| Wait, does President-elect Donald Trump actually have a mandate? What would actually be on the chopping block from his government efficiency initiative? These are some questions you all have, and my colleagues at The Washington Post have the answers. I’m sharing them while I work on more of your questions about politics for an upcoming newsletter, like: What happens to the Bide-era infrastructure money? How could Trump use the Justice Department to go after his “enemy from within”? Let me know what else you’re curious about. Does Trump actually have a mandate? Not really. The Washington Post’s senior political reporter Aaron Blake has been exploring just how much Republicans won this month’s election by. As some of the final results come in, he finds that Republican gains were actually small. Here’s an excerpt from his analysis.  |  | | | We learned a while back that Republicans lost most of the swing-state Senate races — four of five. They flipped the chamber because they won in three red states that Trump carried by double digits. Then we learned that Trump didn’t even win a majority of the popular vote, and his popular-vote margin over Vice President Kamala Harris (currently at 1.7 points and falling) ranks on the low side for recent history. He still won — and swept the swing states in a surprisingly decisive electoral-college result — but a majority of voters didn’t support him. And now it’s increasingly evident that Republicans could actually lose ground in the House. Democrats’ gains in California’s razor-thin 13th District race suggest they could flip that seat and actually wind up with a net gain of one seat. If they did, the likely result (a 220-215 GOP majority) would be the second-smallest House majority in history — not exactly the stuff of overwhelming mandates. | | | | Read the full story here. I will add that Harris got some of the most votes of any presidential candidate ever, as Axios shares. Only President Joe Biden in 2020 – and Tump in 2024 – got more. So while Trump won the popular vote, he still lost a majority of the country for a third presidential election. What are the federal programs that could be on the chopping block for “government efficiency”? "Trump government efficiency advisers Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have pledged not to bring a chisel to government spending," writes The Washington Post’s congressional economics correspondent, Jacob Bogage, “but rather ‘a chainsaw.’” What would that look like? Bogage explores:
There is plenty of room for policymakers to uncover and eliminate excess federal spending, experts say, an issue made even more serious by the country’s deteriorating financial health. The national debt is expected to eclipse $36 trillion in the coming days; Trump’s first-term policies accounted for $8.4 trillion of that amount, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
| | | | It just might be harder than they expect, he writes. A lot of the top spending that’s up for being cut covers veteran’s health care and opioid addiction treatment – things that would be hard politically to cut. They could cut funds for NASA, but that “would spell doom for Musk’s commercial spaceflight firm, SpaceX,” Bogage writes. There are also programs like Head Start, which provides preschool education for children from low-income families, and housing assistance for lower-income families. It’s unclear what exactly would get cut. While rising federal debt is a problem; one I’ve written about in this newsletter, not many budget analysts expect two billionaires to take it seriously, Bogage finds: “It is obviously important for the government to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars. There’s real bipartisan areas where people agree there’s stuff to be done. But what Elon and Vivek and Trump are going for is not that,” said Bobby Kogan, an analyst at the center-left think tank Center for American Progress. “They don’t even get the basics right. They get the size of the budget wrong. They named it after a meme. In no way are they actually taking this seriously.” | | | | Read the full story here. | 
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