#muskrump smash and grab

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/08/doge-musk-goals/

Washington Post

In chaotic Washington blitz, Elon Musk’s ultimate goal becomes clear

Excerpt:

“In less than three weeks, Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service has followed the same playbook at one federal agency after another: Install loyalists in leadership. Hoover up internal data, including the sensitive and the classified. Gain control of the flow of funds. And push hard — by means legal or otherwise — to eliminate jobs and programs not ideologically aligned with Trump administration goals.


“The DOGE campaign has generated chaos on a near-hourly basis across the nation’s capital. But it appears carefully choreographed in service of a broader agenda to gut the civilian workforce, assert power over the vast federal bureaucracy and shrink it to levels unseen in at least 20 years. The aim is a diminished government that exerts less oversight over private business, delivers fewer services and comprises a smaller share of the U.S. economy — but is far more responsive to the directives of the president.


“Though led by Musk’s team, this campaign is broadly supported by President Donald Trump and his senior leadership, who will be crucial to implementing its next stages.”

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“It’s one thing to trash USAID. In the view Trump and Musk have tried to cement with the public, the benefits go to a bunch of foreigners, often in shithole countries, sometimes to promote DEI. (This of course is total BS. USAID mainly alleviates starvation and disease, and prevents China from dominating the Global South.)

“But it’s something else to destroy the world-class institutions that make America great, to coin a phrase. Even Hitler did not trash German science.”

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“His funding freeze play was supposed to be part of a well-planned, shock-and-awe takeover. The slapdash result suggests that the minds behind MAGA 2.0 are still a slopcore mess.”

Excerpt;

“The original memo said that it sought to end the “use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies,” whatever that means. Follow-up OMB directives over the next few hours tacked on exemptions for some programs but gave no insight into when others would come back online. Lawmakers, especially among Democrats, denounced the moves as illegal and unconstitutional.

“Chaos followed. The federal government disburses trillions of dollars each year to states, counties, cities, tribes, companies, nonprofits, and individuals. Failure to deliver that expected and allocated money would lead to layoffs at a wide range of organizations and businesses, put low-income Americans in dire financial straits, and wreck state and local budgets. “

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Excerpt:

“So far, the administration has framed the foreign-aid pause as temporary. But even if much of USAID’s work is allowed to resume in a few months, the intricate global-health ecosystem being torn apart will not be easily repaired. Famine and disease—two of the issues against which USAID has made the most progress—don’t stop when funding does, and can spread disastrously in even a short window. Prior to the stop-work order, at least 220,000 people worldwide got their HIV medication every day at clinics supported by the U.S. government. Juli Duvall-Jones, who oversees an HIV clinic in eastern Ivory Coast, told me that the pregnant women her clinic serves are no longer receiving their daily treatment, meaning that some children will almost certainly contract HIV during birth or through breastfeeding. People who are exposed to HIV have only 72 hours—less than the amount of time many clinics have now been closed—to begin a medication regimen called post-exposure prophylaxis that can help prevent infection. A pause of any length in USAID-funded anti-HIV efforts will cause more people to contract the disease. Missing doses of treatment can make it less effective. Without treatment, the disease kills young people in about 12 years, and older adults even faster.”

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Excerpt:

“Presidents Trump and Musk have merged their cult followings, attention addictions, conspiratorial mind-sets, disinformation artistry, disdain for the Constitution, talent for apocalyptic marketing and jumping-from-thing-to-thing styles.

“With a pitiless and mindless velocity, they are running roughshod over the government — and the globe.”

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Robert Reich

Excerpt:

“Musk and his rats have nothing whatever to do with rooting out ‘waste and fraud.’ Their real purpose is to usurp Congress’s authority over spending, under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

“If Trump can turn off a spigot on what Congress wants, he has more power to get something back from Congress for turning that spigot on — say, the authority to close down the Labor Department or the EPA or spend more on the border.

“Sure, there’s some waste and fraud in government. That’s why every department had an inspector general to find and stop it — until Trump fired most of them. In addition, before Musk’s rats tunneled into the General Services Administration, accountants oversaw every department’s and agency’s spending.

“In other words, the coup continues.”