We'll be okay as long as the Silicon Valley grown-up are in charge -- Greenland edition

I'll try to come back to this one with one or two more detailed posts, but for now, here are a few quick observations.

1. This goes a long way toward explaining why the conquest of Greenland remains such a high priority for the White House. I suspect that most people assumed this was just a personal, passing obsession with Trump, when in fact it appears to have considerable support among his backers.

2. The assumption that the sane and sober PayPal Mafia and their hand-picked vice president would be a moderating and stabilizing influence on the administration was always based on a profound misunderstanding of who these people are.

3. The discussion of Greenland's mineral resources was, for me, perhaps the most chilling part. Just coming out and saying we should take them over because they have nice stuff strips away any pretense of justification.

4. Thiel et al. have had this dream for a long time. From Wired (paywalled but discussed here):

THE SEASTEADING INSTITUTE was the toast of tech entrepreneurs when it received financial backing from venture capitalist Peter Thiel in 2008. Its mission was to build a manmade island nation where inventors could work free of heavy-handed government interference. One early rendering shows an island raised on concrete stilts in eerily calm waters. [Spoiler alert: it turned out that the open ocean in the middle of international waters were seldom eerily calm. -- MP]] The buildings atop the platform resemble nothing so much as the swanky tech campus of an entrepreneur’s ultimate dream: No sign of land or civilization in sight. The island, despite appearing strapped for square footage, has room for a full-size swimming pool with deck lounges.

...

Thiel’s reassessment marks a clear departure from tech culture’s unflinching confidence in its ability to self-govern. In recent years a number of prominent entrepreneurs have urged Silicon Valley to create a less inhibited place for its work. Larry Page called on technologists to “set aside a small part of the world” to test new ideas. Elon Musk has aimed at colonizing Mars. And venture capitalist Tim Draper made a proposal to divide Silicon Valley into its own state. But aside from the continued growth of full-service tech campuses such as Google’s and Facebook’s, very little has been accomplished in the way of true societal independence.

One quick side note. While California Forever does have a clear libertarian influence and is modeled after the far-right, white-flight enclave that gave us Matt Gaetz, unlike the Greenland proposal, it is less of a political statement and more of a classic real estate scheme taken from the oldest page in the playbook: Quietly, or even secretly, scoop up land on the cheap, then manipulate the system to get it rezoned. It's a classic because it may be the simplest and easiest way to make a huge windfall profit without breaking any laws (at least most of the time).

Mack DeGeurin writing for Popular Science:

Who is behind the freedom city? 

The Reuters report cites claims Howery, Thiel, and prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreesen are amongst the most prominent names backing the Greenland effort. Howery, who still needs the US Senate to confirm his position as ambassador to Denmark, is reportedly a long-time friend of billionaire Elon Musk and formerly founded a venture capital firm with Thiel. Thiel, meanwhile, has emerged as one of the loudest supporters, both vocally and financially, of the “Seasteading” movement, which is trying to build floating, stateless utopia cities in the ocean. Andressen, notably, is also part of a tech-investor consortium California Forever looking to build the city in Solano County.  Each of these efforts—along with others like the already existing city Próspera in Honduras—are united by libertarian political ideals, a focus on technological development, and lots of money.  

Rumors around the proposed Greenland city date back at least to November 2024 when Praxis co-founder Dryden Brown fired off a series of tweets explaining how he had tried to purchase land in Greenland. Praxis is a self-described “internet-native nation” crypto startup with a stated goal of “restor[ing] Western civilization,” and has reportedly received over $525 million in funding to start building out new cities. Brown told Reuters he has since been approached by several companies to explore establishing a new city on Greenland.

 

Why the obsession with Greenland? 

The idea of the U.S. acquiring Greenland, once widely regarded as a joke during the first Trump administration, has evolved into a serious U.S. foreign policy objective. The president campaigned on the issue during the 2024 election and has since doubled down, despite repeated assertions from Danish officials that the island isn’t for sale. Nevertheless, Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, visited a U.S. military installation on the island in March 2024 and delivered a speech urging Greenlanders to voluntarily cut ties with Denmark. (Recent polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Greenland residents oppose the idea of possible annexation by the U.S.) President Trump, meanwhile, has not ruled out the possibility of taking the territory by force.

So why all the obsession with a mostly uninhabitable island with a population of around 57,000? Supporters of Greenland development laid out their arguments during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation hearing earlier this year. During the hearing, Texas Mineral Resources Board Chairman Anthony Marchese claimed Greenland’s coastline holds what is “indisputably” one of the greatest collections of minerals found in a single jurisdiction. That includes rare earth minerals, which are crucial to powering a plethora of modern consumer electronics devices.

Of course, the chances of people relying on their 401(k)s breaking even are much slimmer

 

 

 

 Though it's highly unlikely that any of them will ever be anything but obscenely rich, most of Trump's billionaire supporters (of which there are alarmingly many) have found the administration’s economic policies—or lack thereof—incredibly costly, both in absolute and relative terms.

 

Trump keeps finding new ways to terrify Wall Street | CNN Business
Allison Morrow

After months of swearing up and down he wouldn’t fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Trump on Thursday reversed course and said Powell’s “termination” couldn’t come soon enough. Stocks fell sharply.

Then US stock traders had a nice three-day weekend — the first sunny and warm spring weather New York City has seen this year — to ponder whether Trump was serious. Perhaps Thursday’s threat was just a bit of bluster from a president prone to tantrums — a one-off social media post that his more stable advisers will surely try to rein in to avoid an all-out panic.

Or…not.

Shortly after the US stock market opened Monday morning, Trump once again attacked Powell for ostensibly not cutting interest rates fast enough. Stocks immediately tumbled and the US dollar fell to its lowest level in three years.

While Trump’s tariff plan has been disruptive, the uncertainty it created had, to an extent, become priced in. Markets famously hate uncertainty, but the 90-day pause on the administration’s most aggressive tariffs offered a measure of reassurance that Trump may relent if there’s enough of a negative reaction.

Attacking the independence of the Federal Reserve is a new level of recklessness that few thought possible. But now even Kevin Hassett, the White House adviser who literally wrote a book arguing against firing the Fed chair, is saying openly that the administration is discussing whether to do so before Powell’s term ends a year from now.

 

At the same time, those plutocrats who happen to be first in line find themselves on the verge of huge, perhaps unprecedented, windfalls from massive and blatantly corrupt government boondoggles.

Among the “My yacht has a yacht” wealthy, it's safe to say that there will be winners and losers, with the latter greatly outnumbering the former. The one name that seems safely in that first group is Peter Thiel. The outcome for Elon Musk, however, is much more uncertain. On one hand, he appears to be in the pole position for billions upon billions of dollars in sweetheart government contracts. On the other hand, he is likely to lose hundreds of billions through the damage that has been done to Tesla. It could well take a quarter of a trillion dollars in graft just to break even.

Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro reporting for ProPublica:

GSA is eying Ramp to get a piece of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay. In recent weeks, Trump appointees at GSA have been moving quickly to tap Ramp for a charge card pilot program worth up to $25 million, sources told ProPublica, even as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency highlights the multitudes of contracts it has canceled across federal agencies.

Founded six years ago, Ramp is backed by some of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley. One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who was one of Trump’s earliest supporters in the tech world and who spent millions aiding Vice President JD Vance’s Ohio Senate run. Thiel’s firm, Founders Fund, has invested in seven separate rounds of funding for Ramp, according to data from PitchBook. Last year Thiel said there was “no one better positioned” to build products at the intersection of AI and finance.

To date, the company has raised about $2 billion in venture capital, according to startup tracking website Crunchbase, much of it from firms with ties to Trump and Musk. Ramp’s other major financial backers include Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures; Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and 8VC, a firm run by Musk allies. [Specifically Joe Lonsdale -- MP]

The special attention Gruenbaum paid to Ramp raised flags inside and outside the agency. “This goes against all the normal contracting safeguards that are set up to prevent contracts from being awarded based on who you know,” said Scott Amey, the general counsel with the bipartisan Project on Government Oversight. He said career civil servants should lead the process to pick the best choice for taxpayers.

...

Rabois, one of Ramp’s earliest investors, is part of an influential group of tech titans known as the “PayPal Mafia.” Leaders of the early payments company include several influential players surrounding the Trump administration, including Musk and Thiel. Rabois and his husband, Jacob Helberg, hosted a fundraiser that pulled in upwards of $1 million for Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to media reports. Trump has nominated Helberg for a senior role at the State Department.

 

 And it gets worse.

 Mike Stone and Marisa Taylor reporting for Reuters

WASHINGTON, April 17 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's SpaceX and two partners have emerged as frontrunners to win a crucial part of President Donald Trump's "Golden Dome" missile defense shield, six people familiar with the matter said.

...

All three companies were founded by entrepreneurs who have been major political supporters of Trump. Musk has donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump, and now serves as a special adviser to the president working to cut government spending through his Department of Government Efficiency.

...

One of the sources familiar with the talks described them as "a departure from the usual acquisition process. There's an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government."

SpaceX and Musk have declined to comment on whether Musk is involved in any of the discussions or negotiations involving federal contracts with his businesses.

 But, as Josh Marshall points out, that's not the jaw-dropping part.

 

 

Though not directly related to the IRS story, I have to mention that the "spend more time with his families" joke has gotten much more relevant recently

Remember a couple of weeks ago when everyone assured us that Musk was phasing out his role in government? (discussed here Is Elon stepping back to spend more time with his families?)

Not so much...

From the Guardian via LGM:

 
    Donald Trump is replacing the acting commissioner of the US Internal Revenue Service after treasury secretary Scott Bessent reportedly complained to the president that the agency head had been appointed without his knowledge and under the instruction of Doge leader Elon Musk.

    According to a report from the New York Times published on Friday, Bessent believed that the Doge head “had done an end-run around him” to get Gary Shapley installed as the interim head of the IRS, despite the fact that the IRS reports to Bessent. The report cited five anonymous sources with knowledge of the situation.

 ...

On social media, the conflict between Bessent and Musk was visible as Musk elevated a post from far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer in which she accuses Bessent of collaborating with a “pro-impeachment and pro-censorship Trump hater”, referring to the businessman John Hope Bryant. Musk agreed with Loomer, calling the collaboration “troubling”, on X, the platform he owns.  

Here's a longer quote from Loomer on Bryant:

This DEI hire by Scott Bessent just wants to, you know, proclaim that Donald Trump should resign or that he should be impeached because he was fighting for election integrity and fighting against the stolen election of 2020. I thought that we were getting rid of DEI, and then we get to have these uppity Blacks just walk into the Trump administration and start making demands and acting like they run the Treasury department, and that they should have, like, an active role in the Trump administration while they sit around and try to undermine every initiative that Donald Trump has worked on.

Yes, she did just unironically use the U-word.

For a bit of context...

 While we can debate whether his influence is waxing or waning, Elon Musk clearly still exercises unprecedented power for someone in his position. Even as broadly and badly defined as his duties with DOGE are—picking the head of the IRS still manages to go well beyond them. In at least this one sense, Elon Musk’s role is larger than we realized.

Furthermore, he appears to be trying to entrench—or even expand—that power by taking out rivals within the administration. For anyone familiar with the history of Tesla or the company eventually known as PayPal, this is the exact opposite of surprising.

With the Cybertruck on its way to becoming perhaps the most disastrous vehicle launch in history, and with new stories of corruption involving him and the rest of the so-called PayPal Mafia continuing to break, he may have decided that the only way to maintain his fortune—which currently rests on a precariously overvalued Tesla and SpaceX—is to put himself in a position where he can divert billions upon billions of dollars of government money into his enterprises.

While it sometimes seems like the markets, instead of hating * uncertainty, have come around to seeing it as an excuse for optimism—as when they responded with a surge of enthusiasm to the indefinite and often contradictory claims about the tariff pause—at some point, investors are going to have to face reality and start pricing in the cost of palace intrigue, policy turmoil, and an increasingly dysfunctional government. The possibility of Musk forcing out the Treasury Secretary might not lead to the level of uncertainty you’d get from Trump firing Jerome Powell, but it’s still a reminder that, as incoherent and chaotic as our fiscal policies have been over the past few months, they can still get worse.

* I had ChatGPT proofread this and I didn't notice it had changed "hating" to "heeding" for some unfathomable reason. Always double check the LLM.

UPDATE: Eight hours after we posted "at some point, investors are going to have to face reality and start pricing in the cost of palace intrigue, policy turmoil, and an increasingly dysfunctional government."

And it makes parallel parking a breeze.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy mocking stupid people as much as the next guy (and possibly a little bit more than that), but it takes its toll—particularly when the ineptitude is being applied to something I enjoy seeing done well.

When I want to remind myself how cool actual engineering can be, I often check out relevant videos from creators I trust on YouTube. That "trust" qualifier is important. As most of you know, the platform has become an absolute SEO cesspool. That's why I'm very careful about where I click—and even more careful about what I recommend on the blog.

This segment from Jeremy Fielding introduced me to a simple but truly elegant innovation. If you're not already familiar with it, you should check it out. It's cool as hell.


The Mecanum Wheel



If you enjoy this sort of thing, I also highly recommend Tom Scott and SmarterEveryday—especially the latter’s absolutely essential lecture on the issues with the Artemis moon mission.

For a narcissist with a messiah complex, this is actually pretty much on brand.

As someone who's been following the career of Elon Musk for a number of years, I found this kind of surprising with respect to how far things have gone—but by no means shocking. Between him inching closer to explicit eugenics and the general cult-leader vibe you get from quotes like “Some hate humanity, but I love humanity so much” and the repeated claims that he is saving America / Western civilization / the species itself (seriously, he talks like this all the time), how can you not at least halfway see something like this coming?

"Strauss and the war on data" was one of our most successful early posts but I would dearly love never to have another excuse to revisit it.

 NOAA 

From the NYT via LGM:

President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to end nearly all of the climate research conducted by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), one of the country’s premier climate science agencies, according to an internal budget document seen by Science. The document indicates the White House is ready to ask Congress to eliminate NOAA’s climate research centers and cut hundreds of federal and academic climate scientists who track and study human-driven global warming.

The administration is also preparing to ask for deep cuts to NASA’s science programs, according to media reports today.

The proposed NOAA cuts—which could be altered before the administration sends its 2026 budget request to Congress in the coming weeks—would cut funding for the agency’s research arm, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), to just over $171 million, a drop of $485 million. Any remaining research funding from previously authorized budgets would be moved to other programs. “At this funding level, OAR is eliminated as a line office,” the document states.

If approved by Congress, the plan would represent a huge blow to efforts to understand climate change, says Craig McLean, OAR’s longtime director who retired in 2022. “It wouldn’t just gut it. It would shut it down.” Scientifically, he adds, obliterating OAR would send the United States back to the 1950s—all because the Trump administration doesn’t like the answers to scientific questions NOAA has been studying for a half-century, according to McLean.

The administration’s plan would “eliminate all funding for climate, weather, and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes,” says the document, which reflects discussions between NOAA and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) about the agency’s 2026 budget request. Currently, NOAA operates 10 research labs around the country. They include influential ocean research centers in Florida and Washington state; five atmospheric science labs in Boulder, Colorado, and Maryland; and a severe storm lab in Oklahoma. It also operates the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in New Jersey, the birthplace of weather and climate modeling, as well as a lab in Michigan devoted to the Great Lakes. The agency further funds cooperative institutes, which support a large collection of academic scientists who work closely with the NOAA labs.

The proposal would cut NOAA’s competitive climate research grants program, which awards roughly $70 million a year to academic scientists. It would end support for collecting regional climate data and information, often used by farmers and other industries. And it would terminate the agency’s National Oceanographic Partnership Program and college and aquaculture sea grant programs, which support a host of research efforts.

NOAA officials still have time to persuade OMB to alter the request, but NOAA sources said it is unlikely to substantially change. But this proposal is only the first stage of the budget process; Congress will have the final word in setting NOAA’s spending.

It will certainly face strong opposition from Democrats. “Trump’s budget plan for NOAA is both outrageous and dangerous,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren (D–CA), the ranking member of the U.S. House of Representatives’s science committee, in a statement to Science. “This administration’s hostility towards research and rejection of climate science will have the consequence of eviscerating the weather forecasting capabilities that this plan claims to preserve.”

At NASA, science programs also face severe cuts, according to details first reported by Ars Technica. The White House is considering requesting a nearly 50% cut to NASA science’s office, down to an overall budget of $3.9 billion. According to Ars Technica, the plan calls for: “a two-thirds cut to astrophysics, down to $487 million; a greater than two-thirds cut to heliophysics, down to $455 million; a greater than 50 percent cut to Earth science, down to $1.033 billion; and a 30 percent cut to Planetary science, down to $1.929 billion.”

Such NASA cuts would require ending the operations of a huge host of earth science satellites. They could also result in the closure of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which has thousands of employees and is one of the agency’s premier centers for earth science research. The cuts would also end plans for Mars Sample Return, the DAVINCI mission to Venus, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is almost fully assembled.

At NOAA, the agency’s budget would be cut by $1.7 billion, the OMB memo said. The proposal also seeks to cut the National Ocean Service in half, with “no funding for Integrated Ocean Observing System Regional Observations, Competitive Research, Coastal Zone Management Grants, National Coastal Resilience Fund, or the National Estuarine Research Reserve System.” The requests would also close the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science.

Other NOAA divisions would also be hit. OMB is seeking to radically rework the next-generation geostationary weather satellites planned by the agency’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS). That includes cutting its planned atmospheric pollution and ocean color instruments because, as the document puts it, the satellites will deliver exclusively “weather” data. It could also cut the infrared sounder, which tracks changes in the vertical distribution of temperature and moistures, catching storms before they form, and a lightning mapper.

The request would also cut funding for the National Center for Environmental Information—the nation’s primary archive of climate data—by $18 million. And it trims mission support for NOAA’s satellites and data systems by $141 million, among many other proposals.

Though Republicans in the U.S. Congress have so far not shown much resistance to the administration, McLean expressed some hope that lawmakers will not approve these cuts, citing how much of NOAA spending is spread throughout their districts. But that’s not a sure thing, he says. “It’s a very different Congress today.” 

 

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Strauss and the war on data

The most important aspect of Randianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell themselves. "When you're successful, it's because other people are inferior to you." "When you fail, it's because inferior people persecute you (call it going Roark)." "One of these days you're going to run away and everyone who's been mean to you will be sorry."

The most important aspect of Straussianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell others. Having started from the assumption that traditional democracy can't work because most people aren't smart enough to handle the role of voter, the Straussians conclude that superior minds must, for the good of society, lie to and manipulate the masses.

Joseph and I have an ongoing argument about which school is worse, a question greatly complicated by the compatibility of the two systems and the overlap of believers and their tactics and objectives. Joseph generally argues that Rand is worse (without, of course, defending Strauss) while I generally take the opposite position.

This week brought news that I think bolsters my case (though I suspect Joseph could easily turn it around to support his): one of the logical consequences of assuming typical voters can't evaluate information on their own is that data sources that are recognized as reliable are a threat to society. They can't be spun and they encourage people to make their own decisions.

To coin a phrase, if the masses can't handle the truth and need instead to be fed a version crafted by the elite to keep the people happy and doing what's best for them, the public's access to accurate, objective information has to be tightly controlled. With that in mind, consider the following from Jared Bernstein:

[D]ue to pressure from Republicans, the Congressional Research Service is withdrawing a report that showed the lack of correlation between high end tax cuts and economic growth.

The study, by economist Tom Hungerford, is of high quality, and is one I’ve cited here at OTE. Its findings are fairly common in the economics literature and the concerns raised by that noted econometrician Mitch McConnell are trumped up and bogus. He and his colleagues don’t like the findings because they strike at the supply-side arguments that they hold so dear.

And with Sandy still on everyone's mind, here's something from Menzie Chinn:

NOAA's programs are in function 300, Natural Resources and Environment, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and a range of conservation and natural resources programs. In the near term, function 300 would be 14.6 percent lower in 2014 in the Ryan budget according to the Washington Post. It quotes David Kendall of The Third Way as warning about the potential impact on weather forecasting: "'Our weather forecasts would be only half as accurate for four to eight years until another polar satellite is launched,' estimates Kendall. 'For many people planning a weekend outdoors, they may have to wait until Thursday for a forecast as accurate as one they now get on Monday. … Perhaps most affected would be hurricane response. Governors and mayors would have to order evacuations for areas twice as large or wait twice as long for an accurate forecast.'"

There are also attempts from prominent conservatives to delegitimize objective data:

Apparently, Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, is accusing the Bureau of Labor Statistics of manipulating the jobs report to help President Obama. Others seem to be adding their voices to this slanderous lie. It is simply outrageous to make such a claim and echoes the worrying general distrust of facts that seems to have swept segments of our nation. The BLS employment report draws on two surveys, one (the establishment survey) of 141,000 businesses and government agencies and the other (the household survey) of 60,000 households. The household survey is done by the Census Bureau on behalf of BLS. It’s important to note that large single-month divergences between the employment numbers in these two surveys (like the divergence in September) are just not that rare. EPI’s Elise Gould has a great paper on the differences between these two surveys.

BLS is a highly professional agency with dozens of people involved in the tabulation and analysis of these data. The idea that the data are manipulated is just completely implausible. Moreover, the data trends reported are clearly in line with previous monthly reports and other economic indicators (such as GDP). The key result was the 114,000 increase in payroll employment from the establishment survey, which was right in line with what forecasters were expecting. This was a positive growth in jobs but roughly the amount to absorb a growing labor force and maintain a stable, not falling, unemployment rate. If someone wanted to help the president, they should have doubled the job growth the report showed. The household survey was much more positive, showing unemployment falling from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. These numbers are more volatile month to month and it wouldn’t be surprising to see unemployment rise a bit next month. Nevertheless, there’s nothing implausible about the reported data. The household survey has shown greater job growth in the recovery than the establishment survey throughout the recovery. The labor force participation rate (the share of adults who are working or unemployed) increased to 63.6 percent, which is an improvement from the prior month but still below the 63.7 percent reported for July. All in all, there was nothing particularly strange about this month’s jobs reports—and certainly nothing to spur accusations of outright fraud.

We can also put many of the attacks against Nate Silver in this category.

Going back a few months, we had this from Businessweek:

The House Committee on Appropriations recently proposed cutting the Census budget to $878 million, $10 million below its current budget and $91 million less than the bureau’s request for the next fiscal year. Included in the committee number is a $20 million cut in funding for this year’s Economic Census, considered the foundation of U.S. economic statistics.

And Bruce Bartlett had a whole set of examples involving Newt Gingrich:

On Nov. 21, Newt Gingrich, who is leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination in some polls, attacked the Congressional Budget Office. In a speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Gingrich said the C.B.O. "is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated."

Mr. Gingrich's charge is complete nonsense. The former C.B.O. director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, now a Republican policy adviser, labeled the description "ludicrous." Most policy analysts from both sides of the aisle would say the C.B.O. is one of the very few analytical institutions left in government that one can trust implicitly.

It's precisely its deep reservoir of respect that makes Mr. Gingrich hate the C.B.O., because it has long stood in the way of allowing Republicans to make up numbers to justify whatever they feel like doing.

...

Mr. Gingrich has long had special ire for the C.B.O. because it has consistently thrown cold water on his pet health schemes, from which he enriched himself after being forced out as speaker of the House in 1998. In 2005, he wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Times berating the C.B.O., then under the direction of Mr. Holtz-Eakin, saying it had improperly scored some Gingrich-backed proposals. At a debate on Nov. 5, Mr. Gingrich said, "If you are serious about real health reform, you must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies."
...                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Because Mr. Gingrich does know more than most politicians, the main obstacles to his grandiose schemes have always been Congress's professional staff members, many among the leading authorities anywhere in their areas of expertise.                                                                                                                                                                                                

To remove this obstacle, Mr. Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it. When he became speaker in 1995, Mr. Gingrich moved quickly to slash the budgets and staff of the House committees, which employed thousands of professionals with long and deep institutional memories.

Of course, when party control in Congress changes, many of those employed by the previous majority party expect to lose their jobs. But the Democratic committee staff members that Mr. Gingrich fired in 1995 weren't replaced by Republicans. In essence, the positions were simply abolished, permanently crippling the committee system and depriving members of Congress of competent and informed advice on issues that they are responsible for overseeing.

Mr. Gingrich sold his committee-neutering as a money-saving measure. How could Congress cut the budgets of federal agencies if it wasn't willing to cut its own budget, he asked. In the heady days of the first Republican House since 1954, Mr. Gingrich pretty much got whatever he asked for.

In addition to decimating committee budgets, he also abolished two really useful Congressional agencies, the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The former brought high-level scientific expertise to bear on legislative issues and the latter gave state and local governments an important voice in Congressional deliberations.

The amount of money involved was trivial even in terms of Congress's budget. Mr. Gingrich's real purpose was to centralize power in the speaker's office, which was staffed with young right-wing zealots who followed his orders without question. Lacking the staff resources to challenge Mr. Gingrich, the committees could offer no resistance and his agenda was simply rubber-stamped.

Unfortunately, Gingrichism lives on. Republican Congressional leaders continually criticize every Congressional agency that stands in their way. In addition to the C.B.O., one often hears attacks on the Congressional Research Service, the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Government Accountability Office.

Lately, the G.A.O. has been the prime target. Appropriators are cutting its budget by $42 million, forcing furloughs and cutbacks in investigations that identify billions of dollars in savings yearly. So misguided is this effort that Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma and one of the most conservative members of Congress, came to the agency's defense.

In a report issued by his office on Nov. 16, Senator Coburn pointed out that the G.A.O.'s budget has been cut by 13 percent in real terms since 1992 and its work force reduced by 40 percent -- more than 2,000 people. By contrast, Congress's budget has risen at twice the rate of inflation and nearly doubled to $2.3 billion from $1.2 billion over the last decade.

Mr. Coburn's report is replete with examples of budget savings recommended by G.A.O. He estimated that cutting its budget would add $3.3 billion a year to government waste, fraud, abuse and inefficiency that will go unidentified.

For good measure, Mr. Coburn included a chapter in his report on how Congressional committees have fallen down in their responsibility to exercise oversight. The number of hearings has fallen sharply in both the House and Senate. Since the beginning of the Gingrich era, they have fallen almost in half, with the biggest decline coming in the 104th Congress (1995-96), his first as speaker.

In short, Mr. Gingrich's unprovoked attack on the C.B.O. is part of a pattern. He disdains the expertise of anyone other than himself and is willing to undercut any institution that stands in his way. Unfortunately, we are still living with the consequences of his foolish actions as speaker.

We could really use the Office of Technology Assessment at a time when Congress desperately needs scientific expertise on a variety of issues in involving health, energy, climate change, homeland security and many others. And given the enormous stress suffered by state and local governments as they are forced by Washington to do more with less, an organization like the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations would be invaluable.