Musk now controls all US payments 🚨 | USDA freezes payments to farmers

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Now imagine if a Dem did this, putting all that critical information into the hands of a private citizen. Like Soros. The double standard with the Rs makes me want to slap them across the face with a cactus.
 
Healing said:
You think he's unserious about emptying Gaza? He undoubtedly is flooding the zone so Musk can raid the coffers, but trump isn't imaginative. trump is blunt, crude, and simplistic. Gaza is a large component of the flood, for sure, but do you really think trump won't send military personnel help bibi eradicate the Palestinian presence in Gaza? ttump is dead serious about the real estate aspect.
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I don’t think there’s a realistic way to do what he’s talking about. It just makes no sense. The surviving Palestinians will never leave voluntarily. There’s no place to establish a new Palestinian “homeland.” This would take buy in from pretty much the entire western and Arab worlds, and there’s just no chance it happens. But it WILL dominate the news cycle for the next few days.
 
Healing said:
I think “no chance” is patently false. The obstacles are ever present, but authoritarians with one track minds often care little about buy-in, particularly when they have the biggest guns.

I don’t think killing, or displacing 2 million people is likely, while acknowledging this type of shit has happened throughout human history. More likely, Gaza gets further reduced to rubble, people are forced to flee, Israel expands their borders into resource rich and attractive lands, and further concentrates the remaining Palestinians in a smaller ghetto.
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I’ll agree the odds of Trump allowing the Gaza genocide to be completed are not 0%. But the chances what Trump is talking about now — relocating the Gazans to a new place built just for them — could actually happen are nonexistent.
 


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Representatives of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have been working at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where they have gotten access to key payment and contracting systems, according to people familiar with the matter.

The DOGE representatives have been on site at the agency’s offices this week, the people said, and they are looking at the systems’ technology as well as the spending that flows through them, with a focus on pinpointing what they consider fraud or waste. DOGE representatives are also examining the agency’s organizational design and how it is staffed, the people added.

… CMS in particular is a highly politically and economically sensitive agency. It is the nerve center of much of the nation’s complex healthcare economy, with outlays of about $1.5 trillion in fiscal 2024, or about 22% of the federal total.

With around 6,710 employees, it oversees Medicare, the health coverage program for older and disabled Americans and Medicaid, for lower-income enrollees, among other areas. Many veteran CMS staffers have worked there for decades.

…
One of the people familiar with DOGE’s work at CMS said that, to their knowledge, Musk’s allies hadn’t yet been given access to databases that include identifiable personal health information of Medicare or Medicaid enrollees. DOGE also hadn’t yet accessed a sensitive accounting system called HIGLAS, or the Healthcare Integrated General Ledger Accounting System, this person said.

The DOGE access is “read-only,” meaning that its affiliates cannot make changes to the systems, the person added. …”
 
I predict that this will end very badly for Musk. If he causes an economic collapse while simultaneously growing his immense wealth, the people will be outraged.

I could see one or several of the following happen:

1. When things turn bad, Trump could make Musk the scapegoat.

2. The people could demand blood.

3. He also faces criminal liability. (Will post a scenario with that in another post.)

I don’t think Musk realizes that he is in significant jeopardy.
 
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So on the potential criminal charges, first I don’t know exactly what crimes Musk may have committed but some of this stuff has to be very questionable.

So let’s just assume Musk has or will commit serious crimes. That leaves Trump with significant leverage over the richest man in the world.

We know Trump sells pardons. We also know that selling pardons almost certainly does not put Trump at legal risk given the immunity ruling. Trump could flat out demand a hundred billion dollars for a pardon, and Musk could be forced to pay it.

Which would in a way be f’ing hilarious.
 
nycfan said:
Trump confirms:



“Well, he’s [Musk] got access only to letting people go who he thinks are no good if we agree with him, and it’s only if we agree with him. He’s a very talented guy from the standpoint of management and costs and we put him in charge of seeing what he could do with certain groups and certain numbers, the numbers, some of the numbers are horrible what he’s found uh a hundred, think of it, a hundred million dollars in condoms to Hamas. Condoms to Hamas and many other things that are frankly even more ridiculous. And they’re finding tremendous waste, really waste more than anything else, I think you could say, probably fraud and abuse could be added to it … “
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Trump’s response has to be almost the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard a President say. JFC!!
 

DOGE will keep limited access to Treasury payments system with 2 associates having ‘read-only’ view​

“…
Two Treasury Department employees affiliated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will keep limited access to the highly sensitive payment system within the agency, following emergency court proceedings Wednesday that arose out of privacy concerns about DOGE’s access to the system.

The Trump administration agreed to the limitation that the two Treasury employees have “read-only” access to the system and won’t share it with others working with DOGE, a new court filing said. A federal judge still must sign off on the proposal but signaled earlier in the day she would be willing to do so.

The proposal would keep the status quo since DOGE sent two special government employees to the Treasury Department, Tom Krause and Marko Elez, who both came from tech jobs to Washington since Donald Trump took office.

… During a hearing on the access earlier Wednesday, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the DC District Court tried to nail down how Musk and his DOGE team are accessing the department’s sensitive payments system.

But government attorneys provided little detail on DOGE’s mission and had few definitive answers.

Lawyers for the Justice Department told Kollar-Kotelly that Musk himself and the White House [probably] hadn’t seen copies of the sensitive personal data contained in the department’s payments system, as federal workers have feared.

“Not that I’m aware of,” the DOJ attorney, Brad Humphreys, hedged at the court hearing Wednesday.

“I don’t know if I can say nothing has been done” with records in the system, Humphreys said, adding that the Justice Department doesn’t believe Americans’ privacy has been breached at this time. …”
 

Musk associates sought to use critical Treasury payment system to shut down USAID spending, emails show​


"Four days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk’s top lieutenants at the Treasury Department asked its acting secretary, a career civil servant, to immediately shut off all USAID payments using the department’s own ultra-sensitive payment processing system.

The ask was so out of line with how Treasury normally operates, it prompted a skeptical reply from David Lebryk, then serving as acting Treasury secretary, who said he did not believe “we have the legal authority to stop an authorized payment certified by an agency,” according to a source familiar with the exchange.

Lebryk suggested a “legally less risky approach” would be for the State Department, which oversees USAID, to rescind the payments itself and examine whether they complied with President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order freezing foreign development aid.

Tom Krause, a former tech executive and now the top DOGE staffer at Treasury, responded that Lebryk could have legal risk himself should he choose not to comply.

This back and forth over email, described to CNN by a source familiar with it, reveals the first known indication that Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency emissaries sought to use Treasury’s tools to block some payments, fulfilling the president’s political agenda.

The ensuing controversy set off a chain reaction around Washington this week, sparking a tense political debate and emergency court proceedings over DOGE’s access to the system and the administration’s potential interest in using it to turn off payments as it chooses.

... Last Friday, Lebryk announced his sudden departure from government service, ending his more than 35-year career at Treasury.,,,"
 
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