Clearly illegality is not the proper benchmark of corruption, nor is it the proper benchmark for "incitement."
5 hours ago — Count Timothy von Icarus
“We are going to be signing a very important deal today,” Trump said from the Oval Office. “It’s DOGE.” He said that his administration had found “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse.” — Washington Post
The executive order gives billionaire Elon Musk’s DOGE, tasked with finding government inefficiencies, even more power than it has amassed in the first three weeks of the new administration. The order installs a “DOGE Team Lead” at each agency and gives that person oversight over hiring decisions. DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency. ...
Trump on Tuesday criticized the judicial rulings, saying that “it seems hard to believe that judges want to try and stop us from looking for corruption.”
He threatened to “look at the judges because that’s very serious,” but later said he would “always abide by the courts” and appeal their findings.
Answering questions from the media for the first time since his arrival in Washington to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk stood next to the Resolute Desk and asserted that his work was in the interest of the public and democracy. President Trump sat behind the desk, chiming in with approval as he let the world’s richest man expound for roughly 30 minutes on the rationale for the drastic overhaul of the federal bureaucracy.
The goal is to “restore democracy,” Mr. Musk said. “If the bureaucracy’s in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?”
Among Mr. Musk’s claims, which he offered without providing evidence, was that some officials at the now-gutted U.S. Agency for International Development had been taking “kickbacks.” He said that “quite a few people” in the bureaucracy somehow had “managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position,” without explaining how he had made that assessment. He later claimed that some recipients of Social Security checks were as old as 150.
“We are actually trying to be as transparent as possible,” Mr. Musk said, referring to postings by his team on his social media site, X. “So all of our actions are maximally transparent.”
He continued, “I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization.”
In reality, Mr. Musk’s team is operating in deep secrecy: surprising federal employees by descending upon agencies and gaining access to sensitive data systems. Mr. Musk himself is a “special government employee,” which, the White House has said, means his financial disclosure filing will not be made public.
Hey Pierre-Normand - Wrong thread, I'm afraid. This one is about the imminent demise of American constitutional democracy. — Wayfarer
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