Trump just issued an EO banning transgender care for minors which, first of all, you can't do with an EO, but laws don't matter at this point.
Anyway it was great how Dems insisted trans people and trans issues were "a distraction" during election season when attacking trans people is clearly a central plank of the fascist program. Sigh.
Yeah, I was reading about that. The funding review is just a review. It's not empowered to "freeze" anything. So making a new statement that the freeze is still going to happen is scare tactics, because the ONLY thing endorsing the freeze is the (now-rescinded) memo. Do I believe they are intentionally sowing confusion so nobody can be sure exactly what they're doing? Absolutely.
That's just one article of several. Bottom line, multiple agencies are reporting that he is sending his lackeys in to boss people around and generally sow chaos.
Elon Musk has no official power, which is what is actually empowering him to wreak havoc because there are no accountability structures in place. As long as Trump doesn't care, Musk can do whatever the hell he wants.
Quote:According to the same sources, other people at the top of the new OPM foodchain include two people with apparent software engineering backgrounds, whom WIRED is not naming because of their ages. One, a senior advisor to the director, is a 21-year-old whose online resume touts his work for Palantir, the government contractor and analytics firm cofounded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who is its chairman. (The former CEO of PayPal and a long-time Musk associate, Thiel is a Trump supporter who helped bankroll the 2022 Senate campaign of his protege, Vice President JD Vance.) The other, who reports directly to Scales, graduated high school in 2024, according to a mirrored copy of an online resume and his high school’s student magazine; he lists jobs as a camp counselor and a bicycle mechanic among his professional experiences, as well as a summer role at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company.
This is real fucking bad, and also straight out of the fascist playbook.
Peter Thiel is also one of the top 5 most evil people alive today.
Going after OPM and GSA and pretty much taking over all the "infrastructure" that lets executive agencies operate. Absolutely no way this is being done to "reform" them. They might be kept around a while for appearances but you don't hand this shit to a trillionaire for a good time.
Elon now probably has access to all treasury payments. There's a lot of chatter on r/fednews but tbh I can no longer keep up with what's real and what's just terrified conjecture.
This could be their workaround for getting blocked on the federal grant freeze?
More like crapitalism, am I right ladies? - Karl Marx
Yeah, that's exactly what's going on. They might be lying about how much they've been able to do but their intention is to have full control over all federal spending, at the source.
No one fighting this is very bad. Suppose a court says they can't do this, either. Then you get one of two situations: nobody does anything and this just continues, or you have a hairy situation where law enforcement of some kind (who? I dunno) has to enforce it, and the military could be deployed by Trump to prevent them. Or it could be vice versa. Congress would be compelled to impeach over this but lol. They're on board.
USAID is being shut down if nothing is done to stop it. This is blatantly illegal but who's gonna enforce it? Even a judge saying "you can't do that" doesn't mean anyone enforces it.
It should surprise nobody that Musk hates USAID because it was instrumental in ending apartheid in South Africa.
Additionally, controlling the Treasury payments system means that he now controls $6 trillion in annual federal disbursements. It is clear that what they cannot do by law, they will do by decree. Congress won't do anything.
At times, Republicans have worried about presidents seizing too much power, because it weakens Congress. This time, they are fully on board, and you have to assume it's because they don't expect there to be a meaningful Congress in a few years. All power will be exercised by the president, who will always be a fascist, and the other branches will be subservient if they cooperate, ignored (or destroyed) if they don't.
Do we have any reliable sources for keeping track of what Musk is actually doing with his Treasury access? I have a vested interest in having some kind of heads up if certain grants are frozen.
I don't think people are understanding how quickly things can collapse if federal payments are stopped. Even if SSA benefit payments, FAFSA, and SNAP payments continue, halting funding to state governments, non profits, and research would effectively make millions of people unemployed overnight and halt many social services. The job market is already bad, and thousands or millions of federal, state, and private nonprofit employees will be added to those looking for work. At that point, we have more issues than high unemployment; social services, already insufficient, either cease to exist or are effectively buried. Millions of people lose their jobs, homes, and assets.
The only macabre silver lining in this potentiality is that, as in 2020 when a large reduction in the workforce meant a lot of people suddenly had a lot of time on their hands and we saw the largest continuous protests in American history, that a similar thing might happen now. Of course, 2020 ended up being largely materially ineffective at changing systemic police brutality, and I think people learned from that too -- protests as we know them do not meaningfully change anything. Alternative tactics must be explored.
So really, I don't think any of us know what will happen. There are so many what-ifs and threats and unprecedented action that it's difficult to predict what we will need to face, or respond to.
More like crapitalism, am I right ladies? - Karl Marx
(02-03-2025, 06:32 PM)antipelican Wrote: Do we have any reliable sources for keeping track of what Musk is actually doing with his Treasury access? I have a vested interest in having some kind of heads up if certain grants are frozen.
I don't think anyone knows yet. Odds are we will hear about it as people stop getting payments. There's zero transparency happening here.
I would say anyone who can make contingency plans about these funds, should start doing so.
Quote:I don't think people are understanding how quickly things can collapse if federal payments are stopped. Even if SSA benefit payments, FAFSA, and SNAP payments continue, halting funding to state governments, non profits, and research would effectively make millions of people unemployed overnight and halt many social services. The job market is already bad, and thousands or millions of federal, state, and private nonprofit employees will be added to those looking for work. At that point, we have more issues than high unemployment; social services, already insufficient, either cease to exist or are effectively buried. Millions of people lose their jobs, homes, and assets.
Oh, this is fucking terrifying. I agree, people are just kinda shrugging at something would be completely apocalyptic for this country. Like, Great Depression bad. And even if it was reversed quickly, even if it only happened for a few weeks, it would be months or years before any kind of return to "normal." (And "normal" is not great now either, as you said.)
Quote:The only macabre silver lining in this potentiality is that, as in 2020 when a large reduction in the workforce meant a lot of people suddenly had a lot of time on their hands and we saw the largest continuous protests in American history, that a similar thing might happen now. Of course, 2020 ended up being largely materially ineffective at changing systemic police brutality, and I think people learned from that too -- protests as we know them do not meaningfully change anything. Alternative tactics must be explored.
This time around they are risking pissing off a hell of a lot more people. I hope that adds up to something.
Quote:So really, I don't think any of us know what will happen. There are so many what-ifs and threats and unprecedented action that it's difficult to predict what we will need to face, or respond to.
Yeah, especially since they are going out of their way not to tell us what exactly they are up to. It's a very dynamic situation and we're facing disruptions that could collapse the whole economy or at least large segments of it, to say nothing of the human cost. Even just shuttering USAID, it would not be hyperbole to say there are countries who governments might collapse as a result, producing millions of refugees and regional instability for years or longer.
Inbound parcels from China are now being rejected by the USPS. Letters are unaffected but this is obviously a tactic to kill Temu and Shein.
Trump endorsed ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip. There's really no other way to put it. He specifically said the US should take it over and Palestinians should leave. True to his absurd persona, his vision for Gaza is some kind of resort.
Trump tracking thread / general hell thread
