somewhat anomalously relative to the current narrative
violent crime has been trending down in DC for 30 years and is near the historic low
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/t...cts-taxes.html"But SpaceX has most likely paid little to no federal income taxes since its founding in 2002 and has privately told investors that it may never have to pay any, according to internal company do ents reviewed by The New York Times."
post #5 in this thread had never been answered by anybody itt to my knowledge
DOGE accused a US intelligence asset who the Taliban tried to assassinate three times -- of being in the Taliban
DOGE should have known better, and they put his family's life in danger
The Taliban had attempted to assassinate Halimi as a traitor at least three times during the U.S. occupation. And the U.S. government knew he had faced real danger in the past. He narrowly managed to flee Afghanistan in the final days before the U.S.-backed government fell to the Taliban, with the help of the second-highest-ranking CIA officer in the country. Since then, he had tried to live a mostly quiet life, partly to keep the relatives he’d left behind safe from retribution.https://www.propublica.org/article/d...-peace-taliban
The work he was pursuing with USIP had nothing to do with supporting the Taliban. It was the opposite.
ProPublica has obtained records making clear that Musk and his team at the newly formed DOGE should have known this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in precise detail in the agency’s records, down to the tasks he performed on specific days. His role at the ins ute was far from top secret, but it had been treated as highly sensitive and confidential. Among other tasks, it involved a program gathering information on the ground about living conditions for Afghan women, who are largely barred from education past primary school or from having a role in public life.
Partly because of Halimi’s contentious history with the Taliban, the militants might equate his work at USIP to espionage and severely punish anyone involved with it. By exposing him, Musk and his team endangered those working with Halimi, as well his relatives who were still in Afghanistan. The White House and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
straight up spreading lies they knew were lies
Cavanaugh told Watters that DOGE was unable to find any justification for those payments. But ProPublica’s reporting showed that four weeks earlier, Cavanaugh had been sent dozens of pages of internal records from USIP outlining Halimi’s work in detail, according to do ents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. There were invoices, project descriptions, and dates and times showing what Halimi was supposed to be doing on specific days. Cavanaugh did not respond to questions about his access to these records or how they appeared to conflict with his statements on Fox News.
did DOGE elimnate waste, fraud and abuse when they mass fired/offered early retirement to thousands of IRS agents the agency is trying to get back now?
are the costs of this reversal tallied on the big board?
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Shrewd observation
Republicans have already wasted their credibility as negotiators
Something that stood out to me: the constant DOGE cuts to the federal workforce kind of inoculated Democrats to Trump’s threats of laying off the federal workforce. “I mean, they got rid of Department of Education,” Ruben Gallego said. “Whether we pass this or not, he's gonna fire whoever he wants.”
lol you disappeared from your own thread in a hurry
Tell us more about the excellence of DOGE, CC
I'm all ears
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/01/nx-s1...nment-shutdownDespite DOGE's promise that canceling contracts and terminating leases would help reverse the trend of the government spending more money than it brings in, the most recent Treasury data shows an increase in expenditures by hundreds of billions of dollars more than the year before.The bulk of that spending goes to debt service, national defense, and en lement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
When it first launched this year, NPR found DOGE's savings and efficiency tracker to be riddled with factual errors, overstatements and unverifiable claims. As a new fiscal year begins, that remains true today.
At some agencies, workers were never officially laid off, but haven't been working, either. Many Department of Agriculture employees, including high-ranking officials, have been on administrative leave, with pay, for months "with no plan for them in sight," according to one USDA employee. They haven't received severance notices or further information about whether they'll be asked to return.
"This was all a giant waste of money," the employee said.
Jessica Riedl of the center-right Manhattan Ins ute previously told NPR that any meaningful changes to how the federal government spends taxpayer money would have to come from Congressional action.
"DOGE has created this false perception that the entire budget deficit can be eliminated by going after waste, fraud and abuse and without making the difficult decisions elsewhere in the budget," Riedl said. "And this exaggeration is making it even harder to do the real hard things that are going to be needed to fix the deficit beyond waste."
Still, billionaire and on-and-off Trump ally Elon Musk, who oversaw DOGE until the end of May, set an ever-shifting goal that eventually landed on $1 trillion in cuts to federal spending from Jan. 20 to the end of September.
Even taking DOGE's savings claims at face value, U.S. Treasury Department data shows the federal deficit has grown by nearly $2 trillion from Oct. 1, 2024 to the end of August 2025 — an increase of $76 billion from the same period the year before.
The most recent contract termination on DOGE's website purports to show $4.3 million in savings from canceling a $4.4 million consulting contract for the Federal Aviation Administration. The linked contract is not terminated, is worth about $150,000 and almost all of the money has been spent already.
The largest claim is $4 billion in savings from a decade-long multiple-vendor contract worth up to $12.5 billion for the Air Force's Base Infrastructure Modernization (BIM) project. There's no public evidence to support that claim. A review of federal contracting data shows the nearly two dozen companies involved have been awarded about $12,000 so far to kick off the project.
It's not just contracts: some of the leases touted on the DOGE tracker as terminated still appear as active on the GSA's Inventory of Owned and Leased Properties.
Millions will die because of Trump/Musk, just from defunding USAID. Cuts to PEPFAR and the World Fund will kill millions more.
World-historical bad guys
https://apnews.com/article/myanmar-u...f6708e47bb88f0“I lost my son because of the funding cuts,” he says. “And it is not only me — many more children in other camps have also died helplessly from hunger, malnutrition and no medical treatment.”
Taher’s grief is echoed in families across conflict-ravaged Myanmar, where the United Nations estimates 40% of the population needs humanitarian assistance and which once counted the U.S. as its largest humanitarian donor. Now, in Asia, it has become the epicenter of the suffering unleashed upon the world’s most vulnerable by President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
And like Taher’s son, Mohammed Hashim, it is Myanmar’s children who have borne the brunt of the fallout. A study published in The Lancet journal in June said the U.S. funding cuts could result in more than 14 million deaths, including more than 4.5 million children under age 5, by 2030.
Judge orders the government to provide a list of ElOn's security clearances
https://storage.courtlistener.com/re...39038.21.0.pdf![]()
it's a e savings tracker
IG's used to save this much and even more on an annual basis without cutting public services and mass firing government employees
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/dog...nt-efficiency/Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, says it has saved $160 billion through its push to root out wasteful or fraudulent government spending. But that effort may also have come at a cost for taxpayers, with a new estimate from a nonpartisan research and advocacy group estimating that DOGE's actions will cost $135 billion this fiscal year.
The analysis seeks to tally the costs associated with putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers and lost productivity, according to the Partnership for Public Service (PSP), a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on the federal workforce.
PSP's estimate is based on the $270 billion in annual compensation costs for the federal workforce, calculating the impact of DOGE's actions, from paid leave to productivity hits. The $135 billion cost to taxpayers doesn't include the expense of defending multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE's actions, nor the impact of estimated lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS.
the rapid deprofessionalization and ideological streamlining of the civil service is striking under Trump 2.0
very Bolshevik in method and effect, tbh
Last edited by Winehole23; 10-14-2025 at 06:42 PM.
Bannon compares the current US Congress to the Duma
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