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The Independent
02-05-2025
- Business
- The Independent
‘Big Balls' finally takes a bow as Musk vows DOGE will keep carving up government
A notorious teenage DOGE staffer known as 'Big Balls' finally revealed himself publicly in a panel discussion with Elon Musk on Fox News Thursday as the crew defended their work dismantling the federal government. 'Who is Big Balls?' host Jesse Watters asked on his program Watters World , surrounded by DOGE members and supporters at a huge oval conference table. 'I am,' piped up 19-year-old DOGE staff member Edward Coristine. 'That should be obvious,' Musk quipped to laughter. 'I just set it [Big Balls] as my LinkedIn username,' said the high school grad. 'People on LinkedIn take themselves like super seriously and are pretty averse to risk, and I was like, I want to be neither of those things,' he explained. 'Honestly, I didn't think anyone would notice.' Coristine, who works in the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Technology, explained he uses 'computer stuff' as he claims to ferret out 'fraud and waste,' the mantra of his boss. He explained, for example: 'You look at a specific line item, $20 million. Okay, what is it going to? For the majority of payment systems it's like, we don't really know.' DOGE critics have argued that the young techie crew's analyses of pay systems demonstrate how little they know about basic bookkeeping and accounting. Another staffer said Thursday that $330 million has been paid to dead people, but DOGE has yet to show evidence of that. The DOGE staffers put on a show of force for Watters even as Musk has left the White House. The tech billionaire insisted his Department of Government Efficiency is not taking 'its eye off the ball' in continued cuts to the federal government. DOGE will remain a 'long-term enterprise,' Musk vowed, even after his role as a 'special government employee' terminates at the end of May. 'It's a long-term enterprise because if we take our eye off the ball, the waste and fraud will come roaring back,' said Musk. 'We're trying to have it be such that the funding is removed, the grants are gone.' Musk has yet to prove he and DOGE cut any waste and fraud, and figures show that he hasn't managed to even reduce spending by the Trump administration. Though an estimated 250,000 jobs have been eliminated by firing or buyouts, and federal agencies, grants, services and contracts have been slashed, Trump administration spending is actually up 6.3 percent (about $153 billion) over the same period last year when President Joe Biden was in office, according to Treasury data. Musk initially promised DOGE would shave $2 trillion from federal spending and debt, but quickly cut that amount in half. Last month he lowered it further to $150 billion, then upped it to $160 billion, a tiny fraction of what he first promised. It's difficult to know how much his Department of Government Efficiency has actually saved, given the error-riddled 'receipts' that have been posted on the DOGE website. Some cuts have cost the government countless dollars, such as firing Internal Revenue Service workers who ferret out tax cheats and collect the taxes that run the nation.
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Who Is Pete Hegseth's Wife Jennifer Rauchet, Star of His New War Plan Leak Scandal?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's wife Jennifer Rauchet has stood by her man through a dizzying array of scandals: cheating, allegations of abuse and now glaring national security breaches. The former Fox News producer is making headlines of her own this week after it was reported she was part of a Signal group chat discussing upcoming strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen. Hegseth had shared 'detailed' information on the March 15 airstrikes before they happened, including flight schedules for the planes, according to The New York Times. His brother and personal attorney were also in the group, which was separate from the one The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to. Before news of the second Signal chat broke, Racuhet had already been raising eyebrows for accompanying Hegseth to high-level meetings at the Pentagon where sensitive military information was discussed, according to the Wall Street Journal. Hegseth and Rauchet met at Fox News when Hegseth was still married to his second wife, Samantha Deering. Rauchet was a producer on Fox and Friends Weekend, where Hegseth was a co-host, and they began an extramarital affair that reportedly led to Rauchet being moved to another Trump-friendly show, Watters World. Their relationship followed something of a pattern; Hegseth had been married to his first wife, Meredith Schwarz, when he began dating Deering, with whom he later had three children. He has admitted to having five affairs during his first marriage. Rauchet became pregnant with Hegseth's child in early 2017, and two months before she gave birth, Hegseth was accused of sexually assaulting a woman at a conference in Monterey. The woman told police she believed Hegseth had drugged and sexually assaulted her on the night of Oct. 7, 2017. Hegseth told an investigator the sex was consensual, but he agreed to pay his accuser $50,000 as part of a confidentiality agreement, he said during his Senate confirmation hearings. He described the case against him as a 'nuisance claim' and said he settled in order to prevent his accuser from trying to tarnish his career at Fox. No charges were ever filed in the case. Six months later, after his daughter with Rauchet had been born, Hegseth was in the middle of a contentious divorce with Deering. His mother Penelope sent him and email calling him 'despicable and abusive.' 'You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth,' she wrote. Penelope has since said she was angry when she sent the email and later apologized for it. The divorce was finalized in July 2018, and in 2019, Hegseth and Rauchet married at Trump National Golf Club in Colts Neck, New Jersey. Before the wedding, they posed in red 'Make Weddings Great Again' hats. He often refers to Rauchet as his 'rock,' according to The Independent. She supported him throughout his contentious Senate confirmation hearing, during which he faced allegations of cheating, alcohol abuse and financially mismanaging two veterans' organizations he'd worked for. As reports of the alleged assault dominated headlines, Rauchet wrote on social media, 'They won't stop with Pete. It's not him they're after. It's your values.'
