The New Yorker:

With cuts comes leverage comes power.

By Jon Allsop

Not long ago, I was reading the newsletter TheRighting, for which the journalist Howard Polskin combs through the right-wing mediasphere so you don’t have to, when a back-to-back pair of links jumped out at me. The first, from Townhall, announced that it was “Time for Trump’s DOJ and FBI to Deal the Pain.” Republicans “control federal law enforcement right now,” an excerpt pulled out by Polskin read. “That means we get to set the agenda, and we need to ruthlessly and brutally use the law to defeat our enemies’ outrageous and disgraceful attacks upon patriotic Americans.” The second, from The American Spectator, focussed on the role that Elon Musk’s company SpaceX played in bringing home astronauts who had been stranded on the International Space Station, arguing that the supposed rescue reinforced the earthly premise of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or doge: that the government is riddled with waste and other actors can perform its functions better. “If the private sector can recover astronauts,” the subheading read, “it can do anything.”

One of these links leaned into the idea that the government should be smaller; the other that it should be bigger. This juxtaposition—and apparent contradiction—seems to be everywhere at the moment. While catching up on the news on a Sunday in early April, I came across stories that attested, respectively, to significant forthcoming job cuts at the Internal Revenue Service and to the Trump Administration’s unprecedented plans to use the agency’s data to go after undocumented immigrants. The same day, Kristen Welker, the host of “Meet the Press,” asked Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, about tariffs that have been called “the biggest tax hike on Americans in decades”—and then about the Administration’s plans to extend President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. More recently, I read a story in the Times about a root-and-branch push to slash regulations across government, which Trump described as the “deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state.” (A notice published as part of this effort, at the Federal Communications Commission, was literally titled “delete, delete, delete.”) I then clicked through to the paper’s live blog for that day, which led with Trump threatening to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status should it not bend to his will.

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