In the past week or so, the courts have begun to try to set some boundaries on the Musk–Miller–Trump administration’s early blitz of recklessness.
. . .
This judicial review provides at least a small reprieve, hope that some of the administration’s most destructive impulses will be stopped. Or at least pared back. But even with the courts stepping up, and even with the reality of the administration’s ineptitude sinking in, this early Musk–Miller–Trump blitz remains very—maybe irreparably—damaging. Of course, there are a lot of moles to whack: the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are being dismantled at an alarming rate, and the court system is not known for being nimble. The administration is betting, perhaps rightly, that at least some of its thoughtless, lawless efforts will slip through the cracks.
But even if the courts caught them all—and even if every court facing each lawless escapade said, “Nope, that’s not a thing”—still the entire process would be doing serious damage to our institutions. Think of it as someone spoofing your identity and going on a shopping spree with your credit cards. Even if the goon gets caught, you still have to go store by store to argue that the fraudulent purchase wasn’t legitimate and hope the debt is forgiven. And all the while, perhaps long after all the debts are dealt with, the torrent of uncertainty kills your credit score.
We had their playbook with p2025 and did nothing. They started enacting it, and we still do nothing. We could have shock-and-awed them right back with prepared lawsuits and movements blow for blow, and nothing.
The DNC and their non-spoiler neoliberals are still getting their sweet sweet oligarch bribe checks, so all is right with the world as far as they’re concerned.
They’re literally more defensive about any actual leftwing movement to get them to defend the people from the murderous capitalists destroying us and the planet for short term profit.
We either need a populist to steal the DNC’s machine from them as they’re kicking and screaming like Trump did the RNC, make a 3rd party, the best option have a hot revolution starting with Wall Street, or accept this hell as we sleepwalk into oblivion.
Blue no matter who is rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. I voted for Harris out of some harm reduction, but the capitalists are the problem and own both parties. Republicans revel in the cruelty and are simply louder about it. Democrats will support your freedom to be LGBTQ… As you die in the gutter of poverty, exposure, and capital defense force brutality. Here have an affirmation ribbon to use as a blanket and/or snack in your cardboard box as they support the industry denying the claims for the nerve damage that made you lose your shitty subsistence job when your treatment would cut into their profit expectations.
Both parties support the “Freedom” of the rich to toss capital batteries they broke into the trash when they’re no longer of use to their bottom line. Freedom without social responsibility is a rampage.
The Democrats just want more gay, trans, PoC concentration camp guards.
This is not the Democrats fault. It is the fault of those that voted for Trump. The knew exactly what he was, and still voted for him. They wanted this.
I’m suspect of posts that blame Democrats, are these posts put up by paid shills?
WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW IS THE FAULT OF TRUMP, AND HIS MAGA FOLLOWERS!!!
Pelosi defends lawmaker stock trades, citing ‘free market’ https://apnews.com/article/business-nancy-pelosi-congress-8685e82eb6d6e5b42413417f3d5d6775
The fascists are worse. I voted Harris with a funeral dirge in my heart out of harm reduction, but make no mistake, all we’ve been arguing for half a century is the rate of decline. A little slower under neoliberals, a little faster under Fascists.
NOTHING CAN IMPROVE until our government knocks our oligarchs down to size. Both parties are very well paid by the oligarchs to defend them from us. The oligarchs are running the asylum because both parties let them.
Republicans having no meaningful opposition on the shape and priorities of the economy for so long made them this bold. Every cycle in most of our lifetimes, both parties have been marching rightward. I fully expect next cycle for neoliberals to advocate “more humane” concentration camps in their never ending March to the new middle, already deep into fascist crazy town.
We had their playbook with p2025 and did nothing.
Liberals ran out their strongest champions
- Chuck Schumer
- Richie Torries
- The Cheney Family
- The UK Labor Party campaign staff
- Ted Cruz’s former chief of staff at the Lincoln Project
- Some very reputable and trustworthy staffers from AIPAC
And spent over $1B of donor money in order to tell people that only
Joe BidenKamala Harris can Beat Trump, after a no-contest primary. A full year of campaigning. They brought Jeff Flake up as a surprise guest for the DNC!You can’t reasonably call that nothing. It felt like less than nothing.
At least they brought war criminal Dick Cheney on board, that made sure they would be completely useless.
How dare they show they have support of both sides of the aisle!
I’m a federal employee. You have no idea the stress my family and I have been dealing with since that motherfucker swore in.
He didn’t swear in. Elon just showed up.
No, he bought his way in and probably holds dirt over Trump. This wasn’t random chance.
Dirt? Guy is a convicted felon, says and does monstrous things openly, and denies things he just did on video the day before. He promoted a violent attack on his own government. He is dirt, he lives dirt. Unless it’s a video of him literally beheading dozens of kittens, I can’t imagine it would give him any leverage. Not even sure if that would either sadly.
Trump’s comment about Elon who “knows those computers very well” relating to voting machines makes me think that all the other crimes he did before are small fries comparitively to what Elon has on him/what Trump owes Elon.
Trump allowing himself to be openly cucked by Elon repeatedly is not something that he would just let happen without something big going on behind the scenes. Trump is a massive narcissist, and he is not afraid to tell people to fuck off normally if they steal his spotlight or slightly disagree with him. Just look at his last administration for plenty of examples.
I don’t live in the US, but I did want to just say that as an outsider I appreciate the effort you are putting in, especially given the hostile working environment.
A relative of mine is a state employee… he had two reports that’d applied for transfer to the equivalent federal departments… and those two have now withdrawn their requests.
I wish you the best of luck and I thank you for your contribution to public well being.
They wouldn’t have been hired anyway. We had people who were supposed to start on Monday, January 27th. On Thursday the 23rd, their offers were rescinded and we were told they wouldn’t be starting. I can only imagine. Of course they had already quit their previous job. Now what the fuck are they doing?
Not personally and directly, no, but broadly, yes - I do know the irreversible damage they’re doing.
And here’s the real key to it all - none of it is accidental. The damage is the point.
Their goal is actually very simple - it’s to utterly destroy every aspect of the government that benefits the common people or inconveniences the wealthiest few, in order to convert it explicitly and entirely into a mechanism for protecting and expanding the privilege of the wealthiest few at the expense of everyone else.
And they announced it and fully laid out a plan ahead of time. This should come as a surprise to no one who is literate.
Majority of the population supports it. Anything else is pure cope.
It burns my ass that some folks actually bought the whole “Trump doesn’t support Project 2025” bullshit. I cannot imagine being such a gullible, credulous moron.
Not just support it, but that he never even heard of it. (Then goes on to say that he doesn’t agree with it lol)
I just need to shout this into the void:
Fuck this fucking bullshit. What the hell is wrong with this country. I fucking hate this timeline.
blame democrats for not having a primary
No, blame the people who did this. Blame the people that voted for Trump.
Blame? They did what you did, vote for the better candidate. That chunk of people was bigger than the chunk who voted for the other side. Isn’t that what the US is all about since the 1780s? Blame should be given to the people who sat on their arses and did not vote. We all know there are more democrat aligned people than republican.
Working as a federal employee comes with a set of golden handcuffs. You trade in a decent salary for retirement at the end. Firing people, or even asking them to leave for less than 10 months salary (maybe) is a huge Fuck You to those who have already sacrificed years of time. When you started your career- you couldn’t possibly predict something like a Trump train coming along to piss all over your life’s plans.
Who the fuck, with any level of competence, would ever want to apply for a federal position after seeing this shit show?
Who the fuck, with any level of competence, would ever want to apply for a federal position after seeing this shit show?
That’s the point. Musk et. al. are foreign assets with orders to weaken NATO and the US at all costs. They are successfully accomplishing their orders. And once the US’s economy has spiraled and collapsed, the USD will no longer be a trusted currency used for global trade. Then it’s BRIC’s time to shine. That’s their dream, at least.
Musk is his own asset. He doesn’t need to be a foreign one to fuck shit up, that’s just a side business for him
Yeah, this along with so many other things they have already done are going to cost us a shit load of tax dollars. We’re going to have to pay market rates or above or offer sign on bonuses to get anyone willing to work for the fed again.
I have so many ideas about it, before it even began. Good luck to you all, may we survive this next fascist cycle
After surviving the last 4 years Americans have proven they can survive anything.
What I don’t understand is that no one is stopping this from happening. They’re all just letting it happen. Perhaps because they are afraid to lose their jobs but at what cost? I’ve lost all hope for this country and I wish to God I could move. Oh well.
Did he really get rid of remote work for no reason?
To add more context - I’m a federal employee who has received these Fork emails -
They always come out at night, usually ~ 8-9 pm Eastern. One came out on a Sunday night. So you show up for work the next morning and that’s what’s waiting for you. I’m convinced this is done on purpose, to fuck with us.
As Vought (perfect Bond villain name, right?) said:
“Put Them In Trauma”
They literally want to traumatize us. They hate us because for decades we’ve been the only ones to tell them no. No, Elon, you can’t fuck all kinds of shit up when you launch a spaceship. No, Elon, you can’t make the stock market go haywire because you were high and tweeted something stupid. No, Elon, you can’t make a deal with the Pentagon and then run to Putin and do something completely different.
Elon does not like to be told no, but Elon can’t go 5 minutes without acting like the entitled dipshit that he is, so here we are.
And so, ~ 2.5 million civil servants - scientists, healthcare researchers, USAID, engineers, doctors, etc etc, will feel his wrath because he can’t be told no.
I took a big pay cut for this job because I valued job security over money after growing up in a household where jobs were not guaranteed and my parents struggled. Finally I got there after trying for years, and now Elon has to throw a shit fit.
But it’s not about me - I’ll be ok, but many others won’t. And we won’t get it back without a lot of work, work that I’m not sure that we, as a country, are going to be willing to do. The brain drain and decades of knowledge capture will be lost forever. And that’s by design - now we can all go work for contractors with fewer benefits and no job security and help Elon to make even more money.
One of the Fork emails taunted us by saying that we should be happy to leave our low productivity jobs in government so that we could go work high productivity jobs in the private sector. (So funny!) I know that’s bullshit, but also I’m old enough to not let 4chan incels trigger me that easily.
I do worry about my younger/newer coworkers though, whose heads are spinning. So, I try to help them. I’m educating them about the union and hopefully giving them the tools to get through this and deal with what comes after in the best way possible, whatever that may be.
So the next time you have to go to some annoying government place with a long line and you’re tired and hungry and frustrated, please try to remember that whoever you end up coming face to face with may have just gotten another email trolling them and telling them what a piece of shit they are and they should resign from their jobs. Just give them some grace. Be kind.
This site is an amazing start! Glad it exists right now.
This is a great resource, and I hope it helps a lot of people.
My agency, and my job specifically, must be done right or people could get hurt. So things like renaming files or purposefully scheduling meeting conflicts aren’t options. I need to find specific bits of technical information to ensure a design is safe. I need to have meetings for safety reviews and make sure there isn’t anything that my group missed that could end up hurting someone.
I’m not saying these won’t be helpful to us in the future, if my agency’s current mission were to change in some way, but right now it’s the same as it was during the last administration. I will keep it in my back pocket though for when I feel it’s necessary.
Thank you!
We know. What we don’t know is why are all civil servants just rolling over, instead of applying simple sabotage.
How would sabotage help when destroying the government is Musk’s and Trump’s goal?
It slows them down. Which is what we can hope for, until people get a bit more organized into other forms of resistance.
It’s easy to volunteer other people, but these are civil servants who inherently believe in the rule of law by default. That programming in itself makes it hard to go against this lifelong belief in doing things by the book.
I hope they can do what they can to resist, but I also don’t believe this is on them either. If the former President in a position of power couldn’t put the brakes on this shit; if we as a society couldn’t put the brakes on this on November 5th… Well, my expectations are very low. Things will have to come crashing down hard until the apathetic and ignorant wake up, I suspect.
It’s easy to volunteer other people, but these are civil servants who inherently believe in the rule of law by default. That programming in itself makes it hard to go against this lifelong belief in doing things by the book.
It also means risking their livelihood, which I expect in many cases is an even greater deterrent than an aversion to rule breaking.
Whose saying they are all rolling over?
Their actions? How else do websites vanish? Whiy aren’t we getting livetracks on Elon’s location, or his toadies? Where are the server crashes?
Lmao, so you are asking “where are the server crashes,” in the same statement acknowledging sites have been removed. How often do you see server crashes of things that have been deleted?
No, I mean crashes if the Whitehouse web sites… or breaking the auth systems for Trump officials… or delaying fleet vehicle reservations for motorcades so they come up short, or have to cancel…
The only way these things can happen so fast is by civil servants just doing what they are told.
I imagine a lot of people just don’t want to go to jail. Considering there’s substantial criminal penalties (for everyone that’s not a billionaire) to take out a website or anything else you mentioned - that’s my guess.
There are myriad ways to take something offline, which is easily plausible as an “oops” moment. There are also myriad tarpits to send requests to.
My old job, if I wanted to totally de-rail a project? I’d push it over to the project management office, and then to the infosec office. Almost guaranteed, the project would fail, because of those two tarpits.
Get a special request? Schedule a meeting for 4 business days out. Spend 1/3 of the meeting catching up and socializing. Spend 1/3 pre-planning the next meeting. Spend 1/3 laying out all the issues needing to be solved, and “circle back” when we get “scheduling lined up”…
And then it gets restored from backup 20 minutes later while you look incompetent to your peers and supervisors.
If you really want to take it down you need to be systematically deleting or corrupting backups for several months; then take it down.
That requires destruction of govt property (up to 20 years in jail).
What’s annoying is the US cable/social media incessantly jumps right to the Trump/Musk framing of things.
The US AID shutdown has led to food aid stuck at ports as populations that rely on it starve.
A report on Monday from Paul Martin, the USAid inspector general, found that close to half a billion dollars’ worth of food was rotting because of confusion surrounding Mr Trump’s freeze last month.
How many americans have heard about the consequences of Trump’s actions? 1%? How many have heard about Elon’s vague and baseless claims that US AID is a big fraud? It seems every Republican I know has heard that.
Is anyone impressed at just how fast they destroyed the government? Almost as if Elon had been given illegal access to the various parts of the government before Trump purchased the seat of the president.
Hmmm I wonder how that could have happened.
Why would you be impressed? The US is a horribly outdated mess of institutions from which many are still built on the logic of the 18th century slaving owning white men being “the people” of the constitution.
Elections are still on Tuesdays because the plantation owners and their posses are supposed to be in church on Sunday and travel to the polling station on Monday. Most proper Democracies hold elections on Sundays, so people dont have to take time off work and depend on their superior to not bully them for exercising their Democratic rights.
FFS slavery is still legal in the US, as long as the slave has been convicted on some bullshit mandatory minimum sentences for Cops having planted a baggy of drugs on them.
The US is falling apart. It is inherently unstable and Trump is now accelerating the process, but it has been ongoing for much longer. Also Trump being elected not once but twice shows that he is on of the symptoms of the US falling apart, not the root cause of it.
Hitler dismantled democracy in 53 days and there are a lot of parallels.
https://www.alternet.org/hitler-democracy/
We’re coming up to 3 weeks with Trump, and they’ve taken a wrecking ball to a lot of government norms, including gutting any department that they think might threaten them. If history is an indicator (and it absolutely is) you can expect him to start targeting attacks against political opponents soon.
I actually do.
We’re entirely fucked.
We’re going to spend the rest of our lives witnessing the enshitification of this nation. Even if we completely turn this crash and burn around, we’ll then spend the rest of our lives watching things being slowly rebuilt as traitorous Republicans continue to obstruct.
I don’t think a lot of Americans are grasping exactly how hard we fucked ourselves by refusing to responsibly inform ourselves even to a minimal degree.
We entirely are. Our lifetimes in this country will never see another good day of it.
The U.S.A. is done. Such sabotage by Trump, Musk and MAGA takes decades to recover from. 40 to 50 at least; rebuilding the civil service, amending all the laws back to normal, fixing the Supreme Court, probably needing Constitutional amendments. This easily echos for a hundred years.
Even if they get rid of pedo-Don, Fox will them everything that went wrong is because of Clinton and the woke and they will vote for him. It’s over. That’s the consequence of decades of under-educating their citizen and raw capitalism. The only question that remain is how much of the world down they will bring down with them.
