President Donald Trump left it to Elon Musk to fight online battles over the DOGE’s moves to slash payrolls government agencies, going for an extended round of golf while the fate of agencies and their data lies with the courts.
And even amid Musk’s shrouded efforts to gain access to trillions worth of government payment information or even deploy A.I. to ferret out government waste, a new plan emerged to make life uncomfortable or simply inconvenient for federal workers being told to report to the office full time.
The idea is to make DC‘s government office buildings – many of which date to the postwar boom and 1960s – a lousy place to punch the clock, one official said.
It’s the inverse of the tech-boom trend of stocking offices with foosball and free soda to get employees to love putting in extra hours.
‘We’ve heard from them that they want to make the buildings so crappy that people will leave,’ a senior official at the General Services Administration, known as the government’s landlord, told the Washington Post.
‘I think that’s the larger goal here, which is bring everybody back, the buildings are going to suck, their commutes are going to suck.’
The D.C. region was already ranked to have some of the worst traffic in the country.
It’s problems have been exacerbated by regional squabbling, a lack of dedicated funding for the Metro, and a drop in ridership during the pandemic, local leaders say.
Traffic wasn’t something Trump had to worry about at the start of his weekend out of Washington.
The president spent about four hours on his Trump International Golf Course Saturday, as temperatures hit 79 degrees around his home at Mar-a-Lago.
He was whisked by protesters in the presidential limo back to Mar-a-Lago, as he prepares to head to the Super Bowl on Sunday.
The potential office scheme came on a day when Musk’s lightning-speed efforts to take on the bureaucracy hit hazards.
President Donald Trump hit the links at his West Palm Beach golf course Saturday, leaving it to his DOGE chief Elon Musk to wage online battles after federal judges slowed some of his moves
‘The buildings are going to suck,’ said an official at the GSA, which acts as a landlord for the federal government, amid Elon Musk’s plans to cull the workforce
A federal judge put a stop to Elon Musk’s access to Treasury Department payment records. That prompted the Department of Governmental Efficiency chief to strike back against New York AG Letitia James, a Donald Trump nemesis.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer was just the latest instance of a court slowing down Musk’s lightning efforts to strip away swaths of the bureaucracy. Trump says Musk is working at his direction, and on Friday night inside his Florida club called Musk’s team ‘super geniuses.’
Judge Engelmayer said he agreed with the state AGs who said there was a risk to Americans’ sensitive data.
He blocked any political employees or so-called Special Government employees – a group that includes Musk – from accessing the data.
It came hours after another federal judge in Washington issued a temporary stop to efforts to put send home thousands of USAID workers amid a plan to strip down the federal agency to a skeleton crew of just a few hundred. But yet another judge lifted an order blocking Musk’s group access to Labor Department data.
It is James who oversaw the prosecution of Trump in a civil case that led to a $450 million fraud judgement against him. A new Justice Department task force on ‘weaponization’ is now probing her effort and looking for any federal participation.
James and a group of state attorneys general sued to block Musk’s group from gaining access to the Treasury information.
‘This unelected group led by the world’s richest man is not authorized to have this information,’ said James, who said the DOGE team ‘accessed the personal private information of tens of millions of Americans’ and were trying ‘to illegally block payments that millions of Americans rely on.’
Musk defended his bid to gain access to Treasury data and blasted Trump nemesis New York AG Letitia James
There were protesters outside Trump’s club, with some waiving the Mexican flag
‘She just wants the fraud & waste to continue,’ Musk hit back.
‘This administration has one chance for major reform that may never come again. It’s now or never,’ Musk wrote in yet another post.
He also posted on how the Treasury codes government payments, saying it was ‘insane and must be addressed immediately.’
Engelmayer Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent were acting unconstitutionally and violated the Take Care Clause stated in the highest law of the land.
The Constitution states that a president ‘shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ but this is rarely ever tested in court.
Trump himself started the day with a post blasting paper straws, hours after declaring ‘Back to plastic!’ and promising an executive order.
This time, instead of attacking the functionality paper straws, revealed that he finds them gross.
‘Crooked Joe’s MANDATE, “NO PLASTIC STRAWS, ONLY PAPER,” IS DEAD! Enjoy your next drink without a straw that disgustingly dissolves in your mouth!!!’ Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Trump appeared to be targeting a Biden Administration directive ‘formally acknowledging the severity of the plastic pollution crisis and the scale of the response that will be required to effectively confront it.’ It set the goal of phasing out single-use plastics in government by 2035.
There were a few dozen protesters outside his Trump National Golf Club, many chanting that ‘immigrants make America great.’ One sign had an expletive and substituted ‘MAGA’ for ‘mama.’
They got moved across the street when Trump exited the club in his armored limo, ‘the Beast.’
Hours earlier, Trump hosted Senate Republicans at Mar-a-Lago, where he recounted telling donors to come ‘see the people you got elected.’
