Congratulations! You’ve survived 100 of the 1461 total days Trump is scheduled to serve as President.
In honor of the occasion, I wanted to pull together three accounts of DOGE, which suggest DOGE and related cuts have cost Americans over a trillion dollars.
First, there’s this WaPo story from March, which describes the cuts to IRS may cost 10% of revenue — or $500 billion a year.
Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.
Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.
NYT reported last week (in a piece that discussed, but did not put a price tag on, other costs) that the way Elon carried out personnel cuts may have created $135 billion in personnel costs, partly because Elon fucked up firings and so Russ Vought had to do it again.
The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year.
And today, Rosa DeLauro and Patty Murray released a tracker that lays out $430 billion in spending that taxpayers have paid for, but for which the services have been withdrawn or frozen.
As the tracker details, President Trump has—through a variety of different means—frozen, cancelled, clawed back, illegally impounded, and slow-walked federal funding for all manner of key priorities. Among much else, this includes investments in:
Critical research into Alzheimer’s disease, women’s health, cancer, diabetes, and much more, throwing research already conducted into the shredder and setting back treatments and cures.
Public safety, including COPS grants, Office of Violence Against Women grants, and programs to help victims of crime.
Relief for states and communities responding to and recovering from natural disasters.
Farmers and local agriculture businesses, making it more expensive for hardworking people to run their farms and cutting off research they count on.
School lunches and food for child care institutions at the detriment of the farmers who rely on these local markets.
Head Start. Head Start programs are already beginning to close their doors as this administration slow-walks funding, kicking kids out of their classrooms and sending parents scrambling to find new preschool options.
Critical investments in transportation projects—for roads and bridges, airports, public transit, ports, and more—and energy projects across the country that are creating new, good jobs and lowering families’ monthly energy bills.
Our national security and efforts to prevent and end global conflicts.
Essential health services like birth control and cancer screenings for over 800,000 patients—and resources to protect people from public health threats.
As a reminder, I’m collecting these and other DOGE debunkings here.
Altogether, that’s $1.065 trillion (of which the $430 billion includes stuff Elon touts as “cost savings”).
Elon Musk came in promising (at various times) to save a trillion dollars.
Instead, a hundred days in, and we’re already a trillion in the hole, and that’s before you consider defending these unlawful cuts, the increased costs that disease and extreme weather and wars will incur because we’ve defunded their mitigation, or increased borrowing costs arising from Trump’s trade war.
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The last paragraph of this NYT story describing absolutely insane plans for the State Department -“eliminating almost all of its Africa operations,” “cutting offices … that address climate change[,] refugee issues, … democracy[,] and human rights concerns,” mandating use of AI for “‘policy development and review’ and ‘operational planning’,” and replacing the Foreign Service exam with loyalty oaths — describes that the Executive Order laying out those plans is not the only proposed plan out there.
It links this story, published by NYT five days earlier, describing more modest plans: closing six embassies in Africa, not the entire continent.
The Trump administration is considering plans to close 10 embassies and 17 consulates and reduce or consolidate the staff of several other foreign missions, according to an internal State Department memo viewed by The New York Times.
The closures and other reductions outlined in the document, which is undated, would pare back the American presence on nearly every continent. They represent an expansion of plans the Trump administration was working on earlier this year for closing a dozen foreign missions and laying off local staff who work in those locations.
The cuts are in keeping with President Trump’s plans to reduce federal spending across the government, as well as a proposal that State Department leaders have been considering to cut nearly 50 percent of the department’s spending.
But the new proposed reductions have raised fresh concerns that the United States will be ceding vital diplomatic space to China, including in areas of the world where Washington has a greater presence than Beijing, compromising American national security, including intelligence gathering.
The competing plans — one a memo, the other an Executive Order that would be signed by Trump and would therefore oblige memo-writers to defer to Trump’s order — comes in the wake of the ouster of Pete Marocco, the Jan6er who effectuated the destruction of USAID, from the State Department.
There are several versions of Marocco’s ouster and his fate, but this Politico story describes that Marco Rubio fired him, in part because of differing opinions about how to destroy USAID (which has long since been accomplished, but during which, Rubio repeatedly made claims about GOP-supported programs like PEPFAR that turned out to be false).
Peter Marocco, the Trump administration official in charge of dismantling USAID, left a meeting at the White House last week to return to his office at the State Department. But when he arrived, Marocco could not enter the building: security told him he was no longer an employee there, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Word of Marocco’s firing quickly tore through the Republican Party and MAGA ecosystem, startling President Donald Trump’s loyalists who viewed the aide as part of an elite cohort of administration true believers. Loud voices on the right piled on Secretary of State Marco Rubio, accusing him of undermining their disruptive agenda.
Yet Marocco’s abrupt termination, which has not been fully reported until now, was not an impulsive dismissal or a case of Rubio going rogue. This report was based on conversations with five people, including administration officials and allies, all of whom were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters. Four of the people said Rubio fired Marocco. They gave varying explanations: one administration official said Rubio and others wanted Marocco out due to what they saw as his bulldozer operating style and failure to work effectively with colleagues; others pointed to substantive disagreements between Rubio and Marocco over how to dismantle USAID. Meanwhile, Marocco allies viewed Rubio and his team as insular, controlling and obstructionist to the DOGE agenda ordered by the president.
One White House official said Rubio went to a senior White House aide for clearance to remove Marocco after tensions reached a boiling point last week. They described Marocco’s firing as “the first MAGA world killing from inside the White House.”
It also describes the backlash targeting Rubio that has resulted.
In the days since his ouster, Marocco’s MAGA allies have come to his defense and raised new suspicions of Rubio, including questions about why he would want to protect USAID and whether he’s loyal to the president.
[snip]
“He’s really not a MAGA guy, he’s a neocon,” a Trump ally said of Rubio, adding that this move “is gonna bite him.”
This is the third instance of an ugly cabinet-level dispute in the Trump Administration in recent weeks.
NYT’s account of Gary Shapley’s installment to head the IRS, without Scott Bessent’s involvement, followed by his removal at the hands of Bessent, incorporates several pieces of intrigue. First, there’s Shapley’s installment by Musk and then Bessent’s reversal of Musk’s plot.
Mr. Bessent had complained to Mr. Trump this week that Mr. Musk had done an end run around him to get Mr. Shapley installed as the interim head of the I.R.S., even though the tax collection agency reports to Mr. Bessent, the people familiar with the situation said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
The clash was the latest instance of Mr. Musk’s influence in the Trump administration that has alarmed top officials. It was also the latest upheaval at the tax agency, with much of its staff pushed out or quitting. Mr. Trump earlier this week called for the I.R.S. to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status after the school refused to impose sweeping changes demanded by the administration.
An I.R.S. spokeswoman declined to comment on the leadership changes.
Mr. Shapley, a longtime I.R.S. agent, gained fame among conservatives after he claimed that the Justice Department had slow-walked its investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes.
Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency pushed Mr. Shapley’s appointment through White House channels, but Mr. Bessent was not consulted or asked for his blessing, according to those with knowledge of the dynamic. Mr. Bessent then got Mr. Trump’s approval to unwind the decision within days, they said. Mr. Shapley had been working from the I.R.S. commissioner’s office as late as Friday morning.
Then, there’s Musk’s magnification of Laura Loomer’s attack on Bessent in response.
The feud between Mr. Musk and Mr. Bessent went public late Thursday night, when Mr. Musk amplified a social media post from the far-right researcher Laura Loomer accusing Mr. Bessent of colluding with a “Trump hater.”
“Troubling,” Mr. Musk wrote about Mr. Bessent’s meeting John Hope Bryant, the chief executive of the nonprofit Operation HOPE. Mr. Bryant is working on a financial literacy effort with Treasury officials.
Ms. Loomer had called that meeting a “vetting failure.”
Finally, there’s an oblique comment about DOGE boy Gavin Kliger’s removal on the same day as Shapley, one that WaPo describes in more detail: Kliger was shut out of IRS systems just as he was about to start a purge of IRS employees in the middle of tax season.
Early Friday morning, the IRS rescinded building and systems access for DOGE official Gavin Kliger, according to the people familiar with the situation. The Post could not immediately confirm the reason for the revocation.
Kliger was managing the massive layoffs at the agency that could cut the tax agency’s headcount by 25 percent. More layoff notices had been planned for Friday afternoon, the people said, but those notifications have been paused.
As laid out in declarations from USAID workers, Kliger left his digital fingerprints all over Marocco’s dismantling of USAID.
Left unsaid is whether Musk installed Shapley so as to empower Kliger to destroy the IRS just as it sets to processing this year’s tax receipts.
Thus far, we have correlation, without any insight into causation.
The far right targeting of Bessent is of particular concern, given the evidence he’s holding together the US (and with it, the global) economy with his own shoestrings. WSJ reported this week that he and Howard Lutnick had to sneak into the Oval Office to override Peter Navarro’s disastrous tariff plans.
On April 9, financial markets were going haywire. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wanted President Trump to put a pause on his aggressive global tariff plan. But there was a big obstacle: Peter Navarro, Trump’s tariff-loving trade adviser, who was constantly hovering around the Oval Office.
Navarro isn’t one to back down during policy debates and had stridently urged Trump to keep tariffs in place, even as corporate chieftains and other advisers urged him to relent. And Navarro had been regularly around the Oval Office since Trump’s “Liberation Day” event.
So that morning, when Navarro was scheduled to meet with economic adviser Kevin Hassett in a different part of the White House, Bessent and Lutnick made their move, according to multiple people familiar with the intervention.
They rushed to the Oval Office to see Trump and propose a pause on some of the tariffs—without Navarro there to argue or push back. They knew they had a tight window. The meeting with Bessent and Lutnick wasn’t on Trump’s schedule.
The two men convinced Trump of the strategy to pause some of the tariffs and to announce it immediately to calm the markets. They stayed until Trump tapped out a Truth Social post, which surprised Navarro, according to one of the people familiar with the episode. Bessent and press secretary Karoline Leavitt almost immediately went to the cameras outside the White House to make a public announcement.
And multiple outlets have described Bessent’s thus far successful efforts to prevent Trump from firing Jerome Powell.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly cautioned White House officials that any attempt to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell would risk destabilizing financial markets, according to two people close to the White House granted anonymity to share details of private discussions.
Bessent’s private message reinforces what President Donald Trump already knows but comes as the president’s anger with the Fed chair is growing because Powell hasn’t shown signs that he will cut interest rates soon. It also comes against the backdrop of widespread market turmoil over the administration’s far-reaching trade war.
Trump’s fury with Powell burst into public view on Thursday morning, when he said in a post on Truth Social that his “termination cannot come fast enough!”
But Powell’s job looks safe for now.
Bessent is a mediocre Treasury Secretary, in no way the match for his counterparts. Yet he is increasingly all that’s standing between Trump and his most feverish nutjobs and far bigger financial catastrophe.
Given Loomer’s success firing NSA Director Timothy Haugh and six NSC staffers, it may be only a matter of time before the nutjobs get to Bessent, too.
The third cabinet level blowup is more opaque. As laid out here, three of Whiskey Pete Hegseth’s top aides were escorted out of the Pentagon in the wake of a leak investigation. Politico reported that they were fired — passive voice — on Friday, but the guy who led the investigation used to explain their ouster is also leaving his current role.
Joe Kasper, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s chief of staff will leave his role in the coming days for a new position at the agency, according to a senior administration official, amid a week of turmoil for the Pentagon.
Senior adviser Dan Caldwell, Hegseth deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, were placed on leave this week in an ongoing leak probe. All three were terminated on Friday, according to three people familiar with the matter, who, like others, were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.
[snip]
Two of the people said Carroll and Selnick plan to sue for wrongful termination. The Pentagon did not respond to a request of comment.
Kasper had requested an investigation into Pentagon leaks in March, which included military operational plans for the Panama Canal, a second carrier headed to the Red Sea, Musk’s visit and a pause in the collection of intelligence for Ukraine.
But some at the Pentagon also started to notice a rivalry between Kasper and the fired advisers.
“Joe didn’t like those guys,” said one defense official. “They all have different styles. They just didn’t get along. It was a personality clash.”
The changes will leave Hegseth without a chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, or senior adviser in his front office.
“There is a complete meltdown in the building, and this is really reflecting on the secretary’s leadership,” said a senior defense official. “Pete Hegseth has surrounded himself with some people who don’t have his interests at heart.” [my emphasis]
Some of those targeted — who have long-standing ties to Hegseth, going back to his failed non-profit management — are denying any role in leaks.
Whatever the genesis of this upheaval or the partisan explanation for it, it leaves a wildly unqualified man at the top of the world’s largest military with no top aides.
There are other signs of the collapse of all management inside the White House — such as the White House attempt to explain away their attack on Harvard with a bullshit claim that they accidentally sent out a letter demanding to effectively take over Harvard University.
Everywhere you look you have to wonder whether Susie Wiles is as much in charge as Amy Gleason is at DOGE, whether her title of Chief of Staff is just a convenient fiction to cover up for the reality that Trump does whatever the last person in the room tells him to do.
And often as not, the last person in the room is Stephen Miller.
We’ve already seen that the three cabinet secretaries struggling to assert control over their own agencies deferred to Stephen Miller when he told the participants of the famous Signal chat what Trump thought.
That is, it’s not just that Stephen Miller is often the last one in the room with Trump. It’s not just that Stephen Miller’s policy ideas are batshit insane (and that he’s the author of Trump’s most egregious abuses of power). It’s also that Miller often stands in as the Word of DOGE, the Word of Trump.
Kremlinologists are pointing to evidence — his demotion at Trump’s most recent cabinet meeting, for example — that Elon’s power at the White House has started to wane (while ignoring that Elon has moved onto the next phase of takeover, cashing in, cashing in, and cashing in).
But behind all the intrigue, Stephen Miller’s ascendance remains, apparently uncontested and possibly unbound.
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Amid all the other news, the purge of suspected leakers Pete Hegseth announced last month has netted three targets — all white men, for a change! Politico has not only provided a roster, but described the scope of the leak investigation.
The Pentagon put a third top official on administrative leave Wednesday as part of a wide-ranging leak investigation, according to a defense official and a person familiar with the matter.
Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, was suspended a day after two other political appointees were placed on leave following a probe into potential leaks of sensitive information.
The leaks under investigation include [1] military operational plans for the Panama Canal, [2] a second carrier headed to the Red Sea, [3] Elon Musk’s controversial visit to the Pentagon to discuss China and a [4] pause in the collection of intelligence for Ukraine, according to the official.
[snip]
Dan Caldwell, a senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Darin Selnick, the Defense Department’s deputy chief of staff, were escorted out of the Pentagon by security officers and had their building access suspended pending further investigation, the official said. Caldwell and Selnick both previously worked at Concerned Veterans for America, the nonprofit that Hegseth once led. [my annotation]
An Air Force Special Forces Command Chief Master Sergeant was also removed on Monday, though no one has said the investigation described to be targeting him is Pete Hegseth’s purge.
When this investigation was first reported by CNN, it focused on the disclosure to NYT, for a story published on March 20[1], that Hegseth was about to give Elon Musk a briefing on US war plans against China.
The memo comes after President Donald Trump pushed back on a New York Times report that DOGE head Elon Musk would be briefed on US military plans for a potential war with China while at the Pentagon on Friday. Trump said he wouldn’t show such plans “to anybody.”
And surely that’s a big focus of this investigation. As news of these ousters broke, Marc Caputo released a story ret-conning Trump’s unhappiness with the briefing, claiming, against all sense, that Trump got mad at Elon but not, also, Hegseth about it.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suspended two top Pentagon officials, Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick, as part of an investigation into who leaked word of a planned top-secret briefing on China for Elon Musk.
Axios learned that Musk or Hegseth didn’t just decide to call off that briefing after the leak. President Trump himself ordered staffers to kill it.
“What the f**k is Elon doing there? Make sure he doesn’t go,” Trump said, a top official recalled to Axios.
Why it matters: Musk has annoyed several administration officials with his constant presence at the White House,his haphazard social media posts and his slash-and-burn tactics at his Department of Government Efficiency.
The planned Pentagon briefing, however, got him cross with the boss at the Resolute Desk.
Anyway, no one made sure Elon “doesn’t go;” the currently operative story is Elon went to the Pentagon, but didn’t get the briefing. If Trump were unhappy with the planned briefing, rather than its exposure, I doubt we’d have this kind of leak investigation, which purportedly prevented the briefing from happening.
But Politico mentions three more leaks targeted by the investigation:
A widely disseminated story [1] disclosing that DOD had developed military plans targeting the Panama Canal; NBC’s story was published March 13.
The deployment [2] of the USS Carl Vinson from Asia to the Red Sea; the Politico version, which noted USNI reported the news first, was like USNI’s report dated March 21. Both versions report the move first as a month-long extension of the deployment of the USS Harry S. Truman, which was damaged and then repaired in February after being struck by a merchant ship, with the Vinson sailing from East China to the Red Sea to overlap with it. On March 16, the Houthis attempted to attack the Truman in retaliation for the strikes on March 15 ordered up by Pete Hegseth’s signal chat, and potential Houthi disinformation has very recently claimed the Truman has been struck.
Stories [4] about a pause in intelligence sharing with Ukraine that were quickly and publicly confirmed by John Ratcliffe; here’s Politico’s March 5 version, bylined by one of the guys closely tracking the purge.
So in order, the leaks are:
March 5 story on Ukraine intelligence sharing
March 13 story on targeting Panama
March 20 story on the Elon briefing
March 21 story on the Vinson redeployment from the East China Sea to the Middle East
With that list in mind, let’s look at several aspects of the memo, dated the same day as the Vinson deployment, March 21, asking for the investigation.
It does, in fact, identify, “unauthorized disclosures of national security information involving sensitive communications with principals within the Office of the Secretary of Defense,” plural. So while the coverage focused on the Elon briefing, it reportedly entailed the others from the start, including the seemingly routine report on the Vinson deployment.
It not only mentioned “sensitive communications with principals within the Office of the Secretary of Defense,” but it asked for cooperation from “those responsible for maintaining and overseeing information security systems and in coordination with federal partners as required.” At first, in the days before Jeff Goldberg revealed Pete Hegseth conducts these discussions (including discussions about the Middle East operations like the Vinson deployment) via Signal chat, it seemed this might have been an investigation into DOD’s secure communications.
But given the inclusion of Dan Caldwell — the guy whom Hegseth instructed Mike Waltz to add as his representative to the famous Signal chat — as the first guy purged suggests this leak investigation could also be about the Signal chat.
American Oversight’s lawsuit seeking to preserve the signal chats Goldberg published already disclosed that the actual content of the chats did not get preserved on John Ratcliffe’s personal phone, and that between March 26 and March 28 — after Congress was already investigating — participants changed message settings.
In a filing asking James Boasberg to find that Ratcliffe defied his order submitted yesterday, American Oversight included this timeline of what we know from filings in that suit:
March 24: Excerpts of the Signal chat appear in The Atlantic.1
March 25: American Oversight files this action. On the same day, Defendant Ratcliffe testifies before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding his use of Signal.2
March 26: American Oversight files a motion for temporary restraining order. ECF No. 6. The same day, changes occur in the Signal chat “participants’ administrative settings . . . such as profile names and message settings.” Suppl. Blankenship Decl. ¶ 4, ECF No. 15-3. Also on the same day, The Atlantic publishes further excerpts from the Signal chat.3
March 27: This Court orders Defendants to “promptly make best efforts to preserve all Signal communications from March 11–15, 2025.” Min. Order, Mar. 27, 2025. The same day, the CIA’s Office of General Counsel reportedly issued a litigation hold notice. Blankenship Decl. ¶ 4, ECF No. 10-3.
March 28: Changes occur again in the Signal chat participants’ profile names and message settings. Suppl. Blankenship Decl. ¶ 4, ECF No. 15-3.
March 31: Defendant Ratcliffe’s Signal account is “reviewed” for the first time and found to contain no substantive messages from the Signal chat. Suppl. Blankenship Decl. ¶ 4, ECF No. 15-3.
1 See Jeffrey Goldberg, The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans, The Atlantic (Mar. 24, 2025), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trumpadministration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/.
2 Sen. Select Comm. on Intel. Hr’g to Examine Worldwide Threats Tr., Mar. 25, 2025, available at https://www.dia.mil/Portals/110/Images/News/DIA%20in%20the%20News/Committee_Hearing _2025.pdf.
3 See Jeffrey Goldberg & Shane Harris, Here Are the Attack Plans that Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal, The Atlantic (March 26, 2025), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/signal-group-chat-attack-plans-hegsethgoldberg/682176.
All of that took place after Hegseth himself ordered an investigation into leaks including the extension of the Harry S. Truman deployment to fight the Houthis on March 21, the kind of thing that might have been on that Signal chat.
While American Oversight didn’t ask for any other declarations, it did note that the existing declarations [docket] raise real questions about who else, including Whiskey Pete, might have deleted these texts from their devices.
For example, rather than specifying which messages were preserved, the Supplemental DoD Declaration vaguely references the preservation of “existing Signal application messages,” which, as shown by the Supplemental Blankenship Declaration, could be none. Suppl. Bennett Decl. ¶ 2, ECF No. 15-1. Similarly, without specifying whether any substantive messages were preserved, the Supplemental State Declaration merely states that “images of the Signal chat”—including “any” images captured from the Secretary’s devices—have been preserved. See Decl. of Timothy J. Kootz ¶ 4, ECF No. 15-4. As with CIA, those “images of the Signal chat” may simply be the title of the group chat. The Supplemental State Declaration also suggests that Secretary Rubio accessed the Signal chat from multiple devices. Id. More broadly, the evidentiary issues identified in the Supplemental Blankenship Declaration raise substantial questions regarding what these other Defendants actually preserved.
In forthcoming filings, American Oversight will probe the clear deficiencies in Defendants’ recordkeeping practices evidenced by these standout omissions of whether and what substantive messages from the Signal chat still exist, as well as when and how any such messages were lost. [my emphasis]
All of which brings me to the last detail of the original leak announcement that has always struck me: it was set up not as conventional leak investigations are, as a referral to the FBI based on stories that include classified information. That’s how you find out who leaked what if you want all possible culprits involved. Rather, it was set up such that Hegseth himself would get reports on the findings, and from that point, the criminal referrals would go out.
This investigation will commence immediately and culminate in a report to the Secretary of Defense. The report will include a complete record of unauthorized disclosures within the Department of Defense and recommendations to improve such efforts. I expect to be informed immediately if this effort results in information identifying a party responsible for an unauthorized disclosure, and that such information will be referred to the appropriate criminal law enforcement entity for criminal prosecution. [my emphasis]
That is, this so-called leak investigation implicating the guy Hegseth would add to his inappropriate Signal chats was set up such that Hegseth himself gets to gatekeep who gets targeted by it.
He appears to have set it up that way, importantly, before he realized a journalist had witnessed him add Dan Caldwell to a Signal chat on which he himself would disseminate battle information to the personal cell phones of multiple list participants, including journalist Jeff Goldberg.
Update: Adding this for timeline considerations. Roger Wicker and Jack Reed asked DOD IG to investigate this on March 27, while participants in the Signal chat were altering names and retention.
[W]e ask that you conduct an inquiry into, and provide us with an assessment of, the following:
1. The facts and circumstances surrounding the above referenced Signal chat incident, including an accounting of what was communicated and any remedial actions taken as a result;
2. Department of Defense (DOD) policies and adherence to policies relating to government officers and employees sharing sensitive and classified information on non-government networks and electronic applications;
3. An assessment of DOD classification and declassification policies and processes and whether these policies and processes were adhered to;
4. How the policies of the White House, Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and other Departments and agencies represented on the National Security Council on this subject differ, if at all;
5. An assessment of whether any individuals transferred classified information, including operational details, from classified systems to unclassified systems, and if so, how;
6. Any recommendations to address potential issues identified.
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You already know how that works out for the U.S., because it’s one of the biggest single differences between the cost of living in other first world countries and the U.S.
It’s also one of the biggest differences in life expectancy between other first world countries and the U.S.
Healthcare in the EU, for example, costs much less than it does in the U.S., and outcomes measured in life expectancy are far better.
But healthcare in the EU is not fully privatized; though not identical across all EU members, it’s based on universal access and publicly subsidized.
Ditto for Canada and Greenland, the countries Trump wants to seize. Better that they seize us and bring their healthcare systems with them.
But this month has also demonstrated the risk of taking Elon Musk seriously when it comes to privatization.
Imagine this is our social security system:
Who’s not going to get their checks if the bottom drops out even further? Why should Americans who’ve paid into Social Security over a lifetime of work have to worry about additional risk to their futures because unelected and unconstitutionally appointed Musk believes exposure to the market is what Americans need?
It’s bad enough that Americans’ cost of daily living expenses is further exposed to market risks because of Trump’s misbegotten, ill-considered tariffs. Musk believes Americans’ retirement years should be even more deeply risky.
It makes zero sense to listen to a man who has no empathy for others’ concerns, who has no experience dealing with a limited income and trying to make ends meet. He doesn’t have adequate background let alone personal history to make such judgments about what will work best for the American people; he doesn’t even view his children’s health as personal obligations (ex. recent public pleas by two of his children’s mothers for assistance with healthcare matters).
~ ~ ~
What really takes the cake is the silence of the business world.
Of course the financial industry is silently slavering over the chance to get their grubby mitts on our Social Security, and they’re staying quiet about it because they know they dare not set off the American public.
But Jeff Bezos’ Amazon-derived fortune was made in no small part off the subsidy that the U.S. Postal Service has been to American business.
USPS is the fallback for shipping nearly anything nearly anywhere in the U.S.; Bezos didn’t have to worry about whether his books would sell in North Utter Remote, Outer Territory USA. There was a post office nearby where purchasers could pick up their orders if they couldn’t be delivered to their door by USPS carriers on foot.
Bezos didn’t have to negotiate that. Didn’t have to buy sorter equipment, trucks, hire and train personnel, build sorting facilities, so on. All of that was on our dime when it wasn’t paid for by postage, until Amazon was successful enough to consider reducing shipping and handling costs further with their own trucks.
Furthermore, Bezos knew what the competitive rate for shipping a majority of Amazon’s products would be based on USPS rates – rates set by USPS bidding out trucking and equipment purchases. When Amazon started buying its own trucks, Amazon knew its costs had to be no more than USPS’ costs to deliver.
In short, our tax dollars and our volume of postage helped underwrite Jeff Bezos’ billions.
And he’s just going to sit there smug and mum, enjoying his irrational wealth while Musk shoots off his mouth about privatizing government.
Because Bezos will probably ensure the next billions he makes off our backs is from Amazon Postal Service.
Can’t begin to imagine how much our health care will cost once Amazon has the contract both for postal delivery of medications and health care insurance.
You can only imagine when Musk takes his chainsaw to Amtrak what will happen next: he’ll claim only his vaporware Hyperloop is the alternative, and American people should pay him billions to implement it instead of a long-proven passenger rail system.
Privatization will not yield better outcomes for the American people and you already know that. Don’t wait until Musk uses DOGE to shut off funds to the USPS; he’s already targeted USPS personnel. Contact your representative and senators and insist that government should NOT be privatized.
Not our Social Security, not our mail delivery, not a single government service which could end up becoming a pricey-to-us privatized profit center for billionaires.
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The other day, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons claimed he wanted to get his deportation system working like Amazon Prime does.
The leader of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that his dream for the agency is squads of trucks rounding up immigrants for deportation the same way that Amazon trucks crisscross American cities delivering packages.
“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said, explaining he wants to see a deportation process “like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings.”
At first, I had a hard time even envisioning what he could mean by that. But then NYT described how Trump has starting setting the Social Security records of immigrants to dead as a way to debank them.
The goal is to cut those people off from using crucial financial services like bank accounts and credit cards, along with their access to government benefits.
The effort hinges on a surprising new tactic: repurposing Social Security’s “death master file,” which for years has been used to track dead people who should no longer receive benefits, to include the names of living people who the government believes should be treated as if they are dead. As a result of being added to the death database, they would be blacklisted from a coveted form of identity that allows them to make and more easily spend money.
Earlier this week, the names of more than 6,300 migrants whose legal status had just been revoked were added to the file, according to the documents.
The initial names are limited to people the administration says are convicted criminals and “suspected terrorists,” the documents show. But officials said the effort could broaden to include others in the country without authorization.
Their “financial lives,” Leland Dudek, the Social Security Administration’s acting commissioner, wrote in an email to staff members, would be “terminated.”
[snip]
On Tuesday, Aram Moghaddassi, a software engineer working for DOGE, sent Mr. Dudek the first batch of names to be added: the list of more than 6,300 immigrants homeland security officials had identified as having temporary legal status but who were now either on what he described as “the terrorist watch list,” or had been flagged as having “F.B.I. criminal records,” the documents show. The people’s parole status had been revoked that same day, Mr. Moghaddassi wrote.
The list included a 13-year-old and seven other minors, raising fears inside the agency that it was overly broad, according to one person familiar with the list who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
This will likely work in tandem with DHS’ plan to enforce a registration system, starting today, that serves to turn undocumented presence in the US into a felony (ironically, DHS is formalizing this registration system after Pam Bondi announced she’ll shift away from prosecuting FARA crimes, meaning the foreigners trying to influence US politics get better treatment than the ones picking crops).
Meanwhile, the acting IRS Commissioner, Melanie Krause, has announced her resignation after losing the battle to prevent tax data from being repurposed to feed Trump’s migrant campaign.
Krause’s decision to accept the agency’s deferred resignation offer comes on the heels of the IRS and Department of Homeland Security finalizing an agreement Monday to provide sensitive taxpayer data to federal immigration authorities to help the Trump administration locate and deport undocumented immigrants.
The controversial data sharing agreement between the agencies was one factor that played a role in Krause’s decision to leave, according to one source with knowledge of the situation. The source said that the last draft of the agreement that Krause had been involved with, and had reviewed, was different than the final agreement. Krause learned about the details of the final agreement from the news, the source said.
The Social Security-driven debanking and the IRS data-sharing are both DOGE-led efforts to mine data collected for one purpose and use it for another purpose — to make the deportation system work like a modern supply chain does. You might think this effort has nothing to do with waste fraud and abuse, but as I noted, back on February 19, Trump added streamlining deportation to the mandate of DOGE.
Meanwhile, yesterday Elon Musk confessed DOGE only expects to find $150 billion in saving for FY26 (that is, starting in October), a fraction of a fraction of what he previously claimed.
Musk said he anticipates the $150 billion savings in the next fiscal year at Trump’s cabinet meeting Thursday.
Musk repeated his claim that fraud and waste were “very common” in the government, this time giving the example, without evidence, of “people getting unemployment insurance who haven’t been born yet.”
As recently as last month, Musk told Fox’s Bret Baier he expected DOGE to reach $1 trillion in savings by the time his tenure as a government employee is up in a matter of months.
This means that Elon won’t manage the same level of savings that the Inspectors General that Trump fired were on course to find, all without cutting services like Elon has. We could still have cancer cures and achieve the same level of savings — and all that’s before you consider the $500 billion hole Elon created in revenue projections.
And all he achieved was to dramatically cut services that Americans cherish and, in the guise of finding fraud, automate the deportation system.
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Susan Crawford beat Brad Schimel by ten points last night in significant part by yoking Schimel to Elon Musk, who dumped millions into the race.
As I’ve been saying for months, this could undercut Elon’s efforts to silence right wing opposition to his destruction using primary challenges; if last night was any indication, that would backfire.
But there are several ways Elon’s involvement in the race could have further repercussions. After WI didn’t (yet) pursue legal action after Elon offered the same kind of soft bribes he used in last year’s election, the winner of his $1 million check posted a video effectively confirming that her vote was one of the things she did for the money.
On Tuesday, Musk’s super PAC, America PAC, pulled a video from X featuring $1 million giveaway winner Ekaterina Deistler in which she said she received the money, in part, to “vote.” X is owned by the tech billionaire.
“My name’s Ekaterina Deistler,” she said in a video posted Monday morning. “I did exactly what Elon Musk told everyone to do: sign the petition, refer friends and family, vote, and now I have a million dollars.”
But the video was taken down yesterday, and America PAC posted a new video of Deistler on X on Tuesday afternoon.
“My name’s Ekaterina Deistler, and I’m from Green Bay, Wisconsin,” she said in the new video. “I did exactly what Elon Musk told everyone to do: sign the petition, refer friends and family, and now I have a million dollars.”
Then there’s the backlash from comments Elon and Antonio Gracias made, claiming that someone would be arrested the next day, at a rally for Schimel.
Tech billionaire and senior Trump adviser Elon Musk appeared to boast of advance knowledge of a planned arrest related to alleged Social Security fraud during an appearance on a live stream Monday night promoted to his more than 200 million social media followers, frustrating top law enforcement officials, multiple sources told ABC News.
“Yes. In fact, I believe someone is going to be arrested tomorrow,” Musk said in response to a question about whether U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi would prosecute fraud found within the Social Security system.
Musk, discussing the alleged planned arrest, said, “This is someone who actually stole 400,000 social security numbers and personal information from the Social Security database, and was selling social security numbers and all of all the identification information in order for people to basically steal money from Social Security.”
[snip]
Musk did not say how he came to know about the alleged planned arrest, but sources familiar with the matter told ABC News that Musk was referring to an ongoing federal investigation, and that his public disclosure of the matter disturbed top law enforcement officials with knowledge of the probe.
Previewing an arrest before it takes place would conflict with standard practice intended to protect potentially sensitive law enforcement operations and those involved in carrying them out. [my emphasis]
ABC’s story on the blabbing suggests this is just about law enforcement worrying about tipping someone off. But when you add in Gracias’ comments, it may turn out to be more. Gracias effectively leaked details not just of Social Security data, but of Social Security data collated with data from other sources, such as DHS databases.
Gracias alleged that they had identified and reported undocumented immigrants improperly receiving Social Security and registering to vote — allegations that ABC News has not verified.
“The defaults in the system, from Social Security to all of the benefit programs, have been set to max inclusion, max pay for these people, and minimum collection. That’s what’s happening. We found 1.3 million of them [undocumented immigrants] already on Medicaid, as an example,” said Gracias.
“We actually just took a sample and looked at voter registration records, and we found people here registered to vote in this population, yes, and we found some by sampling that actually did vote, and we have referred them to prosecution at the Homeland Security investigation service already,” Gracias said.
These are the kinds of DOGE claims that always collapse upon review (and Elon and his DOGE boys seem not to understand that undocumented workers actually keep Social Security afloat with payments they will never recoup). But they also evince visibility into data from several agencies (and state voting records) at once — the kind of intra-agency dissemination that unions have posited as a heightened privacy risk, one that would require additional privacy assessments. And the theory of fraud here doesn’t match the claimed actions DOJ has laid out in response to lawsuits. So this may help unions and others as they try to fight back against DOGE.
Elon’s intervention in Wisconsin didn’t help Schimel. And he may have caused himself further problems along the way.
Update: FedScoop confirms that DOGE, including Big Balls, has access to USCIS data.
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The State of the Union was 20 days ago. Since that day, Democrats have spent much of their time talking about other Democrats, talking about how Democrats are responding to the assault on the country, rather than talking about the assault itself and the people responsible.
In my opinion, focusing on Chuck Schumer — however justified your opinion about his fecklessness — is every bit as feckless as Chuck Schumer’s response to this crisis.
What has happened since the Continuing Resolution
There are a slew of reasons I think focusing on Chuck Schumer distracts from the matter at hand. One is that his view that the Continuing Resolution was less bad than a shutdown seems to have been a defensible good faith view (though that doesn’t excuse his head fake about it). It’s certainly possible that Democrats would have messaged effectively during a shutdown and used it to waken Americans of the risk Trump’s attacks on government pose (though as I said at the time, no one had laid the ground work for effective messaging, which makes me question how effective they might have been). But keeping the government open has allowed other positive developments.
Not shutting down the government at least temporarily affirmed the import of employment law. Last week, 25,000 government workers were reinstated pursuant to the efforts of two people whose lawsuits delayed their own firing long enough to issue judgments deeming the firings targeting probationary workers illegal, and then two judges (one, two) who ruled the firings to be unlawful (Trump has appealed the California one of these decisions to SCOTUS). Their reinstatement not only gave people paychecks until such time as Trump fires them properly — paychecks they would not have had under a shutdown — but it affirmed the import of following employment law.
Not shutting down affirmed the import of Congressional funding. On March 18, Radio Free Europe used the Continuing Resolution to substantiate its appropriations-related challenge to the shutdown.
28. On March 15, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed into law Congress’s FullYear Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025 (“Third Continuing Resolution”), which, like the previous continuing resolutions, appropriated “[s]uch amounts as may be necessary, at the level specified . . . under the authority and conditions provided in applicable appropriations Act for fiscal year 2024” until September 30, 2025. See H.R. 1968, 119th Cong. § 1101(a) (2025).
29. In sum, Congress appropriated approximately $23 million for RFE/RL in the First Continuing Resolution for October 1, 2024, to December 20, 2024. Congress appropriated approximately $41 million to RFE/RL in the Second Continuing Resolution for December 21, 2024, to March 14, 2025. Congress further appropriated approximately $77 million for RFE/RL in the Third Continuing Resolution for March 15, 2025, to September 30, 2025.
Obviously, the legal posture of this, and similar cases, would be different if Trump had not signed a funding bill.
Not shutting down kept Trump on the hook for any collapse of Social Security. After Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander enjoined DOGE from tampering in Social Security, the Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek attempted to pick a fight with the judge, falsely claiming her order would force him to shut down Social Security entirely.
And then the White Housetold him he was out of line.
Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek threatened Thursday evening to bar Social Security Administration employees from accessing its computer systems in response to a judge’s order blocking the U.S. DOGE Service from accessing sensitive taxpayer data.
Less than 24 hours later — after the judge rejected his argument and the White House intervened — Dudek is saying he was “out of line.”
Dudek initially told news outlets, including in a Friday interview with The Washington Post, that the judge’s decision to bar sensitive data access to “DOGE affiliates” was overly broad and that to comply, he might have to block virtually all SSA employees from accessing the agency’s computer systems. But Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, who issued the order, said in a letter that Dudek’s assertions “were inaccurate.
[snip]
In response to Hollander’s letter, Dudek said in a statement emailed to reporters just after 5:30 p.m. that the court clarified its guidance and “therefore, I am not shutting down the agency.”
Dudek, in a follow-up interview Friday afternoon with The Post, thanked Hollander for the clarification, adding, “The president is committed to keeping the Social Security offices open to serve the public.” He then acknowledged that this was an about-face from his stance in an interview with The Post earlier in the day.
“[The White House] called me and let me know it’s important to reaffirm to the public that we’re open for business,” he said. “The White House did remind me that I was out of line and so did the judge. And I appreciate that.”
Social Security has always been deemed essential during shutdowns and it would have been here. But right now, the White House is sensitive enough about Social Security that they’re not even using an expansive injunction as an opportunity to fuck with it.
Meanwhile, for all the complaints about how shitty the Continuing Resolution is — for the cuts it made to Veterans health and education — I’ve seen almost no effort to hold Republicans accountable for it (just three Democrats — Jared Golden, Jean Shaheen, and Angus King voted to pass it). If it’s so bad, why aren’t Democrats hanging it around Republicans necks (aside from the fact that they’re too busy talking about Chuck Schumer, who voted against the bill itself)?
What needs to happen
Many of the discussions about Chuck Schumer make the same mistake he does: they assume the answer to Trump’s attack on democracy lies in winning midterms.
That’s a luxurious thought.
(In a really good JV Last column, he describes, “Winning in 2026 will not be sufficient to stop the authoritarian push; but it is necessary.”)
But it imagines we have more time to reverse Trump’s actions than we likely do, and it falsely assumes that the Democratic Party — rather than a trans-partisan or nonpartisan movement — is the entity that might reverse Trump’s attacks. Even if you could be sure of winning the House, without thinking more broadly you could only freeze things; without a whole lot more political work, for example, you couldn’t impeach and remove Trump.
To be clear, the quickest way to slow or reverse Trump’s actions is to convince Republicans — somewhere between four and nine in the House, and/or four in the Senate — to stall his efforts. That’s actually what Schumer says too, but he’s not talking about ways (much less doing anything obvious) to make that happen. Barring convincing Republicans to do something to protect the Constitution, it’ll require a mass uprising (or strike) to bring about change. Barring convincing a politically active majority of the country to cherish democracy, even ousting Trump would just bring us back to where we were quickly, with some other right winger exploiting the Republican thirst for authoritarianism.
Town halls
And one of the things that are already going on — outraged constituents at town halls — is one of the quickest ways to affect that, as I wrote about here. Even Chuck Grassley resorted to bullshit claims at a rowdy town hall recently. Organizers have even succeeded in using empty-podium town halls to focus on Republican failures, and more Democrats are showing at town halls in other districts.
Protests
I’ve said from the start that Elon Musk’s role in DOGE provides Democrats with an easy villain. That’s true not just because he keeps fucking up.
He, and his showrooms, make really easy targets for protests.
It also provides a way for Trump believers to begin to criticize his actions, as NYT recorded among Trump supporters who attended the NCAA wrestling match to which Trump brought Elon.
“Not a big fan of Elon,” said Blaize Cabell, a 32-year-old wrestling coach from Independence, Iowa, who nonetheless remains a big fan of the president. He said he viewed Mr. Musk’s career as a businessman as a series of failures and buyouts and said that the billionaire was “making a lot of callous cuts,” citing the Department of Agriculture. Earlier this month, the department fired thousands of experts and then scrambled to hire them back.
“I don’t even know what to think of him at this point,” David Berkovich, a 24-year-old wrestler and graduate school student from Brooklyn, said of Mr. Musk. “He’s just there all the time.”
“He’s going a little rampant — I think everyone can agree with that,” said Bobby Coll, a 24-year-old finance broker who lives in Manhattan’s West Village. He was there with his girlfriend, Julia Sirois, who said of Mr. Musk’s role in the administration, “It’s someone putting their hand in a cookie jar they don’t belong in.”
[snip]
“That’s a tough one for me,” Jarrod Scandle, a 44-year-old retired police officer from Shamokin, Pa., said of the president’s Tesla stunt. “I think it’s a little, I’m trying to think of the word —” he said as his voice trailed off. He concluded that he was really more of a Chevy or Ford kind of a guy.
Katy Travis, a 48-year-old wrestling mom from Columbia, Mo., said she thought Mr. Musk’s constant presence “looks ridiculous.” That he is as empowered as he is just makes the president “look weak,” she said, which is about the worst thing that can be said of someone at a Division I wrestling championship.
“It makes him look like he’s kissing ass to get money,” Ms. Travis said of the president.
As I’ve repeatedly noted, the Wisconsin Democratic Party is trying to brand Brad Schimel with Elon’s taint in their Supreme Court race on April 1.
Right wingers are attempting to push back on the protests against Musk by claiming that all protestors are connected to the three people DOJ charged with attacks on dealers. But there’s an easy way to make this backfire. After Pam Bondi tried to intimidate her the other day, Jasmine Crockett did what I think every Trump opponent should: point out that Trump freed a bunch of violent cop assailants.
What is missing so far from the pushback on Elon is a successful pushback on his claims that he is finding fraud, a claim that Republicans are using to avoid more directly confronting him. But the problems Elon is causing keep piling up. Catherine Rampell recently catalogued all the ways DOGE is preventing government workers from doing their jobs.
At the IRS, employees spend Mondays queued up at shared computers to submit their DOGE-mandated “five things I did last week” emails. Meanwhile, taxpayer customer service calls go unanswered.
At the Bureau of Land Management, federal surveyors are no longer permitted to buy replacement equipment. So, when a shovel breaks at a field site, they can’t just drive to the nearest town or hardware store. Instead, work stops as employees track down one of the few managers nationwide authorized to file an official procurement form and order new parts.
At the Food and Drug Administration, leadership canceled the agency’s subscription to LexisNexis, an online reference tool that employees need to conduct regulatory research. Some workers might not have noticed this loss yet, however, because the agency’s incompetently planned return-to-office order this week left them too busy hunting for insufficient parking and toilet paper. (Multiple bathrooms have run out of bath tissue, employees report.)
Yesterday WaPo estimated that DOGE attacks on the IRS will create a $500 billion revenue hole at the IRS.
Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.
Notably, this would have been invisible otherwise (as it was before Joe Biden hired extra IRS agents to track it down). But DOGE’s involvement makes it visible, something that can be hung on Trump.
And WaPo explained why Elon is having such a difficult time finding fraud at SSA. (Remember, I’ve got a list of all the DOGE debunkings here.)
Trump’s focus in the last two weeks on deportations, rather than firings, has also taken attention away from all the people fired, which has, in turn, shifted the focus away from the services Trump is taking away. Both need to be the centerpiece of messaging.
Messaging
There are topics that I think would be promising foci of organizing, or more organizing. because they’ll expand the network of organized people beyond traditional Democrats and may be more successful at pressuring Republicans.
There was a March for Science on March 7 — but finding ways to translate what science means into terms accessible to the public; the cancer cures and healthier food and business opportunities are a necessary step to get taxpayers to care about NIH and NSF cuts.
This morning I wondered why we haven’t seen more organizing around Trump’s attack on the Department of Education and sought to find a review of how Kentucky successfully defeated a voucher initiative last year. And I discovered that the group that succeeded in that has reformed to organize around that attack .
I have yet to see a concerted response to Trump’s attack on libraries and museums (though here are some organizingpages). Update: NYT has more.
There have been a few protests from Veterans in DC, at least one in February and another in March. VoteVets are also running ads in five swing districts.
I keep talking about how little farmers have pushed back, though I’ve seen individual pushback at town halls.
Finally, there needs to be an attempt to reclaim antisemitism from the white nationalists using it as a weapon against critics of Israel. There’s been a lot of Jewish pushback on the treatment of Mahmoud Khalil, for example. But not yet a full flipping of the perverse narrative Stephen Miller has adopted to justify shutting down universities.
Leaders are stepping up, all over the country. And rather than joining in those efforts, far too many people (at least some of whom who have a grift that depends on it) have made Chuck Schumer a bigger issue than Trump. Yes, people need to throw more anvils at Elon, and once he catches them, make sure he brings Trump down with him.
But they keep throwing anvils better suited for Elon at themselves.
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That was one of the chants at the #TeslaTakedown event I attended in Chicago last Saturday. But selling your Tesla car is not easy. There isn’t much of a market for used Teslas in this area. There’s a similar problem in Boston. And Seattle. It seems to be a world-wide problem. Perhaps Trump will single-handedly create a market for used Teslas among his cult. That would be great, since only a few years ago they were crazy angry about libtards driving electric vehicles.
If you want to sell your Tesla stock, that’s easy. There’s a robust market in the stock. Over 110 million shares traded on March 17. But there is the problem of figuring out how much $TSLA you own, According to the 2024 Tesla Proxy Statement, after Musk, the two largest holders are Vanguard and Black Rock, both huge in investment funds and pension management. If you have a 401k, an IRA, or a pension plan, you most likely own at least a little of the stock of Tesla. It has the 9th highest market capitalization of US stocks,
This site says there are 517 ETFs that hold stock in Tesla. You probably wouldn’t expect Vanguard Consumer Discretionary ETF to hold Tesla stock. Its largest holding is Amazon at 23%, and it includes MacDonalds, Chipotle, Loews, Booking.com, and similar stocks. The second largest holding is Tesla, at 17%. I do not think of electric vehicles as a consumer discretionary expenditure.
I searched for ETFs with low Tesla holdings for the past year, and almost all of the results were funds with lots of Tesla. There are, of course, investment vehicles that don’t hold Tesla. You could look at industry specific funds like ETFs investing in Pharma or Health Care. But you’d be wise to check the actual holdings. I found some on this site where you can search for several sectors.
If you search for Tesla stock you’ll find plenty of people saying it’s fairly valued, or even undervalued. The Yahoo Finance site says the one year target price is $343. Here’s one that’s not so rosy. if you want to see for yourself, here’s a link to the 2024 10-K. .
Note that the people talking about dumping their Tesla cars don’t take about the car itself, in fact most of them like their Teslas. They’re selling, even at a loss, for other reasons. In the same way, the decision to sell Tesla stock doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t good reasons to hold it. That decision may nave nothing to do with the fundamentals of Tesla, or its businesses.
The Proxy Statement says that Elon Musk has pledged about 1/3 of his holdings as collateral for loans, probably including loans for the purchase of Twitter. It seems plausible that the lenders will demand additional collateral or even call the loans if the price sinks dramatically. For example, the current PE Ratio is about 116 at market close March 17. If it were selling at the same PE ratio as the information technology sector, approximately 35 at market close March 17, the price would drop from the current $240 to about $75.
Search for the term Tesla meme stock. It’s possible the chanters have a point.
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