NEW: Sources tell my office that Treasury Secretary Bessent has granted DOGE *full* access to this system. Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk's own companies. All of it.
As Josh Marshall said in this earlier post, this is almost certainly illegal and there needs to be immediate legal action to stop it. We have no idea who these people are, whether they are competent or if they have nefarious goals. It’s literally just Musk’s boys taking over the very closely held US payment system. It could not be more dangerous.
I wonder if Republicans are really a-ok with this. Do they all think Musk is a genius godhead who can be trusted? Or are they just cowards who are so afraid of losing their seats that they won’t question Dear Leader and his henchmen? Let’s just say I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for them to take a stand.
We now know that Trump’s order to the military to “turn on the valve” and give southern California all the water it could ever need resulted in the Army Corps of Engineers releasing a bunch of water into a flood plain without notice almost causing a catastrophe. Oh, and the water would not have flowed to Southern California in any case. The whole thing is insane but apparently we have the military carrying out insane orders that they must know make no sense which is extremely troubling.
And now we have Musk lying like Trump to his millions of followers about this ridiculous stunt.
The LA Times article is a bullshit snowjob by the way. But even with that the truth can gleaned if you read the whole thing.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has dramatically increased the amount of water flowing from two dams in Tulare County, sending massive flows down river channels toward farmlands in the San Joaquin Valley.
Federal records show that water releases from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success jumped early Friday morning.
The sudden increase occurred four days after President Trump said on social media that the U.S. military had “entered” California and “TURNED ON THE WATER.” Trump also vowed during a visit to Los Angeles last week to “open up the valves and pumps” in California to deliver more water.
Deliver it to where???
Responding to questions about the reasons for the sudden increase in water flow, Gene Pawlik, a spokesperson at the Corps’ headquarters in Washington, said in an email that the action was “consistent with the direction” in Trump’s recent executive order to enact “emergency measures to provide water resources” in California.
Pawlik said the Army Corps was releasing water from the dams “to ensure California has water available to respond to the wildfires.” It was not immediately clear how or where the federal government intends to transport the water.
That spokesperson is either a liar or he’s stupid. There was no way that water had anything to do with wildfires. And anyway, LA had water, that wasn’t the problem. I’m going to lose my mind with this bs.
Trump, meanwhile, shared a photo on X of water pouring from a dam, saying: “Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California.”
“Today, 1.6 billion gallons and, in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion gallons. Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory!,” Trump wrote. “I only wish they listened to me six years ago — There would have been no fire!”
The president has sought to link local water supply problems during the L.A. County firestorms, such as fire hydrants that ran dry, with his calls for changing water management elsewhere in the state. But state officials and water experts have called the comments inaccurate: Regional reservoirs in Southern California are at record-high levels, and more water from Northern California would not have affected the fire response.
No, his comments are delusional and insane and this is sane-washing.
Way down the in the article, you read that this was likely a result of Trump’s direct order and that they didn’t bother to coordinate with local officials which meant they could have endangered the lives of homeless people who live along the riverbanks and ruined expensive farm equipment that farmers didn’t have time to move. I’m sure Trump and his henchmen care nothing for the homeless, but their voters in the central valley might have been a little miffed at losing their expensive equipment. But whatever.
They add that this is sometimes done to help irrigate farms, but it isn’t the season for that so there was no benefit to anyone, not even Trump’s thirsty farmers.
Peter Gleick, a water scientist and senior fellow at the Pacific Institute, said dam managers would typically only release large quantities of water in the winter when major storms create a need to make space for large inflows of runoff. But Southern California has been very dry and the snowpack in the southern Sierra remains far below average, so “there is no indication that that’s why these releases occurred.”…
“I don’t know where this water is going, but this is the wrong time of year to be releasing water from these reservoirs. It’s vitally important that we fill our reservoirs in the rainy season so water is available for farms and cities later in the summer,” Gleick said. “I think it’s very strange and it’s disturbing that, after decades of careful local, state and federal coordination, some federal agencies are starting to unilaterally manipulate California’s water supply.”
Trump’s in charge of California’s water supply now and I guess we’ll just have to live with the gargantuan fuck-up it’s inevitably going to cause.
But at least we now know that we won’t have any more fires because he says he’s fixed them. Promises made, promises kept.
I wish every Democrats in the country would read this from Josh Marshall. I’m going to post it all because I really want you to read it and I hope Josh doesn’t mind. (Please do subscribe to his site if you can. It’s consistently great.)
Over the course of the last two weeks, I’ve tried to drive home the point that the Democrats in Congress mostly can’t do anything to stop what the Trump administration is doing. That’s not a matter of weakness or bad strategy. Voters decided in November to put all federal power in the hands of Republicans. That’s done. It already happened. Many of the cries for Democrats to “do something” amount to thinking that if Democrats get energized and forceful enough they can undo the consequences of that election, as though there’s some “off” lever that if you reach really high you can grab ahold of and make all of this stop. You might as well demand Kamala Harris show some gumption and start issuing her own executive orders.
This emphatically does not mean Democrats are doing all they can or that there’s nothing they can do. But it is critical at every level to understand what the menu of actions includes. As much as this might seem pedantic, it’s critical to think very clearly about what an opposition does and what its tools are. Otherwise you’re just getting riled up demanding your fighters run at full speed, head first into the castle wall.
Fundamentally this is a battle over public opinion. And there are three areas of action to engage that battle.
First, Democrats’ job is to make the case every day what a disaster Trump governance is and ask voters whether they’ve decided yet that they’d like to make a change. In a way any opposition must almost exalt it’s powerlessness. We’d love to stop these horrible things for you, voters. But you have to put us in power to do it. Second, there is the critical but highly compromised avenue of court action. It was blue states that brought the lawsuit which just put the budget freeze under a restraining order. Third, there’s the very limited but crucial moments when Democrats, even in the minority, can force the majority to come to them or simply delay or even stymie action. The debt ceiling, as I’ve been saying, is a key one of those moments.
This post is mainly about the point I am about to get to below. But for now, “making the case,” Item #1, really can’t be about press releases or even traditional press conferences. I’ve been watching press releases come in this evening. Those are meaningless. That’s simply not how people communicate today. It involves stunts; it involves making news happen in ways that require knowing how reporters decide what’s a story. Dogs biting men; men biting dogs; dogs and men teaming up to bite someone else. You’ve got to think how media works. It certainly involves actual politicians getting on social media and making cases in their own voices. It requires a lot more creativity than we are currently seeing. But we’ll get to that in subsequent posts.[ See below for a couple of good examples— digby]
In this post I want to focus on what is mostly a legal avenue. We still know much less than we should about who’s actually running this show. There’s mounting evidence that even more than we know is being directed by Elon Musk and his private-sector employees, who are now fanned out across the government. He appears to have taken control of the federal payment system which allows his operatives to stop checks to any private individual in the country and/or examine all their personal financial information. According to The New York Times, Musk has tasked engineers with figuring out how to cut off the flow of funds from the Treasury to programs and priorities he believes conflict with the brief he received from Donald Trump. He has also taken control of some portion of the federal agency computer systems, allowing his operatives to lock federal workers out of key computer systems. We need a lot more reporting on just how he is exerting this power, specifically under what authority and who the people are he’s installed at these government agencies. Some have simply been appointed to new roles the old-fashioned way. But the best information we have about how “DOGE” is working suggests many are employees from his private companies operating with no legal authority at all.
There’s a pretty developed law that you can’t do stuff in the federal government if you’re not an employee of the federal government, or a contractor who is placed under the rules of the federal government. If you do do those things you become a de facto government employee and the law says you come under all sorts of record-keeping and disclosure requirements. Those requirements turn out to be quite important and consequential.
Now to be clear, I don’t expect a federal judge to start smacking Elon Musk around and I don’t expect a sad sack Musk to glumly apologize to the judge and go along his way back to Texas. But in a situation like this, when laws are being broken at such high velocity you’re looking more than anything else to get into court with a live argument. And this is a very live argument. As I noted above, this is fundamentally a battle over public opinion. But critical to a battle over public opinion in an onslaught such as this is slowing things down as much as possible, throwing as much sand in the gears as possible. That stretches out the amount of time people have to get an understanding of what’s happening. It increases their visibility into what’s happening. It also focuses attention, rightly, on Elon Musk who is much more unpopular than Donald Trump.
Getting into court — getting into court on a lot of fronts — is one of the ways you do that. Public opinion only comes into play in a hard fashion at the next election. But as public opinion shifts, if it does, it starts impacting anyone planning on facing voters in the next election. The courts are fundamentally unfriendly to democracy today because they all report up to the Supreme Court. But the point isn’t “courts will save us” malarkey. (In any case, that’s now mainly the mocking phrase of wreckers and sad sacks.) It’s putting sand in the gears, slowing things down as one front in the battle for public opinion.
The legal status of what news orgs are now consistently calling “Musk’s team” is high on the list as one way to do this.
I could not agree more with all of this.
Here are the examples of Democrats doing it well:
This crash happened on Trump’s watch. After he deliberately threw the FAA into chaos by leaving the agency leaderless, firing the safety board, and bullying its employees to quit. The reason he’s casting blame everywhere else is that he knows what he did. pic.twitter.com/MXbrbg20ws
Trump's press conference today, blaming the FAA's hiring of women and black people for the crash – was disgusting. Especially after he just threw the FAA into chaos, ousting the Administrator and the whole FAA safety board.
Kash Patel is maybe Trump’s most dangerous nominee. He wants to the use the FBI to target a political enemies list. Like Trump, he thinks the number one enemy of our nation isn’t China or Russia or rapists or murderers. It’s Democrats. pic.twitter.com/onbmbwhBQM
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.”
A nongovernmental employee and his team are taking over federal government systems.When things start breaking, you know why.
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.
NYT: A photograph provided to The New York Times shows a glimpse of some of the changes underway at the F.B.I., specifically the F.B.I. Academy at Quantico on Wednesday.
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?”
REPORTER: With your efforts to reduce the federal workforce, are there any concerns about protecting the public?
TRUMP: Everybody is replaceable. We want them to go to into the private sector. It's our dream to have everybody almost working in the private sector. pic.twitter.com/aLsLjSlL6w
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.”
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!”
Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California. Today, 1.6 billion gallons and, in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion gallons. Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago – There would have been no fire! pic.twitter.com/Oaz92ZeiTh
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.
This should be 25th amendment level conduct. The president ordered water to be released from a random dam in California nowhere near the wildfires and then claimed it would help. That’s literally Mad King behavior.
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:
i covered the entirety of Trump's first term and things are getting much darker much quicker than they did last time around.
I just want to say for the record that when the history books are written centuries from now, I believe the election of Donald Trump in a free and fair election in 2024 will go down as one of the most senseless and self-destructive own goals in human history
On Sunday, @CaliforniaDFW brought 3 orphaned mountain lion cubs to Oakland Zoo’s vet hospital. The trio, estimated to be about 3 months old, were found in Portola Valley. CDFW believes the mother of these cubs is the same female mountain lion that was killed by a car in the same… pic.twitter.com/D7QWzUjoDY
This past Sunday, January 26th, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and brought three orphaned mountain lion cubs to Oakland Zoo for rehabilitation and care. These rescues mark the 30th mountain lion rescue for the Zoo, with close collaboration with CDFW. Oakland Zoo’s advanced Veterinary Hospital has enabled the Zoo to assist in numerous mountain lion rescue cases for those who were sick, injured, burned, or orphaned. The three mountain lion cubs, now named Fern (female), Thistle (male), and Spruce (male), are currently recovering at the Zoo’s Veterinary Hospital
Mountain lions in California face many threats, including car strikes and wildfires. These factors contribute to human-wildlife conflict, increasing encounters as mountain lions encroach on urban areas and developments.
“As human development has significantly enhanced the wellbeing of our communities, it has simultaneously taken a toll on wildlife and their natural habitats. As we continue to thrive as a species, it is essential for coexistence that we also take action to ensure the survival of others. Now more than ever, we must continually advocate for establishing wildlife corridors, such as the recent overpass in Los Angeles, to maintain the biodiversity of our Golden State,” says Nik Dehejia, CEO of Oakland Zoo.
What happened to their mother?
California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) believes the mother of these three cubs was the same female lion hit by a car on Portola Valley Road about 0.3 miles from where Fern, Thistle, and Spruce were found. While there were many witnesses of the mountain lion after it was hit, the carcass has since disappeared and is still being investigated. As such, CDFW can’t confirm a relationship between the kittens and female lions using DNA.
How long did the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) monitor them, and why did they bring them to Oakland Zoo?
Recently, Portola Valley residents spotted the kittens wandering in the neighborhood, and they were later found hiding under a car. CDFW monitored for any signs of the kittens’ mother over the past two weeks, using trail cameras and reports from local security cameras with the help of the Midpeninsula Open Space District. There have been no confirmed sightings of an adult female searching or calling for her cubs. Due to their disoriented behavior, lack of a mother for two weeks, and proximity to where the female was hit, CDFW decided to capture the kittens for evaluation with help from the Midpeninsula Open Space District.
In what condition did they arrive at Oakland Zoo? How old are they?
Oakland Zoo’s Veterinary Hospital staff conducted a thorough health examination on the Fern, thistle, and Spruce, including treatments and bloodwork. The three cubs arrived at the Zoo relatively healthy but thin after being without a mother and adult care for about two weeks. After examination, Oakland Zoo veterinarians determined that they were around three months old.
Why can’t the cubs be released to the wild?
In the wild, mountain lion cubs need about two years with their mother in the wild to learn survival skills. Because Fern, Thistle, and Spruce are so young, they lack those skills and cannot return to the wild.
Will the cubs remain at Oakland Zoo?
Unfortunately, Fern, Spruce, and Thistle will not remain at the Zoo. Oakland Zoo will work with CDFW to find these cubs a new forever home at an appropriate institution.
In what condition did they arrive at Oakland Zoo? How old are they?
Oakland Zoo’s Veterinary Hospital staff conducted a thorough health examination on the Fern, thistle, and Spruce, including treatments and bloodwork. The three cubs arrived at the Zoo relatively healthy but thin after being without a mother and adult care for about two weeks. After examination, Oakland Zoo veterinarians determined that they were around three months old.
Why can’t the cubs be released to the wild?
In the wild, mountain lion cubs need about two years with their mother in the wild to learn survival skills. Because Fern, Thistle, and Spruce are so young, they lack those skills and cannot return to the wild.
Will the cubs remain at Oakland Zoo?
Unfortunately, Fern, Spruce, and Thistle will not remain at the Zoo. Oakland Zoo will work with CDFW to find these cubs a new forever home at an appropriate institution.
Water managers were relieved Thursday evening after the Army Corps of Engineers agreed to back off of a sudden decision earlier in the day to dump massive amounts of water from Kaweah and Success lakes.
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.“We were able to get them to back off that,” said Eric Limas, General Manager of the Lower Tule River and Pixley irrigation districts, of the Army Corps. “They’ll still be releasing water sometime tonight, but it will be a smaller amount, which will increase tomorrow.”
Limas and Tulare Irrigation District General Manager Aaron Fukuda were unsure how high releases would ultimately go and for how long but Kaweah has about 27,000 acre feet and Success about 5,000 acre fee that are above levels allowed by the Army Corps during winter.
Water managers will continue working with the Army Corps to limit the amount of water released from the lakes, Fukuda said. “We’re still trying to wrap our minds around the numbers that made this happen,” Fukuda said. “We haven’t received much information from the Army Corps, just very vague answers.”
Rick Brown, chief public affairs officer for the Sacramento office of the Army Corps, would only say that levels in both lakes were “currently in the flood control space.” He directed further questions to the Army Corps’ headquarters, which did not return an email Thursday asking: Who made the decision to release the water? Why? Why so suddenly? And why weren’t safety personnel notified?
Some people interviewed for this story speculated that the move was political on the part of the new administration, a kind of water “flex,” but declined to elaborate.
[…]
“Normally, these kinds of flood releases are done with a lot of notification and coordination,” Fukuda said. “I’ve been doing this 18 years and have never seen something like this.”
The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.
David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk as acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.
Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration.
A spokeswoman for DOGE declined to comment. Lebryk could not be reached for comment late Thursday.
When Scott Bessent was confirmed as treasury secretary on Monday, Lebryk ceased to be the acting agency head.
Apparently, these payment systems are very closely held by the Bureau of Fiscal Service which controls more than $6 trillion to households and businesses in America. These are the systems that distribute Social Security and Medicare, salaries, payments and tax refunds. That system works very, very efficiently.
It is unclear precisely why Musk’s team sought access to those systems. But both Musk and the Trump administration more broadly have sought to control spending in ways that far exceed efforts by their predecessors and have alarmed legal experts…
Still, the possibility that government officials might try to use the federal payments system — which essentially functions as the nation’s “checking book” — to enact a political agenda is unprecedented, said Mark Mazur, who served in senior treasury roles during the Obama and Biden administrations.
“This is a mechanical job — they pay Social Security benefits, they pay vendors, whatever. It’s not one where there’s a role for nonmechanical things, at least from the career standpoint. Your whole job is to pay the bills as they’re due,” Mazur said. “It’s never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda. … You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case.”
I would guess that they will say they want “modernize” the payment system and in the process will likely screw it up beyond belief. But having watched Musk’s lunacy on Twitter, I have little doubt that there is also a nefarious purpose to this. He wants to be in control of the payment system because he wants to control the payments,
Go ahead boys, fuck up the Social Security system. See how that goes.
LAST month, the Snohomish County Public Utility District, outside Seattle, released audiotapes of Enron energy traders discussing ”stealing” from California, sticking it to ”Grandma Millie” and other ways of manipulating the energy market.
The tapes, recorded in 2000, surfaced because Enron, now in bankruptcy court, pressed a claim for $122 million against Snohomish, which the company contends improperly canceled a power contract in 2001. An Enron spokeswoman says that while the conversations are ”disturbing and offensive,” the contract fee is still valid.
Snohomish officials disagree, and its lawyers are using the tapes, originally subpoenaed by the Justice Department, to help them fight Enron’s claim. Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, estimates that if the $122 million fee stands, it will cost the average household served by Snohomish $420 in higher bills.
Excerpts from the transcripts follow.
Two Enron employees, Greg and Shari, prepare for a phone call that is part of negotiations with Snohomish about the proposed energy contract.
Greg: Um, called lies, it’s all how well you can weave these lies together, Shari. All right, so um — —
Shari: I feel like I’m being corrupted now.
Greg: No, this is marketing.
Shari: O.K.
Greg: It’s not as bad as trading.
Shari: Yeah, it’s true. Oh yeah, you’re right. O.K., cool, I’ll — I’ll do it.
In the now infamous Grandma Millie exchange, recorded on Nov. 30, 2000, two traders, identified as Kevin and Bob, discuss demands by California officials that electricity-generating companies and traders pay refunds for price-gouging. They also refer to the disputed presidential election, which was as yet undecided.
Kevin: So the rumor’s true? They’re [expletive] takin’ all the money back from you guys? All those money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?
Bob: Yeah, Grandma Millie, man. But she’s the one who couldn’t figure out how to [expletive] vote on the butterfly ballot.
Kevin: Yeah, now she wants her [expletive] money back for all the power you’ve charged for [expletive] $250 a megawatt hour.
Bob: You know — you know — you know, Grandma Millie, she’s the one that Al Gore’s fightin’ for, you know?
Later in the same conversation, Kevin and Bob express little sympathy for Californians.
Kevin: Oh, best thing that could happen is [expletive] an earthquake, let that thing float out to the Pacific and put ’em [expletive] candles.
There’s more of those pricks at the link, in case you’ve forgotten how gross they really were. I feel pretty confident that the Musk cyberpunks are even worse.
Update —
This might be the reasoning:
Didn't Musk do this when he bought Twitter? He ordered Twitter's accounting to stop paying bills. He just figured that if people wanted to sue him to get their money they could try, but whatevs.
Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.
Musk, the billionaire Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab CEO and X owner tasked by Trump to slash the size of the 2.2 million-strong civilian government workforce, has moved swiftly to install allies at the agency known as the Office of Personnel Management.
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.”
Oh, I’m sure there’s no risk there. Musk’s little high school student sycophants are great patriots. We know that.
This Bluesky thread was written by former Obama and Biden administrator, Zealan Hoover:
I ran $100 billion in Infrastructure and IRA programs at EPA. We obligated over $70 billion onto signed awards and contracts to protect public health and the environment. All that funding is currently frozen. Here are the facts…
On January 20, Trump signed Executive Order 14154 (“Unleashing American Energy”) that directed agencies to “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Law (IIJA/BIL). NOTE: EOs do not give agencies special power to break the law.
Not paying grantees with signed grant agreements is illegal. While there are certain activities EPA has discretion to pause, such as designing new competitions and making new awards, once a grant award is signed with a grantee the government is legally obligated to pay them.
This obligation to pay is clearly enshrined in 2 CFR § 200.305. Law states, “The recipient…MUST be paid in advance” unless on reimbursement in which case the agency still “MUST make payment within 30 calendar days after receipt of the payment request.” www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/2/2…
On Jan. 27, OMB issued M-25-13. This memo directed agencies to “pause” all activities related to “assistance for…DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal” by 5pm on Tuesday. EPA’s CFO then issued an internal memo immediately freezing all BIL & IRA funds.
On Jan. 28, several lawsuits were filed to stop the funding freeze from taking effect. U.S. District Judge AliKhan issued such an order, which led to widespread reporting that the freeze was over. This was NOT TRUE – funds were still frozen across the government.
The judge’s order stayed implementation of the OMB memo but not the Executive Order itself. OMB withdrew the memo but EPA and other agencies continued to block all funds by pointing to the authority of the EO. The WH Press Secretary made clear that the freeze was still in effect.
In response, newyorkstateag.bsky.social led 22 states in suing Donald Trump and the federal agencies to reinstate the legal flow of funds. As of Friday afternoon, I expect the judge to issue such an order compelling EPA and others to turn funding back on.
The illegal funding freeze still in effect is an incredible waste of taxpayer dollars. Across the country, projects are pausing construction and laying off staff. This will slow work to replace lead pipes, install clean energy, recover from storms, and clean up contaminated land.
Up to $50 billion in EPA funds are currently frozen across programs including: +Brownfields +Clean School Bus +Clean Water and Drinking Water SRFs +Climate Pollution Reduction Grants +EJ Community Change +Solar4All +Superfund
There are real ramifications for what they are doing for real people. I think many of these are actual “kitchen table issues” and I think we need to see Democrats fanning out all over the country to tell this story. People aren’t paying attention because they are depressed about the election or they just think politics is a bunch of white noise. And they will probably continue to for some time. But taking a page from Trump’s Attention Book, you just keep repeating it over and over again over time and people will finally absorb what you’re saying.
And in this case it has the benefit of being true.
