Wired magazine published an article identifying the young men who are members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team. They are called “experts,” even though they range in age from 19 to 24. Some of these “experts” are college dropouts. All of them worked for either Musk or billionaire Peter Thiel before their current assignment.
Archives for category: Accountability
Texas: Gov. Abbott Says He Will Accept Nothing Less than Universal Vouchers, for Rich and Poor Alike
Governor Greg Abbott of Texas insists on vouchers. He has promoted them in every legislative session. Last year, he called several special sessions of the legislature, solely to get his vouchers passed. He failed and failed and failed. Since last year, he collected millions of dollars to spend defeating anti-voucher Republicans. He spent it on a campaign of lying about them, barely mentioning vouchers but accusing the refuseniks of opposing extra funding for public schools (they opposed extra money for public schools linked with vouchers), he accused them of failing to support Trump on the border, he threw dirt and lies, and he defeated several of those anti-voucher Republicans for their perfidy.
Here’s where matters stand today, as reported by Gromer Jeffers, Jr, in the Dallas Morning-News:
AUSTIN – Texas Gov. Greg Abbott insisted Monday that he would accept nothing less than a robust, universal school choice voucher program, and he resisted calls to join the plan with blanket increases in public school funding.
As he did in Sunday’s State of the State speech, Abbott committed to raising public teacher pay, but on his terms and largely in the form of merit increases
A plan to allow families to use public dollars on private schools is the centerpiece of his legislative agenda for the legislative session that ends in June. Abbott said his success last year in using the primaries to oust House Republicans who voted against school choice dictates that any plan approved by lawmakers be universal and substantive.
Political Points
“An overwhelming majority of Texans want school choice,” Abbott said during an interview in the Governor’s Mansion with The Dallas Morning News. “I won all of those races because the voters want school choice, so now there’s no reason for us to ratchet back on what we’re going to do, especially knowing full well that what we’re seeking to achieve here right now is exactly what the voters of Texas want. Most important is what the parents across the state of Texas want.”
Abbott will make a campaign-like stop Tuesday in support of school choice at a private Christian school in Athens.
In Monday’s interview with The News, Abbott also stressed his commitment to helping President Donald Trump with his immigration policies, discussed the mechanics of lowering property taxes and said his relationship with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows was better than ever.Related:Texas Senate committee approves ‘school choice’ bill on party-line vote
The governor said he was hopeful his agenda, which includes seven emergency items, would be approved by Texas lawmakers.
School choice tops his wish list.
Abbott is backing Senate and House plans that would devote $1 billion for education savings accounts to help families pay for private school expenses and tuition. He wants voucher-type assistance available to any Texas student who wants it.
Public school advocates say they are concerned about the impact universal school choice would have on public education. In the past, a coalition of rural Republicans and urban Democrats in the Texas House have been able to block voucher-style plans, but Abbott says he has 79 votes in the 150-member chamber to approve school choice.
His stronger political position has resulted in a hardening of his education policies, which do not include a significant increase in money to public education outside of teacher pay raises.Related: ‘Hardcore’ supporters will help Texas finally pass school choice plan, Gov. Abbott says
“We bent over backwards to try to provide a compromise position last session,” Abbott said. “They weren’t going to negotiate at all. They said they don’t want anything other than ‘not school choice.’”
Abbott said public education is being funded at historic levels, adding that private schools in Texas were not on “equal footing” with public schools that use taxpayer dollars to build facilities.
“We’re talking apples and oranges here,” Abbott said. “There’s so much money and so much expansion. Spending on the education side has been on the administrative side. We’ve got to ratchet back the spending on administration and devote that money to where it belongs and where it’s most useful, and that is paying our teachers.”
Teacher pay raises would be partly across-the-board because it would come in the basic allotment. The bulk, however, should be devoted to merit increases, Abbott said.
“We want to ensure that we’re putting teachers on a pathway to be able to earn a six-figure salary,” he said. “Some will be across the board. A lot will be a merit.”
A Senate proposal would add $4.9 billion to the Foundation School Program for teacher pay and changes to the Teacher Incentive Allotment. Teacher pay would increase $4,000 for all teachers, plus an additional $6,000 for rural teachers.
State Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas, disagrees with Abbott, saying public schools are not adequately funded because of inflation and unfunded mandates, including paying for increased school security.
“The unfunded mandates that both he and the Legislature put on local school districts, we need to make them whole, because it’s the right thing to do,” Anchia said. “We asked them to increase security, and we said we would pay for it.”
Anchia said $5 billion devoted to public education is sitting unspent.
“We should fully fund public schools based on the historic reform bill that we passed in 2019 and release the funds that he withheld during the last biennium for public education,” Anchia said. “He held these funds hostage to get his subsidy of private schools, also known as the voucher scheme, done.”
Abbott says schools could have had that money, but they rejected his education savings account plan.
Anchia said he hoped pay raises would become a reality.
“I’m all about driving money through the formulas down to the local districts, where they know how to make investments better than any politician in Austin,” he said.
Another major agenda item for Abbott is taxes. Texas has a $24 billion budget surplus to work with, and the governor wants property taxes reduced on top of the historic $18 billion property tax cut he signed in 2023.
Abbott said local tax increases often mitigated the 2023 property tax cut, and he said he hopes to sign legislation that would require local tax increases to be approved by two-thirds of voters.
“Reducing property taxes going forward is only going to work if we tie the hands of the taxing authorities to make sure they’re not going to be able to increase property taxes,” Abbott said.
It’s time to rehabilitate Richard Nixon’s reputation. True, he had a bunch of inept burglars break into the Denocratic National Committee’s headquarters. True, he had an enemies’ list. True, he appointed an ally to lead the Justice Department.
Nixon resigned before he could be impeached. Republicans in Congress were as angry as Democrats.
Nixon had a sense of shame. He resigned rather than be impeached. Trump has no sense of shame.
But all that pales compared to what is happening now. Trump has nominated a long list of completely unqualified people to run major Departments of the federal government. He has started a purge of the FBI, intending to oust anyone who participated in investigating him or the January 6 insurrection.
He has given free access to Elon Musk to enter every Department, copy its files, and fire any career employee who stands in his way.
Bill Kristol, once a conservative stalwart and editor of The Weekly Standard, now writes for The Bulwark, which sees Trump as the sociopath he is.
by William Kristol
In disregard of the rule of law, he knowingly misused the executive power by interfering with agencies of the executive branch, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation . . . in violation of his duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.
Article II, section 5, of the Articles of Impeachment Adopted by the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, July 27, 1974
Half a century ago Congress, the courts, other key institutions within and outside of the government, and the American public, faced an assault launched by President Richard Nixon and his henchmen to the constitutional order and the rule of law.
They defeated it.
Today, we face a crisis greater than Watergate.
Are we up to dealing with it?
We’re going to find out.
The crisis is multi-faceted and fast-moving. President Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk—nominated for no federal office, employed by no federal agency, accountable to no one—are racing on several fronts to undermine laws, procedures, and norms that would constrain their arbitrary exercise of power. But the assault on the rule of law seems centered on the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It began with the nomination of Trump apparatchik and defender of the January 6th rioters Kash Patel to be FBI director. Patel tried to reassure Senators during his confirmation hearing last Thursday that “all FBI employees will be protected from political retribution.”
But the next day, Emil Bove, Trump’s former defense lawyer, who is now acting deputy attorney general and in charge of the Justice Department, ordered the removal of at least six top FBI career executives. Bove also requested the names of all FBI agents who worked on January 6th cases.
All seemed on track for Trump’s efforts to purge the agency and remake it in his own image.
But FBI officials may not permit their agency to go gentle into the dictatorial night.
Over the weekend, in a blizzard of activity (helpful reporting can be found here, and here, and here), FBI officials moved to resist the attempted coup.
Though he had carried out the order to decapitate the bureau’s top executives the day before, on Friday acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll reportedly refused to agree to fire certain agents involved with January 6th cases, and was trying to block a mass purge of such agents. In a message to staff Saturday, Driscoll reminded FBI agents of their rights to “due process and review in accordance with existing policy and law,” and emphasized “That process and our intent to follow it have not changed.”
The FBI Agents Association sent a memo to employees over the weekend to remind them of their civil service protections. The memo urged them not to resign or to offer to resign, and recommended that agents respond to one question in the survey they’ve been instructed to answer: “I have been told I am ‘required to respond’ to this survey, without being afforded appropriate time to research my answers, speak with others, speak with counsel or other representation.”
And in a remarkable letter, obtained by The Bulwark, the president of the Society of Former FBI Agents—a group that seeks to stay out of politics—said the following:
The obvious disruption to FBI operations cannot be overstated with the forced retirement of the Director, Deputy Director, and now all five Executive Assistant Directors. Add in the immediate removal of a number of SACs [Special Agents in Charge] and the requests for lists of investigative personnel assigned to specific investigations and you know from your experience that extreme disruption is occurring to the FBI—at a time when the terrorist threat around the world has never been greater.
Then on Sunday the top agent at the FBI’s New York field office, James Dennehy, wrote in an email to his staff: “Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy. . . . Time for me to dig in.”
It’s surely time for many others to dig in. Especially the United States Congress, which authorizes FBI activities, appropriates its funds, and before whom Kash Patel’s nomination is pending.
It’s pointless to ask President Trump to recall the oath he took two weeks ago, to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
But members of Congress also take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” As it was fifty years ago, so it is today: The fact that the Constitution’s enemies now include the president of the United States does not relieve members of Congress of their responsibility to that oath.
Mercedes Schneider calls your attention to the young people deployed by Elon Musk to peer into the computer files of key U.S. government agencies. She relies on a story that first appears in Wired, which identified the guys and posted their photographs.
On BlueSky, people have added details about Elon’s team. They seem to be computer whizzes. At least one is known for his hacking skills. They range in age from 19 to 24. A couple, apparently, are recent high school graduates.
Musk may have more than one such team, because his gang has taken control of the databases of several important government agencies. They have moved into the closely-guarded payment system of the U.S. Treasury, where they have downloaded the personal data of millions of Americans, as well as the details of government contracts.
Musk teams also took control of the computers at the General Services Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, and the USAID. The last agency has done 13,000 in staff and administers humanitarian aid to countries around the world USAID feeds the hungry, sends help with disasters, and distributes medicines when there is a need). Musk hates USAID, for some reason, and kept the agency closed on Monday so his boys could explore its files and computer system without interference from those who work there. Musk convinced Trump that the USAID should be closed and reopened as a part of the Dtate Department. Musk said that USAID was full of “radical lunatics,” and Trump echoed that claim.
At the moment, they are in the Department of Education, copying files.
On the PBS Newshour last night, Richard Painter, who was the ethics officer in the George W. Bush administration, said that Musk had massive conflicts of interest. Musk owns several businesses that receive federal funding. Painter said that Musk should either divest himself of the companies that hold federal contracts or quit his current job.
Nobody puts things in perspective as well as Heather Cox Richardson. What is happening in Washington, D.C., right now is dangerous and subversive. Trump has given Elon Musk to destroy our government and trash the Constitution. There is a coup underway.
She writes:
I’m going to start tonight by stating the obvious: the Republicans control both chambers of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. They also control the White House and the Supreme Court. If they wanted to get rid of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, they could introduce a bill, debate it, pass it, and send it on to President Trump for his signature. And there would be very little the Democrats could do to stop that change.
But they are not doing that.
Instead, they are permitting unelected billionaire Elon Musk, whose investment of $290 million in Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 election apparently has bought him freedom to run the government, to override Congress and enact whatever his own policies are by rooting around in government agencies and cancelling those programs that he, personally, dislikes.
The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup. The U.S. president has no authority to cut programs created and funded by Congress, and a private citizen tapped by a president has even less standing to try anything so radical.
But Republicans are allowing Musk to run amok. This could be because they know that Trump has embraced the idea that the American government is a “Deep State,” but that the extreme cuts the MAGA Republicans say they want are actually quite unpopular with Americans in general, and even with most Republican voters. By letting Musk make the cuts the MAGA base wants, they can both provide those cuts and distance themselves from them.
But permitting a private citizen to override the will of our representatives in Congress destroys the U.S. Constitution. It also makes Congress itself superfluous. And it takes the minority rule Republicans have come to embrace to the logical end of putting government power in the hands of one man.
Musk’s team in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has taken control of the U.S. Treasury payment systems that handle about $6 trillion in annual transactions for the U.S. government, thus gaining access to Americans’ personal information as well as information about Musk’s competitors. From there, Musk claims to have been cancelling those transactions he thinks are wasteful. He claims, for example, to have “deleted” the popular Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Direct File system that enabled people to file their taxes online for free, without the help of paid tax preparers.
Musk’s team apparently consists of six engineers, aged 19 to 24, who are taking control of the computers at government agencies. From the Treasury Department, they went on to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which receives foreign policy guidance from the State Department. Their breaching of the computers there compromises our national intelligence systems, which must now be considered insecure.
From there, they went on to the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages the federal government’s 7,500 or so buildings. Musk’s people sent an email to regional managers telling them to begin ending the leases on federal offices. According to Chris Megerian of the Associated Press, the person in charge of that initiative is Nicole Hollander, who describes herself on LinkedIn as employed at Musk’s social media company, X.
Today, according to an email sent to employees of the Small Business Administration, Musk’s people have gotten into that agency’s human resources, contracts, and payment systems. The Small Business Administration supports small businesses and entrepreneurs, and under the Biden-Harris administration, small businesses boomed thanks to small-dollar loans to women, Black, and Latino entrepreneurs.
By this afternoon, Musk’s people were digging into the data of the Department of Education with an eye to dismantling it from the inside before Trump tries to shut it down with an executive order, although only Congress itself can shutter the department. According to Laura Meckler, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post, Musk’s DOGE staffers had accessed sensitive internal data systems, including the personal information of millions of students who are taking part in the federal student aid program. It is highly unlikely that Congress would destroy the Department of Education, so Musk and Trump hope to hollow it out from within.
On a livestream last night, Musk said of his destruction of the federal government: “If it’s not possible now, it will never be possible. This is our shot, This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have. If we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen.”
Three federal employees unions are suing the Trump administration to stop Musk, and today, Democratic members of the House and Senate tried to enter the USAID building but were denied entry. Led by Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT), Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Representatives Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA), the Democrats condemned what Raskin called Musk and Trump’s “illegal, unconstitutional interference with congressional power.”
“Elon Musk, you may have illegally seized power over the financial payment systems of the United States Department of Treasury,” Raskin said, “but you don’t control the money of the American people. The United States Congress does that—under Article I of the Constitution. And just like the president, who was elected to something, cannot impound the money of the people, we don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk. And that’s going to become real clear.”
Senator Murphy said: “[L]et’s not pull any punches about why this is happening. Elon Musk makes billions of dollars based off of his business with China. And China is cheering at [the destruction of USAID]. There is no question that the billionaire class trying to take over our government right now is doing it based on self-interest: their belief that if they can make us weaker in the world, if they can elevate their business partners all around the world, they will gain the benefit.”
Murphy continued: “But there’s another reason this is happening. They’re shuttering agencies and sending employees home in order to create the illusion that they’re saving money, in order to…pass a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations.”
While Musk and his DOGE team are trying systematically to dismantle the government, today Judge Loren L. AliKhan of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze trillions of dollars in grants and loans before DOGE got going. AliKhan said that by impounding funds—which Congress declared illegal in 1974—Trump’s Office of Management and Budget “attempted to wrest the power of the purse away from the only branch of government entitled to wield it.” It is Congress, not the president, that determines federal spending.
Meanwhile, the elected president, Donald Trump, sparked a crisis last Friday when his White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, announced that he fully intended to go through with the trade war he had hyped on the campaign trail. Trump announced he would levy tariffs of 25% on most products from Mexico and Canada and of 10% on products from China, beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, in violation of the trade agreement his own team had negotiated during his first term.
As soon as Leavitt announced the upcoming tariffs, the stock market began to fall, and by last night, stock market futures had fallen 450 points on the expectation of tariffs hitting at midnight tonight. Today, the stock market continued to fall. Even reliable Trump allies began to complain that the tariffs would raise prices. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called Trump’s tariffs “the dumbest trade war in history.”
Today, the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, announced that she and Trump had “reached a series of agreements” that would pause the threatened tariffs for a month. Mexico agreed to “reinforce the northern border with 10,000 elements of the National Guard immediately, to prevent drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States,” while the U.S. “commits to work to prevent the trafficking of high-powered weapons to Mexico.”
When Trump announced their conversation shortly afterward, he omitted the part of the agreement that committed the U.S. to try to stop the flow of guns to Mexico. He also did not mention that, in fact, Mexico committed to putting 10,000 troops at the border in 2021. As Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post commented above a record of Mexican troop deployments: “Any news outlet reporting Mexico conceded anything to Trump to get him to delay tariffs has not done its homework. Trump boasts he got Mexico to commit to stationing 10K troops at our border. Apparently he didn’t realize Mexico already has 15K troops deployed there[.]”
The crisis at the northern border worked out in a similar fashion. After conferring, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Trump announced a 30-day pause in the implementation of tariffs. Trudeau agreed to appoint a border czar and to implement a $1.3 billion border plan that Canada had announced in December.
In other words, while Musk was causing a constitutional crisis, Trump created an economic crisis that threatened both domestic and global chaos, then claimed Biden administration achievements as his own and declared victory.
The tariffs on Chinese goods went into effect as planned. China has promised to levy tariffs of up to 15% on certain U.S. products beginning a week from today. It also said it will investigate Google to see if it has violated antitrust laws.
The FBI is supposed to be a nonpolitical agency, although every FBI director chosen by every president was a Republican.
Over the past four years, the FBI was assigned the job of identifying and arresting those who planned and participated in the January 6, 2021, invasion of the U.S. Capitol. The mob was incited by Trump; its goal was to stop the certification of the 2020 election. The insurrection was an attempt to overthrow the Constitution and give Trump a position he lost in the 2020 elections.
The investigation of the January 6 insurrection was the largest in the history of the FBI.
Now Trump’s minions are asking FBI agents whether they were part on the investigation of January 6 or part of the investigation of Trump’s theft of classified documents.
Those who were will be fired because they can’t be trusted to faithfully execute Trump’s agenda.
Understand that the FBI agents who worked in these investigations were carrying out their duties. Understand that in no sane world is it right to send an angry mob to ransack the U.S. Capitol and to disrupt Congress in performing its prescribed duties.
Trump wants to rewrite history. He wants to make it official that the prosecution of the January 6 mob should never have happened. It was, he says, “a day of love.” The mob that beat up and bludgeoned police officers defending the Capitol and members of Congress were “patriots.”
Historians will ignore his lies. The criminal actions of Trump’s mob are well documented.
How can the FBI save itself from a mass purge?
Simple. Every single member of the FBI should sign a statement saying that they were part of the January 6 investigation. Every. Single. Member.
This is a true statement because who investigated the largest single attack in the Capitol were chosen at random. They were not there as volunteers or Trump-haters. They were there because FBI agents take their assignments seriously and execute them with fidelity.
To defend the FBI, sign your name. They can’t fire everyone. That might even offend the sombolent Republicans in Congress. Most were there on January 6. No matter what they say now, they know that their lives were in danger then. Will they sit by silently and let Trump eliminate the entire FBI? Not likely.
Their Trump obeisance must have limits.
Stand together. Sign your name.
Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale and author of On Tyranny, among many other books, summarizes the perilous moment we are now in.
What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together.
The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate.
For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.
The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes.
All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves.
Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.
Think of the federal government as a car. You might have thought that the election was like getting the car serviced. Instead, when you come into the shop, the mechanics, who somehow don’t look like mechanics, tell you that they have taken the parts of your car that work and sold them and kept the money. And that this was the most efficient thing to do. And that you should thank them.
The gap between the oligarchs’ wealth and everyone else’s will grow. Knowing what they themselves will do and when, they will have bet against the stock market in advance of Trump’s deliberately destructive tariffs, and will be ready to tell everyone to buy the crypto they already own. But that is just tomorrow and the day after.
In general, the economic collapse they plan is more like a reverse flood from the Book of Genesis, in which the righteous will all be submerged while the very worst ride Satan’s ark. The self-chosen few will ride out the forty days and forty night. When the waters subside, they will be alone to dominate.
Trump’s tariffs (which are also likely illegal) are there to make us poor. Trump’s attacks on America’s closest friends, countries such as Canada and Denmark, are there to make enemies of countries where constitutionalism works and people are prosperous. As their country is destroyed, Americans must be denied the idea that anything else is possible.
Deportations are a spectacle to turn Americans against one another, to make us afraid, and to get us to see pain and camps as normal. They also create busy-work for law enforcement, locating the “criminals” in workplaces across the country, as the crime of the century takes place at the very center of power.
The best people in American federal law enforcement, national security, and national intelligence are being fired. The reasons given for this are DEI and trumpwashing the past. Of course, if you fire everyone who was concerned in some way with the investigations of January 6th or of Russia, that will be much or even most of the FBI. Those are bad reasons, but the reality is worse: the aim is lawlessness: to get the police and the patriots out of the way.
In the logic of destruction, there is no need to rebuild afterwards. In this chaos, the oligarchs will tell us that there is no choice but to have a strong man in charge. It can be a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras, or a conniving Vance who, unlike Trump, has always known the plot. Or someone else.
After we are all poor and isolated, the logic goes, we will be consoled by the thought that there is at least a human being to whom we can appeal. We will settle for a kind of anthropological minimum, wishful contact with the strong man. As in Russia, pathetic video selfies sent to the Leader will be the extent of politics.
For the men currently pillaging the federal government, the data from those video selfies is more important than the people who will make them. The new world they imagine is not just anti-American but anti-human. The people are just data, means to the end of accumulating wealth.
They see themselves as the servants of the freedom of the chosen few, but in fact they are possessed, like millennia of tyrants before them, of fantastic dreams: they will live forever, they will go to Mars. None of that will happen; they will die here on Earth, with the rest of us, their only legacy, if we let it happen, one of ruins. They are god-level brainrotted.
The attempt by the oligarchs to destroy our government is illegal, unconstitutional, and more than a little mad. The people in charge, though, are very intelligent politically, and have a plan. I describe it not because it must succeed but because it must be described so that we can make it fail. This will require clarity, and speed, and coalitions. I try to capture the mood in my little book On Tyranny. Here are a few ideas.
If you voted Republican, and you care about your country, please act rather than rationalize. Unless you cast your ballot so that South African oligarchs could steal your data, your money, your country, and your future, make it known to your elected officials that you wanted something else. And get ready to protest with people with whom you otherwise disagree.
Almost everything that has happened during this attempted takeover is illegal. Lawsuits can be filed and courts can order that executive orders be halted. This is crucial work.
Much of what is happening, though, involves private individuals whose names are not even known, and who have no legal authority, wandering through government offices and issuing orders beyond even the questionable authority of executive orders. Their idea is that they will be immunized by their boldness. This must be proven wrong.
Some of this will reach the Supreme Court quickly. I am under no illusion that the majority of justices care about the rule of law. They know, however, that our belief in it makes their office something other than the undignified handmaiden of oligarchy. If they legalize the coup, they are irrelevant forever.
Individual Democrats in the Senate and House have legal and institutional tools to slow down the attempted oligarchical takeover. There should also be legislation. It might take a moment, but even Republican leaders might recognize that the Senate and House will no longer matter in a post-American oligarchy without citizens.
Trump should obviously be impeached. Either he has lost control, or he is using his power to do obviously illegal things. If Republicans have a sense of where this is going, there could be the votes for an impeachment and prosecution.
Those considering impeachment should also include Vance. He is closer to the relevant oligarchs than Trump, and more likely to be aware of the logic of destruction than he. The oligarchs have likely factored in, or perhaps even want, the impeachment and prosecution of Trump. Unlike Vance, Trump has charisma and followers, and could theoretically resist them. He won’t; but he poses a hypothetical risk to the oligarchs that Vance does not.
Democrats who serve in state office as governors have a chance to profile themselves, or more importantly to profile an America that still works. Attorneys general in states have a chance to enforce state laws, which will no doubt have been broken.
The Democratic Party has a talented new chair. Democrats will need instruments of active opposition, such as a People’s Cabinet, in which prominent Democrats take responsibility for following government departments. It would be really helpful to have someone who can report to the press and the people what is happening inside Justice, Defense, Transportation, and the Treasury, and all the others, starting this week.
Federal workers should stay in office, if they can, for as long as they can. This is not political, but existential, for them and for all of us. They will have a better chance of getting jobs afterwards if they are fired. And the logic of their firing is to make the whole government fail. The more this can be slowed down, the longer the rest of us have to get traction.
And companies? As every CEO knows, the workings of markets depend upon the government creating a fair playing field. The ongoing takeover will make life impossible for all but a few companies. Can American companies responsibly pay taxes to a US Treasury controlled by their private competitors? Tesla paid no federal tax at all in 2024. Should other companies pay taxes that, for all they know, will just enrich Tesla’s owner?
Commentators should please stop using words such as “digital” and “progress” and “efficiency” and “vision” when describing this coup attempt. The plotting oligarchs have legacy money from an earlier era of software, which they are now seeking to leverage, using destructive political techniques, to destroy human institutions. That’s it. They are offering no future beyond acting out their midlife crises on the rest of us. It is demeaning to pretend that they represent something besides a logic of destruction.
As for the rest of us: Make sure you are talking to people and doing something. The logic of “move fast and break things,” like the logic of all coups, is to gain quick dramatic successes that deter and demoralize and create the impression of inevitability. Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them.
What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. Sometimes self-government just means elections. And sometimes it means recognizing the deeper dignity and meaning of what it means to be a people. That means speaking up, standing out, and protesting. We can only be free together.
Alexander Vindman was a highly decorated member of the military who was invited to join the staff of the National Security Council where he was Director of European Affairs. In 2019, he testified before Congress about the Trump-Ukraine scandal. The scandal culminated in Trump’s first impeachment.
He writes a blog called “Why It Matters”about public affairs.
He wrote recently about Elon Musk’s brash intrusion into the functioning of the federal government, at Trump’s invitation. With the pretext of finding “efficiencies,” Musk has scooped up vast amounts of private infornation about almost every American and caused the ouster of effective career civil servants. He also instigated a buyout offer to 2 million career civil servants, although no money has been appropriated to pay for mass retirements. The offer was modeled on Musk’s strategy at Twitter, where he dramatically reduced the workforce by almost 80%.
He wrote:
Members of the newly created “Department of Government Efficiency” under Elon Musk have engaged in an ongoing campaign designed to cripple the basic functions of government and decimate the federal civil service. Members of the Department of Government Efficiency are reportedly pushing for full access to payment systems and intend to scrape data from within the Department of Treasury. Cloud Software Group CEO Tom Krause has been designated liaison between the Treasury and the Department of Government Efficiency, with Musk reportedly wanting to add the Treasury to the blockchain. Agents from the Department of Government Efficiency have demanded access to classified info with USAID, with Elon later calling the agency a criminal organization and declaring “Time for [USAID] to die”. Civil servants across the federal government have been offered buy-outs to leave their positions early. Not only have no funds been appropriated for these offers (nor has the full legality been determined), but these buy-outs are being made by an administration lead by someone who has notoriously scammed contractors and avoided paying invoices whenever possible. These actions are taking place in the midst of an ongoing purge of high-ranking officials within the FBI by the Trump administration.
Make no mistake, what’s happening right now is a hostile takeover of the federal government by a private agency operating with a broad mandate and no concerns for the stability of the United States or the interests of the average American. It’s easier to break than it is to build, and Elon Musk’s agenda is focused on unraveling America’s governing institutions. When – not if – a preventable disaster is enabled by the Department of Government Efficiency’s decision to destroy a function of government in the name of “fighting wokeness”, there will be a reckoning for the damage Elon Musk has done.
Trump would have us believe that the hiring of anyone other than white Christian men is the reason for everything that goes wrong. He has signed executive orders that ban diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the government and in schools and higher education institutions, as well as any institution that receives federal funding, such as scientific research.
When Trump heard about the horrific airplane-helicopter crash on the Potomac River last week, his reaction was to blame DEI, as well as Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg. To him, diversity equals incompetence. That is, women, Blacks, Hispanics, and people with disabilities are incompetent.
Two points are clear:
First, DEI programs were funded and strengthened during Trump’s first term in office. How did it suddenly become the cause of all that is evil? Why must it be rooted out if every part of American life?
Second, let’s be clear about what DEI IS. It is a knowing effort to seek out and include women and nonwhite minorities and persons with disabilities in the workforce, on faculties, in student bodies.
In other words, those who oppose DEI are using the term to smear the beneficiaries of these policies as undeserving and unqualified, regardless of their experience and qualifications.
Plain English translation: Trump’s anti-DEI policy is RACISM, MISOGYNY, and XENOPHOBIA, and whatever the term is to discriminate against people with disabilities.
When he said the cause of the DC crash was DEI, it was immediately understood that he meant that a woman or a person of color was either the air traffic controller or a pilot. He knew this to be true, he said, not because he had evidence, but because (he said) he had “common sense.”
His instincts told him that a DEI hire did it. Someone, he guessed, was hired to direct the air traffic or to pilot one or both of the aircraft who was not a white Christian man. His “common sense” told him so.
But now we know more about the DEI policy in place. It started under Barack Obama. It was expanded under Trump.
Trump did not know who the air traffic controller was. Nor did he know who was piloting the airplane or the helicopter.
Glenn Kessler, the Fact-Checker for The Washington Post, wrote that Trump ridiculed the diversity policy that his administration put in place:
Reading from a 2024 Fox News report — which he incorrectly identified as being two weeks old — Trump listed conditions that he suggested disqualify people from being air traffic controllers: “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”
“Can you imagine?” he asked. “Brilliant people have to be in those positions, and their lives are actually shortened, very substantially shortened because of the stress.” He suggested that it was wrong for anyone with those conditions to qualify “for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country, pouring into a little spot, a little dot on the map, a little runway.”
But here’s the rub: During Trump’s first term, the FAA began a program to hire air traffic controllers with the conditions that Trump decried.
The facts
In the news conference, Trump said Obama weakened standards and “I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best, to extraordinary. … Then they changed it back — that was Biden.”
Trump’s claim was repeated in an executive order Trump signed Thursday that ordered a review of aviation safety: “During my first term, my Administration raised standards to achieve the highest standards of safety and excellence.”
That’s false. In his first term, Trump left the standards unchanged.
For air traffic controllers, the Obama administration in 2013 instituted a new hiring system that introduced a biographical questionnaire to attract minorities, underrepresented in the controller corps. The program was criticized, such as in a Fox News report in 2015, as making it harder for more skilled applicants to get hired as controllers.
But Trump, in his first term, left the policy in place, leading to a class-action lawsuit filed in 2019 by Mountain States Legal Foundation. The case was due to go to trial this year.
Moreover, the FAA under Trump in 2019 launched a program to hire controllers using the very criteria he decried at his news conference.
“FAA Provides Aviation Careers to People with Disabilities,” the agency announced on April 11, 2019. The pilot program, the announcement said, would “identify specific opportunities for people with targeted disabilities, empower them and facilitate their entry into a more diverse and inclusive workforce.”
The link under “targeted disabilities” is now dead, but the Wayback Machine retains links from June 2017 and January 2021 that show the page was unchanged during Trump’s tenure. The list included:
• Hearing (total deafness in both ears)
• Vision (Blind)
• Missing Extremities
• Partial Paralysis
• Complete Paralysis, Epilepsy
• Severe intellectual disability
• Psychiatric disability
• Dwarfism
The June 2019 webpage for the Aviation Development Program (ADP) — also now removed but still visible on the Wayback Machine — said the program “provides an opportunity for Persons with Targeted Disabilities (PWTD) to gain aviation knowledge and experience as an air traffic control student trainee.” Participants would get up to one year of experience in an Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC), with a possibility of getting a temporary appointment at the FAA Academy.
In August 2021, the FAA announced that one of the first three ADP candidates graduated from the FAA Academy and became an official air traffic control trainee. “Twelve candidates are in the pipeline for the ADP, pending completion of the clearance process,” the agency said. “Candidates must first pass the Air Traffic Skills Assessment (ATSA), followed by the security and medical clearance process.”
The announcement said the program was conceived when an air traffic manager met a quadriplegic student who had assumed he would never qualify to be a controller because of his condition. The FAA stressed that participants must meet the same qualifications as any other air traffic controller student.
A White House spokesman declined to comment.
The Pinocchio Test
Trump claimed that he had changed Obama’s criteria for hiring air traffic controllers with greater diversity — when in fact he left it unchanged. Moreover, he decried the fact that FAA hired controllers with a range of disabilities that he listed at the news conference. But that program was launched during his first term.
Four Pinocchios [The biggest possible lie.]
Trump likes to say that “merit” is the only possible reason to hire someone. The person hired should be the best qualified for the job.
Is conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the best qualified person to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services? No.
Is Pete Hegseth, with his record as a drunk, a sexual predator, and failed management experience, the best qualified person to be Secretary of Defense? No.
Is Tulsi Gabbard–apologist for Putin and Assad, member of a weird cult–the best qualified person to oversee the nation’s intelligence agencies? No.
Is Kash Patel, sycophant, FBI-hater, and election denier, the best qualified person to lead the FBI, especially after Trump’s sweeping purge of all agents who investigated him? No.
Other Trump choices are equally unqualified. The only one I consider qualified are Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. I was going to add Scott Bradenton, the new Secretary of the Teasury, but then I learned on Saturday that he gave Elon Musk permission to bring his team into the inner sanctum of the Department to copy the personal information of millions of Americans. As in the ransacking of Twitter, Musk’s team brought sofa beds so they could work long hours duplicating data that was supposed to be closely guarded.
Pete Hegseth stated the alleged credo of the Trump administration in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday:
“Color blind and merit based, the best leaders possible, whether it is flying Black Hawks, flying airplanes, leading platoons or in government, the era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department and we need the best and the brightest, whether it is in our air-traffic control, or whether it is in our generals, or whether it is throughout our government,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth is living proof that Trump has not chosen “the best and the brightest” (nor does he know the origin of the term, which was the title of a book by David Halberstam about the “best and the brightest” whose arrogance ensnared us into the war in Vietnam).
If merit mattered to Trump, most of his cabinet would not have been chosen. If merit mattered in the election, Trump would not be president.
Musk is sending his agents to sensitive federal agencies and taking over. He has taken control of the payments system at the U.S. Treasury, which processes trillions of dollars in Social Security payments, Medicare, Medicaid, and other obligations and holds personally identifiable information about recipients. They gained access to the computers of the Office of Personnel Managenent, which has records of federal employees, and locked out its government overseers.
Now his team has barged into the offices of the U.S. Agency for International Development, clashed with security officers who barred their entry into restricted spaces; the security officers were suspended, and Musk’s team is now downloading their computers.
The Washington Post reported:
The Trump administration has removed two top security officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development after they refused to let representatives of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” access restricted spaces at the agency, said current and former USAID officials.
The placement of the security officials — John Voorhees and his deputy — on administrative leave is the latest effort by the Trump administration and Musk to wrest control of the world’s largest provider of food assistance, which they have denigrated, without offering evidence, as left-wing and corrupt amid objections from Democratic and Republican lawmakers.
Amid the turmoil at the agency, Matt Hopson, the USAID chief of staff and a political appointee, resigned, according to a current and former USAID official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. Hopson did not respond to requests for comment.
On Sunday, Musk repeatedly attacked USAID on X, calling the long-standing government agency “evil” and a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.”
“USAID is a criminal organization,” he added. “Time for it to die.”
By Sunday afternoon, USAID’s X account had been taken down, with a message saying the account “doesn’t exist.”
Reuters reported that the Trump administration was dismantling USAID and had fired more than 100 of its career staff.
The New York Times reported that the Trump administration will probably shift the agency into the State Department. Trump currently has imposed a 80-day freeze on all foreign aid.
State Department officials did not answer inquiries seeking to clarify the purpose of the moves, which lawmakers and aid workers said could be anything from a restructuring to an effort to significantly downsize, if not eliminate, most U.S. foreign aid programs.
But Democratic lawmakers said they feared a potentially bleak endgame for the aid agency.
“All the signals of how the senior staff have been put on administrative leave, many of the field staff and headquarters staff have been put on a gag order,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, who sits on the Senate panels on foreign relations and appropriations, said Saturday afternoon in an interview.
“It seems more like the early stages of shutting down than it does of reviewing it or merely retitling it,” he added.
U.S.A.I.D. is the government’s lead agency for humanitarian aid and development assistance. Since it was established in 1961, it has received foreign policy guidance from the State Department, but otherwise functioned as an independent entity.
Ironically, the Washington Post published an editorial today defending the value of foreign, especially humanitarian aid.
Foreign assistance is one of the more misunderstood items in the federal budget. In creates an enormous bang for a relatively small buck. American aid supports thousands of programs across 204 countries. It provides lifesaving drugs for millions of people afflicted with HIV/AIDS and malaria. It purifies drinking water, helps rid former war zones of leftover land mines, and trains local police to combat human trafficking and the illegal wildlife trade.
For many people around the world, aid is also the most visible symbol of U.S. power — soft power — and a tangible demonstration of America’s decency. Amounting to $68 billion in fiscal 2023, foreign aid is only about 1 percent of the federal budget. Yet it has long been in the crosshairs of some fiscal conservatives and other critics who deem it a waste of taxpayer dollars that could be better spent at home.
On President Donald Trump’s first day back in office, he signed an executive order suspending all foreign aid for 90 days, pending a review, saying the “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio followed up with a cable on Jan. 24 to all U.S. diplomatic outposts stopping work on most foreign aid programs during the review period, which is supposed to be completed by the time the freeze expires. Initially, exemptions were made only for emergency food aid and military assistance to Israel and Egypt — and conspicuously not for aid to Ukraine or Taiwan. Then on Tuesday, perhaps bowing to global outrage and criticism, Rubio issued an additional waiver for lifesaving humanitarian assistance…
Consider just a few of the programs taxpayers fund, starting with PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, launched under President George W. Bush in 2003. By the end of last year, PEPFAR was providing antiretroviral treatment for nearly 21 million people in 55 countries and delivering pre-exposure prophylaxis (to prevent people from contracting HIV) to 2.5 million people. In South Africa, PEPFAR covers much of the costs for staff to administer the drugs, for HIV-prevention messaging and for supporting the country’s HIV research. It remains unclear whether Rubio’s waiver extends to PEPFAR, but it should. A months-long delay would cost lives.
The United States is also the world’s largest donor to the global fight against malaria, mostly through the President’s Malaria Initiative, known as PMI. In fiscal 2024, Congress allocated $795 million to the U.S. Agency for International Development for the effort to diagnose and treat malaria and to distribute insecticide-treated mosquito nets. With even a short suspension of this aid, prevention gains could be reversed, especially in malaria-prone cities such as Lagos, Nigeria, African health officials warn….
All in all, foreign aid is an extraordinarily effective policy tool. Helping eradicate poverty and promote democracy generates goodwill that makes the United States stronger. Combating life-threatening pathogens and removing the causes of economic and social instability make the world safer. Expanding global prosperity creates new markets for American products.
Rubio’s waiver should expand to include all programs vital to health and well-being. And the secretary should see that the review is done quickly and fairly, so that the flow of aid can resume before the pause does lasting damage.
The editorial was written in response to Trump’s 90-day freeze. It did not acknowledge the all-out assault on USAID, nor the fact that Trump is dubious about all foreign aid and Musk thinks it’s “evil.”
Bear in mind that Musk does not believe in philanthropy. He is the world’s richest man, with wealth of more than $400 billion. But where is his philanthropy? Has he endowed any universities, hospitals, museums, medical research? Or anything else. He once denounced Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife McKenzie Scott because she was so generous with her gifts to struggling nonprofits; he said she was undermining Western civilization. I can’t find evidence of any philanthropy on his part. If it exists, it’s well hidden.
Elon Musk has a hard, cold heart. If he has one.
Diane Ravitch's blog 