DOGE Is Targeting Even More Agencies Than We Knew

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has attempted to expand its influence beyond agencies within the executive branch to distant corners of the federal government, and then some.

NPR reported Tuesday that it had identified nearly 40 organizations that DOGE had attempted to access—some of which were outside of the bounds of the federal government.

Employees at the Office of Government Accountability, or GAO, received a message from a DOGE staffer last week, asking to discuss having a team from Musk’s non-agency assigned to work with them. The offer was quickly rebuffed, as the GAO works for Congress, not the executive branch. It also happens to function as the investigative arm responsible for reporting on the president’s compliance with the Impoundment Control Act—which Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to violate.

GAO wasn’t the only organization to push back against DOGE’s overreach. Late last month, Trump attempted to fire three board members at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an independent nonprofit that disburses taxpayer funds to public stations for educational and cultural programming, but the president’s request was denied.

Shortly after, Trump signed an executive order directing the CPB to stop allocating funds to PBS and NPR. The CPB disburses $535 million in taxpayer funds, an amount that is apportioned by Congress, placing the funding outside of Trump’s realm of control. But the Trump administration wasn’t done: A message arrived with the other two board members from DOGE asking to discuss bringing in a team of cost-cutters.

Crucially, CPB is not part of the executive branch or even the federal government. And funnily enough, DOGE didn’t even send its request to the right email addresses.

Other nongovernmental organizations where DOGE attempted to assign teams include Legal Services Corporation, a nonprofit established by Congress in 1974 that funds 130 legal aid organizations, and NeighborWorks America, which provides grants, training, and assistance to community development groups and was created by Congress in 1978.

The laws creating those organizations state that “the corporation shall not be considered a department, agency, or instrumentality of the Federal Government.”

DOGE also reached out to the Vera Institute of Justice, a private nonprofit that was not created by Congress.

Republicans are forcing through the president’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill despite opposition from within their party, and despite opposition from the American public.

While debating the details of the Medicaid-slashing tax cuts late Tuesday, Massachusetts Democratic Representative Jim McGovern pointed out that the lawmakers in the room were not elected to strip away public services from their constituents.

“I wasn’t sent here to vote for trash like this,” he charged.

The bill proposes $880 billion in Medicaid cuts in order to afford an extension to Donald Trump’s 2017 tax plan, which would overwhelmingly benefit multimillionaires and corporations.

“If I am understanding the numbers correctly, the latest version of their tax scam, the top 0.1 percent stand to gain $255,000 on average in 2027 alone,” McGovern said before the committee. “That is $700 a day every day.

“The people who make over $1 million a year will also get their pockets lined. On average, these millionaires will have an additional $81,500 per year but pennies for everybody else,” the Massachusetts lawmaker continued. “For those earning less than $50,000 a year, the average benefit is $265, less than one dollar per day.

“And that’s laughable when you begin to look at the gaps that are going to be created by these cuts in other programs,” he added.

The Republican bill would kick 8.6 million Americans off of Medicaid over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, though that number could be much larger considering some of the stipulations the GOP hopes to add to the program to limit eligibility, such as adding work requirements to the public health insurance program.

That could eventually strip upward of 36 million Americans of their health coverage—half of Medicaid’s 72 million enrollees, according to a February report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which warned that eligible Medicaid recipients could get strung up in the bureaucracy of increasingly frequent eligibility checks, potentially lapsing coverage for individuals who are entitled to the benefit.

But tampering with the third rail of American politics comes at Trump’s behest, as his acolytes in Congress work to make an enormously expensive tax cut—that won’t add any noticeable benefit for the majority of Americans—more palatable to their base. Trump’s bill is estimated to add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt.

“This is not a governing philosophy. It is a scam,” McGovern said. “For the life of me, I cannot understand why you are doing this. Why the hell did you choose a career of public service just to do this? Just to rip away the health care and food assistance and security of working- and middle-class Americans.

“I don’t understand this, I don’t understand the cruelty,” McGovern added.

Eric Trump on Wednesday broke ground on a $1.5 billion golf course in Vietnam. The deal will “focus on developing 5-star hotels, championship-style golf courses, and luxurious residential estates and unparalleled amenities” near Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, according to a statement in October.

Eric Trump will also meet with Vietnamese officials on Thursday to discuss plans for a skyscraper in the southern business district.

“Vietnam has tremendous potential for luxurious hospitality and entertainment,” said Trump, who serves as senior vice president of his father’s Trump Organization. “We are incredibly excited to enter this dynamic market.”

This news comes as Vietnam is in the midst of an attempt to avoid Trump’s 46 percent retaliatory tariffs on the country. Vietnam has made multiple concessions to the White House already, including a deal with Elon Musk’s Starlink and a pledge to crack down on counterfeit goods. President Trump also just made a massive arms deal with Saudi Arabia and accepted a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar.

The Trump administration is deporting immigrants to countries they aren’t from and refusing to tell judges where exactly, claiming that the information is classified.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy ordered the government to maintain its custody of immigrants on a plane that the immigrants’ attorneys said was headed to South Sudan, and said that authorities might be violating an injunction he issued in late March. The judge’s order came after a hearing in which administration officials refused to say where the flight was or even where it was going.

Lawyers for the immigrants told Murphy that at least two of them were told they were being sent to South Sudan, a country with instability, violence, and political unrest that the State Department warns Americans not to visit. One Justice Department lawyer told Murphy that a Vietnamese man was deported, but refused to provide any details about the flight, including how many other immigrants were on it.

“Where is the plane?” Murphy asked DOJ lawyer Elianis Perez.

“I’m told that that information is classified, and I am told that the final destination is also classified,” Perez responded, claiming that no court order was violated because the man wasn’t afraid of deportation.

But then Murphy asked Perez the authority the government was invoking to classify the location of the flight.

“I don’t have the answer to that,” Perez responded.

Murphy had ordered the government in March not to deport immigrants to countries they aren’t from without allowing them time to challenge their removal in court. He warned the administration that any government official who took part in Tuesday’s flight and knew about the order, including the pilots, could face criminal penalties.

“Based on what I have been told,” Murphy said, “this seems like it may be contempt.”

On multiple occasions, the administration has sent immigrants to countries they aren’t from, all over the world, including Rwanda, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama. The administration has resisted any attempts at oversight, and even judicial orders to stop or slow their actions, refusing to turn planes around. Secretary of State Marco Rubio even claimed he doesn’t have to listen to court orders.

Weeks after a judge ordered the government to allow immigrants some recourse to challenge their deportations, Trump officials still won’t listen. Will the courts have to enforce criminal sanctions against government officials to compel this administration to follow the law?

Earlier this month, the Trump administration’s own intelligence agencies found that Venezuela does not control the Tren de Aragua gang, directly contradicting Trump’s justification for invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport immigrants. But instead of admitting their mistake, they decided to lie.

“We need to do some rewriting … so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS,” said Joe Kent, Tulsi Gabbard’s chief of staff, according to leaked emails viewed by The New York Times. Kent, along with former acting National Intelligence Council head Michael Collins, largely rewrote the memo together. 

The original memo stated, “While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States,” according to the Times.

Trump has been claiming the exact opposite since he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in March to detain and deport Venezuelan immigrants without basic due process.

To support Trump’s use of the wartime powers act, Kent began to piece a story together in the hope that it’d make Trump’s actions look more reasonable.

“Flooding our nation with ‘migrants’ and especially ‘migrants’ who are part of a violent criminal gang is the action of a hostile nation, even if the gov of Venezuela isn’t specifically tasking or enabling TDA’s operations,” Kent wrote, in an email obtained by the Times. 

“Let’s just come out and say [Tren de Aragua] leaders are given sanctuary in Venezuela as their gang members commit horrendous crimes in America, then we can provide the context about our exact knowledge of relationship between TDA and the Venezuelan government,” he continued. Kent even went so far as to say that Tren de Aragua didn’t need logistical support from the Venezuelan government because former President Joe Biden had given it to them in his first term, another lie. 

This is clearly an administration that is making up justifications for its draconian policies as it goes. Whether it’s habeas corpus or birthright citizenship, this administration will look Americans in the eye and lie, over and over again, until their version of events is taken as truth. 

The president unveiled his designs for a “Golden Dome” defense system Tuesday, promising that the massive missile defense sytem—modeled on Israel’s “Iron Dome”—would protect America from international threats.

But when asked by a reporter whether military leaders actually want this supposed upgrade, Donald Trump couldn’t explain himself.

“Have military commanders asked for this system specifically?” asked a reporter. “Because [North American Aerospace Defense Command] had said previously that the current system was adequate, so what does this get the United States that isn’t already—”

“Somebody said the current system is adequate? There really is no current system,” the commander in chief interrupted. “We have certain areas of missiles and missile defense, but there’s no system. We just have some very capable weapons.

“This is a—there’s never been something like this, this is something that’s going to be very protective. Rest assured there won’t be anything like this, nobody else could be capable of building it, either,” Trump said.

The reporter then asked again if the military had actually asked for the space-based missile defense system, to which Trump replied that he had suggested it and military leaders “loved the idea.”

“It’s the way it’s got to be, right?” Trump said, leaning over the Resolute Desk.

Trump requested that Congress appropriate $25 billion in its most recent tax bill to get his Golden Dome dream off the ground, claiming that a final price tag would waver around $175 billion on a projected three-year timeline. But those numbers fall far below what the Congressional Budget Office calculated. Last month, the congressional analysis group estimated that the space-based components of the plan alone would cost more than half a trillion dollars over the next 20 years.

“It’s amazing how easy this one is to fund,” Trump said Tuesday, sounding exceedingly confident that he would be able to secure money for the project from Congress, days after Republicans lapsed on his reconciliation bill for being too expensive. “People actually love it.”

The gold-obsessed real estate developer formally plotted out his Golden Dome idea in a January 27 executive order, throwing the responsibility on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to figure out the details. But since then, critics have wondered if the massively expensive program would cut into funding for America’s preexisting defense programs, including an Air Force project replacing 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles from the 1970s with updated versions.

The Trump administration’s economic plan has dashed America’s credit score, rocking the nation’s lending reputation. And experts warn this could be the beginning of the end.

Credit firm Moody’s downgraded the nation’s score Friday, reporting that it appears increasingly unlikely that the U.S. economy will be able to keep up with its rising debt and interest payments, rattling what was once an unshakable confidence in U.S. growth.

Major international lending entities, such as Deutsche Bank, viewed the score drop as just another indicator that time is running out on solving America’s national debt.

“Yesterday felt like we were somewhere along the line of a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ with regards to the U.S. fiscal situation,” Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid wrote, in a note obtained by Fortune Tuesday. “Hard to know where in that thousand we are but probably much nearer a thousand than at zero even as yesterday saw an initial sell-off reverse as the session went on.

“At the end of the day the loss of the final U.S. triple-A rating late on Friday night doesn’t change anything much immediately but it keeps the drip, drip, drip of poor fiscal news building up against the debt sustainability dam in the background.”

Ratings from Moody’s and other firms inform companies and groups both foreign and domestic regarding how much they need to pay in order to borrow money.

Moody’s was the last of the three major bond-rating agencies to downgrade America’s formerly spotless score, signaling that the nation is a bigger credit risk than it has been in decades. It also indicates that the time in which the U.S. could borrow seemingly infinite sums of money—without the risk of inflation—is coming to a close.

America’s national debt is currently more than $36.8 trillion, as of the time of publishing.

The Trump administration, however, has not yet looked inward for an explanation to the sour score. Instead, it has pushed blame onto the Biden administration, claiming that Republicans are still working overtime to trim the national deficit while they push forward a reconciliation package that would add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt to afford tax cuts for multimillionaires and corporations.

“I do want to assure everyone that the deficit is a very significant concern for this administration,” top White House economist Stephen Miran told reporters Monday. “We’re determined to bring it down and to undo the damage to the fiscal health of the United States that was wrought by the Biden administration and its reckless policies.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, meanwhile, brushed off the score downgrade as a “lagging indicator” of U.S. performance, urging investors to disregard the news.

Trump enacted his sweeping tariff plan in order to offset the jaw-droppingly expensive extension to his 2017 tax cuts, but America has yet to see any gains from the economic agenda. Instead, the tariffs have destabilized American markets while simultaneously undermining U.S. dominance in the global economy.

Whether or not the deficit actually affects the economy is still in debate. But having investors believe in the health of the economy is critical.

“The government deficit isn’t a problem until investors think it is,” Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, told Axios Monday. “And they’re increasingly telling us that the deficit is a problem.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio flippantly said he does not have to listen to court orders at a Senate hearing Tuesday.

Senator Chris Van Hollen asked Rubio about the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador on the government’s own admission. Rubio repeated the Trump administration’s false claims of Abrego Garcia’s gang membership and alleged crimes.

“We deported gang members. Gang members, including the one you had a margarita with. And that guy is a human trafficker, and that guy is a gang banger, and the evidence is going to be clear in the days to come,” Rubio said, referring to Van Hollen’s visit to El Salvador last month to verify Abrego Garcia’s well-being.

Van Hollen interrupted and tried to refute Rubio’s lies, telling Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch that Rubio “can’t make unsubstantiated claims like that.”

“Secretary Rubio should take that testimony to federal court in the United States because he hasn’t done it under oath,” Van Hollen asserted, only to be reprimanded by Risch. Then Rubio made his outrageous claim about the federal judiciary.

“There is a division in our government between the federal branch and the judicial branch. No judge, and the judicial branch, cannot tell me or the president how to conduct foreign policy,” Rubio said. “No judge can tell how I have to outreach to a foreign partner or what I need to say to them. And if do reach to that foreign partner and talk to them, I am under no obligation to share that with the judiciary branch.”

First of all, Rubio completely gets the branches of government wrong, as there are three of them: the executive branch, consisting of the presidency; the legislative branch, comprising Congress; and the judicial branch, made up of the federal court system. But perhaps even more troubling, Rubio also declared that he did not believe in the Constitution’s separation of powers, in which the three branches exist together in a system of checks and balances.

Rubio betrayed what seems to be the Trump administration’s actual beliefs about the U.S. government: that the presidency is more like an absolute monarchy that isn’t subject to congressional or judicial oversight. The conservative-controlled Supreme Court seems to have inspired that belief last year in its ruling on presidential immunity. Now, as President Trump deports immigrants without evidence or due process, we are seeing the actions of a president who believes he is above the law.

Step aside, presidents and prime ministers: Vice President JD Vance says he wants to work with the newest world leader, Pope Leo XIV.

Vance told NBC News Tuesday that he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had discussed U.S. foreign policy during his first meeting with the new pontiff, who hails from Chicago.

“We talked a lot about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza. We talked a lot about the Russia-Ukraine situation,” Vance said. “It’s hard to predict the future, but I do think that not just the pope, but the entire Vatican, has expressed a desire to be really helpful and to work together on facilitating, hopefully, a peace deal coming together in Russia and Ukraine.”

President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social Monday that “the Vatican, as represented by the Pope” was “very interested” in hosting negotiations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

But the Vatican gave no indication it intends to wade into talks. In a statement about the meeting Monday, the Vatican said, “There was an exchange of views on some current international issues, during which hope was expressed that humanitarian law and international law be respected in areas of conflict and that there be a negotiated solution between the parties involved.”

Earlier this month, Pope Leo had called for an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, where the U.S. has directly funded Israel’s relentless slaughter of Palestinians in violation of international law. Since entering the White House, Trump has approved at least $12 billion in arms sales to Israel.

Pope Leo also called for an end to the “war of words and images,” and to end the targeting of journalists—which seemed, again, to be an indirect criticism of Trump’s administration and the MAGA movement. The pontiff had previously shared criticism of Trump’s immigration policies during his first administration, as well as some of Vance’s statements about Catholicism. The noted White Sox fan has also distanced himself from the MAGA crowd by advocating for gun reform and ending racism.

Now it seems Vance is hoping to make nice so as not to alienate a huge swath of the world’s population.

“We have an American pope of the world’s largest single religion—a guy who doesn’t have an army, but who I think has an incredible amount of capacity to convene and to influence not just Europe but, really, the entire world,” Vance told NBC News.

“I hope it’s the beginning of a very good relationship because I think he does care a lot about peace,” he said. “If there is a single most productive thing [from the trip], my hope is that it will be that the relationship between us and the Vatican leads to a lot fewer people getting killed and a lot less humanitarian disaster.”

The United States has maintained diplomatic relations with the papal state for more than 40 years, when former President Ronald Reagan established a partnership with Pope John Paul II to open an embassy in the Holy See.

The president’s threats against Bruce Springsteen are not a joke.

In a post on Truth Social early Monday, Donald Trump said he would be directing the federal government to conduct a “major investigation” into how much money Kamala Harris paid celebrity musicians to endorse her during her 2024 campaign, including the likes of Springsteen, Beyoncé, and U2’s Bono.

One day later, the late-night post appeared less like a stray arrow and more like an administrative agenda.

“Accountability for a class of people who act as if they’re above the law may be uncomfortable for Rolling Stone, but it’s refreshing to the American people,” Trump White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told Rolling Stone Tuesday. Fields said that the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission would “act independently in [their] decision-making” as to whether or not they would get involved, as they have final jurisdiction over such an investigation.

But Trump’s assertion that Harris paid for endorsements isn’t correct. Harris’s campaign was roundly scrutinized for cashing big checks to celebrity production companies, including $165,000 to Beyoncé’s Parkwood Production Media LLC on November 19 and $1 million to Oprah’s Harpo Productions for services that they provided during her campaign. Harpo provided the stage and staff during her livestreamed Detroit town hall, while Beyoncé was paid for “campaign event production,” according to FEC records, weeks after she made a guest appearance at the Democratic presidential nominee’s Houston rally in October. (On Monday, Trump claimed without citation that Beyonce had received $11 million to walk on stage and endorse Harris without performing.)

Springsteen’s production company, meanwhile, received $76,000 from the Harris campaign after he performed as a musical guest at Harris’s Georgia rally in October.

“Campaign finance laws require campaigns to pay fair-market value to vendors. If she failed to pay any of these companies for performing services at an event or rally, it would constitute an illegal in-kind contribution to the campaign in two ways: The contribution would exceed donation limits, and companies are not permitted to donate directly to candidates,” reported Rolling Stone.

The president’s decision to hone in on campaign finance corruption, per those who have spoken to him in recent months, boils down to one word: revenge. Despite skirting consequences by winning the presidency, Trump has seemingly not gotten over the fact that he is the first U.S. president convicted as a felon (and the first convicted felon to become president). Trump was convicted last year on charges related to campaign finance fraud for issuing hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election.

“Democrats pretended to care about campaign finance violations when they persecuted President Trump with their lawfare,” Mike Davis, a conservative lawyer close to Trump who is a key player of the MAGA legal elite, told Rolling Stone. “Maybe they shouldn’t have thrown stones in glass houses. Nobody is above the law.”

Trump and Springsteen have traded barbs for years, but Trump’s fury against the “Born in the USA” singer was reignited last week when the rock star told a crowd in Manchester, England, that the Trump administration was “taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers.”

“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ’n’ roll, in dangerous times,” Springsteen said Wednesday. “In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.”

That sparked Trump’s multi-day tirade against The Boss, writing on Truth Social that the singer of one of his favorite campaign tracks was actually “highly overrated.”

“Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy—Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent FOOL, and our WORST EVER President, who came close to destroying our Country,” Trump posted after clips of Springsteen’s remarks went viral. “If I wasn’t elected, it would have been GONE by now!”

“This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!” Trump added.

In response, Springsteen spoke out again on Saturday, telling another stadium crowd in Manchester that Trump was “unfit” to be president.

“Things are happening right now that are altering the very nature of our country’s democracy, and they’re too important to ignore,” he said.