The Daily Beast Podcast - Elon Musk's DOGE Mistakes Will Cost Lives

Episode Date: March 2, 2025

On the latest episode of The New Abnormal, Elon Musk admits DOGE “will make mistakes” as it weeds out government “waste,” but those mistakes could cost lives, warns co hosts Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy. Plus! Imara Jones, journalist and CEO of TransLash Media, discusses the Trump administration's attacks on trans rights. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears.

Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Amara Jones, journalist and CEO of Translash Media, and they'll discuss the Trump administration's attacks on trans rights, as well as the Democrats' failure to respond and the broader threat to democracy. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips.

That's about the enthusiasm you should have. Okay. Here we have our Overlord, a man who sits in cabinet meetings, despite not being a secretary, and his name is Elon Musk. He's going to just make sure you guys have nothing to worry about. Just calm your pretty little heads. I should say, we will make mistakes. We won't be perfect.

But when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly, was Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately. And there was no interruption. But we do need to move quickly if we're to achieve a trillion dollar deficit reduction in financial year 26. It requires saving $4 billion per day, every day from now through the end of September. What was supposed to be funny there? I'm confused. about what his what this motherfucker was chuckling about and first of all that the freeze on abola that they instituted hasn't been on frozen and the people have been let go they don't know how to

contact them much like you know the people who they fired who were overseeing our nuclear weapons so nothing about this is fucking funny and he's like oh we'll make mistakes except here in government when you make those kinds of mistakes, people actually fucking die. It isn't like a glitch on your broke down fucking social media site. Oh, God. Yeah, he's lying, as you said. The Washington Post had a really good report. They talked to a person named Nidi Bori, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration.

She says there have been no efforts to turn on anything in prevention of Ebola and other diseases. In other words, they haven't restored the Ebola prevention immediately. and there has been interruption. So he's lying. The other thing is, like you said, this is not a mistake like Twitter is down for 15 minutes. This is the kind of mistake that should, I don't know, land you in prison. You can't be doing things like this and getting away with it. I say that aspirationally, not with an understanding that in reality he did do that and he did get away with it, at least for now. It shouldn't be that way. This is not some penny ante mistake. This is, and it's, obviously far from the only one that Doge has made and has tried frantically to backtrack on from firing the people at the Department of Energy who deal with nuclear weapons to a bunch of other things where they have tried to recall the people that they fired, et cetera. They are dumb and they do not know what they're doing and they don't much care unless it becomes something that really does cause a bit of a public uproar like with the nuclear scientists. So

Yeah, I was about to say fuck those guys because I forgot what segment we were doing. I'll just stop. I think of this a lot like what would happen if my wife saw me waving a giant chadesaw around on a stage for no good reason. That she'd be like, do you really have to get it that close to your face? Like, we're coming a little close to danger. And I think a lot about just 11 days ago in the New York Post, there was a headline suspected Ebola exposure at NYC urgent care as hazmat crews on scene. Now, the people did not end up testing positive for Ebola, thank God. But, you know, this is not like one of those things that we often think of of like,

oh, there's an obscure mosquito running around Africa and it'll never touch me. It's like, we come into contact with Ebola all the time. I was in the hospital at one point while the Ebola patient that Chris Christie held hostage was in that hospital. Mm-mm. Yeah, I mean, this is a thing that comes close to us. Mm-mm-mm. Yeah, I do suspect, however, Jesse, that most of my... Musk's ex-wives were hoping he'd wave the chainsaw closer to his face.

That seems like their Twitter vibe lately, huh? Yeah, it really does. Well, now we pivot over to another nice fellow named speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Oh, God. He's going to give an answer that I suspect he'd never dare give it a town hall. It's just the start of the process. Can you say unequivocally that further down the line there won't be any cuts to Medicaid program? Yeah, so look, let me clarify what we're talking about with Medicaid.

Medicaid is hugely problematic because it has a lot of fraud waste and abuse. Everybody knows that. We all know it intuitively. No one in here would disagree. We had a hearing in budget just last week, or week for last. And they asked the experts, and the estimate is, I think it's $50 billion a year in fraud alone in Medicaid. Those are precious taxpayer dollars. Everybody is committed to preserving Medicare benefits for those who desperately need it and deserve it and qualify. for it. What we're talking about is rooting out the fraud, waste, and abuse. Every tax it doesn't matter what party you're in. You should be for that because it saves your money.

And it preserves the programs so that it is available for the people who desperately need it. That's what we're about. And I wish that when you lied, your tongue fell out. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, just to listen to him, rattle off these things about waste, fraud, and abuse, which his party it should just be their mantra because that's all they're about and that's all they do is waste, perpetuate fraud and abuse those most vulnerable. It's just sickening. I'm not too old to remember when Joe Biden at the state of the union stood up and said, they're coming for Social Security and they're coming for Medicaid and they all booed him.

Mm-hmm. And said, liar, not true. Boo, boo. We never said that. and listen to him now. Give me a fucking break. Yeah, you know, I've seen that 50 billion figure floated around other places and I got a little curious about it and I did some digging and I looked at a study that Georgetown University

did. I think just in January it came out. And the deal is, even if you take that 50 point, it's 50.9 billion dollars, I think, that comes from what's called the program integrity port of health and human services. There's two things here. One is the program integrity report does not register fraud. What it registers is improper payments. And what improper payments means, and according to this Georgetown study, 80% of the improper payments were due to missing or insufficient documentation. Or they were technically improper payments. In other words, the payment was to the right provider for the correct amount, but there was something wrong with the payment process. None of that is fraud. So it's very easy for Mike Johnson to get up there and throw around this number and claim that it's $50 billion in fraud. That's not true to begin with. The second thing is, as the Georgetown study points out, even if you take a number that high or they use a 2024 number, which was $31.1 billion,

that is 5.1% of Medicaid outlays. In other words, $579 billion was paid out properly by Medicaid, with no paperwork errors, no anything. And 31 billion, or even if you want to call it 50 billion, which is a 2023 number, yes, it's a ton of money, but it's such a small percentage that it's obviously not indicative of a system that is rife with fraud, which is how they are trying to portray it. It is 5%. 5% of the total outlays by Medicaid were considered improper. And again, not fraudulent, improper.

But even if they were fraudulent, it's a drop in the bucket. So to pretend that they are trying to save the taxpayers from this scourge of Medicaid fraud is an outright lie. Damn. Well, here in New York City, where the three of us live, we are undergoing the madness as a former governor with sexual predator allegations who resigned is running to replace a mayor with an indictment hanging over his head. Guys, I have great news. A bold leader, the minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, is going to come here and speak truth to this situation. Andrew Cuomo is potentially going to jump into the mayor's race as early as this week. You've seen at least one of your colleagues here on the Hill endorse him.

You called from to resign a few years ago. Should he be engaging in the mayor's race? I haven't had a conversation with Governor Cuomo at this point. I do look forward to speaking with him sooner rather than later. If in fact he's going to jump into the mayor's race, and then we'll take it from there. Would it be good for New York if he did? I think it would be a candidate that a lot of people, as I've heard from, the district that I represent would be very interested in checking out.

It's just... Can we start with? There has to be a rule that if you resign in disgrace, you don't get to keep being called the title of that office? You're here. You had to leave the office of the governor. You should not be called Governor Cuomo. There should be no titular respect there or whatever you want to call it.

I would vote for Eric Adams over Cuomo. And my loathing for Eric Adams knows no way. bounds. I found a new thing worse to doing than fuck Barry kill. Yeah, for sure. I mean, Andrew Cuomo is a corrupt bully who just should not ever again in his life have anything resembling the slightest bit of power. And honestly, and my heart goes out to the women that I guess we have to call him his accusers, but I will state categorically that I believe them. And I know Lindsay Boylan is one of them. And, you know, she's been on the show and, you know, We follow each other online, and I know just how angry she is that this guy who treated her like such

shit and this guy who tried to destroy the accuser's lives by leaking information about them, rather than face up to what he did, that he may be back to holding some kind of power in New York. It's absolutely disgraceful. I suspect that he will not be our next mayor because, yeah, people have short-term memories, but you don't even have to do Apo research on him. You can just print out the news stories and talk about them and remember what happened with the nursing homes during COVID and remember what he did to all these women. And I don't think he's going to be our next mayor.

Thank God. I'm going to go on the record and say, I don't think you're right. Okay. I really don't. He's ahead of the polls and ranked choice. And I will tell you that given all of the things that we have dealt with with regard to Donald Trump and heard and seen and done, and it'll never happen again. People won't reelect him, and it was far worse and far, you know, and here we are.

So I think that, one, how is it possible to say so many words and say nothing? Hakeem Jeffries has really mastered the art of minutia and bullshit. The hopscotch that he does is extraordinary. but New York is definitely desperate for someone other than Eric Adams and maybe somebody that can put together sentences and lives on planet Earth. I don't know. What frustrates me is that why can't we ever find anyone new? Why is it that like whether it's New York City or it's Congress, like it's just the boomerang effect of these people that just continue to be recycled through? And that to me is what is infuriating as if there are no new people with fresh ideas that could

actually move us forward in any type of way. We always go back to the well, regardless of how polluted it is. Well put. I almost said fuck that guy as well. Like every segment now. I know. I know. Look, the only thing I'm holding on to is that Cuomo is leading in the polls because of name

recognition and that that will go away once a campaign actually starts. I hope you are wrong and I'm right, Danielle. not for any personal reason, although I will get intense and immense satisfaction out of it. But really, it's more just for the city. I should add that historically, almost no mayor in New York that is not an incumbent that is ahead of the polls, stays that way after the first debate and the second debate usually wildly sway in New York more than most places. Andrew Yang, anyone? Folks, I am very excited to welcome to the new abnormal. Amara Jones, who is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning journalist, activist and founder of TransLash Media,

a platform dedicated to shifting the cultural narrative on trans lives. She was also named as Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. Amara. It has been a time. We are just... close to a month and one week inside of the Trump regime. And from day one, Donald Trump signaled with one of his flurry of executive orders to pronounce that there are only two genders in this country.

There was a part, I think, of a lot of people who believed that the $215 million that was spent on just targeting the trans community was just a campaign. tactic, to scare people, to create divisiveness and rise in hate, which they're very good at. What was your reaction to the executive order that came out? And what did that signal to you? I mean, sadly, I wasn't surprised because through our investigative series podcast, the anti-trans hate machine, which we're now working on season four and have been reporting on since 2020, this is a part of the plan that they've had all along. And I have not personally been surprised by any of the anti-trans policies, executive orders, or laws that are pending that Republicans have put

forward. This was always the tip of the spear for their project to assure an authoritarianism in the United States and to undermine democracy. And so they are doing exactly what they said they were going to do and they are executing against the plan that they have had all along and which they detailed in Project 2025, which has really been in the work since the first Trump administration back in 2017. So this is not terribly shocking, sadly. It's only shocking if you didn't believe what they were saying or you weren't paying attention.

Yeah. And I think that that to me is the problem, which is that they spent so much money, so much time attacking the trans community. And yet I did not feel that there was any considerable pushback that was being done by Democrats and still to this point that is being done by Democrats. We had in that last election just elected the first openly trans member of Congress, Sarah McBride coming out of Delaware. And her introduction to Congress, was met with legislation to ban her from using the restrooms. And again, her as a freshman coming in to Congress acquiesced to the vitriol

because she said that she was focused on her constituents in Delaware. But Democrats as a whole, I did not see rally or message in a way not during the campaign or in the attacks on Representative McBride. What is happening here with Democrats? Is there a failure of understanding, of messaging, of what in your mind? I mean, I think that you can drop the word considerable pushback, right? From your setup there, because there was no pushback. There was fear inside the Democratic Party and inside of the Harris-Waltz campaign actual

to respond on trans issues. And the reason why is because there is a fear in the Democratic Party that voters that they need actually believe the transphobia. And they are afraid to alienate those voters. And they are afraid to be seen as a party that is too much on the side of trans people because they believe that trans issues are a losing issue. But one of the fascinating things is that one of the reasons why it's a losing issue is because the Democrats have never figured out an effective response on defending the human rights of one of the smallest minorities in the country. That's actually the failure here. I mean, people get to decide,

how they're going to attack you. But whether or not those attacks are successful depend on your ability to defend them and then to push back on them. That's just life one-on-one, and it's actually politics one-on-one. And as you know, if another side is going to spend nearly a quarter of a billion dollars attacking you, if you don't have a response, those attack ads are probably going to have an effect, probably going to work. And so the failure here was basic politics. I was abhorred that people like John Favreau and those Pots of America and James Carville and that entire group of people who know what they're doing are really smart and oftentimes brilliant political professionals totally miss the mark on this election in terms of blaming trans people.

And I think that it's because, sadly, there is a belief in the otherization of people working and they believe that the Democratic Party is too much on the side of human rights. for everybody and that the way to win elections is to curb that when what people want as a party that's going to stand 10 toes down for its actual values. And the fact that the Democratic Party did not show a commitment to its stated values actually undermine the position of the party, undermined the belief in people that it was what it said it was. As we know, voters don't, you know, only want politicians to agree with them. They know that they're going to be points of disagreements, they want to believe what politicians are saying. And the lack of commitment here

to the stated values of the Democratic Party when they were being assaulted, you know, is astounding to me. So much so that like actually in a staff meeting once, I had one of my team members say, you know, in the summer of 2024, hey, Amara, why do you think that we haven't seen attack ads yet on trans people when they've been teeing up this issue for the past six years in the states? And I responded to that person, well, if I were the Trump campaign, I would wait until October and then I would release a torrent of anti-trans ads. And that's me. I'm not sitting in the war rooms of the Democratic Party. I don't get paid to do that. I'm not even a political operative. And I could see that that was going to happen. And so if I could see that was going to happen, why didn't someone who's

actually paid hundreds of thousands? And in the case of the firm's millions of dollars to prepare for those attacks. Why didn't they do that? It's astounding. And then, you know, the lack of reaction to these attack ads, I think is also a political malpractice. So, you know, James Carville was out there saying, oh, you know, this trans issue, he shouldn't touch it. And it's otherwise, they should have gone too much, blah, blah, blah. Okay, that's fine. But James Carvel, you know, crafted the modern campaign, right? The modern campaign was the was ushered in by his tactics in the 1992 Clinton campaign, because it was the first time that there was 24-hour all-intensive media. And the rule that James Carville came up with then was that you do not let an ad go unanswered,

and you do not let attacks go unanswered for more than 24 hours at the most, right? And so that's the rule that was developed in 1992. And the Democratic Party let attack ads, the largest campaign by of the entire campaign, go and answer for 31 days. That's political malpractice. Every single time, every single fucking time that Democrats lose, they come out and they throw whatever community they think was the obstacle to them winning under the bus. And it always comes back to their belief that identifying and sticking with their base is what gets them into trouble in the first place. They stretch themselves so thin.

in terms of trying to appease everyone, that they end up appeasing no one. And that's why millions of Americans stayed home. And so I wonder here, because there is latent transphobia. Obviously, it's not latent in the Republican Party, but it is very much so inside of the Democratic Party. And this idea that, oh, well, we don't really have to pay attention. If we just close our eyes and ears, then it'll go away. That was their response. And instead of recognizing what we have said so many times over is that Republicans will always go for the low-hanging fruit.

They will always go to the community that they think that they can galvanize, hate around because it's consistent across the board. It is as if Democrats are shocked by that strategy when it's used over and over again. And so I wonder where we are right now, the fight continues to escalate. The hate continues to escalate. People are being terminated from their jobs. They're being told to tell Elon Musk why they're important and why their work matters. Oh, because I don't know. I'm curing cancer. Or I'm trying to stop the next bird flu from coming in. And Democrats now over a month in, Amara, still don't seem to have found their footing. How is that when they were given a 900-page playbook that said, issue by issue, page by page, this is our attack plan. I don't understand it. And I think that the party's problem is that it listens to a small group of people. Now, what's funny is that I think that like a lot of the critics of the Democratic Party

have the same analysis, right? It's just who do you believe that they're listening to too much, right? There's a part of the party that says the party is beholden to, you know, a series of extreme activists. And that's why the party lost. I don't see how that's the case. but I want to listen to everybody because that's my job. And also, then there's going to be people who say, no, it's actually the people who fund

the campaigns and the consultants. And, you know, as the old saying goes, that he who pays the Piper calls the tune. And I think that that former analysis might be more effective right now and understanding the disorientation of the Democratic Party because if you are a consultant and the consultant class and you raised all of that money and it was spent overwhelmingly on you. and then you lost the campaign, you actually don't know what to do because the tactics that you employed turned out to be sort of null and void. So you're lost.

And then the billionaires that fund the campaigns and fund those consultants, their analysis similarly must be bereft because they don't have confidence in the people who they were giving the money to. And so I think if those two groups of people are lost, then it explains why the Democratic Party is lost, right? Because it's not actually connected to voters in the way that you would need to be. and it's not even connected to activists who would maybe give it some direction on how you respond in a moment like this. And so I think that the problem is that, you know, you're listening to the wrong people.

And it's not the people that you think are. I mean, yeah, people who are activists are loud and can create demonstrations and all the rest of it. That's not really where most people listen and live. And it's not even what the party was doing. If the Democratic Party was, you know, beholden to activists, people were, quote, woke or whatever, there would have been an uncommitted speaker at the convention. There would have been a trans speaker at the convention, right? But none of those things happen. And so this belief that somehow the party is beholden and driven by these small group of people, what you've allowed to have happen is for the Republicans to stereotype your party

as being beholden to interest that, you know, are not aligned with Americans. And so that stereotyping by the other side is what allows you to be misrepresented. and, you know, you can argue, could contribute to people being less attached and affected. When the reality is if you actually grounded yourself in your grassroots, and if you allowed yourself to be able to be politically aggressive to shape the view of the party and the consciousness of the American people, then you would be in a different place, arguably, ostensibly. So I just think that, you know, this malpractice, it really is just political malpractice, right? Like, so for example, is in politics, right, you never allow the other side to get anything cost-free, right?

You don't allow. Like, that's just a basic rule. You make them pay for every single inch of ground that they're trying to take, right? You don't open the door. I mean, what have the Senate Democrats on mass done to make the Republicans pay? For example, for every single nominee. Not a damn thing. Every single nominee, every single committee vote, every single hearing.

You don't allow people to have anything cost-free. And right now, the Democrats are saying, there's nothing we can do. And if you believe, as they said, that this administration is a threat to democracy, right? That's their argument. If that's their argument, then when they are in power, you have to behave like it. Mm-hmm. And one of the things that may cause doubt in the American people about, oh, well, is this really what they're saying or Was this hyperbole or was this whatever?

Is that the Democrats have acted by and large as if this was a normal transition in normal Democratic times from Democrat to Republican. And so it creates doubt on whether or not Trump is actually what they say. So there's this dramatic gap between the stated values and views of the Democratic Party and the way that they're acting. You know, that's not good and healthy for democracy, particularly at the point we are right now. I do want to ask you this. Right now, there are, essentially, we are seeing an erasure that is happening in corporate

mainstream media with the firings of Joy Reid at MSNBC, Lester Holt stepping down at NBC, and others. What do you think that the role is right now of independent media and voices as we're seeing this erasure of black voices? I mean, independent media now more than ever, right? This is something that I believed sincerely since 2015. I worked in independent media before then. It's where I have cut my teeth.

And it's because I believe that these newsrooms, as they are constructed, and these corporations as they are constructed, while they have powerful reach, and while there are a lot of good people that are in them who do really important and essential work, that fundamentally, because they are relying upon the government for a lot of their business model, with respect to licenses,

and with respects to greenlighting mergers and a whole host of other things, that there's a vulnerability there that can always be exercised. And we've seen that exercise in really critical times before, like, for example, the run-up to the Iraq War. So we know that there are these vulnerabilities. We know that in mainstream media, that a lot of times they see themselves as essentially an appendage and an extension of anyone in power, right?

Their role in society is essentially to echo, to petuate, to uplift, the people that are in power and not to truly kind of examine them and to provide really important analysis for the people so that they can make the best decisions. I think that that means that we have to have a vigorous independent media and that it's the only thing that will potentially be a bright light in this moment. Because one of the things that's happened here is that mainstream media has been pressured by the dramatic growth of right-wing sources. And so they feel a need to be center right and, you know, sometimes right leaning and they're reporting. When there's no countervailing force from the other side, that means that there's no balance in

the mainstream media. And so we need to make sure that we have balance in mainstream media by supporting independent media in this moment. Amara, thank you so much for making time for the new abnormal and for the work that you do as a season journalist with Translash Media and just have done writ large. Really appreciate you. And hope that you. you make time for us again soon. Thank you so much. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday.

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