Tesla Name Quietly Removed From Federal Contract After Uproar

The State Department was set to buy $400 million worth of armored Teslas from Elon Musk over the next five years. But after a report from Drop Site News on Wednesday exposed the massive conflict of interest, the department quietly deleted the word “Tesla” and changed the $400 million line item to a generic “armored electric vehicles.”

“After @DropSiteNews revealed Tesla was forecast to be given a $400 million contract for “Armored Tesla,” the State Department altered its spreadsheet to obscure Tesla’s role,” Ryan Grim wrote on X. “Metadata shows the spreadsheet was revised several hours after our story published.”

“I’m pretty sure Tesla isn’t getting $400M. No one mentioned it to me, at least,” Musk wrote on X.

The “armored Tesla” notation was made in December 2024, a month after Trump was elected.  

The State Department did not respond to Drop Site News when asked about the sudden edit in the federal contact.

The question then is: Was this just a very dubious mistake? Or a clear cover-up? 

Donald Trump claimed that his phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday would be the beginning of the end for the war in Ukraine—but his former national security adviser doesn’t think so.

Speaking with CNN late Wednesday, John Bolton argued that Putin had made a puppet out of Trump, using basic flattery to warm him up before stripping the U.S. leader’s position apart. Trump had posted on Truth Social following the call that Putin had “used my very strong Campaign motto of, ‘COMMON SENSE.’”

“I think we know exactly what is going to happen,” Bolton told the network. “President Trump has effectively surrendered to Putin before the negotiations have even begun.

“The positions that Defense Secretary [Pete] Hegseth announced in Brussels—which, I’m sure I’d be stunned if Trump didn’t convey them directly to Putin in their phone call—constitute terms of a settlement that could have been written in the Kremlin,” Bolton said, noting that the details of the arrangement were practically Russian propaganda.

“It’s a complete reversal of the U.S. and NATO position on a number of issues; for example, up until today the official American position was that Ukraine should be returned to full sovereignty and territorial integrity. That’s gone,” he said.

“The question of NATO membership, as far back as 2008, had been that ultimately Ukraine would become a member. It doesn’t look like that’s around anymore, either,” Bolton continued.

“This is a palpable harm to American national security, because what Hegseth and Trump did today was not only blow up the NATO position on Ukraine, they blew up a thing called the Belovezha Accords,” Bolton said, referring to the 1991 agreement between three Soviet states that effectively dissolved the Soviet Union by declaring their independence from Moscow, creating the countries of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

“So it means that not only is unprovoked aggression by Russia against Ukraine now OK, every other former Republic in the Soviet Union is vulnerable to the same thing without any indication that the U.S. will do anything about it.”

Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are scheduled to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Munich on Friday to discuss the state of the war. But Bolton believes that Putin is opting to negotiate through Trump because he believes “he’ll get more out of it.”

“And he’s absolutely right,” Bolton said.

The damage to America’s reputation wouldn’t stop in Eastern Europe, according to Bolton, who noted that Beijing would likely be keeping a close eye on how the U.S. reacts to “unprovoked aggression” with regard to Taiwan. Bolton also described new National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, who was confirmed on Wednesday, as “one of [Trump’s] worst nominations,” specifying that her controversial background would make it less likely for America’s allies to be willing to share intelligence with the United States.

Donald Trump bragged Wednesday about how easily he folded to his beloved Russian President Vladimir Putin, after handing the fellow autocrat everything he’d been hoping for.

“I just had a lengthy and highly productive phone call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “We discussed Ukraine, the Middle East, Energy, Artificial Intelligence, the power of the Dollar, and various other subjects.”

The president said that they’d spoken about how many Russians and Americans had been killed during World War II, and the two leaders agreed that they wanted to “stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine.”

“President Putin even used my very strong Campaign motto of, ‘COMMON SENSE,’” Trump gushed.

“We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations,” Trump added. “We have also agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately, and we will begin by calling President Zelenskyy, of Ukraine, to inform him of the conversation, something which I will be doing right now.”

Trump said that he’d instructed Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA director John Ratcliffe, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, and special envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff to lead the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.

Before entering office, Trump had previously claimed that he would end the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours” of being elected president. When pressed in September on his actual plan, Trump said, “I’ll speak to one, I’ll speak to the other, I’ll get ’em together.”

Already, it’s clear that Trump simply intends to give in to Putin’s demands. On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told U.S. allies that liberating all of Russia’s occupied Ukrainian territory was “an unrealistic objective.” He also backed down on the American push to have Ukraine join NATO, in compliance with a long-standing complaint from Putin.

Also on Wednesday, Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed as the director of national intelligence. Gabbard previously faced intense scrutiny for being a Russian stooge, with her own former staffers warning that she often read and shared articles from Russian state media. She also criticized American hostility toward Putin and pushed propaganda about Ukraine.

After Gabbard’s nomination was announced in November, the response in Moscow was “gleeful,” according to The New York Times. Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian newspaper, fawned over Gabbard, reporting that the CIA and FBI were “trembling” in response to her nomination. The article stated that Ukrainians considered Gabbard to be “an agent of the Russian state.”

“Behind closed doors, people think she might be compromised. Like it’s not hyperbole,” one Republican Senate aide told The Hill in December. “There are members of our conference who think she’s a [Russian] asset.”

Gabbard was able to overcome any meaningful skepticism on the part of Republicans, as she was confirmed by every single Republican senator, save one: Senator Mitch McConnell. Now, Moscow can rejoice at the installation of an authoritarian sympathizer in Gabbard, and keep its stolen territory from Ukraine, while shutting the country out of a military alliance.

Even an apparent Trump win—the release of Marc Fogel, an American detained in Russia—was the result of trading a crypto-criminal back to Moscow. Trump previously railed against prisoner exchanges, claiming that they were extortion.

Donald Trump complained about a “new theory” about magnets during a rant about Boeing, while answering questions that were not about magnets or Boeing at all.

After swearing in Tulsi Gabbard Wednesday as his new director of national intelligence, the president embarked on a winding hour-long question-and-answer session with reporters, where he alleged that “billions and billions of dollars” had been “thrown away illegally.”

Trump threw the blame around widely, alleging massive fraud at the Department of Education, until the weave found its way to Boeing, the airplane manufacturer that produces the Boeing 747 the president flies on. Trump spoke at length and to little effect about how he was “not happy about that whole thing.”

“We signed a very strong contract, I signed a guaranteed maximum contract which they haven’t seen in a long time. And they’re saying they’re getting hurt by it,” Trump ranted, saying that Boeing wanted “more money.”

“But they have to produce the product and we expect them to produce the product. They have to produce the product, they agreed to build planes at a certain price,” Trump rambled. “They’re not used to that. They’re used to having time and material contracts where whatever it costs time and material. No dates. No anything. And it ends up costing five times more.”

Trump’s comments about cheaping out on Boeing are particularly disturbing considering recent allegations that the company might have cut corners during the production of its 737 Max 9 planes. In any case, it seems that reflecting about things that end up being more expensive than you might expect sent Trump’s brain careening into one of his old rants about magnets on boats.

“Take a look at the Gerald Ford, the aircraft carrier, the Ford. It was supposed to cost $3 billion. It ends up costing like $18 billion,” Trump said. “And they make, of course, all electric catapults which don’t work.”

The USS Gerald R. Ford actually cost roughly $13 billion to make, and it’s certainly not clear that its Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System doesn’t work. But the president wasn’t done.

“And they have all magnetic elevators to lift up 25 planes at a time, 20 planes at a time. And instead of using hydraulic, like on tractors that can handle anything from hurricanes to lightning to anything, they use magnets,” Trump said.

“It’s a new theory. Magnets are going to lift the planes up, and it doesn’t work. And they had billions and billions of dollars of cost overruns,” he said.

While the production of the ship was delayed and experienced cost overruns, it’s not entirely clear why Trump has decided that the magnets on these ships don’t work. But, he has talked incoherently about this technology before. In January 2024, Trump baselessly claimed that magnets stop working when placed in water, and therefore were a stupid thing to put on a boat. When weaving his way through his grievances, the president’s mind has a tendency to repeat the hits, even the more inane ones.

“You look at the kind of waste, fraud, and abuse that this country is going through. And we have to straighten it out,” Trump concluded.

European leaders are reeling after Trump’s phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding “peace” talks. 

Trump and Putin announced Wednesday that they’d begin talking to deliver an end to the war on Ukraine. The news came as Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, warned NATO on the same day that it could no longer rely on U.S. protection from Russia attacks—and that liberating all of Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine is “unrealistic.” 

Now the news of Trump and Putin putting their heads together to solve this crisis has sent a shudder through Europe, as its leaders fear the “solution” may be exactly what Trump has suggested in the past: Russia will be allowed to continue its invasion unfettered, with no care for the impacts on the rest of the continent.  

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius noted that it was “regrettable” that Hegseth had already professed that there was no way to end the Russian invasion before negotiations even began. 

“In my view, it would have been better to discuss a possible NATO membership for Ukraine or the country’s possible territorial losses only at the negotiating table and not to take it off the table beforehand,” Pistorius said, ahead of a meeting of NATO defense ministers today. 

“There can be no negotiation about Ukraine without Ukraine. And Ukraine’s voice must be at the heart of any talks,” U.K. Defence Secretary John Healey said to reporters at NATO headquarters. 

Lithuanian Defense Minister Dovilė Šakalienė said it would be a “deadly trap” to accept any solution from Trump and Putin. 

“Whether we decide to fall under the illusion that Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin are going to find a solution for all of us, and that would be a deadly trap, or we will, as Europe, embrace our own economic, financial and military capacity,” he told CNN’s Natasha Bertrand.

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy also spoke to Trump on Wednesday and called the discussion “meaningful.” 

“No one wants peace more than Ukraine. Together with the U.S., we are charting our next steps to stop Russian aggression and ensure a lasting, reliable peace. As President Trump said, let’s get it done. We agreed to maintain further contact and plan upcoming meetings.”

Donald Trump’s plan to send undocumented immigrants to Guantánamo Bay has left officials in the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense scrambling and confused trying to prepare the military base to house more immigrants.

CNN reports that DHS and DOD officials are confused about who is in charge and what will happen when migrants arrive at the base. Multiple federal agencies are involved, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol. They all are accustomed to different responsibilities.

“Nobody really knows what’s going on, between DOD, ICE, and CBP. We’ve got everybody pointing fingers, saying, ‘They’re in charge,’ ‘They’re paying for this,’ ‘They’re providing security.’ No one actually knows,” one source told the news outlet.

The Trump administration began transporting migrants to Guantánamo last week using U.S. military aircraft, prompting protests from immigration rights groups. There have been seven military flights transferring 98 migrants to the facility, as of Wednesday, according to data shared with CNN. The American Civil Liberties Union has sued over the immigrants being denied access to legal representation.

The criteria for who gets sent to the facility aren’t clear. So far, only men have been taken there, who are described as having “criminality,” but CBS News reported Wednesday that the Trump administration is mostly sending nonviolent, low-risk immigrants to the detention facility. One Venezuelan migrant was reportedly sent to Guantánamo because he had an “Air Jordan” tattoo.

It’s another example of Trump’s historic cruelty toward undocumented immigrants and anyone he deems a criminal. It’s red meat for the MAGA right, with their prejudices and long-standing opposition to immigration of any kind. So far, Democrats have not pushed back in large numbers against Trump’s immigration policies, even bolstering them in the case of the Laken Riley Act. For the foreseeable future, humanitarian concerns and comprehensive immigration reform are less than an afterthought.

Some of the country’s foremost national security experts are just as alarmed by Trump’s potential disregard for the judiciary branch as we are. 

During The New Republic’s “America in Crisis” event on Wednesday evening, a panel of experts raised their biggest concern about the direction in which the Trump administration is headed: No one knows what happens next. 

“From the prosecutorial perspective, what’s the worst case scenario? What could [the Trump administration] do if they really decided to go for it, as it were?” New Republic staff writer Greg Sargent asked. “What should people do, what recourse do they have?”

“Particularly one thing that concerns me … the next step when the Trump administration refuses to abide by a federal court order,” said Mark Zaid, a national security attorney famous for defending whistleblowers. “I have strength right now as a lawyer, and we are winning in the legal battles, but if that happens, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do.”

Olivia Troye, a former Homeland Security official in the Trump administration, echoed those sentiments. 

“I would say that that’s my biggest fear, is what Mark Zaid just said.… I’m under no illusions that that is something that could happen when they show plain disregard for that.” Troye urged citizens to speak up in the face of this looming threat. “Make your voices heard. Write letters to the editor, follow your investigative journalist.… Call your members of Congress. Our voices as people still matter. They make us feel like they don’t, but they do matter.”

The fact that these specialists shared the same fear of an impending constitutional crisis was sobering. Those fears were compounded on Monday, when a Rhode Island judge found that the Trump administration had violated a court order to unfreeze some federal funds. The courts have been long viewed as the final line of defense against Trump’s most authoritarian tendencies. But even if Democrats and NGOs sue Trump and win, who’s to say that he’ll undo the policies he already put in place? 

Vice President JD Vance, a Yale law school graduate, offered his own reinterpretation of the Constitution just days before Monday’s court ruling. “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” he wrote on X. “If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal.  Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

You can watch a full recording of The New Republic’s event, “America in Crisis: Navigating the Dark Road Ahead.” This event was produced in partnership with Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Rachel Carson Council.

House Republicans have released their budget plan, and in order to pay for massive tax cuts for the wealthy, they are planning to slash funding for Medicaid and food stamps.

The early budget includes a statement where representatives on the House Budget Committee pledge to cut a whopping $2 trillion in mandatory spending. While the text doesn’t mention Medicaid by name, it directs the Energy and Commerce Committee to cut $880 billion in its budget, which is near impossible to do without touching the health care program.

The budget plan also directs the Agriculture Committee to find $230 billion in cuts, which seems to indicate that SNAP (the food stamp program) will be cut by at least 20 percent. This would devastate the lives of millions of Americans who depend on the welfare programs. Other committees have also been given cuts that will hurt less wealthy Americans: The Education and Workforce Committee has been allocated $330 billion in cuts, which is expected to come from student loan programs.

These reductions won’t even pay for the tax cuts the GOP is proposing, which amount to a whopping $4.5 trillion and require the debt ceiling to be raised by $4 trillion. Keep in mind that President Trump has also promised to eliminate taxes on tips, overtime, and Social Security benefits, which combined with these cuts will balloon the budget deficit.

Many of the programs on the chopping block are popular with the American people, and won’t reflect well on Donald Trump and the GOP, especially with correct framing from Democrats. Pushback is also coming from other Republicans who think the cuts don’t go far enough or are concerned with a backlash from constituents. One thing is for sure: There’s about to be a big budget fight on Capitol Hill, and Trump won’t make it easy.

Elon Musk’s Tesla will receive one of the largest government contracts in 2025 to produce armored vehicles. 

Drop Site first reported Wednesday on the latest filing of the Department of State’s Procurement Forecast for the fiscal year 2025, which was revised as recently as December 23. 

The filing includes a massive contract for hundreds of millions of dollars to the Department of Government Efficiency czar’s automobile company for “Armored Tesla (production units).” The contract is worth more than $100 million and has a cap of $500 million, according to the filing. 

By comparison, a contract for armored sedans was capped at $100 million, and contracts for armored BMW and armored electric vehicles were capped at $50 million. The office handling the award was the Defensive Equipment and Armored Vehicle Division, and it was targeted for Q4. 

The Procurement Forecast shows projected federal contracts for the purpose of publishing “contracting opportunities small and small disadvantaged firms may be able to perform,” according to its website. 

Tesla has been the subject of an investigation by the National Labor Relations Board, as well as the subject of a lawsuit by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and hundreds of complaints by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to The New York Times. In his position as the leader of DOGE, Musk’s house-cleaning has affected each one of these agencies. 

Tesla’s contracts with the U.S. government over the last decade were worth roughly $700,000 in total. 

Since Donald Trump entered office, Musk has been flexing an unchecked power as the head of DOGE, sending his employees into the records of federal agencies, intent on shrinking or shutting them down by uncovering supposed massive fraud. 

On Tuesday, Musk touted the transparency of his organization in an attempt to sidestep a question about potential conflicts of interest.  

“All of our actions are fully public,” Musk said, according to CNN. “So if you see anything like, ‘Elon, there may be a conflict there,’ it’s not like people are going to be shy about it. They are going to say it immediately.”

Trump and the White House have both downplayed concerns about Musk’s oversight on issues where he stands to make money. 

It seems that Musk’s hefty payouts from his cozy relationship with the president are fully public too. 

House Republicans aren’t quite falling into line behind their leadership’s plans to advance Donald Trump’s sweeping legislative agenda, which is set to be presented to the committee Thursday.

House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington’s nascent budget reconciliation plan has been stalled in committee for weeks, and has faced tough opposition from his Republican colleagues—but the embattled Texas Republican said Tuesday that the panel would take up the massive border, tax, and energy resolution in two days, giving it just hours left to manifest into an agreeable existence.

Arrington’s plan, presented in a private panel meeting on Tuesday, calls for a massive target of $2 trillion in cuts on mandatory spending, with a $1.5 trillion floor, two sources and Representative Ralph Norman told The Hill.

According to one of the sources, a White House official, a handful of House members are asking Trump to bless Medicaid cuts as a way to help pay for reconciliation, but the official said that lawmakers wouldn’t actually lay out what the Medicaid cuts would be.

“We’re not just going to agree to some number in cuts to please a score,” the official told NOTUS. “Stop being constrained by [the Congressional Budget Office].”

Arrington’s plan also included a $4.5 trillion cap on new deficits, to offset an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. Representative Jason Smith, who chairs the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax policy, said that a $4.5 trillion cap was “a good starting point,” but he had pushed—unsuccessfully—to expand the scale of the tax cuts.

Smith seemed frustrated afterward, and he told reporters that Arrington’s plan wouldn’t allow for a permanent extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, as well as other priorities from the president’s campaign. “Anything less would be saying that President Trump is wrong on tax policy,” Smith groused.

Arrington’s plan had reportedly received approval from House Speaker Mike Johnson, who was allegedly “snatching the pen” from Arrington to shop around his own deal on Monday, though Arrington later pushed back on this report at a closed-door GOP conference meeting, according to Politico.

It was then that Arrington called for a meeting of the House Budget Committee to be scheduled for Thursday, to attempt to reconcile differences and advance the bill, giving him just hours to put together all the pieces into a coherent deal. It’s not even clear whether it will be the same deal he presented on Tuesday.

“We’ll soon find out if Jodey is in over his head,” one GOP lawmaker, who was granted anonymity, told Politico Tuesday.

But it’s not looking good.

Representative Eric Burlison, of the House Freedom Caucus, which released its own budget resolution on Monday, was less than thrilled by Arrington’s plan.

“It’s pathetic,” Burlison said, according to NOTUS’s Reese Gorman.

Representative Chip Roy had worked with Arrington to go against Smith in determining the parameters of the sweeping bill, according to Politico.

But Roy remained a holdout on supporting the resolution Wednesday, according to Bloomberg News’s Erik Wasson. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky also was reportedly not fully on board.