Elon Musk Is Trying to Get Control of Key Payment System—at Any Cost

A top-ranking official in the U.S. Department of the Treasury is resigning after a fight with Elon Musk over a sensitive payment system.

The Washington Post reports that David Lebryk, who has worked in the department for decades and is its longest-serving career official, will depart soon, after conflicting with Musk’s deputies over access to the government’s payment system used to distribute trillions of dollars every year. Until Scott Bessent’s confirmation as treasury secretary on Monday, Lebryk served as acting head of the department.

Musk’s people at his “Department of Government Efficiency” have sought access to the system since the election, the Post reports, and their requests continued after Donald Trump’s inauguration. However, the Treasury’s payment systems have usually only been accessed by a small number of career officials.

The Bureau of Fiscal Service operates the systems, controlling $6 trillion of money disbursement around the country. Tens, and possibly hundreds, of millions of people rely on the systems, which distribute Social Security and Medicare benefits, federal salaries, payments to government contractors, grants, and tax refunds, as well as thousands of other things.

Lebryk joined the department in 1989 as an intern, and has worked for three decades under 11 different treasury secretaries. His departure at this time doesn’t bode well, especially since he served in the previous Trump administration and was praised by Trump’s current deputy treasury secretary, Michael Faulkender, in 2023.

“I could not, to this day, tell you his politics,” said Faulkender, who worked with Lebryk in sending out stimulus payments during the Covid-19 pandemic, an effort Lebryk led. “He always seemed to be relaxed and under control.”

It appears that Musk, while upending the lives of federal workers, is now causing chaos with the U.S. government’s money flow. If federal officials who have served for decades under different presidents, including Trump, see a need to quit, that’s not a good sign for the country.

The Trump administration’s changes to its email settings has federal employees getting endlessly spammed with vulgar content.

When Trump took office, he changed the email system so that every single federal worker could be contacted with one email. People are taking advantage of that. According to online reports, all 13,000 employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, were flooded with spam emails on Thursday.

“I haven’t laughed this hard in weeks. From a Scientology confirmation email to an Important Weather Alert that the next 4 years has a 99% chance of shit showers,” one federal worker wrote on the r/fednews subreddit. “I guess this is what happens when you plug in an unsecured server.”

“Aren’t you tired of working for a complete cunt?” one of the NOAA emails read. “TRUMP TRIED TO SUCK MY COCK,” said another. The email with the subject “Important Weather Alert” read, “The next 4 years has a 99% chance of shit showers. Our president is a retard and his VP is a f—. We’re cooked. Please reply.”

Not everyone is using this basic lack of security oversight for crassness.

“I just sent this email to all 13,000 federal employees of the NOAA lol,” said journalist Ken Klippenstein, sharing an email asking federal workers to subscribe to his newsletter. “The Trump administration’s changes to their communications system made it so literally anyone can blast messages out to the entire agency.”

Trump has yet to comment on the spam emails.

President Donald Trump made his declaration that the tragic midair crash over Reagan National Airport that killed 67 people late Wednesday was the fault of President Joe Biden’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies before he was even briefed by the chief agency responsible for investigating the tragedy.

Hours after his initial comments, Trump was in the Oval Office Thursday signing another executive order, this time on aviation safety, linking DEI initiatives to the deadly accident.

The order called for a total review of “all hiring decisions and changes to safety protocols” made during the Biden administration, while also alleging the former president “egregiously rejected merit-based hiring, requiring all agencies to implement dangerous ‘diversity equity and inclusion’ tactics, and specifically recruiting individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities in the FAA.

“This review shall include a systematic assessment of any deterioration in hiring standards and aviation safety standards and protocols during the Biden administration,” the order read.

But when pressed by reporters during the signing as to whether he legitimately believed that race or gender played into the tragedy, Trump simultaneously refused to disown the prejudiced statement and failed to express confidence in his administration’s own theory.

“It may have, I don’t know,” Trump said. “Incompetence might have played a role, we’ll let you know that.

“You’re talking about extremely complex things, and if they don’t have a great brain—a great power of the brain, they’re not going to be very good at what they do, and bad things will happen,” he added.

A preliminary safety report on the crash by the Federal Aviation Administration found that staffing at the airport’s air traffic control tower was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” relying on one individual instead of two to handle helicopter traffic as well as incoming and departing planes the night of the crash.

That would imply that the fault of the crash was a systemic issue, rather than the intellectual deficit of one individual as Trump suggested.

The National Transportation Safety Board did not have the opportunity to brief Trump until midafternoon. By then, Trump had already blamed DEI for the crash. He signed the executive order shortly after the briefing, despite the fact that the NTSB had warned it wasn’t yet able to determine what had caused the crash.

“Our investigating team will be on scene as long as it takes in order to obtain all the perishable evidence and all the fact finding that is needed to come to a conclusion of probable cause,” NTSB Board Member Todd Inman told reporters Thursday afternoon. “Since we’re just beginning our investigation, we don’t have a great deal of information to share right now.

“Our goal is to have a preliminary report within 30 days,” Inman added.

A U.S. military Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger plane collided above Reagan National Airport just outside of Washington. The plane, a Bombardier CRJ700 regional jet operated by a subsidiary of American Airlines, was carrying 60 passengers and four crew members at the time of the crash, according to airline CEO Robert Isom.

Critics have pointed to an executive order–initiated federal hiring freeze as a potential tension point for the Federal Aviation Administration, at a time when the vast majority of the country’s air traffic control sites are significantly understaffed.

It is currently not clear whether the freeze directly affected the FAA. The order provided allowances for roles described as “public safety professionals.”

Donald Trump just will not take Wednesday night’s deadly aviation collision seriously.

While signing yet another batch of executive orders on Thursday, the president was asked whether he planned to visit the site of the deadly midair crash between a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight, which killed all 67 people on board the two aircraft.

“I have a plan to visit, not the site, because why don’t you tell me, what’s the site? The water?” Trump said. “You want me to go swimming?”

Trump followed up his flippant response by saying he planned to meet with some of the family members of those who had died in the crash.

The bodies of at least 28 people had been recovered from the Potomac River by Thursday evening, as recovery operations continued, according to the Associated Press.

Earlier on Thursday, Trump had suggested that the Biden administration’s diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring practices were to blame for the crash, specifically pointing to the Federal Aviation Administration’s practice of hiring people with “targeted disabilities.” The FAA published a report contradicting this outlandish and unserious claim, saying that staffing in the air traffic control tower was “not normal” on Wednesday night when the crash occurred.

It’s also worth noting that Trump went on television to speak about the crash hours before he had actually briefed on the incident. Meanwhile, National Transportation Safety Board member Todd Inman said Thursday it is too early to tell what exactly caused the crash.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday slammed Trump’s claims that diversity, equity, and inclusion caused the deadly plane crash that killed 67 people near Washington, D.C.—and is drawing attention to the fact that Trump eliminated members of a key aviation safety committee just days before this disaster.

“The FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website,” Trump said earlier in the day, alluding to this program as the reason for the crash. “Can you imagine?”

AOC responded on X. “I represent LaGuardia Airport as well as workers for JFK. Trump gutted the Aviation Safety committee last week,” she wrote. “Air traffic controllers—already understaffed—got Trump’s ‘buyout’ this week with a 1 week ultimatum to decide. It’s not DEI—it’s him. And Elon too.”

Trump is pointing the finger at aviation workers of color or people with disabilities, while ignoring the fact that he fired the directors of the TSA and the coast guard, and killed the Aviation Security Advisory Committee—all last week. The FAA chief resigned on Trump’s first day in office, thanks to pressure from Elon Musk, leaving the federal aviation agency without a leader during this crisis. It’s also being reported that Trump’s hiring freeze led to the FAA being seriously understaffed when it comes to air traffic controllers.

Trump has since doubled down on his absurd claims that DEI somehow did this.

Elon Musk’s next target in the federal government is its buildings.

The tech CEO and fascism enthusiast reportedly spent Thursday afternoon in the General Services Administration’s headquarters and met with the agency’s acting administrator, The New York Times reports. The GSA manages federal offices and acts as the government’s procurement arm.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has focused on terminating the leases of “mostly empty offices,” and this week touted its termination of three leases in a post on X.

“These are the first steps to right size the Federal real estate portfolio of more than 7,500 leases,” the pseudo-agency posted. And buildings may only be Musk and DOGE’s first target at the GSA: It also provides tech and contracting services for the federal government.

DOGE has already put the screws to federal employees in a takeover of the Office of Personnel Management, installing some of his own people at the agency that manages the entire civil service. The same is taking place at the GSA. The agency’s engineers were told to submit a recent “technical win” to Thomas Shedd, a Tesla engineer who was named the GSA’s director of “Technology Transformation Services,” according to the Times.

A Musk executive from his Boring Company start-up, Steve Davis, has a leading role in DOGE and has focused on the GSA. Previously, Davis assisted with Musk’s cost-cutting at X (formerly Twitter) and oversaw layoffs at the social media company, as his wife Nicole Hollander managed cuts to X’s real estate assets. Now, the pair have GSA email addresses, the Times reports.

Musk’s efforts to slash the federal workforce by copying a plan he used at X and forcing government employees to work in-person is already backfiring, with government employees trashing the plan and vowing to stay at their jobs. If most federal employees stay at their jobs and comply with the return-to-office order, DOGE’s quest to reduce federal office leases would undoubtedly create a space concern.

Musk and Trump’s DOGE efforts have run into issues as well, as efforts to collect federal employee data have been hit with a lawsuit over privacy concerns. Since the tech mogul’s track record involves taking action first and then worrying about laws and regulations, his real estate efforts will probably cause government headaches pretty soon.

Donald Trump is officially waging war on publicly funded journalism.

In a letter to PBS and NPR, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr announced that he was launching an investigation into the news organizations’ member stations, The New York Times reported Thursday.

“I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing Commercials,” Carr wrote in the letter. “In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.

“To the extent that these taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements, then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars,” Carr wrote.

Both NPR and PBS seem game for review.

“We are confident any review of our programming and underwriting practices will confirm NPR’s adherence to these rules,” said NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher in a statement Thursday. “We have worked for decades with the F.C.C. in support of noncommercial educational broadcasters who provide essential information, educational programming, and emergency alerts to local communities across the United States.”

In its own statement, PBS stood by its “noncommercial educational programming” and said it had worked “diligently to comply with the F.C.C.’s underwriting regulations.”

But attacking publicly funded media is all part of Trump’s master plan.

Project 2025, the authoritarian playbook for Trump’s second administration, called for the government to strip noncommercial education stations of their federal funding and licenses. Carr actually wrote the manifesto’s chapter on overhauling the FCC. After Trump announced Carr’s nomination, Carr pledged that the FCC under Trump “will enforce” laws that ensure media organizations act “in the public interest.”

Trump himself has repeatedly called to strip major broadcasters of their licenses whenever they fact-check him on his easily disproven lies. Publicly funded media, such as NPR, is no exception to Trump’s wrath.

In April, Trump declared in a Truth Social post that there would be “NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM!

“THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!” he wrote.

Earlier this month, MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene threatened to drag PBS before Congress so they could testify on their accurate reporting on Elon Musk’s apparent Sieg Heil.

RFK Jr. had no good explanation during his Senate confirmation hearing Thursday for his past peddling of dangerous, anti-Black misinformation about how white people and Black people process vaccines.

Senator Angela Alsobrooks, Maryland’s first Black senator, asked Kennedy about his previous comments, made in a 2021 interview. “You said the following, and I quote: ‘We should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites because their immune system is better than ours.’ Can you please explain what you meant?”

Kennedy immediately began to flail. “There’s a series of studies, most of them by Poland, that show that there are particular antigens that … Blacks have a much stronger reaction. There’s differences in reactions to different products by different race …”

‘I have 17 seconds left, so let me just ask you, so what different vaccine schedule would you say I should have received?” Alsobrooks asked, removing her glasses. “What different vaccine schedule should I have received?”

“I mean … the Poland article suggests that Blacks need fewer antigens …”

“Mr. Kennedy with all due respect, that is so dangerous,” said Alsobrooks. “Your voice would be a voice that parents would listen to, that is so dangerous. I will be voting against your nomination because your views are dangerous to our state and to our country.”

Alsobrooks is right. Experts say there is no validity to the study RFK Jr references. And furthermore, racial bias in pain diagnosis, or the assumption that Black people are inherently stronger or more tolerable to pain, has been hurting Black Americans for decades.

A preliminary report on Wednesday night’s plane and helicopter collision near Washington, D.C. contradicts Donald Trump’s favorite DEI scapegoat.

An internal report from the Federal Aviation Administration found that in reality, the tower’s staffing at Ronald Reagan National Airport (DCA) was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” according to The New York Times. There was only one air traffic controller to handle both helicopters and planes in the airport’s vicinity, a job usually assigned to two people.

Having to handle both types of air traffic can be complicated, the Times report states, because air traffic controllers can use different radio frequencies for helicopter and airplane pilots. In such cases, while the controller is communicating with pilots of both kinds of aircraft, the pilots may not be able to talk to one another.

Staffing levels at the airport’s control tower have been below adequate levels for years, like many of the U.S.’s other airports. DCA’s tower only had 19 fully certified controllers as of September 2023, according to congressional reports. This is well below the FAA and air traffic controller union’s preferred number of 30, and is due to employee turnover and budget cuts, according to the Times.

As a result, many air controllers at the airport work up to 10 hours a day and six days a week. Those levels probably have not been helped by Donald Trump’s federal hiring freeze, his gutting of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and the FAA chief’s resignation at Elon Musk’s behest. As much as Trump and the right might try to blame DEI or something else ludicrous, perhaps they should look in the mirror.

Robert F. Kennedy attempted Thursday to score a cheap political point against Senator Bernie Sanders by accusing the independent Vermont lawmaker of being bought out by the pharmaceutical industry—but he got his facts wrong.

“And by the way, Bernie, the problem of corruption is not just in the federal agencies. It’s in Congress too,” Kennedy said. “Almost all the members of this panel, including yourself, are accepting millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry and protecting their interests.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no,” Sanders said, raising his hand to quiet the applause that erupted from the gallery. “I ran for president like you. I got millions and millions of contributions. They did not come from the executives; not one nickel of PAC money from the pharmaceutical industry. They came from the workers.”

Sanders’s financial support from the health care industry stemmed from everyday workers, galvanized by his campaign promises of Medicaid for all and large-scale pharmaceutical reform.

“In 2020 you were the single largest receiver of pharmaceutical money,” Kennedy again insisted.

“Because I had more contributions from workers all over this country. Workers, not a nickel from corporate PACs,” Sanders continued, before he was cut off again by Kennedy, reiterating his point.

“Bernie, you were the single largest acceptor of pharmaceutical dollars. $1.5 million,” Kennedy said.

“Yeah, out of $200 million,” Sanders said, before reminding Kennedy that he had deflected from answering a question as to whether, under the “Make America Healthy Again” banner and as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, he would “guarantee health care to every single American.”

But Kennedy never had to answer that. Instead, Senator Markwayne Mullin interjected that Sanders had gone over his allotted time and was “battering the witness.”

Quiver Quantitative, a financial technology startup that provides data on insider trading and campaign contributions, listed no corporate PAC donors for Sanders—let alone any within the folds of the pharmaceutical industry. The company noted, however, that they do not currently track donations by industry employees.

Kennedy, meanwhile, has seemingly made a business out of his extreme public health stances. A disclosure form filed for his nomination revealed that the outspoken vaccine critic pulled in roughly $10 million over the last year related to dividends from his vaccine lawsuits, anti-vax speaking fees, and leading Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit dedicated to spreading misinformation about vaccine efficacy.