President Donald Trump has told his inner circle, including members of his Cabinet, that Elon Musk will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role as governing partner, ubiquitous cheerleader and Washington hatchet man. read more
Members of President Donald Trump's National Security Council, including White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, have conducted government business over personal Gmail accounts, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with three U.S. officials. read more
Musk's $1 million Wisconsin giveaway won by chair of state's College Republicans read more
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
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
It keeps getting worse.
Waltz's team set up at least 20 Signal group chats for crises across the world
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.
Well they waited for the markets to close for the day before they made their announcement so you couldn't watch them tank with each new tariff he announced.
20% on EU
34% on China
46% on Vietnam
24% on Japan