NYT reports on the resistance
In the battle against government waste and fraud, the New York Times sides with waste and fraud. It corralled Coral (not Carol) Davenport (Smith Collège 1998) from her job of telling the world it will end because of climate change and pressed her to take on the Department of Government Efficiency.
Putin and Zelensky are not the only ones forced to send raw conscripts to the frontlines. Darn it, if only this was BCL—before Craig’s List—and classified ads were still cash cows, NYT would have plenty of bodies to throw at the enemy.
Her report was typical of this bureaucratic insurrection against President Trump by presenting it as a battle between good (experts and career staff) against unelected bad guys. That no one elected the experts and career staff never enters the skulls of these numbskulls.
Davenport wrote, “Members of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency gained access over the weekend to a payroll system that processes salaries for about 276,000 federal employees across dozens of agencies, according to two people familiar with the matter.
“The move overruled objections from senior IT staff who feared it could compromise highly sensitive government personnel information, including by making it more vulnerable to terrorist cyberattacks, these people said.
“By accessing the system, which is housed at the Interior Department, the DOGE workers now have visibility into sensitive employee information, such as Social Security numbers, and the ability to more easily hire and fire workers, according to the two people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.”
Oh no. General Musk has breeched the gate. Why he might help Trump hire and fire workers. We cannot allow a president to do that.
Davenport never quite explained why it is OK to give access to sensitive employee information about workers at the Pentagon, DOJ and many other agencies to some Civil Service test passer in the Interior Department but not to a businessman who reports direct to the president.
Her report follows another one by Andrew Duehren (Harvard 2018) and Cecilia Kang (Whitman College 1994), “Employees from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are gaining access to vast amounts of information held by federal agencies, even as lawsuits try to stop them.”
Again, the so-called New York Times failed to explain why federal agencies hold all this sensitive information.
But that report hinted at what is going on here—an election-denying resistance that is as unAmerican as the metric system.
That report began, “Last week, Michelle King, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, sought to reassure Democrats on Capitol Hill about the presence of two of Elon Musk’s allies at her agency.”
King told the Democrats, “I share your commitment to protecting sensitive personal and financial information from improper disclosure and misuse. We follow all relevant laws and regulations when granting access to S.S.A. systems.”
That sounds harmless but the reality is she promised to block Musk.
How did that work?
NYT said, “Days later, Mr. Musk's team sought access to the agency’s data. Ms. King resisted the request, and by Monday night she and her chief of staff, Tiffany Flick, were out of their jobs, according to three people familiar with their departures. The Trump administration elevated Leland Dudek, a relatively low-level staff member who had previously collaborated with DOGE, to temporarily lead the agency.”
The newspaper is going with the argument that Democrats are valiantly trying to protect your privacy while the real battle is ending waste and fraud. We lost our privacy decades ago when the government began gathering this information.
Nevertheless, NYT said, “At stake in the struggle between Mr. Musk and the career civil servants is the security of data that is routinely targeted by hackers and scammers hoping to exploit Americans, former government officials and experts say. Quick changes to the often old, intricate technology systems that house the data could also inadvertently break them, leading to cascading technology problems across the government.”
Also a hurricane and an earthquake may hit the Social Security offices. Point Reno, the highest point in the District of Columbia, might turn into a volcano. You never know.
Despite unprecedented resistance, DOGE is getting things done and cleaning DC.
DOGE tweeted, “For the past 4 weeks, Social Security has been executing a major cleanup of their records. Approximately 9.9 million number holders, all listed age 120+, have now been marked deceased. Another ~2 million to go.”
No one is 120 and no one should have a Social Security card without a birthdate. The only question is cui bono—who benefits?
We do know that Democrats are resorting to violence again just as they did in 2020 and its Summer of Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests.
On the Lower East Side of Manhattan this month, two men spray-painted a red swastika on a parked Tesla Cybertruck. In the borough’s meatpacking district, six people sat on the floor of a Tesla showroom and refused to leave, chanting “Elon Musk is unelected, democracy must be protected” before being arrested. In Albany, lawmakers called for New York State’s pension fund to unload its 3.5 million shares of Tesla stock.
And in Harlem, Fred Brathwaite, a visual artist and hip-hop pioneer who goes by Fab 5 Freddy, decided it was time to part ways with his Tesla Model 3, which he bought in 2019. His reasons were unrelated to the car’s performance. “It’s really looking like you’re wearing a red MAGA hat driving this car,” he said.
Destroying someone’s car is a crime. Destroying someone’s car because the CEO of the company is a Republican is insane. Put them all together and you spell Democrat.
Kara Li, an art historian in Brooklyn Heights, is a Democrat’s Democrat. The story said:
She described her Tesla years almost like a relationship that went sour: It’s not me, it’s you.
When she first got the car in 2018, she said, it came with an implied understanding that both brand and driver were “concerned about emissions and fossil fuels and the future of our planet.” But as the years went on, she said, “it became more focused on the cult of Elon Musk. That was not something that appealed to us or that we wanted to be associated with.”I thought auto-erotica meant something entirely different. Maybe I can write a bodice-ripping romance—Tess and the Tesla. She was a historian trying to save the world from climate change until she met and brought home Tesla, a bad boy EV.
The government is $37 trillion in debt. That’s $37 million million. To put that in perspective, there are 129 million occupied houses in the USA. If every one of them carried a $250,000 mortgage, you still wouldn’t hit $37 trillion.
We have neither the time, the patience or the money to continue business as usual.
Can the resistance succeed? That is up to voters, but I do know Trump has to make arrests of violent demonstrators—and bring charges against bureaucrats who are blocking the president.
Very strange how Democrats were for something- cutting government waste and fraud and abuse- before they are now against it. Old tapes of Obama and Pelosi have surfaced showing them railing against waste and fraud. But now they’re against cutting waste and fraud. Democrats were for electric cars built by Musk and a few others but now they’re against Teslas. They used to praise Musk. Now they’re against can’t stand him and want him dead or something equivalent.
It’s not hard to figure them out, though. They figured out a way to make themselves rich off of government programs promoting waste, and fraud and now they see it slipping away. If there was money to be made getting rich of the waste and fraud they would switch sides in a heart beat.
Just as Ilan Omar said awhile back… it’s all about the Benjamin’s.
It's funny (not ha ha funny) how the people who are shocked (shocked I tell you) that non-civil servants have access to personal employee information are elated when someone publishes the addresses of judges and public figures they disagree with for the purpose of mental and physical harassment. That is the height of hypocrisy!