I think it’s obvious that neither President Trump nor his coterie of agents and apparatchiks has any practical interest in governing the nation. It’s one reason (among many) they are so eager to destroy the federal bureaucracy; in their minds, you don’t have to worry about something, like monitoring the nation’s dairy supply for disease and infection, if the capacity for doing so no longer exists.
But there is another, less obvious way in which this observation is true. American governance is a collaborative venture. At minimum, to successfully govern the United States, a president must work with Congress, heed the courts and respect the authority of the states, whose Constitutions are also imbued with the sovereignty of the people. And in this arrangement, the president can’t claim rank. He’s not the boss of Congress or the courts or the states; he’s an equal.
The president is also not the boss of the American people. He cannot order them to embrace his priorities, nor is he supposed to punish them for disagreement with him. His powers are largely rhetorical, and even the most skilled presidents cannot shape an unwilling public.
Trump rejects all of this. He rejects the equal status of Congress and the courts. He rejects the authority of the states. He does not see himself as a representative working with others to lead the nation; he sees himself as a boss, whose will ought to be law. And in turn, he sees the American people as employees, each of us obligated to obey his commands.
Trump is not interested in governing a republic of equal citizens. To the extent that he’s even dimly aware of the traditions of American democracy, he holds them in contempt. What Trump wants is to lord over a country whose people have no choice but to show fealty and pledge allegiance not to the nation but to him.
What was it Trump said about Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator, during his first term in office? “Hey, he’s the head of a country. And I mean he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different,” Trump said in 2018. “He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
DOGE loses its biggest advocate as Musk exits Washington
Sophia Cai, Rachael Bade and Paul McLeary – April 23, 2025
Elon Musk’s claim that his job in Washington is “mostly done” may calm Tesla shareholders — but his departure could sap the Department of Government Efficiency of its disruptive energy even as it continues to make major cuts to the federal workforce.
In an effort to reassure rattled Tesla shareholders after a bruising first-quarter earnings call, Musk told investors this week that his around-the-clock involvement in DOGE will soon be scaled back to just a day or two per week.
The message to the markets was clear: Musk is refocusing on his companies. But his public exit from Washington also leaves DOGE without a clear driver, potentially defanging a group that spent the first 100 days of Trump’s second term tearing through agencies with nearly unlimited momentum. Without Musk’s constant hovering around President Donald Trump, DOGE may not have the same firepower it once did and agency heads could now have more authority to run their agencies and implement cost-cutting efforts at their own speed.
For months, Musk’s physical presence at the White House and attendance at Cabinet meetings served as both sword and shield — giving cover to DOGE staffers, intimidating holdouts, and demanding that the operation move forward at a breakneck speed. “It is rare to have a Cabinet-level secretary pushing for you operationally and politically,” said a Trump official, who, like others in this report, was granted anonymity to speak freely.
And for a long time, a lot of people in the White House weren’t sure how to talk to Musk when DOGE took drastic actions like demanding the “five things” emails from federal employees justifying their jobs or moving to make cuts so deep that they could hurt Trump politically, such as reductions to the Social Security Administration’s operations or firing veterans. White House officials felt that only Trump could say no to Musk.
“How do you tell the world’s richest man to stop and get in line?” a different White House official said last month.
But when Musk takes a step back, the same reluctance to counter the billionaire tech mogul will not extend to DOGE staff, many of whom are now embedded across agencies and serve at the pleasure of agency heads. Already, senior White House officials have taken steps to curb DOGE’s reach, leading the charge to get Musk to drop his goal of cutting $1 trillion to only $150 billion for fear of cutting too close to the bone.
In terms of day to day operations, insiders say Musk’s reduced involvement won’t dramatically alter how DOGE operates at least on paper. “This won’t be a big change from the current situation,” one senior Trump administration official close to the effort said, “because Musk is doing a lot already and [DOGE staff] already try to catch him at specific times.”
The operation that Musk has built has now burrowed into nearly every corner of the executive branch, with most DOGE staffers serving at agencies as political appointees without a time limit on their employment. Others are based out of the General Services Administration, now a DOGE nerve center led by software entrepreneur and Musk ally Stephen Ehikian, continuing a quiet but steady purge of small, independent agencies. (Just this week, it began shutting down the 300-person Millenium Challenge Corporation.)
Musk’s lieutenants, Antonio Gracias and Steve Davis, remain involved in leading the initiative, giving pointers to DOGE staff embedded across agencies as they continue to help execute the reductions in force, an ongoing months-long process.
DOGE’s original mandate — reduce waste and fraud — has since extended far beyond simply cost-cutting. DOGE has been heavily involved in other Trump administration priorities, like immigration data collection for mass deportation planning, Trump’s shipbuilding agenda, and even the implementation of $5 million per piece “Gold Card” visas, according to five people familiar with DOGE’s movements.
Still, Musk’s public pullback will come as relief to some Cabinet officials who have had tensions with the billionaire and DOGE around the personnel cuts.
Indeed, senior administration officials were not surprised by Musk’s announcement on the Tesla call. One, who is a big fan of Musk, said it’s become increasingly clear in recent days that the tech tycoon is souring on Washington. His frustration with the lack of control is palpable, the person said — as he’s used to getting his way and making the final calls with his businesses.
Instead, Musk has seen his influence waning and has been brought to heel by other Cabinet secretaries and people in the White House in recent months, as the insistence on coordinating their efforts has slowed his break-neck speed.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrangled control back from DOGE last week by firing DOGE staffer Gavin Kliger and installing a new IRS commissioner last week. IRS firings which were expected to begin last week and go out on a biweekly basis still have not materialized.
That most recent run-in with Bessent in the White House, first reported by Axios, has only seemed to make him more Washington wary, the senior officials mentioned above added.
At the Department of Defense, Secretary Pete Hegseth has publicly praised DOGE’s work but expressed unease privately about early plans to potentially cut tens of thousands of civilian personnel, one person familiar with the private conversations said. DOGE staffers have been in the building for weeks and have set up shop in the Navy’s offices, where they’re taking a new look at the service’s troubled shipbuilding efforts and preparing recommendations for what new programs the service should cut and which it should keep developing, according to a second official.
When asked to respond, a senior defense official said that Hegseth is “leading several initiatives to meet the president’s intent, to include removing DEI from the department and reviewing fitness and training standards across the services,” among other things.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy struck a defiant tone earlier this month during a visit to the FAA Tech Center in New Jersey: “When I think of DOGE cutting things, I don’t know about that elsewhere, but we actually build things here,” he said. “You can’t cut your way to a new road. You can’t cut your way to a new bridge. You can’t cut your way into a new air traffic control system.”
Even as Musk promises to scale back his involvement, there are no signs that he’ll completely disengage. Far from it — White House officials say he and Trump have such a strong personal friendship that he’s expected to be in Washington at least once a week.
At his other companies, he had a habit of requesting and attending weekly meetings for ongoing projects, weighing in with his ideas and granular feedback. He attended weekly brainstorming sessions for Tesla’s Optimus robot and received weekly updates on America PAC’s voter contact metrics during the presidential campaign.
“I think I’ll continue to spend a day or two per week on government matters for as long as the president would like me to do and as long as it is useful,” Musk said on the earnings call.
DOGE isn’t saving much money. So what is Elon Musk really up to?
Adam Rogers – April 21, 2025
If Elon Musk’s effort to remake the federal government was ever really about “waste, fraud, and abuse,” those DOGE days are over. His quasi-agency has made huge and unprecedented changes to what the federal government does. But ask an economist, historian, or political scientist why, or what it all means, and you’ll get a sad-sounding laugh in response.
One thing is clear: There were never many savings to be found. Last year, Musk predicted he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. (That was always going to be tough, mathematically, given that the government’s entire discretionary budget is $1.7 trillion.) In January, Musk revised his estimate down to $1 trillion. Earlier this month, he revised the revision down to $150 billion.
On the other hand, DOGE has been very good at reducing the number of people who work for the government — as many as 216,000 federal employees and contractors are already out, with more dismissals in the works. Musk has gutted or eliminated agencies that prevent disease, protect us from pandemics, provide aid to our allies, ensure the safety of our food and medicines, and safeguard Americans against toxic chemicals. Every one of those efforts is a proven multiplier of our tax money — every dollar we spend on them redounds to the US economy. Which means that even if Musk succeeds at slashing government spending, he’ll actually be adding to the federal deficit: DOGE cuts to the Internal Revenue Service alone are estimated to cost America some $500 billion in lost tax revenue every year.
So if DOGE isn’t saving us money, what’s the reason for all the cuts? It can’t be motivated by the cliché that “government should be run like a business.” No successful business runs on the kind of bedlam being sown by Musk. What, in short, is going on here?
Here are four possible explanations for what DOGE is actually up to. Maybe none of them are right. Or perhaps they’re all accurate, to varying degrees. But one thing is certain: Each of them provides a more plausible insight into what DOGE is doing than the official explanation of saving taxpayers money.
(1) It’s an “exit” plan
For the past decade and a half, rich guys in Silicon Valley have been trying to leave it all behind — government regulation, wokeist diversity efforts, naysaying journalists, even the Earth itself. Broadly speaking, they call this idea “exit.” In a 2009 blog post, the influential investor Peter Thiel declared that it was time for tech entrepreneurs to abandon the concept of democracy and start their own city-states. A companion piece to that post — written by Patri Friedman, grandchild of the free-market economist Milton Friedman — peddled the idea of “seasteads,” floating cities in the ocean, beyond the jurisdiction of any nation. Musk, meanwhile, launched a company devoted to taking a select sliver of humanity to Mars, and the Exit crowd went all in on cryptocurrencies — money without a pesky state attached.
In a book published in 2022, the venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan laid out a blueprint for Exit. “Technology has enabled us to start new companies, new communities, and new currencies,” his website declared. “But can we use it to start new cities, or even new countries? This book explains how to build the successor to the nation state, a concept we call the network state.”
In a sense, DOGE is serving as a sort of advance guard for Exit. It’s cutting away every government function that isn’t useful to a future network state (stuff that protects the vulnerable and supports the needy) while retaining the resources needed to found Exit-style cities (the blockchain, census data, border control). Casey Lynch, a geographer at the University of Girona who studies Exit politics, says that’s in line with how Exiteers think: “The only things the government should be doing are administrative functions necessary to maintain the market. And the only kinds of government services that are necessary are those related to things like upholding financial transactions, fighting identity theft, and protecting property rights.”
This, in essence, is the new Exit: Don’t secede from the government — absorb the government, digest it, and excrete a new one. A few groups have even met with the Trump administration to get his support for launching what they’re calling “Freedom Cities.” Like a Thiel-backed prototype in Honduras, these enclaves would be economically autonomous zones, free from government limits on Exit passion projects like longevity treatments or nuclear fusion research. Srinivasan has proposed making the area around Musk’s SpaceX facility in Texas into one, and other folks have proposed building one in Greenland — after it’s acquired by the United States, of course. The move is supported by Ken Howery, a college pal of Thiel’s who is Trump’s nominee to serve as ambassador to Denmark.
(2) It’s techno-libertarianism for all
Traditional libertarians believe that people and markets function just fine — better, even — with minimal government oversight. That’s what Ronald Reagan’s cowboy-inflected individualism was all about: shrinking government and letting the markets do as they wanted. But Reagan was careful to leave untouched two cornerstones of federal governance: Social Security, to protect against dissent from within, and a hefty nuclear arsenal, to guard against threats from without.
Silicon Valley libertarianism scraps the social safety net and the nukes. It’s closer to the venture investor Mark Andreessen’s vision of “techno-optimism,” where digital technologies and unfettered markets solve every human problem. It’s not just having Amazon replace the post office, or bitcoin taking the place of banks — it’s “deleting” regulations across all of government, no matter how critical they are to America’s health and safety and financial well-being.
In this explanation, DOGE is attempting to turn back the clock to the regulation-free excesses of the Gilded Age. In the 1910s and 1920s, America was dominated by industrial oligarchs, plagued by race and class struggles, and free from laws that kept food safe and the air and water clean. It took a spectacular market crash, and a Great Depression, to usher in the modern age of federal oversight.
DOGE effectively wants to return America to the days before the New Deal, when industrialists could do as they pleased. Musk, in fact, has called for a “wholesale, spring cleaning” of all federal regulation. “If it’s not possible now, it’ll never be possible,” he said during a midnight call in February. “This is our shot. This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have. And if we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen, so we’re going to do it.”
Perhaps that techno-libertarian vision — of a digitized world without government — is the entire point of DOGE. “You strip government down to remove all the parts of it that are resisting you,” says David Lewis, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, “and rebuild it in a way that makes it, in your view, more efficient and responsive to you.” That’s actually more authoritarian than libertarian. But it does make government smaller — and weaker. And the weaker government is, the more the powerful can call the shots.
(3) It’s a heist
Tyler Cowen, a leading thinker on the right, has criticized what he calls “the libertarian vice.” Libertarians love it, he says, when the state fails — even if the private sector can’t or won’t step in to fix things.
But what if Musk’s libertarian vice is actually plain old greed? Consider some of the specific agencies DOGE has slashed. Why cut NASA, a broadly popular and relatively inexpensive operation? Well, without NASA to launch rockets, it would be left to private companies like SpaceX to get stuff into outer space. The same is true of DOGE’s cuts to the Office of Vehicle Automation Safety, which has ordered dozens of Tesla recalls and delayed the rollout of self-driving software. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have collected a dozen examples of DOGE targeting agencies that are trying to regulate Musk. One thing DOGE hasn’t gone after? SpaceX’s contracts for military space launches — jobs worth $5.9 billion to the world’s richest man.
DOGE is a Tech-ish Chainsaw Massacre. But with the very real pain comes no perceivable gain.Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Musk isn’t the only Silicon Valley beneficiary of DOGE’s assault. The IRS is turning to Palantir, the security and data company cofounded by Peter Thiel, to assemble all its data into one giant, easily surveilled bucket. The company is also handling the data back end for ICE’s planned mass deportations. The Justice Department, meanwhile, is disbanding its team of lawyers responsible for going after cryptocurrency crime. So maybe DOGE is just an inside job — a case of technologists using their access to Donald Trump to loot the Treasury and line their own pockets.
(4) It’s a confederacy of dunces
Maybe DOGE is just really, really bad at its job. I mean, why would anyone cause this much chaos for so little demonstrable gain?
“It is tempting to think there is some strategy behind it,” says Zachary Liscow, a Yale professor who served as chief economist of the Office of Management and Budget during the Biden administration. “But these are just not competent people. They often don’t have a plan, or it’s often not well thought out.”
There’s certainly a lot of evidence that DOGE is incompetent. It’s staffed by a bunch of kids from Musk’s world who bring virtually no experience in either government or business to the job. Its reports on the cuts it’s making have been hysterically inaccurate. It has cut things it didn’t know it was cutting — like the agency responsible for making sure nuclear reactors don’t melt down — and then scrambled to restore them after the fact. And by grinding away at the government’s ability to do anything, it’s introduced a crippling level of turmoil and uncertainty to America, both at home and abroad. “It’s definitely making us less effective,” says Liscow.
And that’s the bottom line, really, when it comes to DOGE. At a basic level, Musk’s assault on the federal government represents a rejection of modernity itself. “You can’t do modern life without modern regulation,” says Lewis, the political scientist. “Transportation systems, energy systems, waste systems, internet systems — all of those things require government interventions and monitoring to work effectively.” If Musk makes good on his promise to pull the plug on every regulation in sight, the world as we know it would effectively shut down.
I said this sounded like the Gilded Age, but in some ways DOGE is turning the clock back even further. Before the Civil War, the federal government was far weaker and more diffuse than it is today. Individual states competed over tariffs and railroads and lots of other stuff we now think of as national functions. Companies could employ children at starvation wages, dump whatever they wanted into America’s streams and rivers, and sell quack remedies that were more likely to kill you than cure you. That’s roughly where a DOGE-denuded federal government puts us. Forget 1920 — think 1850.
Musk seems to think America’s administrative infrastructure is bureaucratic frippery. To him, just having it is wasteful. “There are more federal agencies than there are years since the establishment of the United States,” Musk observed during an interview with Tucker Carlson. “Which means that we’ve created more than one federal agency per year, on average. That seems crazy.” Carlson responded by pulling his “That’s insane!” face for the camera, as if Musk had just invented arithmetic.
But that math is not math. Times, as they say, change. Look at all the things we depend on today that weren’t even fathomable at the nation’s founding: cars and planes and polystyrene and aspirin and the internet and high fructose corn syrup and phones and recorded music and electricity. We’ve created way more technological marvels than federal agencies. A National Transportation Safety Board is a small price to pay for the wonders of intercontinental flight.
And it isn’t just that the world is more complicated than it was in 1776 or 1850 or 1920. It’s that most of the advances we enjoy today were, in one way or another, created because of government, not in spite of it. An enduring and reliable state — one that invests in innovation, ensures economic stability, and makes sure everyone plays by the rules — is literally what makes technological progress possible. Musk can’t take the government all the way back to the 18th century, even if he’d like to. But if he makes good on his promises with DOGE, America’s future may end up looking a lot more like its past.
Musk’s DOGE Goons Hit With a Major Blow in Bid to Raid Social Security Secrets
Tom Sanders – April 18, 2025
Andrew Harnik / Getty Images
Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts to burrow into the private data of millions of Americans has been thwarted after a judge issued a temporary injunction banning the billionaire’s goons from getting “unfettered access” to Social Security servers.
The case, brought against DOGE by two labor unions and an advocacy group for retirees, accused the Musk lackeys of accessing sensitive personal information in a way that could cause “irreparable harm” to individuals if mishandled.
Government attorneys argued that the way DOGE accesses private information does not deviate significantly from Social Security Administration (SSA) employees, who are routinely allowed to search its databases.
But plaintiffs argued the way DOGE employees have acted signals a “sea change” in how the agency handles sensitive data, which includes information on mental health, children, physical disabilities, and “issues that are not only sensitive but might carry a stigma.”
Granting DOGE unfettered access to this information is a privacy violation that “causes an objectively reasonable unease,” argued Alethea Anne Swift, an attorney for the legal group Democracy Forward, which filed the lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander, who is overseeing the case, agreed with the plaintiffs that DOGE had failed to demonstrate why it needed “unprecedented, unfettered access” to SSA servers, and issued a temporary injunction against the agency extending a ban on them from accessing personal information.
Demonstrators gathered in front of the Social Security administration building to protest DOGE’s attempts to cut social security(Photo by Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty Images) / Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty ImagesMore
The ruling follows a temporary restraining order previously imposed by Hollander in March that was set to expire Thursday.
The judge asked, “What it is we’re doing that needs all of that information?” DOGE argued it was necessary to root out instances of Social Security fraud.
Hollander asked whether the sensitive data could be anonymized, which government attorneys argued was technically possible but would significantly slow down their cost-cutting efforts.
Delivering her order, Hollander said the injunction was necessary to protect against privacy violations and that the plaintiffs would likely be victorious in any further claims brought against DOGE.
“For some 90 years, SSA has been guided by the foundational principle of an expectation of privacy with respect to its records. This case exposes a wide fissure in the foundation,” she wrote in her 145-page ruling, Reuters reports.
A judge ruled that allowing DOGE access to Social Security servers was a violation of privacy (Photo by Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty Images) / Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty Images
Justice Department attorney Bradley Humphreys responded by telling the court that the ruling was starting to “feel like a policy disagreement.”
But Hollander admonished him, saying, “I do take offense at your comment because I’m just trying to understand the system.”
The ruling was met with cheers outside the courthouse, where demonstrators had gathered to protest what they say is an overreach of DOGE’s authority that threatened the future of Social Security benefits, according to CBS.
Democracy Forward said the injunction marked an important step in its case, with president Skye Perryman calling the ruling “a significant relief for the millions of people who depend on the Social Security Administration to safeguard their most personal and sensitive information.”
Nearly 300 scientists apply for French academic program amid Trump cuts in U.S.
Alana Wise – April 18, 2025
Students, researchers and demonstrators rally during a protest against the Trump administration’s funding cuts on research, health and higher education at the University of California Los Angeles on April 8.Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images
More than 2,500 scientists fled russia after putin invaded Ukraine.
A French university courting U.S.-basedacademics said it has already received nearly 300 applications for researchers seeking “refugee status” amid President Trump’s elimination of funding for several scientific programs.
Last month, Aix-Marseille University, one of the country’s oldest and largest universities, announced it was accepting applications for its Safe Place For Science program, which it said offers “a safe and stimulating environment for scientists wishing to pursue their research in complete freedom.”
This week, Aix-Marseille said it had received 298 applications, and 242 of them are eligible and currently up for review. Of the eligible applicants, 135 are American, 45 have a dual nationality, 17 are French and 45 are from other countries, the university said.Sponsor Message
“I am pleased that this request for the creation of scientific refugee status has found both media and political traction,”university President Éric Berton said in a statement.
The public research university said there is an even split between male and female applicants, with backgrounds from various prestigious U.S. institutions including Johns Hopkins University, NASA, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Yale and Stanford. About 20 Americans will be accepted into the program to begin in June.
“We at Aix-Marseille University are convinced that mobilization to address the challenges facing scientific research must be collective in France and Europe,” Berton said.
The Trump administration has prioritized aggressive spending cuts and federal workforce reduction, leading to a battle for America’s best and brightest.
Already, for example, universities and medical research facilities are set to lose billions in federal funding under the National Institutes of Health. And rollbacks on federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs have compromised research ranging from climate change to biomedical research.
Aix-Marseille is not the only European institution hoping to capitalize on America’s brain drain.
Last month, France’s CentraleSupélec announced a $3.2 million grant to help finance American research that had been halted in the states. And Netherlands Minister of Education, Culture and Science Eppo Bruins wrote in a letter to parliament that he requested to set up a fund aimed at bringing top international scientists to the Netherlands.
There is some evidence that these entreaties are reaching curious ears.
Last month in the journal Nature, more than 1,200 respondents identifying as scientists cited Trump’s funding cuts as reasons they were considering moving to Canada or Europe.
Thousands of federal workers would be easier to fire under Trump rule change
Shannon Bond – April 18, 2025
President Trump speaks in the Oval Office on Friday.Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
The Trump administration is moving forward with efforts to make it easier to fire some federal workers from their jobs, as part of its push to both shrink the federal government and exert more control over it.
On Friday the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) proposed a rule reclassifying tens of thousands of career civil servants as “at-will” employees, the White House announced in a statement. Removing civil service protections would make workers easier to fire.
The White House said the proposed rule would address “unaccountable, policy-determining federal employees who put their own interests ahead of the American people’s.”
President Trump and his allies, including billionaire Elon Musk, have said they want to “dismantle government bureaucracy,” which they criticize as a “deep state,” and root out what Trump has called “rogue bureaucrats.” They’ve claimed, without presenting evidence, that the government is rife with corrupt employees and non-existent workers. Trump has long argued that his administration should have greater flexibility in appointing people who will faithfully carry out his agenda and firing those who won’t.
“If these government workers refuse to advance the policy interests of the President, or are engaging in corrupt behavior, they should no longer have a job,” Trump wrote in a post about the proposed rule on his Truth Social platform on Friday.
The effort to strip civil service protections from some workers began on Trump’s first day back in office, with an executive order reinstating an order Trump signed at the end of his first term, in 2020. (That order was rescinded by then-President Biden days after he took office.) The latest Trump order creates a new category of political appointees in the federal workforce, originally called Schedule F.
OPM estimates 50,000 positions, or about 2% of federal workers, will be reclassified under the new rule, which renames Schedule F as Schedule Policy/Career. According to the White House statement, it would apply to “career employees with important policy-determining, policy-making, policy-advocating, or confidential duties.” It said once OPM issues its final rule, another executive order would actually reclassify specific positions as Schedule Policy/Career.
“This rule empowers federal agencies to swiftly remove employees in policy-influencing roles for poor performance, misconduct, corruption, or subversion of Presidential directives, without lengthy procedural hurdles,” the White House statement said.
It added that Schedule Policy/Career jobs “are not required to personally or politically support the President, but must faithfully implement the law and the administration’s policies.” They will continue to be filled by “existing nonpartisan, merit-based hiring processes,” the White House said.
The American Federation of Government Employees has sued the administration to protect civil service workers, and in a statement Friday its president, Everett Kelley, said that this latest action “will erode the government’s merit-based hiring system and undermine the professional civil service that Americans rely on.”
Friday’s proposed rule comes as Trump continues making sweeping changes to the federal government, shuttering some agencies and moving ahead with mass firings.
For decades, residents of South Patrick Shores in Brevard County have tied a myriad of health conditions to the area, potentially stemming from an old military base. The area is at the center of a suspected cancer cluster.
Before homes began to be built in the early 1950s, the area was a military landfill near the Banana River Naval Air Station, where Patrick Space Force Base is now located.
Hazardous waste—ranging from ammunition and unexploded ordnance to chemicals and fuels—is believed to be buried underground on the land just south of Cape Canaveral.
Two years ago, the corps scanned yards in a 52-acre portion of South Patrick Shores with ground-penetrating radars as part of a $5.8 million project to look for military waste. More than 300 homes lie on the site.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is set to begin digging in yards in South Patrick Shores (WKMG/YouTube)
This week, the Army’s engineering branch resumed its excavation efforts to dig at 10 test pits across the neighborhood, aiming to unearth long-hidden hazards that may be present. The ten pits will be dug by April 25.
Brad Tompa, who is leading the clean-up operation, told county commissioners last week that South Patrick Shores was an “uncontrolled dump.”
For homeowners who have given permission, the Corps will dig trenches approximately eight feet deep and eight feet long and begin sampling the soil for any contaminants that may have accumulated.
The initial phase of the investigation is anticipated to take six months, pending findings.
Brevard County Commissioner Katie Delaney alleged that residents who had dug items from their own yards had severe side effects, potentially stemming from the items found.
Sandra Sullivan, who in 2018 said she found lead, bullets, and a partially full oil barrel in her yard, said she became “sick.”
“I know it’s made me sick,” she told News 6 on Tuesday. “Every time I dug up something, between eight days and seven weeks, I would have symptoms.”
Photograph of Banana River Naval Air Station in 1943 before it became Patrick Air Force Base (U.S. Navy)
A 2019 report from the Florida Department of Health found higher rates of certain types of cancers—including bladder cancer and leukemia—in South Patrick Shores than in other parts of the country. The state health department was unable to confirm the cause.
The overall incidence of cancer in the community does not appear to be elevated.
The pattern of Hodgkin’s disease, a type of cancer that affects the lymphatic system, reportedly first emerged in South Patrick Shores in 1967, when 24-year-old Larry Crockett found out he had cancer. By 1982, five of Crockett’s neighbors were diagnosed with the same cancer.
According to a 1991 report by the Tampa Bay Times, eight people in a 10-block area near the toxic waste sites had been diagnosed with the rare cancer. Five of them had died.
“It’s not a fluke,” one resident diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease a decade earlier told the paper. At the time, a spokesperson for Patrick Air Force Base said there was “no known link.”
A health assessment was conducted in 1992 in the area after residents reported an increase in the number of cases of Hodgkin’s disease.
The report, still on the Florida DOH website, suggested that residents believed it stemmed from contamination linked to a radar cluster at the military base and the testing of DDT, which was used in WWII to limit the spread of insect-borne diseases.
Residents were also concerned about the rate of Lou Gehrig’s disease, which affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, and psychiatric illness in the area.
The Independent has contacted the Florida Department of Health and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for more information.
How DOGE may have improperly used Social Security data to push voter fraud narratives
Stephen Fowler – April 11, 2025
Investor Antonio Gracias at a town hall rally held by Elon Musk in Green Bay, Wis., on March 30. Gracias, who is part of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team, has been working at the Social Security Administration. Scott Olson/Getty Images
One of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency lieutenants working in the Social Security Administration has been pushing dubious claims about noncitizens voting, apparently using access to data that court records suggest DOGE isn’t supposed to have.
The staffer, Antonio Gracias, made the claims as part of larger misleading statements about the SSA’s enumeration-beyond-entry, or EBE program, which streamlines the process for granting Social Security cards to certain categories of eligible immigrants.
Gracias said in an April 2 appearance on Fox and Friends that “5-plus million” noncitizens who “came to the country as illegals” received Social Security numbers “through an automatic system” and proceeded to “get into our benefit systems.”Sponsor Message
“And just because we were curious, we then looked to see if they were on the voter rolls. And we found in a handful of cooperative states that there were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted,” Gracias said.
State-levelaudits of voter data have found few examples of noncitizens voting, which is a federal crime punishable with prison and deportation.
Later that week, Gracias furthered his claims on a podcast. “I think this was a move to import voters,” he said, echoing a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump and Musk elevated during the 2024 campaign season and Republican lawmakers are invoking to push for stricter voting policies.
While Musk and some Republican lawmakers are now amplifying Gracias’ claims online, experts familiar with Social Security say Gracias is mischaracterizing the program, and voter registration experts say they doubt the accuracy of his claims about noncitizens voting.
From “no access granted” to data shared by Musk
Using Social Security data to imply that noncitizens are breaking the law also could have violated a court order that prevents DOGE staffers from handling sensitive SSA systems.
It’s the latest example of concerns among privacy activists that DOGE’s sweeping access to personal and financial information of millions of Americans may violate privacy laws and may be used for inappropriate purposes.
It does not mention his analysis of how noncitizens are given Social Security numbers. Gracias is also not supposed to see or share personally identifiable information, or PII, within agency data, according to earlier court filings.
“Appointee shall not share any Personally Identifiable Information accessed or obtained through the use of SSA systems or work performed for SSA, with any external entity, organization, or agency federal or state,” an addendum to his appointment request reads.
A sign in front of the entrance of the Social Security Administration’s main campus in Woodlawn, Md.Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
In a March 12 declaration from the SSA’s then-Chief Information Officer Michael Russo, Gracias is one of two SSA DOGE employees listed as not having access to sensitive databases or PII.
“No SSA data or personally identifiable information access, or access to systems containing such information, has been granted to Employee 6 and Employee 4,” the document reads. Employee 6, listed in the record as a “Growth Equity Vice President,” appears to be Jon Koval, an associate of Gracias at his venture capital firm, who is also detailed to DOGE.Sponsor Message
On March 20, a federal judge in Maryland issued a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE employees from accessing SSA data. Gracias first publicized his claims alongside Musk at a rally in Wisconsin on March 30, ahead of the state’s special Supreme Court election.
A federal appeals court dismissed the Trump administration’s effort to lift that temporary restraining order April 1.
A few days after his Fox News interview on April 2, Gracias joined the All-In podcast on April 4 and offered more details on the data he says he used and the conclusions he drew, which has been subsequently shared by conservative media outlets and amplified by Musk on his social media site X for several days.
Neither Gracias nor a DOGE spokesperson responded to NPR’s questions about when and how any Social Security data was accessed and whether it complied with the court order.
NPR reached out to Social Security and initially spoke to acting press officer Nicole Tiggemann. In a subsequent email from a generic press account, the agency declined to answer detailed questions about DOGE’s data access. It did confirm that a chart Gracias publicized showing totals of noncitizens with Social Security numbers through EBE was taken from an SSA dashboard — but claimed that the restraining order prevented them from responding to NPR’s request for additional data from the program. The agency did not respond to inquiries asking to confirm who gave the emailed answer.
That leaves many questions still unanswered about the Social Security data behind DOGE’s claims. It’s possible the analysis was conducted before the March 20 TRO or that Gracias is not the DOGE employee who accessed any personal Social Security information. So far, there has been no evidence provided of any states sharing public or private voter data with the DOGE team at SSA either.
It’s also possible that the data about noncitizens comes from non-DOGE activities. The judge overseeing the case wrote on March 21 that the TRO only applies to “SSA employees working on the DOGE agenda. It has no bearing on ordinary operations at SSA.”
One clue about the data’s potential provenance comes from this week’s court filing: a March 17 email exchange from someone identified as Employee 7 who copied Gracias and Koval on a request for access to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, which SSA uses to verify the immigration status of EBE applicants.
“This access is absolutely critical to get detailed immigration status for non-citizen SSNs to detect fraud and improper payments,” the email reads.
Employee 7 appears to be DOGE staffer Marko Elez, who resigned from his post at the Treasury Department over past racist tweets — and who shared a spreadsheet of personal information in violation of data-sharing policies, an audit found — before being rehired at multiple federal agencies.
Gracias puts the EBE program at the center of his account about how his team decided to check voter rolls. The program started in 2017 during the first Trump administration but grew dramatically under the Biden administration, which allowed millions of asylum-seekers to enter the U.S. and expanded the categories of immigrants who could stay on a temporary basis.
Until recently, under the EBE program, noncitizens applying for work permits, green cards or naturalization with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services could apply for Social Security cards without visiting a field office. The Washington Post and other outlets reported that the EBE program was paused in mid-March, citing an internal email. NPR has not independently confirmed the reporting.
A sign directs voters to cast their ballots at a polling station set up at the Flagler County Public Library on April 1 in Palm Coast, Fla. People associated with DOGE are using Social Security data to advance debunked claims that large numbers of noncitizens are voting.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Lawfully present immigrants who are authorized to work get Social Security numbers to ensure they are “paying their taxes into the Social Security trust funds as required by law,” said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.Sponsor Message
Since immigrants in the process of naturalizing could use the EBE program, those individuals could be expected to appear on voter rolls once they became U.S. citizens.
It remains unclear which state records the DOGE team checked for noncitizens. On the All-In podcast, Gracias described checking the public voter rolls of four “friendly” states to find noncitizens on the rolls. He then said “we went even further with those friendly states and found that many of those people had actually voted.”
Later in the program, he said “well over a thousand voted” in one state. He has said his team has referred those cases for federal prosecution. In the same unsigned email, the unnamed SSA spokesperson declined to respond to NPR’s questions about the inquiry into individuals who allegedly were identified as illegal voters using Social Security data, citing “ongoing criminal investigations on this matter.”
But voting experts say the data cross-checking Gracias describes raises legal questions and can be prone to many kinds of errors.
“There are huge accuracy questions here,” said Charles Stewart, the director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab.
Typically, states’ public voter rolls would not include Social Security numbers, which would make data matching far less precise. There are known issues with false matches when just using names and birthdays.
Furthermore, it is common for states to find voters who have since naturalized and become citizens when cross-checking databases of noncitizens against their voter rolls.
“DOGE has repeatedly made massive data errors,” said David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “I have some doubts that they’ve discovered anything more than maybe just some poor government data quality tracking or they don’t understand the data they’re looking at.”
It’s also not clear if the DOGE effort to combine Social Security data with other sources inside and outside the federal government runs afoul of data sharing and privacy laws that are designed to limit access to sensitive information to those who have a need to use it.Sponsor Message
“The use has to be consistent with the reason that you’re asking for the records in the first place, which has to be consistent with your own agency’s mission,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School and a voting policy adviser in the Biden administration. “‘Because I’m curious’ is not a thing when the federal government comes to data.”
President Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on March 6.Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Gracias appeared to attribute some of his team’s access to an executive order signed by the president last month that directs agencies to facilitate “both the intra- and inter-agency sharing” of records.
“President Trump had the courage to allow us to go across databases, he signed an executive order,” he said on Fox News. “It’s never been done before where agencies could talk to each other and databases can talk to each other. That allowed us to connect all this data to find these people across the system, across the benefits system, all the way to the voting records.”
Another executive order, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” directs the Department of Homeland Security and DOGE to “review each State’s publicly available voter registration list” among other requests, similar to Gracias’ effort at SSA.
Both presidential actions include the caveat that any sharing must occur “consistent with law.”
The latest in DOGE data concerns
Multiple federal judges have found the DOGE effort has likely broken the law in its effort to comb through agencies to find “waste, fraud and abuse.” Court records have also shown the Trump administration is unable to account for the scope of DOGE’s data access, or the need for a small number of staffers to have virtually unfettered access to sensitive, compartmentalized data across the government.
The claims made by Gracias and Musk about Social Security data underscores growing questions around how DOGE is using the data it has gathered. In a ruling blocking DOGE access to Treasury systems, Judge Jeannette Vargas warned that “a real possibility exists that sensitive information has already been shared outside of the Treasury Department, in potential violation of federal law.”Sponsor Message
But Gracias’ latest claims about noncitizens voting continue to have an impact on policy in the Trump administration and with the Republican-controlled Congress. During Thursday’s House debate over the SAVE Act, Rep. Aaron Bean, R-Fla., mentioned DOGE’s allegations and the claim that the Biden administration had “imported” noncitizens as a reason to pass the bill.
“We have evidence that they’re participating in our elections,” Bean said. “The DOGE team just announced millions of illegals now have Social Security numbers. It’s happening and it ends today when we vote on this SAVE Act.”
Have information you want to share about DOGE access to government databases, Social Security, immigration and IT systems? Reach out to these authors through encrypted communication on Signal. Stephen Fowler is at stphnfwlr.25, and Jude Joffe-Block is at JudeJB.10.
Tesla U.S. Sales Plunge as G.M. and Others Make Gains
Overall sales of electric vehicles rose almost 11 percent in the first three months of the year as traditional carmakers offered new models.
By Jack Ewing – April 11, 2025
Protests against Tesla have been growing since its chief executive, Elon Musk, took a prominent role in the Trump administration. Credit…Rachel Bujalski for The New York Times
Tesla’s sales in the United States fell almost 9 percent in the first three months of the year even as the overall market for electric vehicles grew, according to data compiled by a research firm.
Car buyers are moving away from Teslas and toward models like General Motors’ Chevrolet Equinox electric vehicle, which starts at around $35,000 and can travel more than 300 miles on a charge, Cox Automotive, the research firm, said in a report.
Sales of all electric vehicles in the United States rose 11 percent during the first quarter to about 300,000 cars and light trucks, Cox said, much faster than the overall auto market, which has been flat. About 8 percent of new domestic car sales were electric, Cox said, a slight increase from 2024.
“Despite many obstacles — and what you may read elsewhere — electric vehicle sales continue to grow at a healthy pace in the U.S. market,” the firm said.
Tesla, whose chief executive is Elon Musk, still sells far more electric cars in the United States than any other automaker, accounting for 44 percent of the market, according to Cox. But its share has fallen from 51 percent a year earlier.
The decline in Tesla’s U.S. sales mirror a global slump. The company said this month that deliveries during the quarter in all markets fell 13 percent to 337,000 vehicles.
Analysts attribute the decline to Tesla’s aging selection of models; poor sales of its newest one, the Cybertruck; increasing competition; and Mr. Musk’s embrace of President Trump and right-wing politics, which has led to protests at Tesla dealerships and alienated many buyers. Democrats and independents are more likely to buy electric vehicles than Republicans.
In addition, sales of the Cybertruck have not lived up to projections made by Mr. Musk. Tesla sold 6,400 Cybertruck’s during the quarter, more than double a year earlier when the company was still ramping up production but just half as many as in the last three months of 2024.
Traditional carmakers were slow to offer electric vehicles that could compete with Tesla on technology and design but have been catching up. G.M. sold 10,300 Equinoxes in the quarter. The vehicle was not available a year earlier. G.M. brands, which also include Cadillac and GMC, accounted for 11 percent of the electric vehicle market during the quarter, up from 6 percent a year earlier.
The Ford Mustang Mach-E was the best selling electric vehicle that was not a Tesla, according to the Cox figures. But sales of the electric Mustang may suffer in months to come. It is made in Mexico and is now subject to Mr. Trump’s 25 percent tariff on imported cars. That could force Ford to eventually raise the price of the car.
Mr. Trump’s trade war is expected to have a smaller effect on Tesla, because the company makes all the cars it sells in the United States in factories in California and Texas. But it will still be hurt. Tesla stopped accepting orders from Chinese customers for its Model S and Model X, luxury vehicles that the company only makes in California, after China placed large levies on U.S. imports in retaliation for Mr. Trump’s tariffs.
Claire Fu contributed reporting.
Jack Ewing writes about the auto industry with an emphasis on electric vehicles.
Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime
By David Brooks, Opinion Columnist – April 10, 2025
Credit…Jasmine Clarke for The New York Times
You might have seen the various data points suggesting that Americans are losing their ability to reason.
The trend starts with the young. The percentage of fourth graders who score below basic in reading skills on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests is the highest it has been in 20 years. The percentage of eighth graders below basic was the highest in the exam’s three-decade history. A fourth grader who is below basic cannot grasp the sequence of events in a story. An eighth grader can’t grasp the main idea of an essay or identify the different sides of a debate.
Tests by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies tell a similar story, only for older folks. Adult numeracy and literacy skills across the globe have been declining since 2017. Tests from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that test scores in adult literacy have been declining over the past decade.
Andreas Schleicher, the head of education and skills at the O.E.C.D., told The Financial Times, “Thirty percent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child.” He continued, “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”
This kind of literacy is the backbone of reasoning ability, the source of the background knowledge you need to make good decisions in a complicated world. As the retired general Jim Mattis and Bing West once wrote, “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”
Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute emphasizes that among children in the fourth and eighth grades, the declines are not the same across the board. Scores for children at the top of the distribution are not falling. It’s the scores of children toward the bottom that are collapsing. The achievement gap between the top and bottom scorers is bigger in America than in any other nation with similar data.
There are some obvious contributing factors for this general decline. Covid hurt test scores. America abandoned No Child Left Behind, which put a lot of emphasis on testing and reducing the achievement gap. But these declines started earlier, around 2012, so the main cause is probably screen time. And not just any screen time. Actively initiating a search for information on the web may not weaken your reasoning skills. But passively scrolling TikTok or X weakens everything from your ability to process verbal information to your working memory to your ability to focus. You might as well take a sledgehammer to your skull.
My biggest worry is that behavioral change is leading to cultural change. As we spend time on our screens, we’re abandoning a value that used to be pretty central to our culture — the idea that you should work hard to improve your capacity for wisdom and judgment all the days of your life. That education, including lifelong out-of-school learning, is really valuable.
This value is based on the idea that life is filled with hard choices: whom to marry, whom to vote for, whether to borrow money. Your best friend comes up to you and says, “My husband has been cheating on me. Should I divorce him?” To make these calls, you have to be able to discern what is central to the situation, envision possible outcomes, understand other minds, calculate probabilities.
To do this, you have to train your own mind, especially by reading and writing. As Johann Hari wrote in his book “Stolen Focus,” “The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly.” Reading a book puts you inside another person’s mind in a way that a Facebook post just doesn’t. Writing is the discipline that teaches you to take a jumble of thoughts and cohere them into a compelling point of view.
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Americans had less schooling in decades past, but out of this urge for intellectual self-improvement, they bought encyclopedias for their homes, subscribed to the Book of the Month Club and sat, with much longer attention spans, through long lectures or three-hour Lincoln-Douglas debates. Once you start using your mind, you find that learning isn’t merely calisthenics for your ability to render judgment; it’s intrinsically fun.
But today one gets the sense that a lot of people are disengaging from the whole idea of mental effort and mental training. Absenteeism rates soared during the pandemic and have remained high since. If American parents truly valued education would 26 percent of students have been chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year?
In 1984, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 35 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day. By 2023, that number was down to 14 percent. The media is now rife with essays by college professors lamenting the decline in their students’ abilities. The Chronicle of Higher Education told the story of Anya Galli Robertson, who teaches sociology at the University of Dayton. She gives similar lectures, assigns the same books and gives the same tests that she always has. Years ago, students could handle it; now they are floundering.
Last year The Atlantic published an essay by Rose Horowitch titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” One professor recalled the lively classroom discussions of books like “Crime and Punishment.” Now the students say they can’t handle that kind of reading load.
The philosophy professor Troy Jollimore wrote in The Walrus: “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters. It’s not just the sheer volume of assignments that appear to be entirely generated by A.I. — papers that show no sign the student has listened to a lecture, done any of the assigned reading or even briefly entertained a single concept from the course.”
Older people have always complained about “kids these days,” but this time we have empirical data to show that the observations are true.
What happens when people lose the ability to reason or render good judgments? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Donald Trump’s tariff policy. I’ve covered a lot of policies over the decades, some of which I supported and some of which I opposed. But I have never seen a policy as stupid as this one. It is based on false assumptions. It rests on no coherent argument in its favor. It relies on no empirical evidence. It has almost no experts on its side — from left, right or center. It is jumble-headedness exemplified. Trump himself personifies stupidity’s essential feature — self-satisfaction, an inability to recognize the flaws in your thinking. And of course when the approach led to absolutely predictable mayhem, Trump, lacking any coherent plan, backtracked, flip-flopped, responding impulsively to the pressures of the moment as his team struggled to keep up.
Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence.
Back in Homer’s day, people lived within an oral culture, then humans slowly developed a literate culture. Now we seem to be moving to a screen culture. Civilization was fun while it lasted.
