The dude made a Nazi salute in public in broad daylight. So yes, I'm inherently anti-Musk because I'm inherently anti-Nazi because Nazis are inherently anti human rights and anti basic freedoms.

Can you tell me a cost reduction plan involving police or military or do i have to label it law-and-order with a sharp salute for you to understand what i am talking about?

Communication is so messy man, two sides, same iterpretation ... just tell me when i can lower my arm of friendship, that absolutely noone could misunderstand.

Historically, that has not been the case, hence the question.

> Can you tell me a cost reduction plan involving police or military or do i have to label it law-and-order with a sharp salute for you to understand what i am talking about?

Just yesterday this[0] was a headline: "Hegseth wants Pentagon to cut 8% from defense budget for each of the next 5 years"

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hegseth-pentagon-8-percent-cuts...

The 2.5 million you speak of operate within agencies whose mandates have been given by Congress and their actions are subject to judicial reciew. There is no Comgressional mandate for DOGE. They are the rogue agency people like you spent years worrying about.

"The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President."

And I’m not sure why you think a “congressional mandate” is required for the executive to do things, it’s not. Especially for an agency that a former President created on his own.

As for data access, my understanding is the digital services agency already had data access to other agencies through pre-existing agreements (it goes back to the original mandate to fix the Obamacare website which required pulling data from numerous databases).

[1]https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/esta...

I give credit to Trump and Musk for playing the DC game like professional politicians.

It’s pretty clear you can’t get anything done in DC without it.

There is. It was given during Obama. You might not like it, but it looks like DOGE is likely to be completely legal and working within the frameworks of the government.

It was in fact multiple injunctions because people at DOGE kept trying to work around it in increasingly stupid ways.

> So are 2.5 million other employees and advisors in government.

Those employees are employed by a government agency established, funded and given their mission by Congress. The heads of these agencies are approved by the US Senate.

None of these statements above apply to Elon Musk or "DOGE."

We did this to ourselves.

I think it's worth pointing out that it's not a given Congress would have approved it all. For a start, it would take longer to legally setup the instruments that Musk wanted. Also, the current situation allows Republicans to conveniently wash their hands of any negative consequences. Which is likely a big reason they're not pushing on this at all, as demanding a vote would require them to take a clear side on DOGE.

I wonder how much of your concern is driven this type of paranoid hyperbole

A judgement that was presided by a well-known anti-Trump judge whose OWN daughter worked for "Authentic Campaigns" - which took significant payments to the tune of millions of dollars from the Biden-Harris campaign - and also $16 million from Schiff ? The judge should have recused himself as applicable under "Section 100.3(E)(1) of the Rules of Judicial Conduct", but then I guess it would have been hard to find another partisan judge if he had done so.

What a joke - that conviction truly proved to the ENTIRE world that the U.S. is a corrupt BANANA republic and does not possesses the moral authority to preach about "opposition treatment" to nations of the Global South. The next time a US Secretary of State threatens sanctions while preaching high-faluting nonsense about the principles of democracy, this judgement will definitely be brought up.