Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

At least one of them is:

At the press conference outside of USAID headquarters, Senator Brian Schatz:

"If you want to change an agency, introduce a bill and pass a law. You cannot wave away an agency that you don't like or that you disagree with by executive order, or by literally storming into the… pic.twitter.com/st0kaEmibI

— Art Candee 🍿🥤 (@ArtCandee) February 3, 2025

At the press conference outside of USAID headquarters, Senator Brian Schatz:

“If you want to change an agency, introduce a bill and pass a law. You cannot wave away an agency that you don’t like or that you disagree with by executive order, or by literally storming into the building and taking over the servers. That is not how the American system of government works.”

The WSJ reports:

Sen. Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii) said he would place a “blanket hold” on all of President Trump’s State Department nominees until the administration’s attack on the leading U.S. foreign-assistance agency ends, a move that threatens to stall Trump’s ability to get his foreign-policy team in place.

Schatz’s threat came as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency aims to close the U.S. Agency for International Development; the agency’s existence as an independent government organization is codified in federal law. Over the weekend, DOGE staffers forced their way into USAID’s headquarters in Washington, gaining access to classified information and closing the building to employees on Monday.

The Senate typically speeds up the confirmation of many nominees through “unanimous consent,” a process that bypasses a formal vote if no senator objects. By objecting, Schatz’s hold would halt the Senate’s ability to move nominees quickly, requiring Senate Majority Leader John Thune to use precious floor time to advance the president’s picks through the confirmation process.

“I will oppose unanimous consent,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “I will vote no. I will do maximal delays until this is resolved.”

Speaker Jeffries seems to have come up with a plan as well:

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries issued a key demand Monday as a March 14 government funding deadline approaches, saying President Donald Trump’s recent federal spending freeze “must be choked off” as part of any bipartisan deal to keep the government open, “if not sooner.

The ultimatum, detailed in a letter to House Democrats, is a signal that Jeffries will use Democrats’ leverage in the narrowly divided House to push back on the Trump administration. Historically, Republicans have found it difficult to stick together on government funding bills, with the Senate filibuster giving Democrats additional clout.

[…]

House Democrats also plan to introduce legislation blocking “unlawful access” to the Treasury Department payment system that billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk and his allies recently gained access to as part of their “Department of Government Efficiency” initiative.

The caucus’ messaging arm is also set to highlight GOP policies that would increase the cost of living including the sweeping tariffs rolled out by the Trump administration over the weekend.

In other efforts, Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) is planning a caucus meeting with outside experts on how to “enhanc[e] our ability to unpack and expose a recently uncovered Republican scheme to Rip Off the American taxpayer,” while the No. 3 Democrat, Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), is set to convene House Democrats’ immigration working group as the party searches for a response to GOP-led crackdown on migrants and the border.

Jeffries also urged Democrats to hold outreach in their districts today or this week to “discuss the challenges we are decisively addressing on their behalf.” He said that he will be holding a telephone town hall later Monday and will be tracking caucus participation.

Better late than never.

Honestly, they need to just stand together on the budget and debt ceiling and demand that Elon Musk be banned. Period. That would go a long way to alleviating one of the gravest dangers this nation faces. It’s truly a matter of national security.

A man Ben Smith from Semafor calls a “MAGA Intellectual” (a contradiction in terms) has been tapped for Assisstant Secretary of State:

Beattie has been a vocal critic of broad swathes of American foreign policy and represents a dramatic step away from the establishment Republicanism Rubio long embodied:  In a widely-circulated essay on the site he founded, Revolver, Darren Beattie compared the “color revolutions” that Western democracies backed in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and 2000s to “the coordinated efforts of government bureaucrats, NGOs, and the media to oust President Trump.”

Beattie, who has a PhD in political theory from Duke University, where he also taught, was fired in 2018 after attending a conference with white nationalists. He was appointed by Trump in 2020 to a the Commission for the Preservation of American Heritage Abroad, a move that the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, called “outrageous” at the time. (Greenblatt declined to comment Sunday.) The commission works with other governments to preserve sites related to World War II and the Holocaust.

Beattie’s appointment will send another signal that the new administration is rooting itself deeply in the new right.

Ben Smith writes:

“Darren personifies the America First Right — smart, tough, relentless — with a ‘take no prisoners’ attitude. He made Revolver a major player in the frontal attack on the Deep State,” the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said in a text message. “As important as his agency will be in the building at ‘Foggy Bottom’ , the symbolism of his hire by POTUS screams: ‘We Don’t Give 2 F****x’ for convention.’” The media figure Tucker Carlson called Beattie “decent and genuinely smart” in a text message.

The move offers a glimpse, however, at how Rubio is staffing his department to reassure the MAGA faithful that he’s with the program. Rubio’s director of policy planning is another MAGA intellectual, Michael Anton, whose essay, ”The Flight 93 Election″ made the case for electing Trump in 2016 at any cost.

The so-called “intellectual” Rubio has hired is responsible for this:

Every time I see a post about Beattie, I'm also going to note that he was also the engine for the bullshit claims about federal agents at the Capitol riot, esp. Ray Epps.

— Philip Bump (@pbump.com) 2025-02-03T15:07:50.283Z

He’s nothing more than a Big Lie, white supremacist troll.

Back in 2009, Mitch McConnell led his minority Senate Republicans to obstruct the Democrats at every turn. At the time, the Democrats had a filibuster proof majority but the Republicans (and a few helpful Vicy Dems) managed to drag out the negotiations for months and made it as painful as possible.

A former staffer posted this on Blue Sky yesterday:

Maybe someone should send it to the Democratic Caucus. It might give them some ideas.

Speaking of Mitch, he was on 60 Minutes last night and it was interesting:

I thought this was particularly good:

Stahl: “You said he [Trump] is nasty, not very smart, a sleazeball”
Mitch McConnell: “Those were private comments”
Stahl: “But they’re in your biography.”
McConnell: “Yeah”

But you voted for him Mitch.

McConnell: “[Tariffs] will drive the cost of everything up. In other words, it will be paid for by American consumers. I mean, why would you want to get in a fight with your allies over this?” asks Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Did you not hear him when he promised to do this during the campaign?

Watch the whole thing if you have time. I guess he knows he’s short time and doesn’t believe he has anything to lose. His biographer says that the Court he put in place that saved Trump’s bacon ended up being the greatest stain on his legacy but he deserves to be pilloried for centuries for what he did to the judicial system. They don’t call him the gravedigger of democracy for nothing. Look where we are. At least he is forced to look at his handiwork.

During the last election economics were on everyone’s minds. Despite the greater economy being healthy with an extraordinary job market not seen since the 1960s, people told pollsters that they were extremely upset about the high cost of living that had been brought on by the disruption of the pandemic and took a couple of years to finally sort out. In poll after poll, Americans said that inflation was the biggest problem facing the nation.

When asked what he planned to do about this, then candidate Donald Trump’s only answers were “tariffs!” and ” growth.” It was the cure all for every economic pain that ailed you. Here he is answering a question about what specific legislation he would propose to deal with the high cost of child care. Yes, you guessed it. Tariffs.

He promised over and over again that he was going to lower the cost of living and he made it clear that the way he planned to do it was with his beloved tariffs.

Well, we’re about to find out how that’s going to work. Over the weekend, Trump followed through on his threats to impose 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada and 10% on China, ostensibly because of immigration and fentanyl coming over the borders which is ridiculous. There’s no need to discuss Trump’s obsession with immigration except to say that Mexico has been cooperating fully with US demands and there simply is not a problem with illegal immigration at the Canadian border except maybe from Americans trying desperately to escape Trump’s dystopia.

As for fentanyl, Trump claims that 200,000 people have died from fentanyl this year (I assume he really meant last year. ) But that’s wrong too. Fentanyl overdoses were down 21% last year and in total didn’t even come to half that number. Obviously, all overdose deaths are a tragedy but how Trump thinks hitting Mexico and Canada with tariffs is supposed to solve America’s drug problem is a mystery. Of course, in his mind they are instruments of magical power so perhaps he can make them work.

Canada responded immediately to the announcement with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivering what may be remembered as his finest speech just as he is leaving office. It made me, and I would imagine, plenty of other Americans feel a deep sense of shame at what our president is doing to our closest allies:

“We have fought and died alongside you… during your darkest hours … we were always there standing with you …grieving with you the American people.”

One might have understood Trump aiming tariffs at China, which is the United States’ greatest economic adversary, but then his co-president Elon Musk has important business there so perhaps that wouldn’t be prudent. But these demands on Canada and Mexico are incredibly vague and impossible for either country to actually accede to, raising the question of what he’s really after with these draconian hits on two of America’s closest allies and trading partners.

Economist Paul Krugman wondered the same thing and hypothesized that it’s “essentially a dominance display. And the many people pointing out that it’s a terrible idea probably only reinforced his determination to show that he’s in charge and smarter than anyone else.” That sounds right, especially when you hear his recent rhetoric around America’s relationship with the world.

While signing the Laken Riley Act Trump rambled on about his recent confrontation with Colombia over the treatment of migrants being returned to their country. He said, “we may have tough talk from others, but it’s not going to mean anything. They’re going to all take them back and they’re going to like it too. They’re going to like it.” It’s like he’s speaking in old movie dialog these days.

The other day when he virtually attended the World Economic Forum he said “one thing we’re going to be demanding is we’re going to — be demanding respect from other nations.” In the next breath came this, so we know what he was thinking of in his stream of consciousness “weave”:

Canada.  We have a tremendous deficit with Canada.  We’re not going to have that anymore.  We can’t do it.  It’s — it’s — I don’t know if it’s good for them.  As you probably know, I say, “You can always become a state, and if you’re a state, we won’t have a deficit.  We won’t have to tariff you, et cetera, et cetera.” 

I think everyone has assumed that he is just trolling his younger, handsomer nemesis Trudeau with this endless talk about Canada becoming the 51st state but at this point you have to wonder. His recent obsession with territorial expansionism and all the talk of buying (or seizing if necessary) Greenland and taking back the Panama Canal it seems that he has truly absorbed the idea that the United States should be growing its territory. His threats to Canada have become even more unhinged in recent days, suggesting that the US plans to choke its economy into subservience:

It’s nonsense, of course. The trade deficit with Canada is minor and it is not a subsidy. He’s very confused about all of this. But it seems more and more obvious that he’s seriously entertaining fantasies of being some sort of world conqueror. If it’s a negotiating tactic it’s a mighty weird one.

We’ll soon see if he really means to carry out this inane tariff plan. The markets may react badly which has, in the past, served as a moderating influence on him at least in the short term. (The Wall St. Journal called his plan “the dumbest trade war in history.” )

He told reporters that he will be holding a call today with Mexico and Canada so maybe they can head this off before chaos reigns. If he’s been watching Fox News he may have detected a little bit of a problem:

"It seems like virtually every sector of the American economy" — Fox News has put together a scrolling list of the "goods affected by Trump tariffs" 😬 pic.twitter.com/nofdk3IrEZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 2, 2025

Throughout the campaign Trump never admitted that his tariffs would cause prices to go up. He evaded it at every turn, saying that energy costs were the only cause of inflation and he was going to “drill, baby, drill.” He now admits that it may very well happen but says “it will be worth the price that must be paid.” Paid by average Americans, not him of course. And possibly some of his erstwhile supporters in the business community who really didn’t think he’d be dumb enough to kill the golden goose.

This is a person suffering from severe grandiose delusions and they’re getting worse. But I’m afraid this is just the tip of the iceberg. His co-president Elon Musk is suffering from the same malady and they’ve banded together to take America and the rest of the world on their wild, psychotic ride-along. Fasten your seatbelts.

Here we go

JV Last at the Bulwark provides a handy guide to what’s happening this morning in the financial markets. The question is will the drop stay below 7 percent? The Dow plunged over 600 points right out of the gate.

Donald Trump just launched the “dumbest trade war in history.” Thus saith the Wall Street Journal. While people are screaming for more affordable housing, Trump dramatically increased the price of lumber out of Canada just ahead of the spring building season.

That’s on top of the “five-alarm fire” Trump started in firing inspectors general and FBI agensts from coast to coast. Oh, and Mr. America First allowing Elon Musk to shut down USAID:

In Washington, USAID’s headquarters was closed for the day, with employees told in an email to remain at home.

Logos and photos of its aid work have been stripped from building walls. And its website and social media accounts have gone dark, replaced with a reduced version of its webpage on the State Department’s website.

There is security information in USAID files now in the hands of Musk’s junior firestarters between the ages of 19 and 24 (Wired):

On Sunday, CNN reported that DOGE personnel attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems at the US Agency for International Development and that top USAID security officials who thwarted the attempt were subsequently put on leave. The Associated Press reported that DOGE personnel had indeed accessed classified material.

“What we’re seeing is unprecedented in that you have these actors who are not really public officials gaining access to the most sensitive data in government,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “We really have very little eyes on what’s going on. Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what’s happening because these aren’t really accountable public officials. So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.”

Don’t be intimidated into inaction

Washington Post:

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) wrote on X on Friday that any move to dissolve USAID would be illegal. In a joint letter Friday, Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Reps. Gregory W. Meeks (D-New York) and Lois Frankel (D-Florida) wrote that the freeze jeopardized energy assistance for Ukraine and helped American adversaries like Russia and China.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced an exemption for “life-saving” programs like PEPFAR, but aid officials said other projects remain in limbo and are at risk of shuttering if the funding freeze continues, The Post reported Saturday.

That day, USAID’s website was taken down.

Listen. If there’s no pushback, they will keep going.

Here’s a recommendation worth pursuing. Let your members of Congress know what you think of Musk closing USAID and handing security information to, in one case at least, a kid just out of high school.

UPDATE: I just hit up both my senators both by social media and Tillis by e-fax. Go and do likewise.

When the snake oil bites….

Trump is counting on you to be one of his rubes. Fans of Trumpism, even its operators, are going to feel its impacts very, very soon. Oh, and all y’all as well.

Wow, that was fast. Irving Energy, company that provides propane/fuel oil customers in New England, says it will pass on the full 10% tariff cost to all their customers immediately(reposting with fixed figure – meant to say 10%, not 30%)

— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) 2025-02-03T01:48:15.805Z

The snake behind the oil is about to bite.

Yale Budget Lab estimates that tariffs will cost average US household $1,000-$1,200 in lost purchasing power budgetlab.yale.edu/sites/defaul…

— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) 2025-02-03T02:13:55.718Z

CNN:

Just about everyone thought it was a bluff. Top analysts from the biggest banks on Wall Street said it was highly unlikely. Stocks were trading like it wouldn’t happen. Some companies built contingency plans, but they weren’t exactly rushing to make changes.

But the tariffs are coming — in full force. President Donald Trump announced Saturday that a massive 25% tariff on all goods from Mexico and most imports from Canada will go into effect Tuesday. An additional 10% tariff on Chinese goods will be enacted the same day.

Trump in a message posted on Truth Social Sunday said, “We don’t need anything they have. We have unlimited Energy, should make our own Cars, and have more Lumber than we can ever use.” But America’s supply chains are reliant on its trading partners, and even for goods that could be grown or produced exclusively in the United States, the complex web of interconnected global trade cannot easily be unwound.

So the additional costs on foreign-made goods will be paid by American importers, who typically pass those costs onto retailers, who pass them onto inflation-weary consumers. That means prices will rise — although, for most items, not immediately. Businesses’ profits will be squeezed as they bear the cost burden of the tariffs or pay to adjust their carefully constructed and at times inflexible supply chains.

That’s why stocks on Monday were set to tumble. Dow futures were more than 600 points, or 1.3% lower. S&P 500 futures sank 1.5% and Nasdaq futures were 1.7% lower.

What a ride, huh?

Brace for it. Trumpism is going to wear thin in 3, 2, 1.

Bitcoin getting absolutely destroyed.

— George Pearkes (@peark.es) 2025-02-03T01:55:06.316Z

Now then, the first principle of opposing Trump 2.0 is, as Anat Shenker-Osorio might say, “Don’t Buy It.”

The smallness of Trump’s soul

Ezra Klein adds a corollary to Timothy Snyder’s “Do not obey in advance.” To wit, “Don’t believe him.”

In that famous Glengarry Glen Ross scene, Alec Baldwin berates his salesmen with the ABCs: Always Be Closing. That’s Donald Trump. He’s always marketing. Don’t be snowed by the bullshit, Klein suggests. It’s more marketing than reality. What he says he’s doing and what he can actually do are two different things. That is, unless you buy in (gift link):

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

Like the wizard in Oz, Trump’s power lies in convincing you with a sound-and-light show that he is all-powerful. It’s an illusion. It obscures the reality that, as with his tariffs declaration, Trump “keeps stepping on rakes.”

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

Trump and his accomplices will defy the courts and break the laws only so long as the public lets them. We’ll see how many are cowed into submission once the market opens today at 9:30 a.m.

Meantime, like the prophets of Baal, powerless franchisees like Mike Flynn perform their Trumpy medicine shows on their god’s behalf. They cry aloud and cut themselves until bloody (1 Kings 18) to no effect. It’s a show. Loud and wild-eyed, but only that.

Smells like Team Dispirit.

He said he would do it but they didn’t believe him

I wonder how many people feel this way:

EL PASO — On a recent windy, cold afternoon in this border city, dozens of people gathered at a park for an immigrant rights demonstration to denounce the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Some held signs reading: “Immigrants Make America Great.”

Alan, a local police officer, and his wife came and held a Mexican flag. He said he joined the demonstration because he worries about his father, an undocumented immigrant who works at a farm in southern New Mexico.

Alan said he voted for Donald Trump because of worries about the economy and because he believes Trump is pro-police and would combat the public’s negative perception of law enforcement. He said he believed Trump’s promises to make everyday items affordable for middle-class families.

But after two weeks of Trump in the White House, Alan — who declined to give his last name because he fears retaliation against his father — said he now regrets his vote. Partly because he was angered when Trump granted clemency to people involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

I am trying to dredge up some empathy for these folks and hopefully I’ll be able to eventually. These folks do seem like sad sacks who are more to be pitied than censured. But considering the carnage we are currently experiencing, with the worst yet to come, I’m not there yet. Trump didn’t try to hide it. His voters just didn’t believe anything he said.

All they knew was that he wasn’t Biden or Harris, who they irrationally hated, and that Trump promised to make America 2019 again (as if that was some kind of utopia.) They didn’t think he meant any of the bad stuff. But that’s the only stuff he actually meant.

I’m sorry this is the guy de facto running the us government paycheck system

— Sky Marchini (@sky.skymarchini.net) 2025-02-02T20:19:21.407Z

Is this what MAGA voted for?

Elon Musk’s takeover of federal government infrastructure is ongoing, and at the center of things is a coterie of engineers who are barely out of—and in at least one case, purportedly still in—college. Most have connections to Musk and at least two have connections to Musk’s longtime associate Peter Thiel, a cofounder and chairman of the analytics firm and government contractor Palantir who has long expressed opposition to democracy.

WIRED has identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, according to public databases, their online presences, and other records—who have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, tasked by executive order with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The engineers all hold nebulous job titles within DOGE, and at least one appears to be working as a volunteer.

Wired has now reported the names and backgrounds of all these young fellows. One has recently graduated from high school, three more were interns at X and SpaceX and another worked for an AI firm and wrote a Substack extolling the virtues of Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth. One of them was a senior at Harvard as of last September and has his own AI startup.

These are the people who’ve been given access to classified materials, social security numbers, health records and banking information of American citizens, businesses and charities with an apparent mandate to decide which ones are waste and fraud.

They have no security clearances or any other kind of vetting. If you think they’re not a risk, I would just remind everyone of this young man:

An Air National Guard member has pleaded guilty to posting dozens of classified documents online in one of highest-profile intelligence leaks in recent years.

Prosecutors recommend that Jack Teixeira, 22, be sentenced to up to 16 years and eight months in prison.

While working at an Air National Guard base, he posted documents to Discord, a platform popular with gamers.

The material included maps, satellite images and intelligence on US allies.

Do Musk’s young acolytes have better judgement? I hope so. But let’s just say that giving them keys to the US Treasury and all that information is very poor judgement on Musk’s part. But then again, he has a major case of arrested development himself. Look at this insane comment:

Did you know that USAID, using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people? https://t.co/YVwyKA7ifs

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 2, 2025

This is an excerpt of a piece by legal expert Sam Bagenstos laying out a few of the illegal acts committed by Trump and Musk in the past two weeks. I thought it might be helpful if you’re trying to wrap your mind around all of it or trying to convey to someone who hasn’t been paying attention just how monumental this assault actually is:

There’s an incredible brazenness to the speed and scope at which Trump–and Elon Musk, who in many ways looks like his de facto head of government–is breaking law after law in the interest of bending the bureaucracy to their will.  Here are just a few of the more salient examples:

• Mass suspensions and projected firings of career civil servants whose work touched diversity or equity initiatives;
• Mass suspensions and projected firings of career civil servants whose work involves foreign aid.
• Retaliatory firings of career civil servants involved in investigations or prosecutions of Trump and the January Sixth insurrectionists, with the threat of mass firings to come.
• Mass firings of Inspectors General without following the statutory process of providing Congress 30 days’ notice and specific reasons for the firings.
• Impoundments of federal funds–that is, refusing to carry out the law that requires the President to spend money Congress appropriates–on a scale orders of magnitude greater than we’ve ever seen.
  • Trump’s OMB tried to accomplish this impoundment with an incredibly broad and poorly drafted memo, which led to chaos across the government as payments were suspended for Medicaid and other programs on which people, community organizations, and businesses across the country rely.  The Administration withdrew the memo the next day, but it made clear that the underlying “spending freeze” remained in place.  And now two courts have enjoined the Administration from carrying it out.
  • But various of Trump’s Executive Orders themselves seem to require agencies to stop spending appropriated funds.  And agencies seem to be continuing to carry out those impoundments.
• And perhaps the biggest legal and administrative issue of all: Musk’s successful efforts for his team to take control of the federal government’s system for issuing payments–for writing checks to individual persons and entities.  This action threatens cybersecurity and privacy in a variety of very significant ways.  And it also creates the prospect of yet more illegal impoundments of federal funds.  Indeed, Musk’s statements over the weekend (that he’s optimistic he’s found $4 billion a day in savings, that his team is “rapidly shutting down” payments to Lutheran Family Services to provide services to migrant children, and freezing money to refugee-aid organizations generally, etc.) suggest that he’s going to use his control over the system simply to turn off payments to those organizations and programs that he (and perhaps Trump) believes shouldn’t be funded.  That’s as much of a violation of Congress’s power of the purse as was OMB’s ham-handed memo, but it’s more insidious because it may fly below the radar.

If you’re wondering what the plan behind all this is, he has the right analysis:

It seems obvious that Trump and Musk are running the basic play we’ve seen before from Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires–move fast, break things (with “things” very much including the law), and then dare folks to try and do something about it.  Their expectation is that people will be too overwhelmed, and the law will move too slowly, to stop them from doing what they’re doing.  Maybe at some later point some lawsuit will provide somebody some relief.  But Trump and Musk will fight those challenges at every step through whatever means necessary, many challenges will fail for odd legal reasons, and other challengers will get exhausted by the process.  To the extent they ultimately lose some lawsuit, I expect that Trump and Musk think it won’t reverse what they’re doing; it will just represent a reasonable cost of doing business.

Yes, this is the “break things” ethos of silicon valley where neurotic nerds believe they are geniuses with the capability of running the world and the best way to do that is to destroy it and start from scratch. And they believe no one can stop them. Maybe they’re right.

Bagenstos doesn’t have any answers about how this will end up. He pretty much acknowledges that the illegality of all this may be beside the point but thinks it’s important to point out for its own sake.

I guess we can hope that Musk and Trump have a falling out and Musk is forced to pull all of his flunkies out of the agencies once it becomes clear that it’s causing massive upheaval but I don’t honestly think Trump cares about any of it anymore. He’s just bent on revenge and making money and the more people hurt the better he feels. The law is so slow and cumbersome, Musk will have the country wrecked before they even get to the hearings. And the Congress is well … fuggedaboudit. They can’t even protect their own prerogatives much less the health and livelihoods of Americans.

Hopefully, the Democrats will start blocking unanimous consent. It’s literally the least they can do. But I hope they have something else up their sleeves because otherwise the already demoralized Democratic base which can barely pay attention are going to drop out altogether. Leadership is required.

Are they in the tank with Musk too? If so, we are in even bigger trouble than we knew.

I wonder if all federal agencies will be required to communicate with the public through Elon Musk’s private company from now on? Sounds pretty illegal but what do I know? Someone should find out.