It’s Full Throttle for The Trump Administration This Week – Top 3 Takeaways – February 24th, 2025
- Nonstop. Today marks five weeks since Donald Trump once again became President of the United States. There continues to not be a single day that’s goes to waste. Yes, on Sunday the 45th and 47th president stole the show at CPAC – however his administration continued to be so much more than just talk. Notably, over the weekend, Elon Musk and team DOGE – at the president’s direction made the most substantive move yet to downsize and rightsize the federal government. This came with DOGE delivering this note to federal government employees. The email delivered from the Office of Personal Management with the headline: What did you do last week? Within that email it said this... Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager. Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments. The deadline for submission is just before midnight Monday night (today). The note gained national attention when Elon Musk added that failure to respond will be taken as a resignation. Now notably, the email to federal employees doesn’t actually say that – however Musk’s public admission certainly implies that’s what's in play here. And speaking of playing – I decided to play along with how I would respond if I received a similar note from my employer. The top five bullets of what I did last week would be these... 1) Created and published 20 stories. 2) Created, produced and published 21 podcasts 3) Performed 20 hours of live radio. 4) Created produced and published five videos for social media 5) Programmed 336 hours of radio across multiple radio stations. Last week was just a normal week. The hardest thing for me to do is to prioritize what to include because much of what I do is left out. I suspect that if you were to do the same for your work from last week – your challenge would be the same...and that’s the point. As I illustrated last week- The federal government has been running 667% more poorly than just your run-of-the-mill business. That doesn’t necessarily imply that the average private sector employee is nearly 7x more productive than the average federal worker – the inefficiencies could mostly be in efficient processes – but then again it might. Either way the time has come for business as usual in the federal government to stop and that’s exactly what this is. Today should be an interesting day and this week and interesting week as we see how this will play. As we’ve discussed, Elon Musk laid off 80% of the employees he inherited from Twitter when he bought it. By the time he established X, he had a better product that was considerably more efficient. The cuts aren’t expected to be anywhere that deep within the federal government. But who wants to bet that we can’t do much more with much less within the federal bureaucracy? As for what happened last week...
- A record-breaking pace for Trump administration policy continued. So, about that... We had 5 new executive orders – including an order defunding any entity which uses taxpayer dollars to facilitate illegal immigration policies, in addition to President Trump’s third DOGE related order granting the entity growing authority as it continues to reveal rampant waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer money. Trump has now issued a total of 73 executive orders, or already over a third of the total he signed during the entire four years of his prior presidency. By way of comparison Trump has been enacting policy at a rate that’s greater than double that of Joe Biden at the same stage in his presidency and is greater than 3x faster than he worked at the same stage in his first administration. Trump saw three more members of cabinet confirmed: Howard Lutnick for Commerce Secretary, Kelly Loeffler as SBA Administrator and Kash Patel as FBI Director. Also, importantly, all cabinet members that have come up for a vote have been confirmed. Trump now has 18 of his 22 cabinet members requiring senate confirmation, confirmed – Biden & Trump in his first term, only had seven cabinet members in place by the same date. And while the Trump administration is remaking policy through an overhauled cabinet and executive orders –
- There's no slowing down the work at the border – most recently border activity is down 95% from the Biden administration (and improvement from 93% at this time last week). However, where Trump hasn’t felt there’s been fast enough movement is with deportations back over the border. Late last week the administration removed ICE’s acting director after deportation numbers were coming in well short of the Trump’s team targets. Instead of deporting 1,500 or so illegal immigrants per day – the total has still been pacing below a thousand. So now a new director is in place with a goal to significantly pick up the pace starting this week. Speaking of slowing down a bit, DOGE savings did too last week as total savings now stand at just over $51 billion in savings, or about two billion more than last week. It turns out it was true that one item initially reported by DOGE to be $8 billion in savings was in fact just $8 million in savings. Still savings per taxpayer is up to $350 – not bad for five weeks. This week figures to pick up the DOGE pace as well once again with the employment initiative in play.