Oh, man. Can you imagine the misery of being appointed to this post? Literally half of the government would hate and despise you and would look for ways to undercut you just to have an extra talking point while they stand in the hall talking to Fox News. And to top it off, what could you actually do to affect change? I sympathize with the poor workers of this office.
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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So…department of education?
Or the EPA, or the CDC, or the IRS, or...
You'd be surprised by how much oil companies hate the DOT.
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Also knowing that you’re guaranteed to be “downsized” on the first day of the next party change in the White House.
And imagine how much security you'll have to hire to keep yourself from getting shot.
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Next time a Republican takes office they will set this department's budget to 1 dollar, just like the consumer protection bureau. It will get to the point that parts of the government will only work when dems are in charge.
That's "Starve the Beast" politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
Everyone should know what this is and how and why it is done.
In short, Republicans want to starve a department of funding to a level below which they can not properly function. Then they can claim that agency isn't doing it's job, so we might as well cut it altogether. They are trying to set up these departments and programs to fail and can come in and claim they are saving taxpayers money. What they are really doing is making it easier for corporations and the ultra rich to pollute or side-step their tax obligations. Kind of hard to claim someone is a tax cheat if there isn't an IRS to audit them. Same with the EPA, Amtrak, USPS, DoEducation, and a host of other departments.
Once again, we can thank Reagan for this mess.
I was really curious to learn more about CFPB's financing, I found an article about Trump slashing their budget by a quarter but I haven't been able to find anything about their funding year by year.
It's turbo fucked if they haven't refunded them because they've returned billions to consumers by prosecuting fraudulent organizations like Wells Fargo!!
They've got to earn their $16 million a year from the gun lobby by doing even less than they did back before Sandy Hook, when it was only $8 million a year.
Isn't it just grand to look back on the last 365 days of gun violence and see what figures people put on it? Tens of thousands of lives. Hundreds of them children.
The pro-gun crowd will bury them just to avoid inconvenience. They don't want to wait for their guns, pass a background check, demonstrate they know how to responsibly handle them or store them securely.
Sure, they'll jerk themselves raw as they publicly congratulate themselves for doing any of those, but the moment someone wants to turn "suggestions" into "laws", they're all too happy to be represented by overweight men stuffed into plate carriers.
For the politicians and manufacturers though, it's strictly business.
Republicans get $16 million a year and a bloc of voters who will tolerate all manner of horrific acts, as long as they happen to other people.
In return, they insist that we mustn't change a thing until every man, woman and child in America has been completely cured of mental illness, to a level far beyond current medical science, so perfectly that nobody ever relapses and all in the few days it takes to load up on semi-automatic firearms.
Not only can you buy their souls, they're not even that expensive.
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Whoo boy, that's gonna set off the crazies. And finally Rick Scott will know which Federal agency he wants to eliminate when asked the question. I don't see this as particularly effective or constructive going into an election year. But what do I know?
If they focus on policy that isn't gun control it will help. If they only exist to push gun control you're prolly right. Either way, gun stores will prolly win when the nutters go buy more rifles.
Yep going harder on gun control stuff is going to do nothing but lose votes for Democrats. Because if you're already anti-gun then you're voting [D] anyway right? Personally I'm never voting for any politician who proposes to limit any freedoms. I'm pro-freedom only. I don't really have much to vote for these days.
It’s a nice thought.
To go along with all the prayers.
An office of prayers is strictly forbidden by the first amendment.
3, 2, 1...here come the gun nuts...
As expected every time guns are brought up in a political context, the comments are already full of people talking past each other while ignoring the real issues.
It is exactly as difficult to get rid of guns in this country as it would be to get rid of the electoral college, and the electoral college has done thing like lead directly to the covid pandemic being far worse than it had to be because Trump fired the guy we had in position to warn everyone if China leaked a pandemic.
Instead of discussing that, all you're going to find in a thread like this is back and forth about getting rid of guns (nearly impossible) or decrying the department as redundant (the DHS is proof this is also meaningless) or the like.
If something is not realistically achievable in the short term, that means we shouldn't be able to talk about it?
I disagree. If we limit discourse only to the immediately achievable we stop talking about how things should be, and how best to get there. Sometimes change happens overnight, sometimes it takes decades. It's worth talking about.
It definitely feels like a lost cause banning guns. It’s part of the culture. When we banned guns in Australia after one single mass shooting, I don’t believe Australia had nearly as much of a gun loving culture. It was still seen as a tool in the country side for hunting and such. I don’t know the answer to changing culture. It’ll take generations possibly. Smoking was seen like an everyday thing in the 60s. Now it’s disgusting. Perception can change eventually.
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“After months of research, we have written a 1000 page report proving the solution is fewer guns.”
Republicans: “MORE GUNS! ARM EVERYONE!”
From the WaPo article:
The new office will report up through Stefanie Feldman, the White House staff secretary and a longtime Biden policy aide who has worked on the firearms issue for years, the people said. Feldman previously worked on the Domestic Policy Council and still oversees the gun policy portfolio at the White House.
So it's going to be a purely policy role within the White House? Well that's disappointing. I was hoping it was going to be somewhere in HHS, or at least DoJ.
That would likely require explicit funding. Yes this is just to make a headline. He could actually direct the ATF to follow up on straw purchases, improve data sync with NICS and other federal databases if he wanted to do something meaningful.
Great idea, but I do not have faith that this will be well executed.
If the democrats had the same drive as their republican counterparts, this would be a better country.
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