mtkonczal.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

This "immediate cancellation" violates the law. If the Admin thinks Columbia has violated Title VI by being deliberately indifferent to antisemitic harassment, it has to give Columbia a chance for a hearing first, make findings on the record, & wait 30 days. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03...

submitted 2 days ago • 122 comments

For people engaged in politics but not necessarily economics: "nowcasting" (predicting the data right before it comes out) is notoriously noisy and error-prone. So I'd be cautious on hyping bad data forecasts (jobs, GDP) as evidence of Trump's irresponsibility before the official data comes out. /1

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

Macro: how are you pulling jobs day numbers fast right as they come out? In R I download the flat files but that can take 5-10 minutes right after they come out (normally 20 seconds), and want to supplement that with grabbing a dozen or two series first. Are the API calls speedy enough at 8:31?

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

So DOGE terminates lease on FDA quality lab in St. Louis and 29 other sites. This is a major concern for drug safety in America. 🦶🔫 Here's why:

submitted 5 days ago • 34 comments

I forgot to post their services sector comments when they were released last week and...hooooo boy. www.dallasfed.org/research/sur...

submitted 5 days ago • 19 comments

Jack knows what he's talking about--he oversaw the Social Security Admin at the WH Office of Management and Budget for 30 years. Read this thread and follow him.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Discussing Fed independence, under threat with Trump trying to take control of independent agencies, with a House Financial Services Committee task force today. I do remind them that tax cuts and tariffs will drive macro this year. Testimony here: financialservices.house.gov/calendar/eve...

submitted 5 days ago • 3 comments

An underrated part of this video is you can watch the Dow go down in real time in the bottom right

submitted 6 days ago • 16 comments

The federal government must prioritize the protection of taxpayer data. The DHS request to access taxpayer data would violate critical privacy expectations and deliberately targets and harms immigrant families. 1/

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

I got laid off today, with the rest of 18F. 18F was an elite federal software shop. We made gov't websites work better, more efficiently for the American people. We saved taxpayers from getting screwed over by contractors. And were fired for it. We made this website to tell our story: 18f.org

submitted 8 days ago • 3341 comments

Very excited to start a new role with the Economic Security Project, helping direct their research and policy. In this chaotic moment, the essentials - fighting economic insecurity and corporate abuse, building social insurance and competitive markets - are more important than ever.

submitted 10 days ago • 3 comments

I don't think saying 'the "private sector [had] been in recession" when we got there' is going to work if the economy stumbles from their actions. Certainly you don't see it in private final sales for GDP, a relevant metric, which was higher in 2024 than in 2018-2019. I doubt it politically too.

submitted 12 days ago • 2 comments

Having written a review of books on abundance and the administrative state in mid-January, to go into print in March, and getting one last chance to edit it soon, not sure if I should try and incorporate DOGE at the end in two tacked on paragraphs or just open with "this is from the before times."

submitted 12 days ago • 2 comments

Think of all the ways the administrative arm of the world’s most powerful sovereign state is like a medium-sized tech company that sells ads on a website. Both collect taxes, provide the national framework for markets, run spy agencies, have nuclear weapons, run the global reserve currency, etc

submitted 15 days ago • 8 comments

OMB director Russ Vought has officially begun carrying out his section of Project 2025. Technical thread to follow, but it’s really important - this is a major path through which the Trump administration will illegally impound funding, refusing to carry out some of our spending laws.

submitted 16 days ago • 37 comments

Tonight! Will we see you there? More info: peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/dispos...

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

This is not about efficiency. Giving federal employees purchase cards saves money - it reduces layers of paperwork and red tape. Imagine running a business where you stopped employees from purchasing anything. The goal is to shut down government by other means.

submitted 17 days ago • 78 comments

I and others noted that the investment claims in the Furman piece seemed completely off, so I’m really glad Ernie and Eric dug into them and wrote it out. From highways to broader aggregates, investments were up in real terms.

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Kudos to the school administrator who wrote this letter for making it clear to families what happened and who they should blame. This is the way to build a coalition--with a shared adversary and a reason to fight.

submitted 21 days ago • 53 comments

This Thur. 2/20 @6pm, we welcome @sarahjones.bsky.social and @mtkonczal.bsky.social for a conversation about her new book. "Disposable" exposes the reality of our country's racial & income inequality. It's certainly timely to talk about the ways predatory capitialsm can be contained. RSVP in bio.

submitted 22 days ago • 1 comment

The IRS was a simple test for DOGE: was it really interested in efficiency and state capacity? If so, you support the tax enforcement, the biggest ROI in govt. Or did it want to minimize parts of the state that bothered billionaires? We have our answer. open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...

submitted 23 days ago • 136 comments

A response to @jasonfurman.bsky.social's Foreign Affairs indictment of the Biden administration and its ideas, here with my perspective on tradeoffs, policy, the Biden administration, and "post-neoliberalism." (It's more fun than it sounds?) mikekonczal.substack.com/p/rethinking...

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

why, if they are genius coders with the power of cutting edge AI, have the DOGE team seemingly not done anything to detect fraud or waste that isn't just "scanning a database for a list of naughty words", as if they were practicing writing regexps in the first week of a coding bootcamp?

submitted 23 days ago • 19 comments

This is very good, and very depressing for how obnoxious this power grab and looting is going to go.

submitted 25 days ago • 1 comment

For Energy and Commerce, it's mathematically impossible to achieve $880 billion in savings if you don't cut Medicaid or Medicare. There's not enough money they have jurisdiction over. Republicans say they're not cutting Medicare, so that means they're cutting Medicaid. No way around it.

submitted 25 days ago • 2 comments

He just told two and a half million people they can’t work from home any more

submitted 25 days ago • 290 comments