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The Senate and the House budgets are different. The Senate wants to cut Medicaid to 72 million and other programs for the poor , while giving tax cuts to the wealthy &Corporations. I say, let the government shutdown on 3/15 when they can’t reconcile the budget. It’s better than allowing Musk to further destroy our institutions.
An Explosion of Lies
The Musk Administration chokes on the truth
FEB 20READ IN APP
Source: Monty Python
On Monday a White House official made an extraordinary declaration. Elon Musk, he said, doesn’t run DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. Why, he doesn’t even work there.
This was obviously a lie, since Donald Trump has repeatedly said that Musk does, in fact, run DOGE. The immediate purpose of the lie may have been to protect Musk from the consequences of a case brought by Democratic attorneys general against DOGE and Musk himself.
But the lie about Musk’s role in DOGE barely registered amid the explosion of lies emanating from Musk and Trump these days, ranging from the claim that Social Security is sending checks to tens of millions of dead people to the claim that Ukraine started a war that, as I hope everyone remembers, began with a Russian attempt to seize Kyiv.
Why the frantic lying? I suspect that it’s because Musk, Trump and their Congressional allies are flailing. I don’t think any past administration has ever failed so thoroughly in its first month.
About DOGE: Until last week DOGE’s efforts mainly came across as sinister — an effort to gain control of federal payments systems, along with the personal information of millions of Americans. That effort remains deeply sinister, and we shouldn’t forget about that menace even as we note just how shambolic the Musk team’s efforts have been on other fronts.
But it has been an extraordinary shambles.
Beginning late last week Trump officials, clearly operating on instructions from DOGE, laid off large numbers of “probationary” federal workers — that is, workers who have been hired relatively recently or, in some cases, have experienced a change in job status (often a promotion!) and as a result have fewer job protections than the rest of the federal work force.
As I wrote the other day, this was mainly austerity theater — an attempt to look strong and decisive, to create the appearance that DOGE was saving lots of money even though it wasn’t. And Musk’s people appear to have believed that these layoffs would have few visible