Opinion | Trump’s Gulag Archipelago (Gift Article) Trump is seeking to establish a truly chilling proposition: that no one can stop his administration from imprisoning anyone it wants, anywhere in the world.

If Trump is allowed to use the Alien Enemies Act to swiftly deport someone to a prison in El Salvador without due process…
…HE COULD DO IT TO A US CITIZEN.

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/o...

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Eliminate income tax on social security benefits?

That would cause the social security trust fund to run dry even sooner.

50% of the taxes on social security benefits contribute to the social security trust fund, and for high earners, another 35% go to the Medicare system.

Opinion | How DOGE is making government almost comically inefficient It’s as though “efficiency” isn’t the actual goal.

more here: wapo.st/4kLpNcW

Why the Pentagon Scuttled Its Briefing of Elon Musk on China War Plans (Gift Article) “You wouldn’t show it to a businessman,” President Trump said in denying that Elon Musk was to be briefed on top-secret plans in the event of war with China.

But then Musk tweeted that whoever leaked what the meeting was really going to be about will be found and punished.
These idiots cannot even keep their stories straight.
At least Trump did admit it would have been a conflict of interest…

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/u...

News organizations reported that Musk asked the pentagon for a briefing on war plans regarding China – and they agreed to do it.

Well, the news reports caused a ruckus, and Trump (and his lackey Hegseth) said “No, the meeting is only about efficiency”

Decades Ago, Columbia Refused to Pay Trump $400 Million (Gift Article) A quarter-century ago, the university was looking to expand. It considered, and rejected, property owned by Donald Trump. He did not forget it.

Why did Trump choose to beat up Columbia University?
Decades Ago, Columbia Refused to Pay Trump $400 Million
A quarter-century ago, the university was looking to expand. It considered, and rejected, property owned by Donald Trump.
He did not forget it.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/n...

• At the Pentagon, all this talk of warfighter ethos, and our ‘priority’ is making sure there are no three-year-old tweets with the word ‘diversity’ in them. Crazy town!

• Many have had to ignore their actual jobs in order to scrub words from official documents.
• Routine tasks take longer to complete, grinding down worker productivity, while DOGE bogs workers down with meaningless busy work, which sets them up to be punished for neglecting their actual duties.

• Federal surveyors at the Bureau of Land Management are no longer allowed to buy replacement equipment, so when a shovel breaks, they can’t simply replace it; they have to locate a manager authorized to file an official procurement form and order one.

For example:

• Internal Revenue Service employees line up at shared computers on Mondays to submit their “five things I did last week” emails to DOGE while taxpayer service calls go unanswered.

This from Heather Cox Richardson yesterday:
The ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ is making the federal government almost comically inefficient.

DHS shuts down internal watchdog agencies that advocated for immigrants The three agencies had about 300 employees and investigated complaints, including about detention conditions and delays in processing green-card and citizenship applications.

Civil rights stand in the way of Trump’s plans
DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin confirmed that the agency has ordered a “reduction in force” for the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which they say is a “roadblock” to Trump’s goals.

wapo.st/4hvQCiw

This is extremely bad. There is absolutely no need for this. Not only is it a huge security exposure, but the simplest explanation for this is that it is meant to be a security exposure.”

Waldo Jaquith, who worked for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under Obama & who specializes in best practices for government procurement of custom software, posted: “I'm the guy who used to oversee the federal government's agency IT telecommunications contracts.

although because of security concerns, individuals typically cannot simply give technology to the government.

And maybe those two things go hand in hand. Maggie Haberman, Kate Conger, Eileen Sullivan, and Ryan Mac of the New York Times reported today that Starlink has been installed across the White House campus. Officials say that Musk has “donated” the service,

“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” he wrote.

When Evan Feinman, who directed the $42.5 billion rural broadband program, left his position on Friday, he wrote an email to his former colleagues warning that there would be pressure to turn to SpaceX’s Starlink for internet connection in rural areas.

Those installations seem designed to make the U.S. air traffic control system dependent on SpaceX, whose equipment has not gone through strict U.S.-government security and risk-management review.

Musk is forcing his StarLink into our federal infrastructure
Although the government awarded Verizon a $2.4 billion contract to upgrade the Federal Aviation Administration’s communications network, Musk has instructed his SpaceX company to install its equipment in that network.

Trump says he’s “remaking the US economy” …
that the job growth under Biden was all low-value government employees, and he’s pushing those folks out, so we’ll get real job growth in the private sector.

The claim that job growth under Biden was mainly government employment is completely false.

It's a shutdown that would enable Trump and Musk Angry progressives claim the GOP CR enables Trump. That's backwards.

These "lowlife cowards" didn't walk into Musk's trap and saved us a whole lot of pain.

edspire.substack.com/p/its-a-shut...

Trump is not only out to destroy our federal government, he’s out to destroy our judiciary as well.

Mizelle: “We now have an unelected federal judge who has ‘hired’ more executive branch employees than President Trump. This is a judicial power grab. Plain and simple.”

• DOJ chief of staff Chad Mizelle, who has been moonlighting as acting associate attorney general, raged on social media about the court order to reinstate fired federal workers:

• Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a press release accusing the federal judge who blocked Trump’s deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of supporting terrorists: “Tonight, a DC trial judge supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans.”

Trump DOJ Leads the Attack on Federal Judges
As the right-wing backlash against court rulings adverse to President Trump gains steam, top Trump DOJ officials are fanning the flames:

One responsible GOP senator told Schumer that if we shut the government down, the congressional GOP leadership would just keep it shut down as long as it takes for Trump and Musk to fire all no-essential workers.

But when there is no budget law in effect, Trump has no legal authorization - or requirement - to spend anything: he can legally do whatever he wants.
We can’t get a court injunction to make him follow a budget law when there is no budget law in effect.