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The justices found that a president has immunity for "official acts", but is not immune for "unofficial acts", and referred the matter back to a trial judge.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czrrv8yg3nvo

It's not as cut and dry as you suggest which is what I pointed out in my previous post.


I certainly can't say that I disagree with that.


Sadly that may be what is required to undo all the damage he has done in such a short period of time and there's over three and half years to go. He figured how to rip the guardrails to tear it up so it may require that same scenario to repair the damage.


Nobody is going to do anything as long as he is still in office and the GOP hold both houses of congress. And no, they could care less about law and order because it doesn't go along with "what they feel is right".

I think we're actually pretty much on the same page here.

It's looking more and more like we are on our way to a dictatorship.

Again - that sounds good in threory but we're talking about an administration that invented a Fentanyl crisis on the Canadian border in order to push through his agenda. There was no Canadian border Fentanyl crisis and all the Trumptards thought it was great that Trump was flexing his muscles to get stuff done. Murica! If you think that the sycophants and Trumptards won't support whatever invented 'official' act he needs to justify peeing all over the constitution and whateve law he chooses to ignore and abuse - you are not being honest with yourself. I get what is supposed to happen - I'm just trying to be realistic. SC gave Trump a free pass to do whatever the hell he wants. Period.

I'm being perfectly honest with myself. You refer to what people think. I don't care what people "think and feel". I'm speaking about the law. And as anyone can plainly see, even right now the SCOTUS isn't giving him a free pass to do whatever he wants. All anyone has to do is read the SCOTUS rulings to see he did not get a free pass even now. He may not follow those rulings. But not only did the SCOTUS vote 9-0 he had to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, in a 7-2 vote they stopped any further people being sent to prisons in El Salvador. If that's your perception of a free pass we have two very definitions of what that term means.

Wasn't the ruling that he has immunity? Wouldn't that mean that illegal acts are still illegal, but he just doesn't face any repercussions?

So how does that look in practice? The SC makes a ruling and the Potus ignore it while arguing he is carrying out official duties?

That's what I was getting at. I honestly don't know. Setting aside politics and right/wrong and such, it's an interesting hypothetical that looks like we'll have to figure out sooner rather than later.

I think when the POTUS defies a SCOTUS ruling most people have already figured it out. The SCOTUS is the very body that set the parameters for his power in regards to that immunity and described it as it applied to his official duties. Their ruling makes it obvious that they do not see what is happening as a part of his official duties or at the very least have to take a look at and rule if he has the power to use The Alien Enemies Act during peace time.

They are the law of the land and he is defying them.

So much for food safety...

US FDA suspends milk quality tests amid workforce cuts
Leah Douglas
Mon, April 21, 2025 at 5:13 PM EDT2 min read

By Leah Douglas

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Food and Drug Administration is suspending a quality control program for testing of fluid milk and other dairy products due to reduced capacity in its food safety and nutrition division, according to an internal email seen by Reuters.

The suspension is another disruption to the nation's food safety programs after the termination and departure of 20,000 employees of the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the FDA, as part of President Donald Trump's effort to shrink the federal workforce.

The FDA this month also suspended existing and developing programs that ensured accurate testing for bird flu in milk and cheese and pathogens like the parasite Cyclospora in other food products.

Effective Monday, the agency suspended its proficiency testing program for Grade "A" raw milk and finished products, according to the email sent in the morning from the FDA's Division of Dairy Safety and addressed to "Network Laboratories."

Grade "A" milk, or fluid milk, meets the highest sanitary standards.

The testing program was suspended because FDA's Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory, part of its division overseeing food safety, "is no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis," the email said.

An HHS spokesperson said the laboratory was already set to be decommissioned before the staff cuts and though proficiency testing would be paused during the transition to a new laboratory, dairy product testing will continue.

The Trump administration has proposed cutting $40 billion from the agency.

The FDA's proficiency testing programs ensure consistency and accuracy across the nation's network of food safety laboratories. Laboratories also rely on those quality control tests to meet standards for accreditation.


"The FDA is actively evaluating alternative approaches for the upcoming fiscal year and will keep all participating laboratories informed as new information becomes available," the email said.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-fda-suspends-milk-quality-211319846.html

The crazy thing is that the inspectors are paid for by the supplier.

Looks like Elon is stepping back:

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/04/22...-will-drop-significantly-next-month.html

$2 trillion down to $150 billion. And we’re not even sure if that $150 billion is accurate.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/22/health/fda-food-dyes/index.html

FDA says it will phase out petroleum-based food dyes, authorize four natural color additives

The US Food and Drug Administration plans to phase out the use of petroleum-based synthetic dyes in the US food supply due to health concerns, Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary announced Tuesday.

“For the last 50 years, American children have increasingly been living in a toxic soup of synthetic chemicals,” Makary said. “Now, there’s no one ingredient that accounts for the child chronic disease epidemic, and let’s be honest, taking petroleum-based food dyes out of the food supply is not a silver bullet that will instantly make America’s children healthy, but it is one important step.”

The dyes can be found in many candies, cereals, beverages and even in some medication. Companies use the dyes to give food and drinks brighter colors and make them more appealing.

For decades, research in animals has shown a potential link between artificial food dyes like red No. 3, red No. 40, blue No. 2 and green No. 3 and an increased risk of cancer or tumors. Other research shows that red No. 40 and yellow No. 5 and No. 6 contain or may be contaminated with known carcinogens.

Blue No. 1 and yellow No. 6 may be toxic to some human cells, and as little as 1 milligram of yellow No. 5 may cause irritability, restlessness and sleep disturbances for sensitive children. Some research has also shown connections between artificial food dyes and restlessness, trouble learning and attention problems in some children who are sensitive to some dyes.

I am sure there might be some exceptions, but as a common sense rule it is probably best to keep petrol as an additive you put in to your car or a lubrication oil of some sort and not something you ingest.

This type of thing is what I'm hoping for out of RFK.

If he follows through with this (and more) it will be worth it despite his quackery.

I’m not sure how Coca Cola or any other beverage co. is going to keep petroleum based oils in their plastic containers from absorbing into the drink. That’s going to be one avenue of litigation here. My guess is plastic drink containers will get a pass and they’ll continue to contaminate us and pollute our environment.

Some posters sound like the neighbor of a serial killer. "But he was such a nice man. He helped senior citizens by cutting their lawn and was always at the school board meetings."

Straight forward polymer chemistry for the containers, the real challenge can be the additives that have discontinued for the most part or the eventual breakdown of the polymer which can be a concern.

For anyone who still wants to keep up with my fed employee saga since the DOGE/new admin began, today we are out of paper towels again. Also, they have not turned on the HVAC. My 100+ year old building is sitting at a cool 83 degrees inside. Been like that since last week. Some people started packing shorts to wear. I've still got my slacks and button down on. Good times.

Man, if they only had another place we might be able to work to avoid stuff like this...

I'm keeping up with it. Anyone who can't see that these tactics are geared towards trying to get people to quit aren't paying attention.

Amen. Plastic has taken the world over-- and it can't be good. As an old guy, maybe bringing back glass bottles with return of .50 cents might work.

Talking/thinking Government Efficiency- Since officially taking the oath as the 47th President of the United States on January 20, Trump hit the golf course an astonishing 24 times in his first 99 days in office - spending a staggering 24.24 percent of his second term on the greens.

If those number of golf trips are anywhere close no wonder Trump is tweeting at midnight- he needs to give us a decent days work. How a President could play that much golf in a short time is beyond me---- he must be really special.

I truly hope that you are posting this same content outside the narrow confines of DT.

American citizens/voters NEED to know this.

Our tax dollars are paying for this.

DOGE has made a big impact on Washington. But government spending is up.
Sophia Cai and Irie Sentner
Tue, April 29, 2025 at 3:34 PM EDT8 min read

Elon Musk had to publicly pitch Donald Trump on a government cost-cutting initiative three times at an X Spaces campaign event last August before he appeared receptive.

“We need a government efficiency commission,” said the billionaire, who was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get Trump elected. The president responded with a tangent on rebuilding the military.

Eight months later, that project has become arguably the most powerful force of the beginning of Trump’s second term. Headed by Musk, named after an internet meme and administered, in large part, by mysterious twentysomething engineers, DOGE in 100 days has reshaped Washington, hobbling its longstanding institutions as the world’s richest man brings a chainsaw to a bureaucracy he claims is rife with “waste, fraud and abuse.”

DOGE has cut a wide swath — shrinking the federal workforce to 1960s levels. But its impact in other ways has been more narrow than both supporters and detractors might realize. Government spending is actually increasing amid all the DOGE cuts, with notable exceptions including foreign aid and education.

“In a sense, it’s more successful than you might have thought, in a sense it’s less,” said an administration official close to DOGE who was granted anonymity to speak freely.

Nearly a quarter of a million workers have or are expected to leave their federal jobs. That includes more than 112,000 federal workers who have opted into the deferred resignation program, according to a POLITICO analysis of previous reporting and conversations with administration officials. It also includes some 121,000 workers across agencies who have been fired, according to a CNN analysis.

DOGE has hollowed out or shut down 11 federal agencies and says it has terminated more than 8,500 contracts and 10,000 grants. It has wiped out foreign aid and volunteerism in the U.S., slashed education spending and made sweeping changes to the way the government makes procurements, hires contractors and shares data.

“In terms of downsizing, it’s unprecedented for sure,” said Richard Stern, a federal budget expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He noted that other government makeovers, like the New Deal and Great Society, had been larger — but that DOGE was unique because it is subtractive, not additive.

DOGE, after promising $2 trillion in savings, now says it has saved the government $160 billion. But even these reported savings, so far, have not led to any meaningful decline in total government spending this year, according to the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, which tracks weekly Treasury data.

In fact, the government has actually been spending more compared to this time last year, the model found.

Total spending rose by 6.3 percent, or $156 billion since Trump took office, compared to the first four months of 2024, said Kent Smetters, a Wharton professor who directs the model. Even when accounting for inflation, the federal government has still added $81.2 billion more spending to its books compared to the same period last year, he added.

In a statement after publication, White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields said Trump had a "mandate" to "uproot waste, fraud and abuse." He added: "This isn’t easy to do in a broken system entrenched in bureaucracy and bloat, but it’s a task long overdue."

A DOGE spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Inside the DOGE operation

The operation was part planned, part improvised. Musk assembled a core team of around 40 staff even before the inauguration, most with backgrounds in engineering, venture capital or digital infrastructure, not public administration. The first month and a half of 2025 saw aggressive action.

Musk, a “special government employee” who still heads Tesla, SpaceX and X and has billions of dollars in federal contracts, faced almost no internal levers of scrutiny or accountability in those early days. With boundless resources and a direct line to the president, Musk wielded his accumulated power freely, appearing at Cabinet meetings and in the Oval Office alongside Trump.

And armed with the playbook he used to gut Twitter, Musk revved the chainsaw.

The most immediate and heavy-handed cut came at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Backed by strong Republican support and Trump’s promises to nix U.S. spending abroad, DOGE effectively dismantled the agency, sacking about 10,000 staff members and instructing a remaining skeleton crew to shred and burn internal documents.

DOGE also decimated smaller foreign aid agencies, including the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. That’s reflected in the meaningful decline in spending on the U.S. international presence: USAID, the State Department, and other international assistance programs are all down from the late Biden years, adding up to around $2 billion in savings over the first four months of the year, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

Elsewhere, DOGE made sweeping cuts that caught much of Washington off guard. The DOGE engineers relied on Musk’s mantra to cut 20 percent more than you needed and then add back: “If you’re not in pain, then you didn’t cut enough,” Musk is known to say. The “adding back” was constant: Nuclear power workers, those working on bird flu and regulators overseeing medical devices like heart implants were rehired after initial layoffs.

The first Cabinet-level agency to execute its reduction in force was the Education Department, which moved to cut about 1,300 employees — over 30 percent of its workforce. Those cuts led to the second area of actual decline in spending this year.

The Penn model calculates the department’s spending declined by $10 billion in the last year, when accounting for inflation, to levels not seen in about 15 years, according to Smetters.

Musk faces blowback

By March, the blowback was in full force. DOGE became the subject of at least five dozen lawsuits. Congressional Republicans — rocked by viral outbursts at town halls by worried constituents — expressed concern about the impact on veterans and rural health clinics.

National polling showed that Americans are worried about DOGE, and Musk’s favorability is underwater and trails Trump’s. Democrats seized the opportunity, branding Musk as an unelected, oligarchic boogeyman with unchecked power. During a Wisconsin Supreme Court race earlier this month framed as a referendum on Musk, they delivered him a crushing defeat.

In Washington, Musk’s clashes with Cabinet members including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent became public. Others like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth expressed their hesitation at deep personnel cuts in private.

Musk’s business fortune was turning, too. His net worth has dropped by more than $100 billion since its peak in December, according to Forbes, as Tesla’s sales and stock price fell rapidly amid boycotts. The billionaire also expressed fear for his personal safety, following a series of attacks on Tesla vehicles that the Justice Department is charging as acts of domestic terrorism.

During a Tesla earnings call last week, after the company announced a stunning 71 percent decrease in net income for the quarter, Musk told shareholders he would step back from his government work to focus on Tesla, dropping his DOGE commitment to “a day or two” per week.

But even as DOGE loses its biggest advocate in Washington, it will continue to operate in a more decentralized model, with smaller teams embedded within agencies to carry out reductions in force and efficiency missions.

Agencies including the Departments of Interior, Commerce and Veterans Affairs are still preparing to conduct reductions in force after offering two rounds of deferred resignations.

But notably, administration officials don’t expect massive layoffs at the Pentagon, the biggest agency that has remained largely untouched. In some cases, departments are holding back approvals for deferred resignation programs to avoid losing critical staff.

DOGE’s legacy

Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan, pro-government nonprofit, said DOGE has touched “every element of our government,” but noted that its impact has been “deeper” in the fields of scientific research and health care, and in international development, which he said has been “wiped away.”

“This is not an on-and-off switch,” Stier said. “What they’ve gotten rid of is important capability, amazing talent and deep relationships, both here and in other places. To rebuild will require not 100 days, but years and years.”

Meanwhile, a core group of DOGE staffers is pushing forward on another major project: building a consolidated immigration and citizenship database to track migrants entering the country and allow government officials to more easily identify and deport them, several officials said. That endeavor, if successful, could reorient federal immigration enforcement for decades.

“Trump’s first term was a failure insofar as the country was a failure under Biden,” a Trump administration official closely aligned with DOGE said. “They didn’t break anything.”

“Are you going to be able to reshape the government in order to be in a position to make it take them time to hire back to advance the deep state?” the person added. “That’s what’s important.”


https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-made-big-impact-washington-193441329.html

I think what irks me about it, personally, is that he said we (federal employees) were wasting taxpayer money, lying about working from home and were instead out golfing...

...while he travels to his home in Mar-a-Lago to go golfing a record amount of times spending millions of taxpayer dollars.

Thanks, brother. Maybe I should. I was starting to feel hopeless about it, but I probably should reach out.

DOGE has made a big impact on Washington. But government spending is up.


Sophia Cai and Irie Sentner
Tue, April 29, 2025 at 3:34 PM EDT8 min read

Elon Musk had to publicly pitch Donald Trump on a government cost-cutting initiative three times at an X Spaces campaign event last August before he appeared receptive.

“We need a government efficiency commission,” said the billionaire, who was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get Trump elected. The president responded with a tangent on rebuilding the military.

Eight months later, that project has become arguably the most powerful force of the beginning of Trump’s second term. Headed by Musk, named after an internet meme and administered, in large part, by mysterious twentysomething engineers, DOGE in 100 days has reshaped Washington, hobbling its longstanding institutions as the world’s richest man brings a chainsaw to a bureaucracy he claims is rife with “waste, fraud and abuse.”

DOGE has cut a wide swath — shrinking the federal workforce to 1960s levels. But its impact in other ways has been more narrow than both supporters and detractors might realize. Government spending is actually increasing amid all the DOGE cuts, with notable exceptions including foreign aid and education.

“In a sense, it’s more successful than you might have thought, in a sense it’s less,” said an administration official close to DOGE who was granted anonymity to speak freely.

Nearly a quarter of a million workers have or are expected to leave their federal jobs. That includes more than 112,000 federal workers who have opted into the deferred resignation program, according to a POLITICO analysis of previous reporting and conversations with administration officials. It also includes some 121,000 workers across agencies who have been fired, according to a CNN analysis.

DOGE has hollowed out or shut down 11 federal agencies and says it has terminated more than 8,500 contracts and 10,000 grants. It has wiped out foreign aid and volunteerism in the U.S., slashed education spending and made sweeping changes to the way the government makes procurements, hires contractors and shares data.

“In terms of downsizing, it’s unprecedented for sure,” said Richard Stern, a federal budget expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He noted that other government makeovers, like the New Deal and Great Society, had been larger — but that DOGE was unique because it is subtractive, not additive.

DOGE, after promising $2 trillion in savings, now says it has saved the government $160 billion. But even these reported savings, so far, have not led to any meaningful decline in total government spending this year, according to the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, which tracks weekly Treasury data.

In fact, the government has actually been spending more compared to this time last year, the model found.

Total spending rose by 6.3 percent, or $156 billion since Trump took office, compared to the first four months of 2024, said Kent Smetters, a Wharton professor who directs the model. Even when accounting for inflation, the federal government has still added $81.2 billion more spending to its books compared to the same period last year, he added.

In a statement after publication, White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields said Trump had a "mandate" to "uproot waste, fraud and abuse." He added: "This isn’t easy to do in a broken system entrenched in bureaucracy and bloat, but it’s a task long overdue."

A DOGE spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Inside the DOGE operation

The operation was part planned, part improvised. Musk assembled a core team of around 40 staff even before the inauguration, most with backgrounds in engineering, venture capital or digital infrastructure, not public administration. The first month and a half of 2025 saw aggressive action.

Musk, a “special government employee” who still heads Tesla, SpaceX and X and has billions of dollars in federal contracts, faced almost no internal levers of scrutiny or accountability in those early days. With boundless resources and a direct line to the president, Musk wielded his accumulated power freely, appearing at Cabinet meetings and in the Oval Office alongside Trump.

And armed with the playbook he used to gut Twitter, Musk revved the chainsaw.

The most immediate and heavy-handed cut came at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Backed by strong Republican support and Trump’s promises to nix U.S. spending abroad, DOGE effectively dismantled the agency, sacking about 10,000 staff members and instructing a remaining skeleton crew to shred and burn internal documents.

DOGE also decimated smaller foreign aid agencies, including the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. That’s reflected in the meaningful decline in spending on the U.S. international presence: USAID, the State Department, and other international assistance programs are all down from the late Biden years, adding up to around $2 billion in savings over the first four months of the year, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

Elsewhere, DOGE made sweeping cuts that caught much of Washington off guard. The DOGE engineers relied on Musk’s mantra to cut 20 percent more than you needed and then add back: “If you’re not in pain, then you didn’t cut enough,” Musk is known to say. The “adding back” was constant: Nuclear power workers, those working on bird flu and regulators overseeing medical devices like heart implants were rehired after initial layoffs.

The first Cabinet-level agency to execute its reduction in force was the Education Department, which moved to cut about 1,300 employees — over 30 percent of its workforce. Those cuts led to the second area of actual decline in spending this year.

The Penn model calculates the department’s spending declined by $10 billion in the last year, when accounting for inflation, to levels not seen in about 15 years, according to Smetters.

Musk faces blowback

By March, the blowback was in full force. DOGE became the subject of at least five dozen lawsuits. Congressional Republicans — rocked by viral outbursts at town halls by worried constituents — expressed concern about the impact on veterans and rural health clinics.

National polling showed that Americans are worried about DOGE, and Musk’s favorability is underwater and trails Trump’s. Democrats seized the opportunity, branding Musk as an unelected, oligarchic boogeyman with unchecked power. During a Wisconsin Supreme Court race earlier this month framed as a referendum on Musk, they delivered him a crushing defeat.

In Washington, Musk’s clashes with Cabinet members including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent became public. Others like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth expressed their hesitation at deep personnel cuts in private.

Musk’s business fortune was turning, too. His net worth has dropped by more than $100 billion since its peak in December, according to Forbes, as Tesla’s sales and stock price fell rapidly amid boycotts. The billionaire also expressed fear for his personal safety, following a series of attacks on Tesla vehicles that the Justice Department is charging as acts of domestic terrorism.

During a Tesla earnings call last week, after the company announced a stunning 71 percent decrease in net income for the quarter, Musk told shareholders he would step back from his government work to focus on Tesla, dropping his DOGE commitment to “a day or two” per week.

But even as DOGE loses its biggest advocate in Washington, it will continue to operate in a more decentralized model, with smaller teams embedded within agencies to carry out reductions in force and efficiency missions.

Agencies including the Departments of Interior, Commerce and Veterans Affairs are still preparing to conduct reductions in force after offering two rounds of deferred resignations.

But notably, administration officials don’t expect massive layoffs at the Pentagon, the biggest agency that has remained largely untouched. In some cases, departments are holding back approvals for deferred resignation programs to avoid losing critical staff.

DOGE’s legacy

Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan, pro-government nonprofit, said DOGE has touched “every element of our government,” but noted that its impact has been “deeper” in the fields of scientific research and health care, and in international development, which he said has been “wiped away.”

“This is not an on-and-off switch,” Stier said. “What they’ve gotten rid of is important capability, amazing talent and deep relationships, both here and in other places. To rebuild will require not 100 days, but years and years.”

Meanwhile, a core group of DOGE staffers is pushing forward on another major project: building a consolidated immigration and citizenship database to track migrants entering the country and allow government officials to more easily identify and deport them, several officials said. That endeavor, if successful, could reorient federal immigration enforcement for decades.

“Trump’s first term was a failure insofar as the country was a failure under Biden,” a Trump administration official closely aligned with DOGE said. “They didn’t break anything.”

“Are you going to be able to reshape the government in order to be in a position to make it take them time to hire back to advance the deep state?” the person added. “That’s what’s important.”

DOGE hasn’t helped anyone but Elon and Putin from the evidence I’ve seen so far. Another brilliant move by the Doofus-n-Chief. And now Trump’s brain seems to be completely addled. Maybe he’ll find a new DOGE leader over at Fox… Judge booty-face my be the one!

Wonder why all the secrets?


Politico
Trump administration asks Supreme Court to keep DOGE records secret
Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney
Wed, May 21, 2025 at 12:20 PM EDT4 min read

The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to block an effort to open the inner workings of the secretive DOGE cost-cutting effort to public scrutiny.

The Justice Department filed an emergency appeal Wednesday urging the high court to put a hold on a judge’s orders giving a watchdog group access to documents detailing firings, grant terminations and other actions proposed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which was overseen by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

Solicitor General John Sauer is also asking the Supreme Court to block a deposition of the obscure official the Trump administration has identified as the leader of the budget-cutting drive: DOGE administrator Amy Gleason.

The appeal is the latest in more than a dozen expedited requests the administration has brought to the Supreme Court in the first four months of President Donald Trump’s second term. The myriad requests have sought the justices’ quick intervention to block preliminary lower-court rulings on everything from Trump’s immigration agenda to his layoff plans for federal workers. One other emergency appeal pending before the justices also relates to DOGE: a bid by the administration to give DOGE access to sensitive Social Security data.

Wednesday’s appeal comes in a case in which Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is suing under the Freedom of Information Act to seek records about DOGE’s operations.

The Trump administration contends that DOGE, formally known as the U.S. DOGE Service, is exempt from FOIA because DOGE only provides advice to the president and federal agency officials and has no independent decision-making authority.

However, in a series of rulings beginning in March, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper found there were strong indications that DOGE was actually directing cuts and layoffs at numerous federal agencies. That substantive operational role suggests DOGE’s activities fall under the Freedom of Information Act, the judge wrote.

Cooper ordered DOGE and the Office of Management and Budget to begin turning over records responsive to CREW’s FOIA requests and also allowed the watchdog group to conduct fact-finding under a legal process known as discovery. Cooper’s discovery orders allow the group to obtain documents from DOGE and conduct a deposition in which Gleason would have to answer questions under oath.

Cooper hasn’t yet ruled on any specific exemptions DOGE or OMB may claim to keep secret information contained in the records.

In urging the Supreme Court to lift Cooper’s orders, Sauer argued that they violate the separation of powers and threaten the confidentiality of advice provided to the president.

Cooper and several other judges have suggested DOGE has kept its operations intentionally opaque, part of an effort to outrun legal scrutiny amid its rapid-fire efforts to dramatically reshape the federal workforce and slash programs disfavored by the Trump administration.

It took more than a month for the White House to identify Gleason as the purported “administrator” of DOGE, despite clear indications — and public pronouncements by Trump himself — that Musk steered the operation. And small bands of DOGE affiliates have been dispatched to agencies across the federal government with unclear mandates, vetting and lines of authority.

Courts have intervened to slow or halt DOGE’s access to sensitive systems in the U.S. Treasury, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Social Security Administration and U.S. Agency for International Development. A judge Monday ruled that DOGE’s takeover of the U.S. Institute of Peace was illegal and declared it null and void. But significant details about DOGE’s structure and leadership remain murky.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit paused Cooper’s orders last month at the Trump administration’s request, but another panel of the same court ruled last week that his orders could proceed.

Sauer’s appeal argues that the fact-finding Cooper has permitted into DOGE’s operations and influence gives CREW much of the same information it is seeking in the FOIA lawsuit, even though the process the judge authorized is aimed at determining whether DOGE is subject to FOIA in the first place.

The Trump administration placed DOGE in the Executive Office of the President. Some of its components, like OMB, have been ruled subject to FOIA, while others are beyond the reach of the transparency statute.

The relief Sauer is seeking from the Supreme Court could delay many of the disclosures about DOGE for months or even a year or more, as the administration seeks to add the case to the high court’s so-called merits docket. That would likely result in arguments late this year or early next year and a decision by June 2026.

A spokesperson for CREW said the group will urge the justices to permit the group to probe DOGE’s activities.

"While DOGE continues to attempt to fight transparency at every level of justice, we look forward to making our case that the Supreme Court should join the District Court and Court of Appeals in allowing discovery to go forward,” spokesperson Jordan Libowitz said.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-administration-asks-supreme-court-162053443.html

Transparency…. Pffft.

They want to keep in under cover because it's all BS and/or damning for DOGE. Seriously, when you dig down into what they actually cancelled and all the facts and figures behind their alleged "$150B" it doesn't make any sense. There are enough discrepancies out there with DOGE assertions vs actual FPDS data that the house of cards would fall apart if it came under any actual scrutiny.

There was a reason that they didn't release a comprehensive report. With all the fallout re: Musk and all the damage control that has happened, I think it's pretty safe to call this an abject failure. It was never going to be a success, but people bought into it. If you want to reduce the campaigned $2T, which we all know was BS from the start, you have to slash social security, defense, healthcare or any combination of those three. Instead, they saved pennies by cutting benefits that people like me signed up for when we signed up for our jobs and then gloated about it.

I'm also going to assume that they have a "penny wise dollar stupid" situation going and are only just now realizing it.

I saw that FDA is putting calls out to retained employees to "volunteer" to perform the admin tasks that were being done by the people they RIFd. This is going to slow things down even further (FDA was never known for it's speed or response time) and ultimately add cost.

Oh, 100%. We have ironically lost a lot of efficiency on our end, as well. It's all the trademarks of someone who has personality disorder and a megalomaniac complex taking something over and completely effing it up. He goes on bizarre personal attacks against journalists too when they ask something that barely resembles a tough question and/or just confront him with facts.

Come to think of it, it's a full-on display of the similarities between him and 47.

They are brothers from another mother. The comparisons are uncanny.

Pretty much everything that Trump and his minions do is kept under wraps. Even the Transcripts of his meetings and speeches... This admin is 100% anti transparent. They can't stand up to the scrutany

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opin...07ea80d6164f77b5275ccfbf038f9f&ei=77

A heartfelt letter to Tesla CEO and chief-DOGE-chainsaw-wielder Elon Musk, from America.

Dear Elon:

Hey, buddy. We hear you’re going through a bit of a rough patch lately. Your electric-car brand and overall reputation are in the toilet, people are saying not-nice things about you, and the whole “King of the Department of Government Efficiency” thing didn’t work out the way you wanted. We hear you basically gave up, took your exploding rocket and went home after deciding to leave Trump's administration.. (Oh, we forgot to mention that your rockets keep exploding. When it rains, it pours, right?)

Listen, we get it. There are a lot of emotions involved when a person realizes that bad behavior can have consequences. Just imagine how your best bud, Donald Trump, is going to feel if that should ever happen to him? We’re kidding. That’s never going to happen. But it is happening for you, pal, and we're sorry nobody likes you. But we ‒ the good people of America ‒ want to help you learn from this experience.

The other day, you told The Washington Post that just because you barnstormed into the federal government as head of DOGE and started firing random people and upending years of foreign diplomacy and scientific research while proudly waving around a chainsaw, you were criticized for doing those very dumb things.

“DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” you said. “So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”

But see, here’s the thing, big fella. You were downright gleeful about putting people out of work. You called the U.S. Agency for International Development “a criminal organization.” And while you were doing all this, you changed your social media user name to "Harry Bōlz” and had this at the top of your profile page: “Circumcisions at a discount, now 50% off!”

Now, can you see how that kind of attitude and behavior might upset some people? Can you see how it might eat away at your credibility? We think you can, buddy. We think you’re big enough and smart enough to connect these two dots.

Now you also got a little mad the other day at the Republicans who welcomed you into their government playpen. They’re trying to pass a massive bill to make sure rich people like you don’t see a tax increase, but you saw it as undercutting all your hard work trying to fire thousands of people with little explanation.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,” you told CBS News Sunday Morning, adding that it “increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”

Hey, we get it. It’s not nice when other people try to take the government you tried to ruin and find a different way to ruin it, even if that way screws over the same poor people you were trying to screw over. We want to validate your feelings, while also helping you understand that you are no less harmful than all those congressional Republicans.

In fact, you’re all equally terrible, and your ideas collectively benefit America’s upper crust while treating the rest of the country like doormats.

There’s a human emotion called “shame,” and it’s something you might want to Google when you’re not busy working on an ugly electric truck that won’t sell or a rocket that will almost inevitably explode. Consider that part of your homework!

There’s one other thing you said to The Post we want to discuss. It has to do with how your political work and public comments have turned your reputation more toxic than the bacteria that cause botulism.

“People were burning Teslas,” you said. “Why would you do that? That’s really uncool.”

You’re right, bud. Burning Teslas is very uncool and never acceptable. Never. Ever.

But beyond unacceptable acts of vandalism, a lot of people are justifiably mad at you, and you seem surprised by that. So we want to ask you this: What are some reasons people might be angry?

Could it be because you bought Twitter and turned it into a platform for racists, sexists and Nazis? Could it be that you’ve embraced a far-right German political party and told Germans to “move beyond” the guilt of the past? Could it be that weird salute you did at a Trump rally?

Could it be the way you casually throw around the “R-word” online? Could it be the casual and mocking way you dispatched thousands of federal workers, prancing like a peacock through government agencies and acting like you knew more than anyone else in the room? Could it be that you’re mean? That your wildly anti-transgender comments are dehumanizing and disgust many people?

Could it be that you told advertisers who refuse to buy ads on X to “go f‑‑‑ yourself”?

Opinion: Democrats want a liberal Joe Rogan to help them win elections. I'm right here.

Maybe some of those things explain why Tesla sales in Europe dropped 49% in April compared with the same month a year ago.

Maybe some of those things explain why the Cybertruck is viewed as the symbol of a lonely, unfunny man dealing with serious life issues.

Unfortunately, none of those things explain why your rockets keep exploding. That’s pretty much on you, bud.

But the point here is that we hear you. We hear that you’re sad. We hear that you're confused about the way you’re being treated.

And we want you to know you can learn from all of this. You can become a better person. Or you can keep being a self-absorbed dingus who nobody likes. It’s really up to you, pal.

Your country, unfortunately,

— America

VA-based DOGE associate gets ‘the boot’ after publicly discussing his work
Sahil Lavingia detailed in a personal blog how the reality of hunting inefficiencies at the Department of Veterans Affairs was not what he had expected.
May 28, 2025
DOGE
Natalie Alms
Natalie Alms
Staff Reporter, Nextgov/FCW
Aformer associate of the Department of Government Efficiency says that he was removed from DOGE after an interview where he discussed his work was published earlier this month.

Sahil Lavingia — an engineer, tech startup founder and CEO of Gumroad, an e-commerce platform for content creators — wrote in a recent personal blog that he “got the boot” from DOGE without warning the day after Fast Company published an interview in which he spoke about finding less inefficiencies than he expected in the government during his DOGE assignment as senior advisor to the chief of staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” Lavingia told Fast Company in the piece, which also noted that he noticed the number of mission-driven people working in government. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.”

In the new post, Lavingia detailed his work extracting HR data to lay off employees at VA and working to implement artificial intelligence at the department as part of DOGE. The White House, Office of Management and Budget and VA didn’t respond to requests for comment.

President Donald Trump set up DOGE on his first day in office with a focus on tech. Since then, DOGE has also reviewed and cut government contracts at agencies and played a part in layoffs across the government — though Lavingia wrote that DOGE had no real authority there and the “real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the 'fall guy.'” DOGE associates have, however, led layoff efforts at several agencies before they got political heads.

Lavingia worked for DOGE as a software engineer at the VA for just over 50 days, he wrote, but “was never able to get approval to ship anything to production that would actually improve American lives,” despite building several prototypes.

“In the end, I learned a lot, and got to write some code for the federal government. For that, I'm grateful,” he said in his blog post. “But I'm also disappointed. I didn't make any progress on improving the UX of veterans' filing disability claims or automating/speeding up claims processing, like I had hoped to when I started.”

Lavingia did review contracts, using a large language model to flag some for potential cancellation, he wrote. He also said he built tools to help the VA with its layoff efforts, and generally worked to speed up AI at the agency, specifically via an internal ChatGPT tool and a VA chatbot demo for the public on the VA website.

Lavingia wrote that he wanted to work at DOGE to make an impact, noting that he previously canvassed for Bernie Sanders’ presidential run in 2016.

He previously applied for DOGE’s predecessor, the U.S. Digital Service, during the Obama administration, but discovered a difficult government hiring process, according to Fast Company. Government hiring has long been criticized for being arduous, and what was formerly U.S. Digital Service has done work to try and improve it.

The former member of Elon Musk’s team also wrote about frustration with a lack of knowledge-sharing in DOGE and what he called a lack of team culture. Lavingia said he pushed to open source his work when Musk asked about improving the public’s perception of DOGE during an all-hands meeting.

“The reality was setting in: DOGE was more like having McKinsey [management consulting] volunteers embedded in agencies rather than the revolutionary force I'd imagined,” the blog said. “It was Elon (in the White House), Steven Davis (coordinating), and everyone else scattered across agencies.”

This administration fired many who were already in USDS — which has acted as a type of internal tech consultancy for the government since 2014 — before it became DOGE. The General Services Administration has also since dismantled another of the government’s tech consultancy teams, 18F.

DOGE has been criticized for its work hoovering up government data, as well as its role in workforce layoffs, which have hurt some modernization efforts.

WIRED previously reported on the alarm bells Lavingia and his work set off for VA employees worried about DOGE’s lack of understanding of the agency and disregard for normal procedures.

“In meetings with the Office of the CTO, I discovered ambitious ongoing software projects like reducing veterans' benefits claims processing from 133 days to under a week,” wrote Lavingia. “I also learned that several of VA's code repos were already open-source, and the world's first electronic health record system, VistA, was built by VA employees over 40 years ago.”


https://www.govexec.com/management/...ter-publicly-discussing-his-work/405641/

Truth is their enemy.

DOGE wouldn't be nearly as unpopular and a failure if it had publicized and prioritized stuff like what I had clipped. Nobody needed convincing that the govt needed to be more efficient. It's the execution of DOGE's mission and the people who didn't have the background or the info to do this right. HUGE wasted opportunity.

DOGE was a total failure

It was another grift. Elon got his legal and regulatory obstacles removed, added a few more billion a month in contracts and left the country to rot on the vine. Everything Doge touched is now suspect as hell. I even felt like they were giving the Russians a look around.

In effect, we just watched the richest man in the world trash the lives and actually kill 100s of thousands of the poorest people in the world for personal gain. Murica!

I actually have a story about DOGE “finding less inefficiency” and it’s pretty funny. I won’t post it in here though, so PM me whoever is interested.