Elon Musk’s DOGE Gives Tesla Massive Helping Hand With Newest Purge

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency fired car safety experts in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who directly regulated Tesla.

The Financial Times reports that DOGE fired 30 employees from the agency back in February, including several from the office of vehicle automation safety, which is in charge of regulating self-driving vehicles, a key part of Musk’s car company.

The layoffs made up 4 percent of the agency’s 800-person staff, including employees who were due for promotions and workers who had just been hired. The automation safety staff were disproportionately affected because the office had only been formed in 2023 and was predominately made up of probationary hires.

In a Valentine’s Day email announcing the firings, poor performance was cited as the reason, although this was rejected by an unnamed senior employee still at NHTSA who spoke to the Times.

The NHTSA has eight active investigations against Tesla, including five focusing on Musk’s claims about the company’s Autopilot system and Full Self-Driving software, and has published over 10,000 complaints about the company from the public. The agency has also ordered multiple recalls of Tesla cars and delayed the rollout of the company’s self-driving and driver-assistance software.

Musk has promised to launch a driverless ride-hailing service in Austin, Texas, in June, and to start building a fleet of autonomous “cybercabs” next year, which would require an NHTSA exception because the cybercabs don’t have a steering wheel or pedals.

“Letting DOGE fire those in the autonomous division is sheer madness—we should be lobbying to add people to NHTSA,” one Tesla manager told the Times. They “need to be developing a national framework for [autonomous vehicles], otherwise Tesla doesn’t have a prayer for scale in FSD or robotaxis.”

And, much like DOGE’s other firings at agencies across the government that regulate or deal with Musk’s companies, the NHTSA layoffs have major ethical implications.

“There is a clear conflict of interest in allowing someone with a business interest influence over appointments and policy at the agency regulating them,” a former NHTSA employee told the Times.

Musk owes much of his wealth to government subsidies and contracts, and many of DOGE’s moves have squashed government oversight into his businesses. As long as Trump keeps giving him unprecedented power, the tech oligarch and fascism enthusiast will continue to keep serving his own interests.

Buried within Donald Trump’s executive order “undoing the left’s war on water pressure” was a shady phrase to help the president fast-track his deregulatory crusade.

In a section of the order signed Wednesday repealing a 13,000-word regulation defining “showerhead,” Trump noted that notice and comment on the recission would not be accepted. 

“Notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal,” the order stated.  

Notice-and-comment rulemaking, as outlined by the Administrative Procedure Act, or APA, requires federal agencies to give the public time to comment after presenting a new rule. The agency must then consider all relevant, timely submitted comments before publishing the final rule. 

But in his order, Trump implies that because he was the one rewriting the rule, the public would not be given the opportunity to comment, essentially fast-tracking any deregulation effort he pitches in the future. 

Legal experts were quick to challenge Trump’s rulemaking rule change. 

“This is so illegal. Just utterly, utterly unlawful,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, in an X post Wednesday. “The President cannot overturn the commands of the APA by just declaring ‘because I said so.’”

“If President Biden could have written executive orders requiring rules just be written without comment, we’d have a whole helluva lot of new regulations on the books protecting consumers, workers, and the environment,” Todd Phillips, an assistant law professor at Robinson College of Business, wrote on X. 

In a separate post, Phillips warned that rescissions would be challenged “so, so, so quickly. And in the D.C. Circuit.”

In a separate executive order signed Wednesday, Trump ordered U.S. agencies to get moving on rescinding “unlawful” regulations under several Supreme Court decisions, including Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, by once again skipping the process of notice and comment—this time claiming a “good cause” exception. 

“In effectuating repeals of facially unlawful regulations, agency heads shall finalize rules without notice and comment, where doing so is consistent with the ‘good cause’ exception in the Administrative Procedure Act,” the order stated. “That exception allows agencies to dispense with notice-and-comment rulemaking when that process would be ‘impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest.’”

In February, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a statement revoking its long-standing policy of using notice-and-comment rulemaking, which could potentially allow for expedited reforms to Medicaid programs. 

The public reaction to Donald Trump’s tariff reversal has not been good.

CNN’s John Berman decided to spew off a list of headlines Thursday morning related to the market frenzy while introducing Republican strategist David Urban, who was left with little more than sticks and stones and some misdirection to defend the president’s whiplash tariff rollout and his subsequent cave.

“Let’s go over some of the headlines and leads in today’s papers,” Berman started. “The Washington Post, ‘Trump Blinked.’ Wall Street Journal opinion, ‘Trump Blinks.’ The New York Times lede says ‘Bond Yields cause Mr. Trump to blink.’ The Financial Times, ‘Why did Donald Trump buckle?’

“And just for the sugar on top here, Politico says, ‘Getting yippy with it,’ and Puck says, ‘Un-liberation Day,’” Berman continued.

“So David Urban, blink, blink, buckle,” Berman concluded, before asking Urban, “Was this all bungled?”

“No, John, I don’t think it was bungled. I think that the markets got a little skittish,” Urban said. “I think the House and Senate are working diligently to get this tax bill done and get some things pushed through.”

Urban then blamed the markets, claiming that if investors “were a bit more patient,” they would have seen the administration get “a lot of good things done.” The lobbyist then posited that a forthcoming “stablecoin bill” would make the U.S. dollar stronger again on a global scale.

“However, you know, the bond markets, as you noted there, really put a scare into the administration, I think, when the cost of borrowing for the federal government goes way, way up and the U.S. dollar doesn’t become the reserve currency, which was what it looks like when you have a bond market sell-off like it was happening,” Urban said. “I think that’s what caused the pause button to be pushed.”

But Urban conceded, ultimately, that no one can know how the markets will react.

Trump appeared to intentionally sow volatility last week, when he announced some 200 tariffs on countries around the world (whose rates were discovered to be founded on bad math). After a week of panicked investors and a tanking economy, as well as a midday trade war with China, Trump decided to undo it all, with the White House revealing that it would be pausing the majority of its tariffs (except on China) and lowering the tariffs to a universal baseline rate of 10 percent. That sent the market into a different kind of frenzy, whose biggest winners were the demographic already with the most money: billionaires.

In its latest attack on the free press, the Trump administration is withholding pool reports that make it look bad.

Two recent dispatches from White House pool reporters, a rotating group of reporters designated to cover the president and share information with the rest of the press corps, never made it public, Status reported Wednesday.

On Tuesday evening, Dallas Morning News reporter Joseph Gordon, who was in the pool that day, sent a standard email noting that reporters were following Trump to a dinner but that two photographers from the Associated Press were “turned away from joining the pool.” The pool report never made it to news outlets, Gordon later learned. In February, the Associated Press was banned from the White House press pool for refusing to adopt Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, but a judge ordered the White House to lift the ban Tuesday.

Also earlier this week, Philip Wegman of RealClearPolitics sent a report noting the abrupt cancellation of a joint press conference with Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That report also never made it to press, Status reported.

The White House press pool is essential to distributing information to news outlets across the country, and the censorship of its reports marks yet another attempt by the Trump administration to control journalists. In February, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Trump’s press team would take over the press pool and determine which journalists get to travel with the president, declaring the job “a privilege, not a legal right.”

The announcement broke decades of historical precedent and marked the beginning of unparalleled hostility between the White House and reporters. Trump, Leavitt, and other MAGA members have since tried a number of ways to control the media and avoid being held accountable for their attack on democracy—it looks like censoring pool reports is their next attempt to do so.

Donald Trump claimed that his party was “working nicely together,” just hours after House Republicans’ infighting forced them to delay a vote on a multitrillion-dollar budget bill.

“Great News! ‘The Big, Beautiful Bill’ is coming along really well. Republicans are working together nicely. Biggest Tax Cuts in USA History!!! Getting close,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday morning.

House GOP members were anything but united. The night before, Republican Representative Rich McCormick told CNN’s Manu Raju that there were still 15 Republican holdouts on the bill, which would provide the funding for Trump’s sweeping agenda, including tax cuts and bolstering immigration initiatives.

Representative Thomas Massie, who has become a regular holdout against Republican-backed government spending bills, said that a provision Republicans had added that would prevent efforts to roll back Trump’s tariffs was “illegal.”

“They used the Rules Committee resolution to circumvent U.S. law,” Massie told Raju.

On Wednesday night, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he hadn’t decided how best to rally Republican support behind the budget blueprint.

“We have a pretty well-developed playbook, and it’s got a number of plays in it, and I just haven’t made the call on which one it is yet,” he said.

House Republicans are expected to vote again on the bill at 10:20 a.m. before setting off on a two-week recess.

Donald Trump is taking revenge against two officials from his first term.  

On Wednesday, the president issued directives stripping the security clearances of Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor and ordering the Department of Justice to open investigations against them, characterizing Taylor’s criticisms of him as “treasonous” and calling Krebs “a significant bad-faith actor.” 

Krebs, who ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, affirmed Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020, saying at the time that “claims [of fraud] either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent” and authorizing a statement from CISA that the election was secure. Trump subsequently fired him by tweet.

Later, Krebs was a witness for the House January 6 committee, providing information on securing the 2020 election, testifying that “Republican officials, senior officials, including the former president, lied to the American people about the security of the 2020 election.”

Krebs now works at cybersecurity company SentinelOne, and Trump’s order not only targets him but strips the security clearances of anyone at the company who works with him. As Trump signed the order against Krebs Wednesday, he let everyone know that he still isn’t over losing in 2020, calling the election “rigged.” 

“It was proven by so many different ways in so many different forms,” Trump said. “We’re going to find out about this guy too, because this guy is a wise guy.”

Taylor famously wrote an anonymous New York Times op-ed criticizing Trump in 2018 while working for the Department of Homeland Security. He left the Trump administration in 2019 and, upon revealing his identity, wrote a book detailing the chaos he observed from Trump. He went on to endorse Biden before the 2020 election, although Trump on Wednesday said, “I barely remember him.” 

“Somebody that went out and wrote a book and said all sorts of terrible things that were all lies,” Trump said. “I think he’s guilty of treason.”

The order against Taylor is so broad that it even suspends the security clearances of “individuals at entities associated with Taylor, including the University of Pennsylvania, pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.”

On X, Taylor posted that “I said this would happen.” 

“Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point,” Taylor wrote. 

All of this shows that Trump would not only escape consequences for his actions if he was reelected but that he always planned to take revenge on his critics if he was able to return to the White House. Now the checks on his power are minimal at best.

Many were surprised Wednesday by Donald Trump’s decision to put a 90-day pause on a majority of his sweeping tariffs on other countries (with the exception of China), but only one person was in the midst of defending those very tariffs to Congress.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer sat before the House Ways and Means Committee, where he’d been testifying for nearly four hours in defense of Trump’s “reciprocal tariff” policy, when the president announced the pause.

Democratic Representative Steven Horsford was the first to question Greer about the pause, and asked when exactly he had been made aware that Trump planned to walk back his sweeping tariffs.

“I understood the decision was made a few minutes ago,” Greer said, noting it had been “under discussion.”

“So did you know that this was ‘under discussion,’ and why did you not include this in your opening remarks?” Horsford said.

Greer said he wouldn’t “divulge the contents” of his discussions with the president.

Horsford pressed for details from Greer, but the trade representative couldn’t provide any information on the 90-day deadline, saying he didn’t know all the details because he’d been in the hearing all day.

“So the trade representative hasn’t spoken to the president of the United States about a global reordering of trade? And yet he’s—but yet he announced it on a tweet!” Horsford said above Greer’s protests. “WTF! Who’s in charge?!”

“The president of the United States is in charge,” Greer replied.

“And what do you know about those details? It looks like your boss just pulled out the rug from under you and paused the tariff—the taxes on the American people,” Horsford said. “There is no strategy! You just found out three seconds ago, sitting there; we saw you!”

The Nevada Democrat continued to press Greer on his failure to disclose Trump’s plan at any point during the lengthy hearing. “If you came here knowing that these tariffs were going to be turned off, why didn’t you include that in your opening statement, why didn’t you reference that as part of your testimony?”

Greer repeated that he wouldn’t discuss his conversations with the president.

“These were specific questions. We asked you all along, what’s the strategy? These are real consequences for the American people and small businesses,” Horsford said, exasperated.

“This is amateur hour, and it needs to stop! What does this even mean for your negotiating strategy? How are you in charge of negotiation if the president is tweeting about this, wherever the hell he is?”

When Horsford asked Greer directly if he knew it was happening, Greer would only repeat that they’d been “discussing it.”

“There was no strategy, there was no plan. The president chose to take actions that he didn’t have the authority to take. He has put our economy in near collapse,” Horsford said.

He then asked Greer about the issue on everyone’s mind. Earlier Wednesday, amid a roiling stock market, Trump had advised his followers on Truth Social that it was a “great time to buy.” After announcing the 90-day pause on tariffs, the market shot back up.

“Is this market manipulation?” Horsford asked.

“No,” Greer replied.

“Why not? If it was a plan, if it was always the plan, how is this not market manipulation?” Horsford asked.

“It’s not market manipulation, Sir,” Greer insisted.

“Well then what is it, because it sure is not a strategy!” Horsford said.

“We’re trying to reset the global trade system—” Greer said, before he was cut off.

“And what has that done? And how have you achieved any of that? But to enact enormous harm on the American people, which was our concern from the very beginning!” Horsford said, adding, “So, if it’s not market manipulation, what is it? Who’s benefiting? What billionaire just got richer?”

Horsford noted that all the Republican members of the committee had left “because they don’t want to defend this!”

On X, Horsford posted a picture of Greer conferring with his colleague, captioning it: “What it looks like when you’re the country’s trade representative testifying before Congress and you find out Trump changed his mind on tariffs.”

“This is reckless governing. There is no strategy and it’s obvious this is amateur hour,” Horsford wrote.

The Trump administration is now going to screen immigrants’ social media as grounds for denying immigration benefits, including international students and people applying for permanent residency.

The Department of Homeland Security announced the move in a press release Wednesday afternoon, saying that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would be taking action, effective immediately, against “antisemitic activity on social media and the physical harassment of Jewish individuals.”

“DHS will enforce all relevant immigration laws to the maximum degree, to protect the homeland from extremists and terrorist aliens, including those who support antisemitic terrorism, violent antisemitic ideologies and antisemitic terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, or Ansar Allah aka: ‘the Houthis,’” the statement read.

The move follows the visa revocations and detention of students who have advocated for Palestine, such as Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, as well as the arrest and detention of Columbia University graduate and permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil. In both cases, the government made no indication that it has followed due process, and the two are not alone: Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims to have revoked the visas of over 300 students before Wednesday’s announcement.

Now DHS will begin policing the opinions of anyone seeking to study in the United States, ostensibly on grounds of opposing “antisemitic terrorism.” In reality, there is no proof that Khalil, Öztürk, or many other targeted students engaged in terrorism. Rather, the Trump administration has redefined terrorism to mean opposition to Israel’s brutal war in Gaza and support for Palestinian self-determination. In effect, the message is that immigrants and visitors to the U.S. no longer have the right to free speech.

Trump may have accidentally confessed to insider trading and market manipulation on Truth Social. 

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT,” the president wrote on Wednesday, a mere four hours before announcing a 90-day pause on most retaliatory tariffs except for China, yet another market-shocking announcement that caused stocks to shoot up. 

Insider trading is a very illegal practice that involves using special or private information to give yourself an advantage in buying and selling stocks. Someone with knowledge of an economic policy change that would cause the markets to shoot back up would be posting about how great a time it is to buy right before the policy change happened. This particular situation looks like the opposite of a pump and dump: a poop and scoop. This is when an exclusive group of people with private knowledge do whatever they can to drive stock prices down—like announcing debilitating global tariffs—and then buy stocks up strategically before the price goes up again. And with this administration, the corruption is completely out in the open. 

“Trump is creating giant market fluctuations with his on-again, off-again tariffs. These constant gyrations in policy provide dangerous opportunities for insider trading,” Senator Adam Schiff wrote on X. “Who in the administration knew about Trump’s latest tariff flip flop ahead of time? Did anyone buy or sell  stocks, and profit at the public’s expense? I’m writing to the White House—the public has a right to know.”

“Trump’s Truth Social now basically promotes veiled insider trading on upcoming announcements,” wrote health and economics expert Eric Feigl-Ding. “Trump’s benefactors are gleefully watching.”

The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin called it two days ago on CNBC. *

“Given what the government’s been doing, and what this administration’s been doing, it would not shock me—and I hate to speculate—if we were to find out that a whole bunch of people who work in Washington as our elected leaders … ultimately sold stocks last week, or potentially worse than that, shorted the market.” 

The Trump administration—after crashing the global stock market and eroding U.S. legitimacy—is attempting to spin this as a win. 

“Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

* This article originally misstated Sorkin’s first name.

Donald Trump is once again the laughingstock of the internet after his shocking decision Wednesday to issue a 90-day pause on some of his sweeping tariffs—with the exception of China—after the White House insisted for days that the president had no intention to hit the brakes. 

“Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, as she tried to spin Trump’s sudden reversal as part of a long-unfolding plan to either boost domestic manufacturing or something else entirely—actually, it’s become kind of unclear. 

Online people were quick to make what have now become running jokes about Trump’s so-called “art,” and the Trump administration’s mind-boggling insistence that his tariffs are at once a brilliant negotiation tactic and a legitimate policy meant to bolster the U.S. economy. 

“Oh my god she did the meme,” wrote Tahra Jirari, the director of economic analysis at the Chamber of Progress, on X.  

“The Art of the Deal is panicking and reversing course less than 24 hours after tariffs go into effect?” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, in a post on X. 

Pod Save America host Jon Favreau also took aim at Trump’s deal-making prowess, writing, on X, “Art of the Deal: 1) Impose massive tariffs on nearly every country that crash the markets and create the conditions for global economic collapse 2) Make zero deals with zero countries 3) Pause tariffs 4) VICTORY!!”

While Trump bragged about the scores of foreign leaders who’d come to kiss the ring, many foreign officials said that they’d received no reply to their requests to make a deal with the Trump administration, according to Politico. 

With Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s hollow claims that Trump’s decision was not a response to the last week’s tumultuous stock market, many struggled to understand Trump’s rationale in power-checking foreign countries. 

Meanwhile, others suggested that Trump, having urged his followers on Truth Social that it was a “great time to buy” earlier Wednesday, was attempting to create a window for his allies to buy low, knowing he was about to rescind his tariffs.

But Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz pointed out that there was likely no method to Trump’s madness at all. 

“OUR PLAN IS WORKING PERFECTLY AND IS JUST A NEGOTIATING TACTIC BUT IT IS ALSO GOING TO BE PERMANENT AND WE WILL BE THE WORLD LEADER IN TEXTILES AND NOW THERE IS A PAUSE AND EVERYONE NEEDS TO CHILL BUT ALSO WE WILL NEVER BACK DOWN AAAAAAHHHHHH,” Schatz wrote in a hilariously candid post on X.