Pensito Illustration Elon Musk is leaving after DOGE saved the nation hundreds of bucks.
Now it’s back to business to focus on spaceships, Mars and cyber trucks.
All in all, Musk had a pretty good run,
And breaking the government sure was fun!
But he left a parting shot for Trump: “Your big, beautiful bill sucks!”
Layoffs across the U.S. surged 205% in March when compared with a year earlier, with last month’s 275,240 job cuts fueled by widespread firings engineered by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. reports CBS. March’s layoffs represent the third-highest monthly total ever recorded, Challenger said. The two previous highest monthly totals were recorded in April 2020 and May 2020, when more than 671,000 and 397,000 job cuts, respectively, were recorded, due to the pandemic shuttering the U.S. economy, according to its data.
Why does Elon Musk get to decide fed workers’ fates?
We didn’t elect him to be the United States’ Potentate!
Let men of good will firmly resolve
That Musk is the problem he aims to solve,
Because the fact is, DOGE is indeed the Deep State.
The U.S. had ~172,000 layoffs in February, up 245% from January and the most in a single month since the Covid pandemic in 2020, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That’s also the most job cuts in the month of February since 2009, during the financial crisis. More than a third of those layoffs (~62,000) came from the Department of Government Efficiency’s federal headcount reduction. But it wasn’t just federal workers who were laid off: Retail was also hit hard, losing nearly 40,000 roles. Per CNBC, the sector has lost six times more jobs so far this year than it did in the same period last year.
Pensito IllustrationPresident Elon Musk sent out a not-human-resources-approved email to hundreds of thousands of federal employees last week:
“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk wrote on X, which he owns. The post ends: “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
Federal employee Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) provided the following bullet points to DOGE:
Dear Leader Musk, in the past week, acting in my capacity as a federal employee:
I trashed federal workers at a congressional hearing, stating that none of them “deserve” paychecks. I quote myself: “The bureaucracy is not a business. Those are not real jobs producing federal revenue. By the way, they’re consuming taxpayer dollars. Those jobs are paid for by the American tax people who work real jobs, earn real income, pay federal taxes, and then pay these federal employees. Federal employees do not deserve their jobs. Federal employees do not deserve their paychecks.”
I came under fire by my congressional colleagues after it emerged I purchased between $4,000 and $60,000 worth of Tesla stock on January 8 after I was selected to chair the House Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) subcommittee.
I defended President Trump after my Democratic colleague Rep. Melanie Stansbury referred to Donald Trump as a “king” Wednesday. Stansbury said, “Let me say this to you, Mr. Trump. Two hundred fifty years ago, the people of this great nation rejected a reckless, abusive king, and we won’t go back.” So I said, after recognizing myself for closing remarks, “Threats against the president of the United States will not be tolerated by anyone.”
I helpfully showed the Congressional calendar to constituents on X: “This is our House calendar for 2025. Yellow is our in session weeks. Thought it would be good to share for anyone planning trips to visit your Representative.” Of course, people took it the wrong way: “So you rake in $174K a year, get top-tier healthcare, and play the stock market with insider tips, all for working eight days a month? Not bad. Maybe if you lived on minimum wage for a year, you’d finally get why folks are drowning while you all cash in.”
I did not update the calendar on my congressional website, which shows the last entry as a Town Hall in Dade County, Georgia, October 3, 2024, at 6 p.m.
The Economist: “Every working day the Treasury publishes a statement detailing withdrawals of cash from its primary deposit account, providing the best high-frequency indicator of government spending. Since Donald Trump took office a little more than three weeks ago, outlays have averaged $30bn a day. Compare that with the same period last year under Joe Biden: federal spending back then came to about $26bn a day. … Outflows from the Treasury have actually risen since January 28th, when Mr Musk first claimed his ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, or DOGE, was saving the federal government $1bn a day.”
At least 20,000 federal employees have heeded the Trump administration’s call to leave their jobs and get paid through September, officials told news outlets yesterday, reported the Morning Brew newsletter. That means ~1% of the 2+ million-strong federal workforce is taking the deal first introduced in an email announcing a “Fork in the Road” (the same language Elon Musk used to offer buyouts to non-“hardcore” Twitter employees). This falls short of the White House’s goal of having 5% to 10% of federal staffers turn in their notice to cut down on government spending, but officials say the number continues to climb as the Feb. 6 deadline for accepting the offer nears.
Musk started it, saying Trump’s bill was a “disgusting abomination.”
Trump responded, targeting Musk’s government contracts for termination.
So Musk threatens Trump with impeachment,
Then Trump mulls Musk’s deportation and banishment.
We hope it ends with a duel to the death, broadcast to a grateful nation.
“As is so often the case, Donald Trump’s opponents are playing into his hands. This is exactly the kind of fight that Donald Trump loves, with his opponents carrying Mexican flags past burning cars.”
“Don’t kid yourself they know they are absolutely getting cooked politically with their terrible bill and rising prices, and they want to create a violent spectacle to feed their content machine. It’s time for the mainstream media to describe this authoritarian madness accurately.”
— Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), reacting on X to President Trump sending National Guard troops to Los Angeles.
“The people have spoken. A new political party is needed in America to represent the 80% in the middle! And exactly 80% of people agree. This is fate.”
— Elon Musk floated a new political party on Friday after falling out with President Trump over the big, beautiful bill, The Hill reports. He followed up with a potential name for the group, “The America Party.”
“The BBB will increase by orders of magnitude the scope, scale and speed of removing illegal and criminal aliens from the United States. For that reason alone, it’s the most essential piece of legislation currently under consideration in the entire Western World, in generations.”
— Trump aide Stephen Miller, on X, defending the Republican budget bill after Elon Musk called it a “disgusting abomination.”
As the Senate debates the GOP tax and spending bill titled One Big Beautiful Bill Act and President Donald Trump pushes for a July 4 deadline to sign it, a new Quinnipiac poll finds voters overwhelmingly oppose the legislation, 53% to 27%, with 20% not offering an opinion.
A new YouGov poll finds that President Trump’s deployment of Marines to Los Angeles is deeply unpopular, with a 47 percent disapproval mark, compared with 34 percent who approve. Dispatching the National Guard isn’t much better: 45 percent disapprove and 38 percent approve.
After persistent questioning about the cost of sending National Guard members and Marines to Los Angeles in response to protests over immigration raids, Hegseth turned to his acting comptroller, Bryn Woollacott MacDonnell, who said it would cost $134 million, the Associated Press reports.
Eight states, including Florida and Tennessee, have introduced or passed legislation to ban planes from emitting “chemtrails” to poison Americans or control the weather, The Guardian reports. Of course, there’s no credible evidence that this is even happening.
A new KFF Health poll finds that more than 70% of Americans are worried about the impact of Medicaid cuts in the bill leading to more people uninsured and hurting hospitals.