The Ridiculous and Disturbing Things Elon Musk’s DOGE Staff Are Doing

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency members have wasted no time making themselves comfortable during their efforts to take an axe to federal agencies and reshape them to the liking of tech bros, The Atlantic reported Thursday. 

One month after DOGE’s raid of USAID offices at the beginning of February, the non-agency of non-employees seems to be everywhere, or at least that’s how it feels, according to one USAID contractor. “It’s like the panopticon,” the contractor told The Atlantic. “There’s a sense that Elon Musk, through DOGE, is always watching. It has created a big sense of fear.”

While a memo barred USAID officials from returning to agency headquarters after the takeover, it made no mention of its other offices, providing a window into the goings-on of Musk’s minions. 

One USAID staffer told The Atlantic that after DOGE’s descent into her agency’s offices, she returned to find ample evidence of “activity overnight.” Some of her materials had been moved from where she left them, and there were Panera cookie wrappers strewn across her desk and in the nearby waste bin. 

“Books were open, and things had been riffled through,” another USAID staffer told the magazine. 

The impression that DOGE is always watching takes on a new meaning when considering the unprecedented level of access staffers have been granted to the offices of the agencies they’re gutting. The contractor told The Atlantic that she kept her government laptop under a pile of clothes in her closet, and her colleagues considered storing their computers in the fridge, in case DOGE was using it to spy on them.

During a town hall in Leesburg, Virginia, earlier this month, a man who identified himself as a federal worker claimed that a DOGE employee had moved into the federal building where he worked, bringing with him a wife and baby, according to The Daily Beast. 

It’s not clear where the rest of Musk’s minions reside, but DOGE headquarters, located at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, recently received a shipment of sleep pods to fuel their supposed efficiency.  

“In the last week, we had Elon Musk in our building, and after he visited the building, called for a 50 percent cut of the entire agency,” the man claimed. “My colleagues are getting 15-minute one-on-one check-ins with 19-, 20-, and 21-year old-college graduates asking to justify their existence.”

According to The Atlantic, DOGE has subjected federal employees to extensive corporate-style questioning as part of its efforts to learn even more about the staff it hopes to obliterate. 

Federal employees received short-notice invitations from nongovernmental email addresses, asking them to complete a form probing them for their recent “wins” and “blockers,” and to attend 15-minute interviews. Some people received short coding quizzes, while others were pressed to speak on their beliefs about DOGE itself. While the specific questions varied, many hit the same flavor. 

In one recording obtained by The Atlantic, an employee of the General Services Administration was asked by one of Musk’s twenty-something goons, “Like, what’s your superpower?” 

As one recently departed federal technology official wrote in a draft testimony for lawmakers, this level of access is an obvious double-edged sword. 

“At present, every hacker in the world knows there are a small number of people new to federal service who hold the keys to access all US government payments, contracts, civil servant personal info, and more,” they wrote. “DOGE is one romance scam away from a national security emergency.”

The sheer extent to which these agencies have become inundated with random tech bros may seem laughable, but the purpose of their permeation is much more sinister. 

In addition to sifting through government contracts for words such as “diversity” to put them on the chopping block (and then in an increasing number of cases, hurriedly reinstalled), Musk’s young technologists attempted to gain access to the U.S. Treasury system to stop the payments coming from USAID without having to order the agency to stop spending, according to The Atlantic. 

With a few clicks on a keyboard, DOGE has snatched the purse strings for the entire federal government out of the hands of Congress, and into the hands of the executive—or more likely, the executive’s technocrat buddy. 

Donald Trump’s new commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, says the president wants to get rid of the Internal Revenue Service.

“His goal is to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and let all the outsiders pay,” Lutnick said to Jesse Watters on Fox News Wednesday, adding that the president’s planned “External Revenue Service” will fund the government with tariffs from the rest of the world.

Trump has already started cutting the government agency, with plans to lay off about 7,000 IRS workers beginning Thursday, despite tax season being in full swing. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has also demanded access to the private data of every single taxpayer, business, and nonprofit, and Musk claimed earlier this month that he killed a popular government program that allowed Americans a free and easy way to file their taxes.

In December, in negotiations to avert a government shutdown, Republicans already set the stage for Trump’s plan, cutting $20 billion in funding for the IRS, hurting its ability to conduct audits and adding $140 billion to the national debt, the Biden administration said at the time. Trump’s choice to run the agency, former Representative Billy Long, has yet to be confirmed by the Senate, but he repeatedly sought to abolish the IRS while serving in the House.

While killing the IRS might once have been a half-baked scheme for Republicans, that no longer seems to be the case. Trump has already destroyed one government agency, barring legal challenges. But will he actually be able to get rid of the IRS, which is responsible for bringing in the money that runs the federal government? It remains to be seen if he can overcome all of the legal issues with his goal, as well as Congress.

Vice President JD Vance is asking the American public to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.

Speaking before the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday, the vice president insisted that Donald Trump still held all his cards in negotiations over Ukraine’s fate—just one week after his defense secretary told NATO they didn’t.

“I think President Trump—what makes him such an effective negotiator, I’ve seen this in private—is that he doesn’t take anything off the table,” Vance told CPAC host Mercedes Schlapp. “When he walks in a negotiation, he says, ‘Everything is on the table.’”

But Vance’s comments came barely a week after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explicitly told the NATO conference that the administration’s peace talks with Russia had actually taken several bargaining chips “off the table.”

That included Ukraine’s possible NATO membership (something the military alliance had promised in 2008), the possibility of a U.S. presence in Ukraine to enforce postwar security guarantees, and the end of NATO missions to Ukraine. He also added that it would be “unrealistic” for Ukraine to return to its pre-war borders, effectively ceding land to Moscow.

The announcement came as a complete 180 on American and NATO policy regarding the eastern European country, and left U.S. allies and defense experts reeling. The deal, per Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, amounted to Russian propaganda and was practically “written in the Kremlin.”

Hegseth walked back the brazen settlement terms the following day, insisting that, despite having already shown the American hand, “everything is on the table” when it comes to arranging peace between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Trump denied telling Hegseth to walk back his comments during an Oval Office press conference, describing them as “pretty accurate.”

Hot heads and rocky promises have resulted in several days of tumult on a potential peace deal, including Trump branding Zelenskiy a “dictator.” But beyond the administration’s seismic hiccups, perhaps the most egregious error remains that Trump has continued to relegate Kyiv to the sidelines of a negotiation that will decide Ukraine’s future.

The U.S. and Russia opened discussions at a meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, seeking a conclusion to the three-year war, but the assembly conspicuously excluded Ukrainian leadership. Critics excoriated the administration for doing so, but Vance did little more than brush off the global concern at CPAC.

“And of course that makes the heads explode in the American media, because they say, ‘Why are you talking to Russia?’” Vance told the conference. “Well, how are you going to end the war unless you’re talking to Russia? You’ve got to get everybody involved in the fighting if you actually want to bring it to a close, and I know the president does.”

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine.

Mitch McConnell has finally decided to call it quits.

The longest-serving Senate leader in history announced on Thursday that he will not run for reelection in 2026.

“Seven times, my fellow Kentuckians have sent me to the Senate,” McConnell said to the Associated Press. “Every day in between I’ve been humbled by the trust they’ve placed in me to do their business here. Representing our commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime. I will not seek this honor an eighth time. My current term in the Senate will be my last.”

This ends McConnell’s decades-long reign of conservative terror that upended years of liberal and progressive policy, cemented conservative courts across the nation, and saw the rise of Donald Trump—leading to McConnell’s own eventual dethroning.

McConnell spent his leadership tenure obstructing campaign finance reform and packing the federal courts with likeminded conservatives, providing fertile ground for Citizens United and the debilitating influx of corporate influence onto American politics. He also helped create the correct circumstances for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, as he held up Merrick Garland’s nomination under former President Barack Obama and then helped Trump confirm three justices to the high court.

McConnell unsuccessfully tried to thread the needle near the end, critiquing Trump’s brand of conservatism while protecting it and the power his proximity to it gave him. He backed the president for years, fighting against his impeachment and supporting his claims of a stolen election even after lambasting January 6 as a “violent insurrection.”

McConnell’s exit serves as a fitting end to the Republican Party’s rejection of traditional conservatism and full embrace of Trump’s MAGA movement.

This story has been updated.

Fear might be the driving motivator behind Republican lawmakers’ continual bend to Donald Trump.

The GOP caucus is reportedly “scared shitless” of not just Trump’s ire—but the personal vindictiveness and constant threat of political violence from his MAGA base across the country.

The final straw that reportedly flipped Senator Thom Tillis’s vote on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were “credible death threats” against the North Carolina lawmaker, according to sources that spoke with Vanity Fair. Tillis was the final Republican holdout on confirming the former Fox News star to lead the Pentagon.

“According to the source, Tillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work,” Vanity Fair reported.

Trump’s violent rhetoric offers one obvious reason why Republicans are so wary of crossing him. The president has a bizarre relationship with the more reactive sectors of his base. During the first presidential debate of the 2020 cycle, Trump issued a direct missive to the Proud Boys, a militant white supremacist group, telling them to “stand back and stand by.” And the MAGA leader has also encouraged direct violence at his rallies, encouraging his supporters to “knock the crap out of” protesters who exercise their First Amendment rights against Trump’s agenda.

The president also made his reciprocal loyalty to his base obvious from the first day of his second administration: after claiming for years that he would free the men and women who rioted through Congress in 2021—and forced the legislature to delay the certification of the presidential election result—Trump overrode internal debate amongst his administration hours after his inauguration to pardon some 1,500 January 6 offenders.

“They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former member of Trump’s first administration told Vanity Fair.

Trump’s decision to legally and unilaterally forgive his most aggressive supporters was, actually, wildly unpopular with the American public. A November Scripps News/Ipsos survey found that few Americans—just 30 percent—actually supported a legal reprieve for the Capitol rioters, versus an overwhelming 64 percent of the country that was against it. Just one percent of respondents believed that the pardons should be Trump’s first priority—let alone something that he issued a sweeping executive order for on his first day in office.

A former professional football player was carried off in handcuffs Tuesday after protesting the installation of a pro-Donald Trump plaque at his local library.

Former NFL player Chris Kluwe was arrested during a meeting of the Huntington Beach City Council, after he protested against the city’s decision to install a plaque at the public library featuring the acrostic poem, “Magical. Alluring. Galvanizing. Adventurous,” spelling out “MAGA.”

Kluwe, a 15-year resident of Huntington Beach, California, joined several other residents in speaking against the inclusion of Trump’s slogan on the plaque.

“As the community made clear at the library commission meeting last Tuesday, everyone is in favor of a plaque to celebrate the library,” Kluwe said. “But the vast, vast majority are against including a MAGA acrostic, OK?”

“Unfortunately it’s clear that this council does not listen, so I’m going to take my time to explain what MAGA has stood for these past three weeks,” he said.

“MAGA stands for trying to erase trans people from existence. MAGA stands for re-segregation and racism. MAGA stands for censorship and book bans,” Kluwe said.

“MAGA stands for firing air traffic controllers while planes are crashing. MAGA stands for firing the people overseeing our nuclear arsenal. MAGA stands for firing military veterans and those serving them at the VA, including canceling research on veteran suicide. MAGA stands for cutting funds to education, including for disabled children.”

“MAGA is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy, and, most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat, but that is what it is,” Kluwe said, as onlookers burst into shocked laughs and applause.

“I will now engage in the time-honored American tradition of peaceful civil disobedience,” Kluwe said. As onlookers cheered, Kluwe stepped past the podium, and a police officer could be seen hurrying after him.

The official video of the meeting posted by the City of Huntington Beach cuts away from Kluwe as he was tackled by police officers.

“Do not ask for decorum while you’re shredding the Constitution!” Kluwe can be heard yelling.

In a post on Bluesky Wednesday, Kluwe recapped what he had later told police officers.

The officer “asked for my account of what happened (told him I approached the dias, stopped and put my hands behind my back, then warned the officers I was going to the floor and they would have to carry me out). Asked if I struggled or fought back, I said no (as I’m pretty sure the video evidence would show),” Kluwe wrote.

Another video showed Kluwe was face down on the floor of the chamber while four police officers surrounded and handcuffed him. Kluwe was then carried out by the officers as onlookers cheered.

Police said that Kluwe was charged with disrupting a public assembly, which carries a fine of up to $1,000 or six months in jail, according to California State Penal Code.

During his time in the NFL, Kluwe was an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, and there was some speculation that his advocacy led to his release from the Minnesota Vikings in 2013.

The Huntington Beach City Council ultimately voted to approve installing the plaque, with the inclusion of the MAGA acrostic poem, according to KTLA.

Howard Lutnick, Trump’s billionaire buddy turned commerce secretary, has confirmed that the administration was simply lying to MAGA supporters about not touching Social Security and Medicare.

“Back in October … I flew down to Texas, got Elon Musk to [set up DOGE], and here was our agreement: that Elon was gonna cut a trillion dollars of waste fraud and abuse,” Lutnick told Jesse Waters of Fox News Wednesday night. “We have almost $4 trillion of entitlements, and no one’s ever looked at it before. You know Social Security is wrong, you know Medicaid and Medicare are wrong. So he’s gonna cut a trillion and we’re gonna get rid of all these tax scams that hammer against America and we’re gonna raise a trillion dollars of revenue.”

Just last week, President Trump promised that “Social Security won’t be touched, other than if there’s fraud or something. It’s going to be strengthened. Medicare, Medicaid—none of that stuff is going to be touched.”

Fast forward a week, and he endorsed House Republicans’ budget plan, which is expected to make an $880 billion cut to Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

This is a long cry from the party that was telling its voters—many of whom are elderly conservatives on government benefits—that they wouldn’t lay a finger on the programs they need most.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s purge of federal government employees has apparently gone too far for one Fox News personality.

Jesse Watters begged Trump on The Five Wednesday to be “less callous” in his mass firings because his friend Chris, a military veteran for 20 years who “has killed a lot of bad guys” and “put his life on the line,” was among those set to be axed in cuts to the Department of Defense.

“He punched out after 20 years, and [is now] working for the Pentagon. And he’s only been there a few months, so he’s probationary, and he just found out he’s probably going to get laid off. He’s going to get DOGE’d,” Watters said, adding that he got a text message from the friend, who was upset.

“This guy is not a DEI consultant. This guy is not a climate consultant. This guy is a veteran. So when you’re talking about DOGE-ing people, veterans should get priority. Because if you’re going to go out there and kill enemies, and put your life on the line for this country, you should not be in the same category as people that are doing DEI,” Watters added.

Watters is only upset because someone he knows personally was affected by Trump and Musk’s mass firings. Otherwise, he’d continue to cheer on the arbitrary cuts across the federal workforce. What he and the rest of right-wing media don’t realize is that plenty of other federal workers like Chris have lost their jobs or will soon. Some are veterans, as are 30 percent of federal workers, and others were simply hired too recently.

The firings are taking place regardless of stellar personnel records, and have claimed workers vital to national security that the Trump administration has tried to walk back, such as people who work with the U.S. nuclear arsenal or whose expertise with bird flu is badly needed right now. Watters and his friends on the right ought to realize that Trump and Musk are simply gutting the federal government without any regard for the consequences.

If America was concerned about Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s relationship after their dual Oval Office press conference last week, the MAGA duo’s interview with Sean Hannity did nothing to assuage it.

Appearing side by side in the White House, the president of the United States was cut off and forced to defer to Musk’s language on the multi-billionaire’s missive to other ultra-wealthy people.

“I’d like to also just send a message—like, because, as the president said, like, this—there’s a lot of rich people out there,” Musk said. “They should be caring more about the country because—the reason they should be caring about—more about country is: America falls, what do you think is going to happen to your business?”  

“What do—what do you think—do you think you’re be going to be okay if—if the ship of America sinks? Of course not. Like, what—what I’m doing here, what the president is doing is it’s just long-term thinking. The ship of America must be strong.  The ship of America cannot sink.  If it sinks, we all sink with it.”

When Trump attempted to join in on the answer, Hannity seemed more eager to follow up on Musk’s response, explicitly cutting the president off.

“Sean, you’re a—” Trump started, pointing at the Fox News host.

“This is important,” Hannity responded to Trump, raising his hand to stop him.

Last week, Musk spent more time talking to reporters than Trump did during their joint press conference. The image to the rest of the world was clear: While Trump hunched over the Resolute Desk, the world’s richest man took the reins. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell measured the time spent talking by each administrative figurehead and found that Musk had spoken 3,666 words at the executive order signing, whereas Trump spoke 2,487 words.

Compare Musk’s constant presence to the role that Trump’s vice presidents play in his political realm: Former Vice President Mike Pence never spoke more than Trump did at a Trump-centric event during his first term, and Vice President JD Vance likely never will, either (in part because Vance has been conspicuously absent from many major events so far). That discrepancy calls into question what power Musk, who donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump’s presidential campaign, really has in the administration.

Elsewhere in the duo’s Hannity interview, Musk described criticism of his efforts to strip federal agencies as a nonelected, special government employee, as the “thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.”

“We must be over the target or doing something right,” Musk told Hannity. 

“They wouldn’t be complaining so much if we weren’t doing something useful,” he continued. “What we’re really trying to do here is restore the will of the people through the president. And what we’re finding is that there’s an unelected bureaucracy—speaking of unelected, there’s a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the president and the cabinet.”

Donald Trump called Elon Musk the head of the Department of Government Efficiency Wednesday, and while this may seem obvious to everyone, the White House has been pretending like it isn’t—and the truth could land them in legal trouble. 

During an appearance at the Future Investment Institute Summit in Miami, Trump told attendees at the Saudi investment fund event exactly what Musk’s real job is.

“I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency, and put a man named Elon Musk in charge,” Trump said. 

For an administration that loves to tout its own radical transparency, they sure seem to want to mislead Americans on who is really calling the shots at DOGE.

The Trump administration filed a court declaration Monday asserting that Musk’s official title is “senior adviser to the president,” a position that holds “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.” It also claims that Musk isn’t a DOGE employee or its administrator, but an employee of the White House. 

The filing flies in the face of Trump’s original announcement naming Musk the head of DOGE, as well as everything we’ve seen from Musk since, as the unelected bureaucrat has taken aim at essential federal employees, sending agencies scrambling to hire them back. Most recently, he and his friends at DOGE pretended to save money by eliminating fictionalized government contracts. 

Monday’s filing came as Musk faces legal scrutiny in federal court this week. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ultimately declined to issue a temporary restraining order against Musk and DOGE Tuesday, saying that it wasn’t yet clear that their actions would cause irreparable harm. 

By obfuscating leadership, it seems that the Trump administration wants to avoid accountability for its actions. U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled last week that DOGE should be considered an “agency,” although Trump was “curiously” avoiding calling it that explicitly.  

“This appears to come from a desire to escape the obligations that accompany agencyhood—such as being subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act—while reaping only its benefits,” Bates wrote in his order.