controversial figures like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rammed through in the first week. Executive Orders flew out like a flock of war pigeons released from the battlements — forty-five in the first two weeks alone — bearing commands small and sweeping.

There were high hopes when Donald Trump announced plans for a Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) in mid-November. Led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, DoGE was portrayed as a gift to smaller, more efficient government advocates through fewer regulations and a restructured government. “It will become, potentially, the Manhattan Project of our time,” boasted Trump at the time. “Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of DoGE for a very long time.” Trump seemed to picture Musk and Ramaswamy as a two-headed monster, ripping to shreds bureaucracy through “advice and guidance” along with an “entrepreneurial approach to government.

Elon Musk’s influence on the federal government has reached new heights, with a memo going out to millions of federal employees with a simple message: get on board or take a permanent, (and expensive!) paid vacation.The Trump administration just sent a DoGE-infused ultimatum to much of the federal workforce: opt in to working in your office or take our buyout. According to the White House, “We’re five years past Covid and just 6 percent of federal employees work full-time in office.” President Donald Trump and Musk have made it clear that a return to in-person work is nonnegotiable. The ultimatum, described in a post as “a fork in the road,” would bring the federal government in-line with where the private sector has been moving in recent months and years: back to the office.

TikTok is hoping that 2025 can be its year — but what comes next for the social media company is truly anyone’s guess. Will someone buy it? Will it divest from its Chinese Communist Party ownership? Will it exist in America next week (the app is fully banned in China as is)? Stay tuned.The social-media app is seeking yet another revival at the eleventh hour. Despite a bipartisan bill signed by President Joe Biden that restricts the ability for foreign adversaries to run social-media companies in the United States, TikTok is activating its army of supporters once more (the app is presumably hoping that its child soldiers will not threaten to kill themselves or lawmakers this time)... and it just might work.

The nasty fight between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon over H-1B visas, meant for high-skilled workers, is the Ghost of Christmas Future. That’s not because the visas themselves will be a perennial problem. It’s because of three larger implications, foreshadowed by the visa dispute. One is the battle between populist nationalists (represented, in this case, by Steve Bannon) and growth-oriented American companies with extensive foreign markets. Those are led by hi-tech industries, represented here by Elon Musk, which benefit from bringing in foreign engineers, programmers and others. The second implication is that, in a country with only two major parties, there are bound to be major cleavages within each party on a wide range of issues.

In the 1870s, Gustave Flaubert assembled Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues, a humorous collection of “received ideas” and clichés then current in French society. A new version needs to be produced for contemporary America. As in the original, the humor would often turn on the contradiction or subterfuge implicit in the word or phrase. “Affirmative action” would merit an entry, since it is supposed to be about battling discrimination when in fact it enshrines discrimination in law. So would the current favorite, “Continuing Resolution” (“CR” among the cognoscenti). The phrase carries the aroma legislative diligence.

President-elect Donald Trump’s appointees for his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are planning to crack down on employees who work from home — those who are left, anyway, after the duo’s round of “large-scale firings.”In an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out “the DOGE plan to reform government,” in which they purport to “reverse a decades-long executive power grab” while “following the Supreme Court’s guidance.

What on earth is Donald Trump thinking? That’s what many realists and restrainers inside and out of Washington are asking themselves after news broke late last night that Marco Rubio, the senior senator from Florida, is set to be tapped as secretary of state in the next administration.  The reactions haven’t been uniformly bad, mind you. Other candidates rumored to be under consideration, such as Vivek Ramaswamy, caused many in the US foreign policy elite to wretch in fear. Others, like former national security advisor Robert O’Brien and Senator Bill Hagerty, who served as US ambassador to Japan during Trump’s first term, would have been predictable choices with whom most could live.  Rubio, however, is one of the most hawkish options Trump could have picked.

To hear the New York Times tell it, you’d think Vice President Kamala Harris had finally started answering questions about the Biden administration’s accomplishments and her own policy positions. The Times claims Kamala “hit core campaign themes,” “spoke off the cuff” and “confronted a range of pressing issues” in a two-hour sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey.But did she really?When asked about how she would secure the southern border — one of voters’ top concerns — Kamala said:So it’s a wonderful and important question. I, you know, my background was as a prosecutor, and I was also the elected attorney general for two terms of the border state. So this is not a theoretical issue for me. This is something I’ve actually worked on.

One of the accepted media tales about the Republican Party is that because Donald Trump dominates it politically and stylistically, he also dominates its policymaking process. There are several examples where this hasn’t been true, both during his presidency and after it — but perhaps none more prominent than the TikTok debate on Capitol Hill, which resulted in that modern rarity of a sweeping 352-65 bipartisan vote in the House last week, a vote immediately applauded by populist conservative leaders such as Missouri senator Josh Hawley and institutions such as the Heritage Foundation.

Congress struck a major blow against TikTok's Chinese ownership Thursday morning, by passing the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which would require parent company ByteDance to sell its US entity within six months in order to retain access to American app stores and web hosting services. The bill, passed by a 352-65 margin, now heads to the Senate. It offered a rare time that former president Donald Trump found himself allied with progressive members of the Squad in opposition, while Representatives Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries joined forces in voting for the bill, which would help combat the espionage concerns that intelligence officials in the Biden administration have repeatedly raised.