The biggest news of the day should once again be about DOGE.
A new Executive Order was passed a few minutes ago.
It empowers DOGE to spearhead the complete reorganization of the federal government🧵
The first part of this Order is simple:
The OMB will put out a plan to make the federal workforce smaller and more efficient, including a stipulation that agencies must remove four existing employees for each new hire, with some exceptions.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
But that's not even the big part yet.
Third, agency heads will prepare for a massive reduction in the federal workforce.
This workforce reduction will apply to employees not performing necessary and statutorily mandated functions, so if Congress isn't protecting your job, you're likely leaving.
Fourth, suitability judgments about the excepted service will be expanded.
People who do not meet certain legal obligations, people who do not certify NDA compliance, and people who steal or misuse government resources are deemed no longer suitable for employment in it.
Here's the really big part of this order. It's kind of buried down deep, but it's very important:
Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections, and offices to consolidate.
Putting this all together, what the Order entails is a massive reorganization of the federal workforce and the streamlining of the civil service to make its operation line up with the goals of DOGE.
Not only that, but it empowers DOGE by embedding Team Leads for oversight.
Couple this with the February 4 OPM memo on CIOs, and what we have is staggering:
The federal government will be centralized, stripped down, and more intimately controlled by the President and his delegates, with control enhanced via DOGE.
This is the biggest news of the day, and it's hard to overstate just how big it is.
Because the federal government has grown so unwieldy that no one can provide you with a semblance of an outline of it, measures like this may just be needed to tame the beast.
The biggest news of the day is not so much that @RobertKennedyJr was confirmed by the Senate, but what he's going to do next.
@realDonaldTrump just issued an Executive Order making it official:
America stands against chronic disease and closed science🧵
The first thing the EO does is outline the problem
It talks about how unhealthy America is, how unacceptable that is, and how we have a duty to change that
We do: Americans should not just be the richest people in the world, they should be the hottest, healthiest, and strongest
Now beyond outlining the problems America faces, the Order outlines some policy prerogatives that will be front-and-center during this new administration.
I want to preface something here: Regardless of what you think about the people involved, something here will make you happy
It seems shocking nowadays, but the best major American city for a young person to be in as late as 1980 was Detroit.
The Motor City was America's richest city, not too long ago. Plenty of you reading this will remember a prosperous, beautiful Detroit.
If you're in tech, you might have noticed that a disproportionate number of your friends are from Michigan, and specifically, from suburbs like Troy, Novi, Farmington, Royal Oak, Rochester, and so on.
When Detroit went, so did the reasons for talented young people to stay.
Antibiotics are one of those things where I'm a hypocrite about policy.
I think I should be able to stock up, but also that most people should still have to go to the doctor for a prescription as-needed.
I want to avoid what happens in the developing world:
In the developing world, antibiotics are widely available, with little if any regulations over them. And this makes total sense, because there aren't that many doctors. Poor countries, few doctors per capita, limited access to by-the-book healthcare...
Loads of self-medication!
That self-medication results in lots of people taking an informal approach to medication usage. For example, if you buy a bunch of antibiotics in India, you might get them in a bag that has a reminder to finish your dose printed on it, even if you feel better before it's through.
On the left, you can see a map of corruption indexed by the number of mob crimes per 100,000. On the right, you can see corruption indexed by how much people steal from the public purse.
And in the middle, a map of inbreeding.
Clannish people do clannish crimes.
Though it's noted in the image, I want to reiterate that the corruption measure on the right is reverse-coded, so higher values indicate lower corruption.
The correlations with consanguinity are 0.65 and -0.52, and they hold up splitting the country in half and in other specs.
Outside of Italy, in the wider world, corruption perceptions also relate to consanguinity.
The correlation is high, and far from perfect, but both measures contain error, so keep that in mind.
The largest price-fixing operation in U.S. history took place when @tevapharm hired a woman to do "price increase implementation."
Through LinkedIn & Facebook, she organized a multi-billion dollar cartel, singlehandedly increasing generic drug prices.
There are lessons here🧵
When the cartel started, the companies in question started filing ANDAs, the FDA's "Abbreviated New Drug Applications" to start selling a generic version of an existing drug.
You can see that the involved parties started filing and getting approvals en masse.
When the log(price) hikes are stratified across markets, we see that the cartel was either better able to or more greatly desired to keep prices elevated in smaller markets.
Which makes sense! When the drug is rare, it's easier to successfully collude.