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government spending
The Presidency Is a Public Trust, Not a Personal Monument
The Trump administration has devoted extraordinary attention, taxpayer dollars, and even the power of government to projects centered on the president himself instead of the challenges facing the American people and the core responsibilities of government.
Aug 10, 2026
While Americans worried about rising costs at home and another war in the Middle East, President Donald Trump spent much of June talking about construction projects at the White House.
According to a Washington Post analysis of the president's speeches, interviews, social media posts, and other public remarks, he discussed his construction and beautification projects on nearly 4 out of every 5 days in June—more often than healthcare or wages, and about as often as inflation and prices.
That focus has become so pronounced that veteran White House reporter Maggie Haberman recently remarked that roughly "70%" of President Trump's attention appears devoted to his renovation projects.
The issue isn't just President Trump's construction projects. It's what they reveal about this presidency's priorities. Again and again, this administration has devoted extraordinary attention, taxpayer dollars, and even the power of government to projects centered on the president himself instead of the challenges facing the American people and the core responsibilities of government.
Americans should expect the same urgency in pursuing justice for survivors and greater transparency that this administration showed in protecting a presidential monument.
To begin with, consider where President Trump has chosen to focus his attention.
Over the past several months, President Trump has repeatedly returned to his new White House ballroom, the rebuilt Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, triumphal arches, portraits, flagpoles, and other additions that bear his personal imprint. When asked who his proposed triumphal arch was intended to honor, he answered with one word: "Me."
But few presidents have devoted so much attention to themselves while Americans confronted far more pressing challenges. Families continue to struggle with the cost of groceries, housing, childcare, and healthcare. Students and parents are trying to pay for college. Small businesses face rising costs and tariff uncertainty. Conflict in the Middle East threatens American service members, regional stability, and higher energy prices here at home.
Second, consider how those same priorities have shaped the way taxpayer dollars have been spent.
A recent New York Times analysis found that the known costs of the president's construction projects total roughly $1.2 billion. In my home state of Illinois, that same money could restore Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits for almost all families expected to lose them this year or preserve Medicaid coverage for nearly 130,000 residents at risk of losing it.
Finally, the most troubling example is how this administration has used the power of government.
The Justice Department aggressively pursued people accused of damaging President Trump's Reflecting Pool. One defendant, former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, faced a felony carrying up to 10 years in prison before prosecutors acknowledged last week that the damage was caused by a botched installation—not vandalism—and dropped the case.
Since Jeffrey Epstein's 2019 federal arrest, no one beyond Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell has been criminally prosecuted in the United States for participating in Epstein's sex-trafficking network, yet acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has defended the administration's refusal to release additional Epstein records while arguing there is no current basis for further prosecutions.
Years of litigation, congressional investigations, investigative reporting, and millions of pages of records have documented the network around Jeffrey Epstein. Leon Black paid Epstein more than $158 million. Lesley Groff spent 18 years as Epstein's longtime assistant, scheduling thousands of massages while Epstein abused underage girls. Yet the Justice Department has shown little urgency in pursuing accountability beyond Epstein and Maxwell.
The administration rushed to bring a felony case over alleged damage to President Trump's Reflecting Pool before acknowledging the damage resulted from a botched government installation—not vandalism—and dismissing the case. Yet when it comes to the people who enabled one of the largest sex-trafficking operations in modern history, that urgency has been nowhere to be found.
Every prosecution must rest on the evidence and the law. But Americans should expect the same urgency in pursuing justice for survivors and greater transparency that this administration showed in protecting a presidential monument.
The presidency is a public trust. It should be measured not by the monuments a president leaves behind, but by whether Americans are stronger, more secure, and more prosperous because of the choices he made.
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Memo to MAGA: Big Government Drives Economic Growth
Since at least World War II, the most dynamic sectors of the American economy have been developed in large part by federal government planning and heavy financial investment.
Jan 01, 2026
Few epithets are more heavily utilized among President Donald Trump and his supporters than “socialist” and “communist.” In MAGA’s deeply paranoid Bircher sensibility, “socialism” and even “communism” are defined as even the slightest expansion of governmental intervention in the economy—especially in favor of marginalized groups. In MAGA’s worldview, such interventions are a harbinger of the sort of massive societal disintegration seen in recent years in President Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela—if not the second coming of Stalinist totalitarianism.
As in so much else in the MAGA worldview, its views on economics have little relation to reality. For it is a fact that since at least World War II, the most dynamic sectors of the American economy (revolving around high tech) have been developed in large part by federal government planning and heavy financial investment. Since World War II, initially on the pretext of Cold War defense spending, technologies from computers and the internet to Google, lifesaving pharmaceuticals, and the components of cell phones have been developed by heavily government-subsidized researchers at universities and private companies. The government agencies providing the subsidies included the CIA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health, and especially the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
This crucial role of government investment in economic success (in the United States as well as Western Europe and East Asia) is generally unknown in MAGA world and even among Americans of a more educated and civilized worldview. But a small group of scholars have explored this fact, ranging from Noam Chomsky to former Richard Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips in his 2003 book Wealth and Democracy. In more recent years, it has been explored by Professor Mariana Mazzucato of University College, London. Mazzucato has served as an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom and US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in the United States.
As Bill Gates, a prime beneficiary of this government investment, explained in a 2015 interview with The Atlantic, “Since World War II, US government [funded] R&D has defined the state of the art” in almost every advanced sector of the American economy. Gates noted, for example, that it was the Pentagon’s DARPA which provided R&D investment in the 1960s and 70s which laid the foundation for the modern internet. DARPA’s investment was crucial, Gates noted, because as far as being a source of economic innovation, “the private sector is in general inept.” Because of a lack of guaranteed short-term profit, the private sector often refuses to invest in the early stages of development of technologies like the internet. By the 1980’s, the internet had developed to such an extent that many private companies saw its commercial potential and desired partnership with the federal government’s NSF—which had taken over the internet in the 1980s from the Pentagon’s DARPA—to pursue its further evolution. By the mid-1990s, in a somewhat opaque process, the NSF had fully transferred control of the internet to private sector companies.
AI: Big Government Drives Trump Economy
Then there is Artificial Intelligence (AI), the current massive private sector investment that is—according to many experts—the primary factor keeping an otherwise weak US economy afloat since Trump returned to the White House. The foundations for AI were laid by massive government investment in R&D beginning in the 1950s as the Center for Strategic and International Studies explained in October:
Although recent breakthroughs in AI have largely been funded by the private sector, the foundations of modern AI were built through decades of federally funded research. Following World War Two, government agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) invested in early AI experiments, such as the first AI program in the 1950s, the first chatbot in the 1960s, and rules-based systems for medical diagnosis in the 1970s. Indeed, public funding advanced many core capabilities like machine learning, neural networks, computer vision, and natural-language processing, which the private sector then developed into the AI systems we use today. In 2024, the House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence released a report of its own, acknowledging that the United States “has maintained its AI leadership largely due to continued and consistent federal investments in AI R&D over decades."
Big Government Trumpism
During the initial monologue on his November 2, 2015 radio program, Rush Limbaugh ridiculed the above quoted Bill Gates interview; he called Gates’ notion—that government subsidy of high tech R&D had fueled America’s post-World War II economic growth—as among the “craziest, most nonsensical things” he had ever heard in his life.
It seems fair to state that whatever else one might say about him, Bill Gates possesses a much more realistic view of how the world really works than the late Mr. Limbaugh did. It also seems fair to state that even Trump administration policymakers have the same better understanding than Limbaugh.
For all his anti-establishment grandstanding, Trump is just as committed—perhaps more so—to furthering militarism and the economic exploitation of the working class in the US and around the world as any of his Democrat or Republican predecessors.
After all, the Trump administration has been quietly putting tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in service of the private sector, particularly in subsidies for AI’s continued development. The publicly stated rational for such subsidies is national security, specifically the military and economic competition with China. Trump has even spearheaded the purchase by the federal government of shares in a handful of private sector companies in economically vital areas like minerals, steel, and semiconductors.
Normally Trump supporters would object to the federal government buying up shares of private companies. Relatively few of them seem to have even taken notice of Trump doing so, perhaps because Fox News, Newsmax, or their favorite talk radio demagogues have given little or no sustained coverage of it.
The bottom line is that even if some benefits from the Trump administration’s investments do trickle down to America’s working class—or they somehow help fuel long-term American economic dynamism—it is fair to say that his administration is using those investments first and foremost to benefit its billionaire supporters in Silicon Valley and the armaments industry. For all his anti-establishment grandstanding, Trump is just as committed—perhaps more so—to furthering militarism and the economic exploitation of the working class in the US and around the world as any of his Democrat or Republican predecessors. It would be nice if Americans—whether MAGA adherents or not—would become aware of this dynamic and mobilize against it.
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Trump and Vought Turn Shutdown Into a 'Weapon' to Target Democrats
"It's going to harm them," boasted Sen. Mike Lee, a top Trump cheerleader. "Russ Vought, the OMB director, has been dreaming about this moment... since puberty."
Oct 02, 2025
President Donald Trump is using the government shutdown to carry out an unprecedented attack on his enemies through more layoffs of federal workers and cuts to grants aimed at blue states.
In the Oval Office Tuesday, hours before the shutdown began, Trump told reporters that “when you shut it down, you have to do layoffs. So, we’d be laying off a lot of people that are going to be very affected, and they’re Democrats. They’re gonna be Democrats.”
In the days leading up to the shutdown, congressional Democrats attempted to force Republicans to roll back cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies—cuts that are expected to result in as many as 15 million Americans losing their health insurance while raising premiums for tens of millions more. Trump and the GOP have blamed Democrats for the shutdown, falsely claiming that theyare pushing to fund free healthcare for "illegal aliens."
However, they've struggled to make this story land with the American public. A Washington Post poll released Thursday found that 47% of US adults blame Trump and Republicans for the shutdown, while just 30% blame Democrats and 23% say they are unsure. The sample was divided roughly equally between those who voted for Trump and those who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris (D) in 2024.
In what Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) called an effort to use "taxpayer dollars to try and shift blame," the websites for numerous government agencies—including the US departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), as well as Justice, Agriculture, and several others—were updated with banners that blamed "Democrats" and the "Radical Left" for the shutdown.
Meanwhile, government employees, including those at the Small Business Administration (SBA) were directed to include similar partisan language in their out-of-office auto-reply emails.
Experts have told Politico that the use of taxpayer money for such explicit partisan messaging likely violates multiple ethics laws, including the Anti-Lobbying Act, which forbids the use of appropriated funds for lobbying activities designed to “support or defeat legislation pending before Congress.” It also pushes the boundaries of the Hatch Act, which requires federal programs to be used in a nonpartisan fashion.
The progressive consumer watchdog group Public Citizen said it has filed complaints against HUD and the SBA for what it said was an "obvious Hatch Act violation."
"The SBA and other agencies increasingly adopting this illegal, partisan tactic think they can get away with it because Trump has gutted any and all ethics oversight of the federal government," said Craig Holman, a government ethics expert with Public Citizen.
After being asked about Trump's promise to lay off "Democrats" at a press conference on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance told reporters, "We are not targeting federal agencies based on politics."
But in a Truth Social post early Thursday morning Trump struck a somewhat different tone. He spoke of plans to meet with Russell Vought, the director of the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), "to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity."
Trump also proudly described Vought as "he of PROJECT 2025 fame," referencing his leading role in crafting the Heritage Foundation's infamous blueprint for a far-right takeover of government—a takeover carried out in part through the purging of civil servants disloyal to Trump. During the 2024 election, Trump repeatedly insisted that he had "nothing to do with" Project 2025.
Vought has already begun to unilaterally withhold congressionally appropriated dollars for projects specifically for blue cities and states.
On Wednesday, he said that $18 billion in subway and tunnel funding for New York City had been “put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional [diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)] principles.” Not long before that, Trump had threatened to entirely cut off federal funding to the city if its voters elect the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and current frontrunner, as its next mayor in November.
Vought then announced Thursday that he was also stripping away another nearly $8 billion worth of funding for climate-related projects, referring to it as "Green New SCAM funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda." Vought said that the funding was being withheld exclusively from projects in states led by Democrats: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington state.
House Republicans were reportedly told by Vought on Wednesday that mass firings would also begin in "one to two" days, though he did not outline specifics about who would be fired. However, a memo Vought issued last week instructed agencies to prepare to eliminate employees “not consistent with the president’s priorities," triggering a lawsuit from federal workers' unions.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told the press Thursday that Vought was carrying out these cuts "reluctantly" and is "not enjoying the responsibility" of deciding which programs and employees get the axe.
But in an interview on Fox News, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a top Trump cheerleader, was a bit more candid, proudly declaring that Trump and Vought are using the shutdown specifically to hurt Democrats.
"They're doing it deliberately. It's going to harm them," Lee said. "Because Russ Vought, the OMB director, has been dreaming about this moment, preparing for this moment, since puberty."
Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) said that "Vought is pushing a scheme to turn a government shutdown into a weapon to fire career civil servants and dismantle programs Congress has already passed into law. That is not only reckless. It is flatly illegal and unconstitutional."
"Have we ever had a president work so hard to hurt the people he represents?" asked Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). "I'm not going to be intimidated by these crooks."
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How Can the Dems Win Back the Working Class? Economic Populism
A new report, which analyzes responses to 128 survey questions from gold standard academic surveys, finds that championing progressive economic policies can reverse the exodus of blue-collar voters from the party.
Jul 22, 2025
The Democratic Party has significant work to do if it hopes to bounce back from its 2024 electoral defeat. Making inroads with the working class is the only way possible, and a new report from the Center for Working-Class Politics and Jacobin shows that economic populism is the best path to bring them back into the party.
The Democratic Party lost big in 2024, badly enough to raise the question: Where are the votes they need to win going to come from now, especially in purple states and districts? Major demographic groups, some of which were mainstays of the Democratic Party in the past, swung to the GOP, especially Latino men and even a significant number of Black men.
By the time of the 2024 election, the Democratic Party had firmly committed to its strategy of appealing to suburban moderates at the cost of blue-collar voters. Back in 2016, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) famously said, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
Fast forward to 2025 and the Democratic Party’s options for remaining competitive in swing districts seem more limited than ever. Is it too late for the party to turn back to the blue-collar voters it left behind years ago?
Even more surprising, support for a millionaire’s tax—part of Mamdani’s campaign but not his challenger Andrew Cuomo’s—was 44% among working-class 2020 Trump voters.
Our new report, which analyzes responses to 128 survey questions from gold standard academic surveys, finds that championing progressive economic policies can reverse the exodus of blue-collar voters from the party. It can also help us understand why those policies resonate most with working class voters.
Two key findings prove the potential of leaning more heavily into economic populism. First, contrary to what many might expect, the working class has become both more progressive on economic issues and less conservative on social issues in recent decades. From abortion and gun control to gay rights and views on racial inequality, the working class today is, if anything, more progressive than the working class that helped elect Barack Obama in 2008.
What keeps this leftward shift from being a common part of narratives that describe the working class, however, is that the upper and middle classes have moved left at an even faster rate over the same time period, making it seem like working class voters have become more conservative over that time.
Second, relative to the middle and upper classes, economic populist policies resonate more with working-class voters, while socially progressive policies resonate less. While our first finding means that the working class is still within reach of the Democratic Party, the second makes clear that campaigns centered on economically progressive policies maximize their chances of winning working-class votes. Our report shows the overwhelming popularity of a host of economic populist policies. Increasing the minimum wage, increasing government spending on healthcare and social security, protecting jobs with import limits, and spending more on the poor are all examples of policies that we found resonate with an overwhelming majority of the working class.
Our analysis challenges oft-repeated stereotypes about the supposed conservative drift of the working-class. For example, there are many who seem certain that the economic policies that helped propel Zohran Mamdani to victory in New York City’s recent Democratic mayoral primary would be disastrous outside of the city’s liberal bubble.
That conventional wisdom doesn’t hold up in polling. For example, we found that about 1 out of every 5 working-class people who voted for President Donald Trump in 2020 also favored a four-policy package that included increasing income taxes on million-dollar-per-year earners, federal spending on public schools, federal spending on social security, and the federal minimum wage. Even more surprising, support for a millionaire’s tax—part of Mamdani’s campaign but not his challenger Andrew Cuomo’s—was 44% among working-class 2020 Trump voters. This is only one example, but we’ve identified quite a few ways Democrats can appeal to working-class voters without sacrificing a strong economic program.
Our analysis shows that winning back working class votes from the GOP is still possible. And doing so does not require abandoning the bedrock principles of the Democratic Party by championing regressive social policies. It does, however, require leading with bread-and-butter economic policies that are overwhelmingly popular with working-class voters. The potential for the Democratic party to win back the support it needs to turn the tide on Trumpism is clear from our report. Let’s hope the Democrats pay attention.
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Trump Is Straining Our Mental Health Then Gutting Support Services
Despite the administration’s cuts, there appears to be surprising agreement among people with divergent political beliefs that it’s time to expand services for those who are struggling.
Apr 27, 2025
The United States has been in the throes of a mental health and overdose crisis so severe it has spanned five presidential administrations and been classified as an official state of emergency in three of them. No one knows exactly how this emergency will play out during the current Trumpian cocktail of uncertainty, fear, and cuts to social services, but charts of the recent turbulence of the stock market suggest a relevant visual: Imagine the nervous systems of millions of already struggling Americans, along with millions more who are being pushed to the limits of what they can handle, all experiencing deep emotional crashes, briefly recovering, only to collapse again into new lows. And while it might be tempting to think that many of us aren’t affected by the present gut-wrenching emotional tumult because we appear fine and don’t seem to care about what’s happening to the more desperate among us, our recent research suggests that people do care—including, perhaps, those you’d least expect to do so.
Last year brought a widely reported piece of news in mental health. Overdose fatalities in the United States declined substantially, a notable but qualified victory. As overdose deaths fell 9% from 2021 to 2023 for white Americans, such deaths increased 12% for people of other races, according to a Reuters analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Street drugs continue to kill more than 84,000 people in the United States annually, and overdoses remain the leading cause of death among Americans ages 18 to 44.
In such a devastating moment, in all corners of American society, people are in ever greater need of mental health services, just as funding for them is being slashed.
In other words, many young Americans and people of all ages attempt to numb difficult, even unbearable feelings, and sometimes that numbing is fatal. Depending on who you are, your preferred numbing agent might be wine, work, prescription pills, social media, street drugs, or something else entirely. But in the second age of Donald Trump, as well as long before him, all too many of us have been grappling with profound pain, whether from a sense of hopelessness about the future, oppression, trauma, grief, job loss, or general financial strain in ever more economically difficult times. Those among us who are not U.S. citizens are increasingly seized with the fear of being deported due to false, unknown, or unsubstantiated allegations and without due process. In addition to sowing terror, this has also been exacerbating an already widespread sense of loneliness, as people stay inside for fear of being detained.
Another source of despair is the urgent overseas humanitarian crisis over which noncitizens and legal permanent residents are now being seized, shackled, and imprisoned or disappeared for expressing moral protest. One (but not both) of the authors of this article has the protection of U.S. citizenship, although experts now question whether even citizenship will continue to provide protection, and so, for safety’s sake, we’re not naming that crisis or the widely shared sense of grief and powerlessness as men, women, and heartbreaking numbers of children die there. Students and people in all walks of life continue to take to the streets in protest, including the one of us who is a citizen.
Indeed, in such a devastating moment, in all corners of American society, people are in ever greater need of mental health services, just as funding for them is being slashed. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and so a ripe moment to take stock of the damage being done and to report that there appears to be surprising agreement among people with divergent political beliefs that it’s time to expand services for those who are struggling.
Dismantled?
In late January, the Trump White House issued a vague memo that put a temporary freeze on the disbursement of federal financial assistance. By early February, NBC News had reported that some health clinics were closing their doors. Then, in March, the Trump administration announced the cancellation of more than $11 billion in funding to deal with addiction, mental health, and related issues. A federal judge subsequently halted that cancellation of funds, saying such a sudden termination caused “direct and irreparable harm to public health.” The Trump administration requested a stay of the order, with plans to appeal.
By mid-April, around the same time that Elon Musk’s DOGE took over responsibility for posting federal grant opportunities for the public, Reuters published an extensive investigation on the subject. It drew on interviews with dozens of experts to conclude that funding cuts and associated layoffs were “dismantling the carefully constructed health infrastructure that drove the number of overdose deaths down by tens of thousands last year.”
In Philadelphia, where one of the authors of this article resides, the Inquirer reported that a forensic research lab that tests the nation’s illicit drug supply for new and harmful substances hadn’t received crucial funds from the federal government. That, in turn, meant the furloughing of staff and a growing backlog of untested samples. If you’ve followed news about the evolving nature of illicit and counterfeit drugs, you know that novel and dangerous molecules are continually turning up in unexpected places, whether the veterinary sedative xylazine or the more potent medetomidine found in batches of fentanyl, or as deadly levels of nitazenes in seemingly innocuous pills. Slowing or halting drug-testing is a dangerous proposition.
Meanwhile, a Philadelphia outreach program run by Unity Recovery was recently forced to shut down, while its workers who had offered services in addiction, nutrition, and other kinds of healthcare suddenly lost their jobs. At the time of this writing, the organization’s website features a red warning symbol and the message: “Due to federal funding cuts enacted on March 24, 2025, Unity Recovery has lost critical access to resources to provide peer support services.” It also notes that “information is changing rapidly”—a nod to the fact that a judge halted the cancellation of funds and no one now knows exactly how the pending cuts will (or won’t) unfold.
And while there is supposedly stark disagreement between the Trumpist and non-Trumpist halves of this country about whether such cuts should be taking place at all, extensive data from the purple state of Pennsylvania suggests there is far more agreement than anyone might have guessed.
“It Is in All Our Interests to Give Help and Support”
Over the past year, the two of us have worked on a research project that collected perspectives from thousands of Pennsylvanians about mental health, substance use, and the state’s criminal justice system. We also collected hundreds of surveys from Pennsylvanians who work in law enforcement and criminal justice. We guessed that such anonymous surveys would capture punitive viewpoints and a belief that people who use drugs should be put behind bars. And, yes, there was a bit of that, but to our surprise, on the whole, we found something quite different.
More than a quarter of Pennsylvanians said that, in recent years, they had become more sympathetic toward people who struggle with drugs or alcohol. A majority of the respondents identified stress and traumatic life events as a primary cause of problematic substance use. And most surprising of all, we found broad agreement on policy priorities across—yes, across—the political spectrum.
It’s notable that, in this purple state where the current president won more than 50% of the vote, there is majority support across the political spectrum for providing genuine assistance to people who need it.
Eighty-three percent of Pennsylvanians agreed that “addressing social problems such as homelessness, mental health, and substance use disorder” was a greater priority than “strengthening social order through more policing and greater enforcement of the laws.” That view was shared across political affiliations: 71% of respondents identifying as conservative agreed with it, as did 88% of those identifying as liberal.
Asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “It is in all our interests to give help and support to people who struggle with drugs and/or alcohol,” 68% of respondents identifying as conservative or very conservative agreed, as did 77% of liberal or very liberal respondents. Notably, there was majority support (61%) for increasing government spending for this cause. Even 54% of conservatives said they supported increasing spending to improve treatment and services for substance-use disorder.
We assumed that Americans who work in law enforcement and criminal justice would have more hardline views. Again, we were wrong. Compared with Pennsylvanians overall, over the past five years, those who work in the criminal justice system were—yes!—more likely to report feeling greater sympathy toward people who struggle with drugs or alcohol, and an overwhelming 70% of them believed that this society was obliged to provide them with treatment. Asked what services they believed could help prevent people struggling with substance use from becoming involved in the justice system, 71% said “more access to mental health treatment providers or services.”
Because much drug use in this country is criminalized, those who work in criminal justice are on the frontlines of our mental health crisis. These new findings suggest that, at least in Pennsylvania, justice system workers feel a responsibility to offer genuine help and see bolstering mental health services as the best way forward.
Of course, the opposite is happening. Yet it’s notable that, in this purple state where the current president won more than 50% of the vote, there is majority support across the political spectrum for providing genuine assistance to people who need it.
The ongoing axing of services will likely prove devastating. It leaves many feeling like there is nothing they can do. Yet, as individuals, count on one thing: We are not powerless (as we so often believe).
Looking Out for Others
When life feels scary and uncertain, as it increasingly does in the Trump era, many people respond by thinking a lot about what might happen in their world and trying to anticipate the future in order to make plans and gain at least some minimal sense of control. Both authors of this article—one of us a doctor, the other a writer—struggle with our ruminations on the state and direction of this country, which can lead us deeper into anxiety and isolation.
And while we probably can’t escape those fearful feelings (and probably shouldn’t try to), we can at least stay in touch with others instead of giving in to the common urge to withdraw. That isn’t easy, of course. Both of us find ourselves struggling to pick up the phone. But this is a time when picking up that phone couldn’t be more important. A time when so much of our world is endangered is distinctly a moment to put special effort into looking out for one another and regularly experiencing the energy that comes from human connection.
We also understand that many Americans are living on the edge. We often don’t know who among our neighbors and loved ones is wrestling with the question of whether life is worth living. (Suicide rates remain high for Americans generally and especially for those with drug and alcohol use disorders.) Right now, there is a dire need for better services, but even if every person had access to quality mental healthcare, our actions as community members would still matter. It’s sometimes possible to save the life of someone you care about just by telling them you care.
Each of us, including you, has a role to play in keeping all of us alive and safe as best we can in ever more difficult times.
From Crisis to Care
No one yet knows exactly how the Trump administration’s potentially staggering cuts to community healthcare and social services will unfold. But amid the chaos, people across this nation continue to do meaningful, lifesaving work.
The Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit outfit that seeks to prevent harms associated with drug use and drug criminalization, recently published a report entitled “From Crisis to Care.” It presents an intelligent roadmap for improving mental health and addressing substance use and homelessness, including investing in treatment options that are evidence-based and voluntary, as well as housing programs and community-based crisis response systems. These are anything but radical ideas. They’re grounded in research and can serve as a model for the future. Of course, funding and some political power will be necessary to accomplish such things, and that might sound farfetched in our current situation. But simple actions in the present make it more likely that such services will be launched in the future.
We can save a life by reaching out to friends and neighbors, and it’s no less important to recognize when we ourselves are struggling. Sometimes we worry about others without acknowledging that we, too, are on the edge. With that in mind, we’re writing the following words for you and every other reader but also for ourselves: When you’re struggling, contact someone you trust for support. By doing so, you’re also implicitly giving them permission to ask for help from you when they need it, and by giving and receiving help, you create a new pattern of reciprocity.
Such reciprocity has political significance. It fosters social cohesion, a precursor for coordinated action on a far larger sale.
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The DOGE Budget: Money for War... and Not Much Else
The Trump and Musk hollowing out of the civilian government, while keeping the Pentagon budget at enormously high levels of funding, means the United States is well on its way to becoming the very “garrison state” that Eisenhower warned against.
Apr 24, 2025
Under the guise of efficiency, the Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to essential programs and agencies that are the backbone of America’s civilian government. The virtual elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, and plans to shut down the Department of Education are just the most visible examples of a campaign that includes layoffs of budget experts, public health officials, scientists, and other critical personnel whose work undergirds the daily operations of government and provides the basic services needed by businesses, families, and individuals alike. Many of those services can make the difference between solvency and poverty, health and illness, or even, in some cases, life and death for vulnerable populations.
The speed with which civilian programs and agencies are being slashed in the second Trump era gives away the true purpose of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In the context of the Musk-Trump regime, “efficiency” is a cover story for a greed-driven ideological campaign to radically reduce the size of government without regard for the human consequences.
The first two months of the Trump-Musk administration undoubtedly represent the most blatant power grab by the executive branch in the history of this republic.
So far, the only agency that seems to have escaped the ire of the DOGE is—don’t be shocked!—the Pentagon. After misleading headlines suggested that its topline would be cut by as much as 8% annually for the next five years as part of that supposed efficiency campaign, the real plan was revealed—finding savings in some parts of the Pentagon only to invest whatever money might be saved in—yes!—other military programs without any actual reductions in the department’s overall budget. Then, during a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 7, President Donald Trump announced that “we’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military... $1 trillion. Nobody has seen anything like it.”
So far, cuts to make room for new kinds of military investments have been limited to the firing of civilian Pentagon employees and the dismantling of a number of internal strategy and research departments. Activities that funnel revenue to weapons contractors have barely been touched—hardly surprising given that Elon Musk himself presides over a significant Pentagon contractor, SpaceX.
The legitimacy of his role should, of course, be subject to question. After all, he’s an unelected billionaire with major government contracts who, in recent months, seemed to have garnered more power than the entire cabinet combined. But cabinet members are subject to Senate confirmation, as well as financial disclosure and conflict-of-interest rules. Not Musk, though. Not only hasn’t he been vetted by Congress, but he’s been allowed to maintain his role in SpaceX.
A Hollow Government?
The Trump and Musk hollowing out of the civilian government, while keeping the Pentagon budget at enormously high levels of funding, means the United States is well on its way to becoming the very “garrison state” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in the early years of the Cold War. And mind you, all of that’s true before Republican hawks in Congress like Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who is seeking $100 billion more in Pentagon spending than its officials have asked for, even act.
What’s at stake, however, goes well beyond how the government spends its money. After all, such decisions are being accompanied by an assault on basic constitutional rights like freedom of speech and a campaign of mass deportations that already includes people with the legal right to remain in the United States. And that’s not to mention the bullying and financial blackmailing of universities, law firms, and major media outlets in an attempt to force them to bow down to the administration’s political preferences.
In fact, the first two months of the Trump-Musk administration undoubtedly represent the most blatant power grab by the executive branch in the history of this republic, a move that undermines our ability to preserve, no less expand, the fundamental rights that are supposed to be the guiding lights of American democracy. Those rights have, of course, been violated to one degree or another throughout this country’s history, but never like this. The current crackdown threatens to erase the hard-won victories of the civil rights, women’s rights, labor rights, immigrant rights, and LGBTQ rights movements that had brought this country closer to living up to its professed commitments to freedom, tolerance, and equality.
Back in 2019, right-wing populist and Trump buddy Steve Bannon told PBS “Frontline” that the key to a future victory was to increase the “muzzle velocity” of extremist policy changes, so that opponents of the MAGA movement wouldn’t even know what hit them. “All we have to do,” he said then, “is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never—will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”
The Trump/Musk administration is now implementing just such a strategy in a staggering fashion.
Sparing the Pentagon
Despite a certain amount of noise about DOGE-driven efficiencies at the Pentagon, the department has indeed been spared the fate of civilian outfits like the Agency for International Development and the Department of Education, which have been either decimated or are slated for elimination altogether.
A proposal to lay off 60,000 civilian employees at the Pentagon will have harsh consequences for those expecting to lose their jobs, but it is only 5% of the department’s workforce of 700,000 government employees and another more than half a million individuals under contract. By contrast, the workforce of USAID, which offered a peaceful helping hand to countries around the world, was rapidly reduced from 10,000 to less than 300.
The goal is to Make America Unequal Again with an expansive program that could leave current levels of inequality, which already exceed those reached during the “Gilded Age” of the late 19th and early 20th century, in the proverbial dust.
In addition, the layoffs of research scientists and public health experts may prove to have disastrous consequences down the road by reducing the government’s ability to prevent or respond to infectious diseases and possible pandemics like new variants of Covid-19 or the bird flu. To compound the problem, the administration has ordered the firing of 1 in 5 employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and is now pressing that agency to terminate more than one-third of its outside contracts.
In addition, the almost instant firing of independent government inspectors general, who were charged with overseeing government waste, fraud, and abuse, at the start of Trump’s second term in office bodes anything but well for policing an administration already awash in conflicts of interest. Worse yet, the freezing of actions by the civil rights division of the Justice Department will allow racial injustice to flourish without the slightest meaningful legal pushback.
Then there are the plans of both the Trump administration and House Republicans to slash programs from Medicaid to Social Security to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that serve tens of millions of Americans. In addition, there have already been staff cuts at the Social Security Administration, as well as steps taken to make it harder to apply for benefits there, and that’s undoubtedly just the beginning. In the future, there could be devastating direct benefit cuts to a program that serves more than 70 million Americans. And such crucial programs may, in their own fashion, end up on the chopping block, in part to make way for a planned multi-trillion-dollar tax cut geared mainly—you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn—to helping individuals at the high end of the income scale.
In short, the goal is to Make America Unequal Again with an expansive program that could leave current levels of inequality, which already exceed those reached during the “Gilded Age” of the late 19th and early 20th century, in the proverbial dust.
The Pentagon Exception
While most government agencies are either under siege or fear that they will be so in relatively short order, one agency has largely escaped the budget cutter’s knife: the Pentagon. In 2024, that agency (including nuclear warhead work done at the Department of Energy) already received an astonishing $915 billion, accounting for more than half of the federal government’s discretionary budget that year.
Meanwhile, as a New York Times analysis recently showed, the revenues of major weapons contractors have barely been touched. So far, General Dynamics (with a loss of less than 1%) and Leidos (with a loss of 7%) are the only firms among the top 10 weapons contractors to experience any kind of reduction in revenues from DOGE’s efforts.
One possible tradeoff within the Pentagon could be a move away from big platforms like aircraft carriers and piloted combat aircraft toward faster, nimbler, more easily produced systems based on applications of artificial intelligence, including swarms of drones. Elon Musk is already a longtime critic of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet, which he’s slammed as “the worst military value for money” in the history of Pentagon procurement. His solution, however, is ever more advanced drones, presumably produced by his Silicon Valley allies.
But there is another possibility: The Pentagon might further boost its budget so that it can fund systems large and small, simultaneously feeding both the big contractors and the emerging military tech firms. After all, despite Musk’s critique, the president only recently announced that Boeing will produce a new plane, the F-47 (that “47” being—you guessed it!—in honor of America’s 47th president).
If there is a move toward tradeoffs between existing systems and new tech, both sides will have ample lobbying clout at their disposal. After all, the Silicon Valley crowd is literally embedded in the Trump administration from Musk to Vice President JD Vance, a protégé of Peter Thiel, the founder of the military-tech firm Palantir. Shortly after graduating from Yale Law School, Vance took a job at Mithril, a venture capital firm owned by Thiel. When Vance left that firm in 2019 to run for the Senate in Ohio, he did so with $15 million in backing from Thiel.
And Thiel is just one of the tech moguls backing Vance. An analysis by CBS News found that:
Vance, a relative newcomer to national politics, has assiduously courted billionaires and Silicon Valley titans to bankroll his unlikely rise from bestselling memoirist of despair, drugs, and generational poverty in Appalachia to a ticket that could seat him a heartbeat away from the presidency.
The conservative New York Post summarized the state of play in an article headline in July 2024: “Silicon Valley Cheers Vance Pick as More Tech Billionaires Back Trump.” And keep in mind that Musk and Vance are not the only advocates for the military-tech sector embedded in the Trump administration. Stephen Feinberg, second-in-charge at the Pentagon, worked for Cerberus Capital, an investment firm that has a history of investing in the handgun and defense industries. And Michael Obadal, a senior director at Anduril, has been selected to serve as the deputy secretary of the Army. A recent analysis by Bloomberg, in fact, found that “more than a dozen people with ties to Thiel—including current and former employees of his companies, as well as people who have helped manage his fortune or benefited from his investments and charitable giving—have been folded into the Trump administration.”
For their part, the Big Five arms contractors, led by Lockheed Martin, still have a firm foothold in Congress, having made millions in campaign contributions, employed hundreds of lobbyists serving on commissions that influence military spending and strategy, and placed their facilities in a majority of the states and districts in the country. Even if some in the Pentagon tried to phase out the F-35, Congress might well add funds to that institution’s budget request to save the program.
Recent procurement decisions suggest that there may be a desire in both Congress and the Trump administration to finance traditional contractors and emerging tech firms alike. The two largest recent program announcements—Boeing’s selection as the prime contractor for that F-47 next generation combat aircraft and President Trump’s commitment to a “Golden Dome” defense system supposedly geared to protecting the entire United States from incoming missiles—will offer ample opportunities to both traditional arms firms and emerging military tech companies. The procurement phase of the F-47 program could cost up to $20 billion, but as Dan Grazier of the Stimson Center has noted, that $20 billion will be “just seed money. The total costs coming down the road will be hundreds of billions of dollars.” Meanwhile, General Atomics and Anduril are competing to build drone “wingmen” that would work in coordination with those future F-47s in battle situations.
At this point, President Trump’s Golden Dome isn’t a fully fleshed out concept, but count on one thing: Attempting to meet his goal of a comprehensive, leakproof defense against missiles would require building large numbers of interceptors and new military satellites woven together with advanced communications and targeting systems, at a potential cost over time of hundreds of billions of dollars. And while the big weapons firms may have an inside track on building the hardware for the Golden Dome, emerging tech firms are better positioned to produce the software, targeting, surveillance, and communications components of the system.
Golden Dome is poised to go forward despite the fact that, as Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists has asserted, “It has been long understood that defending against a sophisticated nuclear arsenal is technically and economically unfeasible.” But that reality won’t stem the flow of massive quantities of tax dollars into the project, no matter how unrealistic it may be, since profits from producing it will be all too realistic.
Resistance Rising?
There are signs of growing resistance to the Musk-Trump agenda from lawsuits, to rallies against the oligarchy led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), to a boycott of Musk’s Tesla automobiles. Such efforts will need to be supplemented by the involvement of millions more people, including Trump supporters hurt by his cuts to essential programs that had helped them stay above water financially. The outcome of all this may be uncertain, but the stakes simply couldn’t be higher.
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To Curb Government Waste, Musk Should Start With Pentagon Contractors... Like Himself
The Pentagon’s deep over-reliance on private corporations not only wastes billions of taxpayer dollars, but also feeds conflicts and contributes to weapons proliferation.
Feb 20, 2025
With an annual budget rapidly approaching $1 trillion, the Pentagon already gets more discretionary tax dollars than any other agency.
Now congressional Republicans are proposing to hike that figure by anywhere from $100 billion to $150 billion—while slashing funding for programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and other programs that help keep Americans on their feet.
Lawmakers have it backwards: We need to invest more in those programs and less in the Pentagon, which simply can’t account for how it’s spending our money.
We have to curb our endless spending on the military—and put that money back into our real needs, like creating jobs, educating students, protecting our planet, and much more.
Late last year, the Pentagon failed its mandatory audit—yet again.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, either—in fact, the Pentagon has failed every audit it’s ever undergone. According to the Project on Government Oversight, the Defense Department is the only department to have achieved consistent failure over nearly 35 years of government audits. Quite the achievement.
While the Pentagon may not know where its money goes, we do know that about half of its budget each year goes to private, for-profit military contractors. The Pentagon’s deep over-reliance on these corporations not only wastes billions of taxpayer dollars, but also feeds conflicts and contributes to weapons proliferation. Ultimately, this creates a fundamentally less secure world.
Much of the Pentagon’s operations and personnel have been outsourced to “private military contractors,” or PMCs. The use of PMCs exploded during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars—by 2019, there were 1.5 times as many contractors on the ground in the Middle East as U.S. troops.
These corporations have turned our tax dollars into their private slush fund with rampant waste, fraud, and abuse.
Take for instance the time in 2020 when the Pentagon paid over $52,000 for a trashcan. Or when a Pentagon contractor made a 9,400% profit margin off of a half-inch metal pin. Last year, reports emerged that Pentagon contractor Boeing made almost $1 million in profit just from overcharging for spare parts on C-17 cargo planes, such as soap dispensers.
There are countless examples of Pentagon contractors defrauding American taxpayers like this, and yet we keep writing them bigger and bigger checks. And the wealthier these companies and their executives get, the easier it is for them to throw their weight around in government.
Look at Elon Musk, President Trump’s chief billionaire backer and the one he charged with rooting out “waste” from the government.
Musk, the wealthiest oligarch on the planet, has many glaring conflicts of interest as he meddles in the U.S. government. Not the least of which: He’s a Pentagon contractor CEO himself, through his company SpaceX.
Contractor fraud isn’t going away—in fact, it will only get worse with the most recent Pentagon budget’s loosened restrictions on how these companies can spend taxpayer dollars. Despite this, there is little political will to crack down on the companies that are bleeding taxpayers dry.
Our politicians can’t just allow the Pentagon to fail audit after audit forever. We have to curb our endless spending on the military—and put that money back into our real needs, like creating jobs, educating students, protecting our planet, and much more.
Targeting companies that make billions ripping off taxpayers is a perfect place to start.
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Watchdogs, Unions Target DOGE With Lawsuits Mere Minutes Into Trump Administration
"This fight is about fairness, accountability, and the integrity of our government," said AFGE national president Everett Kelley.
Jan 20, 2025
The legal fight over President Donald Trump's "Department of Government Efficiency" kicked off less than hour into his presidency with a flurry of lawsuits filed in federal court—including multiple that allege the body is in violation of the the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act.
Trump tapped billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to run the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was conceived by Trump to help aid with cuts to government spending and regulation. (Ramaswamy, however, is reportedly departing DOGE to launch a bid for Ohio governor).
In a Monday statement announcing one of the lawsuits, Skye Perryman, CEO of Democracy Forward, said that "allowing unelected billionaires to run roughshod over essential services without being transparent about their operations does not achieve the efficiency the American people want to see from their government and only threatens to further undermine the public's trust."
Democracy Forward is serving as co-legal counsel in one of three lawsuits alleging Federal Advisory Committee Act violations. That complaint was filed by a diverse group of plaintiffs, including the advocacy organization the American Public Health Association, the union the American Federation of Teachers, the veterans group the Minority Veterans of America, the progressive veterans group VoteVets Action Fund, the consumer advocacy group the Center for Auto Safety, and the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
A second was filed by the watchdog group Public Citizen, the watchdog nonprofit State Democracy Defenders Fund, and the federal employees union the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE). A third was filed by the public interest firm the National Security Counselors.
"This fight is about fairness, accountability, and the integrity of our government," said AFGE national president Everett Kelley in a statement Monday. "Federal employees are not the problem—they are the solution. They deserve to have their voices heard in decisions that affect their work, their agencies, and the public they serve."
Plaintiffs in the first three suits argue that DOGE is operating as a federal advisory committee but not adhering to regulations overseeing those bodies.
Under the 1972 law, federal advisory committees—bodies that advise federal decision-makers on policy, which are also known as FACAs—must do things like furnish meeting minutes and make their meetings open to the public. The groups must also establish a charter and ensure the viewpoints of its members are "fairly balanced."
According to the complaint co-authored by lawyers with Democracy Forward and CREW, the defendants—who include DOGE and the Office of Management and Budget—"have taken no action to comply with FACA, including by making a formal determination that DOGE's creation serves the public interest, nor have they filed a charter identifying the scope of DOGE’s work."
The lawsuit also alleges that "DOGE's membership does not include anyone who brings the perspective of the people and communities that will be most directly affected by the drastic cuts to the federal programs and services that DOGE will recommend."
The complaint co-authored by Public Citizen also makes the same argument regarding balanced viewpoints. Each of the plaintiffs listed in that suit appealed to have representatives from their respective groups join DOGE in order to offer expertise, according to the filing.
" Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy both hold financial interests that will be directly affected by federal budgetary policies—presenting substantial conflict of interest concerns," said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, in an early January statement regarding her request to join DOGE.
Two of Musk's companies account for at least $15.4 billion in government contracts over the past 10 years, according to New York Times reporting from October. Ramaswamy's perch atop DOGE could also present conflicts of interest stemming from financial interests he has in multiple companies with exposure to the federal government, the Times reported before revelations of his plans to leave DOGE.
Also Monday, the conservation organization the Center for Biological Diversity sued to obtain public records showing how "people claiming to represent DOGE" have communicated with the White House since the presidential transition began.
In t complaint, the Center for Biological Diversity argues that they filed an unfilled public records request with the Office of Management and Budget for materials that would "shed valuable light on any directives or communications with OMB regarding DOGE and its objectives, which will shed light on the new administration's intended operations and responses as they take office."
"Whether it's Trump or Elon Musk who's really running the government, we're a nation of laws and the people have a right to know what Musk and his cronies have been up to during the transition," said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement Monday.
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Public Interest Law Firm to Sue DOGE Within Minutes of Trump's Swearing In
Other critics of Trump's Department of Government Efficiency have also argued that it runs afoul of regulations governing federal advisory committees.
Jan 20, 2025
The public interest law firm National Security Counselors says it will file a lawsuit in federal court challenging the "Department of Government Efficiency," a nongovernmental entity spearheaded by President-elect Donald Trump to help advise on cuts to government spending and regulation, within minutes of Trump's swearing in, according to The Washington Post.
The complaint alleges that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) meets the requirements to be considered a "federal advisory committee"—groups that are known as FACAs—and therefore must follow regulations outlined in a 1972 law governing how FACAs operate. FACAs must, for example, file a charter with Congress, keep regular minutes of meetings, and ensure meetings are open to the public. DOGE doesn't appear to have taken those steps, according to the Post.
The watchdog group Public Citizen has also criticized DOGE for failing to adhere to FACA requirements, which stipulate that "membership of the advisory committee [must] be fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented and the functions to be performed by the advisory committee." To help remedy this, the co-presidents of Public Citizen—Lisa Gilbert and Robert Weissman—last week requested that the Trump transition team co-chairs appoint them to serve on DOGE.
"As things stand, DOGE's membership falls far short of satisfying FACA's fair-balance requirement," the two wrote. They also point out that the duo tapped to lead DOGE, billionaire and GOP megadonor Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, both stand to potentially benefit financially from lessened federal regulation. CBS News reported Sunday that Ramaswamy is expected to depart DOGE and announce a bid for Ohio governor.
Kel McClanahan, the executive director of National Security Counselors who authored the lawsuit, told the Post that "we're not trying to say DOGE can't exist. Advisory committees like DOGE have been around for decades. We're just saying that DOGE can't exist without following the law."
Another source the Post spoke with, Sam Hammond of the Foundation for American Innovation—who has been a fan of DOGE's efforts—told the paper that until Trump actually treats DOGE as a FACA, it doesn't need to follow FACA reporting rules. "DOGE isn't a federal advisory committee because DOGE doesn't really exist. DOGE is a branding exercise, a shorthand for Trump's government reform efforts," he said.
But early January reporting from the Post indicates that DOGE is more than just a branding exercise. Citing anonymous sources, the outlet reported that aides with DOGE have spoken to staffers at more than a dozen federal agencies to "begin preliminary interviews that will shape the tech executives' enormous ambitions to tame Washington's sprawling bureaucracy." There has also been a hiring sprint. DOGE is aiming to have nearly 100 staff in place by Trump's inauguration, according to the paper.
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If Musk Blocking a Key Spending Bill Isn’t Oligarchy, I Don’t Know What Is
You may not get access to services you depend on just before the holidays because an unelected billionaire shadow president wanted it that way.
Dec 19, 2024
If the government shuts down Saturday, Elon Musk will be largely to blame.
Musk went on a daylong rampage yesterday against the continuing resolution drafted by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and his leadership team to keep the government going.
Musk posted nearly nonstop on his social media platform X about how lawmakers must kill it. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Musk wrote in one post.
We’re getting a preview of what the next four years will look like—dysfunction in D.C. that will make your life worse, driven by a petulant billionaire with an unquenchable thirst for wealth and power.
Musk—the richest person in the world—was joined in his posting spree by another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, whom President-elect Donald Trump asked to partner with Musk in an effort to slash government spending and reduce the federal budget deficit.
Republicans gauging support for the legislation said they were bleeding votes as a result of Musk’s barrage.
Then, after Musk spent the day telling Republicans not to support the bill, Trump weighed in against it, too. That put the bill on life support.
If this isn’t oligarchy, I don’t know what is.
You may not get access to services you depend on just before the holidays because an unelected billionaire shadow president wanted it that way.
Funding for essentials will be jeopardized—disaster relief, clean water protections, food safety inspections, cancer research, and nutrition programs for children.
Federal workers like air traffic controllers will be required to work without pay just as air travel is about to pick up.
The same goes for members of our military.
Musk effectively blocked a government spending bill by mobilizing his 205 million followers on X and then using his influence on Trump—influence he bought by spending more than $270 million getting Trump elected.
Yet Musk’s concern about the federal deficit seems to disappear whenever Trump and MAGA Republicans talk about passing tax cuts that will disproportionately benefit billionaires like Musk. Tax cuts, I might add, that will balloon the deficit by nearly $5 trillion.
We’re getting a preview of what the next four years will look like—dysfunction in D.C. that will make your life worse, driven by a petulant billionaire with an unquenchable thirst for wealth and power.
A billionaire wielding his influence over the rest of us proves we are in a Second Gilded Age.
But there may be a silver lining to this Gilded Age cloud. The lesson of the First Gilded Age is that when concentrated wealth, corruption, and ensuing hardship for average working Americans become so blatant that they offend the values of the majority of us, we rise up and demand real, systemic change.
It’s only a matter of time. A government shutdown that hurts average working people, engineered by the richest person in the world, might just hasten it.
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