Wednesday Reads: The Trump/Musk Demolition Crew

Good Afternoon!!

I woke up this morning to the stunning news that Elon Musk will be in attendance at Trump’s first cabinet meeting this morning. That is completely insane, but it’s the reality we are living in right now. I wonder if this will be similar to the first cabinet meeting in 2017? Remember how most of the attendees took turns praising Trump? This time, perhaps they’ll be forced to suck up to Musk.

CBS News: Trump to hold first Cabinet meeting at the White House, with Musk in attendance.

President Trump is holding his first Cabinet meeting at the White House on Wednesday, convening his top advisers who are now largely in place across the executive branch.

Billionaire and senior Trump adviser Elon Musk, who is not a member of the Cabinet, will also be present, the White House said. Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday that “ALL CABINET MEMBERS ARE EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON. The Media will see that at the Cabinet Meeting this morning!!!” Musk is a special government employee who has been tasked with informally overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

The Cabinet meeting comes as Musk has started to run into opposition from other top officials in his push to slash federal spending and the government’s workforce. In recent days, he has said federal employees must respond to an email by describing five things they accomplished last week or face termination, sparking confusion among federal workers. Multiple Senate-confirmed heads of departments told their employees that they could ignore the demand, which was issued by the Office of Personnel Management.

Most, but not all, of Mr. Trump’s top nominees have now been confirmed by the Senate. A full Senate vote has yet to be scheduled for Rep. Elise Stefanik, his pick to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, as House Republicans cannot afford to lose a vote given their razor-thin majority. Linda McMahon, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the Department of Education, also has yet to be confirmed by the Senate. Mr. Trump has pledged to overhaul that department.

The president’s nomination of Lori Chavez-DeRemer for secretary of labor is still in limbo, with no vote scheduled yet. And the Senate has yet to confirm Jamieson Greer as U.S. trade representative, although the Senate advanced his nomination this week, as the president imposes hefty new tariffs on allies and adversaries alike.

Meanwhile, the White House claims that Musk actually has no control over DOGE; yesterday we learned that the mysterious person who is actually in charge of destroying our government is someone named Amy Gleason.

AP: Who is Amy Gleason, the person named DOGE’s acting administrator by the White House?

The acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency is a low-profile executive who has expertise in health care technology and worked in the first Trump administration.

The White House on Tuesday afternoon identified Amy Gleason as the acting leader of DOGE, which has been pushing agencies to fire employees, cancel contracts and make other budget cuts.

Although DOGE’s cuts have been championed by billionaire Elon Musk and his associates, the White House has insisted that Musk is overseeing the effort as a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, not a DOGE employee.

The identity of who was technically running DOGE had been a mystery, even though an executive order signed by Trump last month called for the appointment of an administrator to report to the White House. A government lawyer on Monday told a judge that he didn’t know who that person was, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had declined to identify the person earlier Tuesday in a press briefing….

Gleason, 53, worked from 2018 through 2021 in the United States Digital Service, an agency that has been renamed the US DOGE Service, according to her LinkedIn profile. In that role, she worked with the White House on the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic.

She returned to the agency in January after Trump took office. DOGE and Gleason did not respond to an email seeking comment on Tuesday….

In the interim, she had been working as “chief product officer” at two small Nashville-based health care startups, Russell Street Ventures and Main Street Health, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Okay. But everyone knows that Musk is in charge.

The latest news and commentary on Musk’s activities:

The Washington Post: DOGE to cancel government contracts that help veterans, records show.

Isaac Stanley-Becker and Jonathan Lemire at The Atlantic on Musk’s demands the federal workers account for their work activities or be terminated: ‘It’s a Psyop’: Inside Elon Musk’s Empty Ultimatum.

Shortly before 11 a.m. on Sunday, the 80,000 physicians, health scientists, disease detectives, and others tasked with safeguarding the nation’s health received instructions to respond to an email sent the day before asking them, “What did you do last week?”

The email arose from a Saturday dispatch issued by President Donald Trump on the social-media platform he owns, Truth Social. “ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE,” he wrote.

The response from Elon Musk arrived seven hours later on the social-media platform he owns, X. The billionaire Trump confidant leading the effort to slash the federal workforce wrote that afternoon that he was acting on Trump’s “instructions” and ensuring that “all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.”

The result was a government-wide email directing federal workers to detail their accomplishments over the previous week, in five bullet points. Musk wrote on X: “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

Government agencies responded in different ways to this e-mail, giving employees confusing messages. A number of bosses advised their employees not to respond at all.

By late afternoon on Monday, many federal health workers had left their offices with no new guidance, uncertain about whether to respond to the email and whether ignoring it would jeopardize their jobs.

They didn’t know that the federal government’s main personnel agency, which had sent Saturday’s government-wide email, had quietly instructed agencies midday Monday that a response was voluntary. Those instructions effectively rescinded Musk’s threats.

For Musk, the episode was a setback. For federal workers struggling to get their bearings, they told us, it was just one more reason to feel both fury and fear.

“This whole administration is a fucking train wreck,” a federal health official said….

Most of the early guidance not to reply to the Musk directive came from the country’s national-security agencies, including the CIA, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. A senior official at NASA, which advised employees not to respond, called the request an “unprecedented ask and unprompted attack on our workforce” in a weekend email to employees that was described to us. A deputy commander at the Navy told people in his chain of command, “Please do NOT respond at this time,” accenting his order using bold red text.

The cascading series of contradictory guidance reflected the unusual balance of power between Trump and Musk, and the unpredictable consequences for millions of federal workers. “It’s a psyop,” said a senior official at the Department of Veterans Affairs, referring to a psychological operation, in this case intended to intimidate federal workers. “It’s a form of harassment. But there’s no one to complain to, because no one knows exactly where it’s coming from or who’s behind it.”

The entire episode was a clusterfuck, but supposedly Musk/DOGE are still trying to make it happen.

Meanwhile, there were signs that OPM was working to make parts of the Musk directive permanent, at least within the agency. In an email to employees Monday evening, OPM’s acting director wrote that he had asked the chief human capital officer to “operationalize this exercise” so that employees continue to “submit weekly accomplishment bullets.”

WTF?! In many cases we are talking about highly accomplished scientists, doctors, and other professionals–and they are supposed to justify their jobs with lists of 5 accomplishments every fucking week?

Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan at “Can We Still Govern?”: Musk’s Fraudulent Fraud Squad.

Fraud, waste, and abuse has become the rallying cry for Elon Musk’s dismantling of the federal government. During a recent Oval Office briefing about DOGE, Trump and Musk used the terms “fraud” and “fraudsters” a dozen times, claiming that their elimination of fraud could save up to $1 trillion dollars.

Musk’s social media is similarly laden with tales of fraud and abuse that his DOGE team has supposedly uncovered. Millions of dead people receiving fraudulent Social Security! “Illegals” living in high end hotel rooms paid for by FEMA! Corrupt USAID bureaucrats ripping off the government and enriching themselves! None of it is true.

Musk and Trump’s focus on fraud is nothing new. Fraud has always served as a powerful political trope, one that provides a rationale for cutting government. Accusations of fraud were used to discredit Black elected officials during Reconstruction. Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Queen was an especially effective trope directed against poverty-based policies. A recent poll suggests that 70% of Americans believe government expenditures are filled with waste, fraud, and inefficiency….

Trump and Musk’s fraud trope is distinct in three ways

First, Musk’s fake fraud claims are different from the past because he has built, and now is able to leverage, a propaganda machine to feed the fraud narrative. Ronald Reagan was an extraordinarily effective communicator, but Musk makes him look like an amateur. Musk can use DOGE to generate false claims about fraud, and how much money DOGE can save by tackling it. He then pushes those claims on his social media platform. The President and right-wing media obligingly repeat the claims. It is an integrated production function that converts conspiracy theories into government policy, and then conventional wisdom in MAGAland.

Second, as we describe below, the scale and scope of the programs they’re targeting are fundamentally different from the past. It’s not just to gut programs that benefit marginalized populations. They’re targeting a broad swath of government programs, including popular policies that benefit most Americans, and using the fraud trope to justify extreme and illegal actions, like shutting down entire agencies. This fits with a worldview that government is fundamentally corrupt, and must be captured and radically refashioned.

Third, the motivation is not really about shrinking government, rather it’s about state capture. The strategy is simple. Claim there’s fraud, dismantle the institutions that prevent fraud, and then capture public dollars for yourself. As Musk himself recently noted: “it’s like, really easy to take advantage of the federal government. Very easy.” He should know. His companies have received at least $38 billion from government subsidies, loans and contracts. Their value, and his personal net worth, have ballooned since the election.

And here is the key point: Musk is the one committing an unprecedented fraud on the American people, conning it out of a functional government. He is systematically lying, claiming that there is widespread fraud and abuse, then leveraging those lies to remake government in ways that benefit the broligarchy.

Please read the rest at the Substack link.

James Fallows at his Breaking the News: ‘They Were Careless People’: Taking Moments to Tear Down What Has Taken Lifetimes to Create.

Fallows begins with a photo of Queens College, Oxford and the caption:

The plush lawn of The Queen’s College, Oxford. As the corny joke goes, a visiting American asks, “How do you get your lawn to look like that?” The British groundskeeper replies, “It’s easy. Just sow it, roll it, mow it—and do that for 400 years.” But what has taken centuries to perfect could be torn up in minutes with a backhoe. That’s essentially what’s happening to America’s carefully built ‘soft infrastructure’ now. Here’s another example from the aviation world.

Last week the eminent China scholar Orville Schell likened this moment’s all-fronts Trump-Musk disruption of American institutions to the early years of the catastrophic Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao. “Trump may lack Mao’s skills as a writer and theorist,” Schell wrote, “but he possesses the same animal instinct to confound opponents and maintain authority by being unpredictable to the point of madness”:

“Mao, who would have welcomed the catastrophe now unfolding in America, must be looking down from his Marxist-Leninist heaven with a smile, as the East wind may finally be prevailing over the West wind – a dream for which he had long hoped.”

It is impossible to keep up with the barrage of daily shocks and dislocations. Of course this is by design. The nonstop flow of outrages also makes it easier for members of the quisling Congress to avoid commenting on any of them in particular—for instance, the US siding with Russia and North Korea in a major UN vote this week, and siding against all its traditional allies. By tomorrow, reporters will have something else to ask about.

So let me focus on one dull-sounding development that sooner or later will be killing people. Yes, I could be talking about changes in Medicaid or in vaccine coverage or in cancer research, or about the USAID shutdowns that have already left many people dead overseas. Or lots more.

But instead I’m talking about the sudden attack on part of the invisible infrastructure that has kept air travelers so safe in the skies. Reminder: before last month’s helicopter-airliner collision over the Potomac, the US had gone nearly 16 years without a major airline crash. Through those years, US airlines conducted well over 10 billion passenger-journeys. A total of two people died in US airline accidents through that time. [UPDATE: Just now, as I put up this post, I see news of a potentially catastrophic close-call this morning at Chicago’s Midway airport. More on that as extra info comes in.]

Aviation as a ‘marker species’: Systems that work only when many other systems are working too.

Certain animals—frequently amphibians—are seen as indicators of the larger health of an ecosystem. If they’re doing OK, probably so is the system as a whole.

Certain industrial and social structures can have a marker-species function. If a society can sustain them, it means that many other institutions and arrangements must be functioning too. Any country can operate crude steel smelters or grow plantation crops. But to have an advanced biotech industry, or a globally successful university system, or advanced info-tech, a country needs a lot of other physical and social infrastructure.

Aviation, especially aircraft-making, is another of these industrial marker-species. There are only a handful of viable aircraft producers in the world. That’s not a coincidence: Success in this realm is so difficult, and the cost of the smallest error can be so high. To have an Airbus company—or a Boeing in its heyday, or a smaller Embraer or Bombardier—you have to have a lot of other things in working order. After living in China, I wrote a book called China Airborne. Its premise was that China’s decades-long quest—still unsuccessful—to join Airbus and Boeing as a global aerospace power was a microcosm of its strengths and limitations in many other realms.

Why would this be? It is again because of aviation’s marker-species role. To have a successful aircraft industry you need so many other things:

Read the rest at the Substack link. I’ve already quoted too much.

More stories of interest:

The Bulwark: It IS Happening Here. Trump’s autocratic project isn’t some threat on the horizon. It’s our current moment.

The Guardian: Bezos directs Washington Post opinion pages to promote ‘personal liberties and free markets.’

The Guardian: Rachel Maddow staff to be let go as part of MSNBC overhaul.

CBS Boston: American Airlines flight from Boston aborts landing at D.C. airport to avoid departing plane.

The New York Times: Two Planes, in Washington and Chicago, Abort Landings to Avoid Collisions.

Alexander J. Motyl at The Hill: Was 40-year-old Trump recruited by the KGB?

Peter Baker at The New York Times: Under Trump, America’s New Friends: Russia, North Korea and Belarus.

Jill Filopovic at The Atlantic: The Adolescent Style in American Politics.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon: “A woman is like a child”: MAGA quickly turns its sights on stripping Republican women of power.

Devan Cole at CNN: For Trump, 3 court losses in 90 minutes.

That’s all I have for today. Take care everyone!