'Tech genius' image wears thin after series of errors calls DOGE competence into question
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Why is Nixon's second term significant in this discussion?
Thanks, Juneholm, for joining us this hour. Appreciate it. So Richard Nixon was sworn in for his second term as president in January 1973. First elected in the 1968 election, then reelected in the 1972 election. So Inauguration Day, he was sworn in for what would, of course, famously become his disastrous second term in office in January. Saturday, January 20th, 1973. Two days after that, LBJ died. The Nixon inauguration was on Saturday, and then on Monday, two days later, former Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson passed away, had a heart attack. And then two days after that, Nixon proclaimed that in the immediate aftermath of LBJ's death, he, Richard Nixon, was going to kill one of LBJ's most beloved projects. two days after LBJ's death. Very classy.
This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools and better health and better homes and better training and better job opportunities. to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery.
For his War on Poverty that he announced in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress to create a new thing. He asked them to create something called the Office of Economic Opportunity. And I'm oversimplifying, but essentially all the things that Johnson wanted to do for Americans who were poor for his War on Poverty, the health care you do with Medicaid and Medicare, but everything else you would do through this new Office of Economic Opportunity. And it did a lot. That is, for example, where we got Head Start, the big preschool program. That's where we got AmeriCorps. We got lots of programs serving Native Americans, for example. So Lyndon Johnson made that, the Office of Economic Opportunity. It was really his baby from his war on poverty. And Nixon declared he wanted it dead. Now, in Nixon's first term in office, he had tried to kill that agency.
He had installed a young zealot, a 36-year-old named Donald Rumsfeld, to go run that office with express instructions from the president to run it into the ground. And young Donald Rumsfeld, I think, did wreck as much as he could. He cut off parts of the agency and put them in other parts of the government. But it wasn't enough. By the time Nixon was coming back for his second term, that agency that he hated so much, it still existed. And so this time, coming back for his second term, he just flat out said he was going to kill it off. He did have the decency to wait until two days after LBJ died, but then he told Congress he wanted them to zero it out of the budget. Kill it. It's interesting, though.
Even that wasn't enough for Nixon. Because when he came back for his second term, again, like kind of famously, he was way more radical than he had been before. He was certainly less constrained and perhaps more thrilled and perhaps more drunk on his own power. And so this time, when he wanted to destroy that part of the government, that agency in the government, yes, he told Congress that he wanted them to abolish the agency. He told them that. But he also sent in yet another new guy who was even more of a wrecking ball than Donald Rumsfeld. A guy whose name was Howard Phillips. He was so much of a zealot, he made Donald Rumsfeld look like a hippie in comparison. But this guy Phillips was sent down to this agency by Richard Nixon. And when he showed up there, he effectively just announced right away that that agency was dead. Wrap up, go home, it's over, we're not doing this anymore.
Quote, Phillips immediately issued instructions to local anti-poverty groups to begin phasing out and planning for reductions in force. Nixon had requested that Congress kill it. Congress hadn't done anything about that yet. In the meantime, he decided he was so impatient he wanted to kill it anyway. He sent this guy to just go announce that it was dead. It's a big scandal at the time. Here's how NBC Nightly News reported on it.
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