Julian Sanchez: Hey, this is Julian Sanchez with your WatchCats Daily News Roundup for Friday, April 4th, 2025.
The White House is pushing back on reports earlier this week, which we mentioned, that Elon Musk may be returning to attend to his companies in coming weeks, saying that they expect Musk to fill out his stint as a special government employee, which runs until the end of May.
Donald Trump also hinted he may attempt to get Musk to stay on in some additional capacity, without much specificity past that point, and also rather gnomically suggested that DOGE has found “something horrible” without providing further details.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the massive consulting firm Deloitte is planning to cut workers after the General Services Administration pushed consulting firms with which the federal government has major contracts to justify those costs.
The top 10 biggest consulting firms with which the federal government has contracts are paid over $65 billion dollars a year. It's worth mentioning, since we are often quite critical of DOGE, that this sounds like the sort of thing it might be quite useful for DOGE to be doing: examining these high value contracts with outside consulting firms and seeing if in fact that cost is justified.
Also earlier this week we mentioned cuts happening at the National Endowment for the Humanities and other cultural institutions. Now, state and local humanities councils are starting to get letters clawing back grants that had been assigned, that is, grants that the government had approved, but now is saying it will not, in fact, issue in full, and which many of those councils had planned their future budgeting around.
The plan is to attempt to claw back some $175 million in such grants.
Also on Thursday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against DOGE was permitted to go forward by a federal judge. U.S. District Judge Denise Coate of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, permitted a lawsuit that was brought on behalf of both individual government employees and labor unions in an attempt to block DOGE's access to sensitive private databases under federal privacy law and the Administrative Procedures Act.
As Judge Cote wrote in rejecting the government's motion to dismiss: “The complaint plausibly alleges that actions by OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, were not representative of its ordinary day-to-day operations, but were in sharp contrast to its normal procedures, illegal, rushed, and dangerous.”
Judge Cote also described the government's arguments in its attempt to dismiss at one point as “Kafkaesque.”
Also, incidentally, if you are curious about the privacy implications of DOGE access to multiple sensitive federal databases, the think tank New America has just posted a “What Does Doge Know About You” quiz tool.
It has a lot of information about the different databases to which DOGE has access and also a tool that will predict the kind of information DOGE may have access to about you, depending on information about your immigration status, your work status, and so on. Definitely worth checking that out.
Also, we reported earlier this week on cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services under the stewardship of RFK Jr., including a massive set of layoffs of staff.
RFK has now admitted that many of those layoffs appear to have been in error, and indeed that as many as 20% of the 10,000 jobs eliminated were mistakes, and that HHS and its subsidiary agencies will have to attempt to hire those people back.
A report in a publication called The Transmitter says that at least some of those erroneous firings appear to have been the result of a “coding error.” That is to say, databases (possibly compiled by AI?) misidentified the nature of the position in which various employees work and and essentially flagged them for termination erroneously.
In somewhat related news, Democratic attorneys general of various states have filed another collective lawsuit targeting the National Institutes of Health over the termination of various research grants. This is yet another attempt to claw back money from grants that have been approved but whose funds have not yet been fully dispersed.
The suit alleges that a series of these grants were effectively arbitrarily terminated for being what the department calls “DEI grants,” often just because the abstract for the research grant mentioned terms like “gender” or “transgender” and other such now apparently verboten phrases. Of course, that bears little relation to whether those grants are actually meaningfully valuable.
That is the news roundup for Friday, April 4th. Stay tuned for the next proper WatchCats podcast, and we'll see you again with another news roundup on Monday. Catch you around.
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