I'm not sure what could possibly be a bigger fish right now. This is, quite literally, the dismantling of our entire government and its public services unfolding before our eyes.
> I try to keep emotion out of this newsletter. I have always tried to write Notes on the Crises in a calm, detached tone so that the information I highlight shines through. However, I must be honest with readers: I’m absolutely terrified. When I first read the Washington Post’s reporting I subsequently had a panic attack. I am not subject to those. I didn’t have one during the start of Covid-19 when I started writing about the full health, economic, and political consequences in March 2020 and knew before many, many people that millions would die. Nor at any time subsequently did I have one. Even as someone who has spent an unusual amount of time thinking about the Treasury’s internal payments system for a person who has never been in government, I find grasping the full implications of Elon Musk and his apparatchiks reaching into and trying to exert full control over the Treasury’s payment system mind-boggling.
> There is nothing more important on the entire planet than getting Elon Musk and DOGE out of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and allowing career civil service employees to run the Treasury’s internal payments system without capricious and self-serving interference from billionaires and their allies. This effort must fail if we are to safeguard any semblance of due process and lawfulness in the executive branch. A vague anonymous promise that DOGE only has “read only” access is not enough. They need to be rooted out so that we can return to the slower moving, less dangerous, “five alarm fire” constitutional crisis we were having as of Friday morning.
Same as you, I have no idea what’s going to happen. But something will, and it might be good. It might be bad as well, but at least the news will be interesting.
Same as me? Speak for yourself, I don't care about what might or might not happen, to avoid honestly dealing with what is happening. That they started doing this on a Friday night should tell you they know what they're doing, that is, that it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. That it "might be bad".
> It might be bad as well, but at least the news will be interesting.
For those who read nothing about the first half of the 20th century, sure. For them this is surely "interesting". But since you wouldn't like your harm to be someone else's entertainment either, that's not an argument for anything.
He’s a threat to the unsupervised government institutions. If measured by the amount of money being stolen, the US government is the most corrupted in the world.
In context, that question would not about the present, but the future:
> It might be bad as well, but at least the news will be interesting.
Of course this doesn't mean "this might suck for me, but at least it will be interesting news for others". Why pretend otherwise?
> Approximately 20 members of Elon Musk’s staff have begun working within the Education Department. They have gained access to multiple sensitive internal systems, including a financial aid dataset containing the personal information of millions of students enrolled in the federal student aid program.
You don't receive such aid, correct? So why care. Just a bunch of dudes soaking up highly sensitive information to do whatever with.
Trump spoke plenty of times of his desire of purging all sorts of things including the "deep state". It's amazing to me that all it takes is to tack on some vague claims about "efficiency" from a guy who lies like a child about the dumbest things, for some Americans to say "but what IF it saves a bit of money?" and just ignore the whole "using a very flimsy excuse to purge political opposition" thing.
