Trump Administration 2025

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Making a thread at this point so that I'm not just sending all this crap to my Discord server lol

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Trump mishandling money

Entire staff at federal agency that funds libraries and museums put on leave

The IMLS is a relatively small federal agency, with around 70 employees, that awards grant funding to museums and libraries across the United States.

This month, President Trump named Keith E. Sonderling — the deputy secretary of labor — the new acting director of IMLS. This followed Trump's previous executive order shrinking seven federal agencies, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

According to a statement from AFGE Local 3403, which represents IMLS workers, the agency's staff was notified by email about being placed on paid administrative leave for up to 90 days, after a "brief meeting between DOGE staff and IMLS leadership." Employees had to turn in government property, and email accounts were disabled.

Happy National Library Week, by the way. There is an online support website and petition for the IMLS.

Opinion | The Tariff Saga Is About One Thing

This isn’t a dig. The president genuinely seems to think of tariffs as fees that foreign countries pay to the United States. “We have massive Financial Deficits with China, the European Union, and many others,” he wrote on his Truth Social website on Sunday. “The only way this problem can be cured is with TARIFFS, which are now bringing Tens of Billions of Dollars into the U.S.A.” Here, you also see his related belief that a trade deficit is an actual absence of funds, akin to a negative balance in a bank account.

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Trump committing crimes

Trump ‘simply floated’ idea of deporting U.S. citizens, White House’s Leavitt says

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that the Trump administration is not sure it is legal to deport U.S. citizens to El Salvador, but that President Donald Trump has “simply floated” the idea for the sake of transparency.

Trump said Sunday that he loves the idea of deporting incarcerated Americans to El Salvador, but that he doesn’t “know what the law says on that.” A reporter had asked Trump about El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s offer to house American prisoners.

State Dept. gives El Salvador a massive upgrade as it disappears U.S. immigrants

In February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Bukele had offered to jail U.S. citizens in El Salvador, a move that Rubio admitted was likely to hit some legal hurdles — you know, because it’s blatantly illegal to expatriate U.S. citizens to foreign prisons.

When Trump was asked about the idea again last Sunday he responded, “I love that.” He added that he’d be “honored” to send incarcerated Americans to El Salvador, before noting, “I don’t know what the law says on that.”

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DOGE says it needs to know the government's most sensitive data, but can't say why

In one order last week blocking DOGE's access to Social Security data, U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of Maryland said the government "never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA's entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government."

"The government has also repeatedly failed to articulate a clear purpose for the unprecedented access it seeks to deeply sensitive information, and why the data it wants access to is necessary for that purpose," said Kristin Woelfel, a lawyer with the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. "If the government cannot answer those questions, then DOGE has no business accessing that data."

I wonder why?

How DOGE may have improperly used Social Security data to push voter fraud narratives

Gracias said in an April 2 appearance on Fox and Friends that "5-plus million" noncitizens who "came to the country as illegals" received Social Security numbers "through an automatic system" and proceeded to "get into our benefit systems."

"And just because we were curious, we then looked to see if they were on the voter rolls. And we found in a handful of cooperative states that there were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted," Gracias said.

Using Social Security data to imply that noncitizens are breaking the law also could have violated a court order that prevents DOGE staffers from handling sensitive SSA systems.

It's the latest example of concerns among privacy activists that DOGE's sweeping access to personal and financial information of millions of Americans may violate privacy laws and may be used for inappropriate purposes.

Gracias is also not supposed to see or share personally identifiable information, or PII, within agency data, according to earlier court filings.

"Appointee shall not share any Personally Identifiable Information accessed or obtained through the use of SSA systems or work performed for SSA, with any external entity, organization, or agency federal or state," an addendum to his appointment request reads.

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Elon Musk abruptly cut a program for teens with disabilities.

One of these programs, cancelled on Feb. 10, was called Charting My Path for Future Success. It was a research-based effort to help students with disabilities make the sometimes difficult transition from high school into college or the world of work and self-sufficiency.

According to DOGE's "Wall of Receipts," the Charting My Path contract was worth about $43 million and only about $5 million had been spent, creating a "savings" of roughly $38 million.

But those closest to Charting My Path, who would not speak publicly for fear of retribution, say the total contract value was over $45 million and that nearly $20 million – not $5 million – had been spent on research, instructor salaries and more before the contract was terminated.

The Trump administration did not respond to a request to explain its accounting.

On that note, I don't like calling it DOGE any more than I like calling Twitter "X", so I will be simply referring to it as Elon Musk for this kind of coverage. Names carry a lot of weight in how we perceive them.

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Reality gets in the way of Elon Musk’s latest misguided boast

Ahead of Election Day 2024, Elon Musk told voters that if Americans elected the Republican ticket, he’d uncover ways to cut “at least $2 trillion” from the federal budget. After Donald Trump’s victory, Musk decided to walk that back — a lot — and told the public that he believed he had a “good shot” at cutting $1 trillion, cutting his original goal in half.

Last week, at a White House cabinet meeting, the president’s top campaign donor added to the pattern, declaring that he and the quasi-governmental DOGE initiative “anticipate” $150 billion in spending cuts — a small fraction of the goal he pitched to voters last fall.

Making matters worse, that figure appears to be wrong, too.

The Times’ report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that while the DOGE website claims to have saved $150 billion in federal spending, as of last week, “it has provided receipt-level breakdowns for less than 40 percent of that amount.” (When the Times sought explanations from DOGE and the White House, neither responded. Administration officials also made no effort to substantiate Musk’s claims.)

A companion report noted that the DOGE website has been “riddled with errors, double-counting and other large inaccuracies.”

I feel like you deserve to be able to visualize the scale of how much money is being mismanaged here so I even made you a little chart