"what digby sez..."
Month: February 2025
Turning the White House into a chop shop
Anand Giridharadas’s The Ink this morning announces:
Musk’s hostile takeover
It’s hard to know just how destructive this will be in the long run, but for now, this is arguably the most troubling development in a day of extremely troubling developments. Elon Musk appears to be trying to do to the federal government what he did at Twitter/X: massively disrupt its functioning and drive out experienced employees not on board with his transformations and his personality cult. [Tusk]
Musk bought his way into the White House complex and now means to, as they say, “have his way” with the federal government.
If you haven’t heard, Musk locked Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) civil servants “out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees” (Reuters):
The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department’s data systems.
The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.
“We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems,” one of the officials said. “That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”
As Digby noted, some of Musk’s aides are barely out of high school. Here’s where we are:
OPM has sent out memos that eschew the normal dry wording of government missives as it encourages civil servants to consider buyout offers to quit and take a vacation to a “dream destination.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove has ordered a massive purge of FBI agents beginning with “at least eight senior FBI executives” and extending it seemingly to anyone and everyone associated with investigations into Trump’s “very special” Jan. 6 insurrectionists and with Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s election plot and stolen classified documents:
“I do not believe the current leadership of the Justice Department can trust these FBI employees to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully,” Bove wrote.
Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll wrote in an email that his orders include reviewing “thousands of employees across the country who have supported these investigative efforts.”
As news of possible firings spread Friday, bureau employees traded information and some sought legal advice.
One person who works at the FBI’s Washington Field Office relayed to a colleague that supervisors had told agents to prepare for the White House to publicly release the names of the agents who worked on the two Trump criminal cases on Monday, and that those agents would to be terminated that same day.
Rachel Maddow noted that the public release of the names of FBI employees who would no longer be agents as of Monday was a signal to MAGA minions and just-released Jan. 6 criminals to “have at ’em.” And since the Jan. 6 investigation was the largest in bureau history, virtually all agents touched it in some way. They too have targets on their backs (NBC News):
In a separate memo to the FBI workforce sent out Friday night, the bureau’s acting director, Brian J. Driscoll, Jr., informed employees that acting Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, had asked for a list of all FBI employees who worked on January 6 cases for “a review process to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”
“We understand that this request encompasses thousands of employees across the country who have supported these investigative efforts,” Driscoll wrote. “I am one of those employees.”
It was not immediately clear why the FBI and DOJ officials had been ousted. The FBI and DOJ declined to comment.
Trump is not only taking retribution against anyone who particpated in investigating his past crimes, but defenestrating federal law enforcement so that no investigations of his current and future criminal activities are even possible. The Roberts court has already preemptively shielded him from that.
Trump now gets to do the one thing many Americans know him for more than anything else: say “You’re fired!” “It’s our dream to have everybody almost working in the private sector,” Trump told reporters on Friday.
That’s been the Midas cult dream for decades. Any product or service provided by We the People on a not-for-profit basis is a crime against capitalism that has to be stopped. Middle men must take their percentage. Or else.
Here he is complaining about people in government working remotely not doing their jobs:
“You don’t know what they’re doing. And then at some point, we may ask them to certify that they didn’t have two jobs. Meaning, were they really getting a check from us, the government, and then were they also working a second job and a third job on government time?”
So says a government employee actively lining his pockets with money from “individuals, companies and foreign governments that want to curry favor with the president.”
Trump and the techbro oligarchy are here, active, and bent on turning the White House into a chop shop.
Friends have asked what people this rich want with the government.
Answer: They want it all.
Cartoonist First Dog on the Moon asks if China’s hyped Deepseek AI might save us “from the smug tech broligarchy.”
Answer: “Only a mass global insurrection against the dictatorship of capital will do that – in fact DeepSeek make it cheaper and easier to put AI in everything, but at least we got to laugh at some of the worst people in the world briefly.”
Solved another problem quickly and easily
Donald Trump is the smartest little boy in the room anywhere he goes. He knows everything about everything. He has a very big brain and great genes, the best genes. He’ll gladly tell you.
He’s also the Seven Deadly Sins on two legs. He’s susceptible to acting on information from the last person he spoke with, and prone to hearing a factoid and building a fantastical narrative around it that he himself believes. Like his riffs about sweeping the forests to prevent wildfires. Or his bit about the big shutoff valve somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. See, fire hydrants ran dry fighting the Pacific Palisades fire because some government idiots up there were dumping perfectly good water into the ocean.
In fact, some Los Angeles hydrants went dry during the January fires because of extreme short-term demand, not because of lack of supply. The state’s “reservoirs are at or near historic levels,” Politico reports. But don’t confuse Trump with facts.
The boy genius now giving orders in the White House directed federal dams in California on Thursday to dump water stored for irrigation so he could have his photo op.
A news site covering water supplies in the San Joaquin Valley reports that “in response to President Trump’s Jan. 24 executive order mandating that federal officials exert all efforts to get more water to fight southern California wildfires,” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at Kaweah and Success lakes began discharging water from the dams.
“Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory!” tweeted the boy genius. “I only wish they listened to me six years ago – There would have been no fire!”
Mad King Donald
One teensy little problem, Donny. The water can’t get to Los Angeles from the lakes southeast of Fresno, and local water managers in the valley are trying to capture the additional flows in recharge basins anyway (SJV Water, Jan. 31):
Tulare County water managers were perplexed and frustrated, noting both physical and legal barriers that make it virtually impossible for Tulare County river water to be used for southern California fires.
First, it would have to be pumped at great expense across the San Joaquin Valley to get to the California Aqueduct and then travel hundreds of miles south.
Second, this isn’t “loose” water free for the taking.
“Every drop belongs to someone,” said Kaweah River Watermaster Victor Hernandez. “The reservoir may belong to the federal government, but the water is ours. If someone’s playing political games with this water, it’s wrong.”
Not to mention that Trump’s actions sent locals scrambling to relocate equipment and warn farmers about possible flooding: , (SJV Water, Jan. 30):
Water managers said they got about an hour’s warning from the Army Corp’s Sacramento office to expect the Tule and Kaweah rivers to be at “channel capacity” by Thursday night.
Channel capacity means the maximum amount of water a river can handle. For the Kaweah, that’s 5,500 cubic feet per second and for the Tule, it’s 3,500 cfs.
Those levels were last seen, and surpassed, during the 2023 floods, which destroyed dozens of homes and businesses and caused significant damage to infrastructure.
People who actually do know something about water management in the region were not as happy as Trump boasted about his order (SJV Water, Jan. 31):
“A decision to take summer water from local farmers and dump it out of these reservoirs shows a complete lack of understanding of how the system works and sets a very dangerous precedent,” said Dan Vink, a longtime Tulare County water manager and principal partner at Six-33 Solutions, a water and natural resource firm in Visalia.
“This decision was clearly made by someone with no understanding of the system or the impacts that come from knee-jerk political actions.”
That person is Donald Trump, boy genius.
Responding to Trump’s Oval Office comments on Friday afternoon and not to this water nuttiness, Aaron Rupar commented:
Now. What are we going to do about it?
