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garlicksauce.bsky.social
UVM political scientist. Congress, lobbying, state politics. YIMBY. Author of "Pre-Existing Conditions: How Lobbying Makes American Health Care More Expensive" (to come in 2025, OUP) www.alexgarlick.com
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submitted 1 day ago • 24 comments

I’ll keep pushing this line of analysis because I’m increasingly convinced the clearest path out of this mess is for Dems to adopt a relentless anti-corruption, anti-inequality, anti-oligarchy, pro-democracy platform. The Dem leadership hasn’t realized it yet, but they’re now a reform party.

submitted 2 days ago • 86 comments

It is insanely obvious that Elon Musk is illegally exercising the powers of a principal officer of the United States in violation of the appointments clause

submitted 1 day ago • 38 comments

Putting responsibility for decimating the federal workforce on Musk or “DOGE” is the most impressive political trick Trump has played in the White House.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

Trump's approval is down to 44 from 47 on inauguration day. As a frame of reference, Biden was at 56 at this point in 2021.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Today in VERMONT PROFESSOR I tried to match my belt to the Merrell hiking shoes that I walked to campus in the 1 degree morning.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Sometimes, "Move fast, break things," just results in a lot of broken things.

submitted 4 days ago • 62 comments

Can someone get the Secretary of HHS on the phone for comment?

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Firing government agricultural researchers is so short sighted. vtdigger.org/2025/02/18/s...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Some brief thoughts from someone who studies public opinion. The federal firing spree can be made unpopular because it is being done in a haphazard way, there will be huge economic effects not just in DC but also across country & it's also likely illegal in many cases. But how to make that argument?

submitted 5 days ago • 36 comments

holy hell this is smart

submitted 5 days ago • 3 comments

“We don’t have the votes in parliament so we will violate our oaths & tolerate the lawless authoritarianism by the executive” is a concise summary of our total Article I constitutional failure right now Presidentialism was a mistake

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

It's becoming more clear what the Trump/Musk/DOGE team is doing. Instead of doing the legislative work of slicing agency budgets with a scalpel in Congress, they're using a sledgehammer. This will lead to collateral damage.

submitted 5 days ago • 3 comments

What if (hear me out) we wrote into our Constitution that Congress had to vote on these things first, and that the votes of each Member of Congress were a matter of public record?

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

Until this moment, I have literally never come across the notion that "brave" is bad. I can speculate as to why some might think so, but... yeah....

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

If the DOGE actually cared about efficiency, they wouldn't be firing the lowest paid members of these agencies.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

If you wanted to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, you would empower the inspectors general. If you wanted more waste, fraud, and abuse, you would fire them.

submitted 6 days ago • 2288 comments

💘

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

I feel like I'm losing my mind to see this from PBS. It would take a goddamn war.

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

I would say the populism of 2024 was mostly a tribal populism - very much akin to the historic populism of the South, with surface elements of economic grievances but, in the end, mostly a group identity fest (one where a key element is about punching at groups outside the identity).

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

How do we make sense of the 2024 talk of "populism" in 2025. It's certainly not economic, as many of the tariffs will raise prices and impoundment will cost jobs. But RFK at HHS shows the cultural populism, elevating someone with no scientific credentials to oversee the health care sector.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

Purely coincidental, Reuters won a Pulitzer Prize for this investigation into Elon Musk: www.reuters.com/investigates...

submitted 10 days ago • 40 comments

One of my mentors got me a @benandjerrys.bsky.social gift card to celebrate submitting my grant🍦 This is how we celebrate grant submissions in Vermont.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

The CFPB survived having *Mick Mulvaney* as its director. If they don't kill it legislatively it will be resurrected by a future Dem administration.

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

Really important to default to “Musk is exaggerating his own impact.” He’s probably trying to manifest reality with his words. He’s definitely lying.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Why don't Musk and Trump face questions like, "if you want to abolish the CFPB, why don't you pass a law to abolish the CFPB?" Congressional Republicans have been proposing bills to do this for years!

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment