Welcome to Trendlines. The secret password is “swordfish.”
Today, DOGE’s demise, an astounding stat about food stamps, and unconventional Christmas movies.
🎧 Shameless plug: You can hear me on the latest EconoFact Chats podcast with Binyamin Appelbaum of The New York Times, Scott Horsley of NPR, Claire Jones of The Financial Times, and Michael Klein, executive editor of EconoFact. We discuss consumer sentiment, wage stagnation, tariffs, and inflation.
➡️ The Latest
- Massachusetts legalized tiny homes hoping to curb its housing shortage. But there’s been no boom yet.
- President Trump said he has decided on a nominee for the next chair of the Federal Reserve, but he didn’t name his pick.
- US shoppers will spend an estimated $14.2 billion online Monday, or 6.3 percent more than in 2024, according to Adobe Analytics.
🪦 RIP
DOGE is dead.
The White House quietly confirmed last week that the Department of Government Efficiency — the cost-cutting initiative once headed by Elon Musk and hyped by President Trump — did not survive to its planned July 2026 expiration date.
“That doesn’t exist,” Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management, told Reuters when asked about DOGE’s status.
Back up: While no official cause of death was given, DOGE had drifted into a coma following Musk’s acrimonious political breakup with Trump in May.
Musk had slammed Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act for increasing government spending at the very moment DOGE was attempting to reduce it — though the world’s richest man was also reportedly angry about the president’s decision to pull the nomination of an ally, Jared Isaacman, to lead NASA. (Isaacman was later renominated.)
Regardless, Trump quickly declared victory and moved on, as did Musk, who returned to his roles running Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. Both ignored the damage DOGE left in its wake — and the failure to come anywhere near Musk’s target of slashing $1 trillion in costs (down from Musk’s initial estimate of $2 trillion).
Zoom out: Making the federal bureaucracy more efficient was a laudable goal. But its implementation — as with tariffs and other Trump initiatives — was half-baked, to be generous.
Musk’s “move fast and break things” approach was ill-suited for government, where there is an inherent tension between Congress’s power of the purse and the president’s authority to run the executive branch.
In their chaotic rush for results, Musk’s minions gutted the United States Agency for International Development without weighing the humanitarian costs, and slashed IRS staff, impairing the agency’s ability to audit and collect tax revenue. More broadly, indiscriminate layoffs cratered morale, removed much-needed expertise from the workforce, and undermined the government’s ability to recruit talent.
DOGE’s cuts weakened public services without making a real dent in the size of the government. In the end, the department claimed just $214 billion in savings — though that number is widely disputed.
Looking ahead: DOGE may be gone, but its spirit lives on, the Trump administration says.
The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources office, has taken over many of DOGE’s functions, Reuters reported. And the White House created the National Design Studio to “reduce duplicative design costs, leverage standardized design, and dramatically improve the quality of public interactions with government services.”
Final thought: Our attention has turned to other matters: National Guard troops patrolling in US cities, Trump’s lethal attacks on alleged drug smugglers in international waters, the Epstein files.
It’s worth remembering that DOGE had a lot of potential. But in Musk’s chainsaw-wielding hands, it became a massacre.
SNAP chat
Economic news is full of facts and figures. But this one stood out in my colleague Katie Johnston’s piece last week on food stamps: 74 percent of working-age people in households that receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits in Massachusetts are employed.
Think about that for just a minute: About 480,000 workers in the wealthiest state live in households that have to rely on SNAP to get by, according to a new University of Massachusetts Amherst study.
About half of those workers hold part-time jobs.
Massachusetts workers in households that rely on SNAP benefits earn just $27,800 a year on average, many making close to the state minimum wage of $15 an hour.
This is yet another example of the K-shaped economy, where the rich are doing great while the rest of America treads water or sinks lower into poverty.
In Massachusetts, households in the top 20 percent by median income earned 5.6 times more than households in the bottom 20 percent, according to a United Health Foundation analysis of 2023 Census data. That’s the third-largest income gap in the country.
Nearly 2,500 SNAP recipients in the state work for Amazon, the highest among all employers, according to data from the Department of Transitional Assistance, which administers the federal program. Walmart follows with about 2,300 workers.
SNAP helps 42 million people nationwide, but that number is expected to decline as the Trump administration implements new work requirements as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill.
Massachusetts officials anticipate many people will lose SNAP benefits because of difficulties understanding and documenting the new rules. Research has shown that work requirements don’t increase employment but lead to people losing benefits and accumulating medical debt.
“The problem isn’t that we have 42 million participating on SNAP,” Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center in Washington, D.C., told Johnston. “The problem is that we have 42 million people living in poverty in a system where the minimum wage is nowhere near the livable wage.”
🎙️ On the Record
“It’s going to get ugly the next three years.”
— Eric Dickson, chief executive of UMass Memorial Health, on looming funding challenges due to federal cuts.
🏗️ Real Estate & Development
Property plan: Hellenic College Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline is on the verge of selling a large portion of its real estate holdings for as much as $30 million.
👷♀️ Politics & Policy
People over cranes: Amid Boston’s real estate slowdown, Mayor Michelle Wu is pouring resources into workforce development.
🤝 Deals
Not so fast: Investors are questioning the merits of undoing the merger that created Burlington’s Keurig Dr Pepper. KDP plans to buy coffee conglomerate JDE Peet’s for $18 billion and then split into two companies: one for cold beverages and one for java.
🏘️ Housing
Cold snap: Boston’s rental market is cooling, leaving landlords “willing to do anything.” The average asking rent in the city dipped to $3,043 in October, its first decline since 2021, and vacancies are the highest since the pandemic.
⚕️ Health Care
Oversight oversight?: The Legislature is weighing a bill to regulate home care agencies for the elderly. Massachusetts is one of only four states without a licensing process for private, nonmedical home care agencies.
🔢 By the Numbers
$556 million
— Global box office sales for “Zootopia 2″ from Wednesday through Sunday, a record opening for an animated film.
🎞️ The Closer
There are two types of film buffs: those who consider “Die Hard” a Christmas movie and those who don’t.
In that spirit, Globe film critic Odie Henderson offers up a list of five “out-of-the-ordinary Christmas movies” you might want to watch this holiday season. His picks:
- “Feast of the Seven Fishes” (2019)
- “Almost Christmas” (2016)
- “Trading Places” (1983)
- “We’re No Angels” (1955)
- “Comfort and Joy” (1984)
For my money, “Trading Places,” a comedy that doubles as a tutorial in commodities markets, is the best of the lot. And I’ll throw in one pick of my own: “The Apartment,” Billy Wilder’s dark social satire from 1960 starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray.
📆 On this date in 1913, Henry Ford installed the first moving assembly line for the mass production of an entire automobile. His innovation reduced the time it took to build a car from more than 12 hours to one hour and 33 minutes.
👋 Thanks for reading. Trendlines will be back on Thursday.
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Larry Edelman can be reached at larry.edelman@globe.com.