Musk’s Make America Stupid Team Takes on the Education Department

(Psst– Resistance is starting to manifest)

The man we didn’t elect to be President is now aiming for the Department of Education. Congressional extremists have picked NPR and PBS for their first round of mayhem. It’s not getting much publicity, but people are mobilizing to defend the constitution. That’s what I’m covering in today’s column. Tomorrow, I’ll include info on what dissenters could face in the struggle against fascism.

There are no words that accurately describe the destruction in progress in the parts of the Federal Government; it’s random, unfocused, deliberately cruel, and so much more.

From the New York Times:

• Russell T. Vought, who served in Mr. Trump’s first administration and is his choice again to lead the Office of Management and Budget, has spoken openly about the Trump team’s plans for dismantling civil service.

• “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Mr. Vought said in a 2023 speech. “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.”

• Mr. Musk, who pushed Mr. Vought for the budget office role, for which he is awaiting Senate confirmation, has echoed that rhetoric, portraying career civil servants and the agencies they work for as enemies.

• U.S.A.I.D., which oversees civilian foreign aid, is “evil,” Mr. Musk wrote in numerous posts on Sunday, while “career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day,” he said in another post.

We don’t need no edukation… Elon Musk and a team of roughly twenty college-aged kids (Including some with Neo-Nazi connections) are circling around the Department of Education, slipping in to growl, nip, and bite, waiting for a fake wrestling executive to be confirmed by the Senate before going in for the kill.

They have gained access to multiple sensitive internal systems, including a financial aid dataset containing the personal information of millions of students enrolled in the federal student aid program. No one knows what’s going to happen with this data, but there is general agreement that privacy laws have been violated.

Taking a page from the Cultural Revolution in China, career employees at DOE have been placed on administrative leave because they attended a diversity conference during Betsy DeVos’ term as Secretary of Education during the first Trump administration. A total of 60 department staffers have been placed on leave.

According to the Washington Post, President Trump is preparing an executive order aimed at eventually closing the Education Department and, in the short term, dismantling it from within.

The agency was created by Congress, and only Congress can eliminate it. Such legislation would require a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate, meaning at least seven Democrats would need to support the plan. I’m guessing that isn’t going to happen, this year anyways.

• The order is expected to direct the Education Department to develop a legislative plan to present to Congress. But it also will instruct the department to come up with a plan to diminish its staff and functions.

• It was unclear how detailed the order will be, but people briefed and others who follow the Education Department closely said they expect the agency will try to move various functions to other federal departments. Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for a second Trump term, detailed where different pieces of the department might land if it were closed.

House Resolution 899 has been introduced to Congress by Kentucky GOP Rep. Thomas Massie to abolish the U.S. Department of Education.

The Musk/Trump administration has already begun to reduce the Department’s workforce by putting scores of employees on administrative leave and pressuring staff to quit. Workers, needless to say, feel demoralized. Later this month the President is going to try and defund the Education Department via executive action.

Needless to say, monies for education are an insignificant piece of the budget. No doubt Musk/Trump will find a way to categorize support to special needs/disabled students, college aid, and assistance to minority students as a crime.

Then candidate Trump laid out his other priorities for American education in a July 2024 campaign email, including cutting federal funding for any schools or programs pushing “critical race theory,” opening civil rights investigations into schools discriminating against Asian Americans, implementing a new credentialing system to certify teachers who “embrace patriotic values,” and “find[ing] and remov[ing] radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education.”

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House DOGE Subcommittee leader Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has decided her first target will be publicly-supported media. This is the lowest of low hanging fruit as far as cost savings are concerned, but should be a great opportunity for scoring cheap political points.

On Monday, Greene asked the heads of NPR and PBS to come testify about their "systemically biased news coverage." Politico's Katherine Tully-McManus wrote that it was the very first move made by the subcommittee.

During Trump's first term he annually proposed slashing public media funding, and every year Republican lawmakers ignored his request.

At the Columbia Journalism Review, Michael Swerdlow looking at the choices NPR and PBS face, he noted:

• Fifteen peer democracies spend an average of $70 per person on public media. In this country, we spend a measly $3 per person. We could correct this imbalance by mandating that just 0.1 percent of the federal budget be spent on local news.

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There are starting to be some news accounts about resistance to the Musk/Trump destroy-the-government-from-within program.

Lawsuits are popping up all over, in addition to the ones already filed.

According to Democracy Docket, there are currently:

• 84 voting and election cases pending in 39 states.

• 19 redistricting lawsuits.

• 19 lawsuits challenging Trump's illegal actions.

Federal employee unions are suing to stop Musk’s team from accessing the Treasury system that controls the flow of trillions of dollars of payments.

Judge Loren L. AliKhan of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze trillions of dollars in grants and loans before DOGE got going. AliKhan said that by impounding funds—which Congress declared illegal in 1974—Trump’s Office of Management and Budget “attempted to wrest the power of the purse away from the only branch of government entitled to wield it.”

Indivisible, the grassroots movement created after Trump’s first election victory, held a massive call with 40,000 people looking for ways to fight back and demand action on Sunday night.

Members of Congress clustered in a lobby around a security guard who denied them access to the USAID Building

Yesterday, Democratic members of the House and Senate tried to enter the USAID building but were denied entry. Led by Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT), Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Representatives Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA), the Democrats condemned what Raskin called Musk and Trump’s “illegal, unconstitutional interference with congressional power.”Several hundred people mobilized by Indivisible and Move On rallied outside the building.

Today (Tuesday), MoveOn and Indivisible will be outside the Treasury Department in DC to protest Elon Musk’s illegal actions..

Protestors marched in cities across the country this weekend, and shut down stores and restaurants on Monday.

In San Diego, businesses throughout the South Bay shuttered for “A Day Without Immigrants.” There were peaceful protests in Barrio Logan and San Ysidro, and groups blocked Interstate 5 and Logan Avenue, carrying signs that said “Less ICE, More Rights” and “Stop separating families.”

Hawaii’s Senator Brian Schatz has responded to Musk’s actions at USAID by placing a hold on all of Donald’s State Department nominees, saying the move is illegal. His hold will force Republicans to spend valuable Senate time on confirmations, slowing the administration’s ability to install loyalists.

"If you are watching the news right now, and feeling overwhelmed by the constant headlines and developments... first of all, know that you are not alone," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on an Instagram Live last night. And second, "this is exactly what this administration is trying to get you to feel." She said "the paralysis and shock that you feel right now is the point. They are trying to induce a state of passivity among the general public."

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Lookie what I did… (Musk said anyone who protested Trump would be banned. I couldn’t resist.)

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Affirmative action for white men by Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims at Popular Information

• …In Students for Fair Admissions, the Supreme Court ruled that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions are illegal. But Students for Fair Admissions does not have any impact on corporations because affirmative action in employment situations, in almost all circumstances, is already illegal. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned the consideration of race in hiring. Corporate DEI programs involve "expanding outreach for new hires, creating employee resource groups for underrepresented workers, and reducing bias in hiring through such practices as 'blind' applications."

• The push to eliminate DEI is effectively affirmative action for white men, eliminating programs that help corporations attract and retain qualified minorities and women.

• Beyond the flawed legal analysis, however, is an empirical question: Is corporate America biased against white people? Are white people being shut out of desirable jobs to accommodate an influx of racial minorities? According to the latest data, the answer to these questions is an emphatic "no."

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AI-Generated Slop Is Already In Your Public Library by Emanuel Maiberg at 404Media

• None of the librarians I talked to suggested the AI-generated content needed to be banned from Hoopla and libraries only because it is AI-generated. It might have its place, but it needs to be clearly labeled, and more importantly, provide borrowers with quality information. Much like Wikipedia editors, librarians are curators of information for society. Wikipedia editors are unpaid volunteers. Librarians told me they were already understaffed, overworked, and under attack by conservative groups before AI-generated content became an issue. Both groups now face an entirely new threat to their core mission: generative AI’s ability to create an infinite amount of low quality information. All librarians are asking for at this point is that Hoopla explain exactly how its selection process work, and hopefully improve it.

• “Platforms like Hoopla should offer libraries the option to select or omit materials, including AI materials, in their collections,” Sarah Lamdan, deputy director of the American Library Association, told me. “AI books should be well-identified in library catalogs, so it is clear to readers that the books were not written by human authors. If library visitors choose to read AI eBooks, they should do so with the knowledge that the books are AI-generated.

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Proud Boys Lose Control of Their Name to a Black Church They Vandalized by Alan Feuer at The New York Times

• Under a ruling by a Washington judge on Monday, the infamous far-right group was stripped of control over the trademark “Proud Boys” and was barred from selling any merchandise with either its name or its symbols without the consent of a Black church in Washington that its members vandalized. In June 2023, the church won a $2.8 million default judgment against the Proud Boys after the organization’s former leader, Enrique Tarrio, and several of his subordinates attacked it in a night of violence after a pro-Trump rally in December 2020.

• The ruling by the judge, Tanya M. Jones Bosier of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, effectively means that Proud Boys chapters across the country can no longer legally use their own name or the group’s traditional symbols without the permission of the church that was attacked, the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church.

• The ruling also clears the way for the church to try to seize any money that the Proud Boys might make by selling merchandise like hats or T-shirts emblazoned with their name or with any of their familiar logos, including a black and yellow laurel wreath.