Oh, gotcha.
Yeah, actually, I mean, I know that it was losing viewers, but I’m also kind of surprised that the numbers are that low, now that I think about it, if that’s “viewers” and not “households viewing”.
It looks like 2010 was the beginning of the decline.
I think I last had cable service somewhere around 2004.
Why would he mean that? They appear to be the two most-watched cable news channels in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSNBC
In the fourth quarter of 2023, MSNBC was the second most-watched cable news network in the U.S., averaging 792,000 total day viewers, behind rival Fox News, which averaged 1.212 million viewers, and ahead of CNN, which averaged 502,000 viewers
Also, man, that surprises me. I thought that CNN was the largest. I was expecting Fox to be second-largest and MSNBC to be in the top five or something.
Maybe I’m just really out-of-date.
It’s possible that he can ignore the Office of Special Counsel. I’d guess that its aim is to deal with small-scale stuff like some branch acting improperly, not to overturn executive orders. Don’t know, though. Probably have lawyers talking about it somewhere soon, if not already.
But I assume that if they’ve got a legal basis for a claim, this is just the first step before going to the courts.
investigates
Hmm. Apparently Trump ordered the head of the Office of Special Counsel, the place these guys are appealing to, to himself be fired, one Hampton Dellinger. Dellinger went to the courts and got a court order temporarily reinstating himself as head of the OSC. Apparently the Trump administration then appealed that reinstatement, and the appeals court refused to reverse it, and so the Trump administration is trying to appeal that to SCOTUS in Bessent v. Dellinger.
Does anyone know what all this firing is going to do to the unemployment rate and economy? They are firing tens of thousands of people around the country.
I’m going to go pull up the civilian labor force participation rate, which isn’t quite the same thing, but I’d think is probably more-relevant in that if you get enough shift in wages, you’ll have people move into or out of that. The unemployment rate only applies to people who are actively looking for work.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm
As of January 2025, there are 170,744,000 people in the labor force.
I have seen little by way on hard numbers for actual layoffs. But, okay, let’s say that a hundred thousand people are laid off. That’d be about 3% of the federal government. If we shift 100,000 people from participation to non-participation, the direct impact – and “direct” does matter, because there’s at least some multiplier effect as non-government employees who support those employees in their current role get laid off – would be about a 0.059 percentage point change in the size of the labor participation rate.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm
That wouldn’t represent a very dramatic change relative to the changes we’ve seen over that chart.
I think a more-impactful concern isn’t just “are people employed”? I mean, federal employment isn’t just make-work to have people employed. Rather, it’s “are the cuts we make ones where we are losing on the net?” Like, say we cut people working on Thing X. Well, now we don’t have Thing X anymore. Theoretically, if we’ve made wise hiring decisions – and maybe we haven’t – we shouldn’t be paying people working on Thing X more than Thing X is worth to us. But…maybe Thing X is really valuable, and laying people off loses us Thing X. That could be pretty costly.
Like, one thing that people just got laid off from was, as I recall, some early-warning radar system in Hawaii. Do we need an early-warning radar system in Hawaii? I don’t know. But if we do, that could be a pretty costly thing not to have in place, if what we’re trying to focus on is China.
I think that this is the item being installed/operated, as it’s a relatively-new early-warning radar going into Hawaii.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Range_Discrimination_Radar
The AN/SPY-7(V)1 is the official designation of an LRDR-derivative used with the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System…Missile Defense Agency has also decided to use AN/SPY-7(V)1 for the Aegis Ashore to be installed in Hawaii.
I mean, has the military actually said that it considers this unnecessary? I’ve seen one article, in searching from this, from someone saying that they didn’t think that DOGE even understood that the people involved were working on missile defense, just cut them because they were FAA. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I kind of doubt that the layoffs represent some kind of prioritized cost cutting coming from the military.
I wish he would’ve negotiated an end to this while Ukraine still had some leverage.
Ukraine doesn’t want to give up land, and isn’t willing to tolerate not having security guarantees. Russia is convinced that it can ultimately militarily prevail.
Wars end when one side is either unable to continue or the two sides moderate their demands to some kind of meeting point. What’s the Biden administration going to do?
The US isn’t willing to go to war on the matter, so compelling Russia militarily probably isn’t an option. The US could have withdrawn military support for Ukraine, but I don’t think that that’s what you want. There’s more sanctions, but we’ve already got a lot of sanctions in place, and you want a rapid resolution.
Maybe we could have dramatically ramped up aid for Ukraine, as long as Ukraine could have made use of it. The US is probably willing to do that to some degree, as long as it doesn’t compromise its position relative to China. But will that substantively change the situation? Like, if you’re Putin, you’ve probably got a pretty good incentive to try to stick it out, if you feel that Biden and Trump are going to have much of a difference in position.
I mean, there are sources there. It’s just…not people who would have current, inside information. John Bolton hasn’t been in government since he was National Security Advisor under Trump in Trump’s first term and the two fell out. He’s been asserting that Trump doesn’t like NATO or alliances at all for some time, though, based on his interactions with Trump in Term 1.
kagis
Here’s him in 2022, back before he expected Trump to actually make it into a second term:
Former National Security Advisor John Bolton says ‘Putin was waiting’ for Trump to withdraw the United States from NATO in his second term
“I thought he put his foot over it, but at least he didn’t withdraw then,” said Bolton, who wrote in his memoir about Trump’s consideration of withdrawing from NATO in 2018. “In a second Trump term, I think he may well have withdrawn from NATO. And I think Putin was waiting for that.”
Trump viewed NATO as a liability during his presidency, believing that European countries were not paying enough of their fair share of the burden of providing defense to the alliance. Bolton, a State Department official during the George W. Bush administration, was brought on to be Trump’s national security advisor in 2018 only to be ousted a year and a half later.
Bolton’s latest comments come just days after he told Newsmax that Trump “barely knew where Ukraine was,” pushing back on a host who said the former president had been “tough on Russia.”
Asked whether he was satisfied by how the Trump administration handled Ukraine, Bolton criticized his former boss.
“I think it went very badly,” said Bolton. "It was hard to have discussions on geostrategic issues when the president’s main interest was getting… Rudy Giuliani in to see [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky so they could go find Hillary Clinton’s computer server.
Bolton said on Friday that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper were concerned by Trump’s behavior at the time. “All of us felt that we needed to bolster Ukraine’s security, and were appalled at what Trump was doing,” he said.
EDIT: It’d actually be interesting to see whether Trump can withdraw from NATO. Remarkably-enough, this is a part of American constitutional law that has never been legally-resolved: does the President, acting solo, have the ability to terminate a ratified treaty without action from Congress?
The question was raised with SCOTUS in Goldwater v. Carter, but that case was dismissed on a technicality, so we don’t really have a ruling on the matter.
Goldwater v. Carter, 444 U.S. 996 (1979), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Senator Barry Goldwater and other members of the United States Congress challenging the right of President Jimmy Carter to unilaterally nullify the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, which the United States had signed with the Republic of China, so that relations could instead be established with the People’s Republic of China.
Goldwater and his co-filers claimed that the President required Senate approval to take such an action, under Article II, Section II of the U.S. Constitution, and that, by not doing so, President Carter had acted beyond the powers of his office. While dismissing the case the Court left open the question of the constitutionality of President Carter’s actions.
To enter into a treaty, like NATO, the Senate’s approval is required. So it does seem reasonable to me that going to the Senate should be required to exit a treaty. But…we haven’t actually established what the rule there is, even after nearly two-and-a-half centuries of being a country.
EDIT2: The UK recently had to fight out a similar question over Brexit in their Supreme Court: could the Prime Minister, without action from Parliament, withdraw from the European Union?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Miller)_v_Secretary_of_State_for_Exiting_the_European_Union
In that case, their Supreme Court ruled no, that the Prime Minister couldn’t singlehandedly leave the European Union, had to go back to Parliament.
EDIT3: I’d also add that I am dubious that Trump would leave NATO, even if Europe refuses to spend another cent on defense. I do think that he would potentially retaliate in other ways. I think that most policymakers in the US want the US in NATO – but that there is a lot of agreement on Europe and defense spending and that the US has been ignored for a long time on the matter.
EDIT4: In the hypothetical that the US did leave NATO, it could theoretically rejoin under a more-sympathetic administration, but there would be two obstacles.
The US Senate. The US has a very high bar for entering into treaties compared to most countries – a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate, plus the President. There is a reason that the US is not party to some important treaties that many other countries are party to (no ratification approval from the Senate) but still is a signatory to the treaty and acts as if it is a member, like UNCLOS. So it’d require a supermajority in the Senate to rejoin. And for NATO, “pretending to be in” doesn’t really have the same effect – under UNSC rules, war is legal, whether or not the UNSC is onboard, as long as it’s defensive and the justification is actual membership in a collective security arrangement. That is, normally a country isn’t supposed to go to war without UNSC approval (on which Russia has a veto which it would probably use) unless it is in defense of itself or an allied member who has been attacked. While the US probably has the practical ability to go to war without UNSC approval if it really, really wants to – who would stop it? – and has certainly come up with rather tortured legal justifications in the past when it couldn’t get explicit UNSC sign-off (e.g. the Iraq War), it does establish political and legal barriers. In the past, the US has not shown a lot of willingness to enter into major direct conflict in Europe without a treaty commitment – like, say, Ukraine or Finland in the Winter War. That being said, the US did enter the Korean War without a treaty commitment, so…shrugs.
Other NATO members. This requires unanimity among all NATO members. If you remember how difficult it was to get NATO approval for Finland and Sweden, the bar is the same for the US…but the impact of the US being in or out is a whole lot more consequential than Finland or Sweden being in or out. I mean, if I were the Kremlin and decided upon a confrontation path, I would pull pretty much any lever available to me to ensure that at least one member did not approve the US re-entering.
Inflation from the period during COVID-19 did go down. That does not mean that prices will return to a pre-COVID-19 point. Inflation is the rate of increase in prices, not prices. The government will actively aim to avoid deflation via adjusting interest rates, because deflation creates problems. What you saw during COVID-19 was the rate of price increases being higher than the rate of wage increases for several years, and what you saw subsequent to that was the rate of wage increases being higher than the rate of price increases.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/
capitalism will use every manufactured crisis to price gouge the fuck out of everyone
The situation here is that the government is imposing a tax and that it’s getting passed on to consumers. I’m not sure why you’re complaining about “capitalism”. If Acer were part of the government, they’d be charging more too.
You can’t impose a tax and then just have the revenue materialize out of thin air.
But otherwise Acer couldn’t have raised their prices!
Acer can set their prices wherever they feel like. They can double them tomorrow, regardless of whether tariffs show up. What limits their prices is competition, and the fact that consumers will buy from competitors if they do so, not a lack of some event to act as an “excuse to raise prices”.
I’ve used Epson and Brother printers without issue, though I suppose things could change on a per-model basis or over time.
I mean, he’s using Linux, so it’d run on Proton. I’m pretty sure that it just fires right up. I don’t think that I did anything special myself.
Getting Mod Organizer 2 set up to mod it or something like that might be more-obnoxious on Linux, but honestly, I’d say that Linux plus Proton might compare favorably against current Windows when it comes to backwards compatibility on older games. I’ve read a bunch of Steam descriptions where there are a bunch of upset reviews from people saying that they can’t get a game working on current Windows, and it just runs on Proton without problems or configuration for me.
Fallout: New Vegas lists an ATI X1300XT as the minimum and 2GB of RAM. That card has a Passmark score of 69. I’d guess that he’d probably be more than fine.
IIRC, New Vegas was really CPU-constrained, too, not GPU-constrained, and the systems he’s using are probably pretty comparable to any other system from the time CPU-wise – it’s just that they don’t have discrete 3D hardware.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/17410/Mirrors_Edge/
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 or better
1GB RAM or more
The GeForce 6800 has a Passmark score of 113 and he’s fine on memory, so, yeah, I’d give decent odds that it’d probably run well on his system.
Well, it depends. I mean, I play rather newer games that I suspect either can handle fine, but they’re light on 3D rendering.
Nova Drift is one favorite.
That exited Early Access this year. I play it regularly. But…it just uses 3D hardware for some lightweight effects.
goes to see what minimum system requirements are
Yeah, that actually lists your older Intel integrated GPU, the one on the MacBook, as being the minimum requirement.
CPUs haven’t advanced all that rapidly for quite some years, so games that are CPU-bound are also less of an issue than those GPU-bound.
EDIT: And some games won’t use 3D hardware at all. I also regularly play Rule the Waves 3, which is a 2023 naval warfare military simulator that doesn’t use 3D hardware at all.
EDIT2: I’ve also played Balatro recently, and that just uses the barest of 3D hardware to do stuff like stick rotated sprites on the screen. They just say “integrated graphics” on their system requirements. That’s a 2024 release.
I’ve run it without issues, on a much newer system.
I don’t know why it wouldn’t run at all, but as you point out, you’re running it on a pair of pretty low-end systems. One is from six years prior to the game’s release without discrete video, and the other came out in the same year, but is a very low-end system with no discrete video card; those things aren’t really aimed at playing 3d games. I don’t think that you’d likely be happy with performance even if it ran.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/323190/Frostpunk/
Windows:
Minimum:
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce GTX 660, Radeon R7 370 or equivalent with 2 GB of video RAM
Recommended:
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce 970, Radeon RX 580 or equivalent with 4GB of video RAM
Mac:
Minimum:
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: 4GB AMD Radeon Pro 5300M, Radeon Pro 560X or better
My experience is that minimum requirements tend to be kind of optimistic.
The minimum system requirements specify a discrete video card.
You’ve got an 8GB RAM Surface Go with a non-discrete GPU and no VRAM, and a 16GB RAM Macbook also with a non-discrete GPU that had been around for six years prior to the game’s release.
I’ve never returned a game, but IIRC Steam does have a refund policy for a short period of time after purchase, so if you buy a game and it doesn’t run, you can refund it.
goes looking
https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/
You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam—for any reason. Maybe your PC doesn’t meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn’t like it.
It doesn’t matter. Valve will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any reason, if the request is made within the required return period, and, in the case of games, if the title has been played for less than two hours.
The Steam refund offer, within two weeks of purchase and with less than two hours of playtime, applies to games and software applications on the Steam store.
EDIT: Here’s a Passmark comparison of your two Intel integrated video things and the lowest-end video card they list in their system requirements, a Geforce GTX 660. This gives a score to give a rough idea of how they’d compare in relative terms:
GeForce GTX 660: 4013
Intel HD 4000: 348
Intel HD 615: 705
I mean, you might get it running, but I’m skeptical that you’d have a good experience with it.
EDIT2:
Their “recommended” card is a GeForce GTX 970. Adding that:
GeForce GTX 970: 9634
EDIT3: Hmm. I’ve never really thought about it, but you’d think that Valve could get minimum requirements plonked into a database, and then have the Steam client, which can see your hardware – assuming that you’re shopping from the Steam client – warn you on the game page if your system doesn’t meet them.
Can’t agree. I mean, sure, people do abuse it, but it’s a quick flag that something might be really wrong or extremely valuable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth
Over time intervals of hundreds of millions of years, random celestial events pose a global risk to the biosphere, which can result in mass extinctions. These include impacts by comets or asteroids and the possibility of a near-Earth supernova—a massive stellar explosion within a 100-light-year (31-parsec) radius of the Sun. Other large-scale geological events are more predictable. Milankovitch’s theory predicts that the planet will continue to undergo glacial periods at least until the Quaternary glaciation comes to an end. These periods are caused by the variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession of Earth’s orbit.[10] As part of the ongoing supercontinent cycle, plate tectonics will probably create a supercontinent in 250–350 million years. Sometime in the next 1.5–4.5 billion years, Earth’s axial tilt may begin to undergo chaotic variations, with changes in the axial tilt of up to 90°.[11]
The luminosity of the Sun will steadily increase, causing a rise in the solar radiation reaching Earth and resulting in a higher rate of weathering of silicate minerals. This will affect the carbonate–silicate cycle, which will reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In about 600 million years from now, the level of carbon dioxide will fall below the level needed to sustain C3 carbon fixation photosynthesis used by trees. Some plants use the C4 carbon fixation method to persist at carbon dioxide concentrations as low as ten parts per million. However, in the long term, plants will likely die off altogether. The extinction of plants would cause the demise of almost all animal life since plants are the base of much of the animal food chain.[12][13]
In about one billion years, solar luminosity will be 10% higher, causing the atmosphere to become a “moist greenhouse”, resulting in a runaway evaporation of the oceans. As a likely consequence, plate tectonics and the entire carbon cycle will end.[14] Then, in about 2–3 billion years, the planet’s magnetic dynamo may cease, causing the magnetosphere to decay, leading to an accelerated loss of volatiles from the outer atmosphere. Four billion years from now, the increase in Earth’s surface temperature will cause a runaway greenhouse effect, creating conditions more extreme than present-day Venus and heating Earth’s surface enough to melt it. By that point, all life on Earth will be extinct.[15][16] Finally, the planet will likely be absorbed by the Sun in about 7.5 billion years, after the star has entered the red giant phase and expanded beyond the planet’s current orbit.[17]
At some point or another, Earth is not going to be in great shape for life as we know it.
But that point is most-likely to be well down the line. The most-potentially-immediate threats, like asteroid defense, are something that we’re doing.
And some perspective on time is nice. If we make it that far without problems, we’re probably going to be able to solve a lot of problems a lot more capably than we are today.
About 66 million years ago, our ancestors looked like this:
If one assumes that our descendants, 66 million years hence, are at least as far removed from our present-day selves as great-grandaddy here is, hopefully they will be able to solve a lot of problems that we are not presently equipped to solve. I’m generally not a fan of kicking the can down the road on problems, but I think that in this case, we can probably have some faith in those who are to come.
No, and that’s actually what concerns me from a US perspective. The arrangements that Trump were making weren’t with the US as beneficiary, but a private entity in the US.
That is, it could be unethical or bad foreign policy or whatever for Trump to ask for a hard bargain for the US. But aside from that, the issue here is that Trump can potentially be asking for a hard bargain that benefits him personally, not – or not exclusively – the US in aggregate. The arrangement was not between the US and Ukraine, but between a private entity in the US and Ukraine.
Ukraine is not the only country that the Trump administration will have dealings with. Corruption is a concern for people in the US. If the next thing that Trump gets up to regarding US policy is to go to the next country over and asks, in a private communication between his legal team and another country, for a lot of assets to be transferred to a private entity in the US in order for the US to take some official action, that is a problem for the American public.
[this comment copied from one I made on the !europe@feddit.org post]
I was curious about what kind of degree of Congressional clout is required to initiate an investigation into Executive Branch activity. Apparently, though this was a while back, during Trump’s first term, Trump wanted the Executive Branch not to provide information on Executive Branch activity to Congressional oversight except under some limited cases:
In 2017, the Trump Administration’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a guidance memorandum to agencies regarding the Executive Branch’s duties to respond to and comply with congressional oversight and investigative inquiries, whether accompanied by a subpoena or not. One might think, given that the President was a Republican and he was facing a bicameral Republican majority in Congress at the time, that the guidance would have favored glass door policies and open communication in favor of truly “draining the swamp.” Instead, the guidance stated that there are only three entities to which the Executive Branch has the duty to reply: a House of Congress in its entirety, a committee or subcommittee of jurisdiction, or an aforementioned committee or subcommittee’s chair.
According to the OLC in this memorandum, the constitutional authority to oversee the Executive Branch can only be conducted officially “by each house of Congress or, under existing delegations, by committees and subcommittees (or their chairmen).” Thus, an investigative inquiry from any individual member of Congress other than a committee or subcommittee chair, regardless of his or her political weight, seniority, or caucus leadership “is not properly considered an ‘oversight’ request” as “[i]ndividual members of Congress . . . do not have the authority to conduct oversight in the absence of a specific delegation by a full house, committee, or subcommittee.” Only those who speak or “act on behalf of congressional committees” may conduct official oversight. Because there is no delegation of authority to an individual member, the OLC reasons, his or her in- quiry “does not trigger any obligation to accommodate congressional needs,” especially since it “is not legally enforceable through a subpoena or contempt proceedings.” Therefore, only those congressional inquiries which are accompanied by a subpoena—or supported by the threat thereof—are owed a response. All other responses, the OLC opinion says, are left to the discretion of the agency.
That is, he really didn’t want senators or representatives being able to obtain information on what the Executive Branch was doing unless the above conditions were true, was asking for minimum cooperation with Congressional oversight, which I think means that someone requiring such information would need to hold a majority in at least one house, since I think that the chairs of committees are always from the majority party.
kagis
Yes (well, this is specific to the Senate, but I expect that the House is the same):
https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/committee-system/committee-assignments.htm
Since the 1950s, Senate and party rules have gradually changed to distribute coveted committee seats more broadly throughout each party conference. Seniority still matters, however, and the majority party member with the greatest seniority on a particular committee traditionally serves as chair.
So I don’t think that as things stand, Congressional Democrats can actually initiate investigations as long as there’s a trifecta – they require at least some Congressional Republican support.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10015
Okay, here’s a Congressional Research Service report, which I’d take to be fairly neutral:
Minority Party and Individual Member Authority to Conduct Oversight
The role of minority party Members in the oversight process is governed by the rules of each chamber and its committees. Minority Members are specifically accorded some rights. For example, House and Senate rules provide the minority on a committee a limited right to call witnesses of their choosing at a hearing, and all members of House committees are guaranteed up to five minutes to question each witness.
Ranking members and individual Members (other than committee chairs) are not authorized by chamber or committee rules to initiate official committee hearings or investigations or issue subpoenas. However, individual Members may seek the voluntary cooperation of agency officials or private persons and perform their own oversight, though these activities may be more difficult without the compulsory powers belonging to the committee
They can call witnesses once hearings are initiated, but that sounds like the only way to conduct an investigation of Executive Branch activity is to get a majority of at least one legislative house onboard. Hmm.
[this comment copied from one I made on the !europe@feddit.org post]
Crucially, the beneficiaries on the American side would not be the US government but private investors. The specific companies involved were not determined at this stage. Instead, the US proposed setting up a trust fund to which Ukraine would transfer the rights to develop its resources. This fund would then select the American companies who would extract – and profit from – Ukraine’s minerals.
Notably, the current draft does not appear to have been prepared by the US Department of Energy or the State Department but by Trump’s private legal team, which seemingly failed to distinguish between intergovernmental agreements and commercial contracts.
Uh huh. Well, that sounds pretty sketchy.
EDIT: I’d also add, setting aside the whole Ukraine angle, that that doesn’t look all that great to me in conjunction with the FCPA suspension, if Trump’s legal team is off looking to cut arrangements out-of-band from the bureaucracy with foreign governments to benefit unspecified private parties in the US. That is, for at last six months, the major legal restriction on American companies on bribing foreign governments is suspended.
On February 10, 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order and accompanying fact sheet directing Attorney General (AG) Pam Bondi to, for a period of 180 days (1) effectively halt the initiation of new Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) investigations and enforcement actions and (2) undertake a detailed review of any such existing matters with an eye toward “restoring proper bounds” on enforcement.
I realize that most folks here are probably interested in the impact on Ukraine, but that’s got some serious issues for the US as well.
To be blunt, that’s a lot of potential money to be changing hands between private parties without record being made of what terms are going on, where decisions on US policy are involved. The only reason that I’m aware of that we’re aware of this in the US is because Ukraine disclosed the offer. I don’t know whether Trump’s legal team might be writing up other contracts potentially involving other countries.
Regarding the mass layoffs? I don’t think that that’s actually the primary reason, though the House is a pretty narrow Republican majority. I think that it’s more that one aspect or another of the layoffs are potentially unpopular. Congressional representatives may need to be around for a while, and I would guess that even for Republican legislators who have constituencies that overall support layoffs, they’d rather not be directly involved, because some people are going to be upset, and some people are going to find that a government service that they liked isn’t there any more. Trump is out in a bit under four years, and Elon’s not elected or going to be in government and IIRC – though his role is certainly fuzzy – at least for a while was under some classification that was supposed to be for people who are only expected to be present for 180 days or less, so he may not be around for too long. A senator or representative may hope to be around Congress for a long time. Easier to just let the President act and then not take any action to stop what he’s doing.
Same sort of reason that Congress hasn’t declared war in ages, just done variations on “authorizing the President to make use of military force”. Declaring war is potentially-politically-costly if a war becomes unpopular. Politically-safer for Congressional representatives to authorize the President to act and then letting him mostly be exposed to any political risks.