The biggest news today should probably be about one of the Executive Orders from yesterday evening.
Trust me, it's big.
The President just authorized DOGE to start cutting regulations🧵
This order starts off huge.
Remember those recently-created DOGE Team Leads going into every agency? They're going to work with agency heads and the OMB to review all of the regulations across a number of huge categories.
The first category is those rules and regulations which violate the law of the land: unlawful and unconstitutional regulations, things that agencies enacted but which they shouldn't have been able to.
Now you might ask: Who decides what's lawful or unlawful, constitutional or unconstitutional, a good or a bad interpretation of statutes, prohibitions, and the law writ large?
Try to keep up, because the administration outlined this a few days ago:
The next category of regulations that DOGE will be purging is sizable.
DOGE was tasked with purging the federal government of socially significant regulations that Congress didn't roll out, and regulations that are costly for private entities without benefitting the public more.
This next category of regulations is where things get huge.
DOGE will be purging all regulations that impede innovation and infrastructure, make it harder to response to natural and manmade disasters, and just generally anything unnecessarily standing in the way of business.
Now obviously this is a major task, but don't worry: the next section says which regulations to focus on first.
It says to focus on regulations that are particularly important. This is totally logical: get rid of the big barriers to growth first, and then move down the list.
The next section might be my favorite part of this whole Order.
This section calls for an end to bureaucratic overreach.
It says that if a bureaucrat is doing more than they're required to, they need to stop it. This means fewer bureaucrats abusing their 'authority'.
Additionally, if agencies are currently engaged in overreach in the enforcement of rules and regulations, they're going to stop.
This can also apply to rules and regulations that the President does not want enforced in a given way based on his valid interpretation of said rule.
And finally, the Order says what to do with new regulations:
Run them by DOGE, and if they're a barrier to business or a burden on the public, they won't go into effect.
Every new regulation will be reviewed and every existing regulation will be reviewed too, and all barriers to growth that can be extirpated from the Federal Register will be extirpated from it.
This authority is expansive and unprecedented, and the admin was building to this.
And just to be sure, there's still more to come.
DOGE is enabling the digitization of records, the installation of modern systems and tools that will enable the U.S. to be governed in a modern, rapid, and flexible way.
That's its purpose, is making a 21st-century government.
And why?
Well obviously because regulations are burdensome, the spending has been too high, and so on, but this Order contains another clue.
One of Trump's goals is ending the secret fourth branch of government that persists between Presidencies and ensures Democrats are always in power.
It is an explicit goal of this Administration to end the "Administrative State."
In their Fact Sheet on this Executive Order, the Presidency stated that it is their goal to end the extreme burdens on the American people from this unconstitutional fourth branch of government, and to stop them from prying into American lives forevermore.
It is hard to overstate how huge this Order is.
There are hundreds of thousands of federal regulations, and a very large portion of them can be stripped back with executive authority alone.
And now, DOGE has been enabled to start that process, with all that entails.
That entails a lot, but I'll cut myself off here. And keep in mind, this is just the first month of this administration.
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
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.
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.