Washington didn't wreck DOGE. Elon Musk did.
As Elon Musk departs Washington, his mood resembles his Cybertruck: ugly and adolescent.
First, during an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum, when pressed about his anemic results at budget-cutting, Musk told his interviewer, Bloomberg's Mishal Husain, that she sounded like an 'NPC' (a non-player character in a video game) who was 'trapped in the dialogue tree of a conventional journalist.'
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Boston Globe
29 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Mexico's president defends first judicial election despite low turnout and democratic criticism
Nevertheless, Sheinbaum called the voting 'a complete success.' 'Mexico is the most democratic country in the world,' she added. Advertisement Experts warned of startling low turnout in the lead-up to the historic election because of the mindboggling array of unfamiliar choices and the novelty of voting for judges. Experts say those factors may throw into question the legitimacy of the election, which has faced months of fierce scrutiny. Instead of judges being appointed on a system of merit and experience, Mexican voters cast ballots to choose between around 7,700 candidates vying for Sheinbaum, a member of Mexico's ruling party, Morena, rejected the criticisms and insisted the election would only make Mexico more democratic and root out corruption in a system that most people in the country believe is broken. Morena Advertisement The president on Sunday said that those who said that Mexico was falling into authoritarianism 'are lying.' And on Monday, she doubled down on that message. 'If the objective was to control the courts, why would we hold an election?' she said. She added that if they had wanted to seize control of the courts, they would have simply done what former President Ernesto Zedillo did 30 years ago when he used a decree to expel judges from the Supreme Court and fill it with his own picks. While some voters said they felt pushed to vote in an election they felt would determine the fate of the country's democracy, many more expressed a deep sense of apathy, citing disillusionment because of decades of corruption and lack of basic information about the vote. 'I'm not interested [in voting]. Parties and their messages — they come and they go. It's all the same,' said Raúl Bernal, a 50-year-old factory worker in downtown Mexico City walking his dog. The extremely low turnout Sunday raised questions of political legitimacy that could weaken the new judicial system, according to Jaime Arellano, academic and former director of the Center for Justice Studies in the Americas, part of the Organization of American States. 'Judicial independence in Latin America is under attack,' Arellano said. Úrsula Indacochea of the Washington-based Foundation for Due Process said that there were two clear signs that justice could be in danger. The first is when politicians begin to attack justice institutions in their public discourse, saying there is a problem and then presenting themselves as the solution. Advertisement The second is when governments begin to disobey judicial rulings. Former Mexico president Andrés Manuel López Obrador hammered the nation's judges for years in his daily news briefings, calling them corrupt and cutting their funding. Then, as his party jammed through judicial reform at the end of his term, he ignored court rulings that would have slowed the process, arguing they couldn't be part of the case and independent judges of the facts. While the contexts are different, politicians have undermined judges in Ecuador, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and more recently, the US. The two Latin American countries of the most acute concern are Guatemala, where a 'The case of Guatemala and Peru is the danger of having a sharpshooter, versus in Mexico's case, a machine gun firing into the air,' she said. 'You don't know where those bullets are going to fall, who they will hit, but you know a lot of people are going to be hurt.'
Yahoo
30 minutes ago
- Yahoo
DOGE Fires Operative After He Admits the Government Was Already Pretty Efficient
One of Elon Musk's austerity operatives discovered that the government had far less glut than he'd banked on — and tellingly, admitting as much publicly got him fired. Sahil Lavingia, a tech founder and erstwhile software engineer with Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), revealed in a recent blog post that he had "got[ten] the boot" from the agency after telling Fast Company last month that the federal workforce had turned out to be way more efficient than he anticipated. In that initial interview, the Gumroad founder said he was impressed to find that his coworkers at the Department of Veterans Affairs "love their jobs" and worked hard at them — an honest admission that seems to have cost him his job. Just a day after the FastCo interview was published, Lavigina found that his "access" — to the VA's computer networks, presumably — had been "revoked without warning." "My DOGE days," the jilted techie wrote, "were over." Lavigina also revealed in the blog post, which detailed his 50-day tenure at the agency, that he didn't end up getting much done — a slap in the face to the agency's mandate to save taxpayer dollars and abolish the "tyranny of bureaucracy," as Musk put it earlier this year. "I didn't make any progress on improving the [user experience] of veterans' filing disability claims or automating/speeding up claims processing, like I had hoped to when I started," the former DOGE staffer lamented. "I built several prototypes, but was never able to get approval to ship anything to production that would actually improve American lives — while also saving money for the American taxpayer." He also suggested that DOGE staffers were more like middle managers than actual workers. "DOGE was more like having McKinsey volunteers embedded in agencies rather than the revolutionary force I'd imagined," the fired engineer recounted in reference to the McKinsey Corporation, the management consulting firm that allegedly fixed bread prices and formerly employed presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. "The public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible," he continued. "In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the 'fall guy' for unpopular decisions." It sounds a lot like DOGE jobs are the ultimate a waste of time and taxpayer money — though thankfully, Lavigina volunteered to work there for free. More on DOGE: There's Apparently Some Serious Drama Brewing Between Elon Musk's DOGE and Trump's MAGA
Yahoo
30 minutes ago
- Yahoo
'Grotesque': Husband-wife insurance execs earn more than $50 million in 2 years
A Florida insurance company's husband-and-wife team of top executives earned pay in 2023 and 2024 that totaled more than $50 million, according to federal filings. Tampa-based Slide Insurance Company, the state's sixth largest insurance company, which started operations in 2022, paid its CEO Bruce Lucas $21 million last year, more than all other Florida insurance companies except for one. And Slide's COO Shannon Lucas made $16.5 million that same year, according to a May 23 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, first reported in the Insurance Journal. Meanwhile, national insurers' CEOs such as top executives at Liberty Mutual and Progressive, are making less than Shannon Lucas in total compensation, the article notes. The pair earned $12.6 million in 2023. The public filing has sparked condemnation and calls for more reform from a few quarters. The Insurance Journal highlighted how Slide founder and CEO Bruce Lucas, who left Heritage Insurance Company in 2021, is making nearly five times his successor at that Deerfield Beach-based insurer he helped co-found in 2012. Current Heritage CEO Ernie Garateix made $4.3 million in 2024, the Insurance Journal reported. Douglas Heller, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America, called the compensation package, 'grotesque,' especially considering Florida's insurance woes due to its vulnerability to catastrophic hurricanes. Also problematic for Heller: how much of the start-up's business came from policyholders essentially forced to take Slide Insurance because Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-backed insurer of last resort, wanted to pare its rolls. Citizens' policyholders can be forced to take a policy from a commercial insurer should the policy cost within 20% of what the estimated Citizens' policy would have renewed at. Slide, from 2023, when it started taking Citizens' policyholders, to the end of May 2025 has assumed a total of 232,901 policies that were under Citizens, according to information on the state-backed insurer's website. Slide currently has 343,000 policies in force, according to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. The Washington-based consumer education and research organization that's more than 50 years old has found that residents in most Florida zip codes are paying the highest premiums in the country, Heller said The compensation for Slide's executives, Heller said, is 'just shocking and should offend the sensibilities not just of every policyholder who pays premiums to Slide, but every politician who created the conditions for Slide to move in, take all these policies and vacuum up this for their personal windfall.' More: Hope for legislative property insurance fix dimming as Legislature enters second half Slide Insurance officials did not return an email seeking comment, but industry officials have long pointed out that Florida's insurance industry is one of the most heavily regulated in the state. Insurance companies that want to increase their premium rates by 15% more than the previous year company must undergo a public hearing before a panel from the state's Office of Insurance Regulation, justify the increases with historical claims and future risk assessments and then hope for the regulatory body's stamp of approval. Still, Republican Rep. Hillary Cassel, who works as a plaintiff's insurance attorney and introduced legislation this year that would have changed the landscape in which Slide has taken root, said the situation points out exactly why the current set of rules should be modified. Her legislation sought — and ultimately failed — to roll back a 2022 change that made it so that attorney fees, in most cases, would not be added into litigated settlements for policyholders against their insurers. The 2022 tort changes have caused the number of suits against insurers to plummet, and, some say, stem a tide of legal fraud, add up to a healthier insurance market with more consumer choices and slow the premium growth from the crisis of a few years ago when some premiums were tripling. Cassel, however, has said the changes have left Florida homeowners still paying more and with few avenues to hold their insurer accountable. And the Lucases are paying themselves on the backs of Florida policyholders, she said. 'This is exactly the type of egregious behavior that, as the vice chair of the House Insurance & Banking Subcommittee, I am committed to ensuring oversight and transparency into any and all payments … so runaway insurance costs are reined in, claims are paid and Floridian may continue to secure coverage for their property,' Cassel said. More: Report: As insurance market wobbled, some companies paid billions to affiliated firms Cassel's subcommittee was holding an investigation during the last legislative session into insurance company payments, but it did not come to any conclusions about why parent companies of Florida insurers distributed $680 million to shareholders and distributed billions more to company affiliates. The report filed with federal authorities shows that Slide is heavily reliant on reinsurance to pay claims, Heller noted. Reinsurance is what insurers must buy on the global financial markets to fortify their reserves to prepare for when or if a catastrophic level of claims hit. The reinsurance market has improved since the Florida market started wobbling beginning in 2019, but Florida's insurance crisis peaked as the reinsurance market became particularly tight. Reinsurance costs typically account for the largest, single chunk in an insurance premium — about 30% to 50%. 'To be highly reliant on reinsurance that's a real concern, especially in Florida, where the reinsurance market has been extremely volatile, and there's only so much they (Slide) can take out of the Florida reinsurance fund,' Heller said. 'And if you're highly reliant on reinsurance … you could imagine things going south for Slide customers really quickly.' Slide did enter the market at a moment of high risk for Florida insurers: 10 Florida-based insurance companies became insolvent between 1999 and 2023, and some national carriers decreased Florida business. The risk appears to be paying off for Slide: What was left for stockholders after expenses, taxes and costs (commonly known as the profit) grew from $87 million in 2023, its first full year in business, to $201 million in 2024. That's about a 130% growth in net income attributable to common stockholders, according to the federal filing. Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky could not be reached to comment on the filing, and Slide officials did not comment due to the 'quiet period,' according to reporting from the Insurance Journal. This period falls between when the initial public stock offering is registered with the federal government and a month after stock trading begins, to ensure that officers don't release new information that could affect investor decisions. Still, Harold Levy, founder and managing partner of HL Law Group in Fort Lauderdale, which represents insurance policyholders, said the situation sounds like the same old insurance game: deny, delay, defend. 'Further evidence that it is clearly a profitable strategy to take in premiums and not pay claims,' he said, after hearing of Slide's expanding executive compensation and profits. Anne Geggis is the insurance reporter at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach her at ageggis@ support our journalism. Subscribe today This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: 'Grotesque': Married insurance execs earn $50 million in 2 years
