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becca balint
Trump Admin Announces $200 Million Contract for Musk's AI After Grok Hitler Incident
"Stop entertaining this man. Stop giving him money. It's really that simple," said one critic of Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth.
Jul 14, 2025
The U.S. government on Monday awarded a $200 million contract to Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, despite the tech billionaire's ongoing spat with President Donald Trump and his AI chatbot's recent praise for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office announced contract awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Musk's xAI "to accelerate Department of Defense (DOD) adoption of advanced AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges."
Last week, xAI garnered sweeping condemnation after Grok, the chatbot built into Musk's social media platform X—formerly known as Twitter—started spewing antisemitic content and calling itself "MechaHitler."
Meanwhile, Musk and Trump have been at odds since shortly after the richest man on Earth left the president's administration, in which he was the de facto leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Musk's involvement in the administration generated widespread concern, both because of DOGE's efforts to gut the federal government and because his various companies get so much money from federal contracts.
In a Monday statement about "Grok for Government," xAI not only confirmed the new DOD contract but also said that its products will be "available to purchase via the General Services Administration (GSA) schedule. This allows every federal government department, agency, or office, to access xAI's frontier AI products."
The Trump administration's new money for Musk drew intense criticism on various platforms, including X—where Congresswoman Becca Balint (D-Vt.) wrote that "despite the social media wars, the Trump-Elon corruption machine is alive and well."
Kat Abughazaleh, a progressive Democrat running in Illinois' 9th Congressional District, said: "Stop entertaining this man. Stop giving him money. It's really that simple."
Abughazaleh also pointed to her past with Musk—she was laid off from the nonprofit watchdog Media Matters for America as it faced financial strain from legal battles, including what the billionaire described as a "thermonuclear lawsuit."
"Elon Musk cost me my job, deposed me for being too mean to him online, and now he's responsible for tens of thousands of job losses while getting hundreds of millions of our tax dollars," she noted. "I'm running for Congress to stop men like him."
Nina Turner, a former progressive congressional candidate from Ohio, noted that "the Pentagon, which has failed seven straight audits, just gave $200,000,000 of our tax dollars to Elon Musk to use xAI. Meanwhile, funding for food banks [was] cut in the name of 'efficiency.'"
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'Embarrassing': GOP Fails to Pass Their Own 'Cruel' Budget Plan Out of Committee
"It is the biggest tax cuts for billionaires in American history paid for by throwing 13.7 million Americans off their healthcare coverage," said the panel's top Democrat, Rep. Brendan Boyle.
May 16, 2025
Multiple Republican "fiscal hawks" on Friday voted with Democrats on the U.S. House Budget Committee to block the GOP's budget reconciliation package—and while high-level negotiations are expected to continue, members were reportedly told they could go home.
"They couldn't agree on how many people to take healthcare away from in order to give billionaires a tax cut," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a panel member, after the vote. "Embarrassing. We'll keep fighting to protect Medicaid and the American people."
The five Republicans who voted no were Reps. Josh Brecheen (Okla.), Andrew Clyde (Ga.), Ralph Norman (S.C.), Chip Roy (Texas), and Lloyd Smucker (Pa.)—though, unlike the others, Smucker changed his vote from yes to no for a procedural reason.
"To be clear—I fully support the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB). My vote today in the Budget Committee is a procedural requirement to preserve the committee's opportunity to reconsider the motion to advance OBBB," he explained on social media.
According to The Hill, Smucker also said that "we're working through some remaining issues here, there are just a few outstanding issues I think everyone will get to yes, and we're going to... resolve this as quick as we can and hopefully have a vote, ideally on Monday, and we can advance this bill."
The House Freedom Caucus said on social media Friday that "Reps. Roy, Norman, Brecheen, Clyde, and others continue to work in good faith to enact the president's 'Big Beautiful Bill'—we were making progress before the vote in the Budget Committee and will continue negotiations to further improve the reconciliation package. We are not going anywhere, and we will continue to work through the weekend."
Friday's failed vote comes after various GOP-controlled panels advanced parts of the package this week, in the face of protests from Democratic lawmakers and constituents outraged that Republicans are trying to pass massive tax giveaways for wealthy individuals and corporations while adding $3.8 trillion to the national debt they claim to worry about and gutting programs like Medicaid that serve the working class.
"The House Budget Committee's vote is a necessary—but largely performative—step that bundles the 11 different bills Republicans have approved over the last few weeks through their policy committees, including the piece the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee advanced this week and the measure the Energy and Commerce Committee approved after an all-night markup of Medicaid policies forecast to strip healthcare coverage from more than 10 million people," Politico reported.
As the Budget Committee's markup began on Friday, Ranking Member Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) charged that "this is a big bill for billionaires."
Boyle continued:
Now, we will hear over the course of this hearing a vigorous debate, and frankly, there is a strong divide between Republicans and some other Republicans. There is also a divide between both sets of Republicans and this side of the dais, I can speak at least as to why it is every Democratic member will be voting no on the bill for billionaires.
Simply put, besides all of the other important issues involved in this bill, this is the overarching truth. It is the biggest tax cuts for billionaires in American history paid for by throwing 13.7 million Americans off their healthcare coverage.
Now, those aren't my claims, that is not subjective. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office just this week confirmed that at least 13,700,000 Americans will lose their healthcare if the GOP bill for billionaires becomes law. That is bad economics. It is unconscionable.
Several other Democrats have spotlighted the GOP's attempt to strip healthcare from millions of Americans in their critical comments about the megabill, which is backed by Republican President Donald Trump.
"This budget is disastrous and cruel, and we stopped it from moving forward," declared Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.), a committee member, on Friday. "Republicans have no mandate to rip away health care and food assistance from families."
Another panel member, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), said after the vote that "even some GOP recognized that this is an ugly lie atop a mountain of lies and dangerous trillions of additional national debt."
"They'll be back with another scheme next week, and we'll be ready to fight," he added. "Limiting this bill's benefits to 98% of Americans and denying them to Elon Musk and the 2% richest would cut this bill's cost in half and protect the healthcare of millions, which the GOP would otherwise deny."
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After Reporting and Backlash, Republicans Drop Sneaky Effort to Gut FTC—For Now
"We applaud Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee that stood up against his harmful proposal to ensure this amendment landed where it belongs—on the cutting room floor," said one antitrust advocate.
May 01, 2025
House Republicans on Wednesday dropped an effort to hamstring the Federal Trade Commission's ability to fight corporate consolidation after antitrust advocates, Democratic lawmakers, and news outlets—including Common Dreams—highlighted and sounded the alarm over the proposal.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, agreed during a markup hearing Wednesday to remove the proposal from the panel's section of the GOP's sprawling reconciliation package—though he indicated he would try to revive the proposal as a standalone bill at a later date.
The reversal came after Democrats on the panel, including Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Becca Balint (D-Vt.), ripped the proposal as a disaster for small businesses and consumers.
"Why would you go after the FTC and make it harder for small businesses to survive in this landscape?" Balint asked in fiery remarks at Wednesday's hearing. "You all talk about competition... and then you go after the FTC. It doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't pass the straight-face test."
"Why would you go after the FTC and make it harder for small businesses to survive in this landscape? You all talk about competition... and then you go after the FTC. It doesn't make any sense." pic.twitter.com/8EF8AOmW8m
— American Economic Liberties Project (@econliberties) April 30, 2025
Jordan ultimately relented and the House Judiciary Committee voted to remove the section in question, which would have transferred the FTC's antitrust staff and funding to the Justice Department—which doesn't have the same statutory authority to protect the American public from "unfair methods of competition."
Morgan Harper, director of policy and advocacy at the American Economic Liberties Project, said in a statement that Jordan and other Republicans on the judiciary panel "did the right thing scrapping a proposal that would have kneecapped antitrust enforcement against our economy’s most harmful monopolies."
"We applaud Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee that stood up against his harmful proposal to ensure this amendment landed where it belongs—on the cutting room floor," said Harper.
But Jordan made clear following Wednesday's hearing that he did not agree to remove the FTC proposal from the reconciliation package out of genuine concern about its implications for the future of antitrust enforcement.
Rather, he accepted Republican senators' warnings that the proposal wouldn't comply with the rules of the budget reconciliation process.
"We'll just do it in a standalone bill," Jordan told Punchbowl.
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