Who you calling rogue, rape boy?
What it was like on the inside:
Security agents escorted the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Agriculture out of her office on Monday after she refused to comply with her firing by the Trump administration, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Phyllis Fong, a 22-year veteran of the department, had earlier told colleagues that she intended to stay after the White House terminated her Friday, saying that she didn’t believe the administration had followed proper protocols, the sources said.
In an email to colleagues on Saturday, reviewed by Reuters, she said the independent Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency “has taken the position that these termination notices do not comply with the requirements set out in law and therefore are not effective at this time.”
Which means Trump is doing what dictators do, which means Trump is a dictator.
The White House defended the firing of Fong and the other inspectors general, saying “these rogue, partisan bureaucrats… have been relieved of their duties in order to make room for qualified individuals who will uphold the rule of law and protect Democracy.”
Which is what a dictator would say.
The USDA inspector general has a broad mandate, pursuing consumer food safety, audits and investigations of the Agriculture Department as well as violations of animal welfare laws. The USDA has been at the heart of concerns about bird flu, which has spread among cattle and chickens and killed a person in Louisiana.
In 2022, the inspector general’s office launched an investigation of Elon Musk’s brain implant startup Neuralink, which remains ongoing, sources said.
Brain implant startup????
The dismissals, handed out less than a week after Trump took office for his second term, appeared to violate federal law, the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency said in a letter to the White House on Friday.
Dictators do that.
I think Musk must get his ‘knowledge’ of science from old black-and-white sci-fi films from the mid-twentieth century.
Rather fittingly, those films tend to be much more white than black.
The brain implant stuff is actually pretty cool and a direction we should be going into, but I think there’s more than a whiff of Theranos to Neuralink…