Latest news with #federalbureaucracy
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Elon Musk departs DOGE with a horrific legacy
Elon Musk's government service has supposedly come to an end, with the billionaire decamping to his company town of Starbase, Texas. Except there he was in the Oval Office on Friday, in a press availability alongside President Donald Trump. Sporting a black eye — given to him by his 5-year-old, he said — Musk grumbled about his time in the nation's capital. 'We became essentially the DOGE bogeyman,' Musk said. 'It just became a bit ridiculous.' That complaint echoed similar comments in his media tour preceding that appearance, as Musk whined about his DOGE stint not turning out quite as triumphantly as he had hoped. 'The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,' he told The Washington Post. 'DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything.' Not only that, 'People were burning Teslas. Why would you do that? That's really uncool.' In other words, his noble effort at reform was undone by the deep state, and all he got for it was a heap of criticism and slumping sales for his car company. Won't somebody pity the billionaire? Musk has teams of acolytes around him who will no doubt be eager to reassure him that if some people in Washington don't adore him, that just means they didn't deserve him in the first place. But in truth, Musk's feelings are irrelevant; what matters is the chaos he brought to the federal government that serves all of us, and the deaths he is at least partly responsible for around the world. The malignancy that is his Department of Government Efficiency project lives on, not only in the cadre of incompetents he has left behind in Washington, but in the spirit of gleeful destruction ever more firmly incorporated into Republican ideology. Musk's time in Washington was characterized by a toxic combination of ignorance, arrogance and malevolence. He didn't know how things worked, wasn't interested in learning and didn't care how many people he would hurt. All of it stemmed from his belief that not only is government incapable of doing anything right, almost everything it tries to do isn't worth doing anyway. So if he had an impression that an agency was bad — say, the U.S. Agency for International Development — what would be the point of learning its goals and methods? Just shut the whole thing down. The demise of USAID is one of the most horrific legacies of Musk's time in Washington. The abrupt cutoff of food aid to vulnerable people around the world 'has destabilized some of the most fragile locations in the world and thrown refugee camps further into unrest,' according to internal State Department documents obtained by ProPublica. The withdrawal of medical assistance — especially through PEPFAR, the spectacularly successful U.S. program that fights the spread of HIV in Africa — is already leading directly to people's deaths, almost certainly by the thousands. Some studies have concluded that hundreds of thousands of people either have died or will die because the U.S. government, at Musk's urging, has all but shut down its foreign humanitarian efforts. The experience of USAID was repeated in agency after agency, often at Musk's whims or to serve Musk's interest. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which used to protect Americans from financial scams, could cause problems for Musk's plans to add payment services to his social media platform X. But now CFPB staff have been sent home, and the agency has essentially ceased to function. We saw a pattern repeated over and over: Musk's DOGE staffers would descend on a government office, demand access to critical systems and start destroying programs they didn't bother to understand. Officials who stood up to them were fired. Contracts were canceled, offices were closed, and people who relied on services were abandoned. That damage can't easily be undone, and even if Musk and some his top lieutenants are gone, their underlings are still in the federal government. And while the shock of what DOGE was doing may have been appalling to most of us, to Republicans in both the executive branch and Congress, it was thrilling (though Republicans on Capitol Hill have been less thrilled about formalizing DOGE's cuts into law). They've now assimilated Musk's ethos as their own: break everything you can see, fire as many committed employees as possible, don't worry about consequences to people's lives, and if what you're doing is illegal, well, maybe the courts will sort that out later. And no, Musk was never going to cut $2 trillion from the budget; the fact that he thought he could just showed how clueless he was. But his contempt for the government and the public servants who work in it was obvious from the outset. He wanted indiscriminate destruction, and he got it. Now he claims to be peeved that the Republican megabill doesn't reduce the deficit, as though that was ever something the GOP cared about. If he's really concerned, perhaps he should use some of his billions to lobby for tax increases on the wealthy. For all his complaints, Musk is getting most of what he really wanted. His time in the government coincided with the Trump administration shutting down many investigations Musk faced over his labor and environmental practices. The administration is also moving to direct billions of dollars in funding meant for rural broadband to his satellite company, and Trump's new idea for a 'Golden Dome' missile defense system looks like a contracting gravy train with Musk's companies in the front car. So why isn't Musk happy? The answer isn't that he didn't succeed, because in most ways he did. What upsets him is this: He didn't just want to lay waste to the government and enrich himself. He wanted to do that and then have us thank him for it. Tell that to a mother watching her child die from malnourishment, or a skilled park ranger who got fired from their dream job, or someone in tornado alley who can't get updated weather forecasts, or AIDS patients who no longer have lifesaving medication. I'm sure they'll be very sympathetic. This article was originally published on
Japan Times
3 days ago
- Health
- Japan Times
On the Trump campaign trail, Elon Musk juggled drugs and family drama
As Elon Musk became one of Donald Trump's closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the U.S. presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according to people familiar with his activities. Musk's drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it. It is unclear whether Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting Cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview. At the same time, Musk's family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews. On Wednesday evening, Musk announced that he was ending his stint with the government, after lamenting how much time he had spent on politics instead of his businesses. Musk and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment this week about his drug use and personal life. He has previously said he was prescribed ketamine for depression, taking it about every two weeks. And he told his biographer, "I really don't like doing illegal drugs.' The White House declined to comment on Musk's drug use. At a news conference with Trump on Friday afternoon, Musk was asked about The New York Times' coverage. He questioned the newspaper's credibility and told the reporter to "move on.' As a large government contractor, Musk's aerospace firm, SpaceX, must maintain a drug-free workforce and administers random drug tests to its employees. But Musk has received advance warning of the tests, according to people close to the process. SpaceX did not respond to questions about those warnings. Musk, who joined the president's inner circle after making a vast fortune on cars, satellites and rocket ships, has long been known for grandiose statements and a mercurial personality. Supporters see him as an eccentric genius whose slash-and-burn management style is key to his success. But last year, as he jumped into the political arena, some people who knew him worried about his frequent drug use, mood swings and fixation on having more children. This account of his behavior is based on private messages obtained by The New York Times as well as interviews with more than a dozen people who have known or worked with him. This year, some of his longtime friends have renounced him, pointing to some of his public conduct. "Elon has pushed the boundaries of his bad behavior more and more,' said Philip Low, a neuroscientist and onetime friend of Musk's who criticized him for his Nazi-like gesture at a rally. And some women are challenging Musk for control of their children. One of his former partners, Claire Boucher, the musician known as Grimes, has been fighting with Musk over their 5-year-old son, known as X. Musk is extremely attached to the boy, taking him to the Oval Office and high-profile gatherings that are broadcast around the world. Boucher has privately complained that the appearances violate a custody settlement in which she and Musk agreed to try to keep their children out of the public eye, according to people familiar with her concerns and the provision, which has not been previously reported. She has told people that she worries about the boy's safety, and that frequent travel and sleep deprivation are harming his health. Another mother, the right-leaning writer Ashley St. Clair, revealed in February that she had a secret relationship with Musk and had given birth to his 14th known child. Musk offered her a large settlement to keep his paternity concealed, but she refused. He sought a gag order in New York to force St. Clair to stop speaking publicly, she said in an interview. A ketamine habit Musk has described some of his mental health issues in interviews and on social media, saying in one post that he has felt "great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress.' He has denounced traditional therapy and antidepressants. He plays video games for hours on end. He struggles with binge eating, according to people familiar with his habits, and takes weight-loss medication. And he posts day and night on his social media platform, X. Musk has a history of recreational drug use, The Wall Street Journal reported last year. Some board members at Tesla, his electric vehicle company, have worried about his use of drugs, including Ambien, a sleep medication. U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk during a news briefing at the White House on Feb. 11. | Eric Lee / The New York Times In an interview in March 2024, journalist Don Lemon pressed him on his drug use. Musk said he took only "a small amount' of ketamine, about once every two weeks, as a prescribed treatment for negative moods. "If you've used too much ketamine, you can't really get work done, and I have a lot of work,' he said. He had actually developed a far more serious habit, The New York Times found. Musk had been using ketamine often, sometimes daily, and mixing it with other drugs, according to people familiar with his consumption. The line between medical use and recreation was blurry, troubling some people close to him. He also took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms at private gatherings across the United States and in at least one other country, according to those who attended the events. The Food and Drug Administration has formally approved the use of ketamine only as an anesthetic in medical procedures. Doctors with a special license may prescribe it for psychiatric disorders like depression. But the agency has warned about its risks, which came into sharp relief after the death of actor Matthew Perry. The drug has psychedelic properties and can cause dissociation from reality. Chronic use can lead to addiction and problems with bladder pain and control. By the spring of last year, Musk was ramping up criticism of President Joe Biden, particularly his policies on illegal immigration and diversity initiatives. Musk was also facing federal investigations into his businesses. Regulators were looking into crashes of Tesla's self-driving cars and allegations of racism at its factories, among other complaints. "There are at least half a dozen initiatives of significance to take me down,' he wrote in a text message to someone close to him last May. "The Biden administration views me as the #2 threat after Trump.' "I can't be president, but I can help Trump defeat Biden and I will,' he added. He publicly endorsed Trump in July. Around that time, Musk told people that his ketamine use was causing bladder issues, according to people familiar with the conversations. On Oct. 5, he appeared with Trump at a rally for the first time, bouncing up and down around the candidate. That evening, Musk shared his excitement with a person close to him. "I'm feeling more optimistic after tonight,' he wrote in a text message. "Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.' "This is not something on the chessboard, so they will be quite surprised,' Musk added about an hour later. "'Lasers' from space.' After Trump won, Musk rented a cottage at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect's Florida resort, to assist with the transition. Musk attended personnel meetings and sat in on phone calls with foreign leaders. And he crafted plans to overhaul the federal government under the new Department of Government Efficiency. Family secrets Musk has also been juggling the messy consequences of his efforts to produce more babies. By 2022, Musk, who has married and divorced three times, had fathered six children in his first marriage (including one who died in infancy), as well as two with Boucher. She told people she believed they were in a monogamous relationship and building a family together. But while a surrogate was pregnant with their third child, Boucher was furious to discover that Musk had recently fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain implant company, Neuralink, according to people familiar with the situation. Musk was by then sounding an alarm that the world's declining birth rates would lead to the end of civilization, publicly encouraging people to have children and donating $10 million to a research initiative on population growth. Privately, he was spending time with Simone and Malcolm Collins, prominent figures in the emerging pronatalist movement, and urging his wealthy friends to have as many children as possible. He believed the world needed more intelligent people, according to people aware of the conversations. Collins declined to comment on his relationship with Musk, but said, "Elon is one of the people taking this cause seriously.' Even as Musk fathered more children, he favored his son X. By the fall of 2022, during a period when he and Boucher were broken up, he began traveling with the boy for days at a time, often without providing advance notice, according to people familiar with his actions. Boucher reconciled with Musk, only to get another unpleasant surprise. In August 2023, she learned that Zilis was expecting a third child with Musk via surrogacy and was pregnant with their fourth. Boucher and Musk began a contentious custody battle, during which Musk kept X for months. They eventually signed the joint custody agreement that specified keeping their children out of the spotlight. By mid-2023, unknown to either Boucher or Zilis, Musk had started a romantic relationship with St. Clair, the writer, who lives in New York City. St. Clair said in an interview that at first, Musk told her he wasn't dating anyone else. But when she was about six months pregnant, he acknowledged that he was romantically involved with Zilis, who went on to become a more visible fixture in Musk's life. St. Clair said that Musk told her he had fathered children around the world, including one with a Japanese pop star. He said he would be willing to give his sperm to anyone who wanted to have a child. "He made it seem like it was just his altruism and he generally believed these people should just have children,' St. Clair said. St. Clair said that when she was in a delivery room giving birth in September, Musk told her over disappearing Signal messages that he wanted to keep his paternity and their relationship quiet. Elon Musk jumps in the air during a rally for Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 5 last year. | Doug Mills / The New York Times On election night, St. Clair and Musk both went to Mar-a-Lago to celebrate Trump's victory. But she had to pretend that she hardly knew him, she said. He offered her $15 million and $100,000 a month until their son turned 21, in exchange for her silence, according to documents reviewed by the Times and first reported by the Journal. But she did not want her son's paternity to be hidden. After she went public in February, ahead of a tabloid story, she sued Musk to acknowledge paternity and, later, to get emergency child support. Musk sought a gag order, claiming that any publicity involving the child, or comments by St. Clair on her experience, would be a security risk for the boy. 'No sympathy for this behavior' Some of Musk's onetime friends have aired concerns about what they considered toxic public behavior. In a January newsletter explaining why their friendship had ended, Sam Harris, a public intellectual, wrote that Musk had used his social media platform to defame people and promote lies. "There is something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality,' Harris wrote. Later that month, at a Trump inauguration event, Musk thumped his chest and thrust his hand diagonally upward, resembling a fascist salute. "My heart goes out to you,' he told the crowd. "It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.' Musk dismissed the resulting public outcry, saying he had made a "positive gesture.' Low, who is chief executive of NeuroVigil, a neurotechnology company, was outraged by the performance. He wrote Musk a sharp email, shared with the Times, cursing him "for giving the Nazi salute.' When Musk didn't respond to the message, Low posted his concerns on social media. "I have no sympathy for this behavior,' he wrote on Facebook, referring to the gesture as well as other behaviors. "At some point, after having repeatedly confronted it in private, I believe the ethical thing to do is to speak out, forcefully and unapologetically.' The next month, Musk once again found himself under scrutiny, this time for an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington. As he walked onto the stage, he was handed a chain saw from one of his political allies, Javier Milei, the president of Argentina. "This is the chain saw for bureaucracy!' Musk shouted to the cheering crowd. Some conference organizers told the Times that they did not notice anything out of the ordinary about his behavior behind the scenes. But during an onstage interview, he spoke in disjointed bouts of stuttering and laughing, with sunglasses on. Clips of it went viral as many viewers speculated about possible drug use. This article originally appeared in The New York Times © 2025 The New York Times Company
CNN
23-05-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Judge extends block on Trump's mass layoffs at several agencies
A federal judge said late Thursday that she will continue to halt President Donald Trump's orders for mass terminations at several agencies, handing down a preliminary injunction that follows up the temporary restraining order she issued earlier this month. The new order is set to escalate a legal fight that the Justice Department has took to the Supreme Court, in an aggressive maneuver last week that has not yet prompted a response from the high court. The latest ruling from Senior Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco also goes further than the temporary restraining order because she is ordering the reinstatement of employees on administrative leave, although, she has paused that aspect of her order so it can be appealed. The case is a major roadblock in the president's efforts to drastically shrink the federal bureaucracy. Tens of thousands of federal employees have been placed on administrative leave under the actions challenged in the lawsuit, but those terminations will not be finalized while IIlston's order is in effect. The latest order will likely jumpstart the appellate battle over Trump's power to, without Congress's authorization, gut the workforces of agencies across the government. The administration's emergency appeals of her earlier temporary restraining order are pending both at the Supreme Court and the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. However, those appeals courts may have been waiting for a preliminary injunction to intervene, as TROs are only appealable in limited circumstances. Illston, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton , said in the Thursday opinion that the, 'President has the authority to seek changes to executive branch agencies, but he must do so in lawful ways and, in the case of large-scale reorganizations, with the cooperation of the legislative branch.' She foreshadowed her conclusions at a Thursday hearing, telling the lawyers she was likely to grant the order, as the evidence 'strongly suggests' that the executive branch 'usurped the constitutional powers of Congress.' CNN has reached out to the White House for comment on the order. The case revolves around a February executive order from Trump that seeks to conduct a 'critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy' and directives from the Office of Personnel Management and Office of Management and Budget that stemmed from it. Those directives instructed government agencies to submit plans for approval by the offices for mass terminations, known as reductions in force. The challengers in the case – unions, local governments, and outside groups – also targeted the involvement of the Department of Government Efficiency. They argued that the top-down decisions by DOGE, OMB and OPM demanding extensive layoffs and crippling the agencies' operations were unlawful. 'With every move this President is making, we are holding him accountable in court, and seeing judges of all stripes recognize and defend the rule of law,' said Skye Perryman, President & CEO of lead co-counsel Democracy Forward, one of the plaintiffs in the case. 'We will continue to lawyer up and level up to protect the American people and our democracy.' An attorney for the Justice Department argued the plans were just preparatory documents and that the agencies were given discretion to determine how far the cuts could go without interfering with their statutory functions. Danielle Leonard, an attorney for the challengers, countered, 'we don't live in the hypothetical world that government counsel wants to live in.' She pointed to evidence in the case suggesting that OPM and OMB were rejecting proposals from agencies that would have staved off drastic cuts. 'They have taken the decision-making away from the agencies,' she said.
Washington Post
15-05-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
Hundreds of VOA employees set to be axed amid legal fight with Trump
More than 500 Voice of America contractors are expected to lose their jobs June 30 as the U.S.-funded news service continues its legal battle with the Trump administration over the dismantling of VOA's parent agency. 'In accordance with President Trump's executive order dated March 14, we are in the process of rightsizing the agency and reducing the federal bureaucracy to meet administration priorities,' Kari Lake, senior adviser of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, told The Washington Post in an email. 'We will continue to scale back the bloat at USAGM and make an archaic dinosaur into something worthy of being funded by hardworking Americans.'
Bloomberg
25-03-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Job Searches on Indeed Are Surging Among Workers at DOGE Targets
President Donald Trump's campaign to shrink the federal bureaucracy has triggered a wave of job-hunting by workers at targeted agencies, according to a new study by Indeed Hiring Lab. Applications on Indeed's job matching and hiring platform have climbed more than 50% among employees of federal agencies singled out for review by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency — ranging from the US Agency for International Development to the Department of Agriculture — the research shows.
