Elon Musk Suffers Embarrassing Blow as His IRS Chief Forced Out

Elon Musk’s latest pick to lead the Internal Revenue Service is being forced out after less than 72 hours, The New York Times reported Friday.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly complained to Donald Trump that Musk went behind his back to appoint Gary Shapley, a former supervisor at the agency who garnered attention for blowing the whistle on Hunter Biden’s tax investigation, without his knowledge. Trump gave Bessent the go-ahead to oust him from the IRS, which falls under Bessent’s jurisdiction as head of the Treasury Department.

Shapley’s meagre three-day tenure beats that of Anthony Scaramucci, who was famously booted from his role as Trump’s communications director after just 10 days during the president’s first term. It’s also yet another change in leadership for the IRS, which has now lost its fourth commissioner in three months.

Melanie Krause, the IRS acting commissioner before Shapley, was appointed in February but resigned earlier this month after the Treasury Department allowed Immigrations and Customs Enforcement access to IRS data to help deport immigrants. Doug O’Donnell retired amid agency cutbacks and chaos, and Danny Werfel, Joe Biden’s appointed IRS commissioner, resigned on Trump’s Inauguration Day. The agency is facing so much turbulence, it’s starting to become known as a “zombie agency” among tax attorneys, CNBC reported Thursday.

While Trump’s official pick to lead the IRS, Representative Billy Long (who suspiciously just had a six-figure debt paid off by campaign donors), awaits Senate confirmation, Musk and Bessent continue to publicly butt heads.

On Thursday, Musk shared a tweet from far-right activist Laura Loomer slamming Bessent for his reported association with a Trump hater. “Troubling,” Musk replied. It’s a sign that much of the Trump administration is not on the same page, as federal agencies fall apart at the seams.

Friday was not a good day in court for the Trump administration.

The White House suffered not one but two federal court setbacks: Judges paused President Trump’s plan for mass layoffs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and halted the administration’s deportation of immigrants to countries other than their place of origin without due process.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said she was “deeply concerned” about Trump’s attempt Thursday to fire nearly everyone at the CFPB, saying it would violate her earlier court order against the administration’s attempt to shut down the agency. Jackson has scheduled a hearing for April 28 to hear testimony from the officials behind the CFPB’s reduction in force.

“I’m willing to resolve it quickly, but I’m not going to let this [reduction in force] go forward until I have,” said Jackson.

The CFPB’s union estimated Trump’s layoffs could hit as many as 1,700 workers. The layoffs would result in the CFPB’s enforcement division being cut from 248 employees to just 50. The supervision division would go from 487 to 50 and be relocated from Washington, D.C., to the southeastern United States. In some cases, some of the agency’s legally required functions would only have one person assigned to them.

Hours before Jackson’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued a separate injunction against the Trump administration’s deportation of immigrants to countries such as El Salvador, regardless of where those immigrants are from.

“Defendants argue that the United States may send a deportable alien to a country not of their origin, not where an immigration judge has ordered, where they may be immediately tortured and killed, without providing that person any opportunity to tell the deporting authorities that they face grave danger or death because of such a deportation,” Murphy wrote in his ruling.

“All nine sitting justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Assistant Solicitor General of the United States, Congress, common sense, basic decency, and this Court all disagree,” Murphy added.

Last month, the White House cited the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan immigrants that it claims are gang members to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a Salvadoran prison known for human rights abuses, without court hearings for the accused. Many of the immigrants didn’t have criminal records and were considered gang members merely for having tattoos, which isn’t even a clear indicator of gang affiliation in Venezuela.

Trump won’t react positively to the rulings, and may even defy them, as he has done with other court orders. It’s another example of how recklessly his administration operates, taking action without any regard for legality or constitutionality. The question is whether Congress or the Supreme Court will eventually limit his authority as the Constitution demands.

Dr. Mehmet Oz made a particularly useless comment Friday, after being sworn in as Donald Trump’s administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“It is your patriotic duty, I’ll say it again, the patriotic duty of all Americans to take care of themselves because it is important for serving in the military, but it is also important because healthy people don’t consume health care resources,” Oz said during a ceremony at the White House.

“The best way to reduce drug spending is to use less drugs ’cause you don’t need them, ’cause you’re healthy. And it feels a lot better, as well.”

Oz’s suggestion that Americans stay healthy is so simple, it might just be work—oh wait, no!

The health care programs that Oz now oversees provide coverage for about half of the U.S. population. During his confirmation hearing, Oz refused to say that he would oppose cuts to Medicaid that Trump and Republicans are intending to force through in order to fund an extension on the president’s 2017 tax plan.

Earlier this week, Trump signed an executive order promising to lower drug prices, but in fact handed a huge win to pharmaceutical companies, which will be permitted to set their own drug prices for an additional four years before they can be reduced as part of Medicare’s negotiation program.

Behind Oz stood Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s secretary of health and human services, who is spearheading the administration’s efforts to “Make America Healthy Again”—and folding his crusade against conventional medicine into the government’s health recommendations.

After Donald Trump has spent months promising to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio just admitted that might not be possible.

“So we came here yesterday to sort of, begin to talk about more specific outlines of what it might take to end a war,” Rubio told reporters Friday in Paris, where he met with European and Ukrainian officials. “To try to figure out very soon—and I’m talking about a matter of days—not a matter of weeks, whether or not this is a war that can be ended.… If it’s not possible, if we’re so far apart that it’s not going to happen, then I think the president’s probably at a point where he’s going to say, ‘Well, we’re done.’”

A reminder: Before he was elected, Trump said he would have the war “settled in one day.”

But in his first three months as president, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have done little to help the situation. They’ve instead cut millions in military aid to Ukraine and berated the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for his supposed lack of allegiance to the United States.

The Trump administration is discovering that putting a stop to Europe’s largest war in decades is harder than it thought, and it’s growing impatient.

“We’re not going to continue with this endeavour for weeks and months on end,” Rubio told reporters. “We need to determine very quickly now, and I’m talking about a matter of days, whether or not this is doable. If it is, we’re in, if it’s not, we have other things to focus on as well.”

The president echoed Rubio’s message from the White House Friday, telling reporters he wants to “get it done.”

“People are dying. We’re gonna get it stopped ideally now,” Trump said before flipping the script. “If for some reason one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just gonna say, You’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people, and we’re just going to take a pass, but hopefully we won’t have to do that.”

Both Rubio and Trump clearly think it’s time to move onto more important things; there are visas to revoke and citizens to deport.

Donald Trump revoked a U.S. citizen’s Social Security benefits in the hopes he would leave the country.

A man who became a naturalized citizen shortly before Trump took office received a letter on February 13 from the Social Security Administration informing him that he was losing his Social Security and Medicare benefits, The Bulwark reported Friday.

“We cannot pay you benefits because you are not lawfully present in the U.S.,” the letter obtained by The Bulwark reads. The man’s English-speaking family appealed the letter, reversing the decision, but his case is yet another reminder that the president isn’t afraid to weaponize the federal programs in his war on immigrants … or really anybody he wants out of the country.

Last week, multiple news outlets reported that the Trump administration entered the names of more than 6,000 immigrants into the SSA’s “death master file,” stripping them of their legal ability to work and receive benefits in the U.S. (Meanwhile, Elon Musk continues to claim federal safety net programs are rampant with fraudulent information, such as incorrect death dates.)

“This is an outrageous abuse of power. It will not only create extreme hardship, but kill people,” Nancy Altman, the president of the advocacy organization Social Security Works said in a statement. “Imagine, in one Trump administration keystroke, losing your income, your health insurance, access to your bank account, your credit cards, your home, and more.… When Social Security incorrectly declares someone dead, it ruins their lives.”

The Bulwark’s report comes as Trump takes his deportation threats to a new level. The Department of Homeland Security is sending letters to U.S.-born immigration attorneys telling them to leave the country immediately, and last week, Trump mused about the possibility of sending American citizens to megaprisons in El Salvador, a stark reminder the president will stop at nothing to rid the country of his adversaries.