So, if anyone needs to do a hard reverse from obsessing about the eight or so transgender collegiate athletes, and the bizarre need to eliminate any hard-earned consideration of diversity, equity, and inclusion from the American experience, it is the American voters who have empowered MAGA. If anyone needs to wake up—to become woke, if you will—it is those voters who allowed Elon Musk to spend a quarter of a billion dollars to help them demonize Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and forget all about the fact that Donald Trump was a convicted felon, that Donald Trump had committed sexual assault, had stolen top secret documents and stored them in his completely unsecured Mar-a-Lago bathroom. That he had cheated every other New York taxpayer by raising and then lowering the value of his assets to either get loans or avoid the taxes he and his business owed. Those who forgot that Donald Trump was/is a serial liar and is not to be trusted.
Well, in Truskmumpian America, you certainly do get what you pay for: While Elon Musk did indeed shell out a massive amount of money to install our erstwhile king, he has made so much more than that since the election.
According to The Washington Post:
The tech mogul made a big bet on Donald Trump. By one measure, it has paid off handsomely. Elon Musk’s net worth has climbed by more than $200 billion in 2024, a massive increase in the same year that the world’s richest person spent at least $277 million backing Donald Trump and other Republican candidates. The bulk of the increase, more than $170 billion, has come since Election Day.
Trump’s election sent stock in electric-vehicle maker Tesla, a company central to Musk’s wealth and where he is CEO, soaring. Shares were trading at prices about 70 percent higher on Friday than on Election Day … Trump has indicated he will be friendly to businesses and investors of all kinds when he returns to office. Musk’s empire is poised to especially benefit from the president-elect’s promised cuts to regulation — and potentially also overt favors to the tech billionaire, who has become a loyal political lieutenant.
[Emphasis added.]
By signing Executive Order No. 14,210, “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,” Donald Trump provided Musk with the power for his DOGE lieutenants to meddle in the operation of every critical governmental agency. Along the way, Donald Trump has empowered Musk, under the fraudulent cover of efficiency, to get rid of any and every government agency and government worker who might feel compelled to investigate him—government employees previously mandated to ensure that he and his investors and associates don’t break the law.
Talk about fixing the deck. I mean, you don’t need to be a phony rocket scientist to know that if you have an ethics problem, the first folks you need to disappear are those watchdogs who monitor whether our government follows legal guidelines. Yes, those inspectors generals at every government agency whose job it is to root out unethical practices. Those who make sure government contracts aren’t given out to political allies or corrupt contractors or that sensitive, top secret government documents are returned to the National Archive. Seems pretty basic and simple.
On January 25, 2025, NBC News reported:
President Donald Trump on Friday fired 18 inspectors general in the federal government, according to Hannibal ‘Mike’ Ware, the head of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency who was also fired …
Among those terminated were inspectors general for the Defense Department, State Department, Health and Human Services Department and the Department of Labor …
When asked why the inspectors general were fired, the White House official said the move was an effort by the president to let go of parts of the past Biden administration that don’t ‘align’ with the new Trump administration.
‘We’re cleaning house of what doesn’t work for us and going forward,’ the official said.
By the way, firing these folks has absolutely zilch to do with rooting out government waste and everything to do with ending governmental accountability. Yes, cutting food inspectors and folks at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institute of Health (NIH) clearly endangers public safety. Oh, and firing folks at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) makes it difficult to monitor potentially out-of-control banks. And firing auditors at the IRS ensures that the wealthiest Americans don’t ever have to worry about cheating on their taxes.
In case you are curious, here is what the law says about Musk and potential conflicts of interest. Usually, 18 USC §208 of the federal code would ensure that ethical standards prevail:
According to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, because federal legislation would prohibit an executive branch employee like Elon Musk “from participating personally and substantially in a particular Government matter that will affect his own financial interests,” the Trump administration needed a workaround.
This brings us to special government employees. NPR explains:
Typically, SGEs are hired as experts or consultants or serve as members of federal advisory committees, of which there are roughly 1,000 across the U.S. government.
SGEs are limited to working for the government for no more than 130 days out of a 365-day period, though they can work multiple years, and they can either be paid or unpaid. NPR has reported that Musk is not being paid for his work with DOGE …
According to Kathleen Clark, a professor specializing in government ethics law at Washington University in St. Louis, SGEs are mostly the same as regular government employees and can be given similar powers, including access to sensitive information. Musk and DOGE were granted access to a massive Treasury Department payment system that contains Americans’ Social Security numbers and bank account information.
Clark says what’s different about Musk’s case is that he is exercising power — such as purporting to shut down entire government agencies — that she says is beyond that of anyone in the White House.
‘The president does not have that power and neither does Elon Musk under our Constitution, which grants Congress the power to control how money is spent by the executive branch,’ Clark said.
A group of 19 Democratic state attorneys general filed a lawsuit challenging DOGE’s authority to shut down agencies and access sensitive information, while another lawsuit alleges a lack of transparency at the office.
So what, exactly, are some of the actual and potential conflicts of interest for Elon Musk and his companies? As early as last year, when it became apparent during the campaign that Musk would have enormous influence over Donald Trump, The New York Times published a report titled “U.S. Agencies Fund, and Fight With, Elon Musk. A Trump Presidency Could Give Him Power Over Them.” They wrote:
Elon Musk’s influence over the federal government is extraordinary, and extraordinarily lucrative. Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, effectively dictates NASA’s rocket launch schedule. The Defense Department relies on him to get most of its satellites to orbit. His companies were promised $3 billion across nearly 100 different contracts last year with 17 federal agencies.” The list included such prominent government agencies as State, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Veterans Affairs, Interior, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Transportation, EPA and NASA. [Emphasis added]
The New York Times reported at the time:
Elon Musk’s private space company is developing a giant rocket called Starship to one day take people to Mars.
But first, it will drop off NASA astronauts at the moon.
NASA announced on Friday that it had awarded a contract to SpaceX for $2.9 billion to use Starship to take astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon.
The contract extends NASA’s trend of relying on private companies to ferry people, cargo and robotic explorers to space. But it also represents something of a triumph for Mr. Musk in the battle of space billionaires. One of the competitors for the NASA lunar contract was Blue Origin, created by Jeff Bezos of Amazon.
The Times reported in October 2024:
His entanglements with federal regulators are also numerous and adversarial. His companies have been targeted in at least 20 recent investigations or reviews, including over the safety of his Tesla cars and the environmental damage caused by his rockets …
Together, they show a deep web of relationships: Instead of entering this new role as a neutral observer, Mr. Musk would be passing judgment on his own customers and regulators.
Already, Mr. Musk has discussed how he would use the new position to help his own companies.
He has questioned a rule that required SpaceX to obtain a permit for discharging large amounts of potentially polluted water from its launchpad in Texas. He also said that limiting this kind of oversight could help SpaceX reach Mars sooner — ‘so long as it is not smothered by bureaucracy,’ he wrote on X, his social-media platform.
[Emphasis added.]
Starship will make life multiplanetary, preserving life as know from extinction events on Earth, so long as it is not smothered by bureaucracy.
There is more government regulatory smothering every year. If this continues, all large projects in the United States will be illegal.… https://t.co/97GbZCfELC
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 13, 2024
I guess when you are preserving life from extinction, you can dispense with a whole bunch of regulations and annoying oversight. The Times continued: “Earlier this month, he attacked the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the internet satellites that SpaceX launches.”
Had the FCC not illegally revoked the SpaceX Starlink award, it would probably have saved lives in North Carolina.
Lawfare costs lives. https://t.co/FF0ugexP2g
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 2, 2024
But, as the FCC declared on December 12, 2023, the agency had valid concerns that Starlink couldn’t live up to the requirements of the contract:
The FCC explained further:
The agency qualified Starlink at the short form stage, but at the long form stage, the Commission determined that Starlink failed to demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service. Funding these vast proposed networks would not be the best use of limited Universal Service Fund dollars to bring broadband to unserved areas across the United States, the Commission concluded. In the initial auction results announced December 7, 2020, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (Starlink) was the winning bidder of $885,509,638.40.
Not surprisingly, Donald Trump wants to assure the American people that there won’t be any Musk problem. In Newsweek’s February 18, 2025, story, “White House Responds as Elon Musk Faces New Conflict of Interest Claims,” Ewan Palmer reported:
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said there will be no conflict of interest as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is expected to target the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as part of the Trump administration’s federal cost-cutting plans.
Despite Karoline Leavitt’s reassurances, Newsweek had previously reported that, in April 2022, Musk proposed to purchase Twitter for $44 billion:
The deal soon led to legal scrutiny over how he amassed his stake in Twitter and the delayed disclosure of this stake to the SEC. Investors who acquire a 5% or more stake in a publicly traded company are required to disclose this ownership within 10 days of acquisition. Musk reportedly reached this threshold on March 14, but did not disclose it until April 4, 21 days later.
Newsweek noted:
[I]n May 2022, Musk was sued by Twitter investors who alleged he had engaged ‘in market manipulation, purchasing Twitter stock at an artificially low price. This tactic was believed to influence the stock price negatively, saving Musk around $156 million.
If this wasn’t enough, in June 2022:
Musk was also accused of insider trading by investors who alleged he manipulated the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, causing them to incur significant financial losses. Musk was sued for $258 billion by a Dogecoin investor who accused him of running a pyramid scheme to support the cryptocurrency. According to Reuters, the plaintiff, Keith Johnson, alleged that Musk, along with his companies Tesla and SpaceX, promoted Dogecoin and drove up its price, only to let it plummet later.
In October 2022, Newsweek noted:
The SEC sued Musk to compel him to testify as part of a probe into his takeover of Twitter. Musk resisted the subpoena on several grounds, including claims that the SEC’s investigation was baseless and harassing, and that the subpoena exceeded the SEC’s authority because it was not issued by an officer appointed by the President, a court, or the head of a department.
Then, according to Newsweek, in February 2023, Musk’s $56 billion Tesla compensation was challenged. It was alleged:
[Musk had] coerced Tesla directors into approving the deal and that the disclosures about the pay plan were misleading. Presiding judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled that the process followed by Tesla’s board was ‘deeply flawed,’ resulting in an unfair and potentially excessive compensation package. The blocked package would have made Musk the recipient of what McCormick dubbed the ‘largest potential opportunity ever observed in public markets by multiple orders of magnitude.’
As for Elon Musk’s significant hatred for all things woke and DEI, Newsweek provides some perspective. In April 2023, a federal jury in San Francisco had ordered “Tesla to pay $137 million to a Black elevator operator who won a racial harassment lawsuit against the company. Owen Diaz alleged that he was repeatedly referred to using racial slurs by workers at a California factory he worked at between 2015 and 2016.”
But, really, truly, when it comes to issues of conflict of interest, the administration assures us we should have no fear:
A Trump administration official told POLITICO that Musk is a special government employee and ‘plays no direct role in the work of those working across the administration to identify, expose, and uproot waste, fraud, and abuse. President Trump is the chief executive of the executive branch and reserves the right to fire anyone he wants,’ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. ‘As for concerns regarding conflicts of interest between Elon Musk and DOGE, President Trump has stated he will not allow conflicts, and Elon himself has committed to recusing himself from potential conflicts.’
It is pretty clear that both Donald Trump and Elon Musk are convinced the rules shouldn’t apply to them and they will rigorously look to remove any and everyone who looks to enforce those rules. Convinced of their own superiority, they are confident they deserve everything they have gotten, no matter how they have gotten it. They reek of arrogance.
Donald Trump took a break from golf and from parroting Vladimir Putin to meddle in New York City’s traffic problem. And, not surprisingly, he couldn’t help but imagine he had somehow saved New York City. Such a majestic accomplishment, he felt sure he deserved a crown.
And just in case you missed the post, this picture is worth more than a million words:
“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”
–President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/IMr4tq0sMB— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 19, 2025
Not to be outdone, AP reports:
Billionaire Elon Musk appeared at a conservative gathering outside Washington waving a chainsaw in the air, showing openness to auditing the Federal Reserve and accusing Democrats of ‘treason’ …
Before his appearance, he met with Argentine President Javier Milei, who has been frequently praised by Musk and popularized the power tool while campaigning in 2023 and proposing slashing public spending.
After Musk appeared onstage, wearing shades and his trademark black ‘Make America Great Again’ … The Argentine leader then walked onstage with the red chainsaw and passed it to Musk …
‘This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy,’ he said.
Elon Musk obviously wanted you to see this:
This is a real picture pic.twitter.com/HFSxrpbiju
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2025
Musk wants you to believe he is a man committed to eliminating government waste and cutting through the needless layers of bureaucracy. But what if he is just cutting out the ability of those whose jobs it is/was at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the U.S. Department of Transportation to make sure unmanned Tesla cars can’t really kill people or those at the FCC who try to make sure that Musk’s rocket ships don’t blow up?
Of course, in the real world, getting rid of those working at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) may very kill a whole lot more of us ordinary citizens who, while we can’t afford a few minutes’ private trip in a boutique rocket ship, just want to fly and visit friends in another city without dying along the way.
As for Elon Musk’s Tesla, well, according to The New York Times:
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has laid off 4 percent of its workers, a transportation official said. The agency has raised questions about crashes involving Tesla’s self-driving technology … [and] has three active investigations of Tesla, according to agency documents, including one examining whether the company’s autonomous driving software is prone to failure when visibility is poor …
One of the investigations into Tesla is based on four accidents involving technology that the carmaker calls supervised full self-driving, which can steer, brake and navigate Tesla cars in some situations. In one of the crashes, a Tesla struck and killed a pedestrian, according to agency documents. In another of the accidents, a person was injured.
Tesla’s self-driving technology relies on cameras to survey a car’s surroundings, in contrast with competitors like Waymo, a unit of the same company as Google, that also uses lasers and radar to recognize objects.
The traffic safety agency has been looking into whether Tesla’s technology failed when visibility was poor because of glare from the sun, fog or dust.
Mr. Musk has often argued that Tesla self-driving technology is safer than human drivers.
The technology is also crucial to Tesla’s future and share price. As Tesla sales have flagged, falling 1 percent last year even as the global market for electric vehicles rose 25 percent, Mr. Musk has shifted the company’s focus to autonomous driving technology and plans for a self-driving taxi.
The technology will help make Tesla the most valuable company in the world by far, Mr. Musk told investors last month.
A small government team regulating the sort of autonomous cars that Elon Musk says represent the future of Tesla, his car company, is getting cut nearly in half by the Musk-led U.S. Doge Service, … In all, the agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, will lose between 70 and 80 people, split roughly evenly between firings of probationary employees and buyouts, according to three people, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.
The losses touch on many aspects of the agency’s safety work, according to fired workers who also spoke with The Washington Post: an engineer who worked with crash test dummies, employees who work with states on safety grant funding, and a research psychologist focused on drunken driving and speeding. ‘It was just very jarring to go from saving lives one day to being locked out of your computer the next,’ said one terminated employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid hurting his prospects of finding a new job.
[Emphasis added.]
According to The Washington Post, in a joint interview with FOX entertainer Sean Hannity, Trump and Musk assured the public there would be no ethical problems with DOGE:
If Musk has a business conflict with any of the work he is doing advising the federal government, ‘he won’t be involved,’ Trump told Hannity. ’I haven’t asked the president for anything ever,’ Musk said, adding that he would recuse himself should there be any conflict of interest.
But as The Post noted:
[The NHTSA’s work has included ]investigations of safety risks in Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving technologies … Tesla plans to put fully autonomous vehicles on the road this year. An agency investigation led to a recall of 2 million vehicles in December 2023, and it disclosed in April that it had documented numerous deadly crashes involving Autopilot.
You have probably seen claims that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been compromised by bureaucrats with left-leaning political agendas and has been tainted by rampant corruption.
Yet, there seems to be no concern whatsoever for the fate of those USAID has been serving all these years. Never has Donald Trump or Elon Musk acknowledged the severe cost to be borne by those in foreign lands who benefited from the humanitarian assistance we were providing. Nor any calculation of the extraordinary benefits our farmers were receiving for providing that aid. The Washington Post recently made that point:
The Post explained:
Federal and nonprofit employees across Washington are reeling, some preparing to be jobless as President Donald Trump takes an ax to their agencies. Government aid workers abroad have had to foot the bill to relocate their families back home, their programs and livelihoods suddenly cut short. Food is at risk of spoiling as it sits waiting to be distributed in relief projects that may not continue. The Trump administration’s response has roughly amounted to so what?
‘I campaigned on this,’ Trump said from behind the Resolute Desk this week, defending the ruthlessness with which his White House is moving to cut the federal workforce and spending programs that have existed for decades. ‘I campaigned on the fact that I said government is corrupt, and it is. It’s very corrupt.’ The federal government wasn’t just corrupt, the president added. ‘It’s also foolish.’
Trump’s White House is relishing how quickly his flurry of cuts are leaving some federal agencies in a state of paralysis, even as courts have temporarily blocked some of his most aggressive actions. As justification for the steep cuts, Trump and his advisers point to his popular-vote victory and a recent poll that shows more than half of Americans approve of his job performance … A White House official dismissed concerns about the cuts as a ‘media narrative … We knew they were going to do this,’ said the White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal discussions. ‘They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle, and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.’
Now Elon Musk may not be the king, but he sure loves what the king is letting him do. And he sure loves pushing the boundaries and upping the ante. And, as The Washington Post reported in a story titled “Feds must answer email on what they did last week — or lose jobs, Musk says,” Musk sent an email to millions of federal workers demanding they account for their activities. The Post wrote:
Federal workers began receiving emails Saturday asking them to describe what they did last week — as Elon Musk warned on social media that, if employees fail to respond, it will be taken as a resignation.
A large number of good responses have been received already. These are the people who should be considered for promotion. https://t.co/Rc8sGBLemU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 23, 2025
The Post continued:
Musk wrote he was acting ‘consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions,’ apparently referencing a social media post Trump shared earlier Saturday encouraging the billionaire to be harsher in his efforts to slash the federal workforce.
Trump posted on Saturday morning to Truth Social, his social media platform, commending Musk for doing ‘A GREAT JOB,’ but adding, ‘I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE.’
Musk’s post to X came about seven hours later, and the emails began going out to federal employees close to 4:30 p.m. Eastern. ‘Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,’ read the email, sent from the HR arm of the Office of Personnel Management with the heading, ‘What did you do last week?’ according to a copy reviewed by The Washington Post. ‘Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.’ The deadline to reply, the email stated, is Monday at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. The email made no mention of Musk’s threat of enforced resignation.
Like every other action taken by DOGE, the Musk email provoked chaos across the government. According to fedsmith.com, an email sent by the Office of Personnel Management attempted to provide guidance to governmental employees:
Agency heads may exclude personnel from this expectation at their discretion and should inform OPM of the categories of the employees excluded and reasons for exclusion. Agencies should consider whether the expectation for employees to submit activity and/or accomplishment bullets should be integrated into the agency’s Weekly Activity Report … Furthermore, agencies should consider any appropriate actions regarding employees who fail to respond to activity/accomplishment requests. It is agency leadership’s decision as to what actions are taken.
Two days later, according to a report in The Washington Post, it was still not exactly clear what was expected of governmental employees and what would be done with the estimated 1 million responses OPM had received, or whether there would be consequences for those who hadn’t complied:
The Trump administration has told federal agency leaders that they can ignore the public decree from Elon Musk to effectively fire employees who do not send in bullet-point summaries of their work last week, according to three people familiar with the matter, a break with the billionaire who has exerted significant power to slash the 2.3-million-person federal workforce.
The Office of Personnel Management, a federal agency that functions as the government’s HR department, delivered the news to agency chief human capital officers on a call midday Monday … Another person briefed on the call said that OPM is also looking at weekly reporting for government departments. But the person said that OPM was unsure what to do with the emails of employees who responded so far and had ‘no plans’ to analyze them.
The Post continued:
Later in the day, though, Trump suggested nonresponders could still be terminated, while Musk wrote on X they would be given ‘another chance’ to write back before being fired. In a written memo, OPM wrote that employees should respond but added, ‘Agency heads may exclude personnel from this expectation at their discretion and should inform OPM of the categories of the employees excluded and reasons for exclusion … It is agency leadership’s decision as to what actions are taken,’ the memo said of those who did not respond.
While there still seems to be no clear directive, in his bizarre televised cabinet meeting on Wednesday, February 26, 2025, President Trump suggested that the 1 million employees who hadn’t responded with a list of their five accomplishment for the week were “on the bubble” and could be fired.
I would like to end with two examples of how very flawed this whole process is. Independent analyses of the savings claimed by Elon Musk and DOGE are wildly inaccurate. On February 18, 2025, The New York Times reported:
The Department of Government Efficiency, the federal cost-cutting initiative championed by Elon Musk, published on Monday a list of government contracts it has canceled, together amounting to about $16 billion in savings itemized on a new ‘wall of receipts’ on its website.
Almost half of those line-item savings could be attributed to a single $8 billion contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But it appears that the DOGE list vastly overstated the actual intended value of that contract. A closer scrutiny of a federal database shows that a recent version of the contract was for $8 million, not $8 billion. A larger total savings number published on the site, $55 billion, lacked specific documentation …
On Wednesday, February 26, 2025, AP News published a detailed analysis of savings DOGE claimed they had made by cancelling contracts:
Data published on DOGE’s ‘Wall of Receipts’ shows that more than one-third of the contract cancellations, 794 in all, are expected to yield no savings. That’s usually because the total value of the contracts has already been fully obligated, which means the government has a legal requirement to spend the funds for the goods or services it purchased and in many cases has already done so.
Finally, it is pretty clear that the one place Elon Musk and his DOGE accomplices aren’t looking to reclaim money is from Elon Musk’s pocket. Because Musk has benefitted from local, state, and federal grants and subsidies to the tune of $38 billion:
Elon Musk and his cost-cutting U.S. DOGE Service team have been on a mission to trim government largesse. Yet Musk is one of the greatest beneficiaries of the taxpayers’ coffers. Over the years, Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits, often at critical moments, a Washington Post analysis has found, helping seed the growth that has made him the world’s richest person.
The payments stretch back more than 20 years. Shortly after becoming CEO of a cash-strapped Tesla in 2008, Musk fought hard to secure a low-interest loan from the Energy Department … When Tesla soon after realized it was missing a crucial Environmental Protection Agency certification it needed to qualify for the loan days before Christmas, Musk went straight to the top, urging then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to intervene …
There is hypocrisy, and then there is hypocrisy times 38 billion. The last person who should oversee how our government spends our money is someone who has wrested so much more than his fair share of our money for himself. How crazy is it to rely on someone who demands accountability from everybody else yet has fought so hard to evade it himself? Only a crazy and corrupt king would have picked Elon Musk for the job.
