A collection of opinionated commentaries on culture, politics and religion compiled predominantly from an American viewpoint but tempered by a global vision. My Armwood Opinion Youtube Channel @ YouTube I have a Jazz Blog @ Jazz
and a Technology Blog @ Technology. I have a Human Rights Blog @ Law
“A radiologist in Denmark swapped her Tesla Model 3 for a BYD Sealion 7 due to frustration with Elon Musk’s actions, including joining the Trump administration. While she misses some Tesla features, such as automatic window defrosting and the “Santa Mode,” she appreciates the BYD’s build quality and premium feel. She believes the entry of Chinese EV brands into Europe is positive, pushing European brands to innovate.
Mahican Gielen with her newly purchased BYD Sealion 7. Mahican Gielen
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Mahican Gielen, a radiologist in Hjørring, Denmark, about swapping her Tesla Model 3 for a BYD Sealion 7. It has been edited for length and clarity.
We live in Denmark, in the city of Hjørring, but we're actually from Holland. My husband and I are both doctors: I'm a radiologist, and he's a cardiologist.
I bought a Tesla Model 3 three years ago. It was my first electric car, and I'd wanted a Tesla for years.
My kids even pushed me because they knew I was looking for a car. They said: "Mom, it should be a Tesla. That's the best car. It's a green car. It saves the planet."
I have to say, I loved that car. It was such a big step up from the normal combustion engines and had so many cool features. I still miss it sometimes.
The first time I got a bit annoyed with my Tesla was when the company started cutting the prices. I bought mine right before, so that hurt.
Elon Musk joining the Trump administration was the final straw. I love cars, but if owning one gets overruled by the constant noise about the CEO and people asking whether it bothers me, then the fun goes out of it.
I just didn't want the headache anymore.
I know there is more to the company. But when you have a CEO who's so visible, he just becomes one with the company. And I really feel bad for Tesla because I like the brand. They were so innovative and new.
But this was a step too far. It really made me say, you know what? I'm going to get rid of this car. It's not going to get any better from here, so I'll just cut my losses.
Buying a BYD
Mahican Gielen replaced her Tesla Model 3 with a BYD Sealion 7. Mahican Gielen
I sold my Model 3 for 150,000 Danish Krone, or about $22,000, in April, having paid 350,000 Krone for it in 2022, and I bought a BYD Sealion 7 Excellence the same month.
[Editor's Note: BI was unable to verify the purchase price of Gielen's BYD Sealion 7 Excellence. It starts from roughly 390,000 Danish krone, or about $59,000.]
I wasn't going to buy an SUV, but I saw the Sealion 7 in a showroom and thought it looked amazing.
It was a little bit impulsive, but I'm really happy with it.
The build quality is on a level with a Mercedes, and the car feels really premium.
Things are different, but it has so many cool features, like a head-up display and actual physical buttons, which I missed as the Tesla didn't have them.
The best thing about the car is how solid it is. I always tell people the Tesla felt like a toy car compared to this one, because it was always rattling.
Sometimes, when it was freezing, you couldn't close the door because it wouldn't catch, and when you drove the Tesla around in the rain, sometimes you would hear sloshing sounds like water was dripping in the car. So the build quality is completely different.
The range is more than enough for me, and the software works pretty well. It's a bit slower and less intuitive than the software in the Tesla, but overall, I like it.
I think it's great that Chinese EV brands are entering Europe. I absolutely believe that the market should be open, and they have something to offer.
For me, many European brands seem kind of boring. They do the same thing every time, and these brands do something new.
Even if people don't buy them, it will probably make the European brands push their boundaries a bit and do more stuff. So I think it's absolutely good for everyone if more become available in Europe.
Feature FOMO
There are a few features I still miss about the Tesla, but I'm hoping they could be added to the BYD with software updates.
The Tesla auto-locks and unlocks when you just have your phone in your bag or on you. In the BYD, I really had to get used to pushing the button on the car key to lock and unlock.
When you charged your car, the Tesla automatically opened its charger port flap and closed it again. I have been driving around with an open flap because I'm so used to it.
My kids also really loved the Tesla's "Santa Mode," and the Tesla app has a lot more features than the BYD one.
The feature I'm really going to miss is that Tesla automatically defrosted the windows via the app. So, I didn't have to remove ice for the last few years. It's not a problem now, but I know it's going to be annoying in the winter.
You could overlook some of the things that were wrong with the Tesla because it was so easy to use, it was almost like an iPhone. But in the end, some things are just not right.
Part of the reason I sold the car was because of the build quality. Mine was beginning to get a bit older, and I was in the shop with it more and more.
The path Musk has taken is extremely frustrating. It seriously hurts because I was really rooting for the brand. I think it's sad for a company that was so promising and could have done much more.
Have you swapped your Tesla for a BYD or bought a Chinese EV? Contact this reporter at tcarter@businessinsider.com.“
On a morning in May, Mordecai Johnson, the president ofHoward University, testified before a congressional subcommittee about the prevalence of far-left ideas among his faculty and students. Given that the federal government has historically provided funding for the university’s budget, through an annual allocation, Johnson had a difficult choice to make. He could respond to representatives’ questions with a defense of the free exchange of ideas (and risk them holding up the allocation) or take the safer path of conceding their criticisms and promising to work to insure that the thinking on campus better aligned with putatively American values.
Johnson’s dilemma will be familiar to anyone who has observed higher education in this country during the harrowing academic year that is now coming to a close. Spring is typically a joyous time on campus, when graduating students celebrate having overcome whatever challenges they may have faced along the way. This month, administrators and faculty are likely equally relieved to have made it through. That, in fact, has been the prevailing sentiment since December of 2023, when Republicans in the House of Representatives—citing harassment and, in some cases, even the physical assault ofJewish students on campuses, in the wake of theOctober 7th attacksin Israel—began summoning university presidents to appear before committees, where they were berated and belittled. Those appearances prefaced the subsequent resignations of the leaders of Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania, all of them women. Johnson’s appearance, however, occurred not in the current wave of federal overreach but in May of 1935, amid a feverish preoccupation with communism in academia. The hearings of these presidents are separated by nearly a century of history, yet their quandaries are strikingly similar.
Academic freedom in the United States has found itself periodically under siege. In March, Ellen Schrecker, a historian and the author of “No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities,” spoke via Zoom to deans at Columbia (including myself) about government repression on college campuses in the nineteen-fifties. Schrecker, who has taught at both Columbia and Harvard and retired as a professor at Yeshiva University, emphasized the severity of the current climate. “I’ve studied McCarthyism’s impact on higher education for fifty years,” she said. “What’s happening now is worse.” This is in part because universities today are far more beholden to the federal government. The explosive expansion of higher education that began after the Second World War was underwritten by federal dollars. So members of Congress, and President Trump, too, have leverage that demagogues who preceded them could only dream of.
In March, the Trump Administration threatened to cancel fifty-one million dollars in federal grants to Columbia. Days later, that amount was increased to four hundred million, and the university received a letter demanding a series of changes to internal operations as a prerequisite for discussions about restoring the funding. The university, which also saw four of its students targeted by the Administration for their political views—one,Mahmoud Khalil, remains in detention—has largely complied. But, on Thursday, the Administration declared that Columbia had acted with “deliberate indifference” toward the harassment of Jewish students, violating civil-rights law.
In April, an even more stringent letter was sent to Harvard, which responded by suing over its demands in federal court. The Administration halted 2.2 billion dollars in grants to the university, then another four hundred and fifty million, and has threatened to rescind the school’s tax-exempt status. Last Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security took the extraordinary step of terminating Harvard’s certification to enroll international students; Harvard is suing the D.H.S., and a federal judge has halted the department’s effort. The Administration had also announced that it would investigate sixty institutions and initiated seemingly arbitrary cuts at schools such as Johns Hopkins, which had eight hundred million dollars in grants rescinded. A resource-sharing pact among the eighteen universities of the Big Ten Conference has been proposed, in order to provide mutual support should any of them be targeted.
The Administration has relied on two pretexts to justify these incursions. It has used the language of rooting out antisemitism to rationalize actions that at best have tangential connections to that cause. The rescinded grants have been clustered in areas that include climate-change research or that use terms such as “diversity” in proposals. It further strains credulity to argue that curtailing a university’s ability to conduct cancer or Alzheimer’s research is an appropriate strategy to correct alleged religious bias. Meanwhile, NPR reported last month that three officials in the government have “close ties to antisemitic extremists.” This news dovetails with previous events, such as Trump welcoming the prominent antisemites Nick Fuentes and Kanye West to his home for dinner.
The incursions also take place amid a conservative insistence on greater “viewpoint diversity.” This push comes just as measures enacted to protect other kinds of diversity are being overturned. The Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision invalidated racial quotas at the University of California, but held that affirmative action was constitutional, and experts have long since acknowledged that racial diversity fosters a wider range of viewpoints. The threats to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status represent a similar inversion of history: the government first used the tactic decades ago against institutions such as Bob Jones University, a conservative Christian school that banned interracial couples on campus. The biggest mistake that some universities have made in responding to the White House has been to presume that it is operating in good faith. It is not. Efforts to engage with it have yielded escalating punishments and leadership turnover but little by way of concession.
Mordecai Johnson was a Black man leading an academic institution during Jim Crow when representatives from an almost entirely white Congress asked him whether professors with radical sympathies should be allowed to teach at Howard. Yet he firmly said that he would sooner shut down his university than allow anyone to dictate what its students could or could not learn. The principle at play—that without free inquiry there is no basis for a university to exist—still applies. ♦"
One afternoon in Gaza, two family tragedies: the childhoods cut short by Israeli airstrikes
Yaqeen Hammad, who was killed in Gaza on 23 MayPhotograph: @yaqeen hmad
"At about 3pm last Friday, Dr Alaa al-Najjar, a paediatrician at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, received thecharred remains of seven of her 10 children, killed in an Israeli airstrike. The bodies of two others were buried beneath the rubble.
A few miles away, 11-year-old Yaqeen Hammad, known asGaza’s youngest social media influencer, was killed after a series of heavy Israeli airstrikes hit the house where she lived with her family. She was watering flowers in a tiny patch of greenery eked out of a displacement camp when she died. Her cousin, 16-year-old Eyad, was gravely wounded.
Even by the terrible standards of theGazaconflict, the deaths had the power to shock. But they were also a reflection of a daily reality in the territory: the killing and maiming of its youngest citizens and the destruction of a generation.
Adam al-Najjar lying in a hospital bed at Nasser hospital.Photograph: Hani Alshaer/Anadolu/Getty Images
A family photograph of Adam al-Najjar (left), with two of his siblings, Sedra and Eve, who were killed.Photograph: Reuters
According to local health officials, whose estimates have generally been found to be accurate by the global humanitarian community, more than 16,500 children have been killed in the 19 months since the war began – a figure almost 24 times higher than the number ofchildren killed in Ukraine, where the population is 20 times bigger, since Russia’s invasion. The World Health Organization tally for child deaths stands at 15,613.
Colleagues of Najjar say that in the days since she lost her children she has spent her waking hours weeping outside a room in Nasser hospital. Inside lies her only surviving child, 11-year-old Adam, who is clinging to life with the help of a ventilator, his breathing shallow and more than 60% of his body covered in burns.
Najjar’s husband, Hamdi, a 40-year-old physician, also survived the strike but suffered severe injuries, including brain damage and fractures caused by shrapnel.
Hamdi al-Najjar in the intensive care unit in Nasser hospital.Photograph: Hatem Khaled/Reuters
Alaa al-Najjar (left) being comforted at Nasser hospital on 25 May.Photograph: Hatem Khaled/Reuters
Reached by the Guardian, theIsraelDefense Forces (IDF) said “the Khan Younis area is a dangerous war zone” and that “the claim regarding harm to uninvolved civilians is under review”.
Speaking to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Adam’s uncle, Ali al-Najjar, 50, issued a desperate plea: “Adam must be taken away, to a real hospital, outside Gaza. I beg the Italian government – do something. Take him. Save him, Italians.”
Along a corridor in the same hospital where Adam is being treated lies Eyad. His father – and Yaqeen’s uncle – is Hussein Hassan, a 46-year-old Red Crescent paramedic. Hassan said he was working in the hospital’s emergency department when he received a call saying his son had been injured and his niece killed by a missile.
Hassan said the family had received no warning that a strike was imminent and that he was haunted by the question of why a missile would be fired that hit children watering and planting flowers. “How could this be? The children are still so young to be considered targets,” he said. “Was there a targeted vehicle nearby? Or someone being pursued who passed by the street? I don’t know.”
When news of Yaqeen’s death spread online on Monday, there was an outpouring of grief and tributes from activists, followers and journalists. “Yaqeen was cheerful, full of energy,” Hassan said. “Due to my workload I hadn’t seen her in a month before she died – and that’s what hurt the most, that my last sight of her was when she was wrapped in a white shroud.
“I said my goodbye to her in the morgue at al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir-al Balah, and then carried her cold body into the ambulance to be transported for burial. Her family is devastated – she was their pampered youngest, the baby of the family.”
Palestinian influencer Yaqeen Hammad gives tips on cooking with no gas – video
Eyad remains in intensive care in Nasser hospital. He lost his left eye in the strike and has a fractured shoulder. When he was admitted to hospital, shrapnel was embedded in various parts of his body.
“Seeing him in that condition broke my heart – my son, now lying in the hospital before my eyes,” Hassan said. “Yaqeen’s story is like that of so many children in Gaza who have been killed in the war, for no reason. They are not just numbers – each child has a story, a life, and families who are heartbroken by their loss.”
The IDF says it is reviewing the circumstances of the strike.
Three days later, in Gaza City, another family suffered another unimaginable loss. Six-year-old Ward Khalil’s mother and two of her siblings were among dozens of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes on Fahmi al-Jarjawi school. Harrowing footage showed Ward leaving the scene of the strike, her body silhouetted against flames that had engulfed the school.
Young girl escapes flames after Gaza school strike – video
The next day Ward gave an interview to Al Jazeera in which she recounted the horrors she had experienced. “When I woke up, I found a huge fire, and I saw my mom was dead,” she said. “I walked in the fire so I could escape … I was in the fire, and the ceiling fell on me. The ceiling all collapsed. The fire was blazing,”
Ward Khalil with her uncle in Gaza City on 26 May.Photograph: Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu/Getty Images
On top of Israeli strikes, Gaza’s children are facing catastrophic levels of hunger.
Aid agencies say Palestinian children are bearing the brunt of an Israeli aid blockade that for nearly three months has severely restricted the flow of food and humanitarian assistance into the territory.
The consequences have been devastating: last week, in one 48-hour period, 29 children and elderly people died from starvation, according to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority health minister, Majed Abu Ramadan.The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) estimated in Maythat nearly 71,000 children under the age of five were expected to be acutely malnourished by next March. Of these, 14,100 cases are expected to be severe.
According to the UN humanitarian aid organisation for children, Unicef, more than 9,000 children have been treated for malnutrition in Gaza this year. “These children – lives that should never be reduced to numbers – are now part of a long, harrowing list of unimaginable horrors,”Unicef said in a statementthis week.
“The children of Gaza need protection,” it said. “They need food, water and medicine. They need a ceasefire. But more than anything, they need immediate, collective action to stop this once and for all.”
The U.S. Deported This Chinese Scientist, in a Decision That Changed World History
Sam Whitney/The New York Times
"In 1950, though it didn’t know it yet, the American government held one of the keys to winning the Cold War: Qian Xuesen, a brilliant Chinese rocket scientist who had already transformed the fields of aerospace and weaponry. In the halls of the California Institute of Technology and M.I.T., he had helped solve the riddle of jet propulsion and developed America’s first guided ballistic missiles. He was made a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, worked on the top-secret Manhattan Project and was sent to Germany to interrogate Nazi scientists. Dr. Qian wanted the first man in space to be American — and was designing a rocket to make it happen.
Then he was stopped short. At the height of his career, there came a knock at the door, and he was handcuffed in front of his wife and young son. Prosecutors would eventually clear Dr. Qian of charges of sedition and espionage, but the United States deported him anyway — traded back to Communist Beijing in a swap for about a dozen American prisoners of war in 1955.
The implications of that single deportation are staggering: Dr. Qian returned to China and immediately persuaded Mao Zedong to put him to work building a modern weapons program. By the decade’s end, China tested its first missile. By 1980, it could rain them down on California or Moscow with equal ease. Dr. Qian wasn’t just rightly christened the father of China’s missile and space programs; he set in motion the technological revolution that turned China into a superpower.
His story has been top of mind for me (I’ve been working on a biographical book project on him for several years now) as we’ve watched the Trump administration ruthlessly target foreign students and researchers. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio turned up the pressure,announcingthat the administration would work to “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or who are studying in “critical fields.” There are some one million foreign students in the United States — more than 250,000 of them Chinese. Dr. Qian’s deportation should serve as an important cautionary tale. It proved an American misstep, fueled by xenophobia, that would forever alter the global balance of power.
In an echo of the current moment, he became a target of the hysteria around Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare because he was a Chinese national and a scientist. He was humiliated when his security clearance was revoked. The price paid for shunning Dr. Qian has been dear. Not only did the United States miss a chance to leapfrog the Soviet Union in manned spaceflight; it gave China the one resource it lacked to challenge American dominance in Asia: significant scientific prowess. In addition to closing that gap, his return to China ushered in generations of homegrown Chinese scientific breakthroughs. To this day, Washington spends billions of dollars on a nuclear umbrella shielding our Pacific allies from his technical achievements.
When asked about America’s deportation of Dr. Qian, the former Navy secretary Dan Kimball said, “It was the stupidest thing this country ever did.”
An immigration hearing in 1950 to determine whether Qian Xuesen, second from left, should be deported.Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive/UCLA Library Special Collections
Dr. Qian came to the United States as a young man of 23. He benefited from a scholarship that now seems to represent a vanished mind-set: the idea that international educational exchange would promote American values and foster world peace. Edmund James, the American representative in Beijing, set up the fund that brought Dr. Qian and other students like him to the United States. “The nation which succeeds in educating the young Chinese of the present generation,” Dr. James wrote to President Teddy Roosevelt, “will be the nation which for a given expenditure of effort will reap the largest possible returns in moral, intellectual and commercial influence.” By the 1960s, three-quarters of China’s 200 most eminent scientists, including future Nobel Prize winners, had been trained in America, thanks to Dr. James.
In California, Dr. Qian joined up with a group of other promising young scientists who called themselves the Suicide Squad, after at least one of their early experiments blew up a campus lab. At an annual meeting of engineers, two of the squad members announced they had worked out how to create a rocket capable of flying 1,000 miles vertically above the earth’s surface. Soon they acquired a more official name: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
In 1949, Dr. Qian was chosen to lead the laboratory, which by then was the precursor to NASA. He not only wanted to help the United States win the space race, but he also unveiled plans to use rockets in air travel to allow passengers to get from New York to Los Angeles in less than an hour.
Was Dr. Qian a spy? Was he a Communist? There was no convincing evidence of either, but it’s unclear whether the American government ever cared. Protests by top defense officials and academics, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, who worked with Dr. Qian on the Manhattan Project, went unheeded. After five years under house arrest, Dr. Qian was begging the Chinese government to help him escape the United States.
State Department documents, now declassified, suggest that Dr. Qian had become a highly undervalued pawn in the eyes of the Eisenhower administration, traded back to China for U.S. airmen. The Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, speaking triumphantly about the negotiations, said: “We had won back Qian Xuesen. That alone made the talks worthwhile.”
Dr. Qian never returned to the United States and served the rest of his life as a celebrated leader of the Chinese Communist Party. He is seen as a national hero, too, with a museum built to honor his accomplishments. Most of his remarks in his later years were either technical documents or party propaganda against America. In 1966, however, one of his former Caltech colleagues received a postcard decorated with a traditional Chinese drawing of flowers and postmarked in Beijing. On it Dr. Qian had written simply, “This is a flower that blooms in adversity.”
Mr. Rubio’s announcement, although short on details, has surely set off waves of anxiety among international students and their colleagues at research universities, as schools and laboratories brace themselves for further disruption. Something larger has been lost, though: America once saw educating the strivers of the world as a way to enhance and strengthen our nation. It was a strategic advantage that so many of the best and brightest thinkers, scientists and leaders wanted to study here and to be exposed to American democracy and culture.
Dr. Qian’s achievements on behalf of China demonstrate the risk of giving up that advantage and the potential dark side of alienating — rather than welcoming — the world’s talent. There’s always the chance that it will someday be used against us.
Kathleen Kingsbury is the Opinion editor of The New York Times, overseeing the editorial board and the Opinion section. Previously she was the deputy editorial page editor. She joined The Times in 2017 from The Boston Globe, where she served as managing editor for digital. She received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing.@katiekings"
“Elon Musk arrived in the nation’s capital with the chain saw-wielding swagger of a tech titan who had never met a problem he couldn’t solve with lots of money, long hours or a well-calibrated algorithm
WASHINGTON -- WASHINGTON (AP) — Elon Musk arrived in the nation's capital with the chain saw-wielding swagger of a tech titan who had never met a problem he couldn’t solve with lots of money, long hours or a well-calibrated algorithm.
President Donald Trump was delighted to have the world’s richest person — and a top campaign donor — working in his administration, talking about how he was “a smart guy” who “really cares for our country.”
Musk was suddenly everywhere — holding forth in Cabinet meetings while wearing a “tech support” shirt and black MAGA hat, hoisting his young son on his shoulders in the Oval Office, flying aboard Air Force One, sleeping in the White House. Democrats described the billionaire entrepreneur as Trump’s “co-president,” and senior officials bristled at his imperial approach to overhauling the federal government.
After establishing Tesla as a premier electric automaker, building rockets at SpaceX and reshaping the social media landscape by buying Twitter, Musk was confident that he could bend Washington to his vision.
It’s a quiet exit after a turbulent entrance, and he's trailed by upheaval and unmet expectations. Thousands of people were indiscriminately laid off or pushed out — hundreds of whom had to be rehired — and some federal agencies were eviscerated.
But no one has been prosecuted for the fraud that Musk and Trump said was widespread within the government. Musk reduced his target for cutting spending from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to $150 billion, and even that goal may not be reached.
In Silicon Valley, where Musk got his start as a founder of PayPal, his kind of promises are known as vaporware — a product that sounds extraordinary yet never gets shipped to market.
Trump, who once called Musk “a truly great American” and “a patriot,” said nothing about the departure. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “We thank him for his service.”
Musk's position was always designed to be temporary, and he had previously announced his intention to dedicate more of his time to his companies. But he also told reporters last month that he was willing to work part-time for Trump “indefinitely, as long as the president wants me to do it.”
It was clear that Musk wouldn’t be the typical kind of presidential adviser around the time that he showed the world his belly button.
Racing on stage at a campaign rally one month before the election, he jumped for joy next to Trump, his T-shirt rising to expose his midriff. Musk had already sold Trump on his idea for a Department of Government Efficiency while also putting at least $250 million behind his candidacy.
The plan called for a task force to hunt for waste, fraud and abuse, a timeworn idea with a new twist. Instead of putting together a blue-ribbon panel of government experts, Trump would give his top donor a desk in the White House and what appeared to be carte blanche to make changes.
Musk deployed software engineers who burrowed into sensitive databases, troubling career officials who sometimes chose to resign rather than go along. Trump brushed off concerns about Musk’s lack of experience in public service or conflicts of interest from his billions of dollars in federal contracts.
Their unlikely partnership had the potential for a generational impact on American politics and government. While Musk dictated orders for government departments from his perch in the White House, he was poised to use his wealth to enforce loyalty to the president.
His language was that of catastrophism. Excessive spending was a crisis that could only be solved by drastic measures, Musk claimed, and “if we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt.”
But even though he talked about his work in existential terms, he treated the White House like a playground. He brought his children to a meeting with the Indian prime minister. He let the president turn the driveway into a makeshift Tesla showroom to help boost sales. He installed an oversized screen in his office that he occasionally used to play video games.
Sometimes, Trump invited Musk to sleep over in the Lincoln Bedroom.
“We’ll be on Air Force One, Marine One, and he’ll be like, ‘do you want to stay over?’” Musk told reporters. The president made sure he got some caramel ice cream from the kitchen. “This stuff’s amazing,” Musk said. “I ate a whole tub of it.”
Looking back on his experience in government, he described it as a lark.
“It is funny that we’ve got DOGE,” an acronym that references an online meme featuring a surprised-looking dog from Japan. “How did we get here?”
From the beginning, Musk treated federal workers with contempt. At best, they were inefficient; at worst, they were committing fraud.
His team offered them a “fork in the road,” meaning they could get paid to quit. Probationary employees, generally people new on the job without full civil service protection, were shown the door.
Anyone who stayed faced escalating demands, such as what became known as the “five things” emails. Musk wanted every government employee to submit a list of five things they accomplished in the previous week, and he claimed that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
Some administration officials curtailed the plan, concerned that it could jeopardize security in more sensitive areas of the government, and it eventually faded, an early sign of Musk’s struggle to get traction.
But in the meantime, he continued issuing orders like thunderbolts.
One day in February, Musk posted “CFPB RIP,” plus an emoji of a tombstone. The headquarters of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created after the Great Recession to protect Americans from fraud and deceptive practices, was shut down and employees were ordered to stop working.
Musk had already started gutting the U.S. Agency for International Development, a pillar of the country’s foreign policy establishment and the world’s largest provider of humanitarian assistance.
“Spent the weekend feeding USAID into a wood chipper,” he bragged.
Thousands of contacts were cut off, pleasing conservatives who disliked the agency’s progressive initiatives on climate change and gay rights.
Musk rejected concerns about the loss of a crucial lifeline for impoverished people around the globe, saying, “no one has died.” However, children who once relied on American assistance perished from malnutrition, and the death toll is expected to increase.
The lawsuits began piling up. Sometimes workers got their jobs back, only to lose them again.
The Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for ensuring the safety of everything from baby formula to biotech drugs, planned to lay off 3,500 employees. But again and again, the agency was forced to rehire people who were initially deemed expendable, including laboratory scientists, travel bookers and document specialists.
Commissioner Marty Makary, who started his job after many of the cuts took place, told attendees at a recent conference that “it was hard and my job is to make sure we can heal from that.”
Only 1,900 layoffs took place, but another 1,200 staffers took buyouts or early retirement. Experts fear the agency has lost much of its institutional knowledge and expertise in areas like vaccines, tobacco and food.
There are also concerns about safety on public lands. The National Park Service has been bleeding staff, leaving fewer people to maintain trails, clean restrooms and guide visitors. More cuts at the Forest Service could undermine efforts to prevent and fight wildfires.
The Environmental Protection Agency faces a broad overhaul, such as gutting the Office of Research and Development, which was responsible for improving air pollution monitoring and discovering harmful chemicals in drinking water.
Not even low-profile organizations were exempt. Trump ordered the downsizing of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a nonprofit think tank created by Congress, and Musk’s team showed up to carry out his plan. The organizations' leaders were deposed, then reinstated after a court battle.
The bulk of federal spending goes to health care programs like Medicaid and Medicare, plus Social Security and the military.
Unfortunately for Musk, all of those areas are politically sensitive and generally require congressional approval to make changes.
Thousands of civilian workers were pushed out at the Pentagon, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reducing the ranks of top generals and looking to consolidate various commands. A plan to downsize an office for testing and evaluating new weapons systems could save $300 million per year. Hegseth recently asked employees to submit one idea per week for cutting waste.
However, the Pentagon budget would increase by $150 billion, for a total of more than $900 billion, under Trump’s spending proposal working its way through Congress. The money includes $25 billion to lay the groundwork for Trump’s “golden dome” missile defense program and $34 billion to expand the naval fleet with more shipbuilding.
Another $45 million is expected to be spent on a military parade on June 14, which is the 250th anniversary of the Army’s founding and Trump’s 79th birthday.
Musk also faced blowback for targeting Social Security, which provides monthly benefits to retirees and some children. He suggested that the popular program was “a Ponzi scheme” and the government could save between $500 billion and $700 billion by tackling waste and fraud.
However, his estimates were inflated. Social Security’s inspector general said there was only $71.8 billion in improper payments over eight years. Nor was there any evidence that millions of dead people were receiving benefits.
Changes to Social Security phone services, pitched as a way to eliminate opportunities for fraud, were walked back after an outcry from lawmakers and beneficiaries. But the agency could still shed 7,000 workers while closing some of its offices.
Musk’s popularity cratered even though Americans often agreed with his premise that the federal government is bloated and wasteful, according to polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Just 33% of U.S. adults had a favorable view of Musk in April, down from 41% in December. In addition, 65% said Musk had too much influence over the federal government.
During a campaign rally in October, Musk said he could find “at least $2 trillion” in spending cuts. In January, before Trump was inaugurated, he revised by saying, “if we try for $2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting one.”
But in April, at a Cabinet meeting, Musk provided a different target. He was “excited to announce” that they could reach $150 billion in savings during the current fiscal year.
Whether that figure proves to be accurate is difficult to measure, especially because DOGE routinely inflated or mischaracterized its work. But it falls short of President Bill Clinton’s initiative three decades ago, which resulted in $136 billion in savings — the equivalent of more than $240 billion today.
Elaine Kamarck, a key figure in the Clinton administration, said they focused on making the government more responsive and updating antiquated internal procedures. The work took years.
“We went about it methodically, department by department,” she said. The effort also reduced the federal workforce by more than 400,000 employees.
However, Musk did little to seek insight from people who knew the inner workings of government.
“They made some changes without really knowing what they were doing,” said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies for the libertarian think tank Cato Institute. He said there were “a lot of unforced errors.”
In the end, Nowrasteh said, “they set themselves up for failure.”
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Associated Press writers Tom Beaumont in Des Moines and Lolita Baldor, Matthew Daly, Gary Fields, Fatima Hussein, Ellen Knickmeyer, Matthew Perrone, Michelle Price and Amelia Thomson DeVeaux in Washington contributed to this report.“
