When she's not claiming that her opposition controls the weather or accusing her own party of covering up sexual assault, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is gearing up to work in President-elect Donald Trump's second term, and she has some novel ideas about bringing down the deficit.
Greene has been tapped by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new House subcommittee working with the pair's not-yet-created Department of Government Efficiency. During a stop by Fox News on Sunday, Greene gave a glimpse at the sort of line items the government-budget-slashing department would focus on.
"It's all over," Greene said of supposed government waste. "We'll be looking at everything from government-funded media programs like NPR that spread nothing but Democrat propaganda...all kinds of programs that don't help the American people."
The statement led "defund NPR" to trend briefly on Musk-owned social media app X. In truth, NPR receives very little of its budget directly from the federal government. How exactly to calculate its funding is up for debate as money granted to local public radio stations via the government-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting is frequently used to pay for the rights to air NPR-produced national programming locally. However, the conception of NPR as an entity that only exists thanks to government largesse is false.
To hear tell from experts, it wouldn't be the first time that the newly minted DOGE had a surface-level understanding of government programs they hoped to cut. The Center for American Progress' Bobby Kogan told Salon earlier this week that DOGE leadership's proposal to cut all programs whose spending authorizations had lapsed betrayed a "fundamentally superficial" understanding of how government budgets work.
'Let's get rid of unauthorized spending' is the sort of thing that you might see in a Facebook meme," Kogan said."People have this idea of just huge and absurd amounts of government waste, and it's just not borne out in the data."
No_Clue_7894 on November 24th, 2024 at 21:52 UTC »
That’s straight out of Victor Orban Play book.
Orban has an English-language think tank called the Danube Institute, which has a formal agreement with Heritage to work with them on projects. Orban has bragged several times in Hungarian — most recently a couple of weeks ago — that he has designed a lot of the Trump program.
In his first three years in office, Orban passed — like 10,000, 15,000 pages of new laws.
Everybody got attacked at once.
They put in place a media regulator that started cracking down on dissident media.
They put in place a new system for appointing judges to take over the judiciary.
They fired a big chunk of the civil sector and put in their own people. Everybody had an ox that was being gored.
By the blitz approach, where everybody gets attacked at once, it encourages everybody to focus only on the thing that’s closest to them.
You can see that Trump is adopting this blitz strategy. Look at the speed with which Trump is rolling out these nominations. This is not going to be the chaotic Trump Version One.
GrilledCassadilla on November 24th, 2024 at 21:05 UTC »
Pretty funny since NPR has tried so hard this past election season to appear unbiased, to the point where they were sane washing Trumps behavior.
And of course MAGA will still view them as a “leftist threat” that needs destroyed. Proof that comprising with these people is not an option.
You give these people an inch and they will take a mile.
iforgotmymittens on November 24th, 2024 at 21:04 UTC »
And what would you say you do for the American people, Marge?