Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in economics. For nearly 25 years, he wrote a regular column for The New York Times. Now he writes at Substack.

He recently wrote about the absurd lies that Elon Musk has told about the massive fraud and waste that his DOGE team has uncovered. If you follow him on Twitter, you will see his lies repeated, then blown up by his readers (did you know that USAID paid Chelsea Clinton $84 million? False.)

Krugman writes:

Did you hear the one about how USAID spent $50 million — or was it $100 million? — providing condoms to Hamas? This claim played a big role in the public relations campaign to rationalize the sudden, illegal dismantling of an agency that provides humanitarian aid to millions of people, and is also a key element of US foreign policy.

Reporters were puzzled by the claim because there didn’t appear to be any evidence. You will be happy to know that the mystery has been solved. Some DOGE staffers noticed that USAID had disbursed grants to local groups trying to limit the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in Gaza. But they didn’t read far enough in to learn that the Gaza in question isn’t the war-ravaged strip; it’s a province in the African nation of Mozambique. Oh well, southern Africa, the Middle East, what’s the difference to the Muskenjugend?

Elon Musk actually admitted the mistake, albeit with minimal grace, during his extraordinary Oval Office press conference with President Trump on Tuesday. (Trump hasn’t acknowledged error.) That conference consisted mainly of Musk pacing around, declaiming, while Trump sat passively at his desk, occasionally expressing agreement. Musk behaved as if he were the actual president and Trump merely a heavily made-up prop.

Anyway, the incident demonstrated the level of care and understanding that DOGE is bringing to its alleged mission of identifying waste, fraud and abuse.

But both Trump and Musk insisted that DOGE has already found billions, maybe tens of billions, of waste and fraud. Here’s a complete list of the specific examples Musk gave during the press conference:

[This space intentionally left blank.]

That’s right: Musk has yet to offer any specific examples of government waste. The closest Musk came to specifics was his assertion that DOGE had done

“just cursory examination of Social Security, and we got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone that’s 150? I don’t know. They should be on the Guinness Book of World Records. So that’s a case where I think they’re probably dead.”

Is this true? Can we have some names please? It wouldn’t be a violation of privacy if the people are already dead.

Actually, my personal experience suggests that this story is likely to be false. Someone once tried to impersonate me and collect Social Security payments in my name. The Social Security Administration contacted me, saying that they couldn’t verify my address. So I think SSA would quickly question the identity of an 150-year-old recipient.

Now, we know that there’s huge waste in Medicare, in the form of overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans. Through Medicare Advantage insurance companies have been gaming the system; the Medicare Payments Advisory Commission estimates the annual loss to taxpayers at more than $80 billion, that is, roughly twice USAID’s budget. Oddly, however, this clear example of gigantic fraud isn’t on Musk’s radar.

But back to that Oval Office scene. Musk also asserted that

“there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position, which is what happened at USAID.”

Is this true? What are these peoples’ stories, if they exist? Sorry, Elon, but why should we believe you when the obvious explanation is that you are taking us for fools?

Of course, given that there are 2 million federal workers, there must be somebody out there who committed fraud. But there’s no reason to think that the waste is significant.

For those of us who have been around for a while, Musk’s evidence-free claims of fraud by federal employees bring back memories of Ronald Reagan’s ranting about welfare queens driving Cadillacs — rants that appear to have had their origin in the story of a single lifelong con artist who was in no way representative of the millions of mothers receiving Aid to Families With Dependent Children.

Yet Reagan’s rant came after AFDC enrollment grew rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast, Musk’s vendetta has been launched against a federal work force that has been more or less flat for many decades, and has declined drastically relative to the size of the population it serves:

Source: FRED

So why is Musk obsessed with reducing the federal headcount? Is he just ignorant of the basic facts? Or is all the talk about efficiency cover for a purge intended to replace professional civil servants with political loyalists? Both, if you ask me.

I am, however, sure that Musk knows that DOGE’s efforts to find waste and fraud have come up empty. If he had anything real to talk about, he would.

Whether Trump realizes that Musk is faking it is less clear. But as Tuesday’s event showed, it’s not clear whether Trump matters at this point.

In any case, Musk imagines that he can con the American people, that he can keep his racket going by talking fast and throwing around what sound like big numbers, even as people are dying.
And I wish I were sure that he’s wrong.

Greg Toppo was the chief education journalist for USA Today. He is now a senior correspondent for The 74, where this story appeared.

The DOGE team visited the Institte for Education Sciencesand canceled scores of contracts for education research. It was widely assumed that the studies had some relation to diversity, equity, or inclusion, which Trump has vowed to stamp out. But Toppo says a far broader range of subjects was canceled.

Never before has any administration censored which topics could be studied. Trump’s prejudices now define what is NOT a proper object of study.

The DOGE agents who canceled the contracts did not have the time to read them, nor is any of them knowledgeable about education research. Either they looked for trigger words or they decided to cancel all education research.

Toppo wrote:

When the director of a small regional science nonprofit sat down last week to pay a few bills, she got a shock. 

In the fall, the group won a National Science Foundation grant of nearly $1.5 million to teach elementary and middle-schoolers about climate-related issues in the U.S. Gulf Coast. The eagerly anticipated award came through NSF’s Racial Equity in STEM Education program.

But when she checked her NSF funding dashboard, the balance was $1.

Educators and researchers nationwide have been suffering similar shocks as the Trump administration raises a microscope — and in some cases an ax — to billions of dollars in federal research grants and contracts. On Monday, it said it had canceled dozens of Institute of Education Sciences contracts, worth an estimated $881 million and covering nearly the institute’s entire research portfolio, according to several sources. 

Last week, the NSF began combing through billions of dollars in already-awarded grants in search of keywords that imply the researchers address gender ideology, diversity, equity and inclusion — all themes opposed by the administration….

Interviews with more than a dozen key stakeholders found that researchers with studies already in the field are being forced to suddenly pause their research, not knowing if or when it will resume. Nearly all spoke only on condition of anonymity, fearing that speaking out publicly could jeopardize future funding.

While the administration has said the moves are an attempt to rein in federal spending that doesn’t comport with its priorities and values, it has offered no explanation for cuts to bedrock, non-political research around topics like math, literacy, school attendance, school quality and student mental health.

Heather Cox Richardson is a historian with deep knowledge of the nation’s institutions and its Constitution. It is not surprising that she is appalled by Trump’s calculated and mean-spirited assault on the agencies and departments of the federal government, ignoring laws and norms. Trump is motivated, he says, by a desire to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse, yet one of his first acts as Presidents was to fire the independent, nonpartisan departmental Inspectors General, whose role is to investigate waste, fraud, and abuse in their agencies.

Richardson writes:

Maya Miller of the New York Times reported today that the congressional phone system has been jammed with tens of millions of calls from outraged constituents contacting their representatives to demand that they stand against President Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk as they unilaterally dismantle the United States government and gain access to Americans’ private information. The Senate phone system usually gets about 40 calls a minute; now it is up to 1,600.

On Wednesday, Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo reported that Senate Republicans were not especially concerned about Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team rampaging through the federal government, figuring that Musk won’t last long and that the courts will eventually stop him. Today, Musk posted on X: “CFPB RIP,” with a tombstone emoji. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has recovered more than $17 billion for consumers from fraudulent or predatory practices since it began in 2011.

Trump seems willing to let Musk continue to run amok through the government while he becomes a figurehead. Today he posted on his social media site that he has fired the chair and members of the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center, saying they “do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” He promised to announce a new board, “with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” “For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” he wrote.

U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, is less impressed with the direction of the Trump administration. Today, he blocked it from placing more than 2,000 employees of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on paid leave. Trump and his allies have claimed—without evidence—that USAID is corrupt, but Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson of the New York Times reported today that the disinformation making those claims on social media posts, for example, comes from Russia.

Senator Angus King (I-ME) took his Republican colleagues to task yesterday for their willingness to overlook the Trump administration’s attack on the U.S. Constitution. King took the floor as the Senate was considering the confirmation of Christian Nationalist Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought, a key author of Project 2025, believes the powers of the president should be virtually unchecked.

King reminded his colleagues that they had taken an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic” and noted that the Framers recognized there could be domestic enemies to the Constitution. “Our oath was not to the Republican Party, not to the Democratic Party, not to Joe Biden, not to Donald Trump,” King said, “but…to defend the Constitution.”

“And…right now—literally at this moment—that Constitution is under the most direct and consequential assault in our nation’s history,” King said. “An assault not on a particular provision but on the essential structure of the document itself.”

Why do we have a Constitution, King asked. He read the Preamble and said: “There it is. There’s the list—ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” But, he pointed out, there is a paradox: the essence of a government is to give it power, but that power can be abused to hurt the very citizens who granted it. “Who will guard the guardians?” King asked.

The Framers were “deep students of history and…human nature. And they had just won a lengthy and brutal war against the abuses inherent in concentrated governmental power,” King said. “The universal principle of human nature they understood was this: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

How did the Framers answer the question of who will guard the guardians? King explained that they built into our system regular elections to return the control of the government to the people on a regular basis. They also deliberately divided power between the different branches and levels of government.

“This is important,” King said. “The cumbersomeness, the slowness, the clumsiness is built into our system. The framers were so fearful of concentrated power that they designed a system that would be hard to operate. And the heart of it was the separation of power between various parts of the government. The whole idea, the whole idea was that no part of the government, no one person, no one institution had or could ever have a monopoly on power.”

“Why? Because it’s dangerous. History and human nature tells us that. This division of power, as annoying and inefficient as it can be,… is an essential feature of the system, not a bug. It’s an essential, basic feature of the system, designed to protect our freedoms.”

The system of government “contrasts with the normal structure of a private business, where authority is purposefully concentrated, allowing swift and sometimes arbitrary action. But a private business does not have the army, and the President of the United States is not the CEO of America.”

In the government, “[p]ower is shared, principally between the president and this body, this Congress, both houses…. [T]his herky-jerkiness…this unwieldy structure is the whole idea,… designed to protect us from the…inevitable abuse of an authoritarian state.”

Vought, King said, is “one of the ringleaders of the assault on our Constitution. He believes in a presidency of virtually unlimited powers.” He “espouses the discredited and illegal theory that the president has the power to selectively impound funds appropriated by Congress, thereby rendering the famous power of the purse a nullity.” King said he was “really worried about…the structural implications for our freedom and government of what’s happening here…. Project 2025 is nothing less than a blueprint for the shredding of the Constitution and the transition of our country to authoritarian rule. He’s the last person who should be put in the job at the heart of the operation of our government.”

“[T]his isn’t about politics. This isn’t about policy. This isn’t about Republican versus Democrat. This is about tampering with the structure of our government, which will ultimately undermine its ability to protect the freedom of our citizens. If our defense of the Constitution is gone, there’s nothing left to us.”

King asked his Republican colleagues to “say no to the undermining and destruction of our constitutional system.” “[A]re there no red lines?” he asked them. “Are there no limits?”

King looked at USAID and said: “The Constitution does not give to the President or his designee the power to extinguish a statutorily established agency. I can think of no greater violation of the strictures of the Constitution or usurpation of the power of this body. None. I can think of none. Shouldn’t this be a red line?”

Trump’s “executive order freezing funding…selectively, for programs the administration doesn’t like or understand” is, King said, “a fundamental violation of the whole idea of the Constitution, the separation of powers.” King said his “office is hearing calls every day, we can hardly handle the volume. This again, to underline, is a frontal assault of our power, your power, the power to decide where public funds should be spent. Isn’t this an obvious red line? Isn’t this an obvious limit?”

King turned to “the power seemingly assumed by DOGE to burrow into the Treasury’s payment system” as well as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, with “zero oversight.” “Do these people have clearance?” King, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked. “Are the doors closed? Are they going to leave open doors into these? What are the opportunities for our adversaries to hack into the systems?… Remember, there’s no transparency or oversight. Access to social security numbers seem to be in the mix. All the government’s personnel files, personal financial data, potentially everyone’s tax returns and medical records. That can’t be good…. That’s data that should be protected with the highest level of security and consideration of Americans’ privacy. And we don’t know who these people are. We don’t know what they’re taking out with them. We don’t know whether they’re walking out with laptops or thumb drives. We don’t know whether they’re leaving back doors into the system. There is literally no oversight. The government of the United States is not a private company. It is fundamentally at odds with how this system is supposed to work.”

“Shouldn’t this be an easy red line?” he asked.

“[W]e’re experiencing in real time exactly what the framers most feared. When you clear away the smoke, clear away the DOGE, the executive orders, foreign policy pronouncements, more fundamentally what’s happening is the shredding of the constitutional structure itself. And we have a profound responsibility…to stop it.”

King’s appeal to principle and the U.S. Constitution did not convince his Republican colleagues, who confirmed Vought.

But today, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker took a different approach, trolling Trump’s claim that the Gulf of Mexico would now be called “the Gulf of America.” Standing behind a lectern and flanked by flags of the United States and Illinois, Pritzker solemnly declared he was about to make an important announcement.

“The world’s finest geographers, experts who study the Earth’s natural environment, have concluded a decades-long council and determined that a Great Lake deserves to be named after a great state. So today, I’m issuing a proclamation declaring that hereinafter Lake Michigan shall be known as Lake Illinois. The proclamation has been forwarded to Google to ensure the world’s maps reflect this momentous change. In addition, the recent announcement that to protect the homeland, the United States will be purchasing Greenland, Illinois will now be annexing Green Bay to protect itself against enemies foreign and domestic. I’ve also instructed my team to work diligently to prepare for an important announcement next week regarding the Mississippi River. God bless America, and Bear Down [a reference to the Chicago Bears football team].”

Governor Bill Lee is determined to enact universal vouchers in Tennessee, and it ought to be a slam-dunk since Republicans control both houses of the legislature. He tried and failed before, because some rural Republican legislators opposed vouchers.

But the billionaire money behind vouchers make them tough to resist, so Governor Lee is making vouchers his top priority this session.

As Marta Aldrich explains in Chalkbeat Tennessee, Governor Lee

Steve Schmidt, veteran Republican operative turned Never-Trumper, is outraged by Trump’s belittling of Canada, our staunchest ally. There is no more durable alliance than ours with Canada. Trump’s absurd claim that he wants it as our “51st state” is insulting to our friends.

Why does he like to antagonize our closest allies? Why does he defer like a puppy dog to Putin? Someday we will have the answer. Not now. The easy answer is that he’s a sociopath. But there must be more to it than that.

Schmidt begins:

What Donald Trump is doing is foolish in the extreme and deeply immoral. He is the steward of a relationship between two nations that has been forged across centuries. It is sealed by blood sacrifice on freedom’s alter, marriage, commerce and shared values. His bullying is unseemly, shortsighted and a refutation of the combined wisdom of 14 presidents across 82 years.

Heed their words. Take them in to properly appreciate the astonishing stupidity of the venomous Chauncey Gardiner from Mar-a-Lago, who is cheered when he should be jeered, and bowed down to when he should be confronted.

Everywhere one looks these days a capitulant weakling is defenestrating and beclowning themselves.

The obeisance plays out in many forms. For example, the silence around Trump’s outrages towards Canada are a form of capitulation. Where is Hakeem Jeffries? Where is Chuck Schumer? Where is anyone?

Remember this when thinking about the Canadian nation. It was the country in which an American slave could breathe free air.

Trump will debase our nation in a thousand different ways, and while all should be opposed, there are some assaults that must be opposed by the American people.

Donald Trump is not king. He was not elected to harass, destabilize, assail, assault, disrespect or insult Canada….

Trump’s conduct is disgusting. For my part, as an American citizen, I repudiate the coming actions of the Trump administration towards Canada, our ally and friend. This is shameful and embarrassing, but not as much as the silence of all of Canada’s friends across America.

What is happening is no laughing matter. It is wrong, and sometimes that should be enough.

Schmidt goes on to post the speeches delivered to the Canadian Parliament by Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. All were respectful and appreciative of our neighbors to the north.

Trump is like a dinner guest who blows his nose with his dinner napkin, spits in the common soup bowl, and tells the host that the food stinks. Never invite him.

Once upon a time, public money was spent only for public schools, with a few exceptions for government-mandated programs and services.

Once upon a time, there was a wall of separation between church and state. That wall was accepted and respected by most Americans.

Ohio has decided to tear down that wall. Ohio Republicans want the state to pay for all education-related expenses of every student.

Now, Ohio has taken a step beyond by allocating taxpayer money to pay for building religious schools.

ProPublica wrote:

The state of Ohio is giving taxpayer money to private, religious schools to help them build new buildings and expand their campuses, which is nearly unprecedented in modern U.S. history.

While many states have recently enacted sweeping school voucher programs that give parents taxpayer money to spend on private school tuition for their kids, Ohio has cut out the middleman. Under a bill passed by its Legislature this summer, the state is now providing millions of dollars in grants directly to religious schools, most of them Catholic, to renovate buildings, build classrooms, improve playgrounds and more.

The goal in providing the grants, according to the measure’s chief architect, Matt Huffman, is to increase the capacity of private schools in part so that they can sooner absorb more voucher students.

“The capacity issue is the next big issue on the horizon” for voucher efforts, Huffman, the Ohio Senate president and a Republican, told the Columbus Dispatch.

Huffman did not respond to a request to comment.

Following Hurricane Katrina and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, some federal taxpayer dollars went toward repairing and improving private K-12 schools in multiple states. Churches that operate schools often receive government funding for the social services that they offer; some orthodox Jewish schools in New York have relied on significant financial support from the city, The New York Times has found.

But national experts on education funding emphasized that what Ohio is doing is categorically different.

“This is new, dangerous ground, funding new voucher schools,” said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center and the author of a new book on the history of billionaire-led voucher efforts. For decades, churches have relied on conservative philanthropy to be able to build their schools, Cowen said, or they’ve held fundraising drives or asked their diocese for help.

They’ve never, until now, been able to build schools expressly on the public dime.

“This breaks through the myth,” said David Pepper, a political writer and the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. Pepper said that courts have long given voucher programs a pass, ruling that they don’t violate the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state because a publicly funded voucher technically passes through the conduit of a parent on the way to a religious school.

With this latest move, though, Ohio is funding the construction of a separate, religious system of education, Pepper said, adding that if no one takes notice, “This will happen in other states — they all learn from each other like laboratories.”

Open the link to finish reading.