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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Trump: "Like on tractors that can handle anything from hurricanes to lightning to anything. They use magnets. It's a new theory — magnets. They're gonna lift the planes up. And it doesn't work."
Conflict of interest? The State Department’s procurement forecast lists Tesla as the recipient of the largest expected contract, with Marco Rubio’s department planning to purchase $400 million worth of “Armored Tesla” vehicles.
Interesting: the State Department’s procurement forecast detailing a $400 million order for "armored Tesla" has now been edited to "armored electric vehicles." The document shows the edit was made tonight at 9:12 p.m. — after it was highlighted in reports
About 75,000 US federal workers accepted the deferred buyout program of President Donald Trump's administration, a spokesperson for the US Office of Personnel Management said reut.rs/3Ez0avr
"Details of the agreement were not made public in court filings, but X and Mr. Trump notified the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday that they had agreed to dismiss the lawsuit. Both parties agreed to pay their own costs…www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/t…
📌I was the managing editor at Stars and Stripes and can tell you that Pete Hegseth is the first SecDef I am aware of to be openly booed by military families on a military base.📌This is the most significant pushback I have seen to this administration's racist, hostile initiatives.
Not this next few items are about a horror bill called SAFE Act HR 22
The Save Act has already passed the House and is intended to suppress the vote among women. This is the 1st step in the GOP's effort to take away women's right to vote.
As many as 69 million women who have changed their last name to match their spouse’s do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.msmagazine.com/2025/02/11/s…
the SAVE Act, a bill that would require all Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or one of a few other citizenship documents every time they register or re-register to vote would disenfranchise tens of millions of eligible American citizens. http://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/ana…
I’m having a colonoscopy this morning. So I will be awol today. This will be a quick post.
I’m watching a coup in progress…while people are having Superbowl parties. It feels like I’m in my own personal Twilight Zone episode. If only I could send Trump, Musk and all the MAGA idiots to the cornfield… but in reality, we are the ones that are being held hostage…in The MAGA Zone.
Good morning. It is a bit of a sad news today. Last night Keely crossed over, she was Dak’s beloved cat. Keely had been through a lot the last couple years and she passed away in Dak’s arms. Peace to her and to our Dak. We love you honey.
I will keep this post short today. And share a couple of things with you. I think we all need a break.
Sadhbh (aka JJ) suggested I look into medieval Irish cats for today’s post, and she shared a website to get me started. It turns out that cats were highly valued in medieval Ireland–both for their rat and mouse hunting abilities and for companionship. There’s a beautiful poem from the 9th century about a cat named Pangur Ban. Here’s the poem, in modern translation:
Members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team have had access to the US Treasury Department’s payment systems for over a week. On Thursday, the threat intelligence team at one of the department’s agencies recommended that DOGE members be monitored as an “insider threat.”
Sources say members of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s IT division and others received an email detailing these concerns.
“There is ongoing litigation, congressional legislation, and widespread protests relating to DOGE’s access to Treasury and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service,” reads a section of the email titled “Recommendations,” reviewed by WIRED. “If DOGE members have any access to payment systems, we recommend suspending that access immediately and conducting a comprehensive review of all actions they may have taken on these systems.”
Although Treasury and White House officials have repeatedly denied it, WIRED has reported that DOGE technologists had the ability to not only read the code of sensitive payment systems but also rewrite it. Marko Elez, one of a number of young men identified by WIRED who have little to no government experience but are associated with DOGE, was granted read and write privileges on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the BFS, an agency that according to Treasury records paid out $5.45 trillion in fiscal year 2024.
“There is reporting at other federal agencies indicating that DOGE members have performed unauthorized changes and locked civil servants out of the sensitive systems they gained access to,” the “Recommendations” portion of the email continues. “We further recommend that DOGE members be placed under insider threat monitoring and alerting after their access to payment systems is revoked. Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even ‘read only,’ likely poses the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”
The recommendations were part of a weekly report sent out by the BFS threat intelligence team to hundreds of staffers. “Insider threat risks are something [the threat intelligence team] usually covers,” a source told WIRED. “But they have never identified something inside the bureau as an insider threat risk that I know of.”
NEW YORK — A federal judge issued an emergency order early Saturday prohibiting Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service from accessing personal and financial data on millions of Americans kept at the Treasury Department, noting the possibility for irreparable harm.
U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer’s decision also ordered Musk and his team to “immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems, if any.”
The conditions are in place until another judge hears arguments on the matter on Feb. 14.
The ruling came hours after attorneys general from 19 states sued to stop Musk’s team from dealing with sensitive files during its review of federal payment systems — an unprecedented effort that skirted firm security measures that permitted access to systems only to trained Treasury employees.
In a four-page order, Engelmayer said the states that sued the Trump administration “will face irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief.”
“That is both because of the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking,” Engelmayer wrote.
He adopted arguments by the states that Treasury records from the agency’s Bureau of Fiscal Services can only legally be accessed by specialized civil servants “with a need for access to perform their job duties.”
Under the order, the Trump administration is prohibited from giving access to political appointees, special government employees or government employees that are not assigned to the Treasury Department. The White House has said that Musk has been designated a special government employee.
The lawsuit, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), says DOGE, a group operating under the direction of President Donald Trump, had no authority to access the Treasury Department’s systems and that doing so was a potentially massive cybersecurity and privacy risk.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols issued a pause on efforts to place 2,200 staff on administrative leave and to expedite evacuations for personnel abroad until next Friday at 11:59 p.m
He also rescinded leave for 500 workers already put on leave.
“All USAID employees currently on administrative leave shall be reinstated until that date, and shall be given complete access to email, payment, and security notification systems until that date, and no additional employees shall be placed on administrative leave before that date,” Nichols wrote.
Nichols also paused the administration’s plans to impose a 30-day deadline for USAID personnel abroad to return the the United States, saying “such short notice disrupts long-settled expectations and makes it nearly impossible for evacuated employees to adequately plan for their return to the United States.”
Nichols said he would not impose a pause on the funding freeze and scheduled an in-person preliminary injunction hearing for Wednesday.
A spokesperson for Democracy Forward, a progressive nonprofit group that filed a lawsuit against the Office of Management and Budget that resulted in a judge temporarily halting the Trump administration’s freeze on most federal grants and loans, said the organization is confident it will demonstrate standing.
“We are confident our clients will be able to demonstrate standing with more fulsome briefing and are committed to continuing to use the legal process to protect the privacy of the American people and to uphold the rule of law,” the spokesperson said.
Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration.
Since President Trump’s second inauguration, Musk’s DOGE team has gained access to a truly staggering amount of personal and sensitive data on American citizens, moving quickly to seize control over databases at the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Resources, among others.
Wired first reported on Feb. 2 that one of the technologists on Musk’s crew is a 19-year-old high school graduate named Edward Coristine, who reportedly goes by the nickname “Big Balls” online. One of the companies Coristine founded, Tesla.Sexy LLC, was set up in 2021, when he would have been around 16 years old.
“Tesla.Sexy LLC controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” Wired reported. “One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market. While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review.”
Mr. Coristine has not responded to requests for comment. In a follow-up story this week, Wired found that someone using a Telegram handle tied to Coristine solicited a DDoS-for-hire service in 2022, and that he worked for a short time at a company that specializes in protecting customers from DDoS attacks.
Internet routing records show that Coristine runs an Internet service provider called Packetware (AS400495). Also known as “DiamondCDN,” Packetware currently hosts tesla[.]sexy and diamondcdn[.]com, among other domains.
DiamondCDN was advertised and claimed by someone who used the nickname “Rivage” on several Com-based Discord channels over the years. A review of chat logs from some of those channels show other members frequently referred to Rivage as “Edward.”
From late 2020 to late 2024, Rivage’s conversations would show up in multiple Com chat servers that are closely monitored by security companies. In November 2022, Rivage could be seen requesting recommendations for a reliable and powerful DDoS-for-hire service.
Read more complex stuff at the link. Basically this kid is a cybercriminal and he could have access to our social security numbers.
There’s lots of creepy news about creepy Elon Musk today.
In December, more than a month before Donald Trump took the presidential oath of office, The New York Times reported a blockbuster scoop: Elon Musk and his SpaceX company had repeatedly failed to meet federal reporting requirements designed to safeguard national security despite being deeply entangled with the military and intelligence bureaucracy. These included a failure to provide details to the government of Musk’s meetings with foreign leaders, the Times reported.
Those lapses had triggered a number of internal federal reviews, according to the Times. Perhaps most interestingly, the Defense Department’s inspector general had opened a probe of the matter sometime during 2024. The Air Force and the Pentagon Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security also launched reviews in November.
Now that Trump is president and controls the executive branch—including the Defense Department—it’s time to raise what appears to be a forgotten question: What exactly is going on with these government reviews into Musk? Have they continued? Or are they effectively dead?
When Trump fired over a dozen independent inspectors general last month, one of them was the Defense Department IG, Robert Storch. We don’t know whether the Musk probe was a reason for this firing, but it now seems awfully convenient for the SpaceX billionaire, who is known to be enraged about having to face regulations and oversight while enjoying immensely lucrative contracts with the federal government.
Now Democrats fear that Trump’s firing of the Defense Department IG has had the effect of closing down the IG’s investigation into Musk. And they’re demanding that the Pentagon clarify its status.
“I want to know, where is this investigation?” said Representative Adam Smith of Washington State, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), in an interview with me. “My deep concern is that it’s just basically been shut down and buried—and will not be pursued.”
Smith told me that Democrats on the HASC are asking the Defense Department for an update on the IG investigation. It will certainly be interesting to see if the agency clarifies this point, though Smith said there’s “no reason to expect a response anytime soon.”
Constituents have flooded the phone lines at the U.S. Capitol this week, many of them asking questions about billionaire Elon Musk “feeding USAID into the wood chipper”and his access to government systems.
Senators’ phone systems have been overloaded, lawmakers said, with some voters unable to get through to leave a message. The outpouring of complaints and confusion has put pressure on lawmakers to find out more about Musk’s project, heightening tensions between the billionaire tech mogul and the government.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said the Senate’s phones were receiving 1,600 calls each minute, compared with the usual 40 calls per minute. Many of the calls she’s been receiving are from people concerned about U.S. DOGE Service employees having broad access to government systems and sensitive information. The callers are asking whether their information is compromised and about why there isn’t more transparency about what is happening, she said.
“It’s asking for a lot of clarification,” Murkowski said, noting that Alaska has a high concentration of federal workers.
“It is a deluge on DOGE,” said Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota). “Truly our office has gotten more phone calls on Elon Musk and what the heck he’s doing mucking around in federal government than I think anything we’ve gotten in years. … People are really angry.”
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said he’s been hearing from constituents “constantly” on DOGE and Musk. “We can hardly answer the phones fast enough. It’s a combination of fear, confusion and heartbreak, because of the importance of some of these programs.”
During Donald Trump’s transition, it appeared that Elon Musk wouldn’t survive in Trumpworld much after the inauguration. Multiple leaks left the impression that Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO and X owner who staked a fortune on reelecting the president, had already outlasted his welcome at Mar-a-Lago, like a houseguest who comes for the weekend, stays for a month, and decides to rearrange the furniture. Musk dropped in on one of Trump’s calls with a world leader; publicly lobbied to install billionaire Howard Lutnick as Treasury secretary; and feuded with Trump ally Steve Bannon over H-1B visas, later writing to critics of the program, “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” Republicans I spoke to at the time said it was inevitable that Musk’s meddling and outbursts would cause a blowup with Trump.
That still may happen. But since Trump was officially sworn in back on January 20, Musk has increased his influence in the White House to unfathomable levels, even as his behavior has at times been erratic. Musk is now leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency as if there are no limits to his power. His band of teenage and 20-something programmers is burrowing into federal computer systems at breakneck speed, and it’s unclear if Trump has a full grasp on what Musk is doing. For instance, there were conflictingreports this week about whether DOGE staffers had read-write access to the Treasury Department’s vast payment system, which would allow Musk to potentially cancel disbursements he didn’t like. Musk has since plugged into the FAA, the Department of Education, and the Office of Personnel Management. According to one Trump ally, Musk is not fully briefing White House chief of staff Susie Wiles about his plans and the White House is effectively in the dark. A White House official disputed this: “The chief of staff is very much involved, and there is no daylight between Elon Musk and anyone in the administration about executing the president’s agenda.” (Musk did not immediately reply to a request for comment for this article.)
Meanwhile, Musk is using his X account like a personal White House pressroom podium to dominate the news cycle. In recent days, Musk has claimed to have “deleted” a division of the General Services Administration and to have fed USAID “into the wood chipper.” He’s also spread conspiracy theories, such as one falsely alleging that DOGE staffers discovered $84 million given to Chelsea Clinton by USAID. (Musk later deleted his tweet that promoted the claim.) Musk has even criticized his ostensible boss. On January 20, Musk undercut Trump’s announcement that the White House had secured a commitment from OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank for an investment of up to $500 billion to build data centers and AI infrastructure. “They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote on X a few hours after Trump revealed the plan. “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”
The president did not look amused. He was meeting the Japanese prime minister for the first time on Friday when a reporter shouted out to ask if he had a “reaction” to the new cover of Time magazine. The cover, the reporter told Mr. Trump, depicts “Elon Musk sitting behind your Resolute Desk.”
“No,” Mr. Trump answered pointedly. He looked down at the floor. The next few seconds stretched like an eternity as a translator related the exchange to the prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, in Japanese.
Just in case any of the sauciness of the moment had been lost in translation, Mr. Trump waited until the interpreter had finished and then cracked: “Is Time magazine still in business? I didn’t even know that.” Everyone around him laughed gamely, if a bit nervously.
It is unlikely that Mr. Trump didn’t know whether Time magazine was still in business. His own face had, after all, stared out from its cover only two months ago, when the magazine anointed him its “Person of the Year.” As part of the rollout of that issue, Mr. Trump rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange in front of a blown-up version of the cover….
The last time he was president, a Time cover in 2017 featuring his adviser Stephen K. Bannon at the height of his powers — “The Great Manipulator,” it read — was believed to have annoyed Mr. Trump. Mr. Bannon left the White House later that year.
I have no doubt that Trump is pissed off about this.
As members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have fanned out across the government in recent days, attention has focused on the young Silicon Valley engineers who are wielding immense power in the new administration.
But ProPublica has identified three lawyers with elite establishment credentials who have also joined the DOGE effort.
Two are former Supreme Court clerks — one clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, another for Justice Neil Gorsuch — and the third has been selected to be a Gorsuch clerk for the 2025-2026 term.
Two of the lawyers’ names have not been previously reported as working for DOGE.
All three — Keenan Kmiec, James Burnham and Jacob Altik — have DOGE email addresses at the Executive Office of the President, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. Altik was recently an attorney at the firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, but his bio page is now offline. Neither the White House nor any of the three lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment about their roles.
Referring to DOGE work, the White House told ProPublica in a statement earlier this week that, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law.”
However, DOGE’s aggressive actions across the government have already drawn lawsuits contending that the group has broken the law.
The legal challenges brought by several groups could ultimately reach the Supreme Court. This week, for example, more than a dozen Democratic attorneys general said they would sue to block DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems, and federal employee unions sued to challenge the DOGE-led dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“What’s striking is how contemptuous the administration seems to be of traditional administrative law limitations — in ways that might get them into trouble,” said Noah Rosenblum, a law professor at New York University. “When this stuff goes to the courts, one important question is going to be: How well-lawyered was it?”
Your response to that column was incredible, both from Americans who feel like they’re being gaslit by the tepid headlines and couched language most mainstream US news outlets are still using to describe grave assaults on our Constitution and legal system and also from readers overseas (including foreign correspondents who are writing about the collapse of our constitutional order) who agreed in dismay that my satirical portrayal was precisely how they were viewing the events in Washington from afar.
I thought — for now at least — I’d offer this as a weekly Saturday column, one that helps both to round up the firehose of news and events on multiple fronts that we’re living through each day as well provide some larger, clear-eyed context about the effects of these events. Without further ado, I give you William Boot’s latest dispatch from our troubled country:
I thought — for now at least — I’d offer this as a weekly Saturday column, one that helps both to round up the firehose of news and events on multiple fronts that we’re living through each day as well provide some larger, clear-eyed context about the effects of these events. Without further ado, I give you William Boot’s latest dispatch from our troubled country:
NEWS ANALYSIS: White Nationalist Forces Consolidate Power Alongside Musk’s Junta
By William Boot
Two weeks into a fast-moving coup by a South African tech oligarch, the United States — which was already deep into planning for its 250th birthday next year — hangs suspended this weekend in a liminal state somewhere between the constitutional republic it has been for 249 years and an authoritarian regime akin to Europe’s infamous fallen democracy, Hungary.
Following the alarming purges of the security services last week and the successful capture of the national treasury and other federal agencies by technical junta forces loyal to centibillionaire Elon Musk, the country’s constitutional system seemed to awaken from slumber this week.
Although by Monday Musk reigned unquestioned as head of the government, he appears content to allow the country’s elected president, Donald Trump, to remain the ceremonial head of state, and overall the political situation seemed to stabilize as the week progressed. Amid widening protests by opposition leaders and the public, damning mediareports, and a flurry of courtorders that blocked or slowed some of the most controversial power grabs, the country even appeared — at least temporarily — to pull back from the abyss.
The capital’s limbo status was reflected in a bizarre power sharing arrangement—some agencies were directly controlled by Musk, while others remained led by ideologically aligned ministers appointed by the figurehead Trump. Many of those officials who support Musk’s white nationalist agenda went out of their way to pay homage to the oligarch. The transportation minister bragged publicly about inviting a Musk takeover of his ministry’s work on aviation safety, and the capital’s federal prosecutor posted a letter to social media putting his supposedly independent force at Musk’s disposal.
The small handful of correspondents whose news organizations have not been cowed into compliance by regime threats spent much of the week in the embattled capital trying to even identify the mysterious Musk-backed figures taking control of government systems. Many of the junta gang members, who would only identify themselves by first-names and were known locally as DOGE, adopted a standard uniform of t-shirts under blazers and appeared to be youths, some even in their teens — one went online by the moniker BigBalls.
Many of these child foot soldiers were apparently mercenaries pulled from the sprawling business empire run by Musk, himself a notoriously immature and boyish oligarch raised amid wealth and privilege in apartheid-era South Africa who has steadily built deep ties to far-right political movements around the globe in recent years.
Regime spokespeople refused to clarify for much of the week whether the DOGE operators deployed across Washington were officially employed by the government or just acting at the personal order of Musk.
Throughout the week, reports and rumors of surprise DOGE appearances at one government office or another spread like wildfire on social media and over text-messaging chains filled with nervous government employees. Members of the parliament’s opposition party tried to investigate some of the agencies under siege, but were blocked from even entering buildings occupied by DOGE forces; at the education ministry, for instance, they faced down an anonymous brown-shirted enforcer who refused to identify himself.
Read the rest at the link above.
That’s it for me today. The stress is really getting to me. I’m having even more difficulty sleeping than usual and I feel exhausted all the times. I do feel slightly better now that the courts are getting involved, but I fear what will happen when these cases reach the corrupt Supreme Court. I also think it’s quite likely that Trump and Musk will eventually clash the way Trump and Bannon did in Trump’s first term.
Take care everyone.
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