- Via Reuters: Senior U.S. prosecutor resigns, citing demands to open probe into Biden-era contract.
- Via Reuters: Exclusive: FDA staff reviewing Musk’s Neuralink were included in DOGE employee firings, sources say.
- Via Politico: Ukraine balks at signing Trump deal to hand over its mineral wealth.
- Via Wired: No, 150-Year-Olds Aren’t Collecting Social Security Benefits.
- Via Axios: Musk is not a DOGE employee and “has no actual or formal authority,” WH says. Nonetheless, he is a special advisor to Trump and is clearly being given wide latitude to act. (To me the headline and the contents of the piece are kind of at odds with one another).
- Quite a bit more context and explanation from emptywheel: Why Elon Musk Can’t Run DOGE [sic] Anymore. Kudos for the sic.
- Even more from Politico: Who’s in charge of DOGE? Not Elon Musk, White House says.
That explanation, provided to a federal court by Joshua Fisher, the director of the White House’s Office of Administration, seems to directly contradict the way President Donald Trump and Musk have spoken publicly about the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, widely seen as a Musk-driven project to shrink and dismantle key aspects of the federal government.
The sworn statement instead deepens the questions surrounding DOGE. Fisher confirmed that Musk is not the official administrator of the office, which was established by Trump as an office in the Executive Office of the President. But Fisher did not indicate who the administrator actually is.
The technical designation does not mean Musk is not, for all practical purposes, the key decision-maker for DOGE, which has been staffed full of his allies and may still ultimately be fueled by his influence in the White House. Musk has eagerly touted DOGE’s work, described his influence over its operations and appeared alongside Trump to talk about its mission.
Trump himself has credited Musk with leading DOGE.
- Via Politico: GOP flinches at Musk cuts. Cool. Cool cool. But how about more than “warnings” and private expressions of concern?
- Amanda Marcotte in Salon: “Hitler actually had some decent points”: Musk’s covert coup is guided by internet trolls. The piece really does a good job of running down the degree to which Musk is very much driven by meme and Twitter-based cheerleaders. And she makes a great point about the youth angle:
Their youth is alarming not because they lack experience — which will thankfully make it harder for them to figure out how to execute Musk’s supervillain-style plans — but because of what it suggests about Musk’s strategy. Young people tend to be more naive and are probably starstruck by their celebrity boss. Such people are easier to lure into committing direct crimes, so they incur legal liability instead of Musk. It’s easy to see how young men, drunk on memeified far-right politics and the cloak-and-dagger excitement of hacking into government offices, might not see how they’re taking serious risks with their futures by playing illegal games.
