- Musk lays off workers overseeing his car company;
- Musk asks federal employees to justify their jobs or be fired;
- Trump issues an EO stating that only he can interpret the meanings of law;
- Adam Serwer on how MAGA is about reversing the civil-rights movement.
It gets worse and worse.
For example, this makes a kind of sense.
AP, 22 Feb 2025: Musk’s cost-cutting team is laying off workers at the auto safety agency overseeing his car company (via)
Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team is eliminating jobs at the vehicle safety agency that oversees Tesla and has launched investigations into deadly crashes involving his company’s cars.
Musk has accused the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of holding back progress on self-driving technology with its investigations and recalls.
In addition to investigations into Tesla’s partially automated vehicles, NHTSA has mandated that Tesla and other automakers using self-driving technology report crash data on vehicles, a requirement that Tesla has criticized and that watchdogs fear could be eliminated.
As JMG notes, “Earlier this month an analysis found that Tesla’s Cybertruck is 17 times ‘more deadly’ than the infamous Ford Pinto.”
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But that’s peanuts compared to this.
CNN, 22 Feb 2025: Federal employees told to justify jobs in email or Musk says they face dismissal
and
NY Times, 22 Feb 2025: Musk Says Government Workers Must Detail Their Workweek or Lose Their Jobs, subtitled “Elon Musk has drawn inspiration from his 2022 takeover of X, then known as Twitter, as he works to overhaul the federal government.”
Elon Musk threw federal workers into further confusion and alarm on Saturday when he ordered them to summarize their accomplishments for the week, warning that a failure to do so would be taken as a resignation.
Shortly after his demand, which he posted on X, civil servants across the government received an email from the Office of Personnel Management with the subject line, “What did you do last week?”
The missive simultaneously hit inboxes across multiple agencies, rattling workers who had been rocked by layoffs in recent weeks and were unsure about whether to respond to Mr. Musk’s demand. His mounting pressure on the federal work force came at the encouragement of President Trump, who has been trumpeting how the billionaire has upended the bureaucracy and on Saturday urged him to be even “more aggressive.”
In his post on X, Mr. Musk said employees who failed to answer the message would lose their jobs. However, that threat was not stated in the email itself.
(As an aside, no one except Musk thinks his takeover of Twitter was a success.)
This is astonishingly irresponsible. What kind of imbecile would threaten to fire virtually the entire government —
The email was received by workers across the government, including at the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Personnel Management, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to copies seen by The New York Times.
— for not responding to his arbitrary whim? (Not to mention, who’s going to evaluate the tens or thousands of responses from those employees who might respond?) Can he not imagine what will happen if the US government simply disappears? How is this demand any different from that of an invading force bent on destroying the US and its government?
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That one competes with this one for worst of all. From a few days ago.
Slate, Frank Bowman, 21 Feb 2025: Trump Issued Perhaps His Most Terrifying Executive Order on Tuesday
Over the past month, many have warned that President Donald Trump is trying to make himself king or dictator. Trump’s defenders wave off such warnings as hysterical hyperbole. The past week has shown that they are very much not.
…
The defining attribute of a dictatorship, as well as of kingship in its ancient and absolute form, is the assertion that law—its making, interpretation, adjudication, and enforcement—is an emanation of the will of one man.
To the point:
In addition, the Feb. 18 executive order makes a breathtaking assertion that reaches far beyond independent agencies, declaring that the president (and the attorney general subject to the president’s control) “shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch” and that:
No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General.
In short, Trump is declaring that in all questions of either making law in the form of regulation or interpreting any law whatever—regulatory, statutory, or constitutional—the only executive branch opinion that matters is his.
If Trump opines, for example, that SEC regulations do not bind Elon Musk, then that is the authoritative position of the executive branch, from which no SEC commissioner may dissent.
So then, isn’t this evidence that Trump wants to be king, or a dictator? In contrast to living within the balance of powers built into the US government?
On the other hand, that the major news sources have not covered this more prominently is perhaps a sign that this EO is just another gesture, and has no teeth. (Many of Trump’s EOs face legal actions.)
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Stepping out a bit. The true motivation of MAGA, and Trump, is to return to an era, say the 1950s, in which white (Christian) men ruled everything in America.
The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 22 Feb 2025: The Great Resegregation, subtitled “The Trump administration’s attacks on DEI are aimed at reversing the civil-rights movement.”
I’ve discussed the broad social trends that might have brought us to this reactionary era. But another is the xenophobia and racism that resides in base human nature, uneducated and uncultured, in all those small towns across the land.
The nostalgia behind the slogan “Make America great again” has always provoked the obvious questions of just when America was great, and for whom. Early in the second Trump administration, we are getting the answer.
In August, speaking with someone he believed to be a sympathetic donor, one of the Project 2025 architects, Russell Vought, said that a goal of the next Trump administration would be to “get us off of multiculturalism” in America. Now Vought is running Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and the plan to end multiculturalism is proceeding apace. Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.”
