Health is non-essential.

The White House is working on an executive order to fire thousands of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services workers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.

White House on Thursday denied it is drafting an executive order to cut workers across federal health agencies.

According to the Wall Street Journal, under the order, which could come as soon as next week, the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies would have to cut a certain percentage of employees.

How do Musk and his troops know that there is a “certain percentage of employees” who are useless to public health?

Or is that beside the point? Has he simply decided that bad health and early death are worthy goals?

Confusion.

Tickle v Giggle; remember that?

I went looking for some reporting to refresh my memory, and up popped the ever-diligent BBC.

A transgender woman from Australia has won a discrimination case against a women-only social media app, after she was denied access on the basis of being male.

The Federal Court found that although Roxanne Tickle had not been directly discriminated against, she was a victim of indirect discrimination – which refers to when a decision disadvantages a person with a particular attribute – and ordered the app to pay her A$10,000 ($6,700; £5,100) plus costs.

But so many decisions “disadvantage” people with “a particular attribute.” We all have some particular attributes, right? So we should all keep a sharp eye out for disadvantages, so that we can sue people and get a few thousand plus costs.

Anyway, I just wanted to revisit this sentence, which I think I probably grumbled about when it was first published.

As someone who identifies as a woman, Tickle claimed she was legally entitled to use services meant for women, and that she was discriminated against based on her gender identity.

And he won.

So why doesn’t that apply more broadly? Why can’t people “identify as” people who are legally entitled to whatever they feel like having? As a CEO with a huge salary, as an Olympic athlete, as a rock star, as the host of a popular tv talk show, as your best friend, as a trainer of flying horses? Why isn’t it a blanket rule that if there’s a criterion for something – entrance, membership, an award, a bonus, a promotion, a profession, first place in a contest – then everyone is legally entitled to claim to meet the criterion, and be rewarded accordingly?

In other words, how does this work? It doesn’t work with everything, in fact it doesn’t work with anything except idennifying as a woman, so why does it work with idennifying as a woman? It’s not normal law, it’s the opposite of normal law, so how did we get here?

Lego has bumps and slots. That’s heteronormative AND transphobic.

Lego can be anti-LGBT, the Science Museum has said.

A self-guided museum tour on “stories of queer communities, experiences and identities” includes a display of Lego bricks alongside a guide stating the plastic blocks may reinforce the idea that heterosexuality “is the norm”.

The tour, devised by a Gender and Sexuality Network at the museum, also claims in the “Seeing Things Queerly” guide that Lego adds credence to the view that there are only two genders.

This is because people supposedly describe Lego bricks as having male or female parts that are made to “mate” with each other.

This is “heteronormative”, the guide states…

Ok so how do you connect the bricks without some kind of slot plus slot-fitting protuberance arrangement? Please inform.

Other stops on the Seeing Queerly tour, advertised on the Science Museum’s official website, include a display of the Billy Doll, a toy launched in 1992 that was intended to depict a gay man.

A Spitfire has also been included, because a pilot who flew one of the Second World War fighter planes, Roberta Cowell, born Robert Marshall Cowell, would later have transgender surgery. Cowell “was the first British trans woman to undergo gender-affirming surgery and change her birth certificate”, the guide states.

And the Spitfire proves it. Or something.

The war on truthful reporting is on.

The television news magazine 60 Minutes — the most storied and profitable show in the history of CBS News — currently finds itself as the avatar of President Trump’s onslaught against the media in the courts and the court of public opinion.

Despite brave talk from the news division, CBS’s parent company appears to be inching toward capitulation, as its controlling owner wants to drag CBS out of the headlines and wrap up a corporate sale.

Naturally. News people care about truthful reporting; owners care about profit. Owners, being owners, win conflicts between the two.

Before becoming president, Trump sued CBS over 60 Minutes‘ interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris shortly before the election. Now, Trump’s newly elevated Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, is using the levers of government to put pressure on the network.

Naturally. Trump is 100 times more ruthlessly aggressive than he was the first time around.

Before Carr’s involvement, CBS had refused to release those materials, calling Trump’s demand for them an intrusion on its journalists’ First Amendment rights. Democratic Commissioner Anna M. Gomez called the FCC’s investigation part of “the administration’s focus on partisan culture wars” and urged her fellow commissioners to dismiss it.

Failure to flatter the dictator is a crime. Bend the knee or be squashed; your choice.

The clash at CBS represents just the latest front in a multi-pronged assault on the press waged by the second Trump administration, using litigation, regulatory agencies, budget powers, executive prerogatives and sympathetic lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

The danger is obvious.

More broadly, the president and his allies are seeking to pressure the media writ large, both to inhibit its ability to check the president and to punish it for coverage he views as unfavorable.

ABC News’ parent company, The Walt Disney Co., paid $15 million toward Trump’s future presidential library, plus another $1 million in legal costs, to settle Trump’s defamation suit over inaccurate remarks about him by anchor George Stephanopoulos. The social media giant Meta paid $25 million to settle Trump’s suit over sidelining him from Facebook after the January 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol.

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong stopped their newspapers from endorsing Harris ahead of the 2024 election. They each cited the low esteem in which the media is held by the broader public. Both owners are billionaires with major business concerns before federal agencies; in Amazon founder Bezos’s case, they include contracts worth billions of dollars.

Free enterprise in action.

Beyond CBS, Trump still has lawsuits pending against Gannett’s Des Moines Register for polling ahead of the election that inaccurately found Harris in the lead (Trump won Iowa decisively) and the committee that awards Pulitzer Prizes over awards given to coverage of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to the Russian regime.

How does that work? How do you sue a committee that awards prizes for giving awards to people you don’t like? Why doesn’t the attempt get laughed out of court?

Under new Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, the Defense Department tossed Politico, NPR, the New York Times and NBC News from their reserved press spaces at the Pentagon in favor of the conservative New York Post, the right-wing Breitbart and One America News Network and the liberal HuffPost, a site that, according to a spokesperson, hadn’t asked for a workspace. No press credentials were revoked; the dislodged outlets can still visit the Pentagon and report there.

Serious adult news media lose their reserved spaces to trashy childish news media.

It’s only going to get worse.

So many outright lies in this CNN piece on getting men out of women’s sports:

President Donald Trump is ready to take his fight against transgender athletes to the International Olympic Committee.

Trump said Wednesday during a signing ceremony for an executive order aimed at banning transgender athletes from women’s sports that his administration wants the IOC to “change everything having to do with the Olympics and having to do with this absolutely ridiculous subject” ahead of the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles.

Liar liar liar. It’s not a “fight against transgender athletes” and it’s not “an executive order aimed at banning transgender athletes from women’s sports.” It’s an executive order banning male athletes from women’s sports.

The order empowers the Secretary of State’s office to pressure the IOC to amend standards governing Olympic sporting events “to promote fairness, safety and the best interests of female athletes by ensuring that eligibility for participation in women’s sporting events is determined according to sex and not gender identity or testosterone reduction.”

Oh look, a paragraph free of lies. Yes: fairness, safety and the best interests of female athletes. You got a problem with that?

The order also calls for the Secretary of State and the Department of Homeland Security to “review and adjust, as needed, policies permitting admission to the United States of males seeking to participate in women’s sports.” There is no evidence that male athletes have competed in women’s Olympics events.

OH yes there is.

It never ceases to amaze me how happy guys like this are to brush off women’s right to fairness as completely irrelevant and insignificant. Easy for you, dude.

Musk continues to bully federal workers.

Elon Musk has declared war on the bureaucracy. And as a Thursday deadline nears for federal employees to take a “buyout,” he is looking to demoralize and wear down his enemy.

Across the government, officials in President Donald Trump’s administration have fired off message after message pushing staff to accept the deferred resignation program, coaxing them with promises of paid vacations and threatening that there will be layoffs if they don’t leave. At the same time, Musk has bullied them with online taunts.

…

According to Trump allies, the intimidation campaign is deliberate as the president pursues an unprecedented purge of the federal workforce.

“They realized that you can kind of turn up the heat in a lot of these departments and people will leave, especially because the federal workforce is older,” said a former Trump official who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to speak freely. “You have a glut of Boomers now and they’re reaching retirement age. And if you can force them out of the door, you don’t have to replace them, and it’s one way to reduce the government.”

Well, yes, and another way would be to lock them in and gas them.

Musk and Trump officials have increasingly turned the screws on career employees as Thursday’s deadline has neared.

Musk boasted to his 216 million followers on his social media platform X that DOGE is “the wood chipper for bureaucracy.” He accused Treasury employees of “breaking the law every hour of every day,” attacked the U.S. Agency for International Development as a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” and shared a post belittling government workers as dumb.

…

Musk’s moves at DOGE mirror his purge at his social media company previously known as Twitter. He said he cut 80 percent of the staff there, and was sued by employees alleging that he did not pay them all of the severance that they were owed. A U.S. judge dismissed one such case, but others are working their way through the courts and arbitration.

And now Musk’s highly publicized history at Twitter is coming back to haunt him. Some federal employees and union leaders representing them said that they are not taking the offer because they don’t trust it will be upheld.

They also have dug in as they’ve felt smeared.

“The offer that we’ve been presented with is not something I see a lot of people taking,” said Sheria Smith, union president of Local 252 at the American Federation of Government Employees. “It was really, really insulting, frankly. It insulted our work ethic and insulted our commitment to our jobs.”

Smith said that of the 2,000 members she represents, fewer than 10 have asked the union questions about the offer. She added that she is “aware of a handful of people who are taking it because they already had plans to leave the agency.”

I like that “fewer than 10.” Artistic.

But…

But that’s just nonsensical. People don’t have to be “biological experts” to know which people are female and which are male. If we did, we wouldn’t be here, because mating would never happen so there would be no people.

More simply, it’s not a matter of biological expertise, it’s just a matter of knowing the names for things. We learn the names for things so early in childhood that we don’t remember doing it. Trans ideology wants to change the meanings of the names “woman” and “man” but that’s a fatuous thing to want, and a deeply obnoxious thing to demand, insist on, try to enforce via shouting and bullying and lawyering.

Oh, you have to be an expert to know whether people are women or men.

Huh. So how have so many people managed to reproduce over the past thousands of years? Just wild guesses, roughly half of which were wrong?

Also there’s that whole definition thing – male adults are men by definition: that’s what the word means.

You really don’t need to be a “biological expert” or even an expert biologist to know that male adults are men, unless you’ve been raised by computers while living in a self-contained box.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Signing a truce with starvation and disease.

I’d like to try highlighting one small reason our political discourse so often feels frustratingly fruitless.

Our dominant political factions represent opposed paradigms of government, and the arguments one side finds compelling simply cannot and will not move the other. In order to make an argument that is compelling to the other side of a conversation, one must understand what matters to them. Unfortunately, we tend to simply repeat ad nauseam arguments that address questions that matter to us, rather than consider the questions motivating our interlocutors. This is a kind of fallacy of irrelevance—one that’s often hard to see, because the premises are relevant to us and therefore salient.

Group L sees government as an expedient means of accomplishing good things, so its most important question is, “Is this thing beneficial?” When this group argues for or against government action, it means that the action is either good or bad. If something is good and not within government’s purview, then government’s purview should be extended to include it.

Group R sees government as a dangerous means of accomplishing necessary things, so its most important question is, “Who or what should do this thing?” When this group argues for or against government action, it argues that the action is or is not within government’s purview. If something is good and not within government’s purview, responsibility to do it should be left to the people.

On R’s view of the social contract, government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, constituting a fiduciary relationship and obligation. Government fulfills its fiduciary duty to the extent that it uses the resources it extracts to serve the interest of the citizenry, and it betrays that duty to the extent that it uses those resources to serve the interests of anyone else. To R, justification for a government action consists in its benefit to the citizenry. Thus, if L were to attempt to justify a government program by reference to the good it does for people in foreign nations, R would find that argument not merely unconvincing but completely perverse. L’s argument amounts to demonstrating that the program would be a violation of the government’s role as fiduciary. If, however, the program does have domestic benefits, then those are what L should marshal as evidence.

In this case, that’s exactly how USAID was sold in the first place. Its nominal goal was to bolster national security by means of foreign assistance programs, on the understanding that nations receiving aid would be more economically stable and less likely to serve as vectors for Soviet influence or action. Benefits to foreign peoples function as the cost we pay to benefit ourselves, and the government is acting within the proper boundaries of its power. As long as the benefits we receive outweigh the costs we pay, that is.

On the L view, sufficient justification for maintaining USAID is found on the grounds that it does good in the world. Saying, “Health programs like those credited with helping end polio and smallpox epidemics and an acclaimed HIV/AIDS program that saved more than 20 million lives in Africa already have stopped. So have monitoring and deployments of rapid-response teams for contagious diseases such as an Ebola outbreak in Uganda,” is sufficient. We can accomplish this and other goods through government action, and therefore we should continue to do so.

On the R view, however, it is simply impossible to justify USAID’s existence by reference to foreign benefit. Even a literally infinite list of laudable accomplishments would fail to make even the first step toward justification. It is entirely reasonable for someone who subscribes to something like R’s view to ask whether the original justification for USAID still holds and whether a similar case can still be made for it.

Of course, dichotomous (and brief) analyses always trade in simplification, and while they’re useful abstractions for capturing broad tendencies, L and R don’t describe everyone, as real political attitudes are messier and more complex. People on the political Left do care about governmental overreach and consent, and people on the Right do make utilitarian arguments about government action. The R perspective might not even account for the majority of those who support dissolving USAID, as many on the Right would say that government should have no role in charity at all, regardless of how it might benefit the nation. The L perspective, likewise, doesn’t represent the entirety of the Left, many of whom also argue for moral, constitutional, and institutional constraints on government action. In fact, if you’d asked me thirty years ago, I might have said that the fiduciary view of the social contract was core to both Republicans and Democrats.

As I said, it’s a simplification.

It’s odd how oblivious journalists (and no doubt the people who read them) can be about misogynist insults. CNN for instance:

Darren Beattie, a former Donald Trump speechwriter who was fired in 2018 after CNN revealed he spoke at a conference attended by White nationalists, has been elevated to a top job at the State Department, multiple sources familiar with the move told CNN.

…

Beattie also has made a series of racially charged comments, writing in one tweet last year, “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”

Yes, that’s “racially charged,” aka racist, but it’s not only racist. I wonder if you can spot what else it is. Take your time. You may consult a dictionary.

And it’s not just CNN – I quoted the passage to Google News and all the hits I got did the same thing. Apparently nobody noticed the “men” bit.

It’s so annoying. Hello??? We’re right here. We’ve been pointing out this crap for more than half a century, and still you just blank us?

Or maybe you just agree that we’re uniformly incompetent.

Balancers v slashers.

The battle is between legacy government and the legal checks and balances that have held it together for generations, a system Democrats are vociferously trying to defend — including in court — and Trump’s new order, aimed at tearing down the status quo with the fast-paced, slash-and-burn tactics of venture capital and big tech, where breaking things in the name of innovation is celebrated.

Yeah clearly breaking things is always good, no matter what the things are or why they exist or how anyone will replace them. When you come to a fork in the road, break everything. It never goes wrong!

In addition to being the primary owner of X, Musk is the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla. The companies hold dozens of contracts with the federal government worth billions of dollars.

Democrats say it is impossible to untangle Musk from his conflicts, particularly if he is given sweeping spending authority across all of federal government. They say no president has the legal right to disregard budget decisions by Congress or the basic structure of government as outlined in the Constitution and other law — much less an unelected and clearly conflicted subordinate who has not been confirmed to any real government position by the Senate.

And they warned that a system that hands government control over to rich campaign donors is not a democracy at all, but an oligarchy.

Welp, this right here is an oligarchy then.

“Before our very eyes, an unelected, shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said during a news conference Monday.

…

Schumer took a similar message to X, attacking DOGE there as a made-up entity with zero legitimate power.

“DOGE has no authority to make spending decisions. DOGE has no authority to shut programs down or to ignore federal law,” Schumer wrote. “DOGE’s conduct cannot be allowed to stand. Congress must take action to restore the rule of law.”

Musk, reportedly operating as a “special government employee” with limited responsibilities, called Schumer’s response “hysterical” and proof that DOGE “is doing work that really matters.”

“This is the one shot the American people have to defeat BUREAUcracy, rule of the bureaucrats, and restore DEMOcracy, rule of the people,” Musk wrote on X. “We’re never going to get another chance like this. It’s now or never. Your support is crucial to the success of the revolution of the people.”

Right. Multi-billionaire Musk doing whatever he wants all the time=the revolution of the people. Two brutal greedy narcissistic self-dealing billionaires=the revolution of the people.

This is all great.

When Elon Musk set about “feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper,” as he put it, it wasn’t only supporters of President Trump’s “America First” agenda who were cheering the dismantlement of the foreign aid agency.

The Kremlin was, too.

“Smart move,” Dmitri A. Medvedev, a former Russian president who is currently the deputy chairman of the country’s security council, chimed in from Moscow, which for years had chafed at the U.S. Agency for International Development’s actions before forcing it out of the country in 2012.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is closely aligned with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, celebrated what he called an end to the funding of “globalist” organizations in a Facebook post on Tuesday. Mr. Orban’s political director said he “couldn’t be happier” with what Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump were doing. (Mr. Musk reposted the comment on Tuesday).

Good good good. Fabulous. Brilliant. We’re on Team Orban, and Musk is happy about it. Chip that wood, bro!

Agency grants to promote democracy, human rights and good governance have gone to support election monitoring groups, anti-corruption watchdogs, independent media outlets and human rights organizations — exactly the kind of oversight that leaders like Mr. Putin detest.

Because human rights are bad. Boooooo human rights.

The US has not always lined up with team human rights as opposed to team anti-human rights, to say the least. But winning hearts and minds via aid programs that do actually aid humans seems a lot more benign than, say, the coup that restored the Shah of Iran or the one that killed Allende.

Democracy initiatives amounted to $1.58 billion of U.S.A.I.D. funding in 2023, a sliver of the agency’s annual budget. But they can attract outsize attention. Grant recipients often cross swords with the world’s authoritarian leaders, who view the activities as a threat to their power.

Mr. Orban — who met in December with Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk — and other foreign officials have persisted in asking the U.S. government to end such programs over the years.

And now Elon Musk, elected by no one, has done it.

U.S.A.I.D. has come under fire for wasteful spending in the past, particularly during the war in Afghanistan, when hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on botched projects, such as an incomplete road and a minimally used power plant. But Mr. Musk has said the entire agency needs to “die,” not just wasteful programs.

Much of U.S.A.I.D.’s work focuses on health and humanitarian assistance. In 2023, the agency provided more than $1.9 billion in food aid. The agency also delivers vaccines, H.I.V. treatment and childbirth care, and combats malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases.

Wrong tense. Delivered. No longer delivers.

Another massive lurch down:

The Trump administration said Tuesday that it is pulling almost all U.S. Agency for International Development workers off the job and out of the field worldwide, moving to all but end a six-decade mission to shore up American security by fighting starvation, funding education and working to end epidemics.

The administration notified USAID workers in emails and a notice posted online, the latest in a steady dismantling of the aid agency by returning political appointees from President Donald Trump’s first term and billionaire Elon Musk’s government-efficiency teams who call much of the spending on programs overseas wasteful.

Well, I consider much of what Elon Musk does evil, so we have to shut him down.

Even if he’s right that much of the “spending” is wasteful, how does that necessitate sudden instant shutdown of everything? What is that but a display of force and sadism?

“Spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk boasted on X.

The Nazi salute was no joke.

The U.S. is the world’s largest humanitarian donor by far. It spends less than 1% of its budget on foreign assistance, a smaller share of its budget than some countries.

Health programs like those credited with helping end polio and smallpox epidemics and an acclaimed HIV/AIDS program that saved more than 20 million lives in Africa already have stopped. So have monitoring and deployments of rapid-response teams for contagious diseases such as an Ebola outbreak in Uganda.

Hundreds of millions of dollars of food and medication already delivered by U.S. companies are sitting in ports because of the administration’s sudden shutdown of the agency.

Yay! No more food and medication! No more responding to outbreaks of contagious disease! Into the wood chipper with them! Aren’t we having fun?!

Might as well just pour it down the drain.

The US Army Corps of Engineers opened two dams on Friday in Central California and let roughly 2.2 billion gallons of water flow out of reservoirs, after President Donald Trump ordered the release with the misguided intent to send water to fire-ravaged Southern California.

Trump celebrated the move in posts to Truth Social post on Friday and Sunday, declaring, “the water is flowing in California,” and adding the water was “heading to farmers throughout the State, and to Los Angeles.”

There are two major problems, water experts said: The newly released water will not flow to Los Angeles, and it is being wasted by being released during the wet winter season.

“They were holding extra water in those reservoirs because of the risk that it would be a dry summer,” said Heather Cooley, director of research for California water policy organization the Pacific Institute. “This puts agriculture at risk of insufficient water during the summer months.”

So it’s not just the nonsense about opening a valve and it’s not just bragging about sending water to Malibu when it’s not going to Malibu, it’s also dumping water that was meant to be held for agriculture during the dry months. A threefer.

Los Angeles’ water sources are completely separated from the water system that Lake Kaweah and Lake Success supply. That water system flows into the agriculture-heavy Central Valley — where large farms grow nuts, citrus and grasses for animal feed, among other crops. The water-stressed region is heavily reliant on groundwater and winter precipitation stored in state reservoirs to irrigate crops.

Stored in state reservoirs. Not dumped out in January when it’s not needed, but stored in reservoirs.

Yes he would.

Bill Gates: Musk wouldn’t be telling USAID workers to say home if he knew what it does

Sure he would. Of course he would. He is not a nice man.

Anyway, if he doesn’t know what it does, what business does he have meddling with it in any way? How hard would it have been to find out what it does?

Billionaire Bill Gates said in an interview early Tuesday that Elon Musk “wouldn’t be telling” employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) not to come to work if he “really knew” what it does.

“I give billions of dollars to the same thing that USAID does. I go out in the field and study these things. I hire scientists,” Gates said on NBC’s “Today” show.

The Gates Foundation is about a 20 minute walk from here. I kind of feel like giving it a hug or something.

“And so, you know, I think if he really knew the work there, he wouldn’t be telling 10,000 people not to come and do that work,” he added.

But that assumes he’s a decent person, and he’s not. No one who embraces Trump is decent, and Musk is doing way more than embracing.

Exactly.

Why is no one stopping him?

The billionaire tech magnate has never been elected to office or been confirmed by the Senate for a high-level government job, but in the span of a few days, Musk has still gained access to sensitive federal data through his position as head of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency project, or DOGE, to push a far-reaching agenda and potentially spark a constitutional crisis. 

Musk has embraced Silicon Valley’s most notorious instincts to “move fast and break things” in a lightning battle to muscle into the computer systems and power structures of federal agencies. 

But the government of a large powerful country isn’t Silicon Valley. We don’t actually want things broken.

With a cadre of engineers as young as 19 years old, and with the encouragement of Trump, Musk has demanded and been given access to sensitive government databases and the Treasury Department’s payment system with an unprecedented series of bureaucratic maneuvers. 

There are deep concerns among many Democrats and some Republicans that Musk — and his staff members who are not government workers and are not bound by the same ethics and rules that apply to federal workers — are acting in secret, without accountability and potentially against the law in the Trump administration’s effort to shrink the federal government.

Cool about the deep concern, but how about doing something?

Many Democrats — and even some Republicans — say the attempted unilateral remake of the federal government is unlawful, as Trump and Musk have shoved aside not only career civil servants but also the authority of Congress itself. 

“It’s a potential constitutional crisis,” said Brian Riedl, a former Senate Republican staff member who is now a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. In a phone interview, he said he was concerned that Musk’s power is going unchecked. 

“Someone with as much power as Elon Musk has should be Senate-confirmed,” he said. “There needs to be some accountability to Congress and the voters.” 

So do something.

Musk has been using as his primary example of suspected government waste a dubious claim that $50 million of taxpayer money went to pay for condoms sent to the Gaza Strip. The Associated Press reported last week that there was no evidence for the claim. 

And he has acted largely in secret, withholding not only the names of newly hired government officials who are helping him make decisions, but also the details of the decisions themselves and the supposed legal authority under which he is operating. On Monday, after people began posting the names of DOGE employees online, Musk accused them of breaking the law. 

Classic reverse victim and offender.

Michael Tomasky on our new overlord:

It literally sounds like the plot of a dystopian science fiction movie: The richest man in the world befriends—and helps finance—another rich man who becomes president of the United States, who then gives his plutocratic benefactor carte blanche access to the operations of the federal government. The bedlamite billionaire instantly zeroes in on the obscure little office that oversees the writing of all the government’s checks, thus ensuring that he has the power to bring down the U.S. and global economy and even, if he so wishes, topple said president.

Oh, and—he’s also a right-wing extremist who recently spoke to the far-right German political party whose leaders say things like “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” He told them—with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge—that Germans placed “too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” And then there’s the matter of that salute, which of course, he denies was what many people—even or especially among those who delighted in it—thought it was.

Well, yes, but clearly Tomasky is suffering from Musk derangement syndrome.

Musk wrote on X over the weekend, according to CNN, that his team had “discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups. They literally never denied a payment in their entire career. Not even once.”

He was trying to make this sound scandalous. It’s not. Not remotely! The opposite would be scandalous. The bureau spends the money Congress has approved. If fraudulence or terrorism is to be identified anywhere, that’s Congress’s job. Never denying a payment is the bureau’s job.

So that’s how it’s unprecedented. It’s antidemocratic because some of these people don’t even appear to have real positions in the government. Yes, Donald Trump was elected. But Elon Musk was not. And press accounts of these goings-on, you might notice, don’t identify a number of the people working on this effort by their official titles, presumably because they don’t even have them. They’re just called “Musk associates.” One, a man named Baris Akis, heads a venture capital firm. His presence at transition-period meetings, CNN reports, “raised alarms among some of the Treasury officials present for those early meetings, since he was not an official member of the incoming Trump administration and didn’t have a security clearance at the time.”

…

Over the weekend, Mike Flynn tweeted out the federal dollars that go to Lutheran services for immigrants and refugees. They are vast amounts, to be sure, but they were approved by Congress. Musk replied to Flynn that “The @DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.”

Congress is illegal, and Musk is the cop and the prosecutor and the jury who will shut it down. Good times.

And the lawless interloper finds the time to advertise his lawless interloping on his soshul media toy.

Newest at top.

The BBC has been live reporting on Musk’s coup:

Democratic lawmakers have gathered outside USAID headquarters in Washington DC.

They are now speaking about how they believe shutting down USAID is a “clear and present danger” to US national security.

Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, says that closing this agency will only aid US adversaries and cites Russian President Vladimir Putin’s celebration of its closure.

The legislators also point out that it’s plain illegal.

Democrat[ic] lawmaker Gerry Connolly says “no-one elected Elon Musk to dismantle” USAID.

“Congress created this agency,” he says. “If you want to change it, you’ve got to change that law. It’s a matter for Congress to deal with, not an unelected billionaire oligarch named Elon Musk.”

Jamie Raskin, a frequent political foe of Donald Trump, is taking the fight directly to Elon Musk, who is leading efforts to dismantle USAID.

Musk leads the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) – which is not a government department, but a team within the Trump administration.

“Elon Musk, you didn’t create USAID, the United States Congress did for the American people. And just like Elon Musk did not create USAID, he doesn’t have the power to destroy it,” he says. “We don’t have a fourth branch of government called ‘Elon Musk,'” he also says.

He then notes that Musk’s SpaceX company has contracts with the defence department and says he “became the richest man in the world off our money”.

The richest and the evilest.

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who came to the US as a refugee from Somalia and now represents parts of the state of Minnesota, shares firsthand perspective about USAID’s role.

Omar shares that she once lived in a refugee camp and that USAID assistance “kept my family fed and safe”. She said aid programmes “creates goodwill for the American people” because it reinforces the US’s soft power in the world.

Omar claims that the Trump administration’s moves made against USAID are “what the beginning of a dictatorship looks like”.

She’s not wrong.

Then Trump stepped up to let us know he has no clue what USAID does or doesn’t do.

He briefly touched upon the controversy regarding Elon Musk and DOGE, as well as on the future of USAID – which he described as fraudulent and claimed it is run by “lunatics”.

“They went totally crazy,” he said. “They were giving [money] to people that shouldn’t getting it, and to agencies and others that shouldn’t be getting it. They’re a tremendous fraud, but we’ll be doing a report.”

He did say, however, that he “loves” the concept of USAID. “The concept of it is good, but it’s all about the people,” he added.

He doesn’t know. If he knew, he would blab it. He doesn’t know: that’s why it’s all generalities. He does that a lot.