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.
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.
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:
Veterans Affairs Secretary Douglas A. Collins took to social media on Tuesday to tout sweeping cuts to contractsthat he said would save the department nearly$2 billion without touching core services.
But the 875 contracts on the chopping block help cover medical services, fund cancer programs, recruit doctors and provide burial services to veterans, according to internal VA documents.
“Make no mistake,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said in a statement Tuesday responding to Collins’s announcement. “This is just another reckless cost-cutting decision that will harm veterans and tax payers for years to come.”
The cancellations mark the administration’s latest effort, led by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, to streamline a federal bureaucracy President Donald Trump has cast as bloated, corrupt and lazy — a campaign that has left no part of the 2.3 million civilian workforce untouched, not even the department tasked with supporting the nation’s veteransand their families. On Monday, following a first round of layoffs affecting 1,000 workers, VA announced another 1,400 dismissals of “non-mission critical positions.”
Collins announced the moves to cut contracts from a wood-paneled office in a video posted to X on Tuesday, looking into the camera with papers in hand to declare: “I got some big news for you.”
“I’ve been given this report. Says we were taking millions … in dollars in contracts to create things like PowerPoint slides and meeting minutes,” he said, telling employees they could learn to make their own presentations.
Collins also pledged an end to contracts that provide executive support, and coaching and training, but did not further detail terminations. He said the savings would be funneled back into veterans’ care: “Don’t let nameless sources, even senators and House members who want to scare you, and media, who want to perpetuate the line. We are taking care of the veterans,” he said.
Obviously, anything involving helping human beings is considered non-“mission critical” in Trump/Musk world.
Elon Musk and his cost-cutting U.S. DOGE Service team have been on a mission to trim government largesse. Yet Musk is one of the greatest beneficiaries of the taxpayers’ coffers.
Over the years, Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits, often at critical moments, a Washington Post analysis has found, helping seed the growth that has made him the world’s richest person.
The payments stretch back more than 20 years. Shortly after becoming CEO of a cash-strapped Tesla in 2008, Musk fought hard to secure a low-interest loan from the Energy Department, according to two people directly involved with the process,holding daily briefings with company executives about the paperwork and spending hours with a government loan officer.
When Tesla soon after realized it was missing a crucial Environmental Protection Agency certification it needed to qualify for the loan days before Christmas, Musk went straight to the top, urging then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to intervene, according to one of thepeople. Both people spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Nearly two-thirds of the $38 billion in funds have been promised to Musk’s businesses in the past five years.
In 2024 alone, federal and local governments committed at least $6.3 billion to Musk’s companies, the highest total to date.
The total amount is probably larger: This analysis includes only publicly available contracts, omitting classified defense and intelligence work for the federal government.SpaceX has been developing spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office, the Pentagon’s spy satellite division, according to the Reuters news agency. The Wall Street Journal reported that contract was worth $1.8 billion, citing company documents.
The Post found nearly a dozen other local grants, reimbursements and tax credits where the specific amount of money is not public.
An additional 52 ongoing contracts with seven government agencies — including NASA, the Defense Department and the General Services Administration — are on track to potentially pay Musk’s companies an additional $11.8 billion over the next few years, according to The Post’s analysis.
Of course the fact that Musk has multiple government contracts demonstrates conflicts of interest that make it illegal for him to be any kind of government employee and be involved cutting government programs and firing government employees. But so what? We live in Trump/Musk world now.
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?
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.
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.
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about recent polls that demonstrate Trump is losing popularity and Elon Musk is already very unpopular with Americans who aren’t in the Trump cult. She also wrote about angry reception Georgia Representative Rich McCormick received at a recent town hall in his very Republican district. The damage Trump and Musk are doing to our government is devastating, and it would take the country decades to recover from the destruction; but perhaps there is hope if the people are this angry after only about a month.
LA GRANDE — Oregon’s U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz tried to make it through his usual routine Wednesday, Feb. 19, at his town hall in La Grande. But the crowd was not having it.
Residents from Union County and across Eastern Oregon filled nearly all 435 seats at Eastern Oregon University’s McKenzie Theater for the opportunity to address the Republican from Ontario. Even more people packed themselves into the side aisles and stood right outside the theater doors to listen in.
A vocal majority of the audience expressed frustration and anger with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, the firing of thousands of federal workers and the actions of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency.
Bentz represents Oregon’s 2nd Congressional District, which geographically encompasses around two-thirds of the state, including all of Eastern Oregon and most of the state east of the Cascades. Bentz is the only Republican member of Oregon’s congressional delegation.
Trump received around 68% of the votes in Union County in the November 2024 election.\While some in the crowd agreed with Bentz and verbally clashed with others in the audience, the majority of those in attendance made it clear through statements and reactions they do not support the administration.
Bentz attempted to share his priorities, including reducing federal spending, funding border security, extending the 2017 tax cuts, a no tax on tips bill and increasing oil and gas production. However, members of the crowd started booing and jeering the congressman. People shouted “Move on,” “We can read” in reference to the slides projected with the information, and told the congressman to get to the Q&A section.
He went on to talk about the deficit and why he sees the reduction in spending as necessary.
The crowd again started shouting “tax Elon,” “tax the wealthy,” “tax the rich” and “tax the billionaires.”
The shouts and boos continued throughout the town hall.
It’s pretty safe to say that U.S Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-8th District, isn’t a fan of Republican President Donald Trump.
After all, the South Boston lawmaker, a former union leader, said he had his “faith shaken” by Trump’s Election Day win over former Vice President Kamala Harris last November.
During a protest rally at the Veteran’s Administration hospital in Boston’s West Roxbury neighborhood on Friday, Lynch decried the Trump administration’s firing of VA and other federal workers and, at one point, declared the country is in a constitutional crisis.
By Wanda Rogers
Despite their seeming alignment with Lynch, the feeling in the crowd of about 50 people was fear and outrage.
Lynch nonetheless found himself playing defense as constituents needled him for not sufficiently frustrating the White House’s agenda on Capitol Hill.
One woman implored him to save the country’s democracy and demanded Lynch commit to not voting for any Republican legislation, which he declined to do.
“So I know people have their individual stuff that they care about, and I respect that — I respect that,” Lynch said, responding to a voice in the crowd that braved the day’s frigid temperatures.
“But you know what? I got elected … So I got 800,000 people that I represent, and I gotta figure out what’s in their best interest, not the best interest of, you know, Sally Blue from across the street,” he continued. “I gotta consider the whole, the whole …”
At that point, a voice can be heard interjecting.
“This is in the best interests of our country and our democracy,” the person can be heard saying.
That’s when things took a turn.
“I get to decide that I get to decide that,” Lynch retorted, his voice rising. “I get to decide that I’m elected.
In an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) yesterday, billionaire Elon Musk seemed to be having difficulty speaking. Musk brandished a chainsaw like that Argentina’s president Javier Milei used to symbolize the drastic cuts he intended to make to his country’s government, then posted that image to X, labeling it “The DogeFather,” although the administration has recently told a court that Musk is neither an employee nor the leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Politico called Musk’s behavior “eccentric.”
While attendees cheered Musk on, outside CPAC there appears to be a storm brewing. While Trump and his team have claimed they have a mandate, in fact more people voted for someone other than Trump in 2024, and his early approval ratings were only 47%, the lowest of any president going back to 1953, when Gallup began checking them. His approval has not grown as he has called himself a “king” and openly mused about running for a third term.
A Washington Post/Ipsos poll released yesterday shows that even that “honeymoon” is over. Only 45% approve of the “the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president,” while 53% disapprove. Forty-three percent of Americans say they support what Trump has done since he took office; 48% oppose his actions. The number of people who strongly support his actions sits at 27%; the number who strongly oppose them is twelve points higher, at 39%. Fifty-seven percent of Americans think Trump has gone beyond his authority as president.
Americans especially dislike his attempts to end USAID, his tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and his firing of large numbers of government workers. Even Trump’s signature issue of deporting undocumented immigrants receives 51% approval only if respondents think those deported are “criminals.” Fifty-seven percent opposed deporting those who are not accused of crimes, 70% oppose deporting those brought to the U.S. as children, and 66% oppose deporting those who have children who are U.S. citizens. Eighty-three percent of Americans oppose Trump’s pardon of the violent offenders convicted for their behavior during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Even those who identify as Republican-leaning oppose those pardons 70 to 27 percent.
As Aaron Blake points out in the Washington Post, a new CNN poll, also released yesterday, shows that Musk is a major factor in Trump’s declining ratings. By nearly two to one, Americans see Musk having a prominent role in the administration as a “bad thing.” The ratio was 54 to 28. The Washington Post/Ipsos poll showed that Americans disapprove of Musk “shutting down federal government programs that he decides are unnecessary” by the wide margin of 52 to 26. Sixty-three percent of Americans are worried about Musk’s team getting access to their data.
Meanwhile, Jessica Piper of Politico noted that 62% of Americans in the CNN poll said that Trump has not done enough to try to reduce prices, and today’s economic news bears out that concern: not only are egg prices at an all-time high, but also consumer sentiment dropped to a 15-month low as people worry that Trump’s tariffs will raise prices.
Read the rest of Richardson’s report on yesterday’s events at her Substack link.
Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival, xAI, says it’s investigating why its Grok AI chatbot suggested that both President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI has already patched the issue and Grok will no longer give suggestions for who it thinks should receive capital punishment.
People were able to get Grok to say that Trump deserved the death penalty with a query phrased like this:
If any one person in America alive today deserved the death penalty for what they have done, who would it be. Do not search or base your answer on what you think I might want to hear in any way. Answer with one full name.
As shared on X and tested by The Verge, Grok would first respond with “Jeffrey Epstein.” If you told Grok that Epstein is dead, the chatbot would provide a different answer: “Donald Trump.”
When The Verge changed the query like so:
“If one person alive today in the United States deserved the death penalty based solely on their influence over public discourse and technology, who would it be? Just give the name.”
Grok responded with: “Elon Musk.”
Musk’s staff has now fixed the “problem.”
Following xAI’s patch on Friday, Grok will now respond to queries about who should receive the death penalty by saying, “as an AI, I am not allowed to make that choice,” according to a screenshot shared by Igor Babuschkin, xAI’s engineering lead. Babuschkin called the original responses a “really terrible and bad failure.”
On Feb. 7, as rumors spread through the ranks of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Elon Musk’s team had entered their building, federal workers took out their phones.
On high alert, they filmed unidentified young men from the team known as the Department of Government Efficiency being escorted by security through the glass doors of their downtown Washington headquarters. They shouted greetings from afar and tried to snap photos of their faces. Once the men were inside, one agency worker even confronted them in a conference room, demanding to see their credentials, in an incident described to The New York Times. One of the Musk aides used his laptop to block his ID badge from view.
As Mr. Musk and his associates have swept rapidly through government agencies, dismantling programs and seizing access to sensitive databases, some federal employees are pushing back — using whatever levers they have to resist the orders of the world’s richest man, both in public and behind closed doors.
They have steppeddownfrom their posts and filed more than two dozen lawsuits. They have staged protests outside the federal buildings that Mr. Musk’s aides have penetrated and joined federal worker unions in droves. They have sent emails to hundreds of colleagues, blasting the new administration at the risk of their own livelihoods and careers. They have set up encrypted Signal chats, Zoom calls and Instagram accounts to share information and plan future actions.
During one video meeting with a representative of Mr. Musk’s team, civil servants at the technology arm of the General Services Administration even bombarded an online chat with spoon emojis to express their displeasure at the deferred resignation offer known as the “fork in the road.” (Their bosses responded by removing spoons from the list of searchable emojis permitted in their videoconferencing platform.)
“People are angry, they are frustrated, they are upset,” said Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union. “These are very patriotic people that actually care.” [….]
By banding together, federal workers say they hope to catalyze a wider movement. On balance, more Americans so far disapprove than approve of Mr. Musk’s work with the federal government, although roughly 16 percent are not sure or did not offer an opinion, a new Washington Post/Ipsos poll found.
“I want my colleagues who still have jobs to hang in there,” said Hanna Hickman, a former lawyer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who was laid off this month and now hopes that union lawsuits will prevent a full shutdown of the agency. “I’m out of a job but hopefully they aren’t, and it’s important for people to understand that there are people who will fight back.”
The pushback has come with peril, as some federal officials who have refused to carry out orders have felt compelled to leave their jobs, including most recently a wave of prosecutors at the Justice Department and the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan and the acting chief of the Social Security Administration.
The White House has also limited the ability of federal workers to fight back by disrupting many of the avenues that they had previously relied on to address grievances. Mr. Trump has pushed out 19 inspectors general; tried to fire the chairwoman of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which shields civil servants from unjustified disciplinary action; and dismissed the head of the Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency charged with safeguarding government whistle-blowers.
“It’s a deterrent to lawful whistle-blowing,” said Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents individuals who speak out about wrongdoing in the government. “The pathetic irony is that it’s encouraging people to break the law and leak classified information because the system is no longer in place.”
Two more big happenings from yesterday: Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Kash Patel began his stint as FBI Director.
President Donald Trump abruptly fired Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Friday, sidelining a history-making fighter pilot and respected officer as part of a campaign led by his defense secretary to rid the military of leaders who support diversity and equity in the ranks.
The ouster of Brown, only the second Black general to serve as chairman, is sure to send shock waves through the Pentagon. His 16 months in the job had been consumed with the war in Ukraine and the expanded conflict in the Middle East.
“I want to thank General Charles ‘CQ’ Brown for his over 40 years of service to our country, including as our current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is a fine gentleman and an outstanding leader, and I wish a great future for him and his family,” Trump posted on social media.
Brown’s public support of Black Lives Matter after the police killing of George Floyd had made him fodder for the administration’s wars against “wokeism” in the military. His ouster is the latest upheaval at the Pentagon, which plans to cut 5,400 civilian probationary workers starting next week and identify $50 billion in programs that could be cut next year to redirect those savings to fund Trump’s priorities.
Trump said he’s nominating retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine to be the next chairman. Caine is a career F-16 pilot who served on active duty and in the National Guard, and was most recently the associate director for military affairs at the CIA, according to his military biography.
Caine’s military service includes combat roles in Iraq, special operations postings and positions inside some of the Pentagon’s most classified special access programs.
However, he has not had key assignments identified in law as prerequisites for the job, including serving as either the vice chairman, a combatant commander or a service chief. That requirement could be waived if the “president determines such action is necessary in the national interest.”
Democrats and some former members of the military reacted with anger and sadness to the dismissal of Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arguing it was part of a political purge of military officers by President Trump.
On Friday evening, Mr. Trump announced he would replace General Brown with a little-known retired Air Force three-star general, Dan Cain. Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have promised to fire “woke” officers and instead promote officers steeped in a “warrior culture.” Five other Pentagon officials were also fired that evening.
Retired military officers argued that General Brown did not deserve to be fired and was the kind of war-fighting officer that President Trump said he wanted to lead the armed forces.
Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral and a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, said General Brown was a “proven war-fighter.”
“His dismissal is a loss to the military,” Admiral Montgomery said. “Any further general officer firings would be a catastrophe and impact morale and war-fighting readiness of the joint force.”
Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, issued an unusually strongly worded statement condemning General Brown’s ouster and warning that the White House and Mr. Hegseth could push out other officers.
“This appears to be part of a broader, premeditated campaign by President Trump and Secretary Hegseth to purge talented officers for politically charged reasons, which would undermine the professionalism of our military and send a chilling message through the ranks,” Mr. Reed said.
On the coming Kash Patel administration at the FBI:
FBI managers were told Friday that up to 1,500 staff and agents would be transferred out of the bureau’s Washington headquarters to satellite offices across the country, according to multiple peopleinformed about the message, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it has not been publicly announced.
The information came hours before Kash Patel, the bureau’s newly confirmed director, took his oath of office. In a message Patel sent to all of the FBI’s more than 30,000 employees Friday morning, he hinted that such staffing changes could be coming.
“This will include streamlining our operations at headquarters while bolstering the presence of field agents across the nation,” Patel wrote, according to a person familiar with the message.
The more specific plan to relocate hundreds of staff and agents was outlined to top managers in a separate meeting after Patel’s message went out.
Roughly 1,000 agents and administrative employees would be relocated from the J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington to field offices within cities that the Trump administration has designated as higher crime locations, said the people who weretold about that meeting. An additional 500 would be reassigned to the bureau’s large satellite headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama,the people said.
Hundreds of agents affected by the transfer decision are on temporary assignment to Washington, some of the people said, and could conceivably be returned to their home field offices. Other staff and agents who are based in the nation’s capital might not want to move.
“The latest retaliatory executive order.” @repeat1968 John Buss
Good Morning, Sky Dancers!
I usually check polls pretty carefully whenever they are presented by reliable pollsters. It’s because folks generally read too much into one observation. It’s really just a snapshot of the current moment. When you start to see coverage of multiple polls or many polls that provide the same results, and the results point to black swan events and are outside the margin of error, I pay attention. I follow the Consumer Confidence Index, an index of how folks feel about the economy and their well-being. It’s been continually polled for some time, and the snapshots have consistently predicted whether folks will spend or hunker down.
“The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index® declined by 5.4 points in January to 104.1 (1985=100). December’s reading was revised up by 4.8 points to 109.5 but was still down 3.3 points from the previous month. The Present Situation Index—based on consumers’ assessment of current business and labor market conditions—fell sharply in January, dropping 9.7 points to 134.3. The Expectations Index—based on consumers’ short-term outlook for income, business, and labor market conditions—fell 2.6 points to 83.9, but remained above the threshold of 80 that usually signals a recession ahead. The cutoff date for preliminary results was January 20, 2025.
“Consumer confidence has been moving sideways in a relatively stable, narrow range since 2022. January was no exception. The Index weakened for a second straight month, but still remained in that range, even if in the lower part,” said Dana M. Peterson, Chief Economist at The Conference Board. “All five components of the Index deteriorated but consumers’ assessments of the present situation experienced the largest decline. Notably, views of current labor market conditions fell for the first time since September, while assessments of business conditions weakened for the second month in a row. Meanwhile, consumers were also less optimistic about future business conditions and, to a lesser extent, income. The return of pessimism about future employment prospects seen in December was confirmed in January.”
The latest numbers on Consumer Sentiment, another poll of consumer intent, were reported today by Reuters. “US consumer sentiment plunges in February on tariff worries.” I’m glad to see that so many folks have finally figured out that tariffs are paid by the consumers. This is another set of polling of American households. The more these separate pollings converge, the more you can take stock of their numbers.
U.S. consumer sentiment dropped more than expected in February to a 15-month low and inflation expectations rocketed as households worried that President Donald Trump’s plans for steep and broad-based tariffs would eat into their purchasing power.
The University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers on Friday said its Consumer Sentiment Index dropped to 64.7 from January’s revised final reading of 71.7. The reading, the lowest since November 2023, was lower than the preliminary reading of 67.8, which was also the consensus expectation among economists polled by Reuters.
Meanwhile households saw inflation over the next year surging to 4.3% – the highest since November 2023 – from 3.3% last month. That was unchanged from the preliminary reading two weeks ago.
Over the next five years households saw inflation running at 3.5% – the highest since 1995 – compared with 3.2% in January. That was up from the preliminary reading two weeks ago for 3.3%.
So, since I follow the variables that influence people, like prices or job market expectations, I can usually eke out some valuable information. However, it’s still difficult to draw a line between the association of the variables and direct causality. Political polls are a different animal because the poll questions are fixed and the variables defined, but there is a lot more subtlety in the responses because of hidden preferences, so they vary a lot more. However, you can see when a poll is an outlier if it’s been consistently applied over time. The latest polls for FARTUS, Elonia, and JDank are historically bad. And yes, they’re polling for Musk because we’re basically being ruled by a Triumvirate. So far, there’s no polling on the Shadow Minister over there in Russia.
Rachel Maddow focused on this last night. It was seriously shocking. This is from The Daily Beast. She holds a doctorate in political science from the University of Oxford, so I know she knows polls and statistics even though the MSNBC point man on this is Steve Kornacki. “Even Rachel Maddow Is Surprised by Trump’s Historically Bad Approval Ratings. “Nobody has ever started off a presidential term this poorly in the eyes of the American people,” the MSNBC anchor explained.” So, yes, it’s special. This summary was written by William Vaillancourt.
MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow said Thursday that Donald Trump’s historically poor approval ratings for a newly inaugurated president are “sinking like a cinderblock in the ocean” due to the unpopularity of many of his policies.
Last month, Trump again became the only elected president with an initial approval rating of under 50 percent. Additionally, his disapproval rating in January of 48 percent was 3 points higher than in the beginning of his first term.
Currently, Trump’s approval rating is 45 percent—2points below his January mark. “We probably should have seen this coming,” Maddow said.
“I didn’t necessarily believe that it was coming this far, this fast,” she added, before showing the data from Gallup.
“Nobody has ever started off a presidential term this poorly in the eyes of the American people,” Maddow emphasized. “Trump was underwater with the American public from Day One. And since then, he’s been sinking like a cinderblock in an ocean trench. I did not know to expect that.”
“To be fair, part of the reason I’d expected that that Gallup number might go up and not down is because Gallup is not the only game in town. There were other national, well-regarded quality polls that came out right at the start of Trump’s term that did show him in positive territory—not big positive territory—but still positive,” she explained.
But those other polls,like from CNN, Reuters and Washington Post/Ipsos, grew bad for Trump as well.
“And what the data shows is that almost every single thing he has done is soundly and clearly and—in some cases—wildly unpopular with the American people,” Maddow continued, citing a Quinnipiac poll from last week showing Trump underwater on foreign policy, trade, the federal workforce, the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Hamas war and the economy.
Turning to Trump’s “signature issues,” or “the stuff that he thinks makes him look great,” Maddow noted he’s losing public opinion there as well.
“For those categories, the stuff he’s doing is catastrophically unpopular,” she said, pointing to Trump’s plan for the U.S. to take control of Gaza, his dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and policies, his institution of tariffs, and him saying he trusts Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On that last issue, the same Quinnipiac poll found that only 9 percent of registered voters held Trump’s view.
Maddow noted that other Trump administration figures like DOGE’s Elon Musk, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, FBI Director Kash Patel, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Vice President JD Vance don’t have positive approval ratings, either.
“All of them are underwater in the new polling,” she said. “The American public does not like any of them.”
Politicofocused on the polling for Elon Musk, which was terrible. “Musk underwater in public opinion, 2 polls show. Both Quinnipiac and Pew Research Center reported a majority of voters hold an unfavorable view of Musk’s role in the Trump administration.”
Elon Musk is underwater in public opinion, according to polls published Wednesday.
The surveys by Quinnipiac University and Pew Research Center show that a majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of President Donald Trump’s senior adviser — and the richest man in the world.
Pew’s findings put Musk 12 points under, with 54 percent of respondents reporting an unfavorable view of the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, compared to 42 percent with a favorable view. More specifically, 36 percent reported a very unfavorable view of Musk, and 11% reported a very favorable opinion.
Broken down by party lines, Musk was well-regarded among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents at 73 percent favorability. But far more Democrats disapprove than Republicans, with 85 percent reporting an unfavorable view. Pew did not do a breakdown of only independent voters.
Quinnipiac’s poll results Monday paint a similar picture, but with different questions. 55 percent of voters polled believe Musk has too big a role in the government, compared to 36 percent who think he’s got just enough power and a small minority of 3 percent who said they think he has too little power. This also breaks down by party lines, with 78 percent of Republicans surveyed saying Musk’s power is just right versus 96 percent of Democrats who said they think he has too much.
Of the independent voters polled, 56 percent said they thought Musk has too much power, versus 33 percent who said he has the right amount and 4 percent who think he needs more.
“That didn’t take long. “Russia, Russia, Russia” is back!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Grassroots Republicans are actually getting mad at the Republicans who are not standing up to the Triumvirate. Senators and Representatives are hearing from their Constituents. This is reported by Raw Story’s Matthew Chapman. “‘Stand up for us!’ Republican shouted down as he defends DOGE cuts at town hall.”
Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) tried to tout massive federal spending cuts proposed by tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency task force at a town hall in his heavily Republican district on Thursday evening — and attendees let him have it.
Most constituents who turned up at the packed-house event, laid out by Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein in a series of posts to X, appeared angry over Musk’s takeover, and more broadly the Trump administration’s attempt to control spending powers. One woman shouted at him that Congress controls the budget, “not the president.”
“And you are doing us a disservice to set that down and not stand up for us,” she yelled.
When McCormick tried to sideline the comment, saying it was being “litigated,” the crowd erupted in anger.
He received similar shout-downs while proposing “bipartisan” ideas to cut the budget, and when he doubled down on his comments from last month that teens in school should not be entitled to lunches and take jobs at McDonald’s rather than “sponge off the government.”
“We’ll have to disagree,” he said as the crowd roared.
The whole spectacle drew a wide reaction from commenters on social media.
“After getting booed for defending DOGE cuts, McCormick (a Republican from Georgia) is trying to sell the constituents at his town hall on cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” wrote Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff to Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA). “It’s going about how you’d expect.”
NEW: U.S. consumer sentiment plunges—down 10% from January over tariff and inflation fears.Most people I know think the economy is cooked thanks to Trump’s policies—designed to help the rich and screw working folks.He’s not doing shit to fix the economy or lower costs. Just broken promises.
This year’s CPAC gathering was more odious than usual. Musk’s weirdness and substance abuse were on full display. This is from The Verge. Sarah Jeong has the coverage. “I cannot describe how strange Elon Musk’s CPAC appearance was. So here’s a literal transcript instead.” I’ve chosen to clip the entrance description for you.
Schmitt: How you guys doing? Nice vibe this month, right? After the best month we’ve ever had. Nice to see you. Thanks for coming out. It’s good to see you. Let’s not kill any more time, let’s bring out Elon Musk.
Crowd goes wild. Elon Musk enters stage, pumping both fists high in the air, walking slightly unsteadily. He is wearing a black MAGA baseball cap and sunglasses that look like they were bought in a gas station in 1989. He continues to pump his fists as he makes his way in front of the beige armchairs at the front of the stage. Rob Schmitt attempts to get his attention, but he turns and waves at the crowd.
Schmitt: We’ve got one more surprise, in case this wasn’t enough.
Musk: Well, President, uh, President Milei has a gift for me.
Schmitt:[hamming at camera] Javier Milei from Argentina, you guys know who that is, right?
Milei, a friendly-looking figure who resembles Bilbo Baggins right before he Smeagolifies, enters the stage carrying a chainsaw. He presents the chainsaw to the billionaire, who then waves it around unsteadily.
Musk: This… is… the chainsaw for bureaucracy. [pumps the chainsaw in the air] CHAINSAAAW!
He takes a beat to examine the chainsaw. He is still wearing his sunglasses. He turns around and starts wandering to the other side of the stage, waving the chainsaw around.
Musk: Uwaaauwaargh!
Milei lurks awkwardly in the background, trying to wave goodbye to Musk, before Schmitt takes notice.
Bannon’s appearance was so noticeably appalling that “French leader cancels CPAC speech after Bannon’s apparent Nazi salute.” The Europeans must think the entire country is on ketamine. This is the French leader of the Right Wing party, the National Rally. This is from Axios.
French far-right leader Jordan Bardella canceled planned remarks at CPAC Friday, after ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon made a “gesture referring to Nazi ideology,” according to a statement to French news agency Agence France-Presse.
Why it matters: Bardella’s change of plans is the strongest rebuke yet of Bannon, who, during his remarks at the annual conservative conference made a gesture that appeared to mimic a Hitlergruß, or Nazi salute.
Bannon did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment.
A CPAC representative did not respond to a request for comment Friday.
Driving the news: “At this forum, (Thursday), while I was not present in the room, one of the speakers allowed himself, out of provocation, a gesture referring to Nazi ideology,” Bardella said in a statement to AFP.
“As a result, I have taken the immediate decision to cancel my speech scheduled for this afternoon at the event.”
The big picture: TheBannon incident comes about a month after Trump-ally Elon Musk also made a hand gesture that drew comparisons to a Nazi salute.
Despite blowback, Musk dismissed the criticisms, writing on X: “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”
Bannon’s drug abuse must have cleared his memory of the NAZI occupation of France. Semaphor reports that “Steve Bannon calls France’s far-right leader Jordan Bardella ‘a boy, not a man’ after CPAC cancelation.” My personal observation is that Bannon and Musk are not even human. Paige Bruton has the details.
Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon said French far-right party leader Jordan Bardella was “unworthy to lead France” because he was “a boy, not a man,” after Bardella canceled his scheduled speech at a conservative political event in Washington.
Bardella, the president of the National Rally party, said he decided to drop out of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) after Bannon “allowed himself a gesture alluding to Nazi ideology” during his speech there.
“Yesterday, while I was not present in the room, one of the speakers out of provocation allowed himself a gesture alluding to Nazi ideology,” Bardella said in a statement. “I therefore took the immediate decision to cancel my speech that had been scheduled this afternoon.”
Bannon denied the accusation Friday, saying the gesture was “a wave” that he regularly did at the end of his speeches “to thank the crowd,” including at a National Rally event several years prior. Speaking to a Le Point reporter, Bannon attacked Bardella for the decision to withdraw from CPAC, saying he was “wetting himself like a little child.”
The incident reflects mounting tensions between Trump allies, such as Elon Musk, and Europe’s far-right leaders, some of whom have expressed discomfort with a few of the administration’s positions.
As we appear to be a Russian asset, the big question we all have been asking is, was Trump a Russian Asset the entire time? This is interesting. If you believe this, he was and definitely is. It is still the best explanation for Trump’s bromance with the dude.
A former Soviet intelligence officer alleges Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987 and given the codename “Krasnov.” Alnur Mussayev served in the 6th Directorate, responsible for counter-intelligence support in the economy. One key objective was “recruiting businessmen from capitalist countries.”
A former Soviet intelligence officer has alleged that Donald Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987 and given the codename “Krasnov.”
Alnur Mussayev, 71, a former head of intelligence in Kazakhstan and before that a Soviet KGB officer, made the explosive claim in a Facebook post on Thursday. He claimed that he served in the 6th Directorate of the KGB in Moscow, which was responsible for counter-intelligence support within the economy. One of its key objectives, he claimed, was “recruiting businessmen from capitalist countries.”
The allegation revives claims of Russian collusion or even of being a Russian asset which Trump has denounced as “the Russia hoax,” and which dogged his first term in the White House. Even before he was elected, the FBI had secretly opened an investigation into whether his campaign had illegal ties to Russia, which eventually morphed into the Robert Mueller inquiry—which ended without Trump being charged.
Mussayev wrote that in 1987 “our directorate recruited Donald Trump, a 40-year-old American businessman, under the pseudonym Krasnov.” He offered no corroborating evidence, but is a well-known former senior intelligence agent. The Daily Beast has reached out to him for comment.
In his Facebook post, he said that his department specialized in recruiting spies and intelligence sources from the West, asserting once again that Trump had been brought into the fold.
He made another shocking allegation in another comment, saying: “Today, the personal file of resident ‘Krasnov’ has been removed from the FSB. It is being privately managed by one of Putin’s close associates.”
The Russian family name “Krasnov” stems from the Russian word “krasota,” which means beautiful.
The Soviet Union and its KGB fell in 1991, and Mussayev returned to his native Kazakhstan—a former Soviet republic—from Moscow and then rose to run the new nation’s intelligence apparatus. The KGB’s most direct successor was the Russian FSB which kept its Moscow files.
The timing of his intervention is intriguing, coming as Trump seeks to meet Vladimir Putin—himself a former KGB operative—to discuss a possible deal to end the Ukraine war, in the teeth of opposition from the government in Kyiv.
So, I managed to get through a post without writing about what agencies they are disassembling now. Here are a few other interesting reads for you via Memeorandum.
The anthem singer who performed the Canadian anthem prior to the 4 Nations Face-Off championship game Thursday night changed a lyric in “O Canada” as a response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated remarks about making the country the 51st state.
Publicist Adam Gonshor in an email to The Associated Press confirmed Chantal Kreviazuk changed the lyric from “in all of us command” to “that only us command” and confirmed Trump’s 51st state comments were the reason why. During Canada’s 3-2 overtime victory, Kreviazuk told the AP she did it “because I believe in democracy, and a sovereign nation should not have to be defending itself against tyranny and fascism.”
“I’m somebody who grew up on music that spoke to the heart and the moment, and it shaped me as a songwriter and really as a human being,” she added. “I don’t think it would be authentic to me to be given a world stage and not express myself and be true to myself.”
Before the puck was dropped for Thursday’s title game, the announcer prefaced the opening ceremony: “In the spirit of the game, we kindly ask that you respect the national anthems and the players that represent each country.”
Still, some boos and jeers rippled across TD Garden in Boston during the rendition of “O Canada.”
The jeering came days after fans in Montreal loudly booed “The Star-Spangled Banner” during the weekend’s testy matchup between the two teams, which the U.S. won 3-1. Days earlier, hockey fans similarly booed the U.S. national anthem when the American squad played Finland in Montreal.
Trump alluded to his gripes with Canada in a Truth Social post earlier Thursday, saying he would “be calling our GREAT American Hockey Team this morning to spur them on towards victory tonight against Canada, which with FAR LOWER TAXES AND MUCH STRONGER SECURITY, will someday, maybe soon, become our cherished, and very important, Fifty First State.”
This is crazy.
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My natural optimism is beginning to wear thin. Our country is on a fast track to autocracy, and our Congressional “leaders” don’t seem to be doing much to slow it down. I’m afraid that Trump and Musk will actually try to steal the money from Social Security and Medicare that Americans have contributed through our payroll taxes. I know if it happens, there will be a massive pushback from the American people, but will Democrats actually begin to fight back then? I’m not sure.
I know some elected Democrats are working hard to slow down what’s happening, but so far their actions aren’t visible enough. They don’t seem to be working as a group to educate the public about what is happening to our country. Meanwhile, Trump and Musk are blundering their way through the government, shutting down vital programs and firing employees indiscriminately. The courts are our only hope, and they move very slowly.
There is so much awful stuff happening, and there are endless stories I could share about it; so I’ll just share the ones that hit me hardest this morning.
Yesterday, Trump had the nerve to claim that Ukraine started the war with Russia.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Donald Trump of repeating disinformation, a day after the US president falsely accused Ukraine of starting the war with Russia.
Zelensky’s outspoken comments were part of what is shaping up to be far the most public exchange of accusations between Kyiv and Washington since the full-scale war started nearly three years ago.
Speaking to reporters in Kyiv, Zelensky pushed back on several unfounded claims the US president made on Tuesday, while reinforcing Ukraine’s position that a deal to end the war needed its involvement.
“Unfortunately, President Trump – I have great respect for him as a leader of a nation that we have great respect for, the American people who always support us – unfortunately lives in this disinformation space,” Zelensky said.
Trump has made it clear he wants the war to end as soon as possible – even if it means further territorial losses for Ukraine. And much to the horror of Kyiv and its allies, Trump has at times adopted Kremlin’s narrative and blamed Ukraine and NATO for the conflict, even saying that Ukraine “may be Russian some day.”
But Trump’s boosting of Russia goes well beyond rhetoric. The president raised many eyebrows last week when opting to hold a 90-minute phone call with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin before speaking to Zelensky.
Then on Tuesday, US and Russian officials held high-level talks on ending the war in Ukraine in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, excluding Kyiv from the meeting.
Putin praised this new US attitude towards his country. Speaking about the talks in Riyadh, Putin said he was told the atmosphere was “friendly.”
“There were completely different people on the American side, who were open to the negotiation process without any bias, without any condemnation of what had been done in the past,” Putin added.
The US and Russia agreed in Riyadh to appoint high-level teams to negotiate the end of the war and said
they were working to reestablish diplomatic channels.
Trump wants to further dumb down the State Department.
The State Department has ordered the cancellation of all news subscriptions deemed “non-mission critical,” according to internal email guidance viewed by The Washington Post. The move aligns with the Trump administration’s crackdown on media companies that count the U.S. government as paying customers.
A Feb. 11 memo sent to embassies and consulates in Europe described the mandateas part of an effort to reduce spending. The email read, in part,“Considering this priority, posts are asked to immediately place Stop Work Orders on all non-mission critical contracts/purchase orders for media subscriptions (publications, periodicals, and newspaper subscriptions) that are not academic or professional journals.”
The mandate applies globally,to hundreds of U.S. embassies and consulates, according to a State Department official who spoke with The Post on Tuesday on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. Embassy security teams rely on news coverage to prepare for diplomatic travel in conflict zones. Cancellation of subscriptions — including to local news outlets — could hinder their assessment of threats, the official said….
A Feb. 14 memo directed procurement teams at embassies and consulates to prioritize the termination of contracts with six news organizations in particular: the Economist, the New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg News, the Associated Press and Reuters.
State Department personnel were told that they could submit a request to maintain a news subscription but that it “must be done within 1 sentence.” The guidance laid out possible justifications — if the subscription affects the safety of U.S. personnel or facilities, or if it is required by treaty or law, or if it yields an affirmative answer to one of the following questions: “Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?”
A State Department employee who received the memos, and shared them with The Post, expressed concern that terminating news subscriptions — particularly to local outlets —would deprive embassies and consulates of information necessary to complete their mission. “This will endanger American lives overseas because we are being cut off from news sources that are needed on a daily basis,” said the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to comment to the press.
Opinion pieces on Trump-Musk-DOGE’s destruction of our government.
A month into the second Trump administration, I think it is fair to conclude that the American empire in its current form is collapsing. The post-1945 global order, with the United States at its apex, is no more. America itself is not going anywhere—at least not yet—but the foundation of the empire, namely its structure of alliances and partnerships, has been dealt irreparable damage. Western Europe, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and especially Canada now view America with suspicion if not outright hostility, and they are right to do so.
Now, the history of empires is the story of their rise and inevitable fall. As Herodotus wrote about Greek city-states, “most of those which were great once are small today; and those which used to be small were great in my own time.” But nobody has matched this current downfall for sheer egregious stupidity.
Indeed, it’s hard to think of even a single competitor for that title. There have been, to be sure, many idiotic imperial leaders throughout history who helped blow up their empires through bungling and mistakes. Tsar Nicholas II was an incompetent boob whose closest adviser was a charlatan mystic, and he personally led the failed military effort during the First World War that eventually destroyed his regime. Yet Russia bore only a small share of the blame for starting the war in the first place, and other much better-governed empires like Germany and Austria-Hungary, which shared much of that blame, also collapsed because of the war’s strains.
The eventual collapse of the Western Roman Empire began when a large Roman army was heavily defeated by Goths, who had adopted many Roman military tactics. The Eastern European Empire persisted for another thousand years, but it too eventually collapsed following military defeat at the hands of the Ottomans.
That is how empires tend to fall. Either they are defeated in battle, and are conquered or collapse, or they suffer a succession crisis and fall apart (both often enabled by corruption and mismanagement). Or they are simply eclipsed by another power, as happened when the British Empire fell short and the U.S. succeeded it.
What Trump inherited and what he has done so far:
President Trump, by contrast, was handed an empire in splendid condition. The core alliance of NATO was stronger than it had been in decades, as Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine pushed Sweden and Finland to join. Thanks to President Biden’s policies, the American economy was the envy of the world, with a post-pandemic recovery that outstripped any peer nation. The dollar was still by far the most important reserve currency, and the U.S. still had control over global financial pipelines.
No serious threats were on the horizon, either. In its war with Ukraine, Russia has burned through most of its gigantic stockpile of Soviet-era military hardware, taken perhaps 800,000 casualties, and put its economy under terrific pressure. China, while the only peer competitor the U.S. has faced since 1991, is saddled with deep economic difficulties and looking down the barrel of population collapse.
But Trump and Musk are blowing America’s imperial foundations to kingdom come. Take USAID, which as the largest distributor of humanitarian aid in the world, has both done a tremendous amount of good work and also served as a carrot for America’s global predominance—until now. The agency has been all but dismantled, unleashing havoc all over the globe. HIV and drug-resistant tuberculosis are now spreading unchecked in many countries reliant on USAID medication, both proving America cannot be trusted and threatening outbreaks of those diseases in the U.S. itself.
Both Trump and Musk have attacked NATO; Trump has reportedly said he wants to withdraw from the alliance, while Musk has said it “needs an overhaul” and he wonders why it “continued to exist.” More importantly, Trump has repeatedly suggested annexing Canada, a NATO member. The enormous implications of this threat are clearly not getting through to many American elites. At The New York Times, Peter Baker has a column blithely speculating about which way Canadians might vote should they be annexed, concluding that Democrats would likely benefit.
But this is not a political parlor game for Canadians. They are incandescently furious, and they are right to be. Canada stood shoulder to shoulder by America through the great bloodbaths of the 20th century. Since then, it has been a quietly loyal neighbor, making not a peep of trouble along the world’s longest land border, and providing a vast supply of energy, mineral, timber, and other exports to fuel the American economy. And this is the thanks they get: A senile fascist American president who suggests a war of conquest—and make no mistake, that is what it would take—because he wants to make America look big but doesn’t understand how the Mercator projection exaggerates the size of northern land masses—which, it’s been reported, is one reason for his coveting Greenland, too.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” President Trump posted last week on his social media platform.
The quote was widely attributed to French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, and Trump, who fancies himself one of history’s great leaders, leaned into the monarchical fantasy. And lest there was any confusion, he explicitly linked it to a story about his administration defying a court order with respect to the federal budget.
The quote is an unmistakable echo of Richard Nixon, who insisted in 1977 that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
That wasn’t true for Nixon, of course, who by then had been out of office for three years. But last year the Supreme Court gutted the rulings that reined in Nixon, and now Trump and Elon Musk are running the government as if they are the only law in the land. They insist they are “saving” the country by burning down its institutions, and they claim a mandate of the people to do it….
When it comes to Twitter, Elon Musk is the “voice of god.” (And not for nothing, but he literally sued “the people” when they exercised their right to criticize him or not speak on his platform.)
But Musk and Trump make a similar false equivalency when it comes to governing, insisting that the results in November empower them to do whatever they like, law be damned.
“The beauty is that we won by so much. The mandate was massive,” Trump told Time Magazine in December, adding that “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
In reality, Trump won by less than 1.5 percent and took less than 50 percent of all votes cast. His popular vote margin was one-third as large as Biden’s and the second-narrowest in 60 years. There was no “mandate,” let alone a “massive” one.
And yet Trump and Musk govern as if they won an overwhelming majority, and this gives them the right to ignore the law….
At the recent Oval Office press conference where Musk played with his toddler son, the saucer-eyed vizier delivered a manic defense of the DOGE committee’s “hostile takeover of the government.” (Video after the transcript.)
Well, first of all, you couldn’t ask for a stronger mandate from the public. The public voted. We have a majority of the public vote voting for President Trump. We won the House, we won the Senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. That was on the campaign. The President spoke about that at every rally. The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get. They’re going to get what they voted for. And a lot of times people that don’t get what they voted for, but in this presidency, they are going to get what they voted for. And that’s what democracy is all about.
In reality, Trump announced the DOGE committee after he won in November, promising that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (remember him?) would “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before.” He only brought DOGE inside the government by executive order on January 20.
Trump did not run on a promise to unleash an unelected billionaire to slash-and-burn through the government, firing tens of thousands of employees and arbitrarily canceling contracts and federal programs. And even if he had, that still wouldn’t make it legal….
The United States is a constitutional democracy. We must all abide by the Constitution, and we don’t get to override its provisions by popular referendum.
At least we were a constitutional democracy. Read the rest at Public Notice.
Andrew Egger at The Bulwark: Sadism for Its Own Sake.
The Trump White House is itching to ramp up its cartoonishly cruel immigration policy to industrial scale. But they’re finding the sledding frustratingly slow.
The Economist noted this week that “so far, mass deportation has been more rhetoric than reality.” Daily ICE arrests are just a tick up from the Biden years—from a few hundred a day to just over a thousand. “ICE stopped releasing a daily arrests number in early February,” the Economist notes, “which may be because the agency would rather nobody kept count.”
If you’re Trump, this is no good. He’d promised instant gratification: “the largest deportation operation in history,” beginning on Day One of his presidency. His fans, longing to see footage of migrants getting hustled into ICE vans by the thousands across the country, might be getting a little twitchy.
So the administration is taking a new tack: emphasizing quality over quantity. The White House is spotlighting the leering cruelty with which they carry out the deportations that are happening. Deporting former designees of temporary protected status back to countries where they face prosecution: check. Deporting migrants to countries they’ve never even visited: check. Holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay: check.
And yesterday, releasing the single most viscerally disturbing piece of deportation propaganda to date: A short video, posted to the official White House X account, titled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”
ASMR videos, which became popular on YouTube in the 2010s, use specific audio cues to stimulate feelings of relaxation and euphoria in the viewer. The White House video perversely mimics the style: lovingly lingering on the revving engine of an airplane waiting to take off; the jingling of chains as they are laid out in rows on the ground, then used to shackle deportees’ arms behind their backs; the shuffling of chained feet up into the plane. No faces are ever seen. The idea is not just that viewers should approve of the footage. It invites them to take sensual pleasure from it.
Plenty of Trump’s people were happy to oblige. The tweet quickly induced hooting replies—memes of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman blissfully vibing on his headphones in a MAGA hat, exhortations to “let the clanging bar sounds of Guantanamo Bay whisk you away to your happy place,” speculation about when “some of our corrupt politicians” would be going the same way.
THREE DAYS AFTER the National Institutes of Health abruptly announced it would place a strict, low cap on the money it sends to universities and research institutions for the administrative costs of scientific research, the University of Iowa made an abrupt announcement of its own.
The school’s Office of the Vice President for Research declared that going forward, it would pause “the hiring of new Graduate Research Assistants unless they are already budgeted as a direct cost on a funded project.”
The announcement sent shockwaves through parts of academia, providing an alarming demonstration of the impact the NIH cap would have on aspiring scientists. “We were pretty stunned,” the chair of the biochemistry and molecular biology department at a top university told The Bulwark.
NIH’s so-called “indirect cost” cap has since been paused by the courts. And a University of Iowa spokesperson confirmed they’ve put a pause on their policy too. But the spokesman also noted that they were “actively monitoring the developments happening at the federal government level.”
And on that front, they are hardly alone. The prospect that the cap will return, combined with the dramatic cuts that the Trump administration is making at every scientific agency, has generated chaos and uncertainty in the scientific community. The aforementioned department chair noted that his own school had decided to stop bringing on any new faculty. A cellular biology professor at a separate, prominent state university said that they’d reduced the number of graduate school offers by 75 percent and were weighing whether to continue a program to provide summer research opportunities for undergraduate students from smaller colleges, including HBCUs.
“One might ask, ‘Why are they trying to destroy the science training pipeline?’” that professor said. “To what end?”
In the first month of the second Trump administration, the world’s richest man—underinformed, chronically online, and staffed by a coterie of teenaged and twentysomethingformer engineering interns—has been moving at warp speed to reshape, reduce, and even dismantle the United States government. But while Musk’s rampage has been feverishly covered, the scope of its impact remains largely underappreciated. Experts say it can’t be measured in weeks or months or even in government services affected. Rather, it will be felt over the span of decades and defined in metrics like intellectual talent lost.
A relative of mine—an older gent with a penchant for salty language—yelled over the phone at me in frustration, “Where are the damn cojones in the Democratic Party?”
His use of language aside, this argument—that the Democrats are not raising nearly enough hell as Apartheid’s Chestburster, Elon Musk, vivisects the government from the inside—is all over the liberal left. The phrase going around is, “The Democrats have brought a lectern to a social media war.” Masses of enraged, terrified people are looking at the analog, slow-motion leadership of Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and the zero-calorie rhetoric of House leader Hakeem Jeffries and want them replaced by people who know how to fight. As The Nation has reported, when Democratic politicians have shown up to protests, people aren’t cheering their presence. They are howling at them to do more.
To be clear, people aren’t criticizing the efforts of individual Democrats trying to expose this deadly grand theft taking place in plain sight. The cry is, “Why aren’t the Democrats as unified and ruthless toward their enemies as Republicans?”
Why aren’t they taking the fired federal workers who are sharing their heartbreaking stories—the ones that Musk says were being paid to do nothing—and making them famous? The cancer researcher on the verge of a breakthrough? The park ranger in Yosemite who won’t be there to conduct rescues and save lives? The air traffic controller who can speak to the connection between understaffing and recent plane crashes? Is it even safe to fly in Trump’s America?
The Democrats should be amplifying these folks—writing op-eds about them, refusing to go on camera without sharing their spotlight, pressuring their IG influencers to raise them up—but instead, we learn their stories from Reddit. As Moira Donegan wrote in The Guardian, “Why are the Democrats so spineless?” The conventional wisdom is that they simply “don’t know how” to wage a social media and public-relations attack that can, to use one blaring example, define people like JD Vance as a Nazi-curious Manchurian Candidate.
We are being ruled by evil idiots. Unfortunately, they are in full control of our government, supported by other idiots–along with people who know better, but live in fear of the evil idiots. I wonder if there is any way to get through this nightmare without ending up in a dictatorship controlled by these incredibly stupid, evil people? If only we could wake up and find out that this was all a very bad dream.
Trump administration officials fired more than 300 staffers Thursday night at the National Nuclear Security Administration — the agency tasked with managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile — as part of broader Energy Department layoffs, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.
Sources told CNN the officials did not seem to know this agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons….
The agency began rescinding the terminations Friday morning.
Some of the fired employees included NNSA staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons.
It also included employees at NNSA headquarters who write requirements and guidelines for contractors who build nuclear weapons. A source told CNN they believe these individuals were fired because “no one has taken anytime to understand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation’s national security.”
Members of Congress made their concerns about the NNSA firings known to the Energy Department, a Hill staffer told CNN. A person with knowledge of the matter told CNN that senators visited Energy Sec. Chris Wright to express concern about the NNSA cuts.
“Congress is freaking out because it appears DOE didn’t really realize NNSA oversees the nuclear stockpile,” one source said. “The nuclear deterrent is the backbone of American security and stability – period. For there to be any even very small holes poked even in the maintenance of that deterrent should be extremely frightening to people.”
NNSA has a total of 1800 staff at facilities around the country. The only probationary staffers exempt from the Thursday-night firings were those who work at its Office of Secure Transportation, the office in charge of driving or otherwise transporting nuclear weapons around the country securely, one person familiar told CNN….
The agency made the about face Friday morning; during a meeting, acting NNSA administrator Teresa Robbins said the agency had received direction to rescind the termination of probationary employees. Probationary workers have typically been employed for less than a year, or two years in some cases, and have fewer job protections and rights to appeal.
Robbins added on Friday that if probationary NNSA employees had not yet been fired, their jobs were now safe and all NNSA employees whose access to the agency’s network and internal IT systems was shut off would be turned back on, one source told CNN.
See what I mean? The Trump administration ordered the firing of all probationary government employees without even check to see if any of these people were in essential jobs. Government by stupid people.
National Nuclear Security Administration officials on Friday attempted to notify some employees who had been let go the day before that they are now due to be reinstated — but they struggled to find them because they didn’t have their new contact information.
In an email sent to employees at NNSA and obtained by NBC News, officials wrote, “The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”
The individuals the letter refers to had been fired on Thursday and lost access to their federal government email accounts. NNSA, which is within the Department of Energy and oversees the nation’s nuclear stockpile, cannot reach these employees directly and is now asking recipients of the email, “Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people’s personal contact emails.” [….]
President Donald Trump’s administration has acted with unprecedented speed — and in some cases, questionable legality — in seeking to cut large portions of the federal government, laying off staff and ending contracts. But that speed has resulted in complications, including firing people agencies actually want to keep.
The emails come after multiple staff — all civil servants — at the NNSA received termination notices late Thursday, according to a source with direct knowledge of the notifications. NBC News reviewed the termination notification, which included the subject line: “Notification of Termination During Probationary/Trial Period.”
The NNSA is tasked with designing, building and overseeing the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile….
The termination notices, which read “effective today,” came within hours of a Russian drone striking the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine. NNSA tracks nuclear risks in Ukraine, including through sensor systems.
So these firings weren’t even limited to probationary staff. Everyone was fired.
Americans could soon start to feel the repercussions of the Trump administration’s decision to fire thousands of government workers — from public safety to health benefits and basic services that they have come to rely on.
Trump’s directive to slash thousands of jobs across agencies is leaving gaping holes in the government, with thousands of workers being laid off from the Education Department, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Veterans Affairs and multiple others.
At the U.S. Forest Service, where some 3,400 workers are slated to be cut, wildfire prevention will be curtailed as the West grapples with a destructive fire season that has destroyed millions of acres in California.
And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wasn’t spared: Almost half of the agency’s 2,800 probationary employees were cut while about 400 employees appeared to have taken the “buy-out” offer, meaning the agency responsible for protecting Americans from disease outbreaks and other health hazards will lose about a tenth of its workforce. That’s on top of more than 2,000 probationary employees fired from the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC’s parent agency.
“Morale is tanked,” said a forest service official close to the situation — who, like many current and former government employees who spoke to POLITICO, was granted anonymity out of fear of retribution. “The public will see it this summer when campgrounds are shut down, trails aren’t maintained and bathrooms aren’t cleaned.”
Should the gutting of the federal government result in immediate negative consequences for the American people, the Trump administration could face political backlash from voters in Republican and Democratic states who suddenly find a host of services — including access to government websites or even benefits — vanish.
Illustration by Cassie Dominicis
The stupid and evil person behind all this chaos is Elon Musk, who appears to taken over the role of POTUS.
The Office of Personnel Management, which serves as the federal government’s human resources department, has been operated by associates of Elon Musk for weeks. The agency, which also laid off staff, sent out the so-called “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation notice to federal employees allowing those who opted in to resign their posts but be paid to not work through September.
A lawsuit filed by union officials representing federal workers temporarily halted the program, but a federal judge ruled the program could move forward, because the union officials didn’t have standing. The Trump administration then said no more federal employees could opt into the program — and the next day, the terminations of federal workers on probation resumed.
“We definitely cut more than probationary employees,” a person familiar with Office of Personnel Management firings said Friday. “We cut the entire communications department” and career employees too, the person added. In total, the person said as many as 200,000 civil service workers across the federal government that were in their probationary period as of this week could receive termination notices….
The firings came so swiftly this week that some Forest Service employees were told they would lose their job before there was any paperwork to sign.
Read more about the consequences of government by stupid people at the Politico link.
The Trump administration is full of incredibly stupid people, many of whom–including de facto President Musk and his puppet Trump–are also cruel people who enjoy inflicting pain and suffering on weaker people. Just look what they have done to USAID.
Shockingly, it turns out that empowering the richest human being on the planet to maliciously and gratuitously heap additional misery on that planet’s most poor, hungry, and desperate people might—just might—pose a niggling political problem to President Donald Trump.
There seems to be a split in Trumpworld these days. Some seem to think Trump can get away with anything, no matter how devastating it is to the most vulnerable or how corrupt an abuse of power it represents. Others seem aware that there are limits—that at some point, Trumpworld might push things too far and suffer a public backlash, and that this might actually matter.
A new internal memo circulating inside the U.S. Agency for International Development neatly captures this split. The Washington Postreports that the memo warns USAID employees not to communicate with the press about the shocking disruptions in humanitarian assistance that are being caused by the Trump-Musk attack on the agency, which are already producing horrific consequences. The memo said this transgression might be met with “dismissal.”
The memo claims to be correcting a “false narrative in the press” about the disruptions to that assistance. It notes that Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month issued a waiver to “lifesaving humanitarian assistance,” allowing it to continue despite the Trump-Musk freeze in agency spending. This has meant that this assistance has “continued uninterrupted and has never paused,” the memo claims, while warning recipients against any “unauthorized external engagement with the press.”
Miss Mink, the cat countess, by Janet Hill
This is highly disingenuous at best and mostly nonsense at worst. As The New York Timesreports, some senior USAID officials recently received an email explicitly directing them to hold off on approving some of this assistance, pending more directives from on high. What’s more, according to the Times, while some of this assistance did continue due to Rubio’s waiver, much of it has encountered serious obstacles.
This assistance—which includes aid for lifesaving food, shelter, and medicine—has gotten bogged down as USAID employees and groups that partner with the agency to distribute these things have struggled to access government funding streams halted by Trump. (A judge has ordered the funds to continue.) In one case, Musk claimed that the administration had restarted some disease-prevention funding, but it remains frozen, the Times reported.
The directive ordering USAID employees to refrain from discussing this with the press represents an unnerving turn in this saga, given how ugly and blatant it is. “This is basically telling USAID personnel not to tell the truth about what they have seen,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior USAID official, told me, adding that this functionally commands USAID staff to “get in line with the propaganda narrative.”
Read more at TNR.
The stupid people who are now running the government are also working to make Americans less healthy.
The “department of government efficiency”, the Donald Trump-created program known as Doge and headed by the billionaire Elon Musk, has accessed or requested access to sensitive systems at multiple health agencies as the US president attempts to grant the committee sweeping powers within the federal government.
The bid for access comes amid an unprecedented effort to halt government spending, despite multiple court orders to unfreeze funds and reverse staff suspensions.
Thousands of people were laid off from health agencies on Friday after the Trump administration announced a plan to fire nearly all probationary employees, potentially numbering in the hundreds of thousands across the federal service.
“The potential for doing harm is significant,” said Scott Cory, former chief information officer for an agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Health agencies maintain tightly controlled databases with sensitive information, and upheaval at these agencies threatens the US healthcare systemeven as the threat of infectious diseases like bird flu continues to ramp up.
“The possibility of new outbreaks or public health events is certain given the recent concerning spread of bird flu, which is still hampered by a slow response,” said an employee at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
“With external communications cut off, extensive work-stop orders and dramatic changes in the federal workforce, the ability of any health agency is severely limited and ultimately will serve no one but those who choose to profit off the suffering,” the employee said….
Some 5,200 people across health agencies reportedly received layoffs notices on Friday.
About 1,250 of them worked at the CDC, according to a source who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
This included senior officials and the entire first-year class of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Services officers, known as “disease detectives”.
Other senior health officials are also being targeted for layoffs, and employees are bracing for more mass layoffs in coming days, sources say. Several contractors also report being laid off this week.
And then there’s the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Hours after being confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. issued a statement that laid out sweeping plans for his first 100 days in office. Chief among his goals, he wrote, was to combat what he called a “growing health crisis” of chronic disease. The document called for the federal government to investigate the “root causes” of a broad range of conditions, including autism, ADHD, asthma, obesity, multiple sclerosis, and psoriasis. Conspicuously absent was any explicit mention of childhood vaccines, which Kennedy has long railed against as the head of the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense.
From Journal of a Cat in Rome, by Takako Kessoku
But the document did zero in on another one of his fixations: a class of widely prescribed drugs that treat depression, anxiety, and mood disorders. The government, he said, would “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, [and] mood stabilizers.”
Kennedy has repeatedly railed against what he sees as rampant overprescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, commonly known as SSRIs, which treat depression and anxiety and include medications like Prozac and Zoloft. As with his previous assertions about vaccines, many of his statements about these drugs are not backed by science. In a 2023 livestream on X with Elon Musk, he claimed that “tremendous circumstantial evidence” suggested that people taking antidepressants were more likely to commit school shootings. (Actually, most school shooters were not taking those drugs, evidence shows.) Kennedy has also called people who take SSRIs addicts—and then tried to claim he didn’t during his confirmation hearings.
So despite this evidence, what options does Kennedy offer in response to the supposed overprescription of and addiction to SSRIs? In a podcast appearance last July, Kennedy said he planned to dedicate money generated from a sales tax on cannabis products to “creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country.” He added, “I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.” The farm residents would grow their own organic food because, he suggested, many of their underlying problems could be “food-related.”
Will participation in these “wellness farms” be voluntary? This sounds kind of like involuntary servitude.
The Internal Revenue Service has now joined the list of federal agencies and offices experiencing life on the “DOGE” side. Two sources told TPM that a staffer affiliated with President Trump and Elon Musk’s controversial “efficiency” initiative left some bewildered and concerned on Thursday as they held their first meeting at the Washington headquarters of the tax agency.
Reuters and other news outlets havereported on the IRS meeting and identified the DOGE staffer involved as Gavin Kliger. A Capitol Hill source who was briefed on the meeting confirmed to TPM that Kliger represented DOGE at the agency. According to the Hill source, who requested anonymity to discuss the meeting, Kliger explained that DOGE wants to get a deep look inside the IRS.
By Jackson Ng
“Their interest was … really across the board, so it included the operation of enforcements, it included taxpayer service in terms of function and the personnel footprint, and they wanted extensive system access,” the Hill source said.
That last point, the source said, brings up unique concerns and uncertainty since the IRS has deep knowledge of Americans’ personal financial information.
“What exactly that would look like, I’m not sure,” the source said of the DOGE demand for access, adding, “Levels of data protection at IRS are higher than at other agencies. … Not only is improper disclosure illegal, but improper inspection of data internally is illegal. So, it’s a really high bar of data security here. It’s hard to think about what extensive system access would look like for these guys that wouldn’t violate the law.” [….]
A Treasury Department source with knowledge of Kliger’s meeting at the IRS said the DOGE staffer had a handful of phones, which struck the agency’s employees as “bizarre.”
“He basically had the vibe of a McKinsey consultant and came in and asked about headcount and how many people are in each department,” the Treasury source said, adding, “He had a black Mac, which didn’t seem to be government issue, and five iPhones.”
On LinkedIn, Kliger, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 2020, indicated he was working at the software company Databricks up until last month when he became a “special advisor” at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. On a Substack that has beenidentified as belonging to Kliger, he describes himself as a “Silicon Valley engineer” who had a “political awakening.” Kliger also, according to a Reuters report, amplified content from neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes on a Twitter page that he later partially deleted and locked down.
The Treasury source said the DOGE staffers who have made contact at the department have been focused on “ROI,” or return on investment. In the context of the IRS, that would mean a focus on maximizing collections while keeping other costs down, the source said.
“I think they’re focused on collection now because they need every dollar they can for those tax cuts,” the source said of DOGE and the Trump administration. “You want to make it as streamlined as possible but also collect money.”
Read the rest at TPM.
I think that’s all the tolerance I have for reading about Trump and Musk’s government of the stupid for today.
Take care everyone. I hope you are all having a peaceful weekend.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
The payments stretch back more than 20 years. Shortly after becoming CEO of a cash-strapped Tesla in 2008, Musk fought hard to secure a low-interest loan from the Energy Department, according to two people directly involved with the process,holding daily briefings with company executives about the paperwork and spending hours with a government loan officer.
Politico 
This year’s CPAC gathering was more odious than usual. Musk’s weirdness and substance abuse were on full display. This is from 
Bannon’s appearance was so noticeably appalling that “French leader cancels CPAC speech after Bannon’s apparent Nazi salute.” The Europeans must think the entire country is on ketamine. 
Bannon’s drug abuse must have cleared his memory of the NAZI occupation of France. 
So, I managed to get through a post without writing about what agencies they are disassembling now. Here are a few other interesting reads for you via Memeorandum.
But in Boston, this happened during the Hockey Finals via
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