Democrats Get Ready to Probe DOGE
Ahead of the 2024 election, Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson joked on a livestream that Musk was “fucked” if Democrats won the White House. Musk had trollishly asked on Twitter why, despite two Trump assassination attempts, no one tried to assassinate Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. That, he and Carlson mused, was enough for the Democrats to throw him in prison. “How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?” Musk said. “Will I see my children, I don’t know.”
That comment was an example of the deeply personal and sometimes apocalyptic terms with which many Republicans and Silicon Valley titans approached the last presidential election, equating Democrats’ moderate regulatory regimes and gentle, federal antiracism programs with the decline of western civilization.
Now, however, Musk actually does have something on the line in the midterms, into which he has, by latest tally, poured $366 million.
Congressional Democrats, Politico reports, have ranked the billionaire high on their list of oversight targets for a few reasons: his many government contracts, his role in squeezing Ukraine as Trump scapegoats Volodymyr Zelenskyy for high fuel prices. But above all else, the Politico report indicates, Democratic committees want to delve into the disaster that was DOGE, including its access to Americans’ data and the decimation of USAID.
“He helped orchestrate the systematic destruction of government programs and services over the last nearly two years,” Zoe Lofgren, who heads the committee that oversees NASA, told Politico. “The sheer number of conflicts of interest are astounding.”
The report on Democrats’ Musk-related oversight plans come as Texas Democrats campaign on their opponents’ ties to him. Much of Musk’s midterms money has been spent in the state, and Democrats are assuming that the billionaire’s Trump-like levels of unpopularity work in their favor. Gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinajosa is suing to obtain her opponent, Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R), emails with Musk, while Senate candidate James Talarico has cast Musk as trying to buy up the state’s natural resources and Attorney General Ken Paxton himself.
“The world’s first trillionaire may think he’s entitled to our land, to our water, to his own personal U.S. senator, but he’s not,” Talarico said yesterday.
Important Economic Data Conspicuously Missing
In the months before the midterms, key economic data has gone unreleased, Layla A. Jones reports for TPM.
- The Statistics of Income report, intended for release by the IRS in July, never surfaced, she writes.
- The data would have shown, among other things, how many Americans took advantage of tax programs in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill including the “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” provisions of the legislation. Experts are wondering if the data was suppressed because of what it would have said about those programs.
- The data has been produced, it seems, but the Treasury Department, which oversees IRS, has not given the green light for it to be released.
- “It could be that everything was humming along fine and somebody just doesn’t like what they show,” Barry Johnson, former director of the IRS Statistics of Income Division, told Layla. “Without looking at the data, you just don’t know.”
Tabs
- After throttling Starlink, the Trump administration is now withholding patriot missiles from Ukraine, the Washington Post reports.
- Immigrants swept up by the Trump administration in its big, performative crackdown on noncitizen voting told an LA Times reporter at the courthouse that they had not, in fact, intentionally registered to vote. It’s unclear if these individuals made an error, registering by accident — but less than 24 hours after they were announced, these cases are looking like they are less than the DOJ claims they are. DOJ would have to prove a purposeful violation of the law, writes election law expert Rick Hasen.
Man of the Hour
It’s Aaron Reitz, the culture warring former prosecutor in Ken Paxton’s office who we have covered before for his comments declaring his intention “to destroy the left,” that Kwanzaa is “ANTI-USA and ANTI-CHRISTIAN,” and that “Islamism is incompatible with American civilization.” Despite all this, he is now a U.S. Attorney in Texas, placed in that position not by Trump but, surprisingly, by local federal judges. In this job, he is making various Reitzian statements such as, “If you violate federal election law, I will hunt you down and prosecute you.” He’s here, he said in a video released on the first day of early voting in Texas, to make sure local election administrators are not “crooked” and “do their job.”
