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Elon Musk And DOGE Are Wreaking Havoc - The Monday AM Quickie 2/11/25

By Jacob Silverman —

It's already spring training in my mind. -Jacob

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THE BIG NEWS

Elon Musk And DOGE Are Wreaking Havoc

Elon Musk's DOGE wrecking ball continues to tear through government agencies while sending the federal workforce into a panic (along with anyone who relies on the government for almost anything!). The Washington Post described Musk's program as a "blitzkrieg" pushing a "vision for a dramatically smaller and weaker government, as [Musk] and a coterie of aides move to control, automate — and substantially diminish — hundreds if not thousands of public functions." The result has been "chaos on a near-hourly basis across the nation's capital."

The MAGA faithful and tech elites love it. The former think they're sticking it to corrupt bureaucrats and woke Democrats who have wasted their tax dollars on DEI regime change censorship woke Disney Covid vax – you get the idea. The tech lords feel a similar resentment toward the liberal establishment and are glad to see it burn. But knowing that a kneecapped administrative state will need to privatize services and outsource more roles to AI software and consultants, tech millionaires and billionaires anticipate some profit coming from this disruption.

DOGE has "penetrated" – taken over? seized? – at least 15 federal agencies. Newly installed Musk loyalists in their early twenties are reportedly holding 15-minute interviews with career civil servants who are asked to justify their jobs. Based in the executive office of the president, DOGE – which is essentially a rebranding of the once-unthreatening government IT department known as the US Digital Service – has focused on taking over umbrella systems and agencies, like the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management. Musk's personnel have visited, or been given roles in, a dozen other agencies, where they've begun firing longtime workers, demanding access to sensitive data and key systems, and, in the case of USAID and the CFPB, working to shut down entire organizations.

It's all being done by seemingly a few dozen people, as the nominal president continues to play the nation's chief executive role on TV. Democrats have held some weak protests outside federal agencies as creepy DOGE security guards prevent our geriatric representatives from entering. The last impediment to Musk and DOGE assuming total control over the government seems to be the federal courts, where there are a number of lawsuits already underway. On Saturday, a federal judge blocked DOGE's access to sensitive personal data on Americans held by the Treasury Department. Musk responded, of course, by calling the judge corrupt and demanding he be removed from office.

The CFPB Is Now On Death Watch

The Trump administration has been preparing the terrain for the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a regulatory agency credited with returning $21 billion to consumers victimized by excessive fees, price gouging, fraud, and other forms of corporate exploitation. Elon Musk and his millionaire and billionaire friends spent last week demonizing the agency as a fraudulent protection racket that is actually gouging companies, not protecting consumers from the companies that would gouge them. Then on Friday, Trump named Russell Vought, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget, to also lead the CFPB. Over the weekend, Vought said that the agency's employees should stop work. Calling the CFPB a "woke & weaponized agency," Vought said that the CFPB's funding would be eliminated. Only Congress has the power to close the CFPB, but the Trump administration is clearly doing all it can to turn this consumer-friendly regulator into a virtual non-entity.

Where Did The DOGE Goons Come From?

Despite its supposed pro-transparency mission, the exact structure and makeup of DOGE remains unknown. Reporters are piecing together who, exactly, works for this pseudo-agency that has somehow retained the authority to purge the federal workforce, from NOAA to the Treasury Department. Some of the best reporting has come from Wired, which found that some of the young software engineers associated with DOGE came from Palantir and SpaceX professional networks. One already notorious 19-year-old engineer worked for a company known for hiring criminal hackers. While the racist young coders have gotten a lot of attention, DOGE's staff also includes some MAGA lawyers with conservative establishment credentials. ProPublica has put together a DOGE Tracker listing confirmed DOGE staffers, and the overall picture is a mix of Musk loyalists, young engineers and execs from the Musk-Thiel-PayPal mafia corporate universe, and a handful of MAGA lawyers and political operatives, including Katie Miller, Stephen Miller's wife.

QUICKEST QUICKIES

  • Major NIH, FDA, And CDC Cuts Signal Bad News For Public Health The Trump administration has been gutting funding for biomedical and scientific research. Under the excuse of cutting down on overhead, billions of dollars are being cut from the NIH. Trump officials are also clamping down on CDC research while major cuts to the CDC and FDA budgets are expected to be announced this week. via WaPo and CBS News.
  • Our New Gulag Is A Gitmo Tent City For Imprisoned Migrants The Trump administration shipped more migrants to Guantanamo on Friday, where they will be housed in a growing tent encampment within the detention facility. The Department of Homeland Security claims that the new migrants are Venezuelan gang members, but it's not clear who's being brought to Gitmo or for how long. Late on Sunday, a federal judge issued an injunction preventing the administration from sending more detainees to the island prison. via NYT and Carol Rosenberg/X.
  • Trump Still Wants Gaza "I’m committed to buying and owning Gaza," President Trump told reporters yesterday. "As far as us rebuilding it, we may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it. Other people may do it through our auspices. But we’re committed to owning it, taking it, and making sure that Hamas doesn’t move back." via AP News.
  • Time To Say Goodbye To The Penny? Last night, after leaving the Super Bowl with the game still underway, Trump posted on Truth Social that he had directed the Secretary of the Treasury to stop producing new pennies, which cost more than their face value to produce. This might actually be a reasonable policy, but he'll find a way to mess it up. via X/Trump.

SOME NUMBER

63.4%

That's how much Tesla sales declined in France last year, part of a dramatic decline in sales for Elon Musk's electric vehicle company around the world. Sales of China-made Teslas dropped more than 11%. In Germany, where Musk has vocally backed the neo-Nazi-ish AfD party, Tesla sales fell more than 59%. In Sweden, where the postal union has refused to deliver Tesla license plates in solidarity with the country's mechanics union, sales dipped 44.3%.

ON THE SHOW TODAY

2/10: Happy Monday! Sam and Emma speak with Kellie Carter Jackson, associate professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College, to discuss her recent book We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance.

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PARTING WORDS

"There could be a problem, you’ve been reading about that, with Treasuries. That could be an interesting problem because it could be that a lot of those things don’t count. Therefore maybe we have less debt than we thought of."

-- President Donald Trump speaking to journalists aboard Air Force One on his way to the Super Bowl yesterday. No one seems to know exactly what Trump was talking about. He may have been implying that the actual US debt is less than stated because of unspecified (and perhaps fictitious) fraud. Some speculated that he was saying that the US government wasn't obligated to redeem all its treasuries – i.e. that it could default on some of its debt, the kind of unnecessary and economically disastrous move that would certainly appeal to Trump.

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