More of February 2025 and Trump 2.0 (and Musk 1.0). This covers February 15–28 in reverse chronological order, starting from the top with February 28.
The previous post ended mid-month with Musk and DOGE illegally cutting employees and cancelling contracts. Lawsuits galore were filed. There was the point where Trump declared himself king, which I wrote about when it happened. He also signaled he would abandon Ukraine to Russia.
Then Elon emailed all federal employees on a Saturday, demanding five bullet points about their past week's work, or they would be fired by Monday night. Confusion ensued. Hegseth and Trump fired key leaders military leaders because they either were not white men, or because they would stand in the way of enacting illegal orders. Near the end of the month, Republicans in the House gave preliminary approval to Trump's budget resolution, which would lay waste to Medicaid and SNAP and many other programs, while funding tax cuts for the wealthiest.
And then at the very end of the month (today, a Friday) we saw Trump and Vance ambush Volodymyr Zelensky in front of the whole world for the benefit of Putin.
Whew. That's leaving out a lot, and I only went through 7:00 p.m. on the 28th because I couldn't stand it anymore.
I've moved some of the less timely images up or down in the order for better visual balance.
Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.
___
The first front pages of Saturday’s newspapers in the UK.
“Ukraine Hero Ambushed”
“Trump stuns world with vile rant at Zelensky”
“A spectacle to horrify the world”
Trump is obliterating the global reputation of the US:
News Eye
People need to understand that we are in an entirely new paradigm. It is now Russia the US against Ukraine and Europe. This is not a shift in US policy, it is a transformation of what kind of country the United States is in the world
Ben Rhodes
Trump’s disgusting behavior in our Oval Office in the company of a genuine hero and defender of democracy like Volodymyr Zelensky may be the most disgraceful public behavior by any president in our history.
Steven Beschloss
Russian state media was given access to the Oval Office for the disastrous Trump-Zelensky meeting while the AP and Reuters were blocked
Jon Passantino
This whole thing was a deliberate set-up, and the real audience for it was not the American people. It was the global fascist movement.
Greg Sargent
Trumpkin expected Zelinsky to be bullied into ritual submission though. He did not expect to be told to fuck off — that is a victory for Zelinsky.
Will Evans @will99.bsky.social
the last 10 years have been pretty eye opening realizing how many americans conceptualize masculinity exclusively in terms of abusive behavior!
mtsw
“Why don't you wear a suit? You're at the highest level in this
country's office & you refuse to wear a suit. A lot of Americans
have problems with you not respecting the office”:
Carl Quintanilla
If you missed today's lowest point in US History, do not despair. A new lowest point is expected to arrive tomorrow.
Ward Q. Normal
This just all feels like some dumb sci-fi alt-history where the Confederacy won and formed an alliance with the Soviets
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social
Interesting that Trump would issue a speak English executive order today when his Oval Office remarks were likely first written in Russian.
Gabe Ortíz @tusk81.bsky.social
RFK Jr. is eliminating transparency and public engagement on important HHS decisions that has been in place since 1971.
Chris Geidner
People who brag about 60 hour a week are really talking about how poorly they manage their time
Nate Pentz
It should go without saying that firing the people you've most recently
hired is bonehead move for any organization. Almost by definition, they
are the people who you need for your new approaches, products and
problems. Bird flu? AI/ML? Next-gen weather models?
Gavin Schmidt @climateofgavin.bsky.social
In addition to what Gavin said, the thing about probationary government workers is that some of them have worked for the government for years as contractors, and then they get hired as federal employees. We're losing not just the newest and brightest but also the most experienced people.
David Ho
How it started/How it's going:
Billy Bragg
“We are barely a month into the second presidential term of Donald Trump and he has made his top priorities clear: the destruction of America’s government and influence and the preservation of Russia’s.” –Garry Kasparov
Koosemar
a few years ago if you said "college republican clubs are hotbeds of white supremacism and enthusiastic support for rape" people looked at you like you were wearing a barrel on a street corner and if you said it today most people would still do that because the newspapers won't print it
geoffrey @parsnip.bsky.social
You know why hurricanes have gotten less deadly over the past century? Not because they're less dangerous. Because scientists at NOAA have gotten really good at predicting their tacks, enabling people to get out of harm's way. Gutting NOAA will kill people.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social
Having competent, trained people working in the federal government, with sustainable enough workloads and sufficient autonomy to do their jobs well, helps all of us in the biggest and smallest of ways. Now, I’m sure, those particular jobs will become AI.
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field
Why do I feel like the Trump message to people who have been contributing to Social Security for 50 years is going to be, “Too bad.” But the message to dudes who went big on crypto in the last year will be, “The government is going to help you out.”
Schooley
People always say: "if libraries didn't already exist, you could never create them today." Well, lots of the stuff MAGA nihilists are destroying right now is like that. We're not just going to put it all back in place when this if over. It's going to take *generations* to repair this shit.
David Roberts @volts.wtf
Thinking about the good people of NOAA and NWS today. Such a dark day for our nation and our safety:
Marshall Ramsey
Many Medicaid recipients do not know they receive it because Medicaid is called different things in different states. The public narrative of Medicaid focuses on a distant other, but 40% of US children and 60% of nursing home residents receive Medicaid.
Lauren Rivera
as part of a larger conservative push to deregulate child care, Idaho is set to become the first state in the country to gut all state-required child-to-staff ratios
Rachel Cohen
do you ever think about how conservatives were sending bomb threats to childrens hospitals and the media and the dems just ignored it
Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social
No more work-from-home, government workers, except for Kash Patel, who will run the FBI from Las Vegas:
Drew Harwell
Everybody has civil rights or nobody does
Costa Samaras
The National Weather Service took more than 150 years to build. Forget flight or the internet or whatever - public-service systems like this are the marvels of the modern world. Conceptual cathedrals, constructed across generations and dedicated to the public good.
Josh Lappen @jlappen1.bsky.social
Musk’s hackers burglarized "a vast trove of information about the entire federal workforce” on OPM computers even as Trump was being sworn in — that is "hours before Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was officially created by an executive order.”
Philip Gourevitch
Essentially ALL tuberculosis programs funded by the U.S. Government were officially terminated last night. Horrifyingly, that includes the Global Drug Facility that coordinates the vast majority of TB treatment and tests purchased globally. Shuttering the GDF will stop TB treatment for the entire planet....
John Green
This is their plan:
Step 1: exploit legitimate pain suffered by young people and families caused by online harm
Step 2: implement government-mandated online ID checks to "keep kids away from harmful content"
Step 3: define all LGBTQ content as "harmful to kids"
Age verification is a trojan horse
Evan Greer
It’s the way Black people and Native people are not surprised by anything the US does and how others continue to be surprised that is quite the thing.
Shani @blerdmommy.bsky.social
I wrote about what's really behind the assault on the Department of Education. Hint: Americans have long placed their faith in the idea that schools can *equalize* us. Now that equality is a banned term, both the department and public education are on the chopping block
Jennifer Berkshire
I think that it's important to share examples of visible dissent. Normalcy bias is real. Sharing how people continue to dissent is helpful.
Prisonculture
You can’t make this stuff up. Trump supporters spent the past few years obsessing over an apparent sex trafficking cabal in charge of our country. And yet one of the first things Trump seems to have done, apparently, is push to get Andrew and Tristan Tate, charged with sex trafficking, released from Romania.
Mehdi Hasan
Funny how they call immigrants rapists. Until they find some that are actually accused of rape… who happen to support Trump. And suddenly, they’re fighting to bring them into the country
Joshua Reed Eakle
He said he was “deporting criminals” but he’s actually importing them…
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social
Backlash to #metoo is brutal
Regina Schrambling @gastropoda.bsky.social
women requested that they no longer be raped and American men decided to burn down the planet
Faine Greenwood
Sometimes, the road to hell is paved with bad intentions
Don Moynihan
The GOP has become the party of pollution, deadly food, disease, and crippling work. Who benefits? The billionaire class…including Trump, Musk, Putin, and their buddies.
Kraig Peck
Was just reading an assessment of the budget fight that was like “Trump’s team says tax cuts will boost spur growth that offsets them.” What it doesn’t say is that they said that last time, too, which everyone said wouldn’t happen and which didn’t happen. Seems important to note!
Philip Bump
I'm curious what it means to vote for a budget when no one has any idea if Musk-Trump is going to spend any of it? Seems Congress is one of those wasteful government entities that DOGE is looking to eliminate.
Dean Baker
This photo says 1000 words. Musk, standing, the center of all eyes. Trump possibly asleep:
Helen Kennedy
Undocumented immigrants paid about $26 billion per year into Social Security, even though they will get nothing out of it. They subsidize citizens to an extraordinary degree.
Don Moynihan
Utah could soon become the first U.S. state to ban the addition of fluoride to drinking water. The move could affect children’s health, experts warned.
The New York Times
Republican efforts to repeal the 20th century proceeding apace I see.
Seth Cotlar
It is really hard to watch people willfully tear down an infrastructure that allowed us to double lifespans, drastically reduce poverty, and become one of the richest countries in the world.
Beth Popp Berman @epopppp.bsky.social
George Washington's cabinet included Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Edmund Randolph, John Jay. Trump's includes Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, RKF Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Sean Duffy, WWE's Linda McMahon. Musk says this is "the best cabinet ever. Literally — and I do not give false praise." No, he's just nuts
James Fallows
they think russia is big and powerful because it occupies a lot of space on a map
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
Something that’s very clear is that Trump is old and checked out. He wants to play the role of president but has zero interest in doing the job and is happy to outsource the real work to Musk, Vought and a crew of feral zealots.
Chris Hayes
The GOP claims slashing $880 billion from Medicaid is about eliminating "waste, fraud, and abuse.” That's a smokescreen. The “fraud” amounts to less than 1/10th of 1%, not even close to $880 billion. Their actual plan slashes coverage for millions & leaves families without care. We won’t be fooled.
Rep. Diana DeGette
I’ve been arguing for four weeks that Trump is basically a ceremonial head of state while Musk is the actual head of government. There is nothing in today’s Cabinet meeting that argues against that theory. Musk has even paid Trump $10M for the privilege!
Garrett M. Graff @vermontgmg.bsky.social
The "campus free speech" and "cancel culture" panics were obvious efforts to seed the ground for a huge expansion of left-wing censorship and right-wing propaganda. That effort appears to have worked.
Michael Hobbes
Life wasn't simpler when you were a kid. You were simpler when you were a kid.
Lee Casebolt
Bezos destroying the Post opinion pages is just another reminder:
Conservatives think free speech is when they can say what they want and
when you can say what they want.
Adam Serwer
Here's my new WaPo op ed: abortion rights are a personal liberty and represent the right of patients to access the freedom of the medical market. Done.
Lauren MacIvor Thompson
Freedom is when the boss tells you what to write and think.
Adam Serwer
Never forget. Cargo bikes aren’t a new invention. They’ve been around as
long as cars, and have always been used both business and people
carrying kids:
Cargo Bike Ben
Once motorists are allowed into an urban space, every bit of infrastructure adapts to serve them. Where cars don’t exist, sidewalks and bike lanes are unnecessary, and even signage becomes obsolete.
American Fietser
If you’re just opening up social media for the first time today, your forecast calls for a 99% chance of Oh God My Eyes, followed by intermittent periods of Cannot Unsee. Be prepared, and self-medicate accordingly.
jabberwoCKY @ckyonwords.bsky.social
It is amazing to me that Republicans have one (1) economic idea: Cut taxes for the super wealthy and big corporations by pillaging medicaid and social security. Fifty years now, that's the only idea.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social
Remember, Elon's handout from taxpayers is roughly equal to the pay of 380,000 government workers (or "bureaucrats," as Elon calls them)
Dean Baker
Note: Whatever you think of DEI, gender and race are essential to understanding transportation. Examples:
• Women commute less than men, and they take more off-peak trips.
• Highways have been deliberately sited in minority areas, leaving a legacy of crashes and pollution.
David Zipper
It's wild to run on "running government like a business" when 50% of businesses fail within 4 years and 75% within 15 years. Seems like such an obvious Dem clapback to a widespread Republican slogan.
Darrell Owens @idothethinking.bsky.social
It's honestly kinda hilarious that Republicans are going to pass a wealth tax but it's on the elitist colleges they all graduated from.
Chris Miller @iamcurious.bsky.social
Every House Republican just voted to defund Medicaid. Reminder: there are no moderate Republicans in Congress, and stop pretending there are.
Jonathan Cohn
In this rambling babble, Trump says that they sent the email to see “if people exist.” He also said they have to go to Fort Knox to see if the gold really there. Never expected “object permanence” to be a problem for a sitting president, but here we are.
Kevin M. Kruse
Genuinely kind of funny that after White House reporters spent years complaining that Biden wasn't accessible enough and saying how much more access they have with Trump that they're now getting the door slammed in their faces, tbh. TRUMP WILL SELECT PRESS POOL The White House said it would handpick the pool reporters who cover President Trump, breaking with decades of precedent.
Parker Molloy
How can you tell that Trump and Musk don’t actually care about going after waste and fraud? They just fired someone at the Minnesota VA whose job was to find waste/inefficiencies to save taxpayer money. It’s all a façade to shell out more money for billionaires and big corporations.
Senator Tina Smith @smith.senate.gov
If Harris were president, she'd be facing impeachment proceedings over $8/dozen eggs.
cdwilsher.bsky.social
I'm sorry to tell you this, but the Nature Conservancy is in the business of selling carbon offsets to corporate clients. (In 2020 it was revealed that many of these were BS offsets for already-protected trees.) They are always going to side with power, even authoritarian power.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social
Government efficiency is when every federal agency has to send a daily emergency email to its workers telling them to ignore another daily email from a different department trying to fire them without knowing what their jobs are.
Mike Drucker
The Six Kinds of Republican:
Barry Deutsch
They’re not called Rare Earth Metals because they’re scarce, but because as a group of elements they took a long time to isolate. It’s an antiquated English use of rare meaning “widely distributed or isolated” that died in Victorian times.
Ed Burmila
Saw a cybertruck and my son asked why Elon Musk would think that looked good and I said "remember that drug they gave you at the hospital when you broke your arm, and you got scared and said everyone had 4 eyes? he takes that all the time"
Christina Holland @mortalwombat.info
The richest man in the world donated 0.0625% of his wealth to a political campaign and now acts like he runs the entire country. This is not a difficult concept to get across to the American people.
Courtney Milan
Your regular reminder that the US air and water pollution laws passed in the 60s and 70s — and the elaborate federal bureaucracy created to administer them -- constitute one of the most successful gov't interventions in history. WILDLY successful. The envy of the world.
David Roberts @volts.wtf
I don’t want us to “resist” the Trump administration. I want us to DEFEAT it. I don’t want us to just “resist” the unholy alliance of fossil capital, big tech, and authoritarian power-grabbing that has captured the US government. I want us to OVERTHROW these people.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social
Musk is stupid in the sense that he is profoundly incurious about the workings of the world and the lives of other people.
Quinta Jurecic
Resistance genealogy, in a nutshell:
Jennifer Mendelsohn
Interesting fact: One thing that's generally overlooked in cost-benefit analyses of government spending is benefits.
Eric Roston
If you’re cheering for a South African sociopath to fuck over US military veterans then you should probably stop with that America first bullshit.
Adam Parkhomenko
Has anyone called Bitcoin “Dunning-Krugerrand” yet?
Kevin M. Kruse
As Elon demands justifications from all federal workers (including many who are not Executive Branch employees), remember that if he paid his taxes, it'd pay for 677K federal jobs.
emptywheel
Wait. Elon Musk now has the email for every federal employee? Isn't THAT a bigger story than the stupid request for 5 bullet points of what they've been doing?
Peter Gleick
Social Security has a payment accuracy rate of over 99 percent. Only 0.3 percent of Social Security benefits are improper payments, which are typically caused by mistakes or delays. That's better than any private insurance company.
Sharil @veggiare.bsky.social
there are so many things happening right now to federal employees that are illegal under current employment laws
Karen K. Ho
Gen-X knows:
Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com
Shutting down already installed EV charging infrastructure isn't "efficiency," it's sabotage
Gernot Wagner
It’s like the conservative version of blowing up pipelines
Eric Bottorff @torff.bsky.social
“I spent hours with Musk and walked with him thru Auschwitz. I stood with him, looking at the nauseating heaps of hair, luggage, and shoes flooded with violet light meant to preserve it. Is Musk an antisemite? People, actually, it’s worse—he doesn’t care whatsoever…He was unmoved by the experience.” –Elon Musk's biographer
Brent Toderian
Something that's maddening about the cases involving DOGE access to our most sensitive private data and the irreparable harm standard is that the ACCESS ITSELF is the irreparable harm, and some judges just aren't getting that.
Sarah Posner
we need a new slur to describe the bizarre combination of traits exhibited by elon musk. traditional insults are simply not enough
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social
The point is, we are *ALL* being punished for letting a Black man lead white America for 8 years. Trump and Musk represent a global white supremacist ideology that would rather destroy everything than let this happen ever again. This is not something elite media likes to discuss.
Karen Attiah
Illegally cutting cancer research and meals on wheels to pay for PR ads for themselves.
Nicholas Grossman
if you look at a bad thing that happened and assume, evidence-free, that it's because a Black person got a job they shouldn't have, you're not a "DEI skeptic," you're a dumb gutter racist
Seth D. Michaels
Want to tell the public what US government workers actually do, vs. the propaganda spewed by DOGE? This incredible website, "We the Builders," is asking for first-person testimonials from government workers about their actual jobs, and how they make the government work.
Annalee Newitz
For decades, the US government has painstakingly kept American science #1 globally — and every facet of American life has improved because of it. The internet? Flu shot? Ozempic? All grew out of federally funded research. Now all that's being dismantled.
Karen Hao
Humans have three life support systems — our bodies, our infrastructure, and our environment — and Trump and his enablers are attacking all three. They are going to kill us all.
David Ho
The media made a big issue of low homeownership rates among the young under Biden, even when the rate was above the pre-pandemic peak. Will it be an issue under Trump now that it is below pre-pandemic levels
Dean Baker
Elon Musk's private security detail has been deputized as Federal Marshalls and can carry firearms on Federal property. What could possibly go wrong?
Rick Wilson
Trump: Fire hundreds of thousands of career civil servants trying to keep America safe and running.
Also, Trump: Give DHS a budget of up to $200 million to run anti-immigrant ads that repeatedly thank Trump for leading an immigration crackdown.
Josh Sternberg
This is a micro photograph of a sand sample from North Beach on St. Paul Island in Alaska. Photo credit: Leo Kenney:
International Sand Collectors Society
No matter how preposterous, the Times headlines nearly every Trump story as if it were written by the White House comms team.
Larry Glickman
A core problem here is that like many things, the public discourse is totally playing on the right's terms. It's not "DEI" to research gender/racial inequality. DEI is a propaganda phrase to denote unnecessary excess in the mind of the public, like HR trainings. That's not what they're eliminating.
W.E.D.em Boyz @leftistwonk.bsky.social
a lot of people want to not be held responsible for slavery and indigenous genocide but want to hold onto the generational wealth and preferential structures resulting from them. I mean, I know it's obvious but I think it should probably get said out loud a lot more often
Dr. Damien P. Williams @wolvendamien.bsky.social
Hegseth called Brown unqualified solely because he's Black. Then they fired him... and replaced him with a white guy so indisputably unqualified that he requires a Presidential waiver. This is what "merit" means to them.
Max Kennerly
So they removed the black chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the middle of his 4-year tour, without cause, and they're seeking to replace him with a white **retired** Air Force three-star general who lacks the requisite experience as a service chief or combatant commander? Huh, how about that
Adam Weinstein
Side note. There are eight members of the joint chiefs. the chair is black. the CNO (navy) is a woman. the other six are white guys. chair and the cno got fired tonight.
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social
Hegseth is going to fire every woman or Black person in military leadership.
Clara Jeffery
Remember when having a really old president and questioning his mental acuity was front page news everyday for months?
Renée Graham
You should question the merit of any white man in a position of power. Did they earn it or was it the result of racial and gender assumptions?
Adam Miller @ajm6792.bsky.social
Remember when John Roberts gutted the Medicaid expansion because he said the *offer* of medicaid money was too coercive to the states?
Adam Serwer
The year is 2033. Baron Trump is about to be inaugurated for his second term. The dollar is underwater, and a potato costs $10. I show the bank teller my attache of Forever stamps. She gasps out loud, and quietly tells me to meet the manager in the back office, make sure I wasn't followed.
@scoopsstp.bsky.social
wearing sunglasses inside and following an event where he at times had a hard time speaking coherently, Elon Musk walks off the CPAC stage waving around a chain saw. this is the guy currently running our government. Congrats, America!
Aaron Rupar
I was watching an interview from 1982 with the imperial wizard of the KKK yesterday, and in it, he was like, “despite what you may have heard, I really hate Nazis.” Did he really hate Nazis? Probably not. But he sure felt like it was the right thing to say to win people over.
Nicole Hemmer @pastpunditry.bsky.social
Meta has spent over $100 billion on VR.
Aftermath @aftermath.site
Meta could have solely funded the ENTIRE WORLD'S 2022 CLIMATE FINANCE GOAL instead of this
Ketan Joshi
In addition to Congress being the place that makes the laws, a pretty key thing, the constitution explicitly says Congress gets to create the postal system. It’s not left implied that that comes under law making generally. The President has no power to unilaterally abolish it and move it to commerce.
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social
IMO journalists shouldn’t grant people anonymity if the sensitive information they’re providing is “I personally disagree with the fascist coup but won’t do anything about it.”
Ned Resnikoff
A delicate Roman yellow glass cup with white trail decoration and
various Roman glass cosmetic bottles, 1st–3rd century AD. Excavated from
Turin and surrounding areas. Museo di Antichità, Turin. Photograph by
me:
Alison Fisk
Kash was I'd say the worst nominee and probably the most tail-end risk for people domestically. Completely unqualified, unhinged, and traitorous. Vile to his very core, and someone who if you inserted in any other right wing country, would probably be leading its secret police. You just don't come back (at least not in any near term timeline) from a political party essentially unanimously confirming someone like Kash. It's a signal that half the country would either support or throw a blind eye if you and your loved ones were sent to a gulag because of political dissention
AdotSad
The corruption that has happened in this month alone could take all of the nation's remaining journalists years to fully document.
Clara Jeffery
Look at how Elon Musk treats his own kids and then think about what these people are willing to do to *your* kids
Ned Resnikoff
the whole 2020-2024 era of “dems shouldn't aggressively use the levers of power because then republicans will do the same thing when they're elected” sure looks dumb as dog shit right now huh
Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social
The Trump administration fired the only locksmith on staff at Yosemite National Park on Friday. He was the sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms (which apparently happens a lot.)
Stacey Burns @wentrogue.bsky.social
Thinking about how Musk once floated the idea that we roll back all government regulation on industry and then reinstate “the ones that are needed” as they come up, as though that wasn’t how all existing regulation was created over the last two hundred something years
Cooper Lund
Your elected officials and DOT claim climate and technical leadership while prioritizing essentially no modern infrastructure. No high speed trains, no statewide bicycle highways, no municipal sidewalk plowing. We simply build roads. How do we move elected officials and sustainability staff to act?
Mary Morse Marti @marymm.bsky.social
Trump's Pentagon just called climate change "woke" but four decades of defense and intelligence assessments have consistently identified climate change as posing serious threats to US national security and the operations of US military assets.
Peter Gleick
I've read most of the analyses of the DOGE 2025 "receipts" site. This, from NPR, is the best I've read so far. Some of what they claim to have cut haven't been cut, other "cuts" will incur costs down the road. NPR says DOGE has made $2B of cuts, not $55B.
emptywheel
"I am a person and you are not" is one of the worst possible sentiments anyone can adopt.
North Easton
Musk and his twerps have exposed us to pandemics, broken science, stolen all your data, endangered the U.S. payments system, threatened air traffic control, and cut off HIV medication to 20m people in order to save ::checks notes:: 2/10th of a percent of the federal budget.
Beth Popp Berman @epopppp.bsky.social
There are two people in Congress — the chairs of the Senate and House Appropriations Committees - who have enormous power over the illegal impoundment of funds appropriated by Congress, which is sowing chaos across the US. They need to be relentlessly contacted at their offices, in person and by phone.
Gregg Gonsalves
You never imagine the descent into despotism being quite this embarrassing, you know? You expect liberal democracy to fall to a Palpatine, not Biff Tannen.
Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social
Trump falsely claimed “fraud” to attempt to steal the 2020 election from the people — he failed. Now, he’s falsely claiming “fraud” to steal the government from the people — he’s succeeding. The analysis below proves Trump’s DOGE is ideologically targeted, meant to consolidate exec power.
Jennifer N. Victor
Cuts that cost more are expenses.
Cuts that hurt public safety qualify as malignant negligence.
Cuts reducing tax collection increase deficit and line rich men’s pockets.
Cuts that destroy the rule of law are Fascist.
Cuts that destroy America’s scientific advantage are economic suicide
Linda James @ljamesnc.bsky.social
I work in audit. It's takes us, on average, approximately 5-6 weeks to audit 1 area of the business (of an EXTREMELY LARGE GLOBAL FINANCIAL SERVICES FIRM). And we're to believe Elon and teen posse have "audited" the largest employer in America in less than 3 weeks. Lying liars who lie.
Jennifer Gordon Thomas @ragekitten.bsky.social
CISA controls the .gov domain registrar and the national public key infrastructure (PKI). This means Elon Musk has the ability to shut down any federal, state, or city government using a .gov domain. Musk can also now prevent .gov agencies and officials from registering their .gov BlueSky handles
Chad Loder
Ukraine voted for a comedian and got a president. America voted for a president and got a clown.
Bonnie Resist! @bll4ever.bsky.social
By a 42-6 vote, the Washington Senate just approved a bill directing the state to adopt standards for passenger and freight elevators that are more reflective of global standards, including a specific requirement to allow smaller elevators in buildings with fewer than 25 units.
Ryan Packer @typewriteralley.bsky.social
I was alive when Barack Obama had 45% approval ratings. The MSM treated that as NO MANDATE for anything.
Prisonculture
The Trumpies are trying to gin up a fake Solyndra-style scandal around EPA climate funding, so that they can shut down that funding through DOJ (rather than through Congress, per, y'know, the law). A brave DOJ prosecutor resigned in protest.
David Roberts @volts.wtf
"America has no king" seems like a good theme to rally around
Don Moynihan
There needs to be a word for when a state DOT converts a shoulder to a travel lane (“sure, we’re adding capacity, but it’s free!”), waits, and then builds a new shoulder (“we’re not widening the freeway; we’re just making it safer!”), rinse and repeat.
Qagggy!
"Move fast and break things" sounds like some bold techbro vision of innovation, but it's also the same motto of thieves who want to do a smash-and-grab and get the fuck out before anybody can catch them.
Chuck Wendig
if the president is breaking the laws you wrote, your authority and duty under the constitution is to *impeach him,* not ask nicely for individual favors
Seth D. Michaels
DHS is spending $200 million money on ads to thank Trump. Entirely plausible that this money is being stolen from migrant shelter money. Last term, Trump took money for health care for detained migrants and spent it on dog food.
David Bier
A key aim of Putin has to been to delegitimise the democratically elected Zelensky and the Ukrainian government. He now has the active assistance and connivance of the President of the United States in that effort.
Lewis Goodall
we're going to miss the regulatory state when it's gone
Tom Tomorrow
The good news is that the United States has a relatively low percentage of religious nationalists. The bad news is that it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it.
Hemant Mehta @friendlyatheist.com
A lot of people now see that Musk is a vile extremist. But many still struggle to accept that he is also an oblivious fool. Once you actually listen to what he has to say about the world, you realize it’s all faux-visionary nonsense layered on top of profound ignorance.
Thomas Zimmer
Democrats made the choice last year that they would rather beat in the heads of college kids and banish people like Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman from the party than they cared about beating Trump. We’re living through the consequences of that decision.
Carter Moon
I will fix my finances using the DOGE roadmap:
Step 1: save 5 dollars by not getting coffee
Step 2: record it as 5,000 dollars in the spreadsheet where i track my finances
Step 3: tell everyone I saved 5,000 dollars already
Maia @maiamindel.bsky.social
In the world of privacy coverage, there has always been a central question of who is a greater threat to it: the government or corporate America. Now with DOGE, the two are merged into one.
Kashmir Hill
“Life under autocracy…is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water — because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.”
Leah McElrath
It seems almost unavoidable at this point that we are headed for a deep, deep recession. Just based on 200K+ federal firings and pullback of contracts, the March employment report (to be released April 4) seems certain to show bigger job losses than any month ever outside of a few in 2008-9 and 2020.
Jesse Rothstein @jrothst.bsky.social
Huh, lots of angry people, some with security clearances and lots of knowledge valuable to foreign adversaries, suddenly facing mortgage payments and hungry kids, with no jobs, limited prospects and a feeling that their nation just betrayed them. That won’t end badly, will it?
seangralton.bsky.social
National Park Employee Laid Off:
Federal Employee News
what does it do to someone with a pathological need for adoration to instead become one of the most hated human beings on the planet? we shall all find out together!
Tom Tomorrow
I hope America is as lucky as the Toronto Delta jet — everyone survives but the right wing explodes
James Medlock
Sure all the best scientists may go to Europe, Canada and elsewhere, but we will still have Wall Street and private equity scammers, as well as the crypto bros, so all is good.
Dean Baker
Again, "probationary" means "at this particular position for less than a year." Probationary workers may have Ph.D.s, decades of experience, etc.
Dan Turner @ddt.bsky.social
True story: a few years ago, I was being interviewed by a reporter for the New York Times. I mentioned the history of eviction statutes and how they tied into Jim Crow. The reporter asked "what's Jim Crow?" When I explained, the reporter didn't believe me and said the US wouldn't do that.
Sheryl Weikal (The Leftist Lawyer) @leftistlawyer.com
Yes and: whatever you think of Latinx as a term, the intent was to acknowledge the existence of and show respect for a marginalized group of people. The intent behind "Gulf of America" is racist, imperialist bluster with a dash of obedience demand from an authoritarian regime
Coffee and Fingernails
Allowing the administration to define broad swaths of history, programming and civil rights compliance as “DEI” and then regurgitating that language instead of clearly articulating what specifically is being targeted is spreading disinformation and propaganda.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones.bsky.social
The most shocking thing about this is that anyone took him at his word:
Jess Calarco
FDA employees reviewing Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink were fired over the weekend as part of a broader purge of the federal workforce. The cuts included about 20 people in the FDA’s office of neurological and physical medicine devices, several of whom worked on Neuralink
Unity @unityndiversity.bsky.social
It’s infuriating beyond belief that Democrats are constantly defined by “defund the police,” “war on Xmas,” “open borders” and countless other bullshit right-wing narratives while Republicans are always allowed to distance themselves from the terrible things they actually do.
One Eyed Jack
The billionaires have been working on their merger with the evangelicals and “conservatives” for decades…abortion was the wedge issue to get Christians to vote against their own good. It was never about babies. It was to bring about a coup…it is an oligarchy taking over the US inch by inch.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social
There probably won't be any National Parks in a generation.
Bryan @bryanformhals.com
americans see the labor of generations around them and assume that it always has been there and always will be there no matter what
Leger-Felicite Snorlax @segatape.bsky.social
scientists say that the disposable nature of starlink satellites results in tons of metals burning up in orbit degrading the progress made on repairing the ozone layer. and the worst part the service isn't even affordable to the people who need it most
Karl Bode
I’m not sure the rest of the country fully grasps the panic and anger building in DC, MD, and VA. The entire economy of this area is about to collapse. Paychecks are stopping. Careers are ruined. Taxes are about to plummet. Yet no one seems able to stop this madness.
Siva @sivav.bsky.social
"The sheep like the shade, plus the solar panels increase grass yield and protect sheep from predators," said Pearce. Meanwhile, Pearce revealed farmers and shepherds reap their own set of benefits, as "sheep eliminate the need for herbicides or costly grass cutting on the solar farms":
David Roberts @volts.wtf
Elon Musk's DOGE team of misfits have fired everybody at the Federal Aviation Administration who is a probationary employee. Thinking they have got rid of all the new hires. It turns out many of these were experienced technicians, recently promoted and were on probation for their new senior role
Louis @louishenwood.bsky.social
Once again, I am so old, I do actually remember rightwingers losing their shit over "political correctness" 35 years ago, which is all this stuff, but with slightly less obvious racist overtones, because they've actually gotten worse in the interim.
Dave Andress
Federalist Society boss overheard telling private gathering that Chief Justice John Roberts was a solid pick for the Supreme Court because “he attends an Opus Dei evening of reflection once a month.” When the Federalist Society advocated for Roberts to be nominated to the Supreme Court in 2005, it was the first time it had campaigned publicly for a particular candidate. Leonard Leo actively campaign for him to be nominated — we know Leo is close to Opus Dei, and is a director at the Opus Dei-run Catholic Information Center in DC
Gareth Gore
this will end up leading to disaster and it will cost significantly more in taxpayer dollars for the trouble, and republican members of congress should be asked about it every single day, particularly if they serve on related committees
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE
remember, trump swore to protect, preserve and defend the constitution "to the best of his ability." he's just not very good at it!
Tom Tomorrow
i don't mean to be alarmist but the nazi who wants to turn the microblogging platform he owns into a bank just dismantled the consumer financial protection bureau and got everyone's social security number
Gallifreyan Jedi @jediofgallifrey.bsky.social
The telegraph on Trump’s plan for Ukraine: “The terms of the contract that landed at Volodymyr Zelensky’s office a week ago amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity.” It seems without EU support, Ukraine has two options: eternal economic servitude or annihilation. “If this draft were accepted, Trump’s demands would amount to a higher share of Ukrainian GDP than reparations imposed on Germany at the Versailles Treaty, later whittled down at the London Conference in 1921, and by the Dawes Plan in 1924.”
Maximilian Mayer @maximilianiras.bsky.social
Men older than me (I’m 50) who need to show their virility and do it by toting their small children (like, mine is 21!) around are so stunted.
Nnedi Okorafor
OSHA has ordered the digital and physical destruction of 18 publications on workplace safety practices, according to an email obtained by Popular Information. The email says the publications have been removed from the web and tells staff that physical copies should be "disposed of or recycled"
Judd Legum
'Josephine Baker wearing her medals from her service in French Resistance at the Civil Rights March on Washington DC, 1963':
Sardonicus
Black history is only offensive if you side with enslavers, segregationists, and other racists. It slaps if you have morality.
Dr. Allison Wiltz @allyfromnola.bsky.social
If you wanted to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, you would empower the inspectors general. If you wanted more waste, fraud, and abuse, you would fire them.
Pete Buttigieg
Musk and his army of dipshits on Twitter keep pointing to Bill Clinton’s federal worker reduction in the 1990s to defend Trump. The difference? Congress passed a law that Clinton signed, he didn’t just get the nearest billionaire to illegally start dismantling the government based on his whims.
Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social
Can you imagine thinking a government employee making 40K processing Medicaid payments to a parent with medically fragile children is the enemy, while thinking a billionaire who sends his sperm to random women and takes billions from the government to go to Mars is the good guy? WTF.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social
Most Americans have no idea that anything unusual is happening. This is probably the weirdest I’ve ever felt as an observer of politics, aware that the whole world is locked into a new order and equally aware that I can’t talk to the average person about it.
Nick @slothropsmap.bsky.social
This is how almost everyone who works on climate feels almost all the time.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social
I feel like I'm going insane every time I see a media story about DOGE that doesn't also mention the fact that the Government Accountability Office exists and performs the exact function that DOGE pretends to, only in a credibly constitutional, non-partisan, and conflict-of-interest-free manner
O.K. Computermeyer @niedermeyer.online
The geniuses at the Democratic Party settling on “maybe we were too woke” rather than “a cabal of billionaire pedophile Nazis are stealing your money and taking a sledgehammer to your future” is astonishing. Just one of those things
journeyman folklorist @aniceburrito.bsky.social
Trump and Putin meeting to “negotiate peace” on anything should be seen for what it is — two criminals discussing how to split the loot.
Brent Toderian
The new Trump administration has illegally removed far more people from their jobs because of speech and beliefs in the last month than the entire list of cancelled or pressured people (many of whom were criticized, not fired) compiled by FIRE and others over years. It’s not remotely close.
Nicholas Grossman
Fascism is always a counter-revolution to a revolution that never was.
rationalpear.bsky.social
Musk might not be doing much to increase government efficiency, but he is doing a great job in helping cancer and other diseases
Dean Baker
The ship "California" arrived at Ellis Island from Naples in May, 1900. You had to give the name and address of the person you were meeting. Many immigrants said "Nobody." They just showed up. How many of their descendants are currently lecturing immigrants about doing it "the right way?"
Jennifer Mendelsohn
As a reference, the $46B that Meta spent building its VR shit is about the same amount of money Spain used to built its WHOLE high speed rail network. All 2469 miles of it. Zuckerberg got that money selling shitty ads and destroying democracy, and gave the world this.
Roger Senserrich @4freedoms.es
"You see, we had the right completely beaten on race and gender issues, until someone said Latinx in 2020, and then it fell apart and we're reinstituting segregation and the country's fascist now."
Will Stancil
just speaking from personal experience now, i think it is really important to understand that simply being black is read by a non-trivial number of people as anti-white extremism
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
Deputy AG Lionel Hutz quickly scribbling an ampersand onto it:
Andy Craig
Elon Musk's DOGE boys have identified spending as "waste" that is roughly equal to 10 percent of Elon Musk's net worth. Raises the question of whether the spending Musk doesn't like will be more than the money he gets from being Donald Trump's co-president?
Dean Baker
Elon Musk's Scrooge on Steroids campaign will do more to convince voters that billionaires are bad for society than any amount of political opinionating previous to the Trump administration could accomplish.
Helaine Olen
You cannot determine whether you saved or cost money based solely on one side of the ledger. Example: I saved my household $2K by not paying the mortgage.
Lawprofblawg
I don't see any way they can spin access to our personal tax data as a "cost saving," but this is the same group that tells us trans people are a threat to America.
Robert Moffitt @justplainbob.bsky.social
donald trump has ordered the IRS to hand over all of your personal information to a Holocaust denier who works for the richest man on Earth, who is a Nazi
rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social
People shocked by this statement are likening it to one made by fascist dictators. It's worse: this is the self-justification used by terrorists everywhere:
Billy Bragg
I’m in Munich and people keep asking me to decode Vance’s speech. OK: In Vance English “free speech” means “Let Musk run your elections” and “democracy” means “let Russia run your elections.” Now move on. 2025 is about what Europeans do, not what Americans say.
Timothy Snyder
The Musk-Vance administration is resegregating the federal government at home, then going to Munich and telling the Germans they need to allow Nazis into the government. This is a fascist movement and we need media not afraid to use the proper words for what is happening.
Dante Atkins
Our nation's federal employees are more than just numbers on a spreadsheet.
They make sure we have clean water.
They protect us from financial fraud.
They provide healthcare to our communities.
They make our government actually work for people.
Do not forget this.
Robert Reich
Did you know the most powerful force for climate action is LOVE — for our children, their future, and the world they’ll inherit? That's right! Research shows this message moves hearts 12x more than jobs and 2x more than extreme weather:
Katharine Hayhoe
They are laying off 1 in 5 of the people who manage the Pacific Northwest power grid — even though tax dollars don’t pay for it. (We do, through our utility rates, which aren’t going down.)
Craig Welch
They’re fighting against racial equity. They’re literally saying don’t treat people equally. And somehow media just keeps repeating “DEI”, like wtf
Erin Maye Quade
One enduring problem with the American electorate is how millions of people convinced themselves the government plays no role in their economic situation except to tax and to hinder them while giving money to undeserving people.
Max Kennerly
It should go without saying, but perhaps not: Removing uncomfortable histories because they fail to glorify the dominant group in power is not the sign of a healthy and free society.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones.bsky.social
This is an administration led by people who view numerous other people here and abroad as human dirt. That’s it. An objective analysis of the matter
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social
After a decade of right-wing fools yelling about “cancel culture,” “free-speech,” and an (imaginary) threat of left-wing censorship, the first thing they do when the get power is ban talking about anything that hurts their little feelings.
Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social
Musk has so much conflict of interest with adversary countries that he wouldn't pass the first background check for a project manager job at some defense subcontractor.
Jean-Marc Liotier
going back in time to tell myself this image is going to end the human race:
Amy Ash @lolennui.bsky.social
Seven years on from when the then-schoolgirl Greta Thunberg first began her simple call for action on climate change, it's remarkable - and so telling - that she is *still* living rent free in the minds of some of the world's most privileged and powerful men
Leo Hickman
The Department of Government Efficiency isn't interested in efficiency. Or transparency, or cutting costs. Its real goal is to destroy the federal civil service. In other words, regime change.
Anne Applebaum
What these nihilistic vandals are doing to dismantle science and medicine—generations of expertise and public service and life improving benefits — is cultural revolution level national self harm. No foreign foe could inflict such brutal damage & senseless suffering on US so fast and effectively and unresisted.
Philip Gourevitch
Trump and Musk are “shrinking” government like cutting off limbs and calling it “weight loss”
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com
Tip for Democratic pols: About 40 percent of Americans will get cancer sometime in their lifetimes. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. Did Trump voters angry about the price of supermarket goods really vote to let Elon Musk and Doge hand a victory to cancer?
Helaine Olen
omgisme @omgisme.bsky.social
republican governments thinking the "department of energy" is about oil drilling and installing solar panels and not the agency that controls the nuclear weapons stockpile is one of the funniest running subplots in american politics
mtsw
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