“It’s impossible to please everybody. Before I ran for governor, I had an 80 percent approval rating. As soon as I announced, I had a 43 percent approval rating Immediately, half of the people said, ‘Fuck him! I’m not going to see his movies anymore.’”

— Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), quoted by The Hill.

“If a Republican enters the Oval Office in 2025, whether it’s Donald Trump or someone else, there is a good chance that president will turn to the same electronic database to staff the White House and federal agencies,” the New York Times reports.

“Think of it as a right-wing LinkedIn. This so-called Project 2025 — part of a $22 million presidential transition operation at a scale never attempted before in conservative politics — is being led by the Heritage Foundation, a group that has been staffing Republican administrations since the Reagan era.”

New York Times: “One vital test Mr. Biden faces is making all his new economic laws work as intended. Much of his economic legacy will depend on how effectively his administration allocates trillions of dollars in spending and tax incentives contained in the economic bills that Mr. Biden signed into law during his first two years in office.”

“Across the White House and several agencies, officials are trying to stretch dollars to meet Mr. Biden’s ambitious goals, including making high-speed internet available to everyone in the country, replacing all lead pipes that carry drinking water and building out a nationwide network of electric vehicle charging stations. In those cases and many others, officials are working with far less money than the president had initially proposed, a side effect of the compromises he accepted to win bipartisan support to enact his agenda.”

CNN: “Nearly a dozen years ago when Barack Obama was president, a newly emboldened House GOP majority came to power, promising to rein in the Democratic agenda, cut spending and investigate a White House they believed had run rampant. What resulted: Years of intense feuding between the two parties and a government in gridlock as Washington careened from one potential fiscal crisis to the next.”

“Now, as Democrats are poised to hold a narrow Senate majority – and Republicans are expecting a razor-thin House majority of their own – lawmakers in both parties have a deeply pessimistic view over the next two years and are bracing for an ugly period of legislating in Washington.”

Jonathan Bernstein: “Back when things were going badly, pressure began building on Biden to do something to turn his administration around. When an administration is perceived to be in trouble, often the first change presidents make is to bring on a new chief of staff. And sure enough, in late January the Washington Post reported that Chief of Staff Ron Klain’s job was in trouble. At that point, the poorly regarded U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan was still fresh in people’s minds. Meanwhile, inflation was building, and the big Build Back Better spending package (the one that eventually became the climate and health bill) was repeatedly pronounced dead.”

“Biden, to his credit, did not do something. He presumably knew that the case against Klain was weak and that his administration was reasonably well-organized and well-run. So he kept Klain on. It appears to have been the right decision.”

“President Biden’s move this week to cancel student loan debt for tens of millions of borrowers and reduce future loan payments for millions more comes with a huge catch, economists warn: It does almost nothing to limit the skyrocketing cost of college and could very well fuel even faster tuition increases in the future,” the New York Times reports.

“That downside is a direct consequence of Mr. Biden’s decision to use executive action to erase some or all student debt for individuals earning $125,000 a year or less, after failing to push debt forgiveness through Congress. Experts warn that schools could easily game the new structure Mr. Biden has created for higher education financing, cranking up prices and encouraging students to load up on debt with the expectation that it will never need to be paid in full.”

Janan Ganesh: “The question is whether, over a large enough sample size, a country can survive the sending of its ablest people to the private sector. In a sense, democratic capitalism is self-eroding. In allowing for private careers of such lavish pay and privacy, it makes politics into a mug’s game. The resulting decline in laws and institutions in turn threatens the economy.”

“If the Tory circus distresses you, consider that, in Labour’s shadow team, the experience comes from someone who has spent a quarter of a century in parliament without leaving much mark (Yvette Cooper) and a failed ex-leader (Ed Miliband). Autocracies at least allow officials enough scope for graft and the indulgence of peccadillos to keep the talent coming.”

Jonathan Bernstein: “Republicans are happy to put anyone in office as long as they’ll be a reliable vote. Democrats are looking more for substance from politicians. That didn’t used to be the case — as recently as the 1980s, neither party had a reputation for politicians who were more prepared or took the job more seriously. Then Republicans nominated George W. Bush for the presidency with far too limited experience. And then they nominated Trump.”

“Of course, there are Republicans in Congress — and in statehouses and other positions — who take governing seriously, and Democrats who don’t. But the parties are no longer equal in that respect.”

“One of the sad things about all of this is that partisan polarization among voters has actually made candidates less important. Theoretically, at least, that should give parties more freedom to nominate candidates based on experience and an expressed interest in public affairs. Parties still care about any small potential advantages they can get, and in a close campaign even very small factors matter. So that may sometimes argue for a know-nothing celebrity candidate. But the truth is, Republicans could really use some legislative talent in Congress — especially if they win control of it in November.”

Ryan Cooper: “Obsessively monitoring polls and instantly trimming down or throwing out policies that don’t register a strongly positive poll result will tend to reinforce that wimpy attitude. It will also tend to rule out unpopular but tactically sound moves, like for example pushing through with an economic stimulus that may not poll well today but will ensure unemployment is low on Election Day.”

“Conversely, Bill Clinton’s passage of free trade deals may have paid off politically in the short term, but did tremendous damage to the Democrats’ long-term performance in the numerous places that were harmed.”

“A lot of the mistrust in our country right now is the result of policy failure. And that policy failure is largely about a generation of intentional disinvestment in the things that we share and need together.”

— Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in an interview with the Washington Post.

Washington Post: “On one side is Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who, with the backing of the U.S. Postal Service’s governing board, is expected as soon as next week to outline a new vision for the agency, one that includes more service cuts, higher and region-specific pricing, and lower delivery expectations.”

“But congressional Democrats are pressing President Biden to install new board members, creating a majority bloc that could oust DeJoy, a Trump loyalist whose aggressive cost-cutting over the summer has been singled out for much of the performance decline. The fight over the agency’s future is expected to be fraught and protracted, leaving Americans with unreliable mail delivery for the foreseeable future.”

Washington Post: “A few weeks after taking office, Biden and his team are confronted with numerous challenges, including smoothing over chaotic operations, boosting flagging morale and staffing up agencies that dwindled. To achieve their policy goals, they must move quickly to communicate a sense of mission, build expertise, improve performance, assure stability and regain public confidence, analysts say.”

“Looking across the agencies… experts on the federal government see symptoms of the damaged bureaucracy: Key jobs are unfilled, talent has departed, departments were politicized, and morale was harmed. Civil servants have hunkered in a defensive crouch as Trump and his allies demanded political loyalty, tested their professionalism and called them the intransigent ‘deep state.'”

Robert Reich: Trump left behind a monstrous predicament. Here’s how to tackle it.