Letters from an American - May 13, 2025

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

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May 13th, 2025. While President Donald Trump's billionaire sidekick, Elon Musk, has said he is pulling back from his work with the Department of Government Efficiency, he is with Trump today in Saudi Arabia, along with representatives from leaders from some of the biggest companies in the United States. The business executives are looking for Saudi investments. Jason Carrion of the New York Times notes that the Saudis are looking to diversify their oil-dependent economy and are now the world's largest investors in artificial intelligence, or AI. In addition to Musk, the AI entrepreneurs in today's entourage include, as Karyann reports,

Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT Parent Open AI, Jensen Huang, the leader of the advanced chipmaker, NVIDIA, Ruth Porat, the chief investment officer of Alphabet, Google's parent company, and Andy Jassy, the chief of Amazon, which is a major provider of cloud computing services. Cyber experts note that the Department of Government Efficiency's mining of Americans' personal data under Musk has given him access to a treasure trove of verified information for his own company, XAI. Carian notes that XAI is in the process of raising money that could bring the value of

the firm to $120 billion. After the promise of $600 billion in Saudi investment in the U.S., including a $20 billion investment in AI and energy infrastructure to support it, Trump today promised Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, $142 billion in state-of-the-art defense and security equipment from dozens of U.S. defense firms. Musk's turn from the Department of Government Efficiency back to AI is revealing not just in providing evidence that his primary interest all along was not in waste, fraud, and abuse, but in collecting government data about the American people.

It is not likely a coincidence that the administration fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden last Thursday and Register of Copyrights Sharer Perlmutter on Saturday. Both Hayden and Perlmutter have questioned the unauthorized use of copyrighted material to train AI. White House spokesperson Carolyn Levitt explained Hayden's firing by saying, "'There were quite concerning things "'that she had done at the Library of Congress

"'in the pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and putting inappropriate books in the library for children. But the Library of Congress collects according to a list of principles to enable it to perform research for members of Congress and to keep a record of the American people. It is not a lending library. In order to conduct research at the Library of Congress, researchers must be at least 16 years old. Musk powers his AI from a massive supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee. As Dara Kerr of The Guardian reported last month, the Southern Environmental Law Center discovered that Musk had quietly moved at least 35 methane-powered generators, enough to power a city, to the plant to help power the supercomputer he calls Colossus, which powers his chatbot, Grok.

Those generators are unpermitted and are major producers of carcinogens and other toxins. After the company assured Memphis Mayor Paul Young that only 15 of the generators were on, thermal imaging showed at least 33 running. The supercomputer is in a historically black neighborhood with a history of industrial pollution and higher rates of cancer and asthma than other Memphis neighborhoods. When residents spoke out against the supercomputer, a group calling itself Facts Over Fiction, but without any other identifying information, spread flyers claiming the turbines are,

specially designed to protect the air we all breathe. They also claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency and the County Health Department regulate the generators, but both agencies told Kerr that they had not issued permits for their use at the Memphis plant. In March, Musk bought another property in Memphis to expand the plant by a million square feet. With Musk turning back to his business interests, the task of cementing the Department of Government Efficiencies cuts into law is falling

to Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vogt. Vogt is a Christian nationalist who was a key author of Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump presidency. Project 2025 called for slashing the federal government that Christian nationalists think is undermining Christianity. It said the federal government must decentralize and privatize

as much as possible, and leave the great majority of domestic activities to state, local, and private governance. That destruction could be accomplished by an extraordinarily of domestic activities to state, local, and private governance. That destruction could be accomplished by an extraordinarily strong president who would refuse to accept the law that Congress had the final say in appropriations and programs

and would impound congressionally appropriated funds in order to slash programs he didn't want. This plan was so unpopular that only 4% of Americans who had heard of Project 2025 before the 2024 presidential election wanted to see it enacted. Opposition to it was so strong that as a candidate Trump ran away from it, claiming he had nothing to do with it. But Ken Thomas, Scott Patterson, and Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal report that VOTE has served as Musk's lower-profile partner on the Department of Government Efficiency

and has been putting the plans in Project 2025 into place. The sweeping cuts to public services and to government agencies are straight out of the Project 2025 playbook. In the past three months, Americans have discovered that cuts to the government invariably affect programs they like, as well as those they think are superfluous. And yet, cuts are on the menu in the House, where Republicans have been pulling together a measure to enact Trump's agenda in what he calls one big beautiful bill. Lisa Mascarro of the Associated Press reported that at least 15 committees have been working on their pieces of the bill but the pieces produced by the Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Agriculture committees

have been the most closely watched. Those committees released their plans over the past few days, beginning with the Committee on Energy and Commerce late Sunday night. Together, they call for extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts that benefit primarily the wealthy and corporations. This has been Trump's top priority. According to the Nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, extending those cuts will add at least $4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years. Such increased spending makes it imperative to increase the debt ceiling, which caps how much money the Treasury can borrow.

The Committee on Ways and Means calls for raising that ceiling by $4 trillion. At the same time that it funnels money upward, the proposed bill also cuts programs that benefit ordinary Americans. It cuts funding for climate initiatives passed by Congress in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. It cuts the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, that 42 million Americans rely on. And despite Trump's repeated promises

not to touch Medicaid, the program that provides health care for poorer Americans, the plan calls for cuts to Medicaid. The CBO estimates that the cuts will take away health care from at least 10.3 million Americans over the next decade. As Mike Lilis and Emily Brooks of The Hill note, Republicans are taking a mighty gamble by pairing tax cuts for the richest Americans with cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and clean energy tax credits. Each of those programs is popular among Republican voters, Lillison Brooks note.

A KFF poll from March found that 77% of Americans, including 64% of Republicans, have a positive view of Medicaid. 97% of Americans believe that Medicaid is important in their community. Republican lawmakers are gambling that voters will be willing to lose services in exchange for putting Trump's agenda into law. But it will not be an easy sell. When the House Energy and Commerce Committee began the process of debating and amending their section of the bill today,

the section of the bill that outlines the cuts to Medicaid, committee chair Brett Guthrie, a Republican of Kentucky, explained that the proposed cuts were designed to stop the billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Medicaid program and are all common sense policies that will return taxpayer dollars to middle class families. Attendees who hoped to protect Medicaid, many of them in wheelchairs, disagreed. They began to chant, no cuts to Medicaid and waste, fraud, and abuse my ass. Activist Julie Farrar told Ben Leonard and Haley Fuchs of Politico

that there were about 90 people there from the disability rights organization, ADAPT. They were, she said, fighting literally for our survival right now. It is against the law to protest inside congressional buildings. U.S. Capitol Police arrested 25 people and removed others. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.