Thank you so much, Gabe, for a terrific newsletter. If you ever have to choose between a good newsletter published on time and an excellent one published a day or more later, by all means choose the latter.
Kudos on this this huge informative message. Let me add to the DOGE shitstorm:
In a whistleblower disclosure filed with Congress and corroborated by internal documents, NPR reports, Berulis said that the DOGE employees first set up a process to hide their activities on the servers, rather than allowing account activity to be tracked. This alone is a “red flag,” cybersecurity experts said, and a technique mimicking what a malicious hacker may use when trying to infiltrate government systems.
Berulis noticed soon after the raid began that a DOGE engineer was working on a “backdoor” to the NLRB’s case management system, which would allow the rogue group to extract information surreptitiously. Then, he saw within the system’s metrics that there was a massive spike in data being extracted from the network and sent to an unknown location that could contain a huge amount of case information.
Trump Is Trying to Axe Collective Bargaining for 1 Million Federal Employees
The IT worker first spoke out internally against the DOGE raid — but when he did, his attorney has said, someone taped a threatening note to his door that contained sensitive personal information about him, as well as pictures of him walking his dog that looked like they were taken by a drone. Whistleblowers have long faced threats to their personal safety, while recent high-profile cases of corporate whistleblowers have created a culture of fear around the practice.
Meanwhile, the information exfiltrated by DOGE includes a huge amount of sensitive information about American workers, including “ongoing contested labor cases, lists of union activists, internal case notes, personal information from Social Security numbers to home addresses, proprietary corporate data and more information that never gets published openly,” NPR wrote.
In other words, as labor experts said, DOGE may have gotten its hands on the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of labor organizers across the country — at a time when President Donald Trump and Republicans are preparing to majorly dismantle labor protections and attack workers’ rights, including unionization.
It also comes from rogue actors assembled by Musk — whose companies are involved in numerous labor disputes. This includes an alarming lawsuit, filed by SpaceX, challenging the constitutionality of the NLRB itself, which is the primary entity in the U.S. protecting workers from labor abuses.
Even if that data isn’t being actively used by Musk and his cronies, labor experts said that the fact that they can access it may have a chilling effect on the labor movement, just after it has seen a major resurgence in recent years.
“Just saying that they have access to the data is intimidating,” Kate Bronfenbrenner, the director of labor education research for Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and co-director of the Worker Empowerment Research Network, told NPR. “People are going to go, ‘I’m not going to testify before the board because, you know, my employer might get access.’”
The extreme, malicious techniques used by DOGE to infiltrate the system, meanwhile, could also leave this data vulnerable to being seized by other bad faith actors. At one point just minutes after DOGE accessed the systems, for instance, employees noticed log-in attempts from an IP address located in Russia — attempts that used a newly-created DOGE account with the correct username and password.
One thing that a lot of folks may have missed is the massive damage that Trump has created between the United States and the International community. This damage, this destruction of trust, will take decades to rebuild - if it’s even possible for that to happen.
Thank you, Mr. Fleischer. The point here is that all the destruction or temporary interruption affects the middle and lower classes. The oligarch clsss just marches blithely on stuffing our tax dollars into their coffers.
One historical example missing from this analysis is that the Clinton administration was very effective in reducing government spending. They did it by having a very deliberative process that took Congress and the legislative/financial process into account. Clinton slashed almost 500,000 Federal employees without the same political backlash that Trump has encountered.
The big difference is that Clinton's effort, led by Al Gore, was focused on outcomes. Trump's is performative and focused on outrage.
One last thing. I have said having been in successful companies in corporate America and been a recruiter all trump and musk’s stuff was completely wrong if you wanted to make something more efficient
Gabe, you are 110% right. It is about process and I will add proper analysis. It is going to turn out the whole thing was about getting a data base
Seems the outsized* military budget, with its notorious $500 hammers and ludicrous toilet prices was the most effective way for DOGE to start eliminating swampy waste.
Part of the reason that the systems destroyed by DOGE had sand in the gears is that the built-in friction protected the privacy of American citizens. The loss is privacy is hard to quantify, but I believe it will be the hardest to restore, if it ever can be.
I like your reporting and I know you like to go in depth but I think more concise might be better. I don’t have time to go in depth on every subject. Just my 2 cents
This seems a bit rosy. So the erosion of norms, the lack of accountability, via any meaningful checks. The grift, graft, cruelty and open collusion don’t matter because it’s not codified by Congress so we can start over in 4 years? You make a lot of assumptions that the totalitarian, facism we are seeing will result in a new crew of folks to temper and reset the system. Elections will happen. Judges will hold the line—upholding the rule of law. Punishing perceived enemies, weaponizing the government in authoritarian ways etc. tariffs is a great example. The supremes finally weighed in and he just ignores them. I don’t how this doesn’t accelerate the fall of the empire, our monetary/global system and credibility in ways that will permanently erode American power and hegemony.
Good stuff. Glad to be aboard. As a statewide candidate running on a Show Me Results platform, I wish that getting better results from taxpayer dollars was more exciting…
Populists are slopulists. Planning is hard. Chaos is easy. Short cuts are sexy. Second law of thermodynamics. It’s why 5 year olds don’t make their beds. It’s just gonna get messed up again when I get back in, right? Why bother fixing for tomorrow what you can trash for today? One word- plastics. It’s no mystery why we find ourselves here. 85 years of anti-intellectualism in American married to 45 years of Reaganomics and Christofascist authoritarianism and 20 years of social media algorithms has produced Americans that hyper individualistic, lazy AND cruel. We now reap the wild wind of what we have sown.
The big thing lacking in Trump's presidency is good ole' fashioned leadership. A real leader speaks to the people, to Congress, to the news media, to everybody, and explains what he wants to do and WHY. Instead, Trump's style is more like slash-and-burn, bull-in-the-china-shop, slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am, damn the torpedoes. (I'd say ask forgiveness rather than permission, but he doesn't even ask for that.) As Gabe points out, his approach accomplishes only temporary results, at best.
Amazing what you find out when a journalist lays out what actually happened. Wow, it's complicated AND not as bad as it seemed. The center holds! Thanks so much for your work.
Thank you so much, Gabe, for a terrific newsletter. If you ever have to choose between a good newsletter published on time and an excellent one published a day or more later, by all means choose the latter.
Kudos on this this huge informative message. Let me add to the DOGE shitstorm:
In a whistleblower disclosure filed with Congress and corroborated by internal documents, NPR reports, Berulis said that the DOGE employees first set up a process to hide their activities on the servers, rather than allowing account activity to be tracked. This alone is a “red flag,” cybersecurity experts said, and a technique mimicking what a malicious hacker may use when trying to infiltrate government systems.
Berulis noticed soon after the raid began that a DOGE engineer was working on a “backdoor” to the NLRB’s case management system, which would allow the rogue group to extract information surreptitiously. Then, he saw within the system’s metrics that there was a massive spike in data being extracted from the network and sent to an unknown location that could contain a huge amount of case information.
Trump Is Trying to Axe Collective Bargaining for 1 Million Federal Employees
The IT worker first spoke out internally against the DOGE raid — but when he did, his attorney has said, someone taped a threatening note to his door that contained sensitive personal information about him, as well as pictures of him walking his dog that looked like they were taken by a drone. Whistleblowers have long faced threats to their personal safety, while recent high-profile cases of corporate whistleblowers have created a culture of fear around the practice.
Meanwhile, the information exfiltrated by DOGE includes a huge amount of sensitive information about American workers, including “ongoing contested labor cases, lists of union activists, internal case notes, personal information from Social Security numbers to home addresses, proprietary corporate data and more information that never gets published openly,” NPR wrote.
In other words, as labor experts said, DOGE may have gotten its hands on the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of labor organizers across the country — at a time when President Donald Trump and Republicans are preparing to majorly dismantle labor protections and attack workers’ rights, including unionization.
It also comes from rogue actors assembled by Musk — whose companies are involved in numerous labor disputes. This includes an alarming lawsuit, filed by SpaceX, challenging the constitutionality of the NLRB itself, which is the primary entity in the U.S. protecting workers from labor abuses.
Even if that data isn’t being actively used by Musk and his cronies, labor experts said that the fact that they can access it may have a chilling effect on the labor movement, just after it has seen a major resurgence in recent years.
“Just saying that they have access to the data is intimidating,” Kate Bronfenbrenner, the director of labor education research for Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and co-director of the Worker Empowerment Research Network, told NPR. “People are going to go, ‘I’m not going to testify before the board because, you know, my employer might get access.’”
The extreme, malicious techniques used by DOGE to infiltrate the system, meanwhile, could also leave this data vulnerable to being seized by other bad faith actors. At one point just minutes after DOGE accessed the systems, for instance, employees noticed log-in attempts from an IP address located in Russia — attempts that used a newly-created DOGE account with the correct username and password.
Will there ever be an investigation and prosecution of this self-inflicted domestic cyber attack on tbs US government. If Andrew formerly prince
went to jail for sharing office trade memos with Epstein, why isn't Musk in jail for a whole lot worse?
One thing that a lot of folks may have missed is the massive damage that Trump has created between the United States and the International community. This damage, this destruction of trust, will take decades to rebuild - if it’s even possible for that to happen.
Thank you, Mr. Fleischer. The point here is that all the destruction or temporary interruption affects the middle and lower classes. The oligarch clsss just marches blithely on stuffing our tax dollars into their coffers.
Thanks for addressing this Gabe! Regular media covers when all these things are "announced" but rarely follows up on what actually happens afterwards.
One historical example missing from this analysis is that the Clinton administration was very effective in reducing government spending. They did it by having a very deliberative process that took Congress and the legislative/financial process into account. Clinton slashed almost 500,000 Federal employees without the same political backlash that Trump has encountered.
The big difference is that Clinton's effort, led by Al Gore, was focused on outcomes. Trump's is performative and focused on outrage.
One last thing. I have said having been in successful companies in corporate America and been a recruiter all trump and musk’s stuff was completely wrong if you wanted to make something more efficient
Gabe, you are 110% right. It is about process and I will add proper analysis. It is going to turn out the whole thing was about getting a data base
Worth the wait!
Seems the outsized* military budget, with its notorious $500 hammers and ludicrous toilet prices was the most effective way for DOGE to start eliminating swampy waste.
*relative to everywhere else on the planet
Part of the reason that the systems destroyed by DOGE had sand in the gears is that the built-in friction protected the privacy of American citizens. The loss is privacy is hard to quantify, but I believe it will be the hardest to restore, if it ever can be.
I like your reporting and I know you like to go in depth but I think more concise might be better. I don’t have time to go in depth on every subject. Just my 2 cents
This seems a bit rosy. So the erosion of norms, the lack of accountability, via any meaningful checks. The grift, graft, cruelty and open collusion don’t matter because it’s not codified by Congress so we can start over in 4 years? You make a lot of assumptions that the totalitarian, facism we are seeing will result in a new crew of folks to temper and reset the system. Elections will happen. Judges will hold the line—upholding the rule of law. Punishing perceived enemies, weaponizing the government in authoritarian ways etc. tariffs is a great example. The supremes finally weighed in and he just ignores them. I don’t how this doesn’t accelerate the fall of the empire, our monetary/global system and credibility in ways that will permanently erode American power and hegemony.
… to voters.
Good stuff. Glad to be aboard. As a statewide candidate running on a Show Me Results platform, I wish that getting better results from taxpayer dollars was more exciting…
Populists are slopulists. Planning is hard. Chaos is easy. Short cuts are sexy. Second law of thermodynamics. It’s why 5 year olds don’t make their beds. It’s just gonna get messed up again when I get back in, right? Why bother fixing for tomorrow what you can trash for today? One word- plastics. It’s no mystery why we find ourselves here. 85 years of anti-intellectualism in American married to 45 years of Reaganomics and Christofascist authoritarianism and 20 years of social media algorithms has produced Americans that hyper individualistic, lazy AND cruel. We now reap the wild wind of what we have sown.
The big thing lacking in Trump's presidency is good ole' fashioned leadership. A real leader speaks to the people, to Congress, to the news media, to everybody, and explains what he wants to do and WHY. Instead, Trump's style is more like slash-and-burn, bull-in-the-china-shop, slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am, damn the torpedoes. (I'd say ask forgiveness rather than permission, but he doesn't even ask for that.) As Gabe points out, his approach accomplishes only temporary results, at best.
Amazing what you find out when a journalist lays out what actually happened. Wow, it's complicated AND not as bad as it seemed. The center holds! Thanks so much for your work.