We begin today with more of WIRED magazine’s reporting from Vittoria Elliott this time along with Tim Marksman on the recruitment effort prior to the 2024 presidential election to staff DOGE.
The establishment of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) relied on a recruitment campaign carried out, in part, by young software engineers fanning out across online chat groups and Discord servers, according to three sources and chat logs reviewed by WIRED. Some of the engineers are associated with data analytics firm Palantir or its cofounder and board of directors chair—and Musk ally—Peter Thiel. [...]
In online chat groups linked to Palantir alumni and SpaceX interns, Musk’s space company, as well as in a Discord server associated with a military artificial intelligence program, the engineers said they were looking for people willing to spend six months in Washington, DC, cutting federal spending—which accounts for around a quarter of the US gross domestic product—by a third. [...]
Anthony Jancso, one of three engineers associated with the recruitment effort, is a former Palantir employee. According to sources, Jancso said he was recruited to DOGE by Steve Davis, the Boring Company president and Musk lieutenant whom Bloomberg reported in December was leading recruitment for DOGE.
Palantir, Jancso, and Davis did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost of The Atlantic spoke to four IT professionals (mostly off the record) about how dangerous Elon Musk and his minions intrusion into federal computer systems is.
Many systems and databases in a given agency feed into others, but access to them is restricted. Employees, contractors, civil-service government workers, and political appointees have strict controls on what they can access and limited visibility into the system as a whole. This is by design, as even the most mundane government databases can contain highly sensitive personal information. A security-clearance database such as those used by the Department of Justice or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, one contractor told us, could include information about a person’s mental-health or sexual history, as well as disclosures about any information that a foreign government could use to blackmail them. [...]
Musk’s efforts represent a dramatic shift in the way the government’s business has traditionally been conducted. Previously, security protocols were so strict that a contractor plugging a non-government-issued computer into an Ethernet port in a government agency office was considered a major security violation. Contrast that with DOGE’s incursion. CNN reported yesterdaythat a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern without a background check was given a basic, low tier of access to Department of Energy IT systems, despite objections from department lawyers and information experts. “That these guys, who may not even have clearances, are just pulling up and plugging in their own servers is madness,” one source told us, referring to an allegationthat DOGE had connected its own server at OPM. “It’s really hard to find good analogies for how big of a deal this is.” The simple fact that Musk loyalists are in the building with their own computers is the heart of the problem—and helps explain why activities ostensibly authorized by the president are widely viewed as a catastrophic data breach.
Justin Elliott, Avi Asher-Schapiro, and Andy Kroll of ProPublica look at some of the legal team now working for DOGE.
...ProPublica has identified three lawyers with elite establishment credentials who have also joined the DOGE effort.
Two are former Supreme Court clerks — one clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, another for Justice Neil Gorsuch — and the third has been selected to be a Gorsuch clerk for the 2025-2026 term.
Two of the lawyers’ names have not been previously reported as working for DOGE.
All three — Keenan Kmiec, James Burnham and Jacob Altik — have DOGE email addresses at the Executive Office of the President, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. Altik was recently an attorney at the firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, but his bio page is now offline. Neither the White House nor any of the three lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment about their roles.
Harlan M. Krumholz of STATnews explains the 8-alarm fire caused by the Trump Administration’s cutting of indirect cost rates for the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
As we contemplate this new era of science funding, it’s essential to understand the role that indirect costs play in research. These funds are not a luxury — they are vital for supporting the infrastructure that makes groundbreaking discoveries possible. Indirect costs cover expenses like research administration, the maintenance of lab facilities, and the overall operations that enable research to thrive. Without them, universities and research institutions simply cannot function at their full capacity. [...]
The United States has long been the epicenter of medical and scientific breakthroughs. Our universities and institutions have led the way, with the Nobel Prizes disproportionately awarded to American scientists. These institutions are incubators for medical cures, life-saving innovations, and breakthroughs that have reshaped global health. Take, for example, the new non-addictive pain medication recently approved by the FDA, which began in the lab of Yale professor Steve Waxman — a reminder that the work of U.S. researchers leads to real-world solutions for millions.
To cut funding for the indirect costs that support these efforts is to risk undermining our research ecosystem. While other countries are investing heavily in research infrastructure, the U.S. is moving in the opposite direction, threatening to dismantle what has been built over decades. This policy change jeopardizes not only the immediate work being done by scientists but also the long-term viability of the U.S. as a global leader in medical research.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo explains much of the politics behind the NIH indirect rate cuts.
I want to address two issues — why, and how likely is this to succeed.
On the why, I think it’s a combination of two things. One is anti-COVID research payback, combined with a general hostility to scientific expertise culture and a general and not-incorrect belief that the kinds of people who work in these institutions are mainly not friendly to Trumpism. Basically, it’s seen as a body blow to blue-state and -city culture. Combined with this is a more structural belief that universities and colleges are institutional loci of opposition to MAGA and Trumpism. So you can knock them out of commission in a broader political and culture war by simply defunding them.
On a secondary level, once you’ve established that these grants are at the political pleasure of the chief executive, they’re a powerful tool for disciplining these institutions. Criticize President Trump and watch half your budget disappear. This latter model is very much the one pursued by people like Viktor Orbán in Hungary: discipline the universities and bring them under political and patronage control. Putting it all together, it’s very much a move in a broader culture war, seeing universities as the breeding ground of cosmopolitan, liberal, empirical values in the society. So you either destroy them or put them on a tight leash.
Having reviewed various particulars I think there are at least some reasons to think that the drasticness of the action may make it hard to pull off. There are academic medical centers outside of Boston, New York and LA. They exist across the South and in red states as well. Indeed, these and the universities they’re associated with are often bigger drivers of job support and growth, in percentage terms, than they are in blue states. They’re also where people get treated for diseases. They’re where a lot of people’s kids go to school. So I think you will have major, major stakeholders from Republican parts of the country who will be pushing back on this. Often in this era it’s not publicly. But it still happens. I’m pretty certain that when the administration nixed its across-the-board grant freeze it was because they were starting to hear from key Republicans that they wouldn’t be able to support it because of the impact in their states and districts.
University of Illinois at Chicago assistant professor Nathaniel Tran writes for The Conversation about how anti-LGBTQ+ health policies are a threat to everyone’s public health.
Research has shown that the social determinants of health – the opportunities and resources that affect how people live, learn, play, work and age – play a significant role in LGBTQ+ well-being. Newly published work from my colleagues and I show how anti-LGBTQ+ public policies can have lasting effects on everyone’s health. [...]
In 2025, the Supreme Court will hear Braidwood v. Becerra, a case arguing that requiring employers to cover PrEP – a once-a-day pill that is highly effective at preventing HIV infection – as part of the insurance plan they offer employees violates their religious freedom. Texas District Judge Reed O’Connor agreed that mandating PrEP coverage requires the plaintiffs to “facilitate and encourage homosexual behavior.”
O'Connor ruled in 2023 to overturn the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that insurers fully cover preventive care. He argues this can be done on the grounds that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force – a group of physicians and researchers that evaluates the quality and efficacy of preventive services – is unconstitutional. This legal challenge puts free coverage of mammograms, vaccinations and other preventive services into limbo for millions of Americans.
The Trump administration has scrubbed federal web pages of resources, programs and documents that reference gender and LGBTQ+ people. This order includes removing datasets that have been continuously updated since the 1980s to track public health issues such as homelessness, bullying in schools, and smoking and drinking, likely because they include LGBTQ+ demographic information.
Former national security adviser under President Obama Ben Rhodes writes for The New York Times that the shoe salesman’s current stances on American foreign policy and national security were not what got him elected.
President Trump, of course, ran for re-election promising to transform America’s place in the world. After the grinding conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, he vowed to discipline the national security elites who refused to learn from forever wars. After decades of complaints that our trading partners benefited more than we did from globalization, he pledged to use older tools of statecraft such as tariffs to leverage better deals. After parts of the federal work force resisted his agenda in his first term, he sought to fill it with loyalists who would serve him and his movement. In a chaotic world full of transactional strongmen, Americans would have their own.
Many Americans, myself included, support overhauling the sclerotic national security consensus that has governed our policies since Sept. 11, 2001. Yet it would be wrong to dismiss Mr. Trump’s dizzying array of pronouncements and executive actions on foreign policy as simply the fulfillment of his campaign promises. He did not run on the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D., the conquest of Greenland or the occupation of Gaza. Rather than showing strength, his foreign policy betrays a loss of American self-confidence and self-respect, eliminating any pretense that the United States stands for the things it has claimed to support since fighting two world wars: freedom, self-determination and collective security.
Really?...I mean, I guess that someone had to write this but...just...moving right along...
Shanti Das and Jon Ungoed-Thomas of the Guardian reveal that British gambling firms have been sharing their customer’s data with Meta without permission.
Gambling companies are covertly tracking visitors to their websites and sending their data to Facebook’s parent company without consent in an apparent breach of data protection laws.
The information is then being used by Facebook’s owner, Meta, to profile people as gamblers and flood them with ads for casinos and betting sites, the Observer can reveal. A hidden tracking tool embedded in dozens of UK gambling websites has been extracting visitors’ data – including details of the webpages they view and the buttons they click – and sharing it with the social media company. [...]
Of 150 websites tested by the Observer, 52 shared data automatically via the Meta Pixel tracking tool without explicit consent, according to analysis of network traffic. The sites found to have transmitted data to Facebook without permission included Hollywoodbets, Sporting Index, Bwin, Lottoland, 10Bet and Bet442.
The data transfer happened automatically on loading the webpage, before the person clicked to agree or decline marketing. At no point during the testing did the reporter agree to the use of their data for marketing.
Chris Sunday and Eliza Gkritsi of POLITICO Europe reports that a German court has ruled that TwitterX has ruled that X must provide election-related data to researchers.
The court decision, seen by POLITICO, was issued Thursday and marks one of the first major judicial tests of the European Union’s Digital Services Act(DSA), raising fresh questions about X’s compliance with European regulations ahead of Germany’s federal election.
The lawsuit, brought earlier this week by Democracy Reporting International (DRI) and the Society for Civil Rights (GFF), accused X of blocking efforts to track potential election interference by not granting them access to key engagement data — including likes, shares and visibility metrics — that other platforms made available to researchers. [...]
The Berlin ruling is one of the first major tests of the DSA’s research access provision (Article 40), which was designed to enable research on social media and support the regulation's implementation.
TikTok and Meta provided DRI with access to data based on a very similar application, the nonprofit told POLITICO earlier this week.
Finally today, Betsy Klein and Samantha Waldenberg of CNN reveal that Trump has spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine...at some point.
It was not immediately clear when the leaders spoke or if they had spoken since Trump took office in January, and how many times. CNN has reached out to the National Security Council for clarification.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told CNN he “can neither deny nor confirm this news.” He added that Washington and Moscow talk “through different channels” the more the Trump administration “is gaining activity.”
“So… there could be something I don’t know,” said Peskov.
Trump said in the interview he “better not say” how many times he had spoken with Putin but touted a “good relationship” with his Russian counterpart.
The US president expressed hope that Putin’s war in Ukraine, which is approaching its third anniversary, ends “fast.” He had previously vowed to end the conflict within 24 hours of taking office.
In spite of all of it, do try to have the best possible day that you can!
