Trump’s first action on becoming President was a wholesale revocation of several Biden Executive Office actions, leading to closure of many vital programs. One of these programs is called the Justice40 initiative.
For the first time in our nation’s history, the Federal government has made it a goal that 40 percent of the overall benefits of certain Federal climate, clean energy, affordable and sustainable housing, and other investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.
By killing the Executive Order that created this initiative, Trump has likely also killed all FEMA funding for a Savannah project to manage stormwater flooding in the Springfield Canal area.
The Justice40 Initiative was a way of allocating resources to historically underserved communities, such as the Carver Village and Cloverdale neighborhoods near the Canal. It wasn’t race-based and in fact made a point of excluding race in its criteria. However, it is a fact that many of the underserved communities in this country are made up of people of color. And because the majority of communities of people of color will benefit, the funding is targeted. The existence of “DEI” is the excuse, but really it is withholding funds that don’t benefit majority white people.
Currently, freezing of these funds is being held up by a court order, though the enforcement of the order is hit and miss. However, because of the association of the funds with environmental justice (“DEI”), and climate change, there’s a strong likelihood the funding will be lost.
It’s difficult to discern from the state of chaos currently in effect in the government, but the funding for the Basin flood control may already have been rescinded.
The state of Georgia, being Republican-led, didn’t join with the other states who have sued the Trump administration to ensure that funding that is promised is delivered. And the states lawsuit court order only extends to the Democrat-led states who filed the complaint However, thankfully, nonprofits also sued to stop the funding freeze, and this may protect the funding for the project. For now.
If the funding is terminated, Savannah will likely have to sue directly to attempt to enforce the previously approved support, or perhaps get funding from the state of Georgia, instead.
Or wait another four years for a different President.
Both Joe Rogan and Donald Trump call Musk a genius. In fact, they call him a ‘super genius’.
Except that Musk is no such thing. As Bill Clayton wrote in November of 2023
Musk’s strength is having the enormous wealth to breathe life into existing ideas by hiring experts who do have the expertise to achieve his goals. I haven’t seen any reports about what goes on behind closed doors, but I’m guessing he hasn’t contributed anything in the way of engineering insight and problem-solving that puts people in orbit.
Musk’s wealth arose from a joint effort between Musk and his brother, Kindal and one other person. By all accounts, Kindal is actually the smarter of the two though Musk is the more aggressive when seeking attention.
For instance, when Musk bought Twitter, his first thought was to use a blockchain, somehow, with the application—solely because this was the ‘kool kidz’ tech of the time. It was Kindal who talked him out of his idiotic idea. Now Musk wants to put the treasury systems on blockchain, a plan so idiotic that it makes my teeth hurt even thinking about it.
Then there’s the Musk proposition about using AI to root out all fraud and waste in government. Sure, it’s easy to convert a decades-old legacy system that’s likely the largest in the world consisting of millions if not billions of lines of code into gee-wiz AI in a day or two. No prob.
However, you only have to look at the AI search results we’ve all laughed at to know how moronic this idea is.
Or look at the current use of AI art. Now, whose arm is that? What’s wrong with those thumbs?
AI Fake!
Musk is aggressive, shrewd, brash, petty, and impulsive, but he is no genius. And what he and his band of merry little Musketts are doing to the government is proof positive that he’s not only not a genius, he’s actually not all that bright.
Take the government firings. The DOGE decided that they wanted to reduce government costs easily, so they focused on firing government employees as low-hanging fruit—without any attention to the fact that the total compensation for government employees is approximately $293 billion dollars, or 4.3% of government funding.
(And why not? After all, Musk crowed about feeding USAID to the wood chipper and bragged about the money saved, when our foreign aid is about 1% of the budget. Oh, and people died.)
DOGE also didn’t take into account that many of these employees live throughout the country and federal employment is a major financial benefit for many areas.
As an example, take Wyoming. Beautiful land for the most part, and a favorite tourist destination. As part of an effort to incorporate a sense of stability for the seasonal workers in the area, President Biden categorized these workers are permanent seasonal employees, with all the rights of government workers.
As new employees, each was put on probationary status, even though most have worked in the national parks for years. But being on probationary status was enough for DOGE to fire at least 10% of park workers, maybe more. That’s almost 1,000 people fired of the 8100 jobs in Wyoming.
And each of these jobs, with their stable income, leads to other jobs in the community where the federal workers reside. So firing these workers will not only mean our national parks aren’t being maintained or kept safe, but will have an economic ripple effect across the entire state.
Many of the Musk/DOGE firings weren’t just ill-considered and bad, they were a major screw up. An example of this was the firings of the people in the National Nuclear Safety Administration, part of the Department of Energy, who keep our nuclear stockpiles safe and secure.
Sources told CNN that DOGE staffers apparently did not realize that the agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons stockpile when the employees were fired Thursday. The terminations were quickly rescinded Friday, CNN reported
What’s worse, now the government can’t find the people to rehire them because they cancelled all their federal emails.
A memo sent to NNSA employees on Friday and obtained by NBC News read: “The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”
“Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people’s personal contact emails,” the memo added.
The Musk/DOGE team also fired 50 first year members of the elite CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service, one of the premier disease research groups in the world. This, as humans infected with bird flu have been discovered in several new states this week.
Firing critically necessary people demonstrates how poorly managed this destructive action was. People fired were fired, unfired, and fired again. There’s been chaos across the government, which means our tax refunds aren’t being processed, our FEMA requests aren’t being answered, and any number of other essential government services aren’t being performed.
Also, by firing the newer members of government, we have lost a generational chance to bring in new ideas, new technologies, new training, as well as ensuring there are enough workers to actually perform the tasks and jobs delegated to them by Congress.
We know we don’t have enough migration judges, but we have even less now because Musk/DOGE just fired twenty.
The sheer stupidity of this mass, sudden firing is mind-boggling. It’s like Musk and his little gang of ijits didn’t spend ten minutes on trying to understand what a government is, and how it works. Musk somehow believes that what worked for Twitter—nothing more than one social media app among many—would work for the US Government.
The federal employees fired were told to get out now; in many cases, to clear out in 30 minutes. There’s no time to ensure a half finished job will be finished correctly, or let folks know where you’re at with a task. It will be days just to discover where people left off, and even more days (weeks or months) to finish the task, because there won’t be enough people to do all the work that needs to be done even when they finally recover from the chaos.
Just like Twitter. Except it won’t be a social media site going offline for a few hours every other day, it will be closed national parks, disease outbreaks, criminals who won’t get caught, risks to our national security, unpaid taxpayers, no support in a disaster, no home loans, no VA medical, and who knows, maybe we can no longer count on getting our Social Security checks, or that our doctors will get paid by Medicare.
The havoc happening right now will negatively impact on the government for years. The only silver lining is that when all of this crap really hits the fan, the country will have no doubt as who is to blame, and it certainly won’t be someone named Biden or Harris.
That’s probably the ultimate measure of Musk’s supposed ‘genius’: smart people don’t shoot themselves in the foot. Repeatedly.
Disregarding law, disregarding Congressional oversight, and disregarding just plain common sense, Trump is allowing Elon Musk and his kids to decimate our working government. Last night it was the CFPB.
This is the same organization that has helped consumers recover billions from financial services that have harmed us. This is also the same organization that would oversee Musk’s own entry into payment systems, which is likely why it was targeted.
Why does Musk have such power? Because the United States has been bought for a mere $280 million dollars by Musk, while Trump sits in the White House, trying to remember why he’s there. And Musk wants his money’s worth.
You, in Congress, could stop all this nonsense. You could, as a group, show a little bit of courage, as well as responsibility to the people who elected you to office. No, instead, you put your party over the people. You put Trump and Musk over the people.
All that matters now, to you, is what Trump/Musk want, they get. No matter how harmful to the people, no matter the lasting damage.
Instead of celebrating the 250th anniversary of our country, we get to watch it be destroyed.
More lawsuits will come from these actions, and the judges—appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents—recognize what’s happening and are doing their best to enforce the rule of law…the same rule of law you just don’t give a damn about.
What did you say in your Sunday newsletter?
Together with Elon Musk, a business mastermind, President Trump is delivering on his promise to the American people that he will remove unnecessary government spending and save taxpayers money.
Save us money? The billions of dollars recovered for US taxpayers, that kind of money? The money to ensure our water is clean, our air breathable, that people aren’t harmed by defective products, to help farmers and small businesses, to ensure corporations don’t harm people, to help in disasters, to help kids go to school, to provide healthcare and financial stability for the nation’s retired community.
That money?
No, that money won’t be saved. The only money ‘saved’ will be tax cuts for you and your other rich friends.
Among the many lawsuits against the Trump/Musk actions is one filed by the AFL/CIO and other labor organizations and unions against the Department of Labor for DOGE access to what should be confidential and private data.
In response, the government attempted to blow off the concerns by stating that DOGE folk are now employed by the DOL, but this is cold comfort when it’s obvious these people have an original allegiance to DOGE/Musk, and only a tenuous at best connection to the requirements of federal employment.
In the reply to the government response, the lawyers for the AFL/CIO highlight the real problem with the continue DOGE access at federal agencies.
Moreover, Defendants’ reassurance that all is well because DOGE1
personnel who have been granted broad access to the Department of Labor’s systems have been detailed to that agency is both cold comfort and legally insufficient. As a consequence of DOGE’s establishment as a free-floating component within the Executive Office of the President, it lacks the requisite authority to detail its personnel to federal agencies and, for the same reason, agencies may not receive those detailees.
Accordingly, the violations causing Plaintiffs irreparable harm, including under the Privacy Act, will persist, absent intervention from the Court.
These faux employees that Musk bullied into each department with Trump’s willing compliance have not undergone the regular reviews, with its checks and balances, for federal employment. They have also not demonstrated a respect for law, particularly the stringent laws that guard the privacy and confidentiality of government systems.
And what harm is it to give DOGE this access?
Many of Plaintiffs’ members will be chilled from reporting legal violations by their employers and prevented from exercising their rights to seek the Department’s protections if they know that records memorializing their complaints may no longer be secure on Department servers (and, indeed, may be made freely available to individuals concurrently serving as executives of companies subject to Department enforcement).
The response also notes another item of importance: that DOGE has no authority to employ people within the federal government. And federal departments have no authority to accept these people as employees.
Defendants argue that, because DOGE personnel at the Department have been “detailed” from DOGE to the Department, those individuals are functioning as employees of the Department and, accordingly, may lawfully perform Department functions and access Department systems. … But DOGE is not authorized to detail its personnel to the Department, or any federal agency, and the Department was not authorized to accept their services
So the employment of people such as Thomas Shedd, who I have written about previously, is inherently illegal, as is allowing them unlimited access to our data and our data systems.
As was noted in the response, once data has been exposed the damage is done and can’t be undone, “a bell that cannot be unrung.”
We shouldn’t have to sue to stop these people. The President’s first duty is to have a care for the American people. And Congress should be stepping up to prevent such atrocities, but evidently, it’s more concerned about $15 million dollars in condoms for the Taliban per Buddy Carter, my own Republican representative to the House.
It was a tip to Washington Post that gives us an indication of what’s really happening with DOGE.
Musk’s claims of changing code and stopping payments was nothing more than a distraction, a way of keeping our focus on what one hand is doing while the other operates freely.
Trump’s blathering out developing Gaza, or the photogenic migrant raids and talk of El Salvador prisons—while heinous and shocking to see and hear from a US President—also serve to distract us fom what DOGE is really doing.
They’re siphoning up all our data, every bit of it. They may be running it through AI systems, true, but that’s not the problem: the problem is all that data is leaving federal systems and being transferred to cloud systems and computers that Musk controls, not us.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud-based platform. This means all that data is being moved outside of strict federal protections and into privately held accounts on Microsoft’s cloud system.
We thought we had stopped them in court, but even that was a distraction. How Musk must have laughed when lawyers out to protect our data inadvertently gave DOGE permission to do what they really wanted to do in the first place: get the data.
Speaking of data: They want that, too. DOGE agents are installed at or have visited the Treasury Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Small Business Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor. Probably more. They’ve demanded data, sensitive data, payments data, and in many cases they’ve gotten it—the pursuit of data as an end unto itself but also data that could easily be used as a competitive edge, as a weapon, if you care to wield it.
The tip was about the Department of Education, but we’ve heard about DOGE people in the Treasury and Medicare/Medicaid systems. We know they’ve already grabbed data related to USAID. And Musk has bragged about accessing all government systems—ostensibly to improve them, but in actuality, to get the data. All that data.
All the information about student loans, all the information about grants, all Medicare and Medicaid payments—and the procedures, diagnoses, and treatments related to those payments.
All of our tax filings, our social security payments and records, any government expenditure, FEMA claims…all of it being siphoned off and sent to the cloud. Not only data about government employees, but data about us.
All corporate data, including taxes, government fees and fines, confidential decisions and actions related to farm and factory.
Data from and about banks and financial institutions, including payment details if we have direct deposit.
And once it’s out there, there’s nothing we can do to grab it back and keep it safe.
We are witnessing the greatest data breach in history, and it’s happening not because of hackers from China or Russia, but from agents in our own federal government. Agents put there by Musk with President Trump’s approval.
What a profound betrayal of the people of this country.
