Deep into the Dumbness of DOGE
Is a Disconnect Developing?
Voters’ visceral reactions to the many excesses and gaffes of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have led the President to announce actions apparently restraining its efforts.
Trump on Truth Social:
“DOGE has been an incredible success, and now that we have my Cabinet in place, I have instructed the Secretaries and Leadership to work with DOGE on Cost Cutting measures and Staffing. As the Secretaries learn about, and understand, the people working for the various Departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain, and who will go. We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’”
Given the President’s ability to, er, mask the truth, I would take that proclamation with a grain of salt. I’d say the truth might be closer to that’s what he’s saying to tamp down Congressional concerns about mass firings and funding cut offs.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s America PAC has reportedly spent $1 million on its first-ever nationwide TV ad praising President Donald Trump’s first few weeks in office. According to ABC News, the ad will begin running this week in Washington, D.C., as well as nationwide.
It’s true that Trump convened his cabinet and, with Musk present, told the secretaries DOGE only has the power to make recommendations, not to make staffing or policy decisions.
This move by the President was most likely in response to a recent federal judge ruling that it was likely illegal for the Office of Personnel Management(OPM), where Musk acolytes have taken control, to direct agencies to fire thousands of employees.
In response, OPM changed its guidance to say it was actually up to agencies all along, not OPM, to fire people. The administration changed tack as it became clear that Musk’s operation was on shaky legal ground.
After the boasts about great savings Musk’s team has achieved during his address on Tuesday, it turns out that the “gotcha” lines about $8 million spent on studying transgender mice came about because somebody saw the prefix “trans” and didn’t read the rest of the word/sentence. The mice were “transgenic,” meaning they were genetically altered for use in scientific experiments to learn more about human health.
So perhaps we should compare that $8 million figure to the about $10.7 million expended during Trump’s first month for golf outings.
Let’s take a gander at what the administration and DOGE are up to.
At Wired, which has done some of the best reporting on what’s going on in the Federal government, Makena Kelly raised and answered questions about whether the Muskateers are becoming what they claim to be against:
The “deep state” is a top-tier conservative bogeyman, right up there with DEI and George Soros. But it seems fair to ask: If a bunch of shadowy, unelected figures, many with shared business interests and connections, took over government functions at the highest levels and directly contravened the will of Congress, what might you call that? How about … DOGE?
After years of alarm over unelected bureaucrats pulling the strings, what better example can you find than this moment the US government is in? DOGE is the thing it claims to fear the most. Elon Musk is the problem he purportedly wants to solve.
According to a report at Politico, DOGE workers have “set up at least four separate rooms on the 6th floor” of the General Services Administration’s office building “for sleeping, complete with beds from IKEA, lamps and dressers.”
Ethics experts told the reporters the arrangement could break agency rules. “The agency is also considering spending about $25,000 to install a washer and dryer on the building’s 6th floor, according to a Feb. 25 invoice obtained by POLITICO.”
Only God knows what’s going on within the Social Security Administration, but it doesn’t look good. And it would appear that the DOGE gang would like to keep their activities from SSA employees, according to an email obtained by Wired.
The email did not specify which websites in particular were to be blocked. However, WIRED has confirmed with two sources inside the SSA that Wired.com is no longer accessible today, though it was accessible previously.
The sources also confirmed that the websites of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and MSNBC were inaccessible. However, the sources were able to access other news websites including Politico and Axios.
“Local news blocked,” says one source at SSA, who was granted anonymity over fears of retribution. “So if there was a local shooting or something, I wouldn’t be able to see.”
At the National Park Service, communication staffers have been told not to release any “proactive communications” mentioning the record setting 332 million visits by the public ibn 2024. The agency is reportedly facing massive layoffs, including many visitors centers.
San Diegans will be pleased to hear that Cabrillo National Park’s facility is not on that list. I’d bet all the sensitive communications devices located in the vicinity might have something to do with that.
A yo-yo effort to list 443 government properties to be sold or vacated revealed 14 buildings not known to belong to Uncle Sam, including a not-too-secret CIA facility in Springfield, VA purportedly used to train technical officers to to bug offices, break into houses, and penetrate computer systems. An edit to the list, published by the General Services Administration, removed 120 buildings. And then –poof— the list was gone.
Among the buildings DOGE is seeking to unload are volcano monitoring buildings close to large population centers in Alaska and Hawaii. The facilities house equipment used to detect probable eruptions and would be needed if mass evacuations were necessary. I’m guessing people living in those areas will be told to check their homeowners insurance if things start looking iffy.
Staffers at the FDA’s Human Foods Program, which oversees food safety, told Consumer Reports that the freeze on federal credit card spending means all food testing will soon come to a halt.
Although a federal district court judge has ordered USAID’s unpaid but authorized debts to be paid by Monday, some of the programs cut off in February have been sent a questionnaire asking if they align with Trump’s values, according to the New York Times. The Washington Post is reporting that faith-based programs are suspended or even closing.
A January 27 executive order titled “Restoring America’s Fighting Force,” which directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to eliminate all Pentagon policies seen as promoting “un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational theories” regarding race and gender, is using prototype generative artificial intelligence program called CamoGPT to screen everything from historical records to social media accounts.
The Associated Press reports that over 26,000 images in military databases have been identified for removal, including photos of the Enola Gay bomber used to carry the first atomic bomb in WWII. If branches of the military could not make through all the materials by Wednesday of this week, they were told to “temporarily remove from public display” all content published during the Biden administration’s four years in office.
Every agency has its horror stories arising from the fundamental sadism of the Trump administration. At Talking Points Memo Josh Marshall points out that looking at the bigger picture always needs to be done.
The NIH and the various other nodes of scientific inquiry in the government are big and much less hierarchically structured than the rest of the government. Reporting has a hard time stepping back and evaluating the systemic picture, goals and inevitable outcomes. If you shut down cell respiration in an organism, the organism will die. And that’s a decent model for what’s happening in these organizations. Only it’s not just cell respiration – it’s every other foundational life process, along with whole digits and limbs simply being removed all at once and carted off for disposal.
My point is simple. We – and I’ve been guilty of this myself – get pulled into each strand of the story: travel, comms, paused grants. What’s important is this bigger picture. It has to be seen as such. They’re shutting down medicine/disease research in the federal government and the government-run and funded ecosystem of funding for most research throughout the United States. It’s not hyperbole. That’s happening. You can’t try to stop something unless you understand it. There’s that final point at which the body dies. It becomes a corpse. It can’t be revived.
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Do it!
When you look at organizing to achieve a passionate 3.5% of the populace, it’s very achievable. That’s all it takes to non-violently overthrow an authoritarian regime.
What are you waiting for?
Here are some upcoming events that may be of interest. I’ll be doing my best to alert readers to events as fast as I learn of them.
3/07 – WE RISE FOR JUSTICE with Leah Greenberg & Susan Crawford
3/07 – Stand Up For Science Rally -UCSD Geisel Library, Noon
3/07 - 50501 Stand Up for Science Rally & March - City Hall 2pm to Waterfront Park 4pm
3/07 - 3/14 – Amazon Blackout
From March 7 – March 14, we do not make a single purchase from:
Amazon.com – No Prime orders, no impulse buys.
Kindle & Audible – No eBook or audiobook purchases.
Whole Foods & Amazon Fresh – Buy groceries elsewhere.
Twitch, Ring, MGM, and all Amazon-owned brands – No support.
3/07 - Issa Hold A Town Hall Rally, 10:30-11:30am WEEKLY, 221 W Crest St #110, Escondido
3/08 - International Women's Day,
Playground Edition & Rally- 9:30-11am Waterfront Park Playground, Pacific Highway,
3/08 – International Women's Day,11am, Unite & Resist County Administration Bldg, 1600 Pacific Hwy
3/08- International Women’s Day Indivisible North County is organizing a sign-waving protest/rally in Oceanside from 1:00pm to 3:00pm at the corner of Oceanside and College Blvds.
3/09 - Stand With Ukraine Rally - 2-4pm, Balboa Park at El Cid Statue, 1450 El Prado
3/10 – SD350 Climate March and Rally - Defend EPA Workers & Our Climate- 11am, US District Court, 333 West Broadway, ending at City Hall.
3/10 – Public Power Meeting - RSVP by sending an email to info@publicpowersd.org
3/15 – Tesla Take Down Encinitas, 1PM
3/21-3/28 – Nestle Blackout, details tba
3/23 - Empty Town Hall (with or without Rep. Darrell Issa) 4-6pm, California Center for the Arts in Escondido.
4/07-4/14 – Walmart Blackout, details tba
4/18 – Total Blackout 2, details tba
Click HERE for more upcoming events.
Antisemitism in the Oval Office by Timothy Snyder at Thinking About…
It is harder in the 2020s to call things by name than it was, perhaps, in the last century. Actual fascists now call other people "fascists" to make the word meaningless, and so they themselves cannot be seen for what they are. This is the normal Russian practice, now picked up by American fascists. Antisemites likewise can call other people "antisemites." When Russians say that they had to invaded Ukraine because of someone else’s antisemitism rather than their own, they are just trying to make the term meaningless. When Americans claim that antisemitism means that universities must be harassed, they are doing much the same thing. The fact that someone wants to ban protests does not mean that they oppose antisemitism. History would suggest rather the contrary.
A concerted effort is being made to train us to think that antisemitism is something besides traditionally hostile ways that non-Jews regard and treat Jews. The result of these semantic abuses is a trivialization of antisemitism — a concept we all need to be able to take seriously, a phenomenon we all need to recognize.
In addition to abusing the word, antisemites can react with manufactured outrage when called out. They can try to hide behind Israel, or by pointing to Jews in their vicinity. So when confronted by actions that appear antisemitic, you have to consider what you see for yourself. The moral and political implications are of the greatest significance. I had a strong personal reaction to that scene in the Oval Office, and I checked it for a week with friends and colleagues, who confessed that they had had the same reaction. I reconsidered what I had learned as a historian. I looked at the scholarly definitions. Everything, sadly, lines up.
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Trump’s "Crypto Reserve" is a world historical grift by Noah Berlasky at Public Notice
Trump has never been shy about grifting. He set up a fake real estate university to grift students in the 2000s. More recently, he’s used his MAGA cult leader status to sell true believers everything from NFTs to Bibles to shoes.
Even by those standards, though, the “Crypto Reserve” seems like a gratuitous grotesque swindle, as Trump uses his power to manipulate markets and hand out huge paydays to whoever happens to be in the room while he’s composing his Truth Social declarations.
The boondoggle is so obvious, and so clumsy, it barely even feels like a scam. Instead, it functions more as an open declaration of Trump’s contempt for the public, his office, and for the rule of law. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live in an authoritarian kleptocracy, this is it.
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Mexico's President Gets Trump To Cave On Tariffs After Dominating Him In Negotiations by Dash Dobrofsky at The Gen Z Perspective
Mexico was never required to pay tariffs for goods that fall under USMCA. This is just more political theater from Trump, who’s making it sound like he’s granting an exemption when it was already in place.
There you have it - Sheinbaum made Trump wave the white flag — for the second time this year — without conceding anything.
That’s what the real Art of the Deal looks like.
