In the movie Casino there is a scene where the house is catching a couple of cheaters at the blackjack tables. They call security, they notify everyone to be in their places, and then they bring out a birthday cake and start singing. This is at an adjacent table, and everyone turns and looks at the singing and security strikes and cattle prods the cheater, and they haul him off behind closed doors to work him and his cheating buddy over. The main character, Ace Rothstein, knew he could trust his guys to run the distraction and handle their business by removing the cheaters.
I’ve often said that Trump operates using a distraction. He wants to negotiate with Russia then threaten to buy Greenland and Canada. Everyone will forget all about Russia kicking the holy crap out of the Ukraine. If he is negotiating with Russia, people will forget that he put a 10% tariff on China and China isn’t happy. These are geopolitical distractions, but today I want to discuss the DOGE department. Is Musk the distraction? Is Musk carrying the cattle prod. Is Musk on team Trump or team Musk? Can Trump trust Musk? We have chronicled the two’s dicey relationship in the past see our Rollo Tomasi episode from Dec 11, 2024 Rollo Tomasi. They seem to be joined at the hip now and I find myself being forced to cheer them on. They are cutting spending on wasteful projects, they are cutting defense, they are saying they can balance the budget. Hurray for the red team. Go team go. I am in favor of all of these things and even if I am skeptical of the two characters cast to do it, I will choose the art over the artist in this situation. That doesn’t mean I am not going to keep one hand on my wallet and my head on a swivel.
First, Ian Duncan writes for The Washington Post, notoriously left leaning, that DOGE employees are cutting heavily in a very interesting department. “A small government team regulating the sort of autonomous cars that Elon Musk says represent the future of Tesla, his car company, is getting cut nearly in half by the Musk-led U.S. Doge Service, according to people briefed on the reductions… DOGE’s slash-and-burn approach also eliminated three out of roughly seven people in a new office charged with overseeing the safety of autonomous vehicles, one person familiar with the cuts said. Fired workers said they do not believe they were targeted specifically because they are examining driverless cars, which remain a new and controversial technology. But one of them said the upshot is the same, with less scrutiny of robotic vehicles. “If the question is, will this affect the federal government’s ability to understand the safety case behind Tesla’s vehicles, then yes, it will,” said one terminated engineer. “The amount of people in the federal government who are able to understand this adequately is very small. Now it’s almost nonexistent.”
We know that Tesla is a car company masquerading as a technology company, electric company, AI company or whatever it needs to be when the camera is on to keep the stock price up. This is a trillion-dollar market for Musk. Duncan continues, “Musk’s various roles represent numerous potential conflicts of interest. He is a leading figure in the Trump administration with responsibility for slashing the federal workforce and spending. At the same time, he is the leader of companies, including Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX, that are regulated by the same agencies his team is targeting for cuts.
Trump and Musk said in a joint interview with Fox News this week that Musk would not be involved in any work that poses a conflict with his business interests.”
Next, Jane Timm weighs in from NBC News, “Elon Musk’s cost-cutting and fraud-finding apparatus, the Department of Government Efficiency, came out swinging in recent days.
The result? Two stunning strikeouts… Two of the most notable claims — around Social Security fraud and $8 billion savings found in a Department of Homeland Security contract — have been debunked. Meanwhile, Trump’s agenda is set to add to the federal government’s deficit well in excess of what DOGE is cutting.
“It’s amateur hour in their federal government,” said Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who ran the Social Security Administration under President Joe Biden. “There’s unelected people that are being given powers to go through and rummage through our personal data for reasons that nobody can quite figure out yet. It’s not for efficiency.”
That is the blue rhetoric being pushed out into the media right now. How true is it? Well, we don’t know exactly.
Timm goes on, ““They’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater,” said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who oversaw an eight-year effort to cut government spending and waste under President Bill Clinton…
While sweeping cuts in the private sector — and particularly Silicon Valley — may be celebrated, government services can be life and death, she said.
“You take down Medicare payment system, you take down Social Security checks, you take down food inspections, OK? That kills people,” she said.”
She says amateur hour like it is a bad thing. We need more amateurs at government and less professionals milking the system. The pros are pros at stuffing their pockets. The way I see this is not a red versus blue although it is, I see this as an us against them. The establishment gives themselves exorbitant salaries to push paper and run programs in DC at the taxpayer cost like it has no cost. The cost is this and only this…the future. I thought children are the future, that was once sung by someone that didn’t value the future. We are pulling ahead, selfishly, the standards of living of the future for the present at the expense of the future. Debt is always a problem, it is the empire killer. It always has been and always will be and if you think different you are naïve and haven’t read how every nation ends their time as the big dog on the block. It is always how nations fail.
So, let’s assume that Trump and Elon know this and I suspect that they do. So Trump is out selling girl scout cookies raising money and Elon is going through laying off people. Trump is selling $5M golden visas in an incredibly Jersey type move, but if it raises money, then ole CTPC is aboard. Musk cutting expenses in the government makes me wary. There is an article out in the Washington Post written by a group of people, I’ll attach the link, and it chronicles the rise of Musk, and by rise, I mean the man has milked the government out of more money than anyone in history and it isn’t even close. “Elon Musk and his cost-cutting U.S. DOGE Service team have been on a mission to trim government largesse. Yet Musk is one of the greatest beneficiaries of the taxpayers’ coffers.
Over the years, Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits, often at critical moments, a Washington Post analysis has found, helping seed the growth that has made him the world’s richest person. The payments stretch back more than 20 years. Shortly after becoming CEO of a cash-strapped Tesla in 2008, Musk fought hard to secure a low-interest loan from the Energy Department, according to two people directly involved with the process, holding daily briefings with company executives about the paperwork and spending hours with a government loan officer.
When Tesla soon after realized it was missing a crucial Environmental Protection Agency certification it needed to qualify for the loan days before Christmas, Musk went straight to the top, urging then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to intervene, according to one of the people. Both people spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Nearly two-thirds of the $38 billion in funds have been promised to Musk’s businesses in the past five years… The total amount is probably larger: This analysis includes only publicly available contracts, omitting classified defense and intelligence work for the federal government… The Post found nearly a dozen other local grants, reimbursements and tax credits where the specific amount of money is not public.
An additional 52 ongoing contracts with seven government agencies — including NASA, the Defense Department and the General Services Administration — are on track to potentially pay Musk’s companies an additional $11.8 billion over the next few years, according to The Post’s analysis.
“Not every entrepreneur at this scale has been this dependent on federal money — certainly not Nvidia, not Microsoft, nor Amazon, nor Meta,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, professor at the Yale School of Management, who noted that much of the funding has come during Democratic administrations. “With DOGE, there does seem to be a paradox there. He has been a big beneficiary of national industrial policy, especially Democrat industrial policy, through government funding.”
The $465 million Energy Department loan, which arrived in 2010, helped fuel Tesla’s meteoric rise: With that money, the company engineered and assembled its luxury electric sedan — the Model S — and bought a factory in Fremont, California, according to the agency. Tesla went public six months later.
“Tesla would not have survived without the loan,” said a former high-level Tesla employee familiar with the company’s finances, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “It was a critical loan at a critical time.”
NASA spokeswoman Cheryl Warner said the agency has invested more than $15 billion in SpaceX for its work on numerous space programs…
At an investment conference in November 2013, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell acknowledged the company has received billions of dollars in U.S. government contracts, adding that the company has delivered. “We earned that,” she said. “It’s not a bad thing to serve the U.S. government with great capability and products.”
Shotwell, however, has credited NASA’s early funding for building SpaceX, noting in a 2013 interview at SpaceX’s headquarters that the company would “probably be limping along” without the agency’s support.
About a third of Tesla’s $35 billion in profits since 2014 has come from selling federal and state regulatory credits to other automakers. The credits are given to automakers that meet certain standards, including selling a certain percentage of zero-emission vehicles. Tesla is the largest seller of these credits to automakers that don’t meet the standards and want to avoid paying a fine.
These credits played a crucial role in the company’s first profitable quarter in 2013 and its first full year of profitability in 2020, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Without the credits, Tesla would have lost more than $700 million in 2020, marking a seventh-consecutive year with no profits, according to an analysis of SEC filings.
With the credits, the company instead reported a $862 million profit… “They would have been totally in the red if it were not for the incentives,” said Alan Jenn, an assistant professor at the Electric Vehicle Research Center at the Institute of Transportation Studies. “That is the thing that has really kept them afloat.”
John Helveston, a professor at George Washington University who studies electric vehicles, said Tesla is a prime example of the success that can come from government investment in nascent industries, though government assistance alone does not guarantee success. “Pretty much every aspect [of Tesla] has benefited from direct government subsidy or financing,” he said. “It’s not a weird phenomenon for Tesla to benefit from this, but it is certainly hypocritical.”
I have been talking and writing about this for years, but only now is this coming to light in the media likely because Musk has switched sides. It was all right for him to get this funding when he was a Democrat, but now he seems to be different. Musk wants to eliminate government funding for just about every project. But wait, Uncle Elon, I would like my $38 billion in subsidies. I could then sell it to the public at a multiple of 11 and have $400 billion just like you.
I don’t want your cars, your driverless cars wrecking me, your internet service, your rockets, your subterranean cars masquerading as a subway system, nor your flamethrowers. It seems that you have plenty of my and every other taxpayer’s money as is. So, with this all in mind and my contempt for this charlatan intact, I am still forced to cheer on his progress cutting spending in the government. Keep the greater good in mind. The fox in the henhouse has promised not to eat any chickens. So far, he hasn’t. Ok, but then this comes out.
Aliss Higham from Newsweek reports, “On Tuesday, billionaire Elon Musk, who heads DOGE, wrote on X—his social media platform formerly known as Twitter—that he would “check with the President” regarding the proposal to send U.S. households tax refund checks funded by savings from DOGE’s cost-cutting campaign.
Musk’s comment came in response to a suggestion by James Fishback, the CEO of the Azoria investment firm, to compensate American taxpayers for “the egregious misuse and abuse of their hard-earned tax dollars that DOGE has uncovered.”
When asked about it, Trump liked the idea. Ok, let me explain something. We have a $2 trillion deficit. Doge is cutting so far maybe $100 billion and counting. We are still spending way more than we are earning. We want to give money back into the hands of the taxpayers to go and spend spend spend. Did we not learn our lesson last time? This will be borrowing less money and giving it to the taxpayers. It is still borrowing money. This might be the dumbest idea in the history of government. It was 2020, when Trump mailed the Cares Act checks out and the $500 checks for having a child and low and behold here comes inflation not far behind. These checks would be $5,000 that Musk is speaking of. Are you out of your minds?
I think they know that they are going to wreck the economy with these job cuts, and they will have to do something that will appease the taxpayer. A Doge dividend sounds better than a stimulus check doesn’t it, Republicans? You get some of your money back.
My response is that the government just took out a loan from your kids and grandkids and gave it to you to go spend on Musk’s autonomous vehicles or Zuckerberg’s AI glasses, or Amazon crap from Bezos. The Doge doesn’t get to spend or return anything. They cut and that’s all they can do. I don’t want any more spending until we see government revenue higher than government spending. This was supposed to be easy Trump said. They need to fix the problem first and then if there is a surplus, which there won’t be, then we can give some of the surplus back to the people. Until then, stop singing Happy Birthday unless someone is getting the cattle prod.
Sincerely Yours,
C Thomas Printer
Also born on this date… Buffalo Bill Cody.
Thank you for listening today and you can find all of our articles and more on our website cthomasprinter.com.