The documents reveal a DOGE affiliate is attempting to transfer the headquarters of an independent think tank, the United States Institute of Peace, to the government at no cost. read more
President Donald Trump's drive to scale down the federal government by unleashing and empowering Elon Musk to indiscriminately fire thousands of federal employees, has wreaked chaos. There have been plenty of demonstrations of the inefficiency of Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), from having to rehire workers to being forced to admit claims of vast savings were bogus. That's not particularly surprising for such an indiscriminate effort.
After weeks of "Tesla Takedown" protests, extremist groups are showing up to back Elon Musk's beleaguered car company.
They see the election results, and they know women are a threat to their majority. The U.S. House of Representatives will vote this week--as early as Tuesday--on the bogusly named SAVE Act. The so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act would make it really, really hard to register to vote, especially for women.
The program that promised efficiency through targeted destruction is instead delivering chaotic and costly destruction through incompetence.
Background info on the Tesla protests:
Protests hit Tesla dealerships across the world in challenge to Elon Muskwww.theguardian.com
From Australia to Europe and the US, demonstrators rallied against carmaker's dismantling of US federal government
On Saturday, with more than 200 events planned worldwide, protests kicked off midday in front of Tesla showrooms in Australia and New Zealand and then rippled across Europe in countries including Finland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, the Netherlands and the UK. Each rally was locally organized with original themes. In Ireland, it was "Smash the Fash", and Switzerland had "Down with Doge". Photos posted to Bluesky by Tesla Takedown showed demonstrators in San Jose, California, close to where Tesla was previously headquartered, and Austin, Texas, where its headquarters are now.
Compare this reporting from the Washington Post with a report put out yesterday by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on the dangers DOGE poses for Social Security, emphasis mine:
The Administration, Musk, and DOGE have engaged in four types of activities that each present a clear danger to Social Security but together create the potential for significant damage to the program:www.cbpp.org
Launching rhetorical attacks on Social Security programs, including false claims of massive fraud--providing a pretext for actions that could undermine eligible beneficiaries' access to benefits.
Engaging in deep cuts to staffing, new restrictions on phone-based services for the public, and "agency-wide . . . restructuring" and "massive reorganizations" of SSA that are neither well thought-out nor wise " all of which threaten SSA's ability to serve seniors and people with disabilities effectively while providing a potential excuse for privatizing key services.
Jeopardizing the reliability of SSA's systems, including through the sharp reduction of staff with technical expertise of systems that serve some 73 million people, or 1 in 5 people in the United States, each month.
Threatening the security of people's personal information by giving untrained DOGE political appointees unprecedented access to sensitive SSA data.
These four dangers (see Figure 1) compound one another--rather than making improvements that would help Social Security beneficiaries now or in the future. Social Security is highly accurate and efficient--with a payment accuracy rate of 99.7 percent and administrative costs of only 0.5 percent--and has successfully paid benefits for over 85 years. After years of underfunding, SSA needs more staff--not fewer--to give the nation's retirees and people with disabilities the service they deserve.
When you've lost the National Review:
This episode is a product of this administration's flippancy. Its casual unseriousness is what produced a text message in the first place. So, too, did that outlook license the way in which the administration's principles disclosed its internal disputes, which are of inestimable value to our enemies, to say nothing of our capabilities. That same unseriousness produced this unsatisfying cleanup operation, which fails to marshal a persuasive argument and relies instead on the assumed partisanship of the intended audience. We have seen this sort of thing a lot from Republicans in the second Trump era. . . .www.nationalreview.com
Maybe it's better that Trump 2.0 has dispensed with Biden's mock solemnity even if it has retained his insouciance. Still, the degree to which this administration seems comfortable discussing matters both grave and trivial as online gamers would in a Discord forum is as puerile as it is reckless.
The work of government is serious business. The American public deserves serious people at the helm. So far, and for elusive reasons, this presidency seems to believe that voters will disregard its mistakes if its officials act as though anyone who notices and objects to them are picayune obsessives and cranks. This strategy, such as it is, is not working.
