May 2025 – Page 2 – artdiamondblog.com

Ramaswamy “Mapped Out” Plan to “Dismantle Much of the Federal Government”

If you choose to submit a suggestion to the deregulatory “suggestion box,” you need to do so by May 12, 2025 for the suggestion to be considered. I apologize for not getting this information out earlier–I only read yesterday the article quoted below.

(p. A1) . . . at the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates radio and television broadcasting and satellite communications, President Trump’s appointees published a seemingly exuberant notice asking for suggestions on which rules to get rid of, titled “DELETE, DELETE, DELETE.”

Across the more than 400 federal agencies that regulate almost every aspect of American life, from flying in airplanes to processing poultry, Mr. Trump’s appointees are working with the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting initiative headed by Elon Musk and also called DOGE, to launch a sweeping new phase in their quest to dismantle much of the federal government: deregulation on a mass scale.

Usually, the legal process of repealing federal regulations takes years — and rules erased by one administration can be restored by another. But after chafing at that system during his first term and watching President Joseph R. Biden Jr. enact scores of new rules pushed by the left, Mr. Trump has (p. A17) marshaled a strategy for a dramatic do-over designed to kill regulations swiftly and permanently.

At Mr. Trump’s direction, agency officials are compiling the regulations they have tagged for the ash heap, racing to meet a deadline next week after which the White House will build its master list to guide what the president called the “deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state.”

The approach, overseen by Russell T. Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, rests on a set of novel legal strategies in which the administration intends to simply repeal or just stop enforcing regulations that have historically taken years to undo, according to people familiar with the plans. The White House theory relies on Supreme Court decisions — some recent and at least one from the 1980s — that they believe give them the basis for sweeping change.

. . .

The specifics of the new approach coalesced in the days after the election, when Mr. Musk teamed with Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump ally who co-founded the Department of Government Efficiency. As Mr. Musk pushed the DOGE team to quickly fire workers and eliminate government offices, Mr. Ramaswamy mapped out a more detailed plan to use a pair of recent Supreme Court rulings to seek out old regulations that, under the new decisions, could now be legally vulnerable.

One of those rulings, in 2022, limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. The other, in 2024, ended a precedent known as Chevron deference in which federal agencies were given wide legal latitude to interpret laws.

Together, the Supreme Court’s actions served to limit the broad regulatory authority of federal agencies, and Mr. Ramaswamy asserted that they could justify permanently erasing many rules that had been adopted before those precedents.

The mission has gained steam since the inauguration under the direction of Mr. Vought, who took over the planning after Mr. Ramaswamy left the Department of Government Efficiency to run for Ohio governor.

Mr. Trump ordered agency heads in February to work with DOGE teams to identify rules that impede technological innovation, energy production, and private enterprise and entrepreneurship, among other issues, giving them a 60-day window to prepare their target lists.

Mr. Musk, meanwhile, developed an artificial intelligence tool intended to comb through the 100,000-plus pages of the Code of Federal Regulations and identify rules that are outdated or legally vulnerable in the wake of the two Supreme Court decisions, according to two people familiar with the matter. It is not yet clear whether the tool has succeeded in its assignment, one of the people said.

. . .

Mr. Vought is seeking public input. He posted a call for ideas on the Federal Register, the government portal where the public can comment on proposed regulatory changes, adding a deregulatory “suggestion box.”

For the full story, see:

Coral Davenport. “Behind The Rush To Discard Rules And Reshape Life.” The New York Times. (Thurs., April 17, 2025): A1 & A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version was updated April 16, 2025 and has the title “Inside Trump’s Plan to Halt Hundreds of Regulations.”)

“Deregulation on a Mass Scale”

The NYT article that I refer to in my Facebook post above is:

Coral Davenport. “Behind The Rush To Discard Rules And Reshape Life.” The New York Times. (Thurs., April 17, 2025): A1 & A17.

(Note: the online version was updated April 16, 2025 and has the title “Inside Trump’s Plan to Halt Hundreds of Regulations.”)

(Note: the title of this entry is a quote from p. A1 of the article.)

Vinyl LP Records Have Been Mostly Replaced, but in Kansas Not Completely Destroyed

In my Openness book, I argue that Schumpeter’s phrase “creative destruction” misleads by overemphasizing the extent of destruction in the process of breakthrough innovation, so I prefer to call the process “innovative dynamism.” A new innovation is often better than the old in many, but not all, traits. A minority of people who put heavy weight on the traits where the old product is better, will still prefer the old product. If the minority is large enough, and willing to pay enough for their preference, then there will be enough demand for the old product to remain in production, rather than be fully replaced (i.e., destroyed).

Illustrating my point, The New York Times ran two full pages on Chad Kassem, a Kansas entrepreneur who is working hard, with some success, at making higher quality vinyl LP records. He has 114 employees and annual revenue of over $1 million.

He is even introducing incremental innovations to the old product: (p. 6) “Kassem hired veterans of the record-making business and indulged their ideas for modernizing a process that (p. 7) had barely changed since the 1970s. Among other innovations, they introduced computerized controls and found ways to regulate the fluctuating temperature of vinyl in the presses.”

The New York Times article is:

Ben Sisario. “In a Digital World, Pursuing an Ideal Of Perfect Vinyl.” The New York Times, Arts&Leisure Section (Sun., March 9, 2025): 6-7.

(Note: the online version of The New York Times article on the resilience of vinyl was updated March 7, 2025, and has the title “The Wizard of Vinyl Is in Kansas.”)

My book mentioned in my initial comments is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Tim Friede’s “Daredevilry” in Taking 650 Venom Injections and 200 Poisonous Snake Bites to Help Create a Universal Antivenom “for Humanity”

Back during Covid, over 38,000 adults volunteered to participate in a “challenge” clinical trial of the new vaccines, but such trials were not allowed. In a challenge trial each participant receives the vaccine and then is exposed to the disease. Phase 3 trials for efficacy can be completed much more quickly, with many fewer participants, and at much lower costs, if the trials are “challenge” trials.

We allow people the freedom to dangerous actions for fun or excitement, or to help humanity, like Tim Friede (below) injecting snake venom and letting snakes bite him. Why then did we not allow challenge trials with the Covid vaccine?

Note on another issue, that the researchers are planning in their next step to test their antivenom on dogs who are bitten by snakes. This is a good example of my ideal use of dogs in medical research–where the trial aims at benefits for both the humans AND the dogs.

(p. A1) Over nearly 18 years, the man, Tim Friede, 57, injected himself with more than 650 carefully calibrated, escalating doses of venom to build his immunity to 16 deadly snake species. He also allowed the snakes — mostly one at a time, but sometimes two, . . . — to sink their sharp fangs into him about 200 times.

This bit of daredevilry (one name for it) may now help to solve a dire global health problem. More than 600 species of venomous snakes roam the earth, biting as many as 2.7 million people, killing about 120,000 people and maiming 400,000 others — numbers thought to be vast underestimates.

In Mr. Friede’s blood, scientists say they have identified antibodies that are capable of neutralizing the venom of multiple snake (p. A19) species, a step toward creating a universal antivenom, they reported on Friday [May 2, 2025] in the journal Cell.

“I’m really proud that I can do something in life for humanity, to make a difference for people that are 8,000 miles away, that I’m never going to meet, never going to talk to, never going to see, probably,” said Mr. Friede, who lives in Two Rivers, Wis., where venomous snakes are not much of a threat.

. . .

“This is a bigger problem than the first world realizes,” said Jacob Glanville, founder and chief executive of Centivax, a company that aims to produce broad-spectrum vaccines, and lead author on the study.

Dr. Glanville and his colleagues found that two powerful antibodies from Mr. Freide’s blood, when combined with a drug that blocks neurotoxins, protected mice from the venom of 19 deadly snake species of a large family found in different geographical regions.

This is an extraordinary feat, according to experts not involved in the work. Most antivenoms can counter the venom from just one or a few related snake species from one region.

The study suggests that cocktails of antitoxins may successfully prevent deaths and injuries from all snake families, said Nicholas Casewell, a researcher at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in England.

. . .

There were other mishaps — accidental bites, anaphylactic shocks, hives, blackouts. Mr. Friede describes himself as a nondegree scientist, but “there’s no college in the world that can teach you how to do it,” he said. “I was doing it on my own as best I could.”

Two teams of scientists sampled Mr. Friede’s blood over the years, but neither project led anywhere. By the time he met Dr. Glanville, in 2017, he was nearly ready to give up.

Dr. Glanville had been pursuing what scientists call broadly acting antibodies as the basis for universal vaccines against viruses. He grew up in a Maya village in the Guatemala highlands, and became intrigued by the possibility of using the same approach for universal antivenom.

. . .

The researchers next plan to test the treatment in Australia in any dogs that are brought into veterinary clinics for snakebites. They are also hoping to identify another component, perhaps also from Mr. Friede’s blood, that would extend full protection to all 19 snake species that were subjects of the research.

Mr. Friede himself is done now, however. His last bite was in November 2018, from a water cobra. He was divorced — his wife and children had moved out. “Well, that’s it, enough is enough,” he recalled thinking.

He misses the snakes, he said, but not the painful bites. “I’ll probably get back into it in the future,” he said. “But for right now, I’m happy where things are at.”

For the full story see:

Apoorva Mandavilli. “Man of 200 Snake Bites May Be the Antivenom.” The New York Times (Saturday, May 3, 2025): A1 & A19.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 2, 2025, and has the title “Universal Antivenom May Grow Out of Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him 200 Times.”)

The academic article in the journal Cell mentioned above is:

Glanville, Jacob, Mark Bellin, Sergei Pletnev, Baoshan Zhang, Joel Christian Andrade, Sangil Kim, David Tsao, Raffaello Verardi, Rishi Bedi, Sindy Liao, Raymond Newland, Nicholas L. Bayless, Sawsan Youssef, Ena S. Tully, Tatsiana Bylund, Sujeong Kim, Hannah Hirou, Tracy Liu, and Peter D. Kwong. “Snake Venom Protection by a Cocktail of Varespladib and Broadly Neutralizing Human Antibodies.” Cell 188 (2025): 1-18.

Muriel Bristol Was Allowed to Act on What She Knew but Was Unable to Prove or Explain

Muriel Bristol knew that tea tasted better when the milk was poured in first, than when it was poured in after the tea. She knew it but couldn’t prove it and didn’t know why it was true. The world is better when more of us, more often, can act on what we know, but what we can neither prove nor explain. Too often regulations restrict the actions of entrepreneurs to what they can prove and explain, e.g., in the firing of employees.

This slows and reduces efficiency and innovation (not to mention freedom).

(p. C8) [Adam] Kucharski, a mathematically trained epidemiologist, says that the rigor and purity of mathematics has imbued it with extraordinary rhetorical power. “In an uncertain world, it is reassuring to think there is at least one field that can provide definitive answers,” he writes. Yet he adds that certainty can sometimes be an illusion. “Even mathematical notions of proof” are “not always as robust and politics-free as they might seem.”

. . .

. . ., proving what is “obvious and simple” isn’t always easy. Kucharski offers the delightful example of Muriel Bristol, a scientist who always put the milk in her cup before pouring her tea, because she insisted it tasted better. In the 1920s, a skeptical statistician designed a blind taste test to see if Bristol could distinguish between cups of milk-then-tea and cups of tea-then-milk. Bristol got all of them right. In 2008, the Royal Society of Chemistry reported that when milk is poured into hot tea, “individual drops separate from the bulk of the milk” and allow “significant denaturation to occur.” The result is a burnt flavor. Eighty years after Bristol was statistically vindicated, she was chemically vindicated too.

For the full review see:

Jennifer Szalai. “Proving It Doesn’t Necessarily Make It True.” The New York Times (Saturday, May 3, 2025): C8.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed name, added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 30, 2025, and has the title “Just Because You Can Prove It Doesn’t Make It True.”)

The book under review is:

Kucharski, Adam. Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty. New York: Basic Books, 2025.

Democratic Donor Warren Buffett Praises DOGE

(p. A1) . . . at the end of Saturday’s Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, the Oracle of Omaha dropped a bonbshell before a gathering of some 17,000 shareholders: that he’s set to step aside as Berkshire CEO, with vice chairman Abel taking his place.

. . .

(p. A4) It was little surprise that the very first question from moderator Becky Quick of CNBC in the Saturday [May 3, 2025] Q&A had to do with tariffs.

. . .

While critical of Trump’s tariffs, Buffett had little bad to say about Trump’s budget and program-slashing Department of Government Efficiency.

He called the current 7% gap between the federal government’s revenues and expenditures unsustainable. Whether that’s two or 20 years “it’s something that cannot go on forever,” he said. And if it isn’t brought under control, he said, it risks rampant inflation.

“I think it’s a job I don’t want, but it’s a job I think should be done, and Congress doesn’t seem to be doing it,” Buffett said.

For the full story, see:

Cordes, Henry J. “Buffett to Step Down as CEO of Berkshire.” Omaha World-Herald (Sunday, May 4, 2025): A1 & A4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the title “Warren Buffett stepping down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO at end of year; shareholders react.”)

A Rare Antibody in James Harrison’s Blood Protected the Lives of 2.4 Million Australian Babies

I recently purchased from Amazon, but have not read, Good Blood, which describes the discovery of a cure, and the struggle for acceptance of the cure, for the RH disease sketched in the passages quoted below. The disease affected my family, but I am not sure I remember exactly how. I am Rh positive and I think my mother was Rh negative. I think with each child after me, there was increasing risk and worry of possible bad health effects.

According to the Amazon summary for Good Blood, the book also describes the devotion of master blood donor James Harrison, whose recent obituary is quoted below.

Starting at least in the 1960s medical experts were often optimistic that future medical advances would come from designer chemicals enabled by scientific advances in our knowledge of chemistry and biological processes. Taxpayer funding was devoted to that approach in Nixon’s War on Cancer. But fewer medical advances have come from that approach than hoped, and more advances than expected have continued to come from the evolved usable chemicals (sometimes poisons, sometimes antibodies) of plants, animals, and exceptional human beings like Mr. Harrison.

Mao is often misquoted as saying ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom,’ but someone should say it (at least if the cost of planting the flowers is not too high).

(p. A25) James Harrison did not much care for needles. Whenever he donated plasma, he would look away as the tip went into his arm.

But Mr. Harrison was one of the most prolific donors in history, extending his arm 1,173 times. He may have also been one of the most important: Scientists used a rare antibody in his plasma to make a medication that helped protect an estimated 2.4 million babies in Australia from possible disease or death, medical experts say.

“He just kept going and going and going,” his grandson Jarrod Mellowship said in an interview on Monday [March 3, 2025]. “He didn’t feel like he had to do it. He just wanted to do it.”

. . .

Mr. Harrison’s plasma contained the rare antibody anti-D. Scientists used it to make a medication for pregnant mothers whose immune systems could attack their fetuses’ red blood cells, according to Australian Red Cross Lifeblood.

Anti-D helps protect against problems that can occur when babies and mothers have different blood types, most often if the fetus is “positive” and the mother is “negative,” according to the Cleveland Clinic. (The positive and negative signs are called the Rhesus factor, or Rh factor.)

In such cases, a mother’s immune system might react to the fetus as if it were a foreign threat. That can lead babies to develop a dangerous and potentially fatal condition, hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn, which can cause anemia and jaundice.

. . .

In Australia, scientists from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne are working to create a synthetic version of the drug using what some have called “James in a Jar,” an antibody that can be made in a lab.

But for now, human donors are essential: The anti-D shots are made with donated plasma, and Mr. Harrison was one of about 200 donors among the 27 million people in Australia, Lifeblood said.

. . .

Mr. Harrison knew the importance of his work firsthand. At 14, he needed a lot of blood transfusions during a major lung surgery. The experience inspired him to donate and encourage others to donate, too.

For the full obituary, see:

Amelia Nierenberg. “James Harrison, Whose Rare Antibodies Helped Millions, Is Dead at 88.” The New York Times (Saturday, March 8, 2025): A25.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated March 7, 2025, and has the title “James Harrison, Whose Antibodies Helped Millions, Dies at 88.”)

The Good Blood book, mentioned above, is:

Guthrie, Julian. Good Blood: A Doctor, a Donor, and the Incredible Breakthrough That Saved Millions of Babies. New York: Harry N. Abrams Press, 2020.

Trump Proposes to “Chop Domestic Spending to Its Lowest Level in the Modern Era”

Source of graph: NYT article cited below.

My entry today is part of a continuing effort to document Trump administrations actions to deregulate and downsize in the hope that the good from deregulation and government downsizing will dominate the bad potentially done by tariffs.

(p. A1) President Trump on Friday [May 2, 2025] proposed slashing $163 billion in federal spending next fiscal year, a drastic retrenchment in the role and reach of government that, if enacted, would eliminate a vast set of climate, education, health and housing programs, including some that benefit the poor.

Issuing his first budget proposal since returning to office, Mr. Trump sketched out a dim view of Washington. His blueprint depicted many core government functions as woke, weaponized, wasteful or radical, as the president looked to justify his request that Congress chop domestic spending to its lowest level in the modern era.

. . .

(p. A17) For Mr. Trump, the budget served to formalize his conservative vision and his disruptive reorganization of the government, a campaign that has already shuttered entire agencies and dismissed thousands of federal workers without the explicit approval of Congress.

. . .

. . ., many Republicans have echoed Mr. Trump’s desire to slash federal spending, though warring G.O.P. factions have disagreed at times over the exact scope.

Party lawmakers have also raced to identify potentially trillions of dollars in cuts that they can include to finance a related package that would expand a set of expiring tax cuts for families and businesses, one of the president’s signature — and costliest — economic policy priorities.

For the full story see:

Tony Romm. “Trump Seeks Drastic Cuts To Core of U.S. Spending.” The New York Times (Saturday, May 3, 2025): A1 & A17.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 2, 2025, and has the title “Trump Proposes $163 Billion in Cuts Across Government in New Budget.”)

Private Sector Succeeds Where Public Sector Fails at Operating a Successful Passenger Train

The New York Times recently ran a surprising (for them) article highlighting the success of the privately owned Brightline passenger railroad on the east coast of Florida. The Times contrasts the private success of Brightline with the public failures of Amtrak and California’s mostly undone proposed bullet train. Amtrak ran an operating deficit of over $700 million in 2024. The long-planned, barely-begun, pared-back California bullet train is now estimated to require over $100 billion to reach completion.

Maybe Brightline succeeds because the private sector allows entrepreneurs to use what Deirdre McCloskey calls trade-tested innovation to pursue their projects.

The private sector allows innovative dynamism.

The New York Times article is:

Michael Kimmelman. “What’s So Hard About Building High-Speed Trains?” The New York Times (Sat., April 19, 2025): B4-B5.

(Note: the online version of the article was updated April 18, 2025, and has the title “What’s So Hard About Building Trains?”)

McCloskey discusses trade-tested innovation in:

McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital, Transformed the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2016.

I discuss innovative dynamism in:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

A World with No Tariffs, No Barriers, No Subsidies

Art Laffer and Stephen Moore had an op-ed a few weeks ago in which they encouraged Donald Trump to be the best version of himself on the tariff and trade issue. Trump has made inconsistent statements on tariffs and trade. Sometimes his goal seems to be to seek long-term tariffs that bring in substantial revenue. But his best version seeks a mutual reduction in tariffs to zero–a world of free trade, which when combined with deregulation and downsizing of government will allow entrepreneurs to innovate and trade so that we all flourish.

The best version of Trump is the one who spoke the following words in 2018 at a meeting of the Group of Seven in Quebec:

“No tariffs, no barriers. That’s the way it should be. And no subsidies. I even said, ‘no tariffs.’ . . . Ultimately, that’s what you want. You want tariff-free, no barriers and you want no subsidies.” (Trump as quoted in Laffer and Moore 2023, p. A17)

Source of quote:

Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore. “A Win-Win Exit Strategy For Trump on Tariffs.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., April 8, 2025): A17.

(Note: ellipsis in original.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 7, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

(Note: Stephen Moore wrote a nice blurb for my Openness book.

“If She Ever Had a Clever Thought, It Died Alone and Afraid”

I still smile whenever I see a Tesla Cybertruck. Boldly audacious–its mere existence gives me hope for the future. If I could charge its battery as fast as I can fill a tank of gas, I would buy one tomorrow. I still worry that Musk will implode or cave. But right now he looks like a genuine hero, defending free speech by buying Twitter, taking on the deep state by creating DOGE, solving the engineering challenges to make the dream of Mars a reality!

(p. B1) When Jennifer Trebb first pulled into her driveway two years ago with her sleek Tesla Model Y, it was — as she put it — “kind of like a ‘Back to the Future’ moment.”

She was helping the environment, she said, but driving a Tesla also had cachet. “It was definitely a little bit of a cool moment to have something that was innovative and different,” she said.

But Ms. Trebb recently made a U-turn, joining the ranks of Tesla owners in the United States and overseas — some well known, including the singer Sheryl Crow — who are selling their vehicles because the values and politics of the company’s billionaire chief executive, Elon Musk, are alienating them, they say.

. . .

(p. B6) In the United States, perhaps the most notable rebuke of the car brand was lodged by Ms. Crow, the singer-songwriter, who posted an Instagram video in February [2025] showing her waving goodbye as her electric vehicle was driven away on a flatbed truck.

. . .

In an appearance with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, mocked Ms. Crow’s protest.

“I think she means well, but if she ever had a clever thought, it died alone and afraid,” Mr. Kennedy said.

For the full story see:

Neil Vigdor. “Tesla for Sale: Buyer’s Remorse Sets In For E.V. Owners Who’ve Soured on Musk.” The New York Times (Friday, March 7, 2025): B1 & B6.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated March 5, 2025, and has the title “Tesla for Sale: Buyer’s Remorse Sinks In for Elon Musk’s E.V.-Owning Critics.”)