The wannabees at work

The really insidious thing about the DOGE phenomenon, wherein a team of hooligans under the direction of a hostile plutocrat wreak havoc on the basic physical and social infrastructure that makes life possible for most Americans, is that.. in addition to this... the movement spawns hundreds of immitators in state and local governments accross the country.

Last month we noted that Jeff Landry has formed a DOGEesque committee to attack state services. At last notice, they were writing a report. A week ago, we learned that St. Tammany Parish is getting a DOGE committee of its own. With the New Orleans municipal elections right around the corner, it also looks like Pres Kabacoff is having his own Project 2025 drawn up. (Let's keep an eye on that one, yes?)  In January, we caught this profile of Jeff Landry advisor/patron and Harvey Gulf President Shane Guidry where he explicitly compared himself and his role in the administration to that of Elon Musk. 

Today we find Guidry behind a move by Landry to dismantle South Louisiana's flood protection. After Katrina, a grass roots movement of residents succeeded in taking corrupt and negligent levee boards out of the hands of political cronies, de-emphasizing their police powers, and professionalizing their core flood risk management function. This week, three board members resigned in protest of Landry's attempts to reverse those reforms.  They addressed their resignation letters to Guidry. 

The letter was signed jointly by board members Roy Arrigo, Thomas Fierke, and William Settoon. It is addressed not to Roy Carubba, the president of the board, but to Shane Guidry, Landry’s informal adviser in New Orleans, who is not on the levee authority’s board but has been overseeing reforms at the agency.

It alleges the agency's new leadership had diminished “morale, readiness and focus on flood protection.”

Guidry thanked the departing board members for their service. He also stressed that, under his guidance, the agency was “moving in a better direction to make sure that all flood control assets are maintained properly, which they haven’t been, and working properly, which they haven’t been,” though neither Guidry nor Carubba has provided any evidence that the city’s flood control infrastructure is faulty.

And now we're getting wild unsubstantiated assertions about what does and doesn't work from unofficial administrators of dubious legal authority.  Our wannabe DOGEs are rounding into form.

Somebody really should do something

The villains are pretty much monologing their evil plans here.  Maybe someone will hear it?  Would that matter? 

An internal Social Security Administration (SSA) memo sent earlier this month suggested that a proposed change that requires claimants to prove their identity online could cause “challenges for vulnerable populations” and strain the agency’s resources to the breaking point, according to a report in Popular Information.

Nobody actually lives here

It's getting more difficult to hide the truth about this place.  

New Orleans and its suburbs have lost population at a faster rate than any other large metropolitan area in the country since 2020, according to new Census Bureau estimates released Thursday.

It's the second year in a row the New Orleans area has topped the list of fastest shrinking large metros.

The New Orleans area lost more than 39,000 people between 2020 and 2024, a decline off nearly 3.9%.

I suppose 2020 can be considered a turning point for many things. And it's fair to think of that as a transitional moment from a rapidly gentrifying Post-Katrina New Orleans, where the communities washed away by the flood were replaced by vacation rental amusements, to the Post-Covid ghost town where it just feels like the the wiring is being stripped out of everything. 

But, really, there is a consistent narrative flowing through both of these phases. As always, the root causes of the current hellscape trace back to what came before it. In our case, that's a long story about a city's ruling class and the deliberate choices it made in the wake of a disaster to change the city "demographically, geographically and politically," as one prominent member of the Rex Organization said at the time.  We've watched that process fairly closely over the years. The archives of this blog should show that farily well.  I have no idea if any of that mattered, though. 

In any case, the stated aim of the gentry, then, was to build a smaller, whiter, city with fewer poor people.  Congratulations to them on their success. 

 

"Good news"

 We live under a terror regime. 

The Ali family had been on ICE’s radar, facing removal, for some time. They had a pending application for a temporary reprieve from deportation when, in mid-January, a case manager working for an ICE contractor asked them for a meeting at a nearby office, promising “good news.”

For months the family had been monitored through one of ICE’s “alternatives to detention” programs, which use various technologies to track immigrants who are not detained and pose little or no security threat. The case manager said the family didn’t need to be under surveillance anymore. 

When they arrived ICE agents were waiting for them. Less than 36 hours later, they were in Honduras. 

While deceptive, such “ruses,” as they are referred to in internal agency memos and operational manuals are neither illegal nor new. But some immigrants’ rights advocates said they are concerned that agents will increase their use of ruses under Trump, creating chaos in immigrant communities.

"Work look"

 Every day I die a little bit

As the Office of Personnel Management oversaw the layoffs of thousands of federal workers and pressed others to justify their positions, the agency’s chief spokesperson repeatedly used her office for a side hustle: aspiring Instagram fashion influencer.

In at least a dozen videos filmed in her OPM office, political appointee McLaurine Pinover modeled her outfit choices for the day, while directing followers from her Instagram account to a website that could earn her commissions on clothing sales.

On the same day OPM sent a government-wide memo pressing federal officials to identify barriers they faced in their work to “swiftly terminate poor performing employees,” Pinover posted a video blowing a kiss to the camera with the caption “work look” and the hashtag #dcinfluencer. Her Instagram account linked to a site where viewers could buy the $475 purple skirt she wore in the video.

 

Get this off my desk

There are a lot of reasons why elected office holders behave the way they do. But one fundamental razor for understanding them I find useful is assume their primary motivating question  with regard to any issue is, "How do we get this off of my desk?"  We're about to find out if Senate Democrats will extend this principle to... well... the entirety of their constitutional mandate. 

But most important, the bill grants an open invitation to Trump and Elon Musk to continue to ignore Congress and toss out disfavored spending. Vice President JD Vance, while selling the deal to House Republicans, stated outright that “Trump would continue cutting federal funding with his Department of Government Efficiency initiative and pursue impoundment—that is, holding back money appropriated by Congress.” This has been reiterated by others in the Trump administration.

In fact, the House Republican bill gives the president more leeway to move money around. It appropriates money for things that Musk has eliminated, meaning that money can operate as a floating slush fund for Trump’s priorities, as long as the courts don’t roll back the illegal impoundments.

Think about what this means. The Trump administration is saying that they will sign a bill appropriating specific funding, and then go about cutting funding anyway. If you’re a member of Congress, you’re being told that your work product doesn’t matter, that the constitutional power of the purse doesn’t matter, and that there’s no guarantee that anything you pass will actually reach the people you serve.

To most modern politicians, that is a tempting offer. With no expectation that your office has any relevance to the work of governing, you are now free to focus on the real work of  raising money and being on TV a lot. This is an especially attractive proposition if you happen to be a member of the "opposition party."  Why bother with performing the frustrations of exerting your limited power when you can scale that back to simply performing. 

So far, only Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has committed to voting yes. But as Josh Marshall has documented at Talking Points Memo, a number of Senate Democrats have stated no position on the bill, leaving their options open. In general, senators have been hedging their bets until forced to make a decision. That time has come.

Credible sources indicate that the most likely Democrats to offer up the remaining seven votes to avoid a shutdown are Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Michael Bennet (D-CO), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Gary Peters (D-MI), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), and Mark Warner (D-VA).

Some Democrats seem to be consumed with Senate brain, worried that they would be blamed for a government shutdown. What they’re not understanding is that the Musk-Trump assault on government has created a kind of permanent government shutdown, where so-called nonessential personnel are fired and operations are deeply circumscribed. Why would any Democrat sign on to a bill making that state of affairs even more likely, out of fear of the same government shutdown that the Trump administration is locking into place anyway?

I'm a little harsher than David Dayen in that article.  I think Democrats understand what's happening perfectly well.  They're being offered a chance to avoid responsibility and are keen on taking it. That's just good political instincts. Your Social Security check didn't come? The bad people must have taken it from you. Meanwhile, now my job doesn't involve looking after Social Security anymore. One less thing I have to do.

Digging out from under

A stressful Carnival season, the collapse of the Republic, and a few bits of personal news have gotten us behind schedule in our endeavors to start writing stuff on the internet again. I still haven't even gotten all the Mardi Gras pictures uploaded yet.  For a visual representation of what this week feels like, here's a short video of the Krewe of Municipal Vehicles cleaning up after Tucks I shot on Saturday.  

More to come soon.