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Friday, March 28, 2025

No one wants to talk to Usha Vance -- at least no one in Greenland. US officials have reportedly been traveling around the Danish-controlled territory looking for locals who wanted to receive a visit from the Second Lady, according to a report from Danish TV 2. Greenlanders' response? No thanks. read more


Thursday, March 27, 2025

Elon Musk handed out $1 million to a voter in a desperate bid to flip Wisconsin's Supreme Court in favor of the GOP. read more


Janet Daley: Accidentally copying in a journalist to senior officials' private thoughts about Europe was a gift of Providence read more


92.9% and 86.1% cancelled grants and contracts went to Harris counties, representing 96.6% and 92.4% of total dollar amounts.


Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Four United States army soldiers have been killed in Lithuania during training, the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, said while visiting Warsaw on Wednesday. read more


Comments

Data source:

doge.gov/savings " cancelled federal grants and contracts

USAspending.gov " contract/grant recipient info

github.com & github.com " county-level election data

Tools: Matlab

Methodology: see bsky.app

I retrieved all publicly available cancellations from DOGE on 3/22, which according to DOGE is a subset of all cancellations.

I then cross-referenced them to official spending data on USAspending using links provided by DOGE and ended up with 5,137 and 4,679 contracts and grants with rich metadata.

These metadata include total dollar amounts obligated, dates, and information on contract/grant recipients (address, county, congressional district, etc).

More: I extracted county info (FIPS code) and cross-referenced them to county-level presidential election data from 2024.

For each contract/grant, I found Trump's popular vote margin over Harris in the recipient county.

I plotted every cancellation in red, with total dollar amount obligated on the y axis against Trump-over-Harris margin on x.

There's a bias for more cancellations in Harris counties. But does this reflect true bias or simply more contracts/grants awarded to Harris counties?

To answer this, I need a good background/control set. I compiled all contracts/grants from FY2021-2025 on USAspending, totaling ~19M/24M. ~99% of all cancelled contracts/grants were from this period.

Clearly, the background/control sets (plotted in gray) are distributed across the Trump-Harris spectrum, but the cancellations are biased towards Harris counties.

Potential caveat: DOGE doesn't specify how it chose certain contract/grant cancellations to disclose. They claim the ones disclosed represent "~30% of total savings". It is therefore possible that they made cancellations unbiasedly across the Trump-Harris political spectrum but preferentially disclosed ones to Harris counties for publicity purposes.

More: Late yesterday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt emailed a response: "As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat. However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation. This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason [sic] " yes, we object to the release." (The Leavitt statement did not address which elements of the texts the White House considered sensitive, or how, more than a week after the initial airstrikes, their publication could have bearing on national security.)

A CIA spokesperson asked us to withhold the name of John Ratcliffe's chief of staff, which Ratcliffe had shared in the Signal chain, because CIA intelligence officers are traditionally not publicly identified. Ratcliffe had testified earlier yesterday that the officer is not undercover and said it was "completely appropriate" to share their name in the Signal conversation. We will continue to withhold the name of the officer. Otherwise, the messages are unredacted.

As we wrote on Monday, much of the conversation in the "Houthi PC small group" concerned the timing and rationale of attacks on the Houthis, and contained remarks by Trump-administration officials about the alleged shortcomings of America's European allies. But on the day of the attack"Saturday, March 15"the discussion veered toward the operational.

More: Dudek's threat to block SSA employees from using the agency's IT systems " a move that could halt Social Security payments " came in response to a judge's temporary restraining order in a case brought by the AFL-CIO labor union. The order bars Social Security Administration officials from allowing DOGE, including Musk, and the SSA's DOGE team to access personally identifiable information. It also directs Musk and DOGE to delete from their possession all non-anonymized personal data, and bars them from having access to SSA computers or code.

Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander wrote that the SSA had likely violated administrative and privacy laws when it gave DOGE "unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers' license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses."

She added that the "defendants, with so-called experts on the DOGE Team, never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA's entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government."

Hollander's order does allow the SSA to grant DOGE members "access to redacted or anonymized data and records" if they receive standard training for employees who generally work with Social Security data systems, to ensure they understand applicable federal laws, regulations, and policies that protect the privacy of personally identifiable information.

In other words, Musk and DOGE must comply with existing privacy laws. According to Dudek, Trump's acting commissioner for the Social Security Administration, this requirement is a reason to threaten to halt the safety net program that 71 million Americans rely on for support.

Dudek's comments come as DOGE moves to close dozens of SSA offices, potentially limit phone services, and demand that beneficiaries travel to visit offices in-person to verify their identities " changes that stand to overwhelm the system and prevent seniors and the disabled from receiving their checks.

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