Julian Sanchez:
Hey, I'm Julian Sanchez, and this is your WatchCats daily news roundup for April 2nd, 2025. Top story today, reports from Politico that Donald Trump is telling his cabinet and other insiders that he expects Elon Musk to be ah stepping back from his role in government and at DOGE and returning to his companies in the coming weeks.
This maybe is something we should have seen coming, partly because of a lot of chatter about Musk acting as effectively co-president—Donald Trump obviously doesn't like to be overshadowed in the news—but also polls consistently show that while Donald Trump is himself not particularly popular for a president at this stage in his presidency, in the so-called honeymoon period, Elon Musk is actually a whole lot less popular.
And the results of a Wisconsin Supreme Court election that Musk had thrown his weight behind, I think, do something to show that Musk himself may be exerting a kind of drag on the popularity of administration, as well as creating, frankly, tension within Trump's end cabinet. There have been plenty of reports of tense cabinet meetings as people who were appointed to run different agencies find themselves effectively taking orders from this outside billionaire.
In response to the news, shares of automaker Tesla, which had been down a whopping 30 percent this year, jumped up five percent, probably in part because investors like the idea that the nominal CEO of the company might spend some time actually running that company instead of tinkering with the federal government, but also, again, because the prominent political role that Musk has taken on has prompted protests at Tesla dealerships, in some cases even vandalism of Tesla vehicles, and sales have, especially in Europe, declined pretty precipitously.
Wired Magazine—which, by the way, our next podcast will have an interview with two of their star reporters—Wired Magazine has been killing it on the DOGE beat in general, and they have a couple of news stories about the ongoing conflict between DOGE and the U.S. Institute of Peace, which caused a conflict initially as DOGE staffers sought to effectively take over the agency and get rid of staff.
The Institute of Peace objected that it was established in 1984 as an independent nonprofit agency, not an agency or a bureau within the federal government. Their legal status is, of course, the subject of a lawsuit.
On Tuesday, federal judge Beryl Howell declined to block the effort of DOGE to transfer the Institute of Peace's $500 million dollar DC headquarters to the federal government as kind of a free gift.
She declined to block it via a temporary restraining order or injunction on the grounds that effectively the transfer had already gone through. And if ultimately the Institute of Peace wins their suit against Trump and DOGE, it will be easy enough to undo that transaction and return the building to them.
That should be an interesting case. Keep your eyes peeled on on that to see how how that continues to unfold.
The New Yorker has a long, very thorough profile of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, which is, I think, well worth reading. I won't try to summarize that in any detail here because it is quite a mouthful, but is relevant in part because while Republicans in Congress have thus far not been openly pushing back against the Trump administration and DOGE, a lot of them are privately at least not particularly happy at the massive usurpation of congressional prerogatives.
DOGE and the Trump administration are refusing to spend money that Congress appropriated in the way that Congress wanted it spent. They are eliminating essentially entire agencies created by federal statute. These among many other things that the Trump administration has assumed power over that are really congressional prerogatives.
The functioning of our constitutional order was designed to, in the words of The Federalist Papers, have ambition counteract ambition, to have the legislature act as a check on a potentially overweening presidency because it was jealous of its own powers and prerogatives. And Thune is someone who, while again, so far has been unwilling to very publicly challenge the administration, is a kind of old school political figure who would certainly obviously prefer ah to to see the Senate remain relevant.
So: I recommend checking out The New Yorker's profile there.
Fortune magazine has a report from Bank of America analysts who say that they deem the ambitious claims of savings of tax money DOGE has made as significantly exaggerated. This should come as no surprise if you've been following DOGE for a little while there. There's a kind of pattern where they will repeatedly make very ambitious claims about how much money they've been saving the public and then a little further reporting reveals that the numbers don't quite add up and often those claims then get walked back.
In this case, Bank of America analysts apparently told Fortune magazine that they think DOGE is overestimating savings from contracts they've canceled in part because they don't really understand how federal contracts work. In many cases, there is a so-called “ceiling” for the contract that is a sort of maximum amount that might potentially be spent into the contract that is very often far higher than the actual realistic amount that is going to be spent.
We hope to do a future episode at some point looking at in more detail the the claims of savings DOGE has made and how expert analysts say they stack up to reality.
In The New York Times, we have reports that the National Endowment for the Humanities is on the chopping block. Staff there were apparently recently told after a meeting with DOGE staff that DOGE is recommending cuts of 70 to 80 percent in the agency's staff, so that would be about 180 people. The National Endowment for the Humanities is, of course, the frankly fairly small federal agency responsible for making grants to local cultural institutions.
Also, finally, two important stories connected to the Social Security Administration from The Washington Post.
The first concerns false claims being made by Elon Musk at public events.
As you may be aware, Musk had been falsely claiming that hundreds of millions of deceased people have been receiving Social Security benefits. That is not true. That is the result of his very young team going in and looking at the variety of vast Social Security databases and not really understanding why, as a function of some artifacts in the systems that are written in very old programming language, there are some people in that database who are not getting benefits that are listed as being 150 years old.
That has been pretty pretty well and widely debunked. But Musk additionally, apparently at public events has tried to suggest that there's something scandalous about the idea that there's been an increase in immigrants receiving Social Security numbers, implying that this is a sign of ah fraud or corruption. Again, this is not in fact the case.
Immigrants who are legally authorized to work in the United States pay Social Security taxes and get non-citizen Social Security cards. It doesn't mean they're fraudulently receiving benefits. And it does not mean that they are able to register to vote using a Social Security card, which is, of course, if you have registered to vote, is not how that works.
The second story in The Washington Post, also about Social Security, concerns internal deliberations there that it led to the canceling of two data collection contracts with the state of Maine.
The state of Maine was essentially targeted for retribution in a number of ways, including a bunch of possibly frivolous probes by various investigative agencies, after an event in February at which Maine Governor Janet Mills contradicted Trump about Trump's insistence that Maine crack down on transgender athletes playing in women's sports.
The acting head of the Social Security Administration apparently was told that canceling these data collection contracts would, in fact, increase the risk of Social Security fraud, but apparently responded that it was more important to punish Janet Mills for being “disrespectful,” in his words, to Donald Trump.
These are, of course, all very short summaries. I encourage you to look down below where you will find links in the transcript to all of these stories. And also stay tuned to the proper WatchCats podcast.
Earlier this week, we ran the final in our series of interviews with former U.S. Digital Service staff who have resigned or been fired since DOGE took over.
In the most recently posted episode, we spoke with Itir Cole, who was seconded from USDS to the Centers for Disease Control, where she had been working on software to improve reporting from hospitals to aggregate data about potential outbreaks, whether of food contamination or a potential viral outbreaks and other kinds of pathogens.
Her story is really fascinating and I think worth a listen, especially as we are seeing federal health agencies being gutted under the stewardship of ah Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And also later this week, stay tuned for our next proper episode of the WatchCats podcast, where we speak with Wired reporters Makena Kelly and Tori Elliott about their excellent, excellent reporting. um Hope to see you there soon.
Come to watchcats.show to check all that out along with our previous podcasts and hope to see you soon!
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