Is Trump serious about DOGE or is it just a dodge so he can throw $$$$ to rich buddies?

Heather Cox Richardson, December 21, 2024, Letters from an American.

In the end, Congress passed a bill much like the one Musk scuttled, but one of the provisions that Congress stripped out of the old bill was extraordinarily important to Musk. As David Dayen explained in The Prospect, the original agreement had an “outbound investment” provision that restricted the ability of Americans to invest in technology factories in China. Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) had collaborated on the measure, hoping to keep cutting-edge technologies including artificial intelligence and quantum computing, as well as the jobs they would create, in America rather than let companies move them to China.

As Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) explained, Musk is building big factories in China and wants to build an AI data center there, even though it could endanger U.S. security. McGovern charged that Musk’s complaints about the spending in the bill were cover for his determination to tank the provision that would limit his ability to move technology and business to China. And, he noted, it worked. The outbound investment provision was stripped out of the bill before it passed.

In The Prospect, Robert Kuttner explained this huge win for Musk, as well as other provisions that were stripped from the bill before it passed. After years of fighting, Tami Luhby of CNN explained, Congress agreed to reform the system in which pharmacy benefit managers act as middlemen between pharmaceutical companies and insurers, employers, and government officials. The original bill increased transparency and provided that pharmacy benefit managers would be compensated with flat fees rather than compensation tied to the price of drugs. The measures related to pharmacy benefit managers were stripped out of the measure that passed.

That lost reform shows another line that will stretch into the future: Trump’s team is working for big business. As Kuttner puts it, Trump, who is allegedly a populist leader, tanked a bipartisan spending bill in order to shield the Chinese investments of the richest man in the world and to protect the profits of second-largest pharmacy benefit manager UnitedHealth Group, the corporation for which murdered executive Brian Thompson worked.

There's much more at the link.