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The coup thread. Fuck the traitors to the Constitution.


Willfully Horn

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8 hours ago, Willfully Horn said:

Nightmare fuel, indeed. Also fuel for rage. Take this excerpt, just rage, rage, rage:

”Public policy expert Dan Moynihan told reporter Elliott that the fact these people “are not really public officials” makes it hard for Congress to intervene.”

 

As citizens, why wouldn’t any given American have standing to file suit against people unlawfully accessing their information?

Or drag them out of the buildings and hang them from any convenient lampost or leftover gallows from Jan. 6? 

These guys seem like enemies of my country to me. The lives of real enemies are less than nothing to me.

We're a banana republic, we will likely have to resort to banana republic means. Where does the Army stand? Is the Constitution being attacked? Should the Army move to defend it. 

Where's the American Ataturk?

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Ever since Bin Ladin was killed (at least) foreign actors have accused the government from using USAID as a front for intelligence operations- I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is the first agency Musk and Trump are trying to close down. I don’t believe for a minute this is about illegally stopping funding for things like supplies and education programs to combat Ebola in Africa 

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51 minutes ago, Pig Bellmont said:

Ever since Bin Ladin was killed (at least) foreign actors have accused the government from using USAID as a front for intelligence operations- I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is the first agency Musk and Trump are trying to close down. I don’t believe for a minute this is about illegally stopping funding for things like supplies and education programs to combat Ebola in Africa 

ZunZuneo

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Layering it on

A judge in Washington said she would further block the White House’s spending freeze.

A federal judge said on Monday that she intended to temporarily block the Trump administration from imposing a sweeping freeze on trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans, adding to the pushback against an effort by the White House’s Office and Management and Budget.

The statement by the judge, Loren L. AliKhan of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, came hours after the Justice Department told a federal judge in Rhode Island who issued a similar order on Friday that the government interpreted his order as applying to all spending nationally, not just to funds for the states that brought that case.

Together, the signals from federal judges amounted to a two-fisted rebuke of the move by the budget office as an overreach that likely lacked legitimate authority.

Judge AliKhan, a Biden appointee, made her statement at the end of a nearly 90-minute hearing on Monday, saying she wanted to file her order before an earlier administrative stay expires at 5 p.m. The case before her was brought by charities and other nongovernmental organizations that rely at least in part on federal grants to operate.

The hearing was the latest turn in a fast-moving set of events since the Trump administration issued the spending freeze last week, paralyzing groups around the country and prompting chaos. After the legal challenges were filed, the Trump administration said it had rescinded the O.M.B. memo and asked judges to dismiss the lawsuits as moot.

But the plaintiffs have presented evidence that the blanket freeze imposed by the memo appears to remain in effect regardless.

On Wednesday, the White House press secretary declared on social media that the retraction of the memo “is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze.” The plaintiffs in the case before Judge AliKhan presented statements from various grant recipients over the weekend that they remained unable to retrieve the funds they had been awarded through an online portal.

The Trump administration has portrayed the spending freeze as an effort to make sure that grants and loans do not violate executive orders Mr. Trump separately issued shortly after taking office in which he sought to end several policies he dislikes, like diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

The case is not challenging those orders themselves. But the plaintiffs have argued that the O.M.B. memo went further, in part by barring nebulous concepts not found in Mr. Trump’s orders, like “wokeness” and in part by requiring a blanket freeze.

Daniel Schwei, a lawyer for the Justice Department, argued that there was no need for any order because, he said, the government interpreted the one by the judge in Rhode Island as covering the entire landscape.

But Kevin Friedl, a lawyer for the plaintiffs who works for the advocacy group Democracy Forward, argued that the order in the Rhode Island case could be lifted at any time, so his clients needed additional relief.

Also calling the order “consequential and ill-considered,” he argued that they were being harmed through various means, from a chilling of First Amendment rights to specific problems keeping their doors open without the funds they had been awarded.

The litigation is complicated by a lack of clarity about the continued block on funding even after the O.M.B. withdrew the memo.

Mr. Schwei argued that if they were instead doing it because of Mr. Trump’s executive orders or as decisions they made for themselves, it would be improper for the judge to use the lawsuit to intervene. Mr. Friedl urged the judge, however, to recognize the “reality” that the freeze was implemented soon after the O.M.B. memo came down.

It remained unclear how far-reaching Judge AliKhan’s order would be.

Mr. Friedl asked the judge to require, as part of the order, that O.M.B. tell all recipients of its original memo that the freeze had been blocked and that they should roll back any steps they had already taken to carry it out.

But Mr. Schwei said that would be “extraordinarily broad” since it would encompass numerous agencies who were not party to the litigation. He asked her to limit any such order to those particular people or groups.

“They are requesting this court superintend all federal financial assistance,” he said, and referring to the part of the Constitution that gives Mr. Trump the power to oversee the executive branch, he called the request both an “extraordinary and an overly broad intrusion on agency authority and the president’s Article II authority.”

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All your government are belong to Grok (with a healthy dose of irony).

Elon Musk Ally Tells Staff 'AI-First' Is the Future of Key Government Agency
Sources say the former Tesla engineer now in charge of the Technology Transformation Services wants an agency that operates like a "startup software company."

In a Monday morning meeting, Thomas Shedd, the recently appointed Technology Transformation Services director and Elon Musk ally, told General Services Administration workers that the agency’s new administrator is pursuing an “AI-first strategy,” sources tell WIRED.

Throughout the meeting, Shedd shared his vision for a GSA that operates like a “startup software company,” automating different internal tasks and centralizing data from across the federal government.

The Monday meeting, held in-person and on Google Meet, comes days after WIRED reported that many of Musk’s associates have migrated to jobs at the highest levels of the GSA and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Prior to joining TTS, which is housed within the GSA, Shedd was a software engineer at Tesla, one of Musk’s companies. The transition has caused mass confusion amongst GSA staffers who have been thrown into surprise one-on-one meetings, forced to present their code—often to young engineers who did not identify themselves—and left wondering what the future of the agency’s tech task force will look like.

Shedd attempted to answer these questions on Monday, providing details around a number of projects the agency will pursue over the coming weeks and months. His particular focus, sources say, was an increased role for AI not just at GSA, but at agencies government-wide.

In what he described as an “AI-first strategy,” sources say, Shedd provided a handful of examples of projects GSA acting administrator Stephen Ehikian is looking to prioritize, including the development of “AI coding agents” that would be made available for all agencies. Shedd made it clear that he believes much of the work at TTS and the broader government, particularly around finance tasks, could be automated.

"This does raise red flags,” a cybersecurity expert who was granted anonymity due to concerns of retaliation told WIRED on Monday, who noted that automating the government isn’t the same as automating other things, like self-driving cars. “People, especially people who aren’t experts in the subject domain, coming into projects often think ‘this is dumb’ and then find out how hard the thing really is.”

Shedd instructed employees to think of TTS as a software startup that had become financially unstable. He suggested that the federal government needs a centralized data repository, and that he was actively working with others on a strategy to create one, although it wasn’t clear where this repository would be based or if these projects would comply with privacy laws. Shedd referred to these concerns as a “roadblock” and said that the agency should still push forward to see what was possible.

Sources say that during the call Shedd tightly connected TTS and the United States Digital Services—rebranded as the United States DOGE Service, or DOGE, under Trump—as “pillars” of a new technological strategy. Later in the meeting, he said that there was no plan to merge the two groups and that projects would flow through them both depending on available staff and expertise, but continued emphasizing the upcoming collaboration between TTS and DOGE.

Employees, sources say, also asked questions about the young engineers, who had previously not been identifying themselves in meetings. Shedd said that one of them felt comfortable enough to introduce himself in meetings on Monday, sources say, though Shedd added that he was nervous about their names being publicly revealed and their lives upended.

Shedd was unable to answer many staff questions about the deferred resignations, the return to office mandate, or if the agency’s staff would face substantial cuts, according to sources. At one point, Shedd indicated that workforce cuts were likely for TTS, but declined to give more details. (Similar questions were also asked of Department of Government Efficiency leadership in a Friday meeting first reported by WIRED.)

Towards the end of the call, sources say, a TTS worker asked if they would be expected to work more than 40 hours per week, to deal with all of the upcoming work and potentially laid off workers. Shedd responded that it was “unclear.”

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1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

FIFY

Imagine having your loyalty to your country questioned by absolute bottom of barrel intellects, and otherwise intelligent people that are just totally sold on foreign policy delusions. 

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37 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Imagine having your loyalty to your country questioned by absolute bottom of barrel intellects, and otherwise intelligent people that are just totally sold on foreign policy delusions. 

So, bourbon?

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s-l400.jpg

They took enormous risk when they moved against the king of England. Jeffereson knew the cycle of governance lined out by the Greeks. There's never stasis although we (me for sure) assumed we'd hit the sweet spot and evolved to the ultimate goal. 

I've never been a communist or even a socialist. Now, at last, I get it. But who could have predicted such tame complacence?

I'm sure that I grow tiresome. I'll step back. My points have been amply made. 

Back to detachment, my friends. At least for awhile.

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36 minutes ago, staboner said:

A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss.

All thing will right themselves eventually. 

Or they will fail. 

And that is ok. 

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50 minutes ago, RomaVicta said:

s-l400.jpg

They took enormous risk when they moved against the king of England. Jeffereson knew the cycle of governance lined out by the Greeks. There's never stasis although we (me for sure) assumed we'd hit the sweet spot and evolved to the ultimate goal. 

I've never been a communist or even a socialist. Now, at last, I get it. But who could have predicted such tame complacence?

I'm sure that I grow tiresome. I'll step back. My points have been amply made. 

Back to detachment, my friends. At least for awhile.

I was told that the second amendment would save us from this. Guess we will find out won't we.

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8 hours ago, Anastasis said:

Imagine having your loyalty to your country questioned by absolute bottom of barrel intellects, and otherwise intelligent people that are just totally sold on foreign policy delusions. 

I’m not a Republican and I live in Texas. I don’t have to imagine

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This puzzles me. 
 

“Elon Musk announced that he has dissolved the Internal Revenue Service’s free file program, effectively firing the staff who worked on the popular program, the Daily Beast reports.

The billionaire revealed that he “deleted” the group of individuals who oversaw the system that allows Americans to easily file their taxes for free on the IRS website”

https://politicalwire.com/2025/02/03/musk-says-hes-deleted-free-irs-tax-filing-program/?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=hubbub-pro

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12 hours ago, staboner said:

A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss.

You're about a decade (or more) behind on that realization. You should accelerate your mental timeline a bit.

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Maybe I'm as neurospicy as the comrade who can't focus with all the whispering, but I'm completely lost and confused on what we are doing in this thread and who we are railing against. Is it Elon (again)? Is it the DOGE? Is it the Congress? Is this the Cabinet hearing thread?

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2 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:

Maybe I'm as neurospicy as the comrade who can't focus with all the whispering, but I'm completely lost and confused on what we are doing in this thread and who we are railing against. Is it Elon (again)? Is it the DOGE? Is it the Congress? Is this the Cabinet hearing thread?

Snl Queen GIF by Saturday Night Live

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It's going to take a little while - a very short while, in fact - but soon the effects of the dismantled agencies will be felt.  There will be a terrorist attack, more plane crashes, foreign governments may fall to their own coups, lots of bad shit.  That's what has to happen to expose what these policies that are being put into place actually mean.

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1 hour ago, Vegas64 said:

Maybe I'm as neurospicy as the comrade who can't focus with all the whispering, but I'm completely lost and confused on what we are doing in this thread and who we are railing against. Is it Elon (again)? Is it the DOGE? Is it the Congress? Is this the Cabinet hearing thread?

I take it as a thread concerning the ongoing attacks (many of them unconstitutional) on the core administrative functions of the federal government. 

Maybe this op/ed essay will best convey what's being discussed here.

Quote

 

The Familiar Arrogance of Musk’s Young Apparatchiks

Appearing on an anti-feminist podcast in 2021, JD Vance compared his ambitions for a conservative takeover of America to U.S. policy in postwar Iraq. “We need like a de-Baathification program, but a de-wokeification program in the United States,” he said, referring to the campaign to root out members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. If and when Donald Trump returned to the White House, Vance argued, he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

Vance’s words were prophetic, because the first days of the second Trump term have a distinct Coalition Provisional Authority vibe. For those lucky enough not to remember, the Coalition Provisional Authority was the administration that George W. Bush and his team put in place after charging heedlessly into Iraq, convinced that it would be easy to remake a government about which they knew next to nothing. It was full of right-wing apparatchiks, some barely out of college, who were given enormous responsibilities. Six people initially hired for low-level administrative jobs after sending their résumés to the conservative Heritage Foundation were assigned to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget. A social worker who’d served as director at a Christian charity was put in charge of rebuilding the health care system.

Meanwhile, 50,000 to 100,000 Iraqi government workers, many of whom had joined the Baath Party only to get their jobs in the first place, were fired. Schools went without teachers. As Syrus Solo Jin wrote in Time, budget blunders by overwhelmed novices meant that the police weren’t paid on time. The de-Baathification that Vance wanted to emulate is widely seen as a disaster that contributed to the deadly chaos and instability that followed America’s invasion.

The United States government, of course, has yet to be dismantled to the same extent as Iraq’s, though not for lack of trying. During the transition, Trump’s allies used the phrase “shock and awe” — another throwback to the Iraq war — to describe his plans for the first 100 days.

Soon after taking over, they created a crisis by shutting down huge segments of federal government spending, though they restarted at least some payments after a judge slapped them with a court order. Late Friday, Elon Musk seized control of the Treasury Department’s payment system, which disburses trillions of dollars and houses sensitive data about millions of Americans. Some of the people helping him take over the government — who include, as Wired reported, a half dozen engineers between the ages of 19 and 24 — appear to be even less experienced than the neophytes who staffed the C.P.A. in Iraq.

Employees at the General Services Administration, which manages office space, transportation and technology for the federal government, told Wired that Edward Coristine, a recent high-school graduate who spent three months at Musk’s company Neuralink, has been on calls where “workers were made to go over code they had written and justify their jobs.” Another young member of Musk’s team, a software engineer named Gavin Kliger, sent out an email to USAID employees informing them that the headquarters has been closed and they shouldn’t come in; Musk said that he’s “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

At the Department of Education, employees have been put on leave for doing diversity training sessions that their managers recommended, and The Washington Post reports that Trump will soon begin dismantling the department altogether. More than a thousand people at the Environmental Protection Agency who work on issues like climate change and reducing pollution have been told they could be fired imminently.

Trump’s lackeys are purging the security services. Thousands of F.B.I. agents are being scrutinized for their work investigating and prosecuting the Capitol rioters, and according to The New York Times, scores or even hundreds of agents could be forced out. Meanwhile, leading administration jobs are going to cranks and fanatics. Darren Beattie, whom Trump reportedly plans to tap to be under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, wrote last year, “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”

Many are describing Musk’s assault on the federal bureaucracy as a coup, which isn’t quite right. Trump was, alas, elected, and delegated outsize power to Musk voluntarily. But the reason it feels like a coup is that we have no precedent for an administration treating its own government like a hostile territory to be conquered and exploited. In his memoir of America’s war on Iraq and its aftermath, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad described being ruled by “young, naïve zealots who held unchallenged powers to reshape Iraq the way their masters wanted. They represented the worst combination of colonial hubris, racist arrogance and criminal incompetence.” We’re now getting a taste of that experience.

It’s as if we’ve come full circle. America’s war in Iraq, in addition to killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and destabilizing the Middle East, also set the stage for Trump’s rise by fostering a widespread sense of distrust and betrayal in the United States. Trump, in turn, is imposing on us a milder version of the careless, unaccountable governance we installed there. As he does so, jingoist mobs and craven elites are cheering him on, just as many cheered George W. Bush. (Before there was the “Gulf of America,” there were “freedom fries.”)

Eventually, the destruction wrought by this new regime will be undeniable, even to some of its supporters. But breaking a country, unfortunately, is a lot easier than putting it back together.

 

 

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