Nothing to see right here.
Forbidden Treasure
It appears to be like like Elon Musk and his buddies have compelled one other US official out of presidency.
The Washington Post reports that senior Division of the Treasury official David Lebryk abruptly introduced his retirement on Friday, after clashing with Musk’s allies on the so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity.
Lebryk has labored on the company for many years. Because the election, in response to the report, DOGE has hounded him for entry to the Treasury’s delicate fee system, which is used to ship out trillions of {dollars} yearly and is often accessed solely by a small variety of senior officers.
Why Lebryk clashed over the requests is unclear. However possibly he simply did not like the concept of handing over the keys for a trillion-dollar cash pipeline to Musk — a strolling battle of curiosity — and his retinue of sketchy and underqualified DOGE lackeys.
Feds Will Roll
Musk fueled Trump’s election victory by promising to intestine federal companies and drastically slash authorities spending. Within the course of, he is made no secret of his intentions to punish his political foes.
On the day of Trump’s inauguration, the chief of the Federal Aviation Administration, Mike Whitaker, resigned. Musk had openly called for Whitaker’s resignation for months, as a result of beneath his management, the FAA briefly halted Musk’s rocket launches at his firm SpaceX on several occasions over security issues, slapping on fines.
Contemplating these interventions had been often in response to a rocket exploding somewhere, you possibly can say that the FAA was merely doing its job fairly than making an attempt to sabotage SpaceX, whose Starship rockets appear to haven’t any downside blowing up on their very own with none malicious affect.
However possibly Musk is not within the correct functioning of presidency — not when pesky regulators get in the best way of his firm’s progress.
As much as No Good
Lebryk’s departure is predicted to be a shock to the Treasury’s rank and file, in response to WaPo.
It is laborious to say what Musk and DOGE’s intentions are with accessing the Treasury’s fee system, which is used to distribute all the things from Social Safety and Medicare advantages to the salaries of federal workers. A element we hope will not show related is that Musk received his begin in growing a fee system, PayPal, and has strived to integrate a money transferring service into his social media web site X, in a bid to show it into an “all the things app.”
What’s appears clear, nonetheless, is that the intentions are cynical.
“Your complete job is to pay the payments as they’re due,” Mark Mazur, a former Treasury official who served through the Obama and Biden administrations, advised WaPo. “It is by no means been utilized in a option to execute a partisan agenda… It’s important to actually put unhealthy intentions in place for that to be the case.”
