Archive for category: DOGE

What Is DOJ Really After in Raiding Hannah Natanson?

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I shuddered when I read this article from Hannah Natanson in real time, in December, which was the first I really took notice of the name behind a flood of important reporting on Trump’s attack on the government. A chronicle of the hell Trump had subjected government workers to, it was a great article.

Signal message sent Feb. 23

I think about jumping off a bridge a couple times a day.

Signal message sent March 21

I want to die. It’s never been like this.

Signal message sent May 21

I have been looking at how much I am worth alive, as opposed to dead.

But in telling that story, Natanson told how she protected the anonymity of her sources.

Colleagues told me to join our internal tip-sharing Slack channel #federal-workers, then talk to Washington economics editor Mike Madden, who was coordinating our DOGE coverage. I started copying and pasting tips there as fast as I could, scraping out identifying details. Then, phone buzzing every few seconds, I speed-walked around the building until I found Mike. Skipping with grace over the fact we’d never met (and I didn’t work for him), he ferried me to every corner of the seventh floor: Meet the team covering technology. The team covering national security. The White House editors. Eventually, The Washington Post created a beat for me covering Trump’s transformation of government, and fielding Signal tips became nearly my whole working life.

[snip]

After consulting Post lawyers, I developed what we felt was the safest possible sourcing system. If I planned to use someone in a story, I asked them to send me a picture of their government ID, then tried to forget it. I kept notes from reporting conversations in an encrypted drive, never writing down anyone’s name. To Google-check facts and identities, I used a private browser with no search history. I retitled every Signal chat by agency — “Transportation Employee,” “FDA Reviewer,” “EPA Scientist” — until the app, unable to keep up, stopped accepting new nicknames. (Then I started moving contacts into two-person group chats, which I could still rename.)

Three weeks later, FBI seized the phone on which all those contacts were labeled with aliases. When they searched her home, she was logged into the Slack on which she had shared all those leads with colleagues. They seized the encrypted drive on which she had her notes.

In short, she publicly revealed where to look for everything else, and three weeks later, Trump agents came and took it all.

(For the record, this is not the only time I’ve shuddered about publicly disclosed operational security lately; far too many profiles on anti-ICE activism describe how their Signal trees are structured and what tools the central dispatcher uses to keep everything flowing.)

And that’s one of many reasons the unusual openness of the indictment against Aurelio Perez-Lugones — the pretext FBI used for raiding Natanson — terrifies me.

As I laid out here, I find it exceedingly unusual that DOJ laid out precisely what information got leaked and its classification level, described to be the following stories to which Natanson contributed.

Even as a legal issue, identifying the specific information that got leaked and how sensitive it is only serves to further compromise the information. It undermines prosecutors’ ability to prove that DOD (which is obscured in the indictment but which Pam Bondi freely identified) was trying to protect this information, a necessary element of the offense.

Seizing two MacBook Pros, an iPhone, a portable hard drive, her Garmin running watch, and a voice recorder from a journalist (while also sending WaPo a subpoena) when you already had proof that Perez-Lugones sent her classified information is more than overkill.

It’s the Garmin that really gets me. According to the declaration Natanson submitted in a bid to get her stuff back, she only communicated with Perez-Lugones via Signal or phone. The FBI is trying to obtain evidence about other people she met with, face-to-face.

So I want to consider what else DOJ might be looking for.

Did Perez-Lugones obtain proof of what Trump is really pursuing in Venezuela?

First, Garmin watch aside, it’s possible that Perez-Lugones took things that did not show up in Natanson’s reporting, yet, that DOJ is attempting to remove from her custody. The only thing classified at TS/SCI that Perez-Lugones is accused of leaking is a report based on an intercept of a letter Nicolás Maduro sent to Putin.

In mid-October, [Ramón Celestino] Velásquez, the transportation minister, traveled to Moscow for a meeting with his Russian counterpart, according to Russia’s Transport Ministry. According to documents obtained by The Post, he was also meant to deliver the letter from Maduro to Putin.

In the letter, Maduro requested that the Russians help boost his country’s air defenses, including restoring several Russian Sukhoi Su-30MK2 aircraft previously purchased by Venezuela. Maduro also asked for assistance overhauling eight engines and five radars in Russia, acquiring 14 sets of what were believed to be Russian missiles, as well as unspecified “logistical support,” according to the documents.

Maduro emphasized that Russian-made Sukhoi fighters “represented the most important deterrent the Venezuelan National Government had when facing the threat of war,” according to the U.S. records.

Maduro asked Russia for a “medium-term financing plan of three years” through Rostec, the Russian state-owned defense conglomerate. The documents did not specify an amount.

The documents also indicate that Velásquez was slated to meet with and deliver a second letter to Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov. They do not state whether or how the Russian government responded to Maduro’s outreach or whether the trip took place.

Nevertheless, DOJ successfully defeated an initial release order by citing all the TS/SCI information in Perez-Lugones’ brain.

Perez-Lugones is similarly positioned as the defendants in these cases: he has had decades of access to TS/SCI systems and, like these other defendants, what he knows is not erased simply because his access to the information ended. Further, like these defendants, because Perez-Lugones has “transcribed” and “photographed” highly classified information, it is likely he can recall it. Therefore, as the Government argued at the detention hearing, Perez-Lugones will be able to disseminate this information if released.

There is one document, classified Secret/Rel to NATO and identified as Document E, which Perez-Lugones allegedly photographed and sent to Natanson, that the indictment does not describe to be incorporated in this story including an account of an effort by the Pope to arrange an off-ramp for Maduro, the last of Natanson’s stories before his arrest.

On Christmas Eve, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, second-in-command to the pope and a longtime diplomatic mediator, urgently summoned Brian Burch, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, to press for details on America’s plans in Venezuela, according to government documents obtained by The Washington Post.

[snip]

For days, the influential Italian cardinal had been seeking access to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the documents show, desperate to head off bloodshed and destabilization in Venezuela. In his conversation with Burch, a Trump ally, Parolin said Russia was ready to grant asylum to Maduro and pleaded with the Americans for patience in nudging the strongman toward that offer.

[snip]

In his Dec. 24 meeting with Burch, according to the documents obtained by The Post, Parolin said Russia was prepared to receive Maduro. He also shared what is described in the documents as a “rumor”: that Venezuela had become a “set piece” in Russia-Ukraine negotiations, and that “Moscow would give up Venezuela if it were satisfied on Ukraine.”

The materials Perez-Lugones shared are consistent with Trump having a quid pro quo with Russia, a swap of Venezuela for Ukraine. If he had obtained proof that he may or may not have shared, it might explain the need to seize any shred that he shared; but if so, the raid has nothing to do with national security, but instead with covering up Trump’s secret alliance with Russia.

A potentially related story describes that State was going to blow $50 million protecting Greenland’s polar bears, basically slush in support of Trump’s bid to conquer the entire hemisphere.

Is DOJ targeting specific whistleblowers, including Chuck Borges?

Remember how I noted that the new disclosures about DOGE’s unlawful access to Social Security data referenced an ongoing investigation?

“SSA first learned about this agreement during a review unrelated to this case in November 2025.”

WaPo was not the first outlet to report on Borges’ allegations of grave compromise of Social Security data, allegations that were partly confirmed by these recent disclosures; NYT was.

But WaPo, including Natanson, was the first outlet to interview Borges after he quit in October.

“Prove me wrong,” Borges told The Washington Post last week in his first media interview since his disclosure. “The only way I feel like we’re going to get to that point is with continued public interest, continued public pressure, and I’m willing to lend my name.”

Although he had until now avoided talking to the media, Borges told Post reporters that he had decided to go public to draw attention to his concerns about the safety of Americans’ data and his hope that the agency will share documentation to prove that the data wasn’t put at risk. At his Maryland home — decorated with photos of his family, his prolific board game collection and Navy paraphernalia — the self-described “data geek” said his fears while working at Social Security had kept him up at night.

And that interview linked several earlier WaPo articles, including an earlier Natanson one.

At the same time, the agency was exploring plans to lay off workers, and others were getting reassigned to jobs they were unfamiliar with or choosing to voluntarily leave. In those especially taxing days, Borges said, he saw co-workers breaking down in meetings or while sitting at their desks.

“I cannot count how many employees I saw cry, and that is at all levels of the agency, from executives downward,” Borges said.

In the summer, Borges first heard from colleagues that DOGE had transferred sensitive data to a cloud environment. He began to ask questions but got little information in response.

In Natanson’s Christmas Eve piece, she cited both a Social Security employee (the interview with Borges cites multiple others who back Borges’ claims, one of whom is Leland Dudek) and an IRS official who sent data to DOGE.

A Social Security employee: “Every piece of our data may be at the mercy of unscrupulous people.”

An IRS staffer: There is “a team figuring out how to get … data sent to Doge,” referring to the U.S. DOGE Service, Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team.

In short, DOJ may have raided Natanson in attempt to target a different whistleblower, one who went through formal channels to reveal an unprecedented assault on US person privacy.

Natanson’s sustained reporting of Trump’s dragnet

But it’s not just the Social Security data.

An earlier Natanson story described DOGE’s effort to effectively merge a bunch of massive government databases.

The U.S. DOGE Service is racing to build a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of U.S. citizens and residents, a campaign that often violates or disregards core privacy and security protections meant to keep such information safe, government workers say.

The team overseen by Elon Musk is collecting data from across the government, sometimes at the urging of low-level aides, according to multiple federal employees and a former DOGE staffer, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The intensifying effort to unify systems into one central hub aims to advance multiple Trump administration priorities, including finding and deporting undocumented immigrants and rooting out fraud in government payments. And it follows a March executive order to eliminate “information silos” as DOGE tries to streamline operations and cut spending.

At several agencies, DOGE officials have sought to merge databases that had long been kept separate, federal workers said. For example, longtime Musk lieutenant Steve Davis told staffers at the Social Security Administration that they would soon start linking various sources of Social Security data for access and analysis, according to a person briefed on the conversations, with a goal of “joining all data across government.” Davis did not respond to a request for comment.

Natanson was part of a story revealing the Postal Service is involved in the migrant dragnet.

The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has quietly begun cooperating with federal immigration officials to locate people suspected of being in the country illegally, according to two people familiar with the matter and documents obtained by The Washington Post — dramatically broadening the scope of the Trump administration’s government-wide mass deportation campaign.

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service, a little-known police and investigative force for the mail agency, recently joined a Department of Homeland Security task force geared toward finding, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals.

She revealed the effort to use Medicare data to target immigrants.

Trump immigration officials and the U.S. DOGE Service are seeking to use a sensitive Medicare database as part of their crackdown on undocumented immigrants, according to a person familiar with the matter and records obtained by The Washington Post.

And another describing how DOGE was using HUD data for a similar purpose.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, officials are working on a rule that would ban mixed-status households — in which some family members have legal status and others don’t — from public housing, according to multiple staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.

These are some of Trump’s most egregious privacy violations, potentially the cornerstone of vast new data mining on Americans, including both immigrants (the ostensible focus) and citizens (clearly implicated in Borges’ allegations). If the Trump Administration believes Natanson has details about the real purpose of these data grabs, it might explain their raid of her devices: to prevent her from building on this reporting.

Relatedly, a Natanson story that should have generated more attention described how Trump is effectively trying to usurp DC’s policing sovereignty by boosting the numbers of Park Police.

The U.S. Park Police is seeking to double its ranks in D.C. over the next six months, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post detailing plans of an expansion that would bolster the federal agency’s role in the Trump administration’s crime crackdown in the nation’s capital.

[snip]

The Park Police website now boasts of a $70,000 hiring bonus, promotion potential and a “streamlined, virtual hiring process with quick turnaround.”

This was a one-off story. But it felt to me when I read it like a parallel to Stephen Miller’s creation of a national paramilitary force at ICE (the expansion of which has also been featured in Natanson reporting).

Like Natanson’s reporting on Trump’s data violations, this could reveal underlying plans for authoritarian power grabs.

Elon Musk’s corruption

Or maybe DOJ is after Natanson’s more general reporting on DOGE.

A number of her stories last year described how DOGE served to benefit Elon Musk and implant Musk’s businesses even more centrally in the Federal government.

One story last year (also relying on court filings and interviews) described all the agencies that Musk gained access while overseeing DOGE.

The Post reviewed court documents and interviewed dozens of current and former U.S. government officials to determine which records DOGE aides were able to examine while Musk led the unit. Reporters also spoke with experts and business competitors about how that information, if improperly shared with Musk’s companies, could give them a competitive advantage.

DOGE aides, for example, were given near-blanket access to records at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, court records show. The agency holds proprietary information about algorithms used by payment apps similar to ones that Musk has said he wants to incorporate into his social media platform, X.

NASA employees told The Post that DOGE aides were able to review internal assessments of thousands of contracts, including those awarded to rivals of Musk’s SpaceX rocket company, which has already won billions of dollars of government work and is competing for more. (Among SpaceX’s competitors is Blue Origin, a company owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. Blue Origin and its executives did not respond to requests for comment.)

And Labor Department employees said in court filings that DOGE aides were allowed to examine any record at the agency, which holds files detailing dozens of sensitive workplace investigations into Tesla and other Musk companies as well as their competitors.

Another broke the story of how State was pushing foreign countries to adopt Starlink (which would put Musk at the center of a global surveillance network).

Less than two weeks after President Donald Trump announced 50 percent tariffs on goods from the tiny African nation of Lesotho, the country’s communications regulator held a meeting with representatives of Starlink.

The satellite business, owned by billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, had been seeking access to customers in Lesotho. But it was not until Trump unveiled the tariffs and called for negotiations over trade deals that leaders of the country of roughly 2 million people awarded Musk’s firm the nation’s first-ever satellite internet service license, slated to last for 10 years.

[snip]

A series of internal government messages obtained by The Post reveal how U.S. embassies and the State Department have pushed nations to clear hurdles for U.S. satellite companies, often mentioning Starlink by name. The documents do not show that the Trump team has explicitly demanded favors for Starlink in exchange for lower tariffs. But they do indicate that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has increasingly instructed officials to push for regulatory approvals for Musk’s satellite firm at a moment when the White House is calling for wide-ranging talks on trade.

She was part of a series of stories on Starlink’s bid to replace an existing FAA contract.

So some of her many sources on DOGE last year exposed the corruption at the core of DOGE.

Obviously, DOJ could have targeted Natanson for no other reason than they want to go after all 1200 Signal contacts she had.

But whatever the reason, or reasons, the Aurelio Perez-Lugones seems like a pretext, a convenient national security case DOJ can invoke to try to identify thousands of whistleblowers, including whistleblowers who have firsthand evidence about the increasing authoritarianism of the Trump power grab.

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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Told You So, Social Security Edition

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The most important line in a court filing filed last week that disclosed DOGE was doing far more with Social Security data than then Social Security Administrator Leland Dudek claimed they were in a declaration submitted last March 24 reads, “SSA first learned about this agreement during a review unrelated to this case in November 2025.” (Docket) That, plus this discussion in the opening paragraph, is the only explanation for why the Social Security Administration (SSA) is just finding all this data now.

Based on its review of records obtained during or after October 2025, SSA identified communications, use of data, and other actions by the then-SSA DOGE Team that were potentially outside of SSA policy and/or noncompliant with the District Court’s March 20, 2025, temporary restraining order (“TRO”) (ECF 48). SSA notified the undersigned Department of Justice (“DOJ”) attorneys on December 10, 2025, of its concerns.

Something else led SSA to review DOGE access in October.

And while Debra Katz, the attorney for Social Security whistleblower Chuck Borges, claimed vindication from the disclosure, it’s not entirely clear whether Borges’ disclosures precipitated the discovery. He first came forward in August, two months before SSA appears to have started doing a real assessment of access violations, though he filed a retaliation supplement to his complaint in November.

Importantly, while Borges’ disclosures covered the revelations in last week’s filing, the most horrific of his disclosures pertained to actions that long post-date what is described in the filing, which all happened in March.

Last week’s declaration revealed the following:

On March 3, 2025, a DOGE boy sent an email with an encrypted file to DHS, copying Steven Davis (who then was the operational leader of DOGE) and a DOGE boy formally assigned to Department of Labor. SSA has not been able to break the encryption and so don’t know which 1,000 people the emailed records exposed.

The email attached an encrypted and password-protected file that SSA believes contained SSA data. Despite ongoing efforts by SSA’s Chief Information Office, SSA has been unable to access the file to determine exactly what it contained. From the explanation of the attached file in the email body and based on what SSA had approved to be released to DHS, SSA believes that the encrypted attachment contained PII derived from SSA systems of record, including names and addresses of approximately 1,000 people.

From March 7 through 17, the DOGE boys were sending links through Cloudflare, and SSA has not bothered to ask Cloudflare what got sent or whether it still has the data.

[B]eginning March 7, 2025, and continuing until March 17 (approximately one week before the TRO was entered), members of SSA’s DOGE Team were using links to share data through the third-party server “Cloudflare.” Cloudflare is not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA’s security protocols. SSA did not know, until its recent review, that DOGE Team members were using Cloudflare during this period. Because Cloudflare is a third-party entity, SSA has not been able to determine exactly what data were shared to Cloudflare or whether the data still exist on the server.

Contrary to a declaration submitted by Mike Russo on March 12, the DOGE boys had more access than he disclosed at the time.

a. Three DOGE Team members were granted access to a system containing SSA employee records for agency personnel for workforce initiatives.

b. Two DOGE Team members were granted access to a system containing personnel access information to ensure terminated employees were unable to badge into the building or to access IT systems with their PIVs.

c. Six DOGE Team members were granted access to shared workspace that would have allowed DOGE Team members to share data to which the employees had separately been granted access for fraud or analytics reviews.

d. Two DOGE Team members had access to a data visualization tool that could connect to other data sources, which could provide access to PII.

e. Two DOGE Team members had access to additional EDW schemas beyond those reported as of March 12, 2025.

On March 24 (after Russo’s declaration claimed all DOGE was doing was pursuing waste, fraud, and abuse), a DOGE boy signed a Data Agreement with a partisan group attempting to overturn some elections.

[A] political advocacy group contacted two members of SSA’s DOGE Team with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired. The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.1 In connection with these communications, one of the DOGE team members signed a “Voter Data Agreement,” in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group. He sent the executed agreement to the advocacy group on March 24, 2025 … but SSA has not yet seen evidence that SSA data were shared with the advocacy group.

From March 26 (two days after the Temporary Restraining Order in question) until April 2, a DOGE boy had access to “ten EDW schema containing” Personally Identifiable Information, but the DOGE boy never used it.

Contrary to some reporting and even more responses to the reporting on this, these abuses are not the most alarming things Borges disclosed, though they are consistent with parts of his whistleblower complaint. In truth, they provide details that make Borges’ earlier disclosures more concerning, such as that in the period when DOGE was sending data through Cloudflare, certain DOGE boys had just asked for and gotten access to the analytical warehouse, EDW.

First, around March 14, 2025, DOGE members requested access to PSNAP and SNAP MI databases for Payton Rehling and Aram Moghaddassi. Information reported to Mr. Borges indicates that proper approval through the Systems Access Management (SAM) system was bypassed for this request, which resulted in four user profiles.35 The Security Access Management process requires a written request for data access that is then either approved or disapproved by a supervisor who provides a written justification for their decision. This process is necessary for oversight of database access approvals.

Additionally, these profiles concerningly included equipment pin access and write access. 36 Equipment pin access means that instead of a user accessing data through a personal pin identifier, which would make the accessor’s actions traceable to a user, an equipment pin is used to verify the identity of a device or piece of equipment before it is granted access to a network or sensitive resources, potentially avoiding the creation of a record tied to a specific user. Giving a user “write access” means that the user will have the ability to edit data.

Granting access to databases that exceed authorized permissions violates the principle of least privilege, which holds that users should have the least amount of access necessary to do their job.37 Information provided to Mr. Borges indicates that on Monday March 17, 2025, the EDW team discovered that users had been given access to data that was reportedly not authorized through normal approval channels.38

34 An Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) is a central, secure system that integrates data from various sources across an organization to support informed decision-making and strategic analysis. It acts as a single source of truth, providing a consistent and reliable view of data for reporting, analytics, and business intelligence.

35 Exhibit 1, p. 5

36 Exhibit 1, p. 5

But these disclosures are entirely separate from Borges’ disclosures about what DOGE did after SCOTUS lifted the TRO in June, which is that in August — so five months after the abuses disclosed last week — SSA DOGE boys including Ed “Big Balls” Coristine with his ties to criminal hackers, created an entire copy of the SSA database and moved it onto a cloud not protected by government infrastructure.

The fact that DOGE was sending things via Cloudflare before that (and that SSA claims to be helpless to determine what got sent) demonstrates the danger of this. But it does not, remotely, address the danger.

As I said in August, when SCOTUS overturned Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander’s TRO in June, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned about the skewed harm analysis SCOTUS was adopting.

Just last week, I wrote about the requirements for granting stay applications and, in particular, how this Court’s emergency-docket practices were decoupling from the traditional harm-reduction justification for equitable stays. See Noem, 605 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 5). With today’s decision, it seems as if the Court has truly lost its moorings. It interferes with the lower courts’ informed and equitable assessment of how the SSA’s data is best accessed during the course of this litigation, and it does so without any showing by the Government that it will actually suffer concrete or irreparable harm from having to comply with the District Court’s order.

[snip]

Stepping back to take a birds-eye view of the stay request before us, the Government’s failure to demonstrate harm should mean that the general equity balance tips decisively against granting a stay. See Noem, 605 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 4). On the one hand, there is a repository of millions of Americans’ legally protected, highly sensitive information that—if improperly handled or disseminated—risks causing significant harm, as Congress has already recognized. On the other, there is the Government’s desire to ditch the usual protocols for accessing that data, before the courts have even determined whether DOGE’s access is lawful. In the first bucket, there is also the state of federal law, which enshrines privacy protections, and the President’s constitutional obligation to faithfully execute the laws Congress has passed. This makes it not at all clear that it is in the public’s interest for the SSA to give DOGE staffers unfettered access to all Americans’ non-anonymized data before its entitlement to such access has been established, especially when the SSA’s own employees have long been subject to restrictions meant to protect the American people.

We’re only finding out about these earlier, less abusive violations, because lawyers and long-replaced SSA officials made declarations that have been debunked.

We’re not finding out why SSA launched the review in October or November (though the notice reveals, “A review of the SSA DOGE Team’s actions is ongoing”), and we’re not finding out what they have learned about the more serious violations.

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Stephen Miller’s Big Shift: Mother-Shooting Goons Replace VA Nurses and Psychologists

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A part of the video Jonathan Ross — the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good — took of the shooting has gotten little attention.

Before Renee’s wife Becca taunts Ross, “You want to come at us? You want to come at us? I say you go get some lunch, big boy,” and after she notes the plate of the vehicle would still be the same when ICE visits them later that day, Becca identifies herself as a US citizen and a “former fucking veteran, disabled veteran.”

If Becca is, indeed, a veteran, it would mean one veteran shot the spouse of another in a neighborhood of Minneapolis, where both lived.

Ross deployed with the Indiana National Guard to Iraq as a machine gunner.

Deployed to Iraq as a member of the Indiana National Guard from November 2004 to November 2005, Specialist Ross of the 138th Signal Battalion earned the Army Commendation Medal, the Army Good Conduct Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Medal and the Iraq Campaign Medal among others, according to the guard.

During his time in Iraq, Ross was a machine gunner on a combat logistical patrol team, court documents show.

Renee’s second husband and the father of her six year old son, Tim Macklin, was an Air Force veteran.

This not only was a conflict between authoritarianism and tolerance, but it appears to have been a conflict between American veterans.

That’s worthwhile background to this WaPo story, which catalogs which agencies shrunk in the first year of the Trump Administration and which have ballooned. The article shows that the Veterans Administration lost the most employees (the largest number through attrition), over 50,000 people.

That includes around 3,000 nurses (3% of the total) and 2,000 claims examiners (10% of the total).

Meanwhile, DHS ballooned in size, adding more than 6,000 ICE goons (reflecting a 30% increase) and almost 1,000 CBP officers.

Ross is not one of these new hires; he worked at CBP for eight years and has been working at ICE for ten years.

Republicans — and because this was done via Trump management, DOGE, and the Big Ugly Bill, with virtually no input from Democrats — took service away from veterans and instead hired a bunch of people to invade blue states instead.

Republicans — Stephen Miller — decided snatching grannies was more important than providing veterans medical care.

The American Prospect has been closely following the staffing woes at the VA — which is basically a bid to privatize much of it, including this recent story explaining why new staffing cuts will endanger mental heath care not just for veterans, but for the entire country.

In late November, a mental health leader at a major VA medical center learned about a directive issued to the 18 Veterans Health Administration (VHA) regional offices, known as VISNs (Veterans Integrated Service Networks). Department of Veterans Affairs’ leaders in Washington were imposing lower caps on employee positions nationwide. Directors of local VA medical centers and clinics had a month to decide which vacant positions to eliminate, and which job offers to rescind. None of these identified positions would be filled because they would be swept from organizational charts entirely. At his facility, 60 percent of the unfilled positions would be lost, including 23 in mental health.

“The past nine months have been very challenging,” the mental health leader told the Prospect. “But this is really going to impact patient care.” He also worried about the effect of cuts on the VA’s critical teaching mission. “The VA trains 50 percent of psychologists in the country,” he said. “Now, we may not have enough staff to supervise trainees.” In the midst of a national mental health professional shortage, reducing VA training capacity ultimately impacts access to mental health care for both veterans and nonveterans alike.

Again, Donald Trump is taking services away from veterans, and then hiring them to invade blue cities as if they were Fallujah.

The results were all too predictable.

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The Inaugural Donald J. Trump Awards

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The Inaugural Donald J. Trump Award Trophy, awaiting the engraving of Donald J. Trump’s name and massive accomplishments.

It’s been quite a year, which is just the way Donald Trump, a narcissist the likes of which the world has never seentm, wants it.

Almost.

Can’t you just hear him: “I do, I do, and I do some more, more than anyone else ever, and yet I don’t get all the accolades I deserve. Haters.”

Now sure, he got the inaugural Gianni “Human rights problems? What human rights problems?” Infantino FIFA Peace Prize. But he wanted more, as he believes is only his due. Sadly, so many other awards have been somehow given to other clearly underdeserving folks, and still other awards are just begging to be given but no one has had the imagination or chutzpah to actually award them.

Until now. May I have the envelopes, please?

The Donald J. Trump Award for Narcissistic Rebranding goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. And how dare any mere jazz musicians object to this.

The Donald J. Trump Award for Nationalistic Rebranding goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for the Gulf of America. All the haters at the AP and elsewhere can just get a life.

The Donald J. Trump Award for Interior Decoration goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for the over-the-top golden decorations, the “live, laugh, love” style signage, and the stunning — really absolutely stunning — renovations of the Lincoln Bathroom at the White House. The Presidential Walk of Fame with its image of Biden the AutoPen and the jawdropping plaques recounting each president’s achievements is truly beyond belief.

The Donald J. Trump Award for Architectural Salvage goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for his efforts to save the nation from the abomination that was the White House East Wing and replacing it with a much more appropriate Donald J. Trump White House Ballroom. Specific plans for the ballroom remain vague – I believe the phrase “we have a concept of a plan” fits this project, among others – but simply removing the East Wing was something that clearly needed to happen. And why does FLOTUS need any office space anyway?

The Donald J. Trump Award for Services to the Legal Community goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for his amazing record of presidential appointments to remake the legal system. From his SCOTUS appointments at the top to his appointment of judges like Emil Bove in the middle and Aileen Cannon at the bottom, as well as his appointment of prosecutors like Jeanine Pirro and Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer, he has truly installed only the best peopletm and that would be enough to earn him this award. But Trump didn’t stop there. Add to this the way in which he pushed out career DOJ staffers and the manner in which he got Big Law to bend the knee in the private sector, and this award is a slam dunk.

The Donald J. Trump Award for Medical Advancements goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for his efforts to dismantle and destroy the World Health Organization. Reading what Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health describes as WHO’s role in the world, it is obvious that WHO is a clear nuisance that needs to go:

The WHO plays many roles—the visible, apparent roles that many people are familiar with, and the roles that are less visible. This includes:

  • Detecting, monitoring, and responding to emerging health threats, pandemics, and diseases of importance; we saw that during the COVID-19 crisis.
  • Gathering and evaluating data and information from all over the world in order to understand the status of health globally and detect emerging problems. This includes acute crises as well as larger trends in health—which issues are causing a higher burden of disease and which ones we’re making progress on and should sustain efforts to address.
  • Setting standards and developing guidelines that help people around the world, including here in the U.S., deal with various health threats and crises—not only infectious diseases, but all sorts of health issues.
  • Providing commodities and goods to improve health around the world, including vaccines and drugs for many diseases. The U.S.’s withdrawal from WHO impacts not only the people who receive those goods, but also the supply chain for them, which includes many people in corporate America.
  • Assisting with humanitarian response, which has important implications both for the populations who are affected by those crises and for global diplomacy and the role of our humanitarian responses in improving global diplomacy around the world.
  • Providing very important technical assistance to governments and partners around the world to be able to respond to health challenges. The U.S. plays a very important role in providing this technical assistance.

Yeah. Who needs all that? (The “Bloomberg” in the name of the school was a clear giveaway as to JH’s unreliable wokeness.)

The Donald J. Trump Award for Services to the Environment goes to . . . Donald J. Trump’s decision to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. As climate scientist Kim Cobb told PBS,

“We’re talking about unique, one-of-a-kind facilities like supercomputers, ticked-out [sic, should be tricked-out] airplanes, and most importantly, a staff of over 800 people who are at the top of their game in innovating in weather and climate science for public good, putting out data that is on every single climate scientist’s computer around the country, if not around the world, and a nexus of collaboration as well that is important training grounds for the next generation of leaders.”

Yeah. Who needs all that when we’ve got The Weather Channel, amiright?

The Donald J. Trump Award for Service to Diplomacy goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for his muscular engagement with Nigeria, Venezuela, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Somolia, among other nations. (Simply renaming the US Institute of Peace as the Donald J. Trump US Institute of Peace seems hardly enough of a recognition for Trump’s breathtaking diplomatic work.)

The Donald J. Trump Award for Economic Excellence goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for his truly amazing grasp of the power of tariffs. Just ask the Kentucky Bourbon industry, US soybean farmers, and the members of the chambers of commerce in cities and towns along the US/Canada border.

The Donald J. Trump Award for Civil Rights goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for his dismantling of anything that smacks of a lack of racial harmony throughout American history. The Stonewall Riots, the Civil War, and anything having to do with Native Americans are merely the tip of the iceberg on the list of things that need to be forgotten, for the good of the nation. Trump is Making America Great Again by going back to the basics. As the faculty senate of Haskell Indian Nations University put it, Trump’s cuts to Native American education “represents a continuation of the trail of broken treaties” that is all too familiar to Native Americans. (Rumor has it he is working on how to get the women back in the kitchen (barefoot and pregnant), the gays back in the closet, and the blacks back in the fields, but those are clearly just rumors. I think. I hope.)

And that’s just a start.

I’m sure there are awards I am missing, but I trust that the imaginative and creative Emptywheel commentators can add to the list. Because really, Alfred Nobel has six prizes with his name on them, and what did he do, really, except invent dynamite? Trump surely deserves many more awards with his name on them than Nobel’s six. or the few that I have listed here.

Trump is truly in a league of his own.

Happy New Year’s, everyone. May next year be better (OK, that’s a low bar, but I’ll take it.).

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White Man’s Burden: Trump Is Failing Six of Ten Metrics on His Own Open Book Test

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One reason I laid out what Stephen Miller and Trump’s other sad little advisors think they’re doing in their National Security Strategy is because once you do that, it makes it even more clear that their overestimation of their own competence is dooming the United States.

Fully seven pages of the short (33 pages as compared to Trump’s 68-page 2017 NSS and Sleepy Joe Biden’s 48-page 2022 one) document blather about what it is trying to accomplish: two pages announcing the adoption of utilitarianism over values, two laying out what the US should want, another laying out what Trump thinks the US wants from the world, and two more laying out what means the US has to get there.

This is the work of a bunch of men who imagine they are competent telling everyone who came before them that they were doing things wrong.

Yet by laying all that out — by writing down what they imagine competence would deliver — they make it clear how badly they’re screwing up.

Effectively, Donald Trump has already done significant, if not grave, damage to six of the ten things that Trump claims America wants:

  1. Continued survival of US sovereignty
  2. Protect the country from human trafficking, foreign influence, propaganda, and espionage
  3. “A resilient national infrastructure that can withstand natural disasters, resist and thwart foreign threat”
  4. The most dynamic economy
  5. A robust industrial base
  6. Unrivaled soft power that “believe[s] in our country’s inherent greatness and decency”)

Start with the obvious ones.

Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and Elon Musk spent the first six months of this Administration trashing America’s soft power. These boys seem to imagine they can replace it with something that “believe[s] in our country’s inherent greatness and decency.” Except no one else will believe in American decency after it suddenly withdrew funding that resulted in the deaths of 600,000 people, two thirds of them children. People won’t trust you after you renege on paying the bills.

Or consider that 2nd bullet, which reads this way:

We want to protect this country, its people, its territory, its economy, and its way of life from military attack and hostile foreign influence, whether espionage, predatory trade practices, drug and human trafficking, destructive propaganda and influence operations, cultural subversion, or any other threat to our nation.

Of course, Trump claims to combat drug trafficking with his murderboat killings, even while he lets increasingly major drug criminals out of prison.

As for the rest? On her first day in office, the Attorney General stopped policing foreign influence, destructive propaganda, and influence operations; then Kristi Noem piled on by shutting down other programs combatting foreign influence and propaganda.

And, as an endless stream of stories reveal, both Pam Bondi and Noem have reassigned those who would hunt spies and human traffickers to go hunt undocumented grannies and day laborers instead.

Worse, the priority on weaponization has resulted in the loss of those people. Just the firing of a bunch of people who took a knee during the George Floyd protests to deescalate resulted in the firing of a counterintelligence Deputy Assistant Director and a supervisor.

a. In late March 2025, Plaintiff Jane Doe 5 was informed that she was being removed at the direction of Defendant Patel from her position at FBI Headquarters as a Deputy Assistant Director for the FBI overseeing counterintelligence at the direction of Defendant Patel because she kneeled on June 4, 2020. Plaintiff Jane Doe 5 had been specifically identified in then-Representative Gaetz’s letter. Plaintiff Jane Doe 5 retained her SES status but was demoted to a Section Chief position.

b. In April 2025, Plaintiff Jane Doe 6 was serving as the Legal Attache for the FBI based overseas along with her family. In that capacity, Plaintiff Jane Doe 6 had previously provided briefings to Defendant Patel with which he said he was very impressed. Nevertheless, on April 3, 2025, an FBI senior leader informed her that she was being removed from her term position in the Senior Executive Service to a non-Senior Executive Service position, abruptly uprooting her entire family and resulting in a significant pay decrease. The FBI senior leader informed Plaintiff Jane Doe 6 that Defendant Patel had indicated that his mind was made up and could not be changed.

c. In April 2025, Plaintiff Jane Doe 9 was demoted from her position as a supervisor overseeing all FBI ransomware and malware investigations. An FBI senior leader informed her that the demotion came straight from top level FBI leadership.

d. In April 2025, Defendant Patel directed the removal of Plaintiff Jane Doe 8 from her position supervising a counterintelligence squad.

There were even greater losses in DHS’ purges.

That’s part of the problem with bullet 3: The NSS’ grand plan to make America’s infrastructure more resilient. Along with gutting those who protect against foreign influence, Noem has gutted those who protect against hacking and natural disasters.

As for bullets 4 and 5? Trump’s trade war has had the opposite effect than he claimed it would, with historic layoffs and struggling manufacturing and small businesses.

Again, Trump did affirmative damage rather than achieving his goals.

Then there’s the question of sovereignty.

For all its yapping about America First, the NSS doesn’t deal with the way that Trump has been trading away America’s advantages to any rich foreigner with millions in cryptocurrency. Just yesterday, for example, Trump approved the sale of one of Nvidia’s most complex chips to China on the same day Houston’s US Attorney rolled out showy prosecutions for Chinese men accused of illegally exporting those very same chips.

“The United States has long emphasized the importance of innovation and is responsible for an incredible amount of cutting-edge technology, such as the advanced computer chips that make modern AI possible,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. “This advantage isn’t free but rather the result of our engineers’ and scientists’ hard work and sacrifice. The National Security Division, along with our partners, will vigorously enforce our export-control laws and protect this edge.”

Alan Hao Hsu aka Haochun Hsu, 43, Missouri City, and his company, Hao Global LLC, both pleaded guilty to smuggling and unlawful export activities Oct. 10.

According to now unsealed court documents, between October 2024 and May 2025, Hsu and others knowingly exported and attempted to export at least $160 million worth of export-controlled Nvidia H100 and H200 Tensor Core graphic processing units (GPUs).

Trump already authorized the export of even more complex chips to Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, the same sovereigns backing Paramount’s hostile bid to take over a big chunk of the US entertainment industry (that’s after China’s Tencent was dropped).

And these are just the areas where Trump has most obviously failed his own standards.

He built in a gimme in those standards he actually accomplished by claiming to want nuclear deterrent but then stating, falsely, that the Golden Dome would deliver such a deterrent.

We want the world’s most robust, credible, and modern nuclear deterrent, plus next-generation missile defenses—including a Golden Dome for the American homeland—to protect the American people, American assets overseas, and American allies.

Mark Kelly explained how unrealistic this effort was months ago.

And as for the hope that the rest of the world will use American technology, one of the things Trump wants from the rest of the world?

We want to ensure that U.S. technology and U.S. standards—particularly in AI, biotech, and quantum computing—drive the world forward.

As for those chips Trump cleared for sale, China is limiting their use.

As for American biotech, the rest of the world is instead importing America’s scientists who’ve been defunded as part of Trump’s anti-intellectual purges.

There’s plenty else in this NSS (such as other references to America’s technical superiority) where the boys aspire to have skills they affirmatively destroyed.

As such, the NSS isn’t so much a strategy (a word they scare quote when they define it): it’s a confession that these self-declared competent people are failing to meet their own standards.

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What Trump’s UNGA Speech Tells the World

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1896 sculpture of Cain by Henri Vidal, not 2025 sculpture of Marco Rubio

Speeches by national leaders at the opening of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) have multiple goals and various audiences. Leaders of small countries hope to raise concerns with large countries in a setting where they can be the center of attention, if only for 15 minutes. Leaders of ostracized countries often seek to justify the behavior that got them ostracized in the first place. Some speeches are aimed at the leaders in the room, while others are aimed at the folks back home. Some are aimed at allied leaders, and others at competitors and still others at enemies.

Under normal circumstances, preparation for the US president’s speech is probably on par with preparing the State of the Union address to Congress. Both speeches utilize folks from multiple agencies and both are subject to weeks and months of internal debates about what will and will not get into the speech. While the SOTU address is as long as the President wants to make it, the UN politely asks that UNGA addresses be kept to 15 minutes or less, because so many leaders will be speaking. The UNGA speech is primarily foreign policy, while the SOTU is more domestic, but both are critical to laying out the president’s – and by extension, the USA’s – positions on all kinds of things.

For UNGA, the State Department takes the lead (broadly speaking) in preparing drafts and posing options to the final decisionmakers in the White House. Other agencies like DOD, Treasury, Commerce, and DHS, as well as folks like the Director of National Intelligence, all weigh in and put their requests into the funnel out of which the final draft emerges.

While all the prep work on the speech is under way, so too is the prep work for listening to the speeches delivered by other leaders. Is it more of the same, are there new policy nuances, or even major changes of direction being conveyed? Different analysts at State, DOD, and the Intelligence community will prepare a list of “what to listen for” points as they get ready to listen to the UNGA speeches from the countries within their purview. Once the speeches have been made, these same folks will then be sharing their analysis with their superiors and the White House. “Here’s what we heard . . . , here’s what it means . . . , and here’s how it may affect our own policies and responses . . .”

Meanwhile, every other foreign ministry and intelligence service in the world does the same with the UNGA speech of the President of the United States of America. Especially when that president is Donald J. Trump.

So what will these folks notice about Trump’s speech, and what will their analysis of his speech lead them to think or do?

First, they will notice the absolute dichotomy between policy prescriptions and petty personal grievances. Yes, the speechwriting team and the professionals behind them put a lot of substantive stuff into the draft of the speech that went on the teleprompter, but Trump went off-script so much that it was easy for that stuff to get lost in the verbal flood of whining about his domestic political enemies alternated with his own personal self-promotion. If the substance was prepared to fill the 15 minute time slot, the whining and boasting filled another 45 minutes or so. That 3:1 ratio speaks volumes about what matters to Trump: “Three parts me, and one part everyone else. And that ratio is me being generous to everyone else.”

Second, even in the substantive parts of the speech, the presentation was arrogant and insulting. (Why yes, I do think Stephen Miller had a large role in shaping the speech. Why do you ask?) Trump’s “I alone can fix it” from campaigns gone by was echoed in Trump’s declaration at UNGA that he has always been right about everything. From immigration to energy to wars to peacemaking to cultural issues to history, Trump’s assertion that he is always right and that the world would be better off if everyone just bowed down and did what he said was at the center of his speech. The prepared draft of the speech might have been more polite about it, but the message was the same. All the world could see how Trump views them — little kids who need to listen to Daddy, and then do what Daddy says so that they don’t get punished.

Third, Trump’s UNGA speech was a confirmation and distillation of something these folks have seen since 2015 from Trump: facts are optional to Donald Trump. They will see that science takes a back seat to whatever Trump’s particular views and preferences are. Signed agreements, especially those signed by someone other that Trump, are optional, not binding. Historical facts that do not fit with Trump’s worldview are overlooked, ignored, or blithely dismissed as irrelevant. Leaders and nations who seek to move Trump and US policies with fact-based arguments will have a very difficult, if not impossible task if they follow this route.

Fourth, Trump has no use for the opinions of other leaders, unless they comport with his own opinions. Dozens of nations call what Israel is doing in Gaza “genocide” but Trump does not give a damn. Countries of all political stripes recognize the reality of climate change (even as they might differ in how it should be addressed), but not Donald Trump.

Fifth, this speech confirms yet again that what Trump desperately seeks is validation. In his head, he dreams of giving his own version of Sally Field’s academy award acceptance speech — “I haven’t had an orthodox career and I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect. The first time [I won] I didn’t feel it, but this time I feel it. And I can’t deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me! Thank you.”

Sixth, these analysts from other nations regularly ask themselves “How long will Trump hold to a given position?” He renegotiated the NAFTA treaty with Canada and Mexico in 2019 and finalized it in 2020, only to come back in 2025 and ask “who would have ever sign a thing like this?” Grudges over personal slights he will carry with him for decades, but agreements with other leaders and other nations are much less predictable.

The danger to all of this is one basic thing: the world is learning –again — not to listen to the United States.

  • When Trump and RFK Jr. issued their untethered-to-scientific-analysis declaration that Tylenol should not be used by pregnant women, not only did the US medical community loudly shout “NO!” but so did medical leaders around the world (UK, Spain, India, Australia, etc.). The US has a long record of leadership in medical research and treatment — think of the elimination of smallpox and the work to do the same with polio — but now? Around the world, folks are asking what used to be an unimaginable question: Should we listen to anything medical coming out of the CDC?
  • When Trump made his big Liberation Day announcements and sought to put tariffs on almost every nation, he followed up on this with all kinds of exceptions, adjustments, and incoherent statements. Today the tariffs might look like this, but next week they went down, then a month later some of them went higher than before . . . and what the hell will they look like next year?
  • When NGOs and other leaders around the world found the rug yanked out from under them when Trump used DOGE to cancel grants for things like malaria prevention and anti-AIDS programs, as well as letting US food aid funneled through USAID rot in warehouses rather than be delivered to those who feed the hungry, they had to ask if the word of the US is worth anything any more. “We had a five year agreement – you put up this and we’ll handle that — and after 3 years, you reneged. Why should we trust you the next time you want to make a deal?”

Trump and his lackeys can laugh at the world all they want, but if the financial world follows the lead of the medical world and the scientific world, and ceases to trust that the word of the US is good, the US will be in a world of hurt. A non-trivial portion of US debt is held by foreign governments. When the Canadian public decided not to travel to the US or buy US bourbon, that hit the US hospitality industry hard. If foreign governments decide that rather than buying US treasury bonds, they’d prefer bonds from Germany or France or Australia, that will mean the US government would have to offer higher rates of return in order to get the money needed to pay for tax breaks for the rich run the US government.

In the world of international affairs, trust matters, and Donald Trump is pissing away what it took decades to earn. Good luck with that, Secretary of State/National Security Advisor/Archivist of the United States Marco Rubio.

 

[Corrected to fix a minor editing error regarding bond costs in the penultimate paragraph.]

 

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The Sound of Teeth on Bone: Leopard Eating Leopards [UPDATE]

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. Update at bottom of this post. /~Rayne]

You knew eventually there would be intraparty autophagy given the conflict that emerged between Trump and his DOGE leader.

The leopard that bought a social media platform to ensure Trump and his party were elected is ready to gnaw on their faces. They were uncritical of Musk’s use of his Nazi bar X to aid their party, wholly accepting the wretchedness published alongside right-wing propaganda bolstering their position.

Now they’re going to have to face the fact the richest man in the world — the one person who could buy the lot of them with the change he can earn in a single day — is utterly enraged with them all.

I can’t blame him for feeling this way, either. I can’t stand Musk but I can understand his point of view.

Imagine burning up hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps even billions, of personal capital by personally taking on Trump’s Project 2025 government elimination measures as leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The Tesla Takedown movement was in no small part a response to Musk slashing away at government without restraint.

Then the party he supported with his $44 billion dollar acquisition of Twitter completely trashed that sacrifice by increasing the budget deficit while trying to hide the $3.3 trillion increase from the public, extending the debt ceiling to pay for their bullshit including the massive expansion of ICE.

Gnaw away, Musk. You bought it, you broke it, you own it. Bon appetit!

The last time Musk threatened to launch a new political party in opposition to the GOP, Trump got pissy and made a counterthreat.

This time I would watch for more than an exchange of words. Tells about Musk’s seriousness would include:

• Establishment of one or more national PACs to fund the new party;
• Establishment of one or more state and/or national PACs to run campaigns against incumbent GOP congress members;
• Co-option of existing libertarian/GOP/conservative PACs for the same (think Russia’s dark money co-option of the National Rifle Association from 2012-2016);
• Creation of an umbrella organization and subset entities across all 50 states and the territories launching the new party presence;
• Recruitment of candidates who are willing to run under the new party banner.

Meanwhile, Musk could continue to use the dead bird app to support his efforts, this time against the GOP. It worked to get them elected, it could work against them as well. Not a lot of additional investment required, especially since Trump’s big fugly bill is so damned unpopular making weaponization of the bill against the GOP a piece of cake.

Musk was worth $363 billion dollars today, even after losing $4.38 billion since Friday. That’s $100 billion more than the next richest man, Jeff Bezos. This is the kind of money which can buy small nations — it’s already bought an American general election. A single good day’s gain in the stock market could easily yield more cash for campaign contributions than the contributions made in 2024:

Between January 2023 and April 2024, US political campaigns collected around $8.6 billion for the 2024 House, Senate, and presidential elections. Over 65% of that money, about $5.6 billion, came from political action committees (PACs).

(source: USA Facts)

The danger to the left should Musk make good his threat: a new political party aiming at taking out the GOP in thrall to their mob boss Trump may peel away some part of the Democratic Party.

Could be centrists (including the not-well-closeted racists, misogynists, and bigots) who feel threatened by the inclusiveness of those left of them.

Could be the gerontocracy within the Democratic Party who feel their death grip on power and relevance weakening.

Could be the horseshoe left which shares fewer ideals with progressives and centrists than the far right.

Whatever the case, the Democratic Party needs to stay clear of the leopards as they claw at each other; they need to offer a strong, clear vision of the future while working on the vulnerable states and districts.

North Carolina, for example, is now in play given Sen. Thom Tillis’s principled stance on the big fugly bill, choosing not to run for re-election instead of kowtowing to the GOP’s mob boss.

Let the leopards gnaw on each other. Stay clear, get busy.

~ ~ ~

Action Items:

• Check out Indivisible’s Stop The Cuts page, especially the Take Action Now section near the bottom of the page.

• Weak on federal budget terminology? See the federal budget glossary at National Priorities Project.

• Or simply keep up the pressure and contact your senators to tell them to vote NO on H.R. 1 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, recruit others to do the same. Congressional switchboard: (202) 224-3121 or use Resist.bot or 5Calls.

~ ~ ~

UPDATE — 8:30 AM ET —

Far more predictable than the weather. Somebody’s Depends are twisted about Musk’s threat.

Trump threatens to re-examine government support for Elon Musk’s companies as mogul trashes megabill
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-threatens-re-examine-government-support-elon-musks-companies-tra-rcna216156

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump threatened to sic the Department of Government Efficiency on Elon Musk’s businesses, saying in a Truth Social post shortly after midnight that there was “big money to be saved.”

“Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa,” Trump said in the post. “No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE.”

“Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this?” the president added.

A spokesperson for the Musk-backed America PAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the hours after Trump’s post, Musk reposted several graphics on X depicting a climbing national debt, which currently sits at more than $36 trillion, according to government data.

Emphasis mine. I am thinking of the aphorism, “I never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel,” antique in the digital age.

Musk can spill a lot more bits and pixels using X than Trump can with his personal social media platform.

Still amazing even after all of Trump’s previous tantrums that he believes it’s acceptable to weaponize government against an individual exercising their First Amendment rights, to benefit his personal and partisan agenda. Is this an official act? Debatable.

Whatever the case I’m buying popcorn futures this morning ahead of Round 3.

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This Is Your Social Safety Net on DOGE

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Elon Musk has repeatedly said government functions should be privatized.

You already know how that works out for the U.S., because it’s one of the biggest single differences between the cost of living in other first world countries and the U.S.

It’s also one of the biggest differences in life expectancy between other first world countries and the U.S.

Healthcare in the EU, for example, costs much less than it does in the U.S., and outcomes measured in life expectancy are far better.

But healthcare in the EU is not fully privatized; though not identical across all EU members, it’s based on universal access and publicly subsidized.

Ditto for Canada and Greenland, the countries Trump wants to seize. Better that they seize us and bring their healthcare systems with them.

But this month has also demonstrated the risk of taking Elon Musk seriously when it comes to privatization.

Imagine this is our social security system:

Screenshot of the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq composite indexes mid-day Friday, April 11, 2025 via Google Finance.
 

Who’s not going to get their checks if the bottom drops out even further? Why should Americans who’ve paid into Social Security over a lifetime of work have to worry about additional risk to their futures because unelected and unconstitutionally appointed Musk believes exposure to the market is what Americans need?

It’s bad enough that Americans’ cost of daily living expenses is further exposed to market risks because of Trump’s misbegotten, ill-considered tariffs. Musk believes Americans’ retirement years should be even more deeply risky.

It makes zero sense to listen to a man who has no empathy for others’ concerns, who has no experience dealing with a limited income and trying to make ends meet. He doesn’t have adequate background let alone personal history to make such judgments about what will work best for the American people; he doesn’t even view his children’s health as personal obligations (ex. recent public pleas by two of his children’s mothers for assistance with healthcare matters).

~ ~ ~

What really takes the cake is the silence of the business world.

Of course the financial industry is silently slavering over the chance to get their grubby mitts on our Social Security, and they’re staying quiet about it because they know they dare not set off the American public.

But Jeff Bezos’ Amazon-derived fortune was made in no small part off the subsidy that the U.S. Postal Service has been to American business.

USPS is the fallback for shipping nearly anything nearly anywhere in the U.S.; Bezos didn’t have to worry about whether his books would sell in North Utter Remote, Outer Territory USA. There was a post office nearby where purchasers could pick up their orders if they couldn’t be delivered to their door by USPS carriers on foot.

Bezos didn’t have to negotiate that. Didn’t have to buy sorter equipment, trucks, hire and train personnel, build sorting facilities, so on. All of that was on our dime when it wasn’t paid for by postage, until Amazon was successful enough to consider reducing shipping and handling costs further with their own trucks.

Furthermore, Bezos knew what the competitive rate for shipping a majority of Amazon’s products would be based on USPS rates – rates set by USPS bidding out trucking and equipment purchases. When Amazon started buying its own trucks, Amazon knew its costs had to be no more than USPS’ costs to deliver.

In short, our tax dollars and our volume of postage helped underwrite Jeff Bezos’ billions.

And he’s just going to sit there smug and mum, enjoying his irrational wealth while Musk shoots off his mouth about privatizing government.

Because Bezos will probably ensure the next billions he makes off our backs is from Amazon Postal Service.

Can’t begin to imagine how much our health care will cost once Amazon has the contract both for postal delivery of medications and health care insurance.

You can only imagine when Musk takes his chainsaw to Amtrak what will happen next: he’ll claim only his vaporware Hyperloop is the alternative, and American people should pay him billions to implement it instead of a long-proven passenger rail system.

Privatization will not yield better outcomes for the American people and you already know that. Don’t wait until Musk uses DOGE to shut off funds to the USPS; he’s already targeted USPS personnel. Contact your representative and senators and insist that government should NOT be privatized.

Not our Social Security, not our mail delivery, not a single government service which could end up becoming a pricey-to-us privatized profit center for billionaires.

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DOGE: Department of Gawdawful Errors

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

This seems very inefficient:

Photo of falling debris from SpaceX Starship Flight 8 over the Caribbean dd. 06MAR2025, via AkaSci on Mastodon

Oh, I’m not referring to the second consecutive failure of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship this year. He can blow up all his capital and burn down his future space freight contracts.

I’m referring to this:

Image, Mastodon post by Ben Brockert dd. 06MAR2025

Why have are our FAA resources, reduced as they are after Elon Musk took a DOGE-ian chainsaw to them recently, been forced to scramble to protect civilian and commercial aircraft from yet another “rapid, unscheduled disassembly“?

Why wasn’t the FAA given enough advance notice of the possible (and likely) threat from debris so that flights could be re-routed or delayed BEFORE the launch attempt?

The reach of this fuckery is breathtaking:

Photographs and videos posted on the social media site X by users saying they were along the Florida coast showed the spacecraft breaking up. The falling debris disrupted flights at airports in Miami, Orlando, Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, and as far away as Philadelphia International Airport.

In other words, most of the eastern U.S. affected — no big deal. But that’s likely an understatement; you know the cascade of effects must have been wider given how tightly planes are scheduled.

Why are any other persons outside of SpaceX forced to change their activities without advance notice because Musk is such a selfish fuck-up of a business manager?

This is particularly galling:

In a Department of Transportation all-hands meeting late last week, Duffy responded to a question about DOGE’s role in national airspace matters, and without explicitly mentioning the new employees, suggested help was needed on reforming Notice to Air Mission (NOTAM) alerts, a critical system that distributes real-time data and warnings to pilots but which has had significant outages, one as recently as this month. “If I can get ideas from really smart engineers on how we can fix it, I’m going to take those ideas,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by WIRED. “Great engineers” might also work on airspace issues, he said.

As if NOTAM wasn’t already a concern, Musk’s SpaceX blows up a rocket without ensuring adequate notice. It’s not as if the launch was scheduled in advance or anything, as if a flight path for the rocket — and its debris — wasn’t predicted well before launch.

You know what really worries me — more so than I already was?

Engineers who work for Elon Musk’s SpaceX have been brought on as senior advisers to the acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), sources tell WIRED.

On Sunday, Sean Duffy, secretary of the Department of Transportation, which oversees the FAA, announced in a post on X that SpaceX engineers would be visiting the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Virginia to take what he positioned as a tour. “The safety of air travel is a nonpartisan matter,” Musk replied. “SpaceX engineers will help make air travel safer.”

Count the errors in the last two sentences of that excerpt. One party doesn’t give a shit about Musk’s manifold conflicts of interest or his unelected status as shadow president, the same party also doesn’t see the problem with giving Musk free rein to trash the regulatory agency which kept his space freight company from making even more explosive mistakes.

Imagine letting Elon’s SpaceX management habits reengineer infect the U.S. air traffic control systems, especially with his clueless if not utterly indifferent attitude about his mistakes.

“Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So nobody can bat 1,000,” he said, adding that he would act quickly to correct errors.

He acknowledged DOGE could be making errors as well.

“We are moving fast, so we will make mistakes, but we’ll also fix the mistakes very quickly,” Musk said.

A plane crash isn’t a mistake one can fix, quickly or otherwise. US air travel demands zero defects; it’s not a series of test launches which can inconvenience people with few repercussions to the individuals responsible for failures.

What will it take before the spineless GOP congressional caucus, in thrall to the current administration, snaps out of its sleepwalking submission to Musk’s Department of Gawdawful Errors?

Will it take the crash of a plane carrying some of its members before it realizes oversight by a separate but equal branch of government is absolutely necessary to their own fucking safety?

Somehow I don’t think it will be enough to wake them up, because they haven’t batted an eye at Musk’s other business failure, the “Deadliest Car Brand in America.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell’s sister-in-law couldn’t be rescued from her swamped Tesla in no small part because of its design, and yet this wasn’t enough to give the GOP congressional caucus pause about Musk in any way. They continue to share the road with these vehicles on a daily basis.

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NOAA: The Biggest Little Agency in America

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What We are Quietly Losing in All the Tumult

Last week the ghouls of DOGE came to gut NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) by firing all the probationary employees, because they were the easiest to fire. It was terrible, but it won’t be their last visit.

I wanted to take a moment to focus on this small and amazing agency because in all the chaotic headlines, outrageous speeches, and feral conduct, it’s easy to miss how consequential the Trumpist destruction of NOAA will be, if no one can stop it. Americans, and to a degree the whole world, depend on the nerdy, devoted folks at NOAA to keep the fish biting, the crops abundant, the land peaceful, and their homes and businesses safe and dry.

I’ve often thought of them as some of the wonderful unsung heroes of the federal government. I learned about NOAA in college. We worked with their oceanography data, pulled down from a satellite to a 486 computer into our little marine science lab in 1993. All their data, then as now, was freely available to anyone in the world. Scientists, students, and even enthusiasts still dig into their archives all the time, and the people at NOAA often look for ways to make their data more useful to anyone who wants it. It has made life easier on this planet in uncountable little ways we’ll never know about.

I don’t want to focus on the most famous parts of NOAA, the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center, not because they’re not important. They are incredibly important: key to saving lives and property, and keeping people informed during emergencies. But these are the two parts of NOAA you most likely already know about. The National Weather Service is the best forecaster and weather analysis agency on this little blue marble we call home, and we see its work every time we look at local news and weather. NWS data populates the various apps on our phones, sends out warnings, and appears on our local news stations.

You also probably know about the National Hurricane Center. That’s the website and associated services that we turn to in hurricane season, to watch and wait to see the fates of the gulf states and the Eastern seaboard every year. It is the high drama of global weather. It attracts the news, storm chasers and media audiences.

Hurricane season, unlike tornadoes, storms, or the long slow violence of climate change, has a ready-for-TV narrative. The danger forms over the sea and creeps nearer and nearer to where people live, and no one is ever quite sure how it will turn out until the danger hits land. This part of weather forecasting even has its own mediagenic hero squad — the hurricane hunters who fly through the eye and eye wall of hurricanes in beefy planes, letting NOAA gather data that can’t be gathered any other way.

You probably know that NOAA has weather satellites. NOAA operates 18 satellites in total. Some track American and global weather, but they also track fires, desertification, drought, heat, tree cover, and more values besides — across the whole world.

But there’s so many more parts you may not know.

In the US, NOAA sent up around 76,000 weather balloons a year equipped with radiosondes, a instrument that gathers and transmits data for NWS upper air network, they’re creating a long term archive of weather, also gathering data that can’t be gathered with cameras in space. They’re even keeping track of cosmic rays as part of the radiosonde telemetry. In theory, that means the first signs of a cosmic event like a supernova could reach earth via NOAA first. Either way, their data is invaluable for many other federal agencies, as well as the public, and private businesses. But with the cuts that have already happened, not as many of those balloons are going up.

NOAA has always worked hand in glove with their more famous cousin, NASA. Though NOAA looks inward more than outward to space, as NASA does. Between the two of them, they run most of the USA’s non-military satellite and sensor systems, gathering data — but also making it public.

But in many ways, NOAA has more to do than NASA, or even many other more famous parts of the federal government.

So Much More Than A Weather Forecast

NOAA’s job is to keep you alive. We get this when it’s hurricanes, tornadoes, flash floods — that kind of thing. But they help the global system in so many more ways that are less obvious. NOAA’s satellite data plays an important role in precision agriculture, where farmers use satellite data and weather information to time and place their crops for the best possible yield. It’s good for the farmers, but also it’s good for the global food system, Data for farmers makes agriculture predictable and efficient, keeping prices low and cupboards stocked around the world. In a globalized food system, that means less political unrest, less war, and more healthy children.

NOAA is the agency that monitors and studies El Niño, more precisely known at ENSO, which is a climate pattern in the equatorial Pacific ocean that affects much of global weather. This information is used all over the world to plan for crops, water allocation, typhoons, hurricanes and more. They study the AMOC,( Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation). This part of the global water circulation is of particular concern right now. If it fails (due to climate change) the Eastern Seaboard could drown and much of Europe could freeze. We don’t know how likely that is or what we could do about it, but NOAA is working the problem.

The NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service) division of NOAA (pronounced “nymphs”) uses both ship and satellite surveys to monitor and protect fisheries, to keep them healthy and commercially viable. This is a global task, because fish don’t really care about your country’s EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) or other applicable human laws. NMFS tell people to stop fishing sometimes, and tell them where to fish at other times, using surveys, satellite data and other fisheries studies. This is about making sure that we can feed ourselves, and that the fish will be there next year, too. Fisheries management isn’t just a resource management task — it’s peace-building.

Fish and seafood account for 6.2% of the world’s protein consumption, and it’s often all the majority of protein in poor coastal communities. When fisheries are stressed or even collapse, conflict inevitably follows. Like increasing crop yields, protecting fisheries makes the world a little more peaceful. NOAA even monitors the Mississippi’s levels and behavior, safeguarding the cheapest and easiest trade route to the majority of the country. (the Mississippi is maintained by the Army Corp of Engineers, but this relationship between the agencies is just one of the many ways American infrastructure reaches out and finds the hand of NOAA there to help.)

NOAA is studying microplastics in whale guts, how to save coral reefs (and therefore also prevent another kind of fisheries collapse), saving sea turtles, and oyster bed restoration that could help preserve food and infrastructure on both of our coasts.  They generate heat maps to help people survive the growing threat of dangerous heat events. They monitor the oceans to help enforce the Marine Mammal Protection Act, protecting cetaceans (along with other marine mammals) from habitat destruction and human interference.

Even if you didn’t like whales, (and go get a therapist if that’s true, because who hates a whale?) they are a keystone species, and without them a lot of fisheries around the world would collapse. Whale poop is the great fertilizer of the global ocean. We know that, in part, because of NOAA research.

All of this, plus educational programs, ecological science, all your weather prediction, hurricane monitoring, and tornado warnings, for .11% of the federal budget. It’s one of the wonders of the data world. But the cost isn’t why DOGE and the Trumpists will want to destroy NOAA. There’s very little waste, fraud, and abuse here. There’s very few things that could even be mistaken for waste, fraud and abuse, even if you squinted as hard as you could.

What NOAA has is a truth the GOP doesn’t want anyone to see. NOAA is one of the foremost research agencies in the field of Climate Change. They collect much of the vital data, but also tell the story of anthropogenic climate change, well, and deeply, with receipts.

Here is NOAA’s mortal sin: their message is comprehensive, clear, and backed up with many, many studies. NOAA is easy to access for anyone in the world. This little slice of the federal government is telling on our crimes against nature, and the GOP doesn’t like that.

Without miraculous intervention, NOAA may be doomed in the coming weeks and months. I hope, and expect, that the people at NOAA are archiving its vast trove of potentially civilization-preserving records they’ve collected over the decades, to keep it from being destroyed by this insane GOP. I also hope companies and other governments will scoop up these people and get them back to their work — the work of preserving our comfortable Holocene civilizations on Planet Earth.

Science isn’t Transactional, and Data Doesn’t Make Deals.

Climate Change doesn’t care about the GOP’s political goals. This agency may end up dying for Trump’s insane vision of how the world works- and the damage is already arriving. There simply is no room in the Republican version of the world for forces beyond their control. But at this point, climate chaos is baked into the world as we have made it. Not all the might of the United States can win this fight with facts.

They have already fired the probationary workers, and anyone else who was legally vulnerable. The weather forecast part of NOAA’s mission is already being damaged. The Trump regime will be back to enact a political murder, trying to stop a global climate crisis by killing the messenger. But more fucking around has never made for less finding out, a fact that Trump will be demonstrating to us for years to come.

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