Lazy Caturday Reads: Government by the Stupid

Good Afternoon!!

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.

Here’s the latest idiocy from our stupid rulers.

Rene Marsh and Ella Nilsen at CNN: Trump officials fired nuclear staff not realizing they oversee the country’s weapons stockpile, sources say.

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.

NBC News: Trump administration wants to un-fire some nuclear safety workers but can’t figure out how to reach them.

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.

Politico: Stunned federal workers brace for the real-world repercussions of Trump’s purges.

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.

Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump-Musk Scandal at USAID Takes Unnerving Turn With Vile Leaked Memo.

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 Post reports 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 Times reports, 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 Guardian: Musk’s takeover of US health agencies raises pandemic threat, experts warn.

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.

Kiera Butler at Mother Jones: RFK Jr. Is Already Taking Aim at Antidepressants.

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.

Musk and his Doge bros hit the IRS this week.

Hunter Walker at Talking Points Memo: Inside The ‘Bizarre’ Meeting Where DOGE Requested ‘Extensive System Access’ At IRS.

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 have reported 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 been identified 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.