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Five Ways Trump Is Sabotaging the United States

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Yesterday, arguably for (at least) the second time, Trump declared fealty to Vladimir Putin.

As I contemplated the awful but in no way surprising developments (here’s a good podcast, featuring Marc Polymeropoulos, Doug Lute, and Rosa Brooks), I thought about the various ways Trump is sabotaging the United States, based on apparently different motivations.

But we only assume those motivations are different because we (or much of the legacy press, anyway) accept the claimed motivation Trump offers. When you look at all of them together, you simply can’t rule out they’re all part of the same effort to capitulate to Putin.

Project 2025

There’s a consensus that Trump is following the plan mapped out in Project 2025. This Politico report, from early February, laid out how Executive Orders Trump had signed implemented plans to attack diversity and LGBTQ protections, attack migrants, and protect disinformation. It focuses on fossil fuel plans that have mostly defunded renewable energy without raising fossil fuel exploitation (in part because it was already so high under Biden).

Even if that were the only thing going on or if that were really what was going on, it would raise real questions about foreign influence. Last year, Casey Michel mapped out how Viktor Orbán used the Heritage Foundation as a beachhead for his influence peddling in the US (which I discussed in this post on Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025).

While much attention has understandably focused on Heritage’s so-called “Project 2025,” which provides a roadmap for Trump to seize as much power as he can, such a shift has extended to foreign policy. This has been seen most especially in Heritage leading the effort to gut funding for Ukraine. But it’s also evident in the way Heritage has endeavored to anchor its relations with Orbán, making Budapest once more America’s preferred partner in Europe—regardless of the cost.

Much of that shift is downstream from Heritage’s leadership, overseen by Kevin Roberts. Appointed as Heritage’s president in 2021, Roberts immediately began remaking Heritage’s priorities with a distinctly pro-Orbán bent—and began opening up Heritage as a vehicle for Hungarian influence in the U.S.

Part of that involved things like last week’s confab, one of many meetings between Roberts and Orbán. (After one 2022 sit-down, Roberts—who, among other things, has said he doesn’t think Joe Biden won the 2020 election—posted that it was an “honor” to meet with Orbán, praising his “movement that fights for Truth, for tradition, for families.”) But the relationship is structural as well: Heritage finalized what they refer to as a ‘landmark’ cooperation agreement with the Danube Institute, a Hungarian think tank that appears to exist only to praise Orbán’s government.*

The Budapest-based Danube Institute is largely unknown in the U.S., but it has transformed in recent years into one of the premier mouthpieces for propagating Orbánist policies. While it is technically independent, it is, as Jacob Heilbrunn notes in his new book on the American right’s infatuation with dictators, located “next to the prime minister’s building and funded by Orbán’s Fidesz party.” Indeed, the Hungarian think tank is overseen by a foundation directly bankrolled by the Hungarian state—meaning that the Danube Institute is, for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.

A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation told The New Republic that their arrangements with the Danube Institute is “restricted to carrying out educational research and analysis, as well as related events—none of which involved any financial commitment from either party” and that “at no point did Heritage receive funds from or pass funds to the Danube Institute, the Hungarian government, or the prime minister’s office.”

The Danube Institute claims it is dedicated to “advocat[ing] conservative and national values and thinking,” which almost always ends up with the institute praising Orbán’s pronouncements. It has become, according to Hungarian journalists at Atlatszo, “one of the main tools of the Orbán government’s ideological expansion abroad”—and one of the “main vehicles” to “building a political network in the United States.

Christopher Rufo, the propagandist behind the demonization of trans people, has ties to the Danube Institute.

So even if this was just about implementing Project 2025, that would best be described as replacing American democracy with Orbanist authoritarianism — adopting the model from a key Putin puppet.

DOGE infiltration and destruction of US government

There have been a slew of stories about how DOGE provided cover for Russ Vought and Stephen Miller to implement Project 2025. Wired, for example, described how Stephen and his wife Katie, who is formally on the DOGE team, serve as gatekeepers to Elon and use Elon to carry out their dirty work.

Meanwhile, Stephen Miller has, along with Project 2025 coauthor and Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, became one of Musk’s closest allies in the administration, The New York Times reported earlier this month. WIRED has learned that the relationship is far closer, and more complicated, than has been previously known publicly.

In many ways, Musk’s targeting of federal agencies is perfectly in sync with the aims of Miller, who has championed DOGE’s work internally and even helped in making a lot of it possible. (In public, Miller has equated federal workers with “radical left Communists” and “criminal cartels.”) Still, sources tell WIRED that Trumpworld is more comfortable with Musk taking the heat for the recent federal cuts rather than the less famous—and, in their view, far less telegenic—Miller.

Yet through their actions so far, the Millers and Musk have developed a MAGA version of the Pet Shop Boys adage from the song “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)”: You’ve got the brawn / I’ve got the brains. Stephen Miller’s knowledge of the federal apparatus, Katie Miller’s contacts on Capitol Hill, and the couple’s good standing among Trump loyalists, coupled with Musk’s relentless ambition and effectively infinite resources, made the scale of the DOGE government takeover possible. Musk is not the independent actor he’s often portrayed as and taken to be, in other words, but is rather carrying out actions essentially in concert with the man to whom the president has delegated much of the day-to-day work of governance.

“Stephen is kind of the prime minister,” one of three Republicans close to Trump and familiar with the situation tells WIRED. Another Republican familiar with the dynamic also used the term “PM” to describe Miller, short for prime minister. The implication is that Miller is carrying out the daily work of governance while Trump serves as head of state, focusing on the fun parts of being president.

But DOGE is going beyond the scope of Project 2025, and in ways that directly harm the United States.

Take the Project 2025 recommendations on USAID, the first target of DOGE. DOGE adopted the general theme of the Project 2025 chapter — that USAID had been used to implement a lot of radical plans. But the virtual elimination of USAID implemented last week goes well beyond Project 2025’s recommended reversal to 2019’s budget of $39.3 billion.

Project 2025 hailed Trump’s use of USAID to push for religious protection for Christians which — as I showed —  got shut down early along with everything else.

It promoted international religious freedom as a pillar of the agency’s work and built up an unprecedented genocide-response infrastructure.

It specifically called for greater reliance on local NGOs — and pointed to PEPFAR as a model.

Streamlining Procurement and Localizing the Partner Base. USAID is a grantmaking and contracting agency that disburses billions of dollars of federal funding in developing countries through implementing partners, such as U.N. agencies, international NGOs, for-profit companies, and local nongovernmental entities. In rare instances, such as in Jordan and Ukraine, the agency provides direct budget support to finance the operations of host-country governments. USAID far more often counts on expensive and ine!ective large contracts and grants to carry out its programs. It justifies these practices based on speed and a lower administrative burden on its institutional capacity.

[snip]

The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has shown that localization at scale is possible within a short time span. Over the four years of the Trump Administration, the multibillion-dollar program increased the amount of funding disbursed to local entities from about 25 percent to nearly 70 percent with positive overall results. This model should be replicated across all of USAID.

But as declarations in various lawsuits repeat over and over, these local partners are not getting paid, and it’s destroying the credibility of the US (and rule of law).

11. Currently my mission has more than $30 million in unpaid invoices for 2 months of implementing partners’ work, with half of those past Prompt Payment Act due date (30 days) and incurring interest every day. If one were to extrapolate the numbers across all of the missions and USAID/Washington, given that annual USAID appropriation is $40 billion, the total dollar amount of unpaid invoices would certainly surpass $1billion at the most conservative estimate.

[snip]

13. Arbitrary withholding of due payments to U.S. and non-U.S. based partners does grave damage to the reputation and reliability of the U.S. government both domestically and internationally. USAID is a USG Agency which signed the contracts and grants in line with the Code of Federal Regulations and other statutes; USG refusal to pay for the past performed work and non-compliance with the TRO can shatter Americans’ certainty in the rule of law.

Rather than empowering local partners and capabilities, the quick decimation has devastated them — and left Americans still located overseas exposed to backlash.

USAID is just the most substantiated example of the sheer waste DOGE is creating. We’re seeing similarly stupid decisions in the firings of critical personnel (some of whom get hired back), but also the elimination of long-term maintenance or safety programs that will cost far more when those protections are gone.

Project 2025 envisioned stripping civil service protections and politicizing the bureaucracy. But with DOGE cuts, it’s not clear the bureaucracy can be rebuilt, even assuming the Heritage hires knew what they were doing. Meanwhile, the method of those cuts is more likely to elicit a backlash from judges, potentially even from the Supreme Court justices whom right wingers were counting on to bless all this.

And all that’s before you contemplate the possibility that Elon’s DOGE boys are doing something else with the data they’re accessing, or — intentionally or not — setting up backdoors via which adversaries can do so themselves.

Assume you were a true believer in Project 2025 (and not far greater authoritarianism). DOGE puts all that at risk, because by breaking so much so early, it is eliciting backlash and collapse of the economy.

The installation of useful idiots

It’s not just Elon who is making a mess. So are the other unqualified useful idiots Trump has installed — people like Pete Hegseth (who has fired three senior women officers after assuring Joni Ernst he wouldn’t target women) and Tulsi Gabbard (who parroted the same Russian propaganda she partly disavowed to get confirmed yesterday) and RFK Jr (who reneged on his promise not to cut off vaccine programs) and Kash Patel (who reneged on his promise to appoint a career FBI Agent as his Deputy).

These people are doing precisely the affirmative damage to the US that Democrats warned they would do — most obviously in RFK’s initial dismissal of the measles outbreak spreading from Texas to other states. And they’re doing it after years of parroting Russian propaganda.

The personalization of DOJ

We expected DOJ to be politicized in a second Trump term. I was even cynical enough to imagine that he would pardon all the January 6ers. The denialism about both Russia and January 6 were baked right into Project 2025.

  • The Federal Bureau of Investigation, knowing that claims of collusion with Russia were false,5 collaborated with Democratic operatives to inject the story into the 2016 election through strategic media leaks, falsified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications, and lied to Congress.6
  • Personnel within the FBI engaged in a campaign to convince social media companies and the media generally that the story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop was the result of a Russian misinformation campaign—while the FBI had possession of the laptop the entire time and could have clarified the authenticity of the source.

[snip]

  • The FBI engaged in a domestic influence operation to pressure social media companies to report more “foreign influence” than the FBI was actually seeing and stop the dissemination of and censor true information directly related to the 2020 presidential election.11

But the personalization of DOJ, along with Pam Bondi’s orders to stop chasing foreign influence operations, does something more.

It effectively makes foreign bribery — as well as the kind of kickbacks we saw in advance of Trump’s inauguration — legal.

As I noted here, the SEC, for example, has paused its suit against Justin Sun. As Judd Legum describes, this follows the Chinese-linked businessman’s multi-million “investment” in Trump’s crypto currency.

In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies, accusing him of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token. The SEC accused Sun of wash trading, which involves buying and selling a token quickly to fraudulently manufacture artificial interest.

[snip]

Sun’s purchase put millions in Trump’s pocket. WLF was entitled to “$30 million of initial net protocol revenue” in a reserve “to cover operating expenses, indemnities, and obligations.” After the reserve was met, a company owned by Trump would receive “75% of the net protocol revenues.” Sun’s purchase covered the entire reserve. As of December 1, this amounted to $18 million for Trump — 75% of the revenues of all other tokens sold at the time. Sun also joined WLF as an advisor. While the purchase benefited Trump, WLF tokens are essentially worthless for Sun, as they are non-transferable and locked indefinitely.

Nevertheless, Sun has since invested another $45 million in WLF, bringing his total investment to $75 million. This means Sun’s purchases have sent more than $50 million to Trump, Bloomberg reported. Sun has also continued to shower Trump with praise. On January 22, Sun posted on X, “if I have made any money in cryptocurrency, all credit goes to President Trump.”

Once you’ve installed lawyers who publicly represent they are Trump’s lawyers, once you’ve ensured that no one friendly to Trump will be prosecuted for bribery, then Ukraine was bound to lose any negotiation with Russia. Russia has been dangling bribes in front of Trump for years and now they’ll be free to deliver in plain sight.

And Trump has never placed his own self interest behind the interests of the United States.

The capitulation to Russia

Keep all that in mind as you consider Trump’s abject capitulation yesterday.

Keep in mind that even before yesterday’s ambush of Zelenskyy, Pete Hegseth ordered Cyber Command to stand down any targeting of Russia.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Hegseth gave the instruction to Cyber Command chief Gen. Timothy Haugh, who then informed the organization’s outgoing director of operations, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Ryan Heritage, of the new guidance, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

The order does not apply to the National Security Agency, which Haugh also leads, or its signals intelligence work targeting Russia, the sources said.

CISA, too, has taken its focus off of Russia, something that risk grave damage to private companies as well as the government.

Liesyl Franz, deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity at the state department, said in a speech last week before a United Nations working group on cybersecurity that the US was concerned by threats perpetrated by some states but only named China and Iran, with no mention of Russia in her remarks. Franz also did not mention the Russia-based LockBit ransomware group, which the US has previously said is the most prolific ransomware group in the world and has been called out in UN forums in the past. The treasury last year said LockBit operates on a ransomeware-as-service model, in which the group licenses its ransomware software to criminals in exchange for a portion of the paid ransoms.

In contrast to Franz’s statement, representatives for US allies in the European Union and the UK focused their remarks on the threat posed by Moscow, with the UK pointing out that Russia was using offensive and malicious cyber-attacks against Ukraine alongside its illegal invasion.

“It’s incomprehensible to give a speech about threats in cyberspace and not mention Russia and it’s delusional to think this will turn Russia and the FSB [the Russian security agency] into our friends,” said James Lewis, a veteran cyber expert formerly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. “They hate the US and are still mad about losing the cold war. Pretending otherwise won’t change this.”

The US policy change has also been established behind closed doors.

A recent memo at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) set out new priorities for the agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security and monitors cyber threats against US critical infrastructure. The new directive set out priorities that included China and protecting local systems. It did not mention Russia.

A person familiar with the matter who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity said analysts at the agency were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency.

The person said work that was being done on something “Russia-related” was in effect “nixed”.

And, again, this happened before the ambush yesterday.

Eight years ago, as Mueller’s prosecutors started to focus on Roger Stone’s possible implication in a hacking conspiracy with Russia, Trump declared that he was going to partner with Putin; Russia and the US would jointly guard things like elections.

Now, Trump has chosen to unilaterally disarm.

Yesterday, Roger Sollenberger unpacked the Gitub of one of Elon’s boys, Jordan Wick.

 

In addition to his AI start-up, AccelerateX (which Wired wrote about), Wick has been fiddling with:

  • Tracking government employees by union status
  • Downloading Xitter DMs
  • Identifying open source data on submarine cables, ports, and mineral deposits

Sure, the utility of some of that — tracking union status — maps right onto the Project 2025 plans DOGE is purportedly implementing, even if that, plus the DM download, raise grave concerns about privacy.

But the submarine cables too?

Even as Donald Trump has made his fealty to Putin clear, even as his Director of National Intelligence parrots Russian disinformation (protected now by the FBI), Elon Musk has been vacuuming up all the data of all the government. And every claim that he’s been modernizing networks or searching for fraud have fallen apart.

At this point, we simply cannot rule out deliberate wholesale sabotage.

Update: Thought I’d repost what I wrote in December in response to Kimberly Strassel complaining about Trump’s useful idiot picks.

But I don’t doubt that the rat-fucker wing of Trump’s advisory team believes that Bobby and Tulsi do accomplish something. The question is whether some really smart politicos believe it’ll be a good thing to kill children and give dictators America’s secrets and let the richest men in the world destroy America’s banking system and the dollar exchange — whether they believe this will win lasting approval from America’s great disaffected masses. It might well! It certainly will expand the pool of disaffected Americans, and with it, increase the market for a strong man to respond to it all.

Or whether there’s some reason Trump is tempting Republican Senators to defy his plans to do great damage to the United States. Perhaps he intends to dare them to start defying him in bulk.

Or perhaps the rat-fucker wing of Trump’s entourage simply has an unknown reason they want to destroy America. Maybe Trump has other election debts — debts he’d get in more trouble for ignoring — that make him amenable to dropping policy bomb after policy bomb on America’s children.

But that’s sort of the point. You’ve got Kimberly Strassel up in arms because Trump is going to the mat for a conspiracist with a Democratic name who’ll get children killed. But it’s more likely to do with the policy bombs that RFK will help Trump drop than the specific conversations that led Bobby Jr to drop out of the race.

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Four Years and Five Weeks

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Trump announces the end of the transatlantic alliance

First it was Emmanuel Macron, putting his hand on Trump’s knee as he publicly corrected Trump in the Oval Office, in the presence of cameras, on the fact that Europe’s contributions to support Ukraine were (a) grants, not loans, and (b) larger than the contributions made by the US. Trump, in turn, tried to toss out his well-worn talking points, but the damage was done. Trump was called out by a foreign leader as a liar, in his very own office and seat of power.

Then it was Keir Starmer, waving a fancy invitation from King Charles to a state dinner, who did exactly the same thing. He publicly corrected Trump in the Oval Office, in the presence of cameras, on Europe’s support for Ukraine. Again, Trump hemmed and hawwed, and embraced the (Starmer: “unprecedented!”) invitation to a second state visit, but the damage was done. Trump was called out by a second foreign leader as a liar, in his very own office and seat of power.

You had to know this would not sit well.

As network after network played the clip of Macron’s hand on Trump’s knee, after all the networks showed Trump fawning over the Bright Shiny Thing that Starmer dangled in front of him, as Starmer very politely called Trump a liar, everyone knew that this would not end well.

And today, it was Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s turn . . . and as anyone with half a brain could anticipate, it *did* not end well.

Personally, I was amused by J.D. Vance’s holier-than-thou whining about Zelenskyy making a benign appearance in Pennsylvania saying “thank you” to the US for their support and calling it Election Interference. I don’t remember Vance taking up umbrage when the head of DOGE Elon Musk appeared and spoke at the national political rally of the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany (AfD) party just days ahead of the recent German election, and who repeatedly praised the AfD via Xitter. After the AfD came in second, with a sizable caucus in the new Bundestag, Musk called the head of the AfD to offer congratulations and called her party the future of Germany, and Vance’s reaction was *crickets*.

Well, to be scrupulously fair, that’s not true. He *did* say something, but rather than condemning such interference, Vance joined it. At the Munich Security Conference, Vance praised the AfD (not by name but by lauding their political positions on immigration and other policies) and attacked mainstream German political parties for refusing to work with the AfD.

Americans might not have been listening to all of this, but the Europeans were – especially the Germans – and they knew exactly who Vance was praising. After the German elections, the victorious chancellor-elect made a stunning statement. From Deutsche Welle:

After his party’s victory in the election was confirmed Sunday night, [CDU party leader Friedrich] Merz said that he wanted to work on creating unity in Europe as quickly as possible, “so that, step by step, we can achieve independence from the US.”

Until recently, this would have been a highly unusual thing for any leader of the CDU to say. After all, it has always had a strong affinity for the US.

“Merz aligns himself with the legacy of historical CDU leaders such as [former chancellors] Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, both of whom played pivotal roles in strengthening transatlantic relations,” said Evelyn Gaiser, a policy advisor on transatlantic relationships and NATO with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German think tank that is associated with but independent of the Christian Democrats.

[snip]

Merz spoke out after JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) in February, in which the US vice president said that the biggest threat to Europe did not come from Russia or China, but “from within.”

“This is really now the change of an era,” Merz said on stage at the MSC. “If we don’t hear the wake-up call now, it might be too late for the entire European Union.”

Add this into the context of withdrawing from the World Health Organization and eliminating all the work done by USAID, and the message is crystal clear. While yes, this meeting today in the Oval Office was about Ukraine, it was really a sign of something much much larger.

In April 2021, when Joe Biden addressed a joint session of Congress in a non-State of the Union address, he said this:

I’ve often said that our greatest strength is the power of our example – not just the example of our power. And in my conversations with world leaders – many I’ve known for a long time – the comment I hear most often is: we see that America is back – but for how long?

We now know the answer: four years and five weeks.

RIP the Transatlantic Alliance (1945-2025).

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Russ Vought Got His Trauma — But Not the Villains He Imagined

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This story, about a Biden-to-Trump voter in rural Michigan who got fired in the probationary worker purge, caused a bit of controversy on Bluesky. After personalizing Ryleigh Cooper, describing her educational successes and her struggles to conceive a child, the story described how Trump’s empty promise to make IVF free was one of the things (the other being high costs) that led Cooper, after a 15-minute struggle in the voting booth, to vote for Trump instead of Kamala Harrs.

Cooper did not want to think about what happened three months prior but her mind went there anyway. To the voting booth in Baldwin’s town hall, where she filled out every part of the ballot before turning to the box that said “Presidential.” She recalled staring at it for 15 minutes.

She did not want to vote for Trump. Cooper hated what he said about women and hated how he treated them. Her family always said the women who accused the president of sexual assault had either made it up or deserved it. Cooper heard them and kept her own experience a secret, thinking that they might feel the same way about her.

She voted for Joe Biden in 2020, her first time casting a ballot in a presidential election. But life felt more complicated these days. Her mortgage was too expensive, groceries were nearly $400 a month, and one single cycle of IVF could cost more than 10 percent of her annual household income.

Trump, at a campaign stop an hour and a half south of her, had promised to make IVF free. She knew that from a video clip she saw on TikTok. And she had believed him.

A number of lefties argue that Cooper got what she voted for and is due no sympathy.

Even ignoring basic humanity, they’re missing how people decide to vote, and so also how people might choose to fight fascism.

They vote based on what their close families and friends do and say. As the piece notes, people in Baldwin, MI — one of the poorest towns in MI — are predominantly Trump people.

Most people in Baldwin like Trump; more than 62 percent in Lake County, which includes the town, voted for him in November and in 2020. But people don’t talk about it. Politics here, at least until recently, felt removed from everyday worries.

That’s not surprising. Baldwin is at the edge of a large swath of National Forest. I’ve driven through, at least twice; the area is pretty, but I drove through on the way to places on Lake Michigan that are beautiful, and so attract wealthy outsiders like Pete Buttigieg and tourism dollars (Baldwin is about an hour closer to Traverse City than to Grand Rapids). The area is focused on forestry and outdoor activities like hunting and fishing (a lovely bike trail ends in Baldwin). Cycling close to there once, I remember the discomfort of hearing people shooting on property sporting a Confederate flag flying right next to the bike trail.

There are news outlets close, in Big Rapids and Cadillac. But there’s not much substantive news, which may be why the piece describes that people don’t talk about politics. The article describes Cooper accessing two kinds of information: the “news” about Trump’s promise to make IVF free, which she found on TikTok, and Facebook posts from her grandmother and a former teacher parroting right wing lines.

She thought about the Facebook posts she had seen a few days earlier.

“It’s February 3,” her grandmother posted, “and we’re going in the right direction.”

“Any government employee who is afraid of transparency,” wrote the man who taught her AP government class in high school, “is a criminal!”

Cooper knew the people in her life meant well, but she wanted her future to be different from theirs. She had grown up watching her family struggle as her mother lost one job, then another, then another. She was just a few months shy of her graduate degree and close to a promotion that could nearly double her salary. Even $50,000 or $60,000 a year, she thought, could help get her a house a few counties over, with better schools.

Aside from her gender, Cooper is the kind of person who voted for Trump because they consume little real news but instead rely on algorithmic garbage, the kind of person who based her vote on a single TikTok post.

Even still, as a number of people on Bluesky noted, the two topics on which Cooper was misinformed, the veracity of Trump’s promise for free IVF and his claim to have nothing to do with Project 2025, were left unchallenged by a great many purportedly factual news outlets. And unless she got her undergraduate degree at Ferris State in Big Rapids, there’s a decent chance she was away at college when she voted for Biden in 2020 (Michigan State, along with some schools further north and in the UP, offer Forestry programs).

The reason why the United States is so polarized — the reason why Cooper is mostly surrounded by people who support Trump and therefore is statistically likely to rely on Trump voters’ opinion to decide how to vote — is because there’s little circulation between increasingly polarized urban and rural areas. She lives in Baldwin because her family does; she worked in forestry because that’s what the local industry is. Cooper’s isolation is the problem we need to fix, not the person we need to abandon.

And this story, the stories of thousands of people like her, are the quickest way to do that.

After all, I’m betting that her grandmother and AP government teacher didn’t think she’d be targeted by Trump’s cuts. She’s not an arrogant academic, she’s someone who made good by going to college and starting a graduate degree. I’m betting neither thinks she’s a criminal, either.

There’s a quote from Russ Vought that has been cited frequently, especially in the wake of Elon Musk’s five bullet email demand last week. Vought described how he wanted to traumatize people he labeled as “bureaucrats.”

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.”

But Vought not only wanted to traumatize people he called bureaucrats, he wanted to turn them into villains.

With regards to the trauma, Vought has undoubtedly succeeded, possibly beyond his wildest dreams. Cooper’s story has already been matched by hundreds and thousands of others reported all over the country. The people who are left in government are waiting for the next blow, struggling to make sense of guidance that changes from minute to minute, paranoid that Musk’s boys are spying on their work emails.

But Vought’s effort to turn government workers into villains has largely backfired.

To be sure, several efforts to villainize workers have succeeded. Complaints about Musk’s disinformation targeting USAID appear throughout court declarations and interviews, such as this one submitted by “Diane Doe” in the AFSA lawsuit.

7. The following days maintained high levels of uncertainty, we tried to focus our team on continuing to analyze our portfolio to align with the America First agenda. It started to slowly become evident that the Administration was targeting USAID. For example, many tweets on X from Elon Musk attack USAID which made it clear that these actions had nothing to do with actually reviewing programs.

8. On Friday, January 31st through media posts many of us learned that the goal was in fact to abolish USAID. The level of chaos and uncertainty has been menacing since then. We thought the entire weekend our Mission Director was going to be recalled without cause. Our website where people could go to learn facts about our work disappeared. The social media attacks against USAID escalated to alleging us to be criminals, comparing us to worms, bragging about putting us through a wood chipper, and publishing false headlines about USAID’s work (the worst of which may be accusing USAID of manufacturing bio weapons including COVID-19). The online campaign against USAID has been unfounded and slanderous

10. Since then, as of February 6th 2025 we have received no official orders or travel authorizations, but have been told to continue to plan our immediate departure. Elon Musk and elected officials continue to misrepresent USAID on social media by sharing false information. I would also like to note that despite media talking points, life saving aid has still not been given a waiver. Our PEPFAR programs are still stalled.

11. I have not slept in days. I am not eating. This insanely rapid upheaval of USAID and its personnel has been appalling and sickening. Our country that we have served honorably has been turned against us. I sit by my phone fearing every email. The entire experience is traumatic and continues to be so. We are being treated unfairly and unjustly despite dedicating our lives to public service.

[snip]

15. The head of Congress in the country I am serving responded to Musk’s tweets by saying that they would be investigating USAID and their staff. This has put our safety and security at risk. Additionally, due to the online attack campaign against USAID and the threatening comments to posts the U.S. does not feel safe to return to.

And the far right has built on years of success villainizing the lead scapegoats for this fascist effort, trans people. Don Moynihan wrote up how the NYT, even after disavowing its past propaganda against trans people, adopted the frame set by Libs of TikTok and Christopher Rufo when they misrepresented NSA chat logs to claim the workers were engaged in wild deviance during work hours.

The bigger issue is that a political activist has a direct pipeline into everything government employees are saying, even platforms that are supposed to include sensitive security messages. Who leaked the information?

The bigger issue is that the DNI fired these employees without even a hint of due process.

The bigger issue is that these employees were targeted and fired because they were trans.

It is simply impossible to believe that a group of White male analysts would have been peremptorily fired for engaging in what their Commander in Chief has deemed “locker room talk.” The political activist being mocked, LibsofTikTok, were known for their anti-trans activism. That is why she was being mocked in the first place.

The political activist who broke the story, Chris Rufo, also mischaracterizes much of the discussion: he presents shared advice about transition surgeries and related medical issues as sexually deviant fetishes, leading to headlines like this in right-wing media:

Pink News analyzed the leaked chats and characterized the discussions as “honest and open accounts of various LGBTQ+ topics and experiences, many of them apparently written by trans employees and offered up as useful advice for colleagues.” People outside the trans community may have different levels of comfort with these discussions, but the context is that Rufo and others have consistently fed a stereotype of trans people as dangerous deviants. You don’t have to condone what the employees did to realize that the accusations of deviance are being used here in a way that would never be the case for other employees.

None of this is about security. Not really. It is about purging certain people and identities from public life. Whatever you think about trans people, you should be disturbed by this. If you are familiar with the Lavender Scare — when gay people were purged from government positions in the 1940s to 1960s — you probably know it as a cautionary tale from an intolerant past. A tale of moral panic and persecutions not to be repeated. But it is being repeated.

[snip]

Time and again Rufo’s harassment campaigns have worked because institutions and the media go along with one story he is telling — that he is battling institutional corruption — while deliberately ignoring another story he is telling about a campaign to purge certain ideas and people from public life.

I in no way want to diminish the effect of years of demonization of trans people, though even there, I hope the contributions trans men and women have made to the military, as Pete Hegseth tries to claim they’re disqualified to work in his DOD, undercuts this campaign. We’re about to hear 4,000 stories about the contributions trans people have made to keeping America safe. Let’s be ready to elevate those stories.

Plus, several things are happening that have dulled the effect of Elon Musk’s normally fine-tuned machine for fascism.

First, Elon and his mob have too many targets, with a focus shifting between lawyers and NGOs organizing the resistance, a wildly mismanaged Jeffrey Epstein disinformation effort yesterday as alleged sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate arrived in the US, judges, not to mention Trump’s old villains from his investigations. You need some modicum of focus — and usually more concerted attention from Trump than he has given so far — to fully demonize a person.

And these campaigns are misfiring. Elon Musk’s targeting of a woman who shares the last name of Norm Eisen, who has launched some of the more aggressive lawsuits against Trump’s abuses, misidentified the person in question.

Elon Musk falsely accused prominent lawyer and CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen of leading a “crime family” after he discovered a woman with the same last name who worked for an organization that accepted funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The only problem? The woman, Tamar Eisen, is no relation to Norm Eisen.

On X, Musk amplified a post which falsely stated that Tamar, an employee of the nonprofit National Democratic Institute, was the CNN personality’s daughter.

The post took aim at the elder Eisen for being “the mastermind behind a slew of lawsuits” that seek to stifle the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s gutting of USAID.

Tamar Eisen, the post alleged, “was strutting her stuff as a Program Officer for the NDI’s Gender, Women and Democracy team for almost three years.”

Musk wrote in response Thursday afternoon: “The Eisen crime family.”

Yet the two have no familial connection, a source familiar told the Daily Beast.

The guy in a Project Veritas video that Lee Zeldin has used in a corrupt campaign to criminalize green programs has, according to Mark Zaid, no tie to the disbursements Zeldin has targeted.

Meanwhile, the former EPA official in the Project Veritas video, Brent Efron, was contacted last week by the EPA’s inspector general’s office and on Monday by an FBI agent from Washington at the request of Miami federal prosecutor Joshua Paster, deputy chief of an asset forfeiture unit with the southern district of Florida, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Miami office is at least the third U.S. attorney’s office asked to take part in the investigation. It was not clear if Paster would remain on the case, the person said.

Spokespeople for the U.S. attorney’s offices in D.C. and Miami declined to comment.

Efron’s lawyer, Mark Zaid, said in an interview that his client “doesn’t know what this is about, and that he was never involved in the obligation or disbursement of funds from any EPA assistance program, including NCIF and CCIA [held at Citibank]. And he was not involved in any conversations about EPA and Citibank.”

Some of these misfires will just fizzle out as they’re replaced by new chosen villains. But some of them could blow up in spectacular (and useful) fashion, especially if Ed Martin — currently the Acting US Attorney but aspiring to win confirmation for the job by the Senate — judge-shopped until he got a warrant using the video to try to claw back $20 billion in funds.

Meanwhile, as Elon strikes out at everyone who crosses his path (including judges whose actions he seems to barely understand), both the national press like this WaPo story but also the local press continues to tell the stories of the people DOGE has fired. One I’m partial to (in part because I understand how a passion for the Great Lakes unifies the two parties) is this story about how the firings of some Fish and Wildlife personnel stationed a half hour away from Cooper may halt the effort to rid the Great Lakes of nasty lamprey eels (if you don’t know what a lamprey eel looks like, click through for the picture).

Over the weekend, 14 US Fish & Wildlife Service employees who implement the program — most if not all of them based in Ludington and Marquette — were fired in a nationwide purge that some have dubbed “The Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

On top of that, the agency has been forbidden from hiring dozens of seasonal workers needed to dose Great Lakes rivers with lamprey-killing chemicals, prompting officials who oversee the program to question whether it can function at all.

[snip]

The program costs US taxpayers more than $20 million annually, and in return it protects a multibillion-dollar fishery from an eel-like invader that entered the Great Lakes on manmade shipping canals more than a century ago.

A single lamprey can consume 40 pounds of fish annually by attaching to the animals’ skin with razor-sharp teeth, slowly draining their fluids. The Great Lakes ecosystem was in collapse by 1957, when scientists discovered a chemical compound called TMF that kills lamprey while sparing other species.

Today, the fishery commission contracts with the Fish & Wildlife Service to dose hundreds of rivers with TMF each year. As a result, lamprey populations are down about 90% from historical averages. But recent history offers a window into the risk of a lapse in treatments.

The story also focuses on other Forest personnel fired along with Cooper.

“These aren’t … quote-unquote bureaucrats,” Vanderheuel said. “They’re people who get their hands dirty and make sure the trails are cleared so you can ride your ATV. They clean your campgrounds. All the paint on the trees that people see? These are the guys and gals who paint the trees so we can sell timber.”

There are stories like this in every locality. People are saying, “these aren’t … quote-unquote bureaucrats,” in every locality.

The first and second batch of firings has already created a surge in stories portraying people Vought calls bureaucrats as, instead, people’s neighbors, neighbors who perform valuable functions that taxpayers have paid for. These people aren’t villains — they’re the ones protecting us from lamprey eels, cancer, and hurricanes. And by firing them, Elon has made it visible to a lot of people who didn’t know that that is what the federal government is about.

Even the USAID cuts — thought to be among the hardest thing to defend — are eliciting rich profiles of people affected, at least overseas, like this FT profile of both a patient at one of the South African HIV clinics shut down, and the network of people who contributed to its work. In short order, the stories will be a lot more dire, depicting the large number of children that Marco Rubio let die, possibly even examples of potentially violent backlash against America for not paying money owed to local partners.

The US government has, for decades, allowed its work to remain invisible to taxpayers, even as those taxpayers relied on programs to support their lifestyle and even to feed their kids. That invisibility made it easy for goons like Vought, Stephen Miller, and Elon Musk to villainize anonymous government workers.

But even as the richest man in the world finds new ways to terrorize people while demanding big tax cuts and $2.4 billion contracts — a villain every bit as ugly as a lamprey eel — he is creating a flood of stories about the people, your neighbors, who provide the services you may not have realized came from the government.

It is, to my mind, an insane waste of time for self-imagined lefties to complain that newspapers are telling the story of Ryleigh Cooper. Not only is the firing spree we’re seeing an unprecedented attack on the American way of life, one that can and almost certainly will disrupt prior patterns of political formation, meaning whatever influence you think her firing will have on her future politicization is without past precedent. But whatever you think about the past choices Ryleigh Cooper made, she is the daughter of a local community that had a wildly distorted understanding of government — even from her AP government teacher! — before Elon’s firings made government visible in a new way. It may be too little or too late, but changing that understanding is a necessary precondition to trying to reverse the damage.

And making Ryleigh Cooper’s story a localized way to portray what government did, before Elon interrupted it, is an irreplaceable way to do that.

More importantly, no lefty should spend their time trying to make Ryleigh Cooper a villain: That’s precisely what the fascists have, explicitly, set out to do.

Update: Fixed my reference to Biden instead of Harris in first paragraph.

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Elon Musk’s AI-bola and Marco Rubio’s Very Busy Month

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Trump had a ritual humiliation session yesterday he billed as a Cabinet Meeting. One purpose of it was to perform complaisance with DOGE [sic]. Trump had Elon lie about his accomplishments and goal, and then invited Cabinet Members to speak up publicly about problems with him, which of course all declined to do.

And obviously, that can only be done with the support of everyone in this room. And I’d like to thank everyone for — for your support. Thank you very much this. This — this can only be done with — with your support.

So, this is — it’s really — DOGE is a support function for the president and for the — the agencies and departments to help achieve those savings and to effect- — effectively find 15 percent in reduction in fraud and — and waste.

And — and we bring the receipts. So, people say, like, “Well, is this real?” Just go to DOGE.gov. We l- — we — line item by line item, we specify each item. So — and w- — and I — I should say, we — also, we will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly.

So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled, very briefly, was Ebola — Ebola prevention. I think we all wanted Ebola prevention. So, we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.

But we do need to move quickly if we’re — if we’re to achieve a trillion-dollar deficit reduction in tw- — in — in financial year 2026. It requires saving $4 billion per day, every day from now through the end of September. But we can do it, and we will do it.

Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, do you have any questions of Elon while we’re on the subject of DOGE? Because we’ll finish off with that. And if you would have any questions, please ask — you could ask me or Elon.

Go ahead, please.

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Mr. Musk. I just wanted to ask you, the — President Trump put out a Truth Social today saying that everybody in the Cabinet was — was happy with you. I just wondered if that — if you had heard otherwise, and if you had heard anything about members of the Cabinet who weren’t happy with the way things were going. And if so, what are you doing to address those — any dissatisfaction?

MR. MUSK: To the best of —

THE PRESIDENT: Hey, Elon, let the Cabinet speak just for a second. (Laughter.)

Is anybody unhappy with Elon? If you are, we’ll throw them out of here. (Laughter.) Is anybody unhappy? (Applause.)

They are — they have a lot of respect for Elon and that he’s doing this. And some disagree a little bit, but I will tell you, for the most part, I think everyone is not only happy, they’re thrilled.

The Ebola line — one Marco Rubio did not contest — got a ton of press.

But WaPo’s story — describing that Elon’s claimed restoration was a lie — got far less.

Yet current and former USAID officials said that Musk was wrong: USAID’s Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved last month to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments, they said. The teams and contractors that would be deployed to fight an Ebola outbreak have been dismantled, they added. While the Trump administration issued a waiver to allow USAID to respond to an Ebola outbreak in Uganda last month, partner organizations were not promptly paid for their work, and USAID’s own efforts were sharply curtailed compared to past efforts to fight Ebola outbreaks.

“There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention” of Ebola and other diseases, said Nidhi Bouri, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration and oversaw the agency’s response to health-care outbreaks.

Last month’s Ebola outbreak has now receded, but some former U.S. officials say that’s in part because of past investments in prevention efforts that helped position Uganda to respond — and that other countries remain far more vulnerable.

Bouri said her former USAID team of 60 people working on disease-response had been cut to about six staffers as of earlier this week. She called the recent USAID response to Uganda’s Ebola outbreak a “one-off,” far diminished from “the full suite” of activities that the agency historically would mount, such as ramping up efforts to monitor whether the disease had spread to neighboring countries.

“The full spectrum — the investments in disease surveillance, the investments in what we mobilize … moving commodities, supporting lab workers — that capacity is now a tenth of what it was,” Bouri said.

[snip]

“We have the programs and the people who were working on Ebola and other deadly-disease prevention capacity in other countries not able to do their jobs because their work is frozen, and many of the people have been put on administrative leave,” said Cameron, who worked on biosecurity efforts in the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. “And we have a response that is, at best, less efficient, because the implementers are not able to get reliably paid.” [my emphasis]

This is consistent with what people have been claiming in court declarations (in this case from a Controller stationed overseas) for weeks: even where State/USAID claims to have sustained a program, it was nevertheless gutted through non-payment and staffing cuts.

8. Every single payment that I tried unsuccessfully to process after January 27 was for an expense incurred before January 20. Most of the payments I have been trying to process were for expenses incurred in November or December of 2024. These included large payments to partners who bill us every month for the work performed in the previous month, as well as smaller administrative items like cell phone and other utility payments, travel reimbursements, and rental payments.

9. On February 3, the situation changed yet again. As of that date, every time I tried to hit the “certify” button to begin a disbursement, I received an error message stating that I did not have authority to proceed. I contacted Phoenix Security to inquire if there was a technical problem in the system and was told “on Friday January 31, we were instructed to remove the ability to certify payments.” They did not indicate who instructed them, only stating “Unfortunately I am unable to reverse this decision.”

10. On February 5, all USAID controllers received another diplomatic cableindicating that USAID personnel could no longer process payments themselves but must request approval from a Senior Bureau Officer before forwarding the payment packages for processing. However, as of February 11, nobody can agree on who is the appropriate SBO for USAID payments and the State Department hasn’t processed a single payment based on the new procedure.

11. As of February 9, when I try to log into Phoenix, I receive a new error message stating that my sign-in attempt has failed. I have even less access to Phoenix after the February 7 court order than I did before that date.

[snip]

13. I have not been able to process payments under any of the waivers included in the January 24 cable, including legitimate expenses incurred prior to January 24 under existing awards or those for employee operating expenses. Though the waivers exist on paper, in reality all USAID funds have remained frozen because of technological barriers added to the system, I don’t know by whom. Phoenix will not let us disburse anything.

The people who pay the bills have all been forced out of payment systems. And it’s not clear whether DOGE [sic] broke the system or simply disabled it (a Matt Bai report I find suspect, but which plaintiffs have now cited in court filings, says it’s the latter).

The first of these USAID cases — on Judge Amir Ali’s order to halt freezes of such funding — landed before SCOTUS last night; the government’s request to vacate Ali’s order presents a wildly misleading description of the posture of the case.

It also wails mightily about plaintiffs’ request to conduct discovery, including by deposing Marco Rubio.

Worse, this order exposes the government to the risk of contempt proceedings and other sanctions. Agency leadership has determined that the ordered payments “cannot be accomplished in the time allotted by the” district court. App., infra, 97a. That risk is especially concerning because the district court appears poised to require mini-trials, discovery, and depositions of senior officials as to whether a host of foreign-aid decisions genuinely rested on the government’s conceded discretionary authority to terminate contracts and grants, or were instead supposed pretexts for a blanket foreign-aid cut that the district court considers unlawful. See id. at 141a (respondents’ proposed discovery plan) (requesting deposition of Secretary of State) Respondents are pressing even further, demanding discovery into personnel actions, payment-processing protocols, and other agency actions that have nothing to do with their original APA claims challenging a categorical funding pause. The threat of invasive discovery into senior officials’ subjective motivations only exacerbates the Article II harms inflicted by the court’s order.

Or perhaps it wails mightily about being called on a claim made below: That Marco Rubio has been personally involved in all this.

After Judge Ali first issued a TRO, State offered a new claimed basis for the freeze: that State was in the process of canceling the contracts via clauses within the contracts, applied individually. It claimed that the reduced staff of State reviewed every contract and decided whether to keep or eliminate it.

And according to multiple declarations from Pete Marocco, Marco Rubio was personally involved in all of that.

5. USAID led a rigorous multi-level review process that began with spreadsheets including each contract, grant, or funding instrument where each line of the spreadsheeting reflected one such agreement and included information about the recipient, the amount of the award, the subject matter, and a description of the project that often included the location of the project. Policy staff first performed a first line review to determine whether the individual agreement was in line with foreign policy priorities (and therefore could potentially be continued) or not (and presumptively could be terminated as inconsistent with Agency priorities and the national interest). Those recommendations were reviewed by a senior policy official to confirm that, for awards recommended for termination, that ending the program was consistent with the foreign policy of the United States and the operations and priorities of the Agency. The results of that review were routed to me for further review, including of institutional and diplomatic equities. As one example, a presumptively terminated agreement might be continued for a variety of foreign policy reasons, such as the location of the project or the general subject matter, or the judgment and foreign policy perspectives of the second line reviewer. Termination recommendations approved by me ultimately received the Secretary of State’s review. The Secretary of State’s personal involvement confirmed that termination decisions were taken with full visibility into the unique diplomatic, national security, and foreign policy interests at stake vis-à-vis foreign assistance programs. [my emphasis]

Just in time to rush this to the Supreme Court, Marocco claimed that Rubio had finished his decision-making.

Since last night when I executed a declaration, the process for individually reviewing each outstanding State Department grant and federal assistance award obligation has concluded. Secretary Rubio has now made a final decision with respect to each such award, affirmatively electing to either retain the award or terminate as inconsistent with the national interests and foreign policy of the United States. State is processing termination letters with the goal to reach substantial completion within the next 24-48 hours. Notification letters will be distributed for retained awards withing 2 weeks to take account of the overseas lag. In total, approximately 4,100 awards were terminated, and approximately 2,700 awards were retained. Of approximately 711 contracts originally paused, approximately 297 still need to be reviewed; the remainder have either been terminated or resumed. Defendants are committed to fully moving forward with the remaining awards and programs that Secretary Rubio has determined to retain.

A Contracting Officer submitted a declaration yesterday explaining how “implausible” the claim of personal involvement from Rubio is.

36. As a CO who manages a portfolio of less than 50 awards, the claims of “individual reviews” by Secretary Rubio are completely implausible. Contracts and awards are lengthy, technical, and complicated documents. They often include technical specifications that are dozens of pages long, as well as lengthy technical appendices. It would take a single person weeks and weeks of work to substantively review hundreds of contracts and awards, especially if that person was not already familiar with the programs at issue. For example, when the Agency asked COs to review the Scopes of Work and Program Descriptions contained in our awards to determine whether provisions regarding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion were incorporated, it took me and my team a week to review fewer than 50 awards. Not only did we have a team of people doing this work, but these were awards which I manage and have significant foundational knowledge about.

37. Beyond that, without consulting the COs and CORs/OARs who manage a specific contract or award, it would be impossible in most cases to understand whether a specific award could be terminated, effective immediately, without incurring even greater termination costs or causing even greater harms to the national interest or Agency priorities. For example, the COs and CORs/OARs have specific information about the status of ongoing work, whether immediate termination would incur sunk costs (for example, by allowing already-purchased food and medicine to expire), whether immediate termination would risk the health or safety of Agency personnel or implementing partners, among many other award-specific factors.

Rubio’s recent schedule makes that all the more implausible. For six days after the original stay, Rubio was traveling.

Secretary Rubio is on travel to Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates from February 13-19, 2025.

He had nothing but briefings on his schedule on February 20. But then he had two high level meetings on February 21. More high level meetings, including with President Macron, on Monday. A meeting with the Saudi Defense Minister Tuesday. And the aforementioned Cabinet Meeting yesterday, where Rubio didn’t speak up to correct Elon’s false claim about Ebola. Rubio did, however, blow off EU foreign policy minister Kaja Kallas yesterday, avoiding a discussion about Ukraine. Today, Keir Starmer visits.

Even with the canceled Kallas meeting, though, Rubio simply had no time —  especially not blocks of time that fell into the periods when Pete Marocco claims these decisions were made — to review the contracts in depth.

State needs to claim Rubio had personal involvement in rescinding these contracts. But it is virtually impossible that he did, much less that he had meaningful input on it.

What is far more likely is that Elon’s AI reviewed these contracts, and State is claiming that the work of that AI is instead the considered conclusion of the Senate-confirmed Secretary of State.

No wonder DOJ panicked when plaintiffs said they wanted to depose the people who made the decisions (a request Judge Ali has not endorsed).

Someone just shut down the bulk of foreign aid, purportedly with the personal involvement of the Secretary of the State. But that very same Secretary of State sat silent when Elon Musk falsely claimed that State was still funding Ebola prevention.

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How a (Thus Far Unsuccessful) Lawsuit Caused Elon Musk’s OPM Email to Faceplant

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Chris Geidner did a post over the weekend explaining the importance of being litigious. He described how just forcing the Administration to defend itself, on the record and in public, can lead to wins down the road.

The reality of litigation challenging the Trump administration is that it isn’t all going to win.

That’s OK.

Forcing the administration to defend its actions, on the record and in public, is important.

The mere fact of litigating can change implementation of policy to improve its application to those affected. Even a loss can advance awareness about oppressive steps being taken by the administration. And, multiple strategies might be taken to challenge certain actions, some of which will be more successful than others.

From a litigation perspective, in other words, not suing is sometimes “obeying in advance.” Actions need to be challenged. If a key aspect of what President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and others are doing right now is seeing what they can get away with — and what they can convince people that they can do — then a key part of pushing back against that needs to be challenging everything that can be challenged.

In short: Force them to work for it.

OPM’s cave-in-process on Elon Musk’s respond-or-resign email is a very good example.

Multiple agencies are now instructing employees that, contrary to what Elon said (and Trump appeared to reiterate in presser), responding is optional.

The reason why they’re doing so is virtually certainly due to this lawsuit, filed by Kel McClanahan (here’s his website, if you want to support his work). Its theory was a bit different than a lot of other lawsuits: he argued that OPM was violating its own standards under the E-Government Act mandating the existence and substance of a Privacy Impact Assessment before collecting new information.

46. OPM is an agency subject to the E-Government Act because it is an “establishment in the executive branch of the Government.” 47. A PIA for a “new collection of information” must be “commensurate with the size of the information system being assessed, the sensitivity of information that is in an identifiable form in that system, and the risk of harm from unauthorized release of that information.” The PIA must specifically address “(I) what information is to be collected; (II) why the information is being collected; (III) the intended use of the agency of the information; (IV) with whom the information will be shared; (V) what notice or opportunities for consent would be provided to individuals regarding what information is collected and how that information is shared; [and] (VI) how the information will be secured.”

48. The Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) is charged with “oversee[ing] the implementation of the privacy impact assessment processing throughout the Government” and “develop[ing] policies and guidelines or agencies on the conduct of privacy impact assessments.”

49. Accordingly, OMB has clarified the minimum requirements for a PIA and the role of PIAs in an agency’s decision to collect (or to refrain from collecting) personal data.

50. According to OMB, “Agencies shall conduct and draft a PIA with sufficient clarity and specificity to demonstrate that the agency fully considered privacy and incorporated appropriate privacy protections from the earliest stages of the agency activity and throughout the information life cycle.”

After he first filed the lawsuit on January 27, OPM did a (legally insufficient, McClanahan argues) Privacy Impact Assessment.

Although the E-Government Act expressly exempts the email system at issue here, which includes only federal government employees, OPM nevertheless has now prepared a PIA. See Attachment A (executed February 5, 2025). That is the sole relief sought through this litigation, and the sole source of Plaintiffs’ asserted irreparable harm. Because the agency has in fact published a PIA (despite it not being required to do so), this case is moot, and Plaintiffs cannot establish irreparable harm.

That PIA gets around providing advance notice about the email because — it claims — responding to any email is voluntary (Josh Marshall may have been the first to notice this, but I don’t think he realizes this PIA exists solely because of the lawsuit).

4.1, How does the project provide individuals notice prior to the collection of information? If notice is not provided, explain why not.

The names and government email addresses of federal government employees are already housed in OPM systems or provided by employing agencies and, in any event, do not contain substantive information about employees. As a result, there is no reason to provide advance notice for the collection of Employee Contact Data. All individuals are provided advance notice of the Employee Response Data, as it is voluntarily provided by the individuals themselves in response to an email.

4.2, What opportunities are available for individuals to consent to uses, decline to provide information, or opt out of the project?

The Employee Response Data is explicitly voluntary, The individual federal government employees can opt out simply by not responding to the email.

Based on those representations — that OPM has a PIA — as well as questions about standing, Judge Randolph Moss denied a Temporary Restraining Order in the lawsuit.

Mind you, the fact that agencies are only now, ten hours before the purported reply deadline, instructing employees not to respond, as well as the fact that DOJ initially instructed DOJ employees to respond (until it reversed course for confidentiality reasons), may help McClanahan prove standing. Imagine employees who did respond before agencies reversed course? Imagine employees who responded to Trump’s public backing for the email? There’s no reversing their injury, or the good faith belief many federal employees would have had that Trump’s comments could be trusted?

Furthermore, OPM claims that actual government employees have fewer privacy protections than others. The lawsuit already includes five plaintiffs who are not government employees. But the Office of US Courts employees also received this email, a violation of separation of powers.

In the course of one month, then, this lawsuit created a way to undercut Musk’s latest assault on government.

Update: In a new filing, McClanahan reveals he’s seeking sanctions.

On 23 February, Plaintiffs’ undersigned counsel served counsel for Defendant Office of Personnel Management (“OPM”) with a motion for sanctions pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 (“Rule 11”). In the spirit of that rule, Plaintiffs will not elaborate on the content of that motion at this time, other than to say that the allegations are new and relate primarily to OPM’s presentation to the Court of the Privacy Impact Assessment (“PIA”) for the GovernmentWide Email System (“GWES”), which, in light of rapidly unfolding events over the weekend, materially misrepresented the allegedly “voluntary” nature of responses to emails sent using that system,1 coupled with the newly discovered evidence that, as Plaintiffs’ undersigned counsel warned the Court in the 14 February hearing, OPM did not purge the GWES of information about non-Executive Branch employees, but only installed “filters” to keep the emails about the deferred resignation program from being sent to them.

Simply put, OPM sent an email using [email protected] demanding that all employees reply to the email with a list of things they did last week by 11:59 PM on 24 February, and today President Trump stated that if someone does not reply “[they’re] sort of semi-fired or [they’re] fired.” Elon Musk (@elonmusk), X.com (Feb. 24, 2025 1:25 PM), at https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1894091228054261781 (last accessed Feb. 24, 2025).

Update: At about 5:00 (so too late for anything but CYA), HHS sent out guidance on how to respond to the OPM email. It ends with this warning.

Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly.

Update: OPM told everyone, just hours before end of work today, that responding is voluntary.

In an email to its workforce on Monday, the Justice Department said that during a meeting with the interagency Chief Human Capital Officers Council, OPM informed agencies that employee responses to the email are voluntary. OPM also clarified that despite what Musk had posted, a non-response to the email does not equate to a resignation, the email said.

Update: Before he likely oversaw that email warning about malign foreign actors, HHS’ Acting General Counsel raised a bunch of other reasons this email was problematic.

One message on Sunday morning from the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., instructed its roughly 80,000 employees to comply. That was shortly after the acting general counsel, Sean Keveney, had instructed some not to. And by Sunday evening, agency leadership issued new instructions that employees should “pause activities” related to the request until noon on Monday.

“I’ll be candid with you. Having put in over 70 hours of work last week advancing Administration’s priorities, I was personally insulted to receive the below email,” Keveney said in an email viewed by the AP that acknowledged a broad sense of “uncertainty and stress” within the agency.

Keveney laid out security concerns and pointed out some of the work done by the agency’s employees may be protected by attorney-client privilege.

Update: Just hours before the deadline, OPM issued new guidance. Using the word “should,” it says people should respond to their managers and CC OPM.

It also excuses Executive Office of the President — purportedly because of the Presidential Records Act.

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The DOGE Fraud Is Coming from Inside the House

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I questioned yesterday whether DOGE’s epic misrepresentations in its DOGE receipts page,

is simply a reflection of the ignorance of the DOGE boys Musk has infiltrated into government, the shoddiness of the AI tools they’re using, or simply a disinterest in giving a fuck, because once Elon claims this website says something, the right wing will follow along like sheep.

There’s still a lot of reporting to be done, but thus far outlets have shown that DOGE:

  • Took items that added up to $16B and claimed it represented $55B of savings
  • Claimed an $8M savings over a multi-year contract represented $8B total savings
  • Claimed credit for things that happened under Joe Biden, such as lease cancelations and Jimmy Carter’s death
  • Included contracts that haven’t been canceled and ignored costs that such cancelations will necessitate

As I said, thus far, this NPR piece captures how badly the DOGE boys are misunderstanding basic things about federal contracting — and also seeking immediate cuts rather than the kind of gradual reorganization that results in savings over time.

That might support a conclusion that these people are just epically incompetent. Except as DOGE gets caught in its errors, something else is happening: it is attempting to cover up its work.

NYT got a lot of attention calling out the response to one error: DOGE tried to cover up its error.

The DOGE website initially included a screenshot from the federal contracting database showing that the contract’s value was $8 million, even as the DOGE site listed $8 billion in savings. On Tuesday night, around the time this article was published, DOGE removed the screenshot that showed the mismatch, but continued to claim $8 billion in savings. It added a link to the original, incorrect version of the listing showing an $8 billion value.

By Wednesday morning, DOGE had updated its list to show $8 million in savings, though it did not acknowledge the error or explain how it might affect its calculation of total money saved, which remained unchanged. A loss of $8 billion in savings would represent nearly 15 percent of the total savings claimed by DOGE.

A screenshot of the DOGE website, showing $8 billion in savings against an $8 million contract.
A screenshot of the DOGE website on Tuesday. The image showing the $8 million value of the contract was later removed.Credit…The New York Times

Even the $8 million is an upper bound on the amount saved by canceling the contract. Since $2.5 million had already been spent on the contract, according to data on USAspending.gov, that suggests that canceling it saved $5.5 million at most.

This thread, from a pseudonymous person on Xitter whose findings have been corroborated and picked up by others, notes several other attempts to cover up errors:

  • DOGE stopped triple-counting one line item
  • DOGE was claiming credit for the 80% of an IT contract that had already been spent

But having identified systematic problems (which NPR also did), DOGE not only didn’t make those fixes systematically, but it continues to claim it has identified $55B of savings.

This is a government website.

At some point, the continued claim of savings based on systematic errors, the continued claim of $55B in savings, amounts to fraud. Deliberate deception in service of justifying DOGE.

DOGE has found fraud. The fraud it is engaged in in plain sight on its success page.

The DOGE fraud is coming from inside the house.

That, plus some of the court filings submitted in lawsuits, has led me to suspect something else is going on. It’s not, as the very good NPR piece suggests, that Elon’s DOGE boys don’t know what the fuck they’re looking at, though I have no doubt they don’t (I’m also not sure anyone has a basis to assess their coding; Edward “Big Balls” Coristine’s former colleagues mocked his skills when the learned he had joined DOGE).

“There’s no doubt that these young people [Musk] has working for him are very intelligent coders, genius coders, but they’re limited,” retired senior contracting officer Christopher Byrne said, referring to DOGE team members who have apparently been identifying cuts across government agencies. “They don’t understand the processes, they don’t understand how things work, they don’t understand contracts, they don’t understand grants,” Byrne said.

Rather, I think it stems from the fact that Trump (and Project 2025, in the guise of DOGE) are using an existing entity — the United States Digital Service, an entity set up by Barack Obama — to do something entirely different.

Trump first repurposed USDS on his first day in office, with an Executive Order. That order generally called for DOGE to do the kinds of things it had been doing — technological modernization, of the sort smart engineers might be qualified to do.

Sec. 4. Modernizing Federal Technology and Software to Maximize Efficiency and Productivity. (a) The USDS Administrator shall commence a Software Modernization Initiative to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems. Among other things, the USDS Administrator shall work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.

But then on February 11, Trump issued an Executive Order vaguely ordering DOGE to do far more, including firing a shit-ton of people.

To restore accountability to the American public, this order commences a critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy. By eliminating waste, bloat, and insularity, my Administration will empower American families, workers, taxpayers, and our system of Government itself.

[snip]

Reductions in Force. Agency Heads shall promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force (RIFs), consistent with applicable law, and to separate from Federal service temporary employees and reemployed annuitants working in areas that will likely be subject to the RIFs. All offices that perform functions not mandated by statute or other law shall be prioritized in the RIFs, including all agency diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; all agency initiatives, components, or operations that my Administration suspends or closes; and all components and employees performing functions not mandated by statute or other law who are not typically designated as essential during a lapse in appropriations as provided in the Agency Contingency Plans on the Office of Management and Budget website. This subsection shall not apply to functions related to public safety, immigration enforcement, or law enforcement.

Even the declarations submitted in lawsuits reflect this disjunct. Take the February 13 declaration DOGE member Adam Ramada submitted in a lawsuit the University of California Student’s Association filed against the Department of Education. In ¶3 of his declaration, Ramada describes that Trump’s EO authorizes DOGE to “modernize government technology.”

3. On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14,158, redesignating the United States Digital Service as the United States DOGE Service. The E.O. directs the USDS to modernize government technology and software to increase efficiency and productivity and to follow rigorous data protection standards and comply with all relevant laws when accessing unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems. It likewise directs agencies to ensure USDS has full access to all unclassified agency records and software and IT systems.

But the very next paragraph describes that he has been tasked to do something else.

4. I have been detailed to the Department of Education since 28 January 2025 to, among other things, assist the Department of Education with auditing contract, grant, and related programs for waste, fraud, and abuse, including an audit of the Department of Education’s federal student loan portfolio to ensure it is free from, among other things, fraud, duplication, and ineligible loan recipients. In addition, I help senior Department leadership obtain access to accurate data and data analytics to inform their policy decisions at the Department. One other USDS employee is also currently detailed to the Department of Education to assist me.

Later, the same declaration describes the access that six DOGE personnel have to student data as stemming entirely from a hunt for waste, fraud, and abuse.

9. The relevant employees require access to Department of Education information technology and data systems related to student loan programs in order to audit those programs for waste, fraud, and abuse.

An updated Ramada declaration filed February 16 disputed plaintiffs’ claim that 37 people had access to student information by claiming only six people were implementing Trump’s DOGE order(s). But by that point, technological modernization went completely unmentioned. And Ramada added a hunt for contracts that were “inconsistent with leadership’s policy priorities,” something not in his original declaration.

7. I am aware of the list of thirty-seven individuals whom Plaintiff’s counsel “believe have been given access to one or more ED records systems,” according to Plaintiff’s message to Defendants’ counsel on February 15, 2025. As stated above, there are only six of us at the Department whose primary role is implementing the President’s executive order. I am not aware of any DOGE-affiliated individuals other than the six listed above who have been granted access to Department information technology and data systems or who have otherwise received any Department information protected by the Privacy Act or section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code.

8. Thus far, the six of us have primarily worked to identify contracts and grants that are wasteful, abusive, or inconsistent with leadership’s policy priorities.

9. It came to my attention today that one of the six employees referenced above has not yet completed ethics or information security trainings. He has been directed to complete both this week and has indicated that he will do so. [my emphasis]

In other words, Trump used the pre-existing entity focused on technological modernization as a front to — first — hunt things that Elon Musk called fraud but were really just things he could spin out of context to inflame the mob, and then use that paranoia to start firing masses of people and getting rid of DEI.

This has nothing to do with the technical mandate of USDS. Which may be why the former Director of Data Science at USDS resigned Wednesday.

But given DOGE’s failure to show any fraud yet, it likely also has little to do with finding waste, fraud or abuse.

DOGE’s “receipts” page appears to be cover, something to show to credulous Republicans to convince them this effort is in pursuit of something good, a hunt for waste, fraud, and abuse. But hidden within a claim to be pursuing technological modernization which got broadened to incorporate an apparently false claim to be hunting fraud is an effort to cut programs appropriated by Congress at scale.

That’s why DOGE’s receipts page is so shoddy. It’s not that the DOGE boys are not accountants, though they are not. It’s that their function is something other than the EO authorizing their work says it is, and the DOGE receipts page exists solely to sustain the fraud that they’re still pursuing waste, fraud, and abuse.

Update: After posting this and calling on Ron Wyden and Patty Murrray to ask GAO to investigate whether DOGE is committing fraud, I learned that GAO confirmed it opened an investigation (at that point limited to DOGE access to Treasury) requested by Wyden and Elizabeth Warren on February 12.

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DOGE Is Xitter Files for Government

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The other day, Fox News’ Jesse Watters explained the difference between left and right wing messaging.

We are waging a 21st century information warfare campaign against the left and they are using tactics from the 1990s. They are holding tiny press conferences. Tiny little rallies. They’re screaming into the ether on MSNBC. This is what you call top-down command and control. Your talking points, from a newspaper, and you put it on the broadcast network and it disappears.

What you’re seeing on the right is asymmetrical. It’s like grassroots guerrilla warfare. Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it.. and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it. It’s free money. And we’re actually talking about expressing information, they are suppressing information.

Only, Watters left several things out (unless it’s what he meant by “expressing” information, whatever that is). The things Musk retweets are, almost without exception, false. Which means this massive asymmetrical guerrilla warfare feeds just propaganda. And Watters didn’t admit (though he seemed to, on a Fox and Friends broadcast the other day when he confessed to making up the Hamas tie to the Gaza condom hoax) that after these false claims go viral, they get parroted by Trump’s propagandist, Karoline Leavitt, and then Trump himself.

Still (as multiple disinformation experts noted), Watters offered a perfectly timed explanation of the information warfare the right is conducting.

And amid conflicting claims about what Elon’s role in all this is, I would suggest that until someone confesses differently, his primary role is simply a propaganda one: taking excerpted data he totally misunderstands out of context and pushing false claims about it, one that will feed a baseless narrative of corruption.

Mike Masnick described this would happen weeks ago.

Later on, Musk (operating without any clear legal authority or Senate confirmation) made a whole bunch of wildly false claims about USAID, including that it is “a criminal organization,” arguing that it funds all sorts of things it does not (including the idea that it funds “woke prosecutors”), that it’s a “terror organization”, and more. He even claimed it helped fund the creation of COVID-19.

The pattern is familiar: ExTwitter users spin elaborate red-yarn-on-corkboard conspiracy theories, and Musk treats each one as revealed truth. The result is a government increasingly run on paranoid hallucinated fever dreams rather than expertise – imagine NASA’s Apollo Program being handed over to flat-earth conspiracy theorists while the actual engineers are sidelined, and you’ll get the idea.

The danger isn’t just bad policy — it’s the replacement of accountable governance with conspiracy-driven chaos that threatens everything from disaster response to diplomatic relations.

And Renee DiResta described the familiar pattern today.

This is absolutely the Twitter Files for the government.

It’s the same methodology boosted by the same people.

Crawl through a bunch of stuff, find something that seems outrageous, make an online mob lose their minds. Destroy work, upend lives. Get it totally wrong, move to the next thing.

That’s what we’ve seen.

First there was the lie Elon told about condoms in Gaza (as I noted, Watters seemed to confess the other day that he made up the bit about Hamas getting them).

Elon Musk acknowledged Tuesday that there might not have been a federal plan to spend $50 million on condoms for Gaza — two weeks after the White House press secretary told the false story at an official briefing and more than a week after the president baselessly doubled the phony figure to $100 million and said the condoms were going to Hamas.

“Some of the things that I say will be incorrect, and should be corrected,” Musk, the billionaire businessman who is leading a Trump administration initiative they call the Department of Government Efficiency, said when a reporter told him the Gaza story was wrong. “So, nobody’s going to bat a thousand. I mean, any – you know, we will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”

This correction was not particularly quick. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s claim that President Donald Trump had thwarted $50 million in condom funding for Gaza made headlines around the world in late January. Trump kept repeating the story, and inflating the figure, even after media outlets reported it was highly unlikely to be true.

The saga of the imaginary condom aid began when Leavitt announced during her debut White House press briefing on January 28 that Musk’s team and the president’s budget office had “found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza” before Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid. Musk promoted Leavitt’s words on the X social media platform he owns.

Then there was the lie about dead people receiving Social Security checks, an anomaly in Social Security data identified ten years ago and revisited in an Inspector General report released two years ago.

In 2015,3 we reported that SSA had not established controls to annotate death information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies of age 112 or older and were likely deceased. At the time, only 35 known living individuals worldwide were age 112 or older, however, SSA’s Numident included 6.5 million numberholders4 age 112 or older whose record did not contain death information. Therefore, the numberholders’ information did not appear in the full DMF. We recommended SSA add death information to approximately 1.5 million Numident records where the numberholders’ death information appeared in SSA payment records. We also recommended SSA determine whether it could efficiently correct the approximately 5 million remaining records. SSA agreed to explore the legal and technical feasibility, as well as the cost, to establish an automated process to update the millions of Numident records for individuals who appeared to be alive and age 112 or older, but ultimately decided not to update these records.

Social Security decided not to address it because of cost.

In response to our 2015 report, SSA considered multiple options, including adding presumed death information to these Numident records. SSA ultimately decided not to proceed because the “. . . options would be costly to implement, would be of little benefit to the agency, would largely duplicate information already available to data exchange consumers and would create cost for the states and other data exchange partners.”16 SSA also believed a regulation would be required to allow it to add death information to these records, and adding presumed death information to the Numident would increase the risk of inadvertent release of living individuals’ personal information in the DMF.

Now there are the outrageous errors in the DOGE “receipts” page. Thus far, the reporting on this has been inadequate (though Washington Times published a slavering review, which I guess indicates DOGE knows its audience). For example, the NYT dedicated four reporters to call out just the most embarrassing error — that the richest man in the world had mistaken an $8 million payment over a multi-year contract and boasted instead that it represented $8 billion in savings for the two years remaining on the contract.

Daily Beast did a better job, noting not just the order of magnitude error that NYT and others identified, but also that Elon, like Trump, is taking credit for savings made under Joe Biden.

The group boasted that its “estimated savings” for American taxpayers is $55 billion so far, but the total it gave Monday adds up to just a third of that figure—and appears to claim credit for the closure of two government offices that were shuttered under Joe Biden.

Those closures are the National Archives centers in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, and in Fairfield, Ohio. DOGE’s site claims the latter location was a “True Termination – Agency Closed Office.” No other details are offered.

The only details offered on a contract termination for the National Archives center in Fairfield, Ohio.
The only details offered on a contract termination for the National Archives center in Fairfield, Ohio.DOGE

Those centers’ approximate closing dates were announced way back on Aug. 1, however, when Biden was still president.

“The records and artifacts of the Barack Obama Presidential Library, which have been held temporarily at Hoffman Estates, will be permanently moved to College Park, MD, in late FY 2025,” a news release from National Archives announced at the time.

Others have noted that many of the big savings are in reality subscriptions to media outlets, including (as Brad Heath noted, the SEC’s subscription to Westlaw). Once all these necessary services get turned back on again, the imagined savings will be wiped away.

Still, DOGE’s shoddy work, slapped up there after days of unfulfilled promises of transparency, needs to be more systematically mined, if for no other reason than to determine whether this is simply a reflection of the ignorance of the DOGE boys Musk has infiltrated into government, the shoddiness of the AI tools they’re using, or simply a disinterest in giving a fuck, because once Elon claims this website says something, the right wing will follow along like sheep.

They don’t need and maybe won’t bother trying to find real proof of savings, because between Elon and Trump and Fox News, they will insist it is the truth, not matter how often it gets debunked.

Until this effort is exposed as the propaganda campaign it is, the lies Musk tells give even Republicans discomforted by all the job losses in their districts something to cling to: A claim that this is about auditing, rather than destruction, a claim that this is about fraud, rather than policies that even Republicans have protected for years, and for good reason.

The richest man in the world is conducting a con on Republicans in government, claiming he is fixing government when instead he is dismantling even the parts that the Republicans themselves cherish.

As Masnick said, “it’s the replacement of accountable governance with conspiracy-driven chaos.”

It remains the case that one of the foundational claims to which Trump’s people continue to return is the one I identified a week ago: A GAO report from last year that spoke of $2.7 trillion in improper payments over the last two decades, but also a spike in recent years that almost entirely arises from fraud and management problems with the various COVID programs Trump rolled out his first term.

The factual claims of fraud — as opposed to the disinformation spun by Elon Musk — largely measure fraud that Trump created through his catastrophic response to COVID. And he fired several of the Inspectors General — most notably HHS IG Christi Grimm (whose work resulted in 193 charges last June), Department of Labor IG Larry Turner (who had already identified $191 billion in improper COVID payments, many fraudulent, and was chasing$135 billion more), and SBA IG Mike Ware (who had IDed around $200 billion in COVID fraud, returning $40 billion to the US Treasury and was still chasing more) — who were busy hunting it all down.

DOGE continues to rely on fraud Trump enabled to excuse their assault on government. And what they’ve found so far is that they lack any of the competencies they would need to audit or identify fraud, and Trump already fired the people who do have those competencies.

Update: Lawfare catches DOGE taking credit for savings due to Jimmy Carter’s death.

Yet a brief glimpse of the data raises questions about its accuracy. One row describes a lease terminated for an “agency” called “Allowance to Former Presidents.” Additional information shows that the property is 7,682 square feet, costs $128,233 per year, and is in Atlanta, Georgia. The GSA maintains a database of property leased by the federal government. Cross-referencing the information on DOGE’s website with GSA’s database reveals that the federal government was leasing this property from “The Carter Center, Inc.” The Carter Center is a nonprofit organization founded by former President Carter, who died on Dec. 29, 2024.

The Former Presidents Act provides former presidents with certain post-presidency benefits. Subsection (c) of that Act says, “The Administrator of General Services shall furnish for each former President suitable office space appropriately furnished and equipped, as determined by the Administrator, at such place within the United States as the former President shall specify.” As one might expect, Carter’s office was located in the Carter Center, and GSA leased office space for Carter from the Carter Center.

DOGE is likely not responsible for the termination of GSA’s lease of the Carter Center. The benefits to Carter under the Former Presidents Act expired upon his death.

Update: NPR’s review of this gets closer to the kind of real test of these claims. For example, it finds that some of the purport cuts have not yet been made.

Just over half of the contracts touted by DOGE, accounting for $6.5 billion in alleged savings, haven’t actually been terminated or closed out as of Wednesday, according to an NPR analysis of a federal government procurement database, even though the site’s “wall of receipts” listed these items.

That includes a billion dollar IT support contract with the Social Security Administration that actually added $1.8 million in obligated spending and additional funding for a Forest Service project management contract worth up to nearly $30 million.

More than a third of the listed contracts posted online would not actually save any money if canceled, according to DOGE.

And it interviews contracting officers.

A smarter way to reform contracting would actually cost money in the short term,” Riedl said. “Because it requires audits, it requires analysis, building new systems, building new controls rather than just going through with a chainsaw and trying to cut contracts almost randomly.”

Byrne, whose contracting career spanned more than 20 years and included work with the General Services Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Navy, says DOGE’s website is also missing basic information needed to track and understand federal spending, like the ID number, what type of agreement or contract method was used and whether the cancellation was for some or all of the spending. Several publicly available data sources already track and confirm changes to federal contracts, including the Federal Procurement Data System, USASpending.gov and the System for Award Management (SAM). Unlike DOGE, those sources list other relevant data like the current value of the contract, historical changes to the amount budgeted and spent for the contract and when the contracts begin and end.

Who also note that the government is going to have to pay for a lot of the programs cut.

Even government contracts that have been terminated before reaching their full value could end up costing taxpayers more to settle up. Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at The George Washington University Law School, previously told NPR that the termination for convenience clause used for many of these cancellations is expensive.

“When the government terminates a contract for convenience, it’s still obligated to pay for the work completed,” she said. “This doesn’t eliminate the government’s responsibility for paying these sorts of costs.”

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Why Elon Musk Can’t Run DOGE [sic] Anymore

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Yesterday, Judge Tanya Chutkan had a Presidents Day hearing on a lawsuit challenging DOGE’s actions. While she reportedly seemed inclined not to grant an emergency restraining order, she did order the government to provide her with two pieces of information: how many people had and were going to be fired, and what Elon Musk’s status is.

In a response and declaration, the government blew off the first question, but on the second, denied that Musk has the power of DOGE. He’s just a senior Trump advisor, one solidly within the White House Office, and so firewalled from the work of DOGE, yet still protected from any kind of nasty disclosure requirements.

But as the attached declaration of Joshua Fisher explains, Elon Musk “has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself”—including personnel decisions at individual agencies. Decl. ¶ 5. He is an employee of the White House Office (not USDS or the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization); and he only has the ability to advise the President, or communicate the President’s directives, like other senior White House officials. Id. ¶¶ 3, 5. Moreover, Defendants are not aware of any source of legal authority granting USDS or the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization the power to order personnel actions at any of the agencies listed above. Neither of the President’s Executive Orders regarding “DOGE” contemplate—much less furnish—such authority. See “Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency,” Exec. Order No. 14,158 (Jan. 20, 205); “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,” Exec. Order 14,210 (Feb. 11, 2025).

The statement is quite obviously an attempt to retcon the structure of DOGE [sic], one that Ryan Goodman has already found several pieces of evidence to debunk.

But it is a testament that the suit in question — by a bunch of Democratic Attorneys General, led by New Mexico [docket] — might meet significant success without the retconning of Elon’s role.

Partly for more general benefit, let me talk about the various kinds of lawsuits filed so far against Trump’s attacks.

Kinds of plaintiffs:

  • Imminent, individual personal injury: The cases that have had the most success, so far, are examples of individuals who describe a specific imminent injury. The most obvious such example is a number of Trans women prisoners who’ve argued, successfully so far, that they face a very high likelihood of assault and/or rape if they are moved to male prisons.
  • Unions or other representatives of federal workers: These lawsuits address the imminent injury of privacy violations or firing and other mistreatment. The most successful (and eye-popping) so far has been the American Foreign Service Association lawsuit challenging the USAID shutdown [docket], in which a Doe employee yesterday provided another horrifying declaration describing another instance of a pregnant woman being deprived of promised medevac, and another from a woman in South Africa running up debt taxpayers will have to pay and about to lose access to electricity on the compound. But there are limits to the recourse that unions can seek on both these theories. For example, while Trump appointed judge Carl Nichols imposed a temporary restraining order on actions targeted at employees oversees, he has not done so for the USAID personnel stuck without the ability to fix anything in DC, because being put on paid leave is not the same kind of injury as being stuck overseas with no access to security warnings.
  • States (all with Democratic Attorneys General): The states are arguing a variety of things, both contractual breaches and injuries to their citizens. Contractual challenges may have little ability to halt ongoing destruction.
  • Private entities, like corporations or associations: These entities are often arguing contractual breaches, or privacy damages. The latter are likely to have more success than the former because of the way the Privacy Act works.

Kinds of challenges:

  • Many of these challenges claim a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, basically arguing that the government changed the rules without going through the process they are required to use to change the rules.
  • Many lawsuits also claim violations of the Privacy Act, which requires that the government follow certain rules if they’re accessing your data in new ways. Thus far, the government has argued that employees have more limited protections than private citizens.
  • Underlying many of these suits are claims about the Impoundment Act and Separation of Powers because the government is not spending money the way Congress said it had to, but argued through an APA challenge. These challenges are particularly important because a key project of Project 2025 is to effectively strip Congress of the power of the purse.
  • Some lawsuits have tried to get at cybersecurity violations or even hacking (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) claims, but thus far with little success. In any case, those would pivot on how DOGE [sic] got access to various computer systems, and in most cases, a senior Agency official ultimately relented to give them access.
  • This lawsuit, and another similar one brought by 26 anonymous USAID employees, argue that Elon Musk’s role in all this violates the Appointments Clause. This basically argues that Elon is acting as a superior officer, which requires Senate confirmation.

The injury suffered by each set of plaintiffs and legal theory largely limits the ability of judges to weigh in. So, for example, if a suit is arguing only Privacy Act violations, a judge can do no more than limit the dissemination outside of authorized channels of the data of the plaintiffs, something that has been ineffective once agencies started giving DOGE formal authorization to access computer servers. If a suit worries about firings, but the government instead puts tons of people on paid leave (as happened with USAID), then the plaintiffs are not yet suffering an irrevocable injury.

Here’s how the Appointments Clause theory, arguing that Elon is exercising powers that need to be created by Congress and confirmed by them, looks in the complaint.

64. Although he occupies a role President Trump—not Congress—created and even though the Senate has never voted to confirm him, Mr. Mr. Musk has and continues to assert the powers of an “Officer[] of the United States” under the Appointments Clause. Indeed, in many cases, he has exceeded the lawful authority of even a principal officer, or of the President himself.

65. As explained below, Mr. Musk: (1) has unprecedented and seemingly limitless access across the federal government and reports solely to President Trump, (2) has asserted significant and sweeping authority across a broad swath of federal agencies, and (3) has engaged in a constellation of powers and activities that have been historically associated with an officer of the United States, including powers over spending and disbursements, contracts, government property, regulations, and agency viability.

66. In sum, Mr. Musk purports to exercise and in fact asserts the significant authority of a principal officer on behalf of the United States. Yet, he does not occupy an office created by Congress and has not been nominated by the President or confirmed by the Senate. As a result, all of Mr. Musk’s actions are ultra vires and contrary to law.

You can see why the White House has decided that Elon is boxed away inside the White House with no direct control over the dismantling of government bureaucracy. The retconning of his role is all the more obvious when you understand that the right wing judges on SCOTUS feel very strongly about the Appointments Clause. And Trump is on the record relying on it, most spectacularly in convincing Aileen Cannon that Jack Smith had to be confirmed by the Senate before he could indict Trump.

In practice, Trump is saying Elon can dismantle entire agencies without Senate confirmation, but Jack Smith couldn’t prosecute him as a private citizen without it.

Or he was. Now he’s arguing that all this is happening without Elon’s personal direction.

There is plenty in the complaint already that debunks this, not least the narrative of how Elon started disappearing USAID even before, by his own description, Trump approved.

93. With a budget of over $40 billion, USAID accounts for more than half of all U.S. foreign assistance. USAID has missions in over 100 countries. As of January 2025, USAID had a workforce of over 10,000, with approximately two-thirds serving overseas.

94. On Saturday, February 1, 2025, a group of about eight DOGE personnel entered the USAID building and demanded access to every door and floor, despite only a few of them having the requisite security clearance.34 The areas to which they sought access included a sensitive compartmented information facility—commonly known as a SCIF—an ultra-secure room where officials and government contractors take extraordinary precautions to review highly classified information. DOGE personnel, aided by phone calls from Mr. Musk, had pressured USAID officials for days to access the secure facility and its contents.35

95. When USAID personnel attempted to block access to some areas, DOGE personnel, including Mr. Musk, threatened to call federal marshals. Under threat, the agency personnel acquiesced, and DOGE personnel were eventually given access to the secure spaces.

96. Later that day, top officials from USAID and the bulk of the staff in USAID’s Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs were put on leave. Some of them were not notified but had their access to agency terminals suspended. USAID’s security official was also put on leave.36 97. Within hours, USAID’s website vanished. It remains inoperative.37

98. On Sunday, February 2, 2025, Mr. Musk tweeted, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”

38 Later, he tweeted, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper.”39

99. Mr. Musk provided no support for his claim that USAID is a criminal organization. 100. On Monday, February 3, 2025, Mr. Musk stated that he was in the process of closing the agency, with President Trump’s blessing. Mr. Musk stated: “I went over it with him [President Trump] in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down. And I actually checked with him a few times [and] said ‘are you sure?’ The answer was yes. And so we’re shutting it down.”40

Now, before DOJ gave this answer and blew off Judge Chutkan’s order to provide details of the ongoing firing spree, she seemed inclined not to grant a restraining order to stop all this.

It’s unclear whether this defiance will change that. Or, at the very least, whether it will lead to more questions about whether White House wrote any of this down.

What is clear is that the White House recognizes a real risk if Elon is held accountable for all the things Elon has done.

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“The Fraudsters Complain the Loudest and the Fastest:” Legacy Media Ignores Import of Gaza Condom Fact Check

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At a weird appearance in the Oval Office rife with awkward projections that Elon Musk believes he is more powerful than Trump (here’s the full CSPAN video), a journalist asked Elon how — given the egregious error he made about condoms and Gaza — we should believe anything he said.

 

 

The exchange is bad enough: Elon basically confessed, in front of Trump, that a hoax Elon started that traveled first to Trump propagandist Karoline Leavitt and from there, through Jesse Watters’ exaggerations on Fox News, into several repetitions of the false claim by Trump was wrong.

 

 

The entire point of this presser was to substantiate Trump’s false (and undocumented) claim that DOGE [sic] had found billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse and use that to, first, pressure judges who are putting brakes on DOGE and, then, justify giving DOGE [sic] authority to fire a bunch of people via Executive Order.

When Trump asked Elon to substantiate such claims, Elon instead vaguely pointed to people who were wealthy even though they had meager salaries — not something that should be under his review. He listed other things that are known — and were known, during Trump’s first term — which are archaic but not fraud.

And in that appearance, a journalist called Elon out for inventing something about Gaza that led Trump to lie publicly.

That should have led to stories about how, in Trump’s presence, Elon admitted he makes shit up and Trump repeats them.

For the most part, it didn’t happen:

  • NYT noted that Elon offered no proof of fraud, but did not mention the proof that Elon got caught in a lie.
  • WaPo focused on the EO, but later explained that neither Trump nor Musk offered proof — but didn’t mention he got caught in a lie.
  • Politico focused on the EO, but later noted that Elon said he would police his own conflicts.
  • In an analytical piece, CNN claimed that Elon offered examples of fraud (which is false), but didn’t mention Gaza.

After airing Elon about scrutiny he claimed he was getting, WSJ did mention the Gaza question.

Asked about the Trump administration’s false assertion that the federal government sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, the billionaire acknowledged that he might at times promote erroneous information. “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” Musk said. “Nobody is going to bat 1,000.”

But WSJ didn’t pursue the implication of it: that Elon got caught in a false claim.

Indeed, the only specific example that Trump mentioned was funding FEMA spent in NYC to house migrants — something approved by Congress — for which the staffers have been fired (as I’ll return to, Trump’s DOJ is already misrepresenting this in courts), was also based on an Elon lie.

The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it had fired four employees from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, including the agency’s chief financial officer, over their roles in disbursing federal funds to house migrants in New York City hotels.

The firings capped a startling chain of events that began on Monday with an early-morning social media post by Elon Musk who claimed, misleadingly, that FEMA had recently sent $59 million meant for disaster relief to New York City to pay for “high end hotels” for migrants, and who called the expenditure unlawful.

New York City officials raced to clarify that the federal money had been properly allocated by FEMA under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. last year, adding that it was not a disaster relief grant and had not been spent on luxury hotels.

Nonetheless, just two hours after Mr. Musk’s post, FEMA’s acting director, Cameron Hamilton, announced that the payments in question “have all been suspended” — even though most of the money had already been disbursed — and that “personnel will be held accountable.”

By Tuesday morning, roughly 24 hours after Mr. Musk’s post, the Trump administration had followed through on one part of its pledge.

Elon also made a false claim that they had turned on AIDS prevention — in one of the state lawsuits, Washington State presented a case where funds for AIDS prevention programs was being withheld.

This press conference consisted of Elon (and Trump) making false claim after false claim.

It also consisted of Trump lying over and over, without proof, about how one only needed to look for fraud to find it. No one asked why he hadn’t looked in his first term. Indeed, several times he blamed Biden for problems that have existed for decades.

And yet, at best, journalists instead claimed only that Elon and Trump simply presented no proof.

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It’s Still Not Clear Whether Elon’s DOGE Boys Are Reviewing, Taking, or Altering Government Networks

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The big news overnight in the legal fight to rein in DOGE is that SDNY Judge Paul Engelmayer has ordered Treasury to stop letting Elon Musk’s DOGE [sic] boys to snoop in Treasury’s payment system and destroy any copies of records already made from it. [docket]

the defendants are (i) restrained from granting access to any Treasury Department payment record, payment systems, or any other data systems maintained by the Treasury Department containing personally identifiable information and/or confidential financial information of payees, other than to civil servants with a need for access to perform their job duties within the Bureau of Fiscal Services who have passed all background checks and security clearances and taken all information security training called for in federal statutes and Treasury Department regulations; (ii) restrained from granting access to all political appointees, special government employees, and government employees detailed from an agency outside the Treasury Department, to any Treasury Department payment record, payment systems, or any other data systems maintained by the Treasury Department containing personally identifiable information and/or confidential financial information of payees; and (iii) ordered to direct any person prohibited above from having access to such information, records and systems but who has had access to such information, records, and systems since January 20, 2025, to immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems, if any;

This order comes on top of Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s order limiting access to Treasury’s payment system to normal employees and two DOGE [sic] employees, but the latter for read-only access [docket]:

Mr. Tom Krause, a Special Government Employee in the Department of the Treasury, as needed for the performance of his duties, provided that such access to payment records will be “read only”;

Mr. Marko Elez, a Special Government Employee in the Department of the Treasury, as needed for the performance of his duties, provided that such access to payment records will be “read only”;

Anna Bower parsed how DOJ substantiated (or not) that this was really “read only” access. Which was part of what a bunch of Democratic Attorneys General, led by Tish James, pointed to to claim they still needed a TRO, over and above the one issued by Kollar-Kotelly.

The temporary restraining order entered yesterday by the D.C. District Court in Alliance for Retired Americans v. Bessent, No. 1:25-cv-313 (D.D.C.) (“ARA”), does not change this conclusion. That order continues to permit two SGEs affiliated with DOGE to have access to the BFS payment records and payment systems, restricts their access to “read only” just for payment records and not payment systems, and does not direct that any copies of data from the systems made since the Agency Action took effect be destroyed. ARA, Dkt No. 13.

Now, I’m somewhat skeptical that Engelmeyer’s order, as issued, is sustainable. He issued the order in advance of the assigned judge on the case, Jeannette Vargas, and before the government had a chance to respond to the lawsuit.

But the lawsuits to enjoin DOGE [sic] are playing catch-up to the known facts.

And the known facts get us much closer to the being able to prove that Elon and his DOGE [sic] boys are altering code, if not hacking it, rather than simply reviewing its data.

The suit and TRO before Judge Kollar-Kotelly, filed by several unions, is entirely privacy focused.

The state AGs’ suit and TRO, which establish standing by pointing to the billions of dollars of payments they get from the Feds, argues that Elon is attempting to intercept payments to entities Trump doesn’t like. It asserts a claim repeatedly backed in public reporting, but affirmatively denied before Kollar-Kotelly: that the DOGE boys — here, self-proclaimed eugenicist Mark Elez, have altered code.

5. As of February 2, 2025, the President and Treasury Secretary, directed Treasury to grant expanded access to BFS payment systems to political appointees and “special government employees” for reasons that have yet to be provided, although one apparent purpose, upon information and belief. Upon information and belief, one purpose is to allow DOGE to advance a stated goal to block federal funds from reaching beneficiaries who do not align with the President’s political agenda. For example, DOGE was tasked with freezing payments issued by the U.S. Agency for International Development (“USAID”) and sought access to BFS payment systems to accomplish that goal.5 Virtually unfettered access to BFS payment systems was granted to at least one 25-year-old DOGE associate, Mark Elez, who, on information and belief, had the authority to view or modify numerous critical files.6 Indeed, reports indicate that Elez had administrative privileges over the BFS payment system’s code, giving him the ability to alter user permissions and “read and write” code—even if the associate had “read-only” access to the system’s data.7 Elez has since resigned from DOGE after being linked to racist social media posts.8

6. Around the same time that DOGE associates were unlawfully granted access to BFS systems, Mr. Musk began publicly stating his intention to recklessly freeze streams of federal funding without warning. On February 2, 2024, Mr. Musk posted on X (formerly Twitter), an online social media platform, that DOGE is “rapidly shutting down” various “illegal payments” made by the government to grant recipients, including payments to Lutheran Family Services to provide services to migrant children.9 That same day, Mr. Musk posted that his team “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” Since then, Mr. Musk has unambiguously called for the cancellation of various streams of federal funding. For instance, on February 6, 2025, he alleged: “Billions of taxpayer dollars to known FRAUDULENT entities are STILL being APPROVED by Treasury. This needs to STOP NOW!”10 Mr. Musk has also made wild, unsubstantiated claims about the BFS payment system and suggested putting it on the blockchain.11

6 A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System | WIRED

7 https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-associate-bfs-federal-payment-system/

8 DOGE Staffer Resigns Over Racist Posts

9 Elon Musk on X: “The @DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments” / X

10 Elon Musk on X: “Billions of taxpayer dollars to known FRAUDULENT entities are STILL being APPROVED by Treasury. This needs to STOP NOW!” / X

11 Fatima Hussein, “Elon Musk’s task force has gained access to sensitive Treasury payment systems, sources say,” PBS News, Feb. 2, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/elon-musks-task-force-hasgained-access-to-sensitive-treasury-payment-systems-sources-say; Billy Bambrough, “‘This Needs To Stop Now’—Elon Musk Confirms Radical Doge U.S. Treasury Plan,” Forbes, Feb. 2, 2025, https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2025/02/02/this-needs-to-stop-now-elon-musk-confirmsradical-doge-us-treasury-plan/.

It cites Elon’s insane rants on Xitter as well.

In addition to the privacy concerns addressed in the union lawsuit, the AGs’ lawsuit raises concerns about appropriations (and separation of powers), but also cybersecurity, something not included in the union lawsuit.

139. The conduct of DOGE members presents a unique security risk to States and State residents whose data is held by BFS, given that DOGE employees have already reportedly set up an unauthorized commercial server at another federal agency without a privacy impact assessment as required by the 2002 E-Government Act. Access by DOGE employees to BFS is likely to present even greater risks to the security and privacy of States’ and their residents’ data.

140. Unsecure data is susceptible to cyber attacks and identity theft. Identity theft has a significant impact on States, beyond the financial well-being of its residents. It strains law enforcement resources, damages state economies through lost productivity and consumer confidence, and raises costs for the state to redress fraudulent claims made from stolen identities for unemployment and healthcare benefits. [my emphasis]

The AGs’ suit actually doesn’t cite a source for the claim that DOGE set up a commercial server at another agency. But I think the claim comes from a lawsuit Kel McClanahan filed against Office of Personnel Management, aiming to require it to stop the all-government email DOGE [sic] set up to offer its “Fork in the Road” severance offer. McClanahan first sued, with two plaintiffs who worked at government agencies, on January 27, for a violation of the E-Government Act. [docket]

In response, the government claimed that the main theory of injury, that the government had set up the all-government email without first doing a privacy assessment didn’t apply for employees, and was moot because it had since done one, which it included here. The privacy assessment claimed this was just a Office365 account.

1.3. Has a system security plan been completed for the information system(s) supporting the project? The Office 365 mailbox has been granted an Authorization to Operate (ATO) that includes a system security plan. The government computer storing the data is subject to standard security requirements, including limited PIV access.

And it claimed that the account included only employee data.

2.1. Identify the information the project collects, uses, disseminates, or maintains. GWES collects, maintains, and uses the names and government email addresses of federal government employees. GWES also collects and redistributes responses to emails sent to those addresses, which are limited to short, voluntary, non-identifying information. Specifically, GWES contains the following:

  • Employee Contact Data: GWES collects, maintains, and uses the names and government email addresses of federal government employees. Other identifying information is not used.
  • Employee Response Data: After an email is sent using Employee Contact Data, GWES collects, maintains, and redistributes short, voluntary responses.

It largely ignored McClenahan’s claim (based largely on Reddit posts) that DOGE had installed a separate server.

But other than speculation on social media, Plaintiffs provide no evidence that OPM took any of the actions that would trigger the PIA requirement under sections 208(b)(1)(A)(i)-(ii) of the E-Government Act. Moreover, Plaintiffs disregard entirely the fact that the E-Government Act does not require a PIA when an agency is seeking to collect information about “agencies, instrumentalities, or employees of the Federal Government.”

Since then, McClanahan filed an amended complaint, which added five more plaintiffs, none of whom are Executive Branch employees (for example, one works for the Library of Congress; another is a contractor), substantiating that some of the DOGE emails went to people outside the Executive Branch, and provided additional substantiation of the Reddit claims (including raising questions about whether this could even be Microsoft365).

30. Furthermore, prior to 20 January 2025, OPM lacked the technical capacity to send direct communications to all Executive Branch employees: But just days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, OPM did not have the capability to send a mass email of that scale, according to a person familiar with the matter. To send mass emails, the agency had used govDelivery, a cloud communications service provided by public sector IT company Granicus, a different person familiar said. The govDelivery contract had restrictions on the volume of emails available to send without incurring added costs, and the agency would not have been able to reach 2.3 million people, the approximate number of all civilian federal employees, the second person added. David DiMolfetta, OPM’s new email system sparks questions about cyber compliance Nextgov/FCW (Jan. 28, 2025), available at https://www.nextgov.com/digitalgovernment/2025/01/opms-new-email-system-sparks-questions-about-cybercompliance/402555/ (last accessed Feb. 3, 2025).

31. Additionally, OPM has used Microsoft Office 365 since at least 2021, including Outlook 365 for email. OPM, Privacy Impact Assessment for OPM – Microsoft Office 365 (May 13, 2021), available at https://www.opm.gov/information-management/privacy-policy/privacypolicy/office-365-pia.pdf (last accessed Feb. 3, 2025). Outlook 365 cannot send more than ten thousand emails per day. See Microsoft, Exchange Online limits (Dec. 11, 2024), at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/exchange-online-servicedescription/exchange-online-limits#sending-limits-1 (last accessed Feb. 3, 2025).

32. According to the FedNews Message, “Instead [of using the normal channels], an on-prem (on-site) email server was setup [sic]. Someone literally walked into our building and plugged in an email server to our network to make it appear that emails were coming from OPM. It’s been the one sending those various ‘test’ message[s] [discussed below].” FedNews Message.

33. This statement is supported by recent reporting:

A new server being used to control these [OPM] databases has been placed in a conference room that Musk’s team is using as their command center, according to an OPM staffer. The staffer described the server as a piece of commercial hardware they believed was not obtained through the proper federal procurement process.

Caleb Ecarma & Judd Legum, Musk associates given unfettered access to private data of government employees Musk Watch (Feb. 3, 2025), at https://www.muskwatch.com/p/muskassociates-given-unfettered (last accessed Feb. 3, 2025).

34. Upon information and belief, this server and/or other systems linked to it are retaining information about every individual with a Government email address.

The amended complaint argues that the privacy impact was factually and legally insufficient.

39. Neither Biasini nor Hogan were OPM employees prior to 20 January.

40. Biasini worked at the Boring Company prior to 20 January. It is not currently known if he still works there.

41. Hogan worked at Comma.ai prior to 20 January. It is not currently known if he still works there.

42. The GWES PIA was both factually inaccurate and legally inadequate.

[snip]

54. Upon information and belief, OPM has not ensured review of a PIA for any of these systems by any legally sufficient Chief Information Officer or equivalent official.

55. OPM has not published a legally sufficient PIA or made such an assessment available for public inspection for any of these systems.

In other words, as these twin lawsuits against Treasury get closer to arguing that Elon is not looking for savings but instead altering the payment system, McClanahan continues to chase proof that Elon’s DOGE [sic] boys have added their own server which, by dint of sending emails to everyone (including people not employed by the Executive branch) with a .gov address, is collecting information on everyone with a .gov address.

Meanwhile, several other developments get closer to showing that Elon is hacking the government, not assessing it.

First, late this week, OPM removed access by some DOGE [sic] boys to more sensitive OPM systems.

Directives from the agency’s interim leadership issued late this week indicated that DOGE representatives should be withdrawn from two principal systems containing personally identifiable information for millions of federal employees, according to communications reviewed by The Post and people familiar with the developments who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

Those systems are called Enterprise Human Resources Integration and Electronic Official Personnel Folder. They hold sensitive information about employees of most federal agencies, including addresses, demographic profiles, salary details and disciplinary histories.

The Post reported Thursday morning that DOGE agents had gained access to those systems along with “administrative” access to OPM computer systems. That allowed them sweeping authority to install and modify software on government-supplied equipment and, according to two OPM officials, to alter internal documentation of their own activities.

Meanwhile, both Wired and WaPo have stories describing how a Booz Allen analyst described the DOGE [sic] access as an ““unprecedented insider threat risk;” the analyst was promptly fired.

The review, delivered Monday to Treasury officials by a contractor that runs a threat intelligence center for Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, said that DOGE’s access to the payment network should be “immediately” suspended. It also urged Treasury to scour the payments system for any changes approved by affiliates of DOGE, which is overseen by billionaire Elon Musk, the correspondence shows. DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency.

A Treasury employee told The Post that the threat center is run by Booz Allen Hamilton, a large federal contractor. The company confirmed it runs the threat center, which it said is embedded within Treasury.

Late Friday, after this article appeared, Booz Allen said it had “removed” a subcontractor who wrote the warning and would seek to retract or amend it. “The draft report was prepared by a subcontractor to Booz Allen and contained unauthorized personal opinions that are not factual or consistent with our standards,” company spokesperson Jessica Klenk said. Booz Allen won more than $1 billion in multiyear U.S. government contracts last year.

In a separate communication a week ago, a high-ranking career official at Treasury also raised the issue of risks from DOGE access in a memo to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, including the potential breach of information that could lead to exposure of U.S. spies abroad, according to five people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect government deliberations. The memo included recommendations to mitigate risks, which Bessent approved, said another person familiar with the matter, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity.

And while the focus at Treasury has been on eugenicist Marko Elez, whom Elon has pushed to be reinstated, closer scrutiny into Edward “Big Balls” Coristine — who is at OPM and possibly HHS — has described he has ties to hackers. Brian Krebs, who was targeted by some people in that crowd, described screen shots that suggest Coristine may have been fired for leaking internal documents to a competitor.

Wired noted that Coristine only worked at Path for a few months in 2022, but the story didn’t mention why his tenure was so short. A screenshot shared on the website pathtruths.com includes a snippet of conversations in June 2022 between Path employees discussing Coristine’s firing.

According to that record, Path founder Marshal Webb dismissed Coristine for leaking internal documents to a competitor. Not long after Coristine’s termination, someone leaked an abundance of internal Path documents and conversations. Among other things, those chats revealed that one of Path’s technicians was a Canadian man named Curtis Gervais who was convicted in 2017 of perpetrating dozens of swatting attacks and fake bomb threats — including at least two attempts against our home in 2014.

And Krebs provides chatlogs showing some of Coristine’s former associates are taking notice.

The Com is the English-language cybercriminal hacking equivalent of a violent street gang. KrebsOnSecurity has published numerous stories detailing how feuds within the community periodically spill over into real-world violence.

When Coristine’s name surfaced in Wired‘s report this week, members of The Com immediately took notice. In the following segment from a February 5, 2025 chat in a Com-affiliated hosting provider, members criticized Rivage’s skills, and discussed harassing his family and notifying authorities about incriminating accusations that may or may not be true.

Bloomberg matched Krebs’ reporting on the reason for Coristine’s firing from Path.

“Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors,” said a June 2022 message from an executive of the firm, Path Network, which was seen by Bloomberg News. “This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this.”

A spokesperson for the Arizona-based hosting and data-security firm said Thursday: “I can confirm that Edward Coristine’s brief contract was terminated after the conclusion of an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure.”

Afterward, Coristine wrote that he’d retained access to the cybersecurity company’s computers, though he said he hadn’t taken advantage of it.

“I had access to every single machine,” he wrote on Discord in late 2022, weeks after he was dismissed from Path Network, according to messages seen by Bloomberg. Posting under the name “Rivage,” which six people who know him said was his alias, Coristine said he could have wiped Path’s customer-supporting servers if he’d wished. He added, “I never exploited it because it’s just not me.”

Bloomberg tied Coristine’s past even more closely to organized abuse campaigns.

JoeyCrafter was a member of Telegram groups called “Kiwi Farms Christmas Chat” and “Kiwi Farms 100% Real No Fake No Virus,” both referencing an online forum known for harassment campaigns. Typically, the site has been used to share the personal information of a target, encouraging others to harass them online, in-person, over the phone or by falsely alerting police to a violent crime or active shooter incident at their home.

This is the kind of DOGE boy Elon has thrown at government networks — and thus far, Republicans don’t seem to give a damn that Trump has given these DOGE [sic] boys access to data on virtually all Americans, employee or no.

One thing is clear, however: There’s not a shred of evidence these boys are doing what Elon claims they’re doing.

Most of these new facts — the seeming proof that OPM isn’t doing what it claimed, the insider threat warning, the ties to hackers — are not in the AGs’ suit. And by the time the suits catch up to the facts, the complaints may look quite different.

Update: Corrected that none of the OPM plaintiffs are employees of US Courts (though they did get an email).

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