Turnabout

"Conservatives" love to bitch:

"Why are we spending all that money on [insert mindless outrage du jour here], when there are [insert the pathos-invoking downtrodden here] ?"

But they don't give one empty fuck about anything but their need to pimp the conflict - any conflict. Constant rage-tweaking keeps people divided and not thinking about how coin-operated politicians are fucking us all with our pants on.

Veterans and immigrants aren't each other's enemies. The enemies - everybody's enemies - are the cynically manipulative politicians and their "donors", and a corporate media cartel that can't bring itself to think beyond their fly-specked ledgers.

So turn it around:

"Why are we spending billions on a sketchy border crisis performance art when the Americans who live down there are struggling to get clean water and decent healthcare?"

Trump is spending billions on border security. Some residents living there lack basic resources.

The president has reportedly urged Congress to pass $175 billion for border security. But residents of Del Rio, Texas, and Douglas, Arizona, say basic needs — like safe drinking water and hospital access — aren’t being met.

Within hours of taking office, President Donald Trump declared an emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, giving him authority to unilaterally spend billions on immigration enforcement and wall construction. He has since reportedly urged Congress to authorize an additional $175 billion for border security, far exceeding what was spent during his first term.

In the coming months, border towns in Texas and Arizona will receive more grants to fund and equip police patrols. New wall construction projects will fill border communities with workers who eat at restaurants, shop in stores and rent space in RV parks. And National Guard deployments will add to local economies.

But if the president asked Sandra Fuentes what the biggest need in her community on the Texas-Mexico border is, the answer would be safe drinking water, not more border security.

And if Trump put the same question to Jose Grijalva, the Arizona mayor would say a hospital for his border city, which has struggled without one for a decade.

Although billions of state and federal dollars flow into the majority-Latino communities along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, many remain among the poorest places in the nation. In many towns, unemployment is significantly higher and income much lower than their interior counterparts, with limited access to health care, underfunded infrastructure and lagging educational attainment. Security walls are erected next to neighborhoods without running water, and National Guard units deploy to towns without paved roads and hospitals.

By some estimates, about 30,000 border residents in Texas lack access to reliable drinking water, among more than a million statewide. For 205,000 people living along Arizona’s border with Mexico, the nearest full-service hospital is hours away.

Such struggles aren’t confined to the border. But the region offers perhaps the most striking disparity between the size of federal and state governments’ investment there and how little it’s reflected in the quality of life of residents.

“The border security issue takes up all the oxygen and a lot of the resources in the room,” said state Rep. Mary González, a Democrat from El Paso County who has sponsored bills to address water needs. “It leaves very little space for all the other priorities, specifically water and wastewater infrastructure, because most people don’t understand what it’s like turning your faucet and there’ll be no water.”

Here’s how residents in two border towns, Del Rio, Texas, and Douglas, Arizona, experience living in places where the government always seems ready to spend on border security while stubborn obstacles to their communities’ well-being remain.

Nearly a fifth of the nearly 50,000 residents in Val Verde County, Texas, live in poverty, compared with the state’s 14% average.

When Cierra Flores gives her daughter a bath at their home in Del Rio, she has to keep a close eye on the water level of the outdoor tank that supplies her house. Like any 6-year-old, her daughter likes to play in the running water. But Flores doesn’t have the luxury of leaving the tap open. When the tank runs dry, the household is out of water. That means not washing dishes, doing laundry or flushing the toilet until the trip can be made to get more water.

Flores lives on a ranch in Escondido Estates, a neighborhood where many residents have gone decades without running water. Flores’ family has a well on their property. But during the summer and prolonged droughts, as the region is now experiencing, their well runs dry.

At those times, the family relies on a neighbor who has a more dependable well and is willing to sell water. Flores’ husband makes hourlong trips twice on weekends to fill the family’s water tank. Their situation has felt even more tenuous lately, as her neighbor’s property was listed for sale, prompting worries about whether they’ll continue to have access to his well.

“I have no idea where we would go here if that well wasn’t there,” Flores said. “It’s frustrating that we don’t have basic resources, especially in a place where they know when the summer comes it doesn’t rain. It doesn’t rain, we don’t have water.”

Val Verde County, where Del Rio is located, is three times the size of Rhode Island and hours from a major city. About a fifth of its nearly 50,000 residents live in poverty, a rate nearly twice the national average. Some live in colonias — rural communities along the U.S.-Mexico border, including illegal subdivisions that lack access to water, sewers or adequate housing.

The county has worked for years to bring water to residents, piecing together state and federal grants. Yet about 2,000 people — more than 4% of the county’s population — still lack running water, according to a database kept by the Texas Office of the Attorney General. For those residents, it means showering at fitness centers and doing the dishes once a week with water from plastic jugs.

Some neighborhoods along the Mexican border on the outskirts of Del Rio, such as the area where Cierra Flores and her 6-year-old daughter, Olivia, live, still lack infrastructure like paved roads and access to safe drinking water.

In the early 1990s, then-Gov. Ann Richards, a Democrat, toured some of the state’s colonias along the border to assess the living conditions. After stepping into the mud on an unpaved street, she’s said to have been so moved by the scene that she told a staffer, “Whatever they want, give it to them.”

Fuentes, a community organizer, likes to tell that story because it drives home how long residents have fought for water and other improvements but been stymied by state and local politics and limited funds.

“It’s going to be an uphill battle, but we are going to keep on battling,” she said. “What else is there to do?”

Over the past 30 years, the state has provided more than $1 billion in grants and loans to bring drinking water and wastewater treatment to colonias and other economically distressed areas. Texas 2036, a nonpartisan public policy think tank, estimates Texas needs nearly $154 billion by 2050 to meet water demands across the state amid population growth, the ongoing drought and aging infrastructure.

Texas state leaders said they are committed to investing in water projects and infrastructure. Gov. Greg Abbott’s office said he is calling on the Legislature to dedicate $1 billion a year for 10 years and is looking forward to working with lawmakers “to ensure Texans have a safe, reliable water supply for the next 50 years.”

Kim Carmichael, a spokesperson for Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows, a Republican from Lubbock, said, “Texas is at a critical juncture with its water supply, and every lawmaker recognizes the need to act decisively and meaningfully invest to further secure our water future.” The Texas House’s base budget proposes $2.5 billion for water infrastructure.

One of the challenges — at the federal and state level — is that infrastructure needs often exceed available funds, said Olga Morales-Pate, chief executive officer of Rural Community Assistance Partnership, a national network of nonprofits that works with rural communities on access to safe drinking water and wastewater issues. “So it becomes a competitive process: Who gets there faster, who has a better application, who is shovel ready to get those funding opportunities out?” she said.

The plight of people without water often gets overlooked, said Karen Gonzalez, an organizer who used to work with Fuentes. Even though she grew up in Del Rio, it wasn’t until she started to work with the community that she learned some county residents didn’t have water.

“Every person that I come across that I tell that we’re working this issue is like, ‘There’s people that don’t have water?’” she said. “It’s not something that is known.”

Unlike border security, which is constantly in the spotlight.

During his inauguration, Trump praised Abbott as a “leader of the pack” on border security. In 2021, Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, a multibillion-dollar effort aimed at curbing illegal immigration and drug trafficking. As part of the operation, the state has awarded Val Verde County and the city of Del Rio more than $10 million in grants, state data obtained by The Texas Tribune shows.

A state-funded border wall that has gone up in the county a short distance from the Rio Grande stretches in fits and starts, including next to a neighborhood without running water. As of November, about 5 miles of it had cost at least $162 million, according to the Tribune. The state Legislature’s proposed budget includes $6.5 billion to maintain “current border security operations.”

Meanwhile, organizers, elected officials and residents say state and federal programs to fund water infrastructure will continue to fall short of the need. Last year, the state fund created by lawmakers in 1989 to help underserved areas access drinking water had $200 million in applications for assistance and only $100 million in available funding.

When grants are awarded, water projects can take years to complete because of increasing costs and unforeseen construction difficulties — like hitting unexpected bedrock while laying pipe, said Val Verde County Judge Lewis Owens. Project delays — some of them, Owens acknowledged, the county’s fault — impede the ability to get future grants.

Organizers like Fuentes and Karen Gonzalez said their frustration with the slow progress on water has grown as they’ve watched the border wall go up and billions more dollars spent to deploy state troopers and the National Guard to aid federal border security officers.

“It’s just infuriating,” Karen Gonzalez said. She said she hopes elected officials “focus on what our actual border community needs are. And for us, I feel like it’s not border security.”

As paramedics loaded her 8-year-old son into a helicopter in the Arizona border town of Douglas, Nina Nelson did her best to reassure him. Days earlier, Jacob and his father had been riding ATVs on their ranch in far southeastern Arizona, along the U.S.-Mexico border. Dust irritated Jacob’s lungs, and over the next few days his breathing deteriorated until Nelson could see him fight for every breath.

He needed care that isn’t available in Douglas, a town of about 15,000. And he would have to make the trip without her.

“Buddy, you’re gonna be OK,” she recalled telling him. She knew it would take more than twice as long to drive the 120 miles to Tucson and the nearest hospital that could provide the care he needed. “I’m gonna be racing up there. I’ll be there. I’m gonna find you,” she said.

Douglas lost its hospital nearly a decade ago. Southeast Arizona Medical Center had struggled financially for years and by 2015 was staffed by out-of-state doctors. When it ran afoul of federal rules too many times, jeopardizing patient safety, the government pulled its ability to bill Medicare and Medicaid and it closed within a week.

As her son’s breathing took a turn for the worse, Nelson considered the variables everyone in Douglas confronts in a medical emergency. Should she go to the town’s stand-alone emergency room, which treats only the most basic maladies? Drive the half hour to Bisbee or an hour to Sierra Vista for slightly higher levels of care? Or could Jacob endure the two hours it takes to drive to Tucson?

“That is the kind of game you play: ‘How much time do I think I have?’” Nelson said.

Arizona hasn’t been as aggressive as Texas in funding border security. But when concerns about the border surge, money often follows.

In 2021, the state created the Border Security Fund and allocated $55 million to it. A year later, then-Gov. Doug Ducey asked state lawmakers for $50 million for border security. They gave him more than 10 times that amount, including $335 million for a border wall. The measure was proposed by Sen. David Gowan, a Republican who represents Douglas. In October 2022, crews began stacking shipping containers along the border in Cochise County, where Douglas is located. Gowan’s spokesperson said he wasn’t available for comment.

The container wall wasn’t effective. Migrants slipped through gaps between containers, and a section toppled over. When the federal government sued, claiming the construction was trespassing on federal land, Ducey had the container wall removed.

The cost of erecting, then disassembling the wall: $197 million. (The state recouped about $1.4 million by selling the containers.)

Daniel Scarpinato, Ducey’s former chief of staff, said border security is a significant issue for nearby communities and requires resources, “especially given the failures of the federal government.” He noted that the Ducey administration didn’t ignore other needs in the area, including spending to attract doctors to rural Arizona. “But we will make no apologies for prioritizing public safety and security at our border,” he said.

Grijalva, a Douglas native, was sworn in as mayor in December with a list of needs he is determined to make progress on: a community center, more food assistance for the growing number of hungry residents and a hospital. Money the state spent on the container wall would’ve been better used on those projects, he said. “I appreciate Doug Ducey trying that, but those resources could have gone into the community,” he said.

The median income in Douglas is $39,000, about half the state’s median income, and almost a third of the town’s residents live in poverty. A shrinking tax base makes it difficult for Douglas to provide basic services. The town doesn’t have enough money for street repairs, let alone to reopen a hospital. The backlog of repaving projects has climbed to $67 million, while Douglas nets only $400,000 a year for street improvements.

Money for wall construction or National Guard units gives a short-term boost to the economy, but those efforts can also interfere with the economic lifeblood of towns like Douglas: cross-border traffic.

Both Trump and Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, have deployed hundreds of guard members and active military personnel to the border. None have shown up in Douglas yet, Grijalva said. When they do, they’ll spend money. But a couple dozen troops don’t compare to the 3.6 million people who cross the border each year. The Walmart in Douglas, a stone’s throw from the port of entry, is packed daily with shoppers from Agua Prieta, Sonora, Grijalva said. More troops on both sides of the port bottleneck traffic and raise people’s fears of being detained, which may discourage them from crossing, even when they are doing so legally, he said.

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Grijalva declared a state of emergency, which could make the city eligible for federal aid if its economy takes a hit. “I know the executive orders didn’t do anything to stop the legal immigration, but it’s the perception,” Grijalva said. “If our economy dips in any way, they could give us some funding.”

Douglas’ new mayor, Jose Grijalva, declared a state of emergency in January over concerns that Trump’s executive orders on border security and immigration will harm the border town’s fragile economy.

Attracting a new hospital is a longer-term effort. Construction alone could cost upwards of $75 million. But then it would have to be staffed. In its final years, the hospital in Douglas suffered from the shortage of health care professionals plaguing much of rural America. The year it closed, it had no onsite physicians, said Dr. Dan Derksen, director of the Arizona Center for Rural Health. The state has programs to address that problem, including helping doctors in rural areas repay school loans. But the shortage has persisted. If a hospital were to open again in Douglas, it could cost as much as $775,000 to launch a residency program there, according to Derksen and Dr. Conrad Clemens, who heads graduate medical education for the University of Arizona.

“There’s policy strategies that you can do at the state level that help, but there’s no single strategy that is a cure-all,” Derksen said. “You have to do a variety of strategies.”

Border security funding, on the other hand, is easier to get.

Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels is known for his aggressive border enforcement activities. His office soaks up state and federal grants to help with drug interdiction, human trafficking and surveillance equipment on the border. The state also awarded him $20 million for a new jail and $5 million to open a border security operations center, a base for various agencies enforcing the border, in Sierra Vista, about an hour from Douglas.

At its grand opening in November, Dannels said all he had to do was ask for the money.

“I was speaking with Gov. Ducey and the governor asked me, ‘What do you guys need?’” Dannels said. “I said, ‘We need a collective center that drives actions.’” Shortly after, the plan came together, he said.

However, if Cochise Regional Hospital were still open, Dannels’ office would have one less security concern. The abandoned building, which is deteriorating in an isolated pocket of desert on the outskirts of Douglas, is a common waypoint for smugglers.

The Founders Warned Us

This is not a government

This is a criminal enterprise

Bad Government

This is shitty power exemplified.

Once Republicans lined up behind the dumbass generic notions that people can't possibly be working if they're working from home, and that voting any way other than in person is outright fraud, they can't help but apply their shit in a thick even coat across everything they see.

They want us to believe they're just adhering to principle, but we all know they have no principles because they keep talking one way and then doing things that run opposite to what they say.

This is as perfect an example as anything. They yell about freedom and democracy, and then do whatever they can to keep certain people from freely exercising their right - even duty - to vote. Especially when it comes to women.

Case in point:

Johnson fails to kill bipartisan measure to allow proxy voting for new parents

After the vote, Speaker Mike Johnson abruptly canceled votes for the rest of the week

WASHINGTON — Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday tried and failed to kill a bipartisan effort to change House rules so that lawmakers would temporarily be allowed to vote remotely after the birth of a child, suffering an embarrassing defeat that paralyzed the chamber and signaled that the proposal could soon be adopted.

Using strong-arm tactics in a bid to block the measure, Johnson tried an extraordinary use of the speaker’s power to prevent the House from even considering a measure backed by half its members. But nine Republicans refused to go along, instead dealing him a public rebuke that left him without a strategy for moving ahead.

After the vote, Johnson abruptly canceled votes for the rest of the week, sending members home and leaving legislative business unsettled. Under House rules, Republican leaders are required to bring the proxy voting resolution to a vote within two legislative days. But they appeared to be refusing to do anything else until the holdouts in their party cave, which they have shown no sign of doing. As Republicans left Washington for the week having passed no bills, it was not clear how or when the issue would be resolved.

The showdown on the House floor was a capstone of a long-running fight over the rights of new parents in Congress.

It began over a year ago, when Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., began agitating for a change to House rules that would allow new mothers to designate a colleague to vote by proxy on their behalf for up to six weeks after giving birth. Luna landed on the idea after her own child was born.

There is no maternity or paternity leave for lawmakers, who can take time away from office without sacrificing their pay but cannot vote if they are not physically in the Capitol. Proponents of the change have called it a common-sense fix to modernize Congress, where more women and more younger members serve now than did 200 years ago.

Democrats, including Reps. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado, who gave birth this year to her second child, and Sara Jacobs of California, joined Luna’s effort, expanding the resolution to include new fathers and up to 12 weeks of proxy voting during a parental leave.

Johnson has adamantly opposed the group at every turn, arguing that proxy voting is unacceptable and unconstitutional, even though the Supreme Court refused to take up a Republican-led lawsuit challenging pandemic-era proxy voting rules in the House.

On Tuesday, he used an unprecedented parliamentary maneuver to close off the only path that members of the House have for steering around their leaders and forcing a vote on a measure that has majority support.

But that measure failed on the floor by a 222-206 vote, keeping alive the proxy voting proposal. Eight Republicans joined Luna and all Democrats in voting no.

Johnson and his allies have argued that any accommodation that allows members to vote without being at the Capitol, no matter how narrow, creates a slippery slope for more, and that it harms member collegiality.

“I do believe it’s an existential issue for this body,” Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., who chairs the Rules Committee, said Tuesday. “Congress is defined as the ‘act of coming together and meeting.’”

Later on the floor, Foxx asserted flatly: “Put simply, members of Congress need to show up for work.”

When Johnson refused to bring the bill to the floor, Luna and her cohorts used a tool called the discharge petition — a demand signed by 218 members of the House, the majority of the body — to force consideration of the measure.

But on Tuesday morning, Republicans on the Rules Committee, often referred to as the “speaker’s committee” because the speaker uses it to maintain control of the floor, engineered a tricky behind-the-scenes maneuver to kill the effort.

They approved a measure that would block the proxy voting bill or any legislation on a similar topic from reaching the floor during the remainder of the Congress, effectively nullifying the discharge petition and closing off any chance for its supporters to secure a vote on the matter for the next two years.

GOP lawmakers inserted it into an unrelated resolution to allow for a vote on the SAVE Act, legislation requiring people to prove their citizenship when they register to vote, in a bid to pressure Republicans to support it. That is the measure that failed Tuesday on the floor.

Democrats implored Republicans to consider the proxy voting change, which they argued was vital to allowing all lawmakers to do their jobs.

“It is unfathomable that in 2025 we have not modernized Congress to address these very unique challenges that members face — these life events, where our voices should still be heard, our constituents should still be represented,” Pettersen said on the House floor, holding her 9-week-old son, Sam, who gurgled in her arms.

She denounced Johnson’s maneuver, saying: “It is anti-woman. It is anti-family.”

They also called the move an unprecedented attempt to shut down a crucial mechanism in the House for ensuring that measures that have majority support are voted upon.

“Republicans love to talk about family values, but when given the chance to actually support families, they turn their backs,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass. “If you want to protect your rights as members of Congress, you should vote no here.”

In trying to block the measure, Johnson took a gamble, risking public humiliation in a bid to thwart a resolution that had support from members of both parties.

Johnson even leaned on President Donald Trump to help him, people familiar with the conversations said, hoping the president could urge Luna, a stalwart Trump supporter, to stand down. The pressure campaign, however, appeared to have only strengthened Luna’s resolve.

On Monday, Luna resigned from the House Freedom Caucus, citing its members’ unwillingness to back her in what she called a “modest, family-centered proposal.”

After the vote Tuesday, she told reporters the proposal would improve the House and the country.

“We had a good majority of Republicans as well that agreed this needs to change and it’s part of a healthy republic,” she said. She added that it was a big day for the institution “and allowing new parents to have a voice in Washington.”

Johnson’s view is in line with the longtime Republican position on proxy voting.

Republicans savaged Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for breaking with centuries of history and House rules by instituting proxy voting during the coronavirus pandemic. When he was minority leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., filed an unsuccessful lawsuit arguing that allowing a member of Congress to deputize a colleague to cast a vote on their behalf when they were not present was unconstitutional.

Smoke And Mirrors

You just had to know it was comin', right?

Musk claims otherwise, but the Trump administration’s spending is on track to surpass Biden’s

U.S. Treasury is on pace to spend 7.4% more in 2025 than last year

Elon Musk doubled down on his pledge to cut government spending by $1 trillion — an amount that would slash the federal budget deficit in half and, if implemented, put the U.S. much closer to stabilizing the growth of its debt burden relative to the size of the economy.

“Our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars,” Musk told Fox News during Thursday evening’s made-for-TV event — adding that he hoped to reduce overall federal spending by 15% solely through “eliminating waste and fraud,” a goal he said “seems really quite achievable.”

He pointed to a number of examples of wasteful spending, including a survey that Musk claimed was done for the Interior Department at a cost of $830 million to collect Americans’ opinions of national parks.

Musk said that the same survey could have been done by another vendor for just $10,000.

The “Department of Government Efficiency,” headed by the Tesla CEO (who also leads SpaceX and owns X, the former Twitter), says on its website that it has saved $130 billion so far, which amounts to about $2 billion in savings per day since President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

That’s about half of the $4 billion per day that Musk pledged to cut in his interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier. It’s difficult for reporters and analysts to confirm any of his claims, though erroneous claims and examples of claimed savings disappearing from the list of purported cost-saving cutbacks have been documented.

See also: What will DOGE mean for your Social Security checks?

DOGE made it particularly challenging to fact check its assertions when it removed federal identification numbers in its website’s source code that could help outsiders identify specifically what grants and contracts the agency is referring to.

That makes it difficult if not impossible to know the vendors the government has contracted with and whether the government is actually saving the amount of money DOGE is asserting that it has.

And there remain claims on the so-called department’s website that are incorrect. The largest savings asserted by DOGE is a canceled $1.9 trillion contract for IT modernization. But the contractor awarded the money told the New York Times last month that the award was actually canceled in November, under President Joe Biden.

The Federal Procurement Data System, a database of federal procurement projects, indicates that no money was ever spent on this grant, despite its authorization of the IRS to spend $1.9 billion over 7 years.

TaxWatch (December 2024): Republicans succeed in clawing back more of Biden’s billions for IRS tax-cheat enforcement

The Trump White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A broader look at federal spending data also appears to counter claims that DOGE’s efforts are saving money for American taxpayers.

The Hamilton Project, an economic-policy think tank, tracks federal spending using daily Treasury statements published by the government.

These data show that the federal government had spent $1.893 trillion in 2025 as of March 26, compared with $1.763 trillion as of the same date last year. In other words, federal spending is on pace to come in 7.4% higher this year than last.

It’s not uncommon for federal outlays to grow year by year along with the economy. But the government is currently operating under a continuing budget resolution that largely locks in spending levels signed into law by Biden last year.

Read more: Here’s the Republican plan to make ‘DOGE’ cuts permanent

By comparison, federal spending at the end of the first quarter in 2024 was on track to be 1.6% lower than in the prior year, though overall spending ended up 3% higher for the full year 2024 as compared with 2023.

“You would expect, given the rhetoric, to see big decreases relative to last year,” Wendy Edelberg, former chief economist at the Congressional Budget Office and director of the Hamilton Project, told MarketWatch.

“It’s less surprising when you consider that most of the cuts they have talked about are pretty small bore, and I think that’s the major takeaway,” she added.

Edelberg noted that even federal spending on salaries is coming in ahead of last year, suggesting that despite the Trump administration’s putting many federal workers on administrative leave, those people are still getting paid.

These figures cannot by themselves refute claims made by Musk and DOGE, as it doesn’t account for future savings that some contract and grant cancellations could realize for the Treasury.

It also doesn’t account for seasonal variations in spending, as contract and grant dollars are not disbursed on a daily basis but in irregular lump sums.

It does provide evidence, however, that whatever savings DOGE has realized, they are not yet significant enough to see any deficit reduction in real time.

Let's Rebut

Y'know who you don't ever fuck with? You never fuck with the wives of service members. You step in an Army wife's shit, you're gonna stink for a while.

These MAGA jerks have no honor, and no sense.

Is He Even There?

Trump has become something that's more like a figurehead - maybe not even that. He's only there for the ceremony of it all?

Whoever is actually running the show is not letting him in on much of anything.

I get the feeling Suzie Wiles is the de facto president, coordinating the Cabinet members who are acting more or less in concert - like an executive committee / group-effort Head Of Government.

It's fucking bizarre.

Four dead American soldiers has been in the news for a coupla days now. Why doesn't Trump know anything about it?

Rip Tear Shred Shred

Department of Health and Human Services will lay off 10,000 workers in a major restructuring plan

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a major overhaul, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will lay off 10,000 workers and shut down entire agencies, including ones that oversee billions of dollars in funds for addiction services and community health centers across the country.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticized the department he oversees as an inefficient “sprawling bureaucracy” in a video announcing the restructuring Thursday. He faulted the department’s 82,000 workers for a decline in Americans’ health.

“I want to promise you now that we’re going to do more with less,” Kennedy said in the video, posted to social media.

Kennedy acknowledged that it will be a “painful period” for the nation’s top health agencies, which are responsible for monitoring infectious diseases, inspecting foods and hospitals and overseeing health insurance programs for nearly half the country.

Overall, the department will downsize to 62,000 positions — losing 10,000 jobs through layoffs and another 10,000 workers who took early retirement and voluntary separation offers encouraged by President Donald Trump’s administration.

HHS provided on Thursday a breakdown of cuts at the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services:

• 3,500 jobs at the FDA, which inspects and sets safety standards for medications, medical devices and foods.
• 2,400 jobs at the CDC, which monitors for infectious disease outbreaks and works with public health agencies nationwide.
• 1,200 jobs at the NIH, the world’s leading public health research arm.
• 300 jobs at CMS, which oversees the Affordable Care Act marketplace, Medicare and Medicaid.

In its statement, HHS said it anticipates the changes will save $1.8 billion per year, but it did not provide a breakdown or any other details about the savings. The department has a $1.7 trillion annual budget, most of which is dedicated to funding Medicare and Medicaid programs used by older, disabled and poor Americans.

That $1.8 billion is a big number - not exactly chump change. But it represents a savings of 0.1% of the HHS annual budget.

So, on the face of it, that money is a drop in the bucket. The real impact - even if we decide to ignore what a truly shitty thing it is to put those 20,000 people out of work - will be felt in the economy, especially as you add it to the possibly trillions of dollars that Elon's merry band of incels is removing from the equation.

Keynesian Economics is a real thing. If you significantly disrupt government spending, you will disrupt your economy. And like the man said: When the US sneezes, the whole world catches cold.

Beyond losing workers, Kennedy said he will shut down entire agencies, some of which were established by Congress decades ago.

Several agencies will be folded into a new Administration for a Healthy America, Kennedy said.

Those include the Health Resources and Services Administration, which oversees and provides funding for hundreds of community health centers around the country, as well as the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which funds clinics and oversees the national 988 hotline. Both agencies pump billions of dollars into on-the-ground work in local communities.

The Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, created by a law signed by then-President George W. Bush and responsible for maintaining the national stockpile that was quickly drained during the COVID-19 pandemic, will be folded into the CDC.

Rachel Last Night

And No Word From Trump?

Notice how three governors have declared states of emergency, but there's no mention of them calling on Trump to do something to help them.

At least 36 people killed as tornadoes and high winds rip through US

• The huge storm has also produced dust storms and icy conditions.

• At least 36 people have been killed as tornadoes and high winds ripped through parts of the US.

The huge storm, which also produced dust storms and icy conditions, destroyed homes, wiped out schools and toppled lorries across the central and southern areas of the country.

National Weather Service meteorologist Cody Snell said tornado watches remain in place for parts of the Carolinas, east Georgia and northern Florida.

At least 36 people have been killed in seven states, including Missouri, where scattered twisters killed a dozen people, according to authorities.

Dakota Henderson, who lives in the state, said he and others found five bodies in the debris outside what was left of his aunt's house on Friday night as they tried to rescue trapped neighbours.

"It was a very rough deal," he said on Saturday. "It's really disturbing for what happened to the people, the casualties last night."

Tornadoes continued on Saturday night as the Storm Prediction Center warned a region stretching from eastern Louisiana and Mississippi through Alabama, western Georgia and Florida was most at risk.

Bailey Dillon, 24, and her fiance, Caleb Barnes, watched from their front porch in Tylertown, Mississippi, as a massive twister struck an area about half a mile away near an RV park, before they drove over to help.

They filmed snapped trees, levelled buildings and overturned vehicles as Ms Dillon described the damage as "catastrophic".

"Everything was destroyed," she said.

"Homes and everything were destroyed all around it," she said. "Schools and buildings are just completely gone."

The dynamic storm, which was given a rare "high risk" designation from weather forecasters, has been blamed for deadly dust storms, icy weather and severe thunderstorms on Sunday.

State of emergency

Mississippi governor Tate Reeves said six people died and more were missing as storms moved further east into Alabama, where three people including an 82-year-old woman were reported dead.

In Arkansas, where three deaths have been confirmed, governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency.

An emergency was also declared in Georgia, where a National Weather Service tornado watch posted early on Sunday warnings of isolated tornadoes, hail and gusts of up to 70mph.

Dust storms and wildfires

Dust storms caused by high winds were blamed for 11 deaths on Friday as eight people died in a pileup involving around 50 vehicles in Kansas, while three people were killed in car crashes in Texas.

The extreme weather conditions were forecast to impact an area home to more than 100 million people, with winds threatening blizzard conditions in colder northern areas and fanning the risk of wildfires in drier, warmer areas to the south.

Today's Not Sorry Not Sorry

BKjr is a fraud and a raving freak, who has used his fraudulent raving freakishness to bilk tens of thousands of grieving and scared-shitless parents out of tens of millions of dollars.

I fuckin' hate these people.

National Cancer Institute Employees Can’t Publish Information on These Topics Without Special Approval

Vaccines. Fluoride. Autism. Communications involving these and 20 other “controversial, high profile, or sensitive” topics will get extra scrutiny under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Employees at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, received internal guidance last week to flag manuscripts, presentations or other communications for scrutiny if they addressed “controversial, high profile, or sensitive” topics. Among the 23 hot-button issues, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica: vaccines, fluoride, peanut allergies, autism.

While it’s not uncommon for the cancer institute to outline a couple of administration priorities, the scope and scale of the list is unprecedented and highly unusual, said six employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. All materials must be reviewed by an institute “clearance team,” according to the records, and could be examined by officials at the NIH or its umbrella agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Staffers and experts worried that the directive would delay or halt the publication of research. “This is micromanagement at the highest level,” said Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

The list touches on the personal priorities of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist who has repeatedly promoted medical conspiracy theories and false claims. He has advanced the idea that rising rates of autism are linked to vaccines, a claim that has been debunked by hundreds of scientific studies. He has also suggested that aluminum in vaccines is responsible for childhood allergies (his son reportedly is severely allergic to peanuts). And he has claimed that water fluoridation — which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called “one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century” — is an “industrial waste.”

In confirmation hearings in January, Kennedy said that he was not “anti-vaccine,” and that as secretary, he would not discourage people from getting immunized for measles or polio, but he dodged questions about the link between autism and vaccines.

Another term on the list, “cancer moonshot,” refers to a program launched by President Barack Obama in 2016. It was a priority of the Biden administration, which intended for the program to cut the nation’s cancer death rate by at least half and prevent more than 4 million deaths.

The list is “an unusual mix of words that are tied to activities that this administration has been at war with — like equity, but also words that they purport to be in favor of doing something about, like ultraprocessed food,” Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco, said in an email.

A directive on topics requiring prepublication review at the National Cancer Institute was said to be circulated by the agency’s communications team. Credit:Obtained by ProPublica
The guidance states that staffers “do not need to share content describing the routine conduct of science if it will not get major media attention, is not controversial or sensitive, and does not touch on an administration priority.”

A longtime senior employee at the institute said that the directive was circulated by the institute’s communications team, and the content was not discussed at the leadership level. It is not clear in which exact office the directive originated. The NCI, NIH and HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions. (The existence of the list was first revealed in social media posts on Friday.)

Health and research experts told ProPublica they feared the chilling effect of the new guidance. Not only might it lead to a lengthier and more complex clearance process, it may also cause researchers to censor their work out of fear or deference to the administration’s priorities.

“This is real interference in the scientific process,” said Linda Birnbaum, a former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who served as a federal scientist for four decades. The list, she said, “just seems like Big Brother intimidation.”

During the first two months of Donald Trump’s second presidency, his administration has slashed funding for research institutions and stalled the NIH’s grant application process.

Kennedy has suggested that hundreds of NIH staffers should be fired and said that the institute should deprioritize infectious diseases like COVID-19 and shift its focus to chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity.

Obesity is on the NCI’s new list, as are infectious diseases including COVID-19, bird flu and measles.

The “focus on bird flu and covid is concerning,” Woodruff wrote, because “not being transparent with the public about infectious diseases will not stop them or make them go away and could make them worse.”

AntiVax

Their champion zigged when he was supposed to zag. Now they don't know what the fuck to do.

No Sunshine, Please

Treasury Department suspends enforcement of ownership information reporting for millions of businesses

Key Points

• The U.S. Department of the Treasury on Sunday said it won’t enforce the penalties or fines associated with the “beneficial ownership information,” or BOI, reporting requirements
• Previously, the Treasury set a March 21 deadline for businesses to comply or risk fines of up to $10,000
• The Treasury will also propose regulation to apply the BOI rule only to foreign companies

The U.S. Department of the Treasury on Sunday announced it won’t enforce the penalties or fines associated with the Biden-era “beneficial ownership information,” or BOI, reporting requirements for millions of domestic businesses.

Enacted via the Corporate Transparency Act in 2021 to fight illicit finance and shell company formation, BOI reporting requires small businesses to identify who directly or indirectly owns or controls the company to the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN.

After previous court delays, the Treasury in late February set a March 21 deadline to comply or risk civil penalties of up to $591 a day, adjusted for inflation, or criminal fines of up to $10,000 and up to two years in prison. The reporting requirements could apply to roughly 32.6 million businesses, according to federal estimates.

The rule was enacted to “make it harder for bad actors to hide or benefit from their ill-gotten gains through shell companies or other opaque ownership structures,” according to FinCEN.

President Donald Trump praised the news in a Truth Social post on Sunday night, describing the reporting rule as “outrageous and invasive” and “an absolute disaster” for small businesses.

Other experts say the Treasury’s decision could have ramifications for national security.

“This decision threatens to make the United States a magnet for foreign criminals, from drug cartels to fraudsters to terrorist organizations,” Scott Greytak, director of advocacy for anticorruption organization Transparency International U.S., said in a statement.

Big Sky

Fun Fact Friday for the Ladies:

In Montana, it is illegal for married women to go fishing alone on Sundays, and illegal for unmarried women to fish alone at all.

Montana 'Abortion Trafficking' Bill Could Criminalize Crossing State Lines for an Abortion

Transporting "an unborn child" from Montana to another state "with the intent to obtain an abortion that is illegal" in Montana, or assisting anyone in doing so, would be illegal under House Bill 609.

A new Montana bill "establishing the criminal offense of abortion trafficking" could criminalize pregnant women who cross state lines to get an abortion. Under House Bill 609, from state Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe (R–Billings), anyone convicted of "abortion trafficking" would face up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $1,000, or both.

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The bill defines abortion trafficking as purposely or knowingly transporting "an unborn child that is currently located in this state either to a location within this state or to a location outside of this state with the intent to obtain an abortion that is illegal in this state."

Aiding or assisting someone else in such transportation would also make one guilty of abortion trafficking.

Criminalizing driving someone else out of Montana to do something that's legal in another state is itself ridiculous. But the language of this bill would very clearly criminalize some pregnant women who transport themselves out of state too.

But Wait… Isn't Abortion Legal in Montana?

 
Per a constitutional amendment voters passed in 2024, Montana allows abortion up until fetal viability and provides an exception to this limit if the mother's life or health is at risk. This fact may give pause to people who think that's an acceptable limit—after all, it's only criminalizing folks who are getting the bad kind of abortions, right?

Look, I don't love the idea of late-term abortions either. But let's step back here for a moment.

First, there are what many would consider justifiable reasons for getting an abortion after about 24 weeks, including fatal fetal conditions that aren't discovered until later in a pregnancy. "Had a bill like this been law at the time, I wouldn't just be a grieving mother, I'd be a felon," Anne Angus told Jessica Valenti of Abortion, Every Day:

The 35-year-old left Montana for an abortion in 2022, after her fetus was diagnosed with a fatal condition. She was 24 weeks pregnant—which was past the legal abortion window at the time. Under HB 609, she could have faced years in prison. "All for fleeing the state to give my son the compassion and dignity he deserved," she says.

What's more, you needn't cheer on unconstitutional, travel-limiting measures like this just because they might stop a few abortions that don't meet your moral standards. There are other solutions—like pushing for changes to laws in states with no limits—that could address abortion-after-viability concerns without implicating other rights.

It's also possible that Montana voters will someday topple the recent constitutional amendment and the state will ban abortion much earlier in pregnancy or ban it entirely. In that case, a woman leaving the state for a first-trimester abortion could still be found guilty of abortion trafficking.

Perhaps most importantly, we should keep in mind that this is unlikely to stop with Montana. In fact, it's possible that Montana is seen by some as the perfect test ground for this sort of thing precisely because it currently allows abortions until viability.

"By starting in a state where abortion is legal until 'viability,' it gives Republicans a certain amount of PR cover. They can pretend this isn't about restricting women's right to travel—just about stopping 'late' abortion," suggests Valenti. "It's no accident that HB 609 targets later abortion patients… just like it's no coincidence that earlier 'trafficking' laws focused on teens."

That's just speculation, of course. But it wouldn't surprise me if backers of abortion trafficking laws like Montana's H.B. 609 may be counting on people to let this one slide, since it would only implicate post-viability abortions (for now). Meanwhile, they get to test out messaging and legal arguments before moving on to a state where abortion is banned earlier or entirely.

The Politics of 'Trafficking'

 
For now, H.B. 609 has been referred to the Montana House Judiciary Committee and had an initial hearing this morning.

Whatever happens with this bill, it surely won't be the last we'll hear about abortion trafficking, a term Republicans have begun to use and favor more frequently in recent years.

It's a handy framing trick. Calling something "abortion trafficking" sounds a lot more nefarious than "driving out of state for an abortion." The latter implicates Americans' right to freedom of movement and might give some moderate people pause. But trafficking means to deal or trade in something illegal and is used in other criminal statutes (drug trafficking, sex trafficking, labor trafficking). For those not paying close attention, abortion trafficking may seem to mean something worse than it does. And even for those who know the definition, it may unconsciously prime expectations of shiftiness and criminality, even when it's being used to refer to someone who leaves the state to get a legal abortion somewhere else.

This is a well-worn strategy. As Mistress Matisse pointed out on X, "They tested 'self-trafficking' charges on sex workers first." Sex workers have sometimes been charged with "sex trafficking" themselves. In addition, sex work customers or prospective customers are sometimes described as sex traffickers and charged with sex trafficking. Because sex trafficking can also refer to terrible crimes, like forcing someone else to sell sex, the term is a muddled mess that allows authorities to invoke evil criminals and heroic rescues when what they're doing is arresting people for trying to have consensual sex.

Some Republicans seem intent on pulling a similar trick with abortion trafficking.

The term is being defined differently in the various states that have considered abortion trafficking legislation. In Idaho and Tennessee, abortion trafficking laws ban helping a minor get an out-of-state abortion.

Regardless of precise definition, invoking trafficking suggests some sort of coercion—a girl or woman being ferried across state lines for an abortion against her will—or the involvement of a black-market abortionist, when the reality is usually people taking advantage of freedom of movement and federalism in order to have abortions.

A Dead Kid In Texas

It's up to 124 cases now. Five of them were vaccinated.

FIVE OUT OF 124 - that's 4%

Measles, once eliminated in the U.S., sickens 99 in Texas and New Mexico

Health authorities warned of further spread. Most U.S. measles cases this year involved people 19 and under and those without a confirmed vaccination.

Nearly 100 people across Texas and New Mexico have contracted measles, state officials say, escalating anxiety over the spread of a potentially life-threatening illness that was declared eliminated in the United States more than two decades ago.

Ninety cases of measles — the majority affecting children under 17 — were detected in Texas’s South Plains, a sprawling region in the state’s northwest, the Texas Department of State Health Services said Friday. The spread marks a significant jump from the 24 cases reported earlier this month. The DSHS said “additional cases are likely to occur in the outbreak area and the surrounding communities.”

Nine other cases were recorded in New Mexico as of Thursday, all in Lea County, which borders the South Plains region. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) urged those in the county with symptoms to call their local health offices.

Measles, which is most dangerous to children under 5, can cause a fever, cough, runny nose, watery eyes and tiny white spots, called koplik spots. As the disease progresses, some may experience a measles rash, which looks like small raised bumps or flat red spots.

There is no specific cure or treatment for measles. One or two in every 1,000 children who contract measles are projected to die, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in 2019, with pneumonia being the most common cause of death.

The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000, meaning the disease had not spread domestically for more than 12 months. It credited the achievement to widespread immunization campaigns after the vaccine became available in 1963.

However, the national vaccination rate for measles has dropped in recent years, particularly since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Even a small decline in vaccination can significantly increase the likelihood of an outbreak. Measles can “easily cross borders” in any community where vaccination rates are below 95 percent, according to the CDC.

Most cases recorded this year have occurred in people who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown, the CDC said.

The disease’s comeback has occurred in tandem with the rise of anti-vaccine rhetoric propagated on social media and among some public officials.

President Donald Trump — a longtime vaccine skeptic — has a mixed record on the subject. His choice for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has a history of spreading vaccine misinformation and recently promised to scrutinize childhood vaccination schedules, blaming them as a potential contributor to the rise in chronic diseases, the Associated Press reported this month.

While on the campaign trail, Trump pledged to cut federal funding for schools that required vaccines.

In the decade leading up to the measles vaccine’s introduction in 1963, the disease killed an estimated 400 to 500 people in the United States each year and caused an estimated 48,000 hospitalizations annually, the CDC said. So far, about a quarter of the cases recorded this year have resulted in hospitalizations, either to isolate the infected person or to treat complications.

- and -

Texas child is first confirmed death in growing measles outbreak

The unvaccinated school-age child is the first confirmed fatality in Texas’s worst measles outbreak in three decades.

LUBBOCK, Texas — A child has died of measles in Texas, the first confirmed fatality in the state’s worst outbreak in three decades, state health officials said Wednesday.

The unvaccinated school-age child was hospitalized in Lubbock last week, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Officials have reported 124 cases in Texas, mostly in west Texas, since late January, and nine cases in a neighboring New Mexico county. Nearly 80 percent are children, who are more susceptible to the vaccine-preventable disease.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Katherine Wells, Lubbock’s director of public health. “My heart just goes out to the family. And I hope this will help people reconsider getting children vaccinated.”

Summer Davies, a physician who cared for the child when they were first hospitalized this month at Covenant Children’s Hospital here, said the patient arrived with a high fever and struggled to breathe without assistance.

The child’s respiratory symptoms grew progressively worse, and then heart problems were diagnosed. Several days ago, the child was moved to an intensive care unit and placed on a ventilator before dying.

The child was otherwise healthy, Davies said.

The patient “could have lived a long, happy life, and it is really heartbreaking when it’s something you know you could have prevented or that is preventable and ended in something like this,” said Davies, a pediatric hospitalist.

Davies said she has seen about nine measles patients during the current outbreak. She had never previously encountered the disease.

While many children recover from measles, some die of pneumonia caused by the virus or a secondary bacterial infection.

Vaccination rates are below average in rural Gaines County, the center of the outbreak, where 80 cases have been reported. The deceased child’s hometown was not released. Many patients in rural areas with limited health-care options have been treated at hospitals in Lubbock, one of the closest large cities.

During President Donald Trump’s White House meeting with Cabinet officials Wednesday, Trump was asked about the measles outbreak, and turned to his new secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the country’s most prominent critics of childhood vaccination, to answer the question.

Kennedy said the federal health department is “following the measles epidemic every day.”

Kennedy said he thought there were 124 people who had contracted the disease, mainly in Gaines County, and “mainly, we’re told in the Mennonite community.” He added: “There are two people who have died, but … we’re watching it, and there are about 20 people hospitalized, mainly for quarantine.”

Lara Anton, a spokeswoman for the state health department, said the agency is aware of only one death in the outbreak. She said patients are not being quarantined at hospitals. They are taken there for critical care, she said.

Kennedy added: “We’re watching it. We put out a post on it yesterday, and we’re going to continue to follow it.”

He appeared to play down the seriousness of the outbreak. “Incidentally, there have been four measles outbreaks this year in this country. Last year, there were 16. So it’s not unusual,” he said. “We have measles outbreaks every year.”

A measles outbreak is defined as three or more related cases. The case tally in Texas in the first two months of the year has eclipsed the annual U.S. case count for each year between 2020 and 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2024, the country had 285 measles cases.

The CDC recommends children receive two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. One dose is 93 percent effective against measles and two doses is 97 percent effective, the agency says.

Public health officials and experts say the Texas outbreak illustrates the consequences of declining vaccination rates. Measles is a highly contagious virus that causes fever and rashes and can also cause long-term neurological complications and death.

In Texas, five of the measles patients were vaccinated; the rest were unvaccinated or their vaccination status was unknown. Eighteen patients have been hospitalized.

“During a measles outbreak, about one in five people who get sick will need hospital care and one in 20 will develop pneumonia,” the Texas health agency said in a news release. “Rarely, measles can lead to swelling of the brain and death. It can also cause pregnancy complications, such as premature birth and babies with low birth weight.”

The outbreak in Texas comes as Trump elevates skeptics of vaccines to the government’s highest health posts.

Kennedy asserts that the risks of the vaccines outweigh the risk of disease.

Kennedy drew criticism for a 2019 trip to Samoa, where he met with activists who were calling for Samoans to skip measles vaccines five months before the island nation experienced a measles outbreak that infected thousands and killed 83.

But during his confirmation hearings, Kennedy said he supports the measles vaccine and would do nothing to discourage people from receiving it.

During his seven terms in the House of Representatives, Dave Weldon, Trump’s nominee to lead the CDC, was a leading proponent of the false claim that vaccines cause autism.

Cracks

It doesn't sound like much - and it isn't much just yet.

But this is actually kind of encouraging.

In every deeply corrupt operation, some of the minions doing the dirty work will invariably hang on to bits of incriminating evidence as bargaining chips.

Daddy State Awareness Guide

Rule 6: Total criminalization

If we're all guilty, then you can't hold me responsible without the risk of exposing your own culpability.

Federal technology staffers resign rather than help Musk and DOGE

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”

The employees also warned that many of those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government under President Donald Trump’s administration were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them.

The mass resignation of engineers, data scientists, designers and product managers is a temporary setback for Musk and the Republican president’s tech-driven purge of the federal workforce. It comes amid a flurry of court challenges that have sought to stall, stop or unwind their efforts to fire or coerce thousands of government workers out of jobs.

In a statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was dismissive of the mass resignation.

“Anyone who thinks protests, lawsuits, and lawfare will deter President Trump must have been sleeping under a rock for the past several years,” Leavitt said. “President Trump will not be deterred from delivering on the promises he made to make our federal government more efficient and more accountable to the hardworking American taxpayers.”

Nearly 40% of contracts canceled by Musk’s DOGE are expected to produce no savings

Musk posted on his social media site X that the story was “fake news” and suggested that the staffers were “Dem political holdovers” who “would have been fired had then not resigned.”

The staffers who resigned had worked for what was once known as the United States Digital Service, but said their duties were being integrated into DOGE. Their former office, the USDS, was established under President Barack Obama after the botched rollout of Healthcare.gov, the web portal that millions of Americans use to sign up for insurance plans through the Democrat’s signature health care law.

All previously held senior roles at such tech companies as Google and Amazon and wrote in their resignation letter that they joined the government out of a sense of duty to public service.

Trump’s empowerment of Musk upended that. The day after Trump’s inauguration, the staffers wrote, they were called into a series of interviews that foreshadowed the secretive and disruptive work of Musk’s’ Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

According to the staffers, people wearing White House visitors’ badges, some of whom would not give their names, grilled the nonpartisan employees about their qualifications and politics. Some made statements that indicated they had a limited technical understanding. Many were young and seemed guided by ideology and fandom of Musk — not improving government technology.

“Several of these interviewers refused to identify themselves, asked questions about political loyalty, attempted to pit colleagues against each other, and demonstrated limited technical ability,” the staffers wrote in their letter. “This process created significant security risks.”

Earlier this month, about 40 staffers in the office were laid off. The firings dealt a devastating blow to the government’s ability to administer and safeguard its own technological footprint, they wrote.

“These highly skilled civil servants were working to modernize Social Security, veterans’ services, tax filing, health care, disaster relief, student aid, and other critical services,” the resignation letter states. “Their removal endangers millions of Americans who rely on these services every day. The sudden loss of their technology expertise makes critical systems and American’s data less safe.”

Those who remained, about 65 staffers, were integrated into DOGE’s government-slashing effort. About a third of them quit Tuesday.

“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” they wrote. “We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”

The slash-and-burn effort Musk is leading diverges from what was initially outlined by Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign. DOGE, a nod to Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency meme coin, was initially presented as a blue-ribbon commission that would exist outside government.

After the election, however, Musk hinted there was more to come, posting to his social media site, X, “Threat to democracy? Nope, threat to BUREAUCRACY!!!” He has leaned aggressively into the role since.

Last week he stood on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference gathering outside Washington, where he boasted of his exploits and hoisted a blinged-out, Chinese-made chainsaw above his head that was gifted by Argentinian President Javier Milei.

“This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy,” Musk bellowed from the stage.

Still, Musk has tried to keep technical talent in place, with the bulk of the layoffs in the Digital Service office focused on people in roles like designers, product managers, human resources and contracting staff, according to interviews with current and former staff.

Of the 40 people let go earlier this month, only one was an engineer — an outspoken and politically active staffer name Jonathan Kamens, who said in an interview with the AP that he believes he was fired for publicly endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, on his personal blog and being critical of Musk in chats with colleagues.

“I believe that Elon Musk is up to no good. And I believe that any data that he gains access to is going to be used for purposes that are inappropriate and harmful to Americans,” Kamens said.

U.S. Digital Service veterans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, recalled experiencing a similar sort of shock about how government processes worked that Musk and his team are discovering. Over time, many developed an appreciation for why certain things in government had to be treated with more care than in the private sector.

“‘Move fast and break things’ may be acceptable to someone who owns a business and owns the risk. And if things don’t go well, the damage is compartmentalized. But when you break things in government, you’re breaking things that belong to people who didn’t sign up for that,” said Cordell Schachter, who until last month was the chief information officer at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

USDS was established over a decade ago to do things like improving services for veterans, and it helped create a free government-run portal so tax filers did not have to go through third parties like TurboTax. It also devised systems to improve the way the federal government purchased technology.

It has been embroiled in its fair share of bureaucracy fights and agency turf wars with chief information officers across government who resented interlopers treading in their agency’s systems. USDS’ power across government stemmed from the imprimatur of acting on behalf of the White House and its founding mission of improving service for the American people.