Letters from an American - February 18, 2025

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

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In a court filing last night, the Director of the Office of Administration in the Trump Administration, Joshua Fischer, clarified the government position of billionaire Elon Musk. In a sworn declaration to the court, Fisher identified Musk as a senior advisor to the president. He explained, in his role as a senior advisor to the president, Mr. Musk has no greater authority than other senior White House advisors. Like other senior White House advisors, Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.

Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President's directives. Fisher's statement went on to say that Musk is neither an employee nor the service administrator that is the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency. The statement is in response to a lawsuit filed by 14 states, New Mexico, Arizona, Michigan, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, contending that Musk's role is unconstitutional because he has such sweeping power in his role at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGGI, that the Constitution requires that his position be confirmed by the Senate. President Trump has routinely referred to Musk as doggy's leader and

the media routinely refer to Elon Musk's doggy. Musk has flooded his social media site with claims the doggy is cutting programs that he claims are wasteful or fraudulent, although so far he has yet to provide any proof of his extravagant claims. In the early hours of Monday he reposted a picture of a leaner, meaner version of himself dressed as a Roman gladiator, with the caption, I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus. Musk added, and I am. Beginning on Friday, the Trump administration began mass purges of federal government employees. As Hannah Natanson, Lisa Reign, and Emily Davies reported in the Washington Post, the

firings were haphazard and riddled with errors, but apparently most of those firings were of employees in the probationary period of employment, typically the first year of service, but a status that's triggered by promotions and lateral transfers as well. About 20 FDA employees who review neurological and physical medical devices were fired, hampering the agency's ability to evaluate the devices produced by Musk's brain implant company Neuralink. Employment lawyers say the mass firings are illegal because they ignore employee protections. Judge Tanya Chutkin, who is overseeing the case, had noted, This is essentially a private citizen directing an organization that's not a federal agency

that has access to the entire workings of the federal government to hire, fire, slash contracts, terminate programs, all without any congressional oversight. Now the Trump administration is attempting to protect Musk by saying he is simply an advisor. Department of Justice lawyer Joshua Gardner told Chutkin that he could not independently confirm the firings of thousands of federal employees last week, prompting her to note that his ignorance seemed willful. The firing of thousands of federal employees is not a small thing, she said. You haven't been able to learn if that's

true? Peter Charalambos of ABC News noted that lawyers from the Department of Justice are also unable to explain what, exactly, doggy is. They won't say it's an agency, which, as U.S. District Judge John Bates wrote, would be subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act. On Friday, Charalambos points out, when reporters asked senior advisor to the Treasury Department's general counsel, Christopher Healy, who runs Doggie, he answered,

I don't know the answer to that. What is clear though is that the Doggie team is vacuuming up data from government agencies. It began its run shortly after Trump took office by accessing the Treasury Department payment system, prompting the resignation of career civil servant David Liebrich. Then, on February 2nd, the doggy people moved on to the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, where they struggled with security officers trying to stop them from accessing classified information. By February 12, they were at the General Services Agency, which oversees the government's real estate.

That pattern has continued. Over the weekend, Fatima Husussain of the Associated Press reported the doggie was trying to get access to taxpayer data from the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, specifically the integrated data retrieval system that enables examinations of tax returns, deep troves of information about hundreds of millions of American citizens and businesses. Access to individuals' bank account numbers and private information has, in the past, been tightly guarded. Indeed, compromising access to that information is a felony. Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Committee on Finance, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the committee on finance, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat of Massachusetts,

the top Democrat on the committee on banking, housing, and urban affairs, wrote to Douglas O'Donnell, acting commissioner of the IRS, demanding information about doggies' access to taxpayer information, and noting that the request for access raises serious concerns that Elon Musk and his associates are seeking to weaponize government databases containing private bank records and other confidential information to target American citizens and businesses as part of a political agenda.

Doggie worked over the weekend to get access to Social Security Administration databases as well. Amanda Becker of the 19th notes that these records contain information about individuals' income, addresses, children, retirement benefits, and even medical records. Lisa Rehn, Holly Bailey, Jeff Stein, and Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post reported that Acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration Michelle King, who had been with the agency for decades before Trump elevated her to Acting Commissioner last month, resigned after a clash over access to the data.

Jason Kobler of 404 Media reported today that workers at the General Services Administration resigned in protest after Musk ally Thomas Shedd, who now runs the group of coders Doggy has embedded in that agency, requested access to all components of the Notify.gov system. That system is used to send mass text messages to the public. Information about it is highly sensitive and gives anyone with access unilateral private access to the personal data of members of the public, according to Kobler. That includes not just names and phone numbers but information about, for example, whether individuals are enrolled in public benefit programs that are based on financial status. A

White House spokesperson defended Doggie's access to the IRS by saying that waste, fraud, and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long, adding, it takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it. But Doggie has been unable to document what it claims are cost-saving measures. On Monday, it listed what it said were $16 billion in canceled contracts, but Atish Bhatia, Josh Katz, Margo Sanger Katz, and Ethan Singer of the New York

Times corrected the record, noting that a contract Doggie valued at $8 billion was actually closer to $8 million. Further, they noted, claims of $55 billion in savings lacked documentation. Musk's recent claims that the Social Security Administration is sending out payments to tens of millions of dead people more than 100 years old, a claim echoed by President Trump, were wrong. The software system defaults missing birth dates to more than 150 years ago, and the Social Security Administration decided not to spend more than $ million dollars on upgrading its system to include death information. Right-wing podcaster Trish Regan warned Doggie that,

"...it's critical to present the math correctly," and noted, "...looks like the team got out over its skis on this one." Aside from the many legal problems with the argument that the opaque doggy can alter programs established by Congress and the problems with documenting its actual work, it is undeniable that Musk's team has had access to a treasure trove of information about Americans and American businesses and the ways in which they interact

with the government. This information can feed the AI projects that Musk envisions putting at the center of American life. It also opens the way for Musk and his cronies to weaponize private information against business competitors as well as political enemies. In addition, it can also feed a larger technological project for controlling politics. The story of how Cambridge Analytica used information harvested from about 87 million Facebook users to target political ads in 2016 is well known, but the misuse of data was back in the news earlier this month when Corey G. Johnson and Byar Duncan of ProPublica

reported that the gun industry also shared data with Cambridge Analytica to influence the 2016 election. Johnson and Duncan reported that after a spate of gun violence, including the attempted assassination of then-Representative Gabriel Giffords of Arizona, and the mass shootings at Fort Hood in Texas, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, had increased public pressure for common-sense gun safety legislation. The gun industry's chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, worked with gunmakers and retailers to collect

data on gun owners without their knowledge or consent. That data included names, ages, addresses, income, debts, religious affiliations, and even details like which charities people supported, shopping habits, and whether they liked the work of painter Thomas Kincaid, and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus-size or petite. Analysts ran that information through an algorithm that creates a psychological profile of an individual to enable precise targeting of potential voters. Ads based on these profiles reached almost 378 million views on social media and sent more than 60 million visitors to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, or NSSF, website.

When Trump won, in 2016, the NSSF took partial credit for the results. Not only was Trump in office, it reported, but also, thanks in part to our efforts, there is a pro-gun majority in the U.S. House and Senate. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.