William Galston asks the right question in his Wall Street Journal column:

Is it unconstitutional for Congress to make government agencies such as the Federal Reserve independent by restricting the president’s authority to fire their heads? The Trump administration is behaving as though that’s the case.

He relies for his argument that “independent agencies” are constitutional on Humphrey’s Executor v. United States which in 1934 found that Franklin Roosevelt had improperly fired William Humphrey as a member of the Federal Trade Commission, rejecting the finding in the 1926 Myers v. United States. FDR thought that the SCOTUS decision was motivated by spite against him on the part of the SCOTUS. In 2020 the Roberts court found that Humphrey’s was not binding precedent today because no agencies with the powers of the FTC in 1935 now exist.

So, is Humphrey’s Executor v. United States a relevant precedent for firings of officials appointed by the president today?

My own view is that barring presidents from firing officials they appointed is a constitutional absurdity. I don’t care whether the sitting president is FDR or Trump in that regard. I also think that “independent agencies” are similarly absurd but that’s a matter for another post.

I materially agree with Filipp Piatov’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s the meat of it:

MAGA sees the AfD as a natural ally in Europe’s largest and most powerful economy. But figures such as Elon Musk and Mr. Vance may not realize that influencers within the AfD consider the U.S. to be Germany’s ideological and most dangerous adversary. They view MAGA as nothing more than a short-term, highly useful ally. Ms. Weidel recently wrote an op-ed referring to Germans as “slaves” of the U.S., offering a glimpse into the party’s deeply anti-Western ideology.

Most of the time Ms. Weidel treads carefully when indulging her party’s deep-seated anti-American sentiments. Her good relations with Mr. Musk are seen as so valuable in the current campaign that even the party’s radical right-wing faction remains conspicuously silent on the matter. Others are less discreet. Björn Höcke, an influential AfD politician, declared in a 2022 speech that the U.S. was an “extraneous power” deliberately driving a wedge between Germany and Russia. He didn’t warn of Germany’s dependence on Russian energy but of its reliance on American liquefied natural gas. He further claimed that America’s goal for the past century has been to prevent a German-Russian alliance because such a partnership could challenge U.S. global dominance.

concluding:

Superficial parallels exist between the Republican Party and the AfD, largely shaped by media. But the AfD isn’t Germany’s equivalent of MAGA. It’s becoming a “German Race First” party. Its ideologues fantasize about a rebirth of an ethnically pure German Volk. It is no coincidence that Mr. Höcke lamented the portrayal of Hitler as “absolutely evil,” or that Maximilian Krah, the party’s lead candidate for the EU elections, publicly declared that not all members of the SS—Hitler’s elite killing troops—should automatically be considered criminals.

It is no accident that AfD politicians have spent years forging ties with America’s greatest geopolitical adversaries, particularly Russia and China. AfD delegations have made obsequious pilgrimages to Moscow. Ms. Weidel has routinely held private meetings at the Chinese ambassador’s residence in Berlin. Last year, an assistant to Mr. Krah, the AfD’s most vocal advocate for a close relationship with the Chinese regime, was arrested in Leipzig on suspicion of espionage for China.

For the Trump administration, the AfD might prove a useful tool for stirring headlines and influencing debates within Germany. But an ally? That, it can never be.

My version would be that AfD is a German political party not an American political party. I think that Americans are generally wrong when they draw analogies between American political parties and foreign ones. We don’t understand the context. Tories are not Republicans. Labour is not the Democrats. No German political party is the natural ally of any American political party for the simple reason that it’s a German political party.

George Will’s latest Washington Post column, arguing for a more activist role for the U. S. vis-à-vis Ukraine can be summarized in two equations:

Russia 2025 = Germany 1938
Russia 2025 = Soviet Union 1945

He doesn’t actually present an argument but here are his major claims:

Putin is waging what Johns Hopkins scholar Hal Brands calls (in his new book, “The Eurasian Century”) “a quasi-genocidal war.” Barbarian regimes (see “‘Be Cruel’: Inside Russia’s Torture System for Ukrainian POWs,” the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 10) will be barbaric until stopped. But a revanchist and expansionist Russia worries Europeans more than it worries Donald Trump.

“Look,” he said on Feb. 3 regarding Europe, “we have an ocean in between. They don’t. It’s more important for them than it is for us.” But the ocean was there in 1941. And someone should explain to Trump the acronym “ICBM.”

I agree that Russia is revanchist. I don’t believe it is expansionist and I don’t believe either of the two equations above.

What I actually think is that Russia wants a materially demilitarized buffer between itself and countries that invaded Russia in the 20th century. To his discourse on 20th century history he might include that Germany, France, Britain, the United States, Poland, and even Italy invaded Russia in the 20th century.

I also think the following equations are false:

Europe 2025 = Europe 1918
Europe 2025 = Europe 1945

What I think our objective should be is to convince the Russians that they have no reason to fear invasion or even covert destabilizing activities from NATO countries. Is it even possible to do that with a country as paranoid from long experience as Russia? And do we actually want to do that?

In a piece at The Nation via MSN Rebecca Traister argues that James Carville, Rahm Emanuel, Seth Moulton, Maureen Dowd and other Democratic critics of the direction the party has taken are wrong and that the real explanation for the Democrats’ loss of the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate is that they were not “woke” and excessive enough:

The right perceives things about the centuries-long march toward a more just and inclusive nation that the left fails to grasp: that all of this is intertwined. As the left tears itself apart trying to distinguish between fights for civil equality, workers’ liberation, and democracy, its opponents are the ones who understand that we cannot have economic justice without social movements, that we cannot have a functional democracy while workers are exploited and people cannot easily vote or control their own bodies. Democrats have lost recently not because of an excess of wokeness but because of a failure to get excessive enough — to fight like these efforts, like the fate of all Americans, are linked.

That’s her conclusion. I recommend you read the whole thing.

Walter Russell Mead in his Wall Street Journal column summarizes the “Trump policy” with respect to Europe as epitomized by Vice President JD Vance’s remarks to the Munich Security Conference:

Mr. Trump’s Europe policy is likely to have one of two outcomes. It could function as shock therapy, jolting Europeans into making the changes that could renew European strength and offering hope for a new and more realistic alliance. Or it could mark the beginning of the end of the trans-Atlantic community that gave Europe its longest era of relative peace since the peak of the Roman Empire.

Either way, the Trump administration’s first foray into European policymaking won’t be soon forgotten. Europeans now know that Charles de Gaulle was right, that the Continent cannot count on American blank checks forever. Let us hope that our shocked and angry European friends draw some wise lessons from a harsh week.

Actually, isn’t there a third alternative? I suspect that the Europeans’ reaction will be to attempt to go over Trump’s head via the American press. Expect a flurry of features on how wonderful the Europeans are, how awful Trump is, how vital to our security Europe is, etc.

I believe former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s observation about European leadership was correct. They have known what needed to be done for decades. They just don’t know how they will keep their jobs if they do what needs to be done. So they won’t reform. They’ll continue to assume that the U. S. will carry their water for them as long as it is humanly possible.

However, while we’re on the subject why should we continue to carry the Europeans’ water for them? Other than that we have treaties that say we will, of course. After all treaties come and go. The European Union (EU) has more than three times’ Russia’s population and nine times’ Russia’s GDP. The Europeans should be able to handle Russian aggression with, as Dr. Mead puts it, “nuclear backstopping” by the United States. Any present incapacity is completely voluntary on their part.

Today the editors of the Washington Post rise to the defense of the Department of Education:

Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, insisted in her confirmation hearing on Thursday that the administration’s objective is not to “defund” the agency but to “take the bureaucracy out of education” and return control over schools to the states.

However, states already drive education policy. The federal government provides only about 14 percent of K-12 funding, and decisions about what schools teach are made by states and local school districts.

The Education Department’s purpose, in contrast, is to help level the playing field for disadvantaged students. It delivers aid to schools that serve such children, and it enforces federal civil rights laws that forbid discrimination based on race, gender and disability in public classrooms.

in what is one of the more self-refuting editorials I’ve read lately. Here are just two of the problems with the editorial. Let’s start with this passage:

President Ronald Reagan was not a fan of the Education Department. Nevertheless, in 1983, his administration issued a landmark report titled “A Nation at Risk,” which pressed for federal action to improve education in the United States. It divulged that 13 percent of American 17-year-olds — and up to 40 percent of minority youths — were functionally illiterate.

Let’s accept that at face value. Forty years ago 13% of seniors in high school were functionally illiterate. According to the most recent study from the Department of Education, today 19% of high school seniors are functionally illiterate.

You can come up with all sorts of excuses for why that might be but one thing is clear. The DoE has failed in the mandate it received 40 years ago. When the approach you’re using isn’t working, doesn’t it make sense to try something else? Doubling down, which is what we’ve been doing for the last 30 years, doesn’t seem to be working.

As far as the “level the playing field” argument goes, that doesn’t seem to be working particularly well, either. Consider this graph of Title I spending by state from Newsweek. The richest state in the Union (California) receives $300 less per K-12 student as the poorest state in the Union (Mississippi). That’s because, ironically, while being the richest state in the Union California also has the largest number of poor people of any state in the Union.

The even more serious problem is not one raised in the editorial: there seems to be little relationship between spending per student and outcomes. Over the last 30 years real spending per student has increased considerably but outcomes have not improved commensurately.

I don’t draw the conclusion from all of this that we should stop paying for education. The conclusion I draw is that we’re doing something wrong.

Although I materially agree with the point Megan McArdle is making in her latest Washington Post column:

Elon Musk is the latest in a long series of government reformers to go on the quest for the magic pot of money.

The magic pot of money is a Washington evergreen. Some politician or policymaker theorizes a fantastically large sum of government spending that can be easily excised from programs without affecting deserving beneficiaries or angering powerful interest groups. The belief in its existence has inspired many a politician to go on the hunt, but thus far, the quarry has proved elusive: The Reagan administration failed to find the “future savings to be identified” that its budget counted on to balance massive tax cuts. The architects of the Affordable Care Act failed to find the fabulous cost savings they believed to be hidden in the byzantine recesses of our health-care system.

Yet every generation, a new hero sets out to find these mythical riches so that they can be returned to their rightful owner, the American taxpayer. Musk thinks he is that hero, having suggested that with the support of the president, we can find $1 trillion in deficit reduction. And hey, he has certainly performed many epic feats. So perhaps he will finally slay the dragon of government inefficiency and liberate this pot of money from its hoard.

I’ve written as much here although not quite as sarcastically. Furthermore, I genuinely wish the exercise he’s going through were being done by the Congress. It is their job after all. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get Congress to do its job. Also, one of the things that has been completely overlooked in this discussion is that what is being done now from a process standpoint should be an ongoing process. It is a task that is never completed.

And I have little doubt that 100s of billions in waste, fraud, and abuse will be found. Rather obviously the “Department of Government Efficiency” started with the low-hanging fruit, e.g. USAID, CFPB. I have little doubt that billions of FWA will be found in Defense, Social Security, and Medicare (where the real money is). In each instance the source will be different. For example, I suspect that most of the fraud in the Medicare system is retail rather than wholesale, e.g. billing services that aren’t covered as services that are covered, but that will be extremely difficult to root out.

But here’s the critical question. Okay, I understand you don’t like Elon Musk, how he and his team are proceeding, and what they’re doing. What’s your plan?

I think this piece by Maria Schmidt at Brussels Signal is perhaps the harshest criticism of Angela Merkel I have ever read. Here’s a sample:

Merkel was an emotionless, heartless, cold, cruel, pragmatic and vindictive political operator. She did not truly lead Germany, or Europe, because she lacked the necessary imagination, creativity and commitment. She managed things. She was sunk in day-to-day politics, adapting her positions and opinions to the findings of focus groups and opinion polls. As a result, she fatally failed to take any decision that had medium- or long-term consequences. She took no risks, ran every conflict into the sand, blunted them and damped them down. Her guiding principle was, “After me, the flood.”

and

Merkel did not create anything, and did not build anything. Her time in power was marked by wasted opportunities, missed chances and irredeemably bad decisions that have squandered the future of Germans and Europeans. She robbed them of 16 years, because she diminished both Germany and Europe with her dilatory, indecisive, shiftless, soporific policies. She tore the continent’s societies apart, condemned its economies to stagnation, stifled its capacity for innovation, and extinguished its ambition.

While this, if true, is a scathing indictment:

In Merkel’s sixteen years as Chancellor, both she and Germany aged into shabbiness, greyness and ungainliness. In her monotone, dull and inelegant jackets, pants and shoes, she was the personification of the former GDR, in whose image she moulded the whole of Germany. She abolished freedom of speech, rendering the media uniform, boring and decrepit, and the country’s public figures slovenly and unkempt. Today Germany, once a better place, has become one big GDR.

This is much what I’ve been saying for some time:

She acted against the German army, and in the process she eviscerated it. She permanently weakened it, and suffocated its fighting spirit with the help of her protégé, the incompetent Ursula von der Leyen. She abolished universal conscription and reduced the armaments and equipment of the troops to the point of absurdity. In 2022, at the time of the shamefully precipitate US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the German army was unable to bring home its contingent there. They had no transport aircraft, and the task was beyond their logistical capabilities.

which is why achieving the “2% guideline” for NATO members is irrelevant, misdirection. Germany’s problem is lack of preparedness. 2% of GDP might not be enough to remedy that. 10% if GDP might not be enough. And if Germany with a quarter of total European GDP is not prepared, Europe is not prepared.

There is one particular on which I disagree with Dr. Schmidt. If her observations are true, did she not read her own piece? If Ms. Merkel’s every policy position was the outcome of a focus group, the problem with Germany is not Angela Merkel but Germany. Angela Merkel is only the symptom not the disease.

Read the whole thing.

At Politico Eugene Ludwig, appointed by Bill Clinton as Comptroller of the Currency, has an op-ed asserting that voters were right in 2024 about the economy and the data were wrong:

Many in Washington bristled at the public’s failure to register how strong the economy really was. They charged that right-wing echo chambers were conning voters into believing entirely preposterous narratives about America’s decline.

What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed. What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality?

continuing:

These numbers have time and again suggested to many in Washington that unemployment is low, that wages are growing for middle America and that, to a greater or lesser degree, economic growth is lifting all boats year upon year. But when traveling the country, I’ve encountered something very different. Cities that appeared increasingly seedy. Regions that seemed derelict. Driving into the office each day in Washington, I noted a homeless encampment fixed outside the Federal Reserve itself. And then I began to detect a second pattern inside and outside D.C. alike. Democrats, on the whole, seemed much more inclined to believe what the economic indicators reported. Republicans, by contrast, seemed more inclined to believe what they were seeing with their own two eyes.

with the following conclusion:

The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics.

He goes on to show how the official statistics on unemployment, the median wage, inflation, and GDP are grossly misleading and that ordinary people’s lived experience suggests that none of those as experienced are nearly as rosy as the official statistics might lead you to believe. You may notice in his analysis some of the things that I have been saying around here.

I would point out that on some of the official statistics, particularly unemployment, his analysis just scratches the surface of the problems. My rule of thumb is that when the fudge factors used to arrive at the official statistics are much larger than the actual measured data you should suspect that something is wrong with the fudge factors.

Some of the discrepancies are undoubtedly due to preconceived notions but some are due to how different things are in the environs of Washington, DC and state capitols than in the country at large while some are due to institutional momentum.