Will Musk be the next Trump?

[Brian Peacock]

Yarrr!

[L'Emmerdeur]

Immigrant citizens being allowed to vote? Musk believes it's bad. Well at least it's bad when other immigrant citizens vote. Especially if they're not white.

Musk’s remarks were made during an appearance on “The Katie Miller Podcast,” a podcast hosted by the wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. Published Tuesday, the interview shows Musk warning that the United States could turn into a “communist hell” should immigration trends continue, which he argued have shaped several elections.

Given Musk’s enormous influence on the 2024 election, where he spent more than $275 million backing Trump, critics couldn’t help but be stunned by the irony of Musk’s complaints.

“Elon Musk, a South African immigrant born in Africa who votes in Texas, is annoyed that Somali immigrants born in Africa get to vote in Minnesota,” wrote former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan in a social media post on X. “There's only one thing he doesn't have in common with his fellow African immigrants in Minnesota… Elon Musk, according to his brother Kimbal, came to this country as an ‘illegal’ immigrant.”

[source]

[NineBerry]

This really must be the shittiest timeline in all of the multiverse

[Sean Hayden]

—nah, there’s another one that’s identical in every way, except you don’t know how to ride a bike.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Inflicting harm in various ways to 'attack waste, fraud, and abuse'? Priceless.

Aside from some billions, but who's counting?

'Musk’s DOGE Chainsaw Massacre Ended With Higher Spending'

Federal spending went up under Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the exact opposite of its mission.

A new report from the New York Times found that federal spending actually went up under DOGE. In fiscal year 2025, the federal government spent $7.01 trillion, while in fiscal year 2024, the federal government spent $6.95 trillion, according to data from the Treasury.

...

While DOGE claimed it “made more than 29,000 cuts to the federal government — slashing billion-dollar contracts, canceling thousands of grants and pushing out civil servants,” the Times found that most of what DOGE said it cut was incorrect.

DOGE had published a list of canceled contracts and grants, but the largest 13 were incorrect.

The top two contracts were with the Department of Defense, which Musk claimed had been “terminated” and had saved taxpayers $7.9 billion. In reality, the Defense Department still has those contracts, according to the outlet.

The Times also found that only 12 of DOGE’s top 40 largest claims were accurate. DOGE also made several inaccurate claims about what it cut, including double-counting cuts, including contracts cut during the Biden administration, and exaggerating its cuts.

Additionally, four of the contracts that DOGE said it had cut had been reinstated by courts, the outlet reported.

Musk had originally claimed his DOGE project would save the U.S. $2 trillion, but later cut that figure in half, claiming it would only save $1 trillion. Towards the end of DOGE’s time in the Trump White House, Musk claimed DOGE cut $150 billion in federal spending, but did not provide details.

...

In addition to Musk’s reportedly bogus claims about government contracts, DOGE was responsible for cutting thousands of federal workers and targeting congressionally appropriated funds.

Courts later ruled, however, that federal employees at multiple agencies had to be rehired, ruling they were improperly fired. It was the federal government that wound up paying the bill to rehire them, as the government had put them on paid leave when they were let go. Federal employees also collected the back-paid salaries from when they were not working.

The federal workforce, firings, rehirings, paid leave, and productivity losses were estimated to have cost more than $135 billion in the last fiscal year, according to the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on the federal workforce.

[pErvinalia]

Incompetents.

[Brian Peacock]

It's all just an entertainment product at this point.

[NineBerry]

Allahu Akbar!

[JimC]

He can stick a lithium ion battery up his bum!

[Svartalf]

honestly, that's a waste of good product when a common rock or stick would do quite as well

[L'Emmerdeur]

A particularly striking example of the noxious process of Musk's 'DOGE' skullduggery has been exposed in court. As the article points out, even though the 'DOGE' wunderkinder's machinations to rescind grants were illegal in various ways, those whose grants were taken away will have to go to court to get them back. Bullshit all the way down.

'It Was One of DOGE's Most Absurd Abuses. A Court Finally Exposed It.'

One year ago, the Trump administration canceled more than 1,400 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. More than $100 million in congressionally appropriated funds awarded to scholars, writers, archivists, and researchers across the country was snatched up in three days. There weren’t any individualized reviews or hearings. There was no due process. Just a chatbot and two guys from DOGE who had no legal authority to be there in the first place.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon handed down a 143-page opinion explaining exactly how illegal that was. She found a smorgasbord of constitutional problems. The mass cancellations violated the First Amendment because they were based on viewpoint discrimination. There were violations of equal protection because certain groups were systematically singled out for adverse treatment. Then there was the “ultra vires problem”: the DOGE officials who ran the whole operation had no legal authority to touch an NEH grant in the first place.

Complaints about the so-called deep state, a term favored by this administration and its supporters, have always centered on a specific grievance: unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats insulated by their own ideas about expertise and merit. The record assembled under oath describes, with uncomfortable precision, the administration doing exactly what it accuses everyone else of doing. Merit displaced by politics. Unaccountable actors. Ideological discrimination. Racial discrimination. The charges fit. It’s just not the defendants they had in mind.

...

Enter Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox. These were the DOGE employees who canceled the grants. Here is the court’s language, not mine:

Prior to joining the Trump Administration, neither Fox nor Cavanaugh had any experience in government, public grant administration, private grant administration, or reviewing humanities projects for scholarly merit. In fact, as both were in their twenties, they did not have much experience in anything at all—certainly not in anything remotely related to the humanities.

Bad enough. But their process for deciding which grants to cancel—allotments that determined whether scholars could pay their rent, take their sabbaticals, and finish their books—made their lack of experience look like the least of their problems.

NEH staff produced a spreadsheet flagging Biden-era grants for perceived association with DEI, environmental justice, or “gender ideology.” Fox also had his own spreadsheet, built around a Control-F search for terms like tribal, immigrants, diversity, inclusion, Indigenous, Native, equity, equality, marginalized, BIPOC, solidarity, citizenship, melting pot, social justice, and gay.

What’s worse, Fox and Cavanaugh did not even read the underlying applications before issuing cancellations. They didn’t consult project websites or other supplementary materials. Spreadsheet-buzzword descriptions were enough for them. They also did not seem to read or care about the statute that governs the agency and states that these exact subjects are proper objects of NEH support. The law’s mandate was the diversity and richness of America’s cultural heritage, but DOGE’s methodology was Control-F.

Two guys in their 20s with no relevant experience used a chatbot to terminate the grants of scholars who had spent careers earning the kind of expertise the process was designed to evaluate. The administration claiming to have come to Washington to restore merit and accountability sent unqualified people to do a job they had no authority to perform. To make matters worse, government lawyers later argued that there was no constitutional problem because the decisions were ChatGPT’s doing, not the government’s. The chatbot did it.

...

[O]nly Biden-era grants were reviewed for termination. That was the big filter. Grants awarded during the first Trump administration were not examined at all. The ideological scrutiny was applied exclusively to one administration’s grants. As the court found, these grants were penalized not because of what they said but because of when they were awarded.

Notwithstanding Fox and Cavanaugh’s failure to define DEI in their “ChatGPT-derived methodology,” the court did the job for them. McMahon relied on dictionary definitions, one of which describes DEI as “the idea that people have equal rights and treatment and be welcomed and included.”

She also framed DEI as the viewpoint “that the exclusion of historically disadvantaged groups is undesirable.” The government canceled grants that expressed that view, and it didn’t hide it.

[...]

[Brian Peacock]

The chatbot did it.

Ah, the Derek Lewis defence, bounced down onto the inorganic tool. No different from saying I didn't cave his head in, the spade did it.