Sunday scaries: Elon Musk edition
A long weekend of too much Musk. Also: More on the canceled Indiana University LGBTQ+ Health Care Conference. And, for paid subscribers: Closing my tabs.

It was a weekend of several extremely disturbing developments across the federal government — and rippling out from it — with news reports relating to attempted employee purges, successful website and data purges, and Elon Musk’s apparent — and lawless — government takeover.
While President Donald Trump golfed in Mar-a-Lago this weekend, Musk — who has no established legal or formal role in the federal government, let alone one that has been confirmed by the Senate — announced that he would be having a working weekend:
This, moreover, was stated in a post amplifying a tweet declaring, “DOGE is speedrunning government reform—$4B/day cuts could start THIS weekend.”
DOGE — the inaptly named “Department of Government Efficiency” — is not a department. Under Trump’s executive order establishing it, it is, instead, housed within a renamed executive office and it exists as a “temporary organization” within it:
Among other things to know about temporary organizations, even a “person providing volunteer services” as part of participation in a temporary organization “shall be considered an employee of the Federal Government” for purposes of “Chapter 11 of title 18, relating to conflicts of interest.“
This came in the week of stories about Musk’s team infiltrating significant spaces in the federal government, including the Office of Personnel Management. (And, on Sunday, this story — also from Wired — about who’s doing Musk’s dirty work.)
Over the weekend, though, the New York Times reported on his team seeking and eventually obtaining access to the Treasury Department’s sensitive government-wide payment system.
When U.S. Agency for International Development officials refused a request from Musk’s team over the weekend to give them access to classified data, the Associated Press reported the employees were put on leave. After the Saturday moves by Musk’s team at USAID, Musk tweeted Sunday that the agency “is evil” and “was a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” before declaring that it was “[t]ime for [USAID] to die.”
Musk also went after other groups on X on Sunday. In amplifying a tweet from Mike Flynn attacking Lutheran Family Services and related organizations, for example, Musk wrote, “The DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.”
Given that Flynn didn’t provide evidence of anything actually illegal about the payments, it should also be noted that several line-items in Flynn’s chart include jurisdictions where the January 31 temporary restraining order issued by a federal judge in Rhode Island stated that federal government agencies “shall not pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate [the sued entities]’ compliance with awards and obligations to provide federal financial assistance to the States, and … shall not impede the States’ access to such awards and obligations, except on the basis of the applicable authorizing statutes, regulations, and terms.” Those include Illinois; Maryland; Washington state; Washington, D.C.; and Wisconsin.
And none of this gets into the “Fork in the Road” effort to get employees across the federal government to leave their federal employment. I’ll have more in that this week, but in a sign that it’s still got issues — and, issues it has — all federal employees got yet another email from the now-infamous hr@opm.gov address on Sunday night.
The subject line: “Fork in the Road: Today's FAQs.“ It contained six more Q&As that any properly vetted program would have dealt with before having haphazardly rolled it out in the first place.
The six questions have been added to the online OPM “Fork” FAQ page:
As ever, definitely consult a lawyer before signing anything here.
Even before all of this happened this weekend, the Congressional Research Service had already published an initial “insight” paper on “early implementation” of Trump’s “DOGE”-related executive order. In it, it highlighted several questions the order and early implementation of it raised for Congress, including three key government ethics questions:
Students at work
Thanks to the Indiana Daily Student for covering and up following up on the cancellation of the LGBTQ+ Health Care Conference that was to be hosted by Indiana University School of Medicine this spring. I had been asked to be a keynote speaker for the conference, and I wrote about the cancelation earlier this week.
It’s great coverage, including noting that Indiana Gov. Mike Braun — like President Donald Trump — has signed a so-called “anti-DEI” executive order.
They also highlight this oh-so-helpful statement from the school":
"The statement from the school is that the IU School of Medicine LGBTQ+ Health Care Conference has been canceled," Katie Duffey, a spokesperson for the IU School of Medicine, said in an email.
In my comments to the paper, I talked about the school’s statement and the effects of the conference’s cancellation:
And with a simple, “vaguely worded” email, Geidner said, an eight-year-old conference was canceled seemingly without notice to the IU community. The statement provided to IDS by the School of Medicine, Geidner said, was lacking.
“That’s bad,” Geidner said in response to Duffey’s statement. “I think that if something exists, has existed for several years and is canceled, that had benefited both your academic community and a broader community, that there absolutely should be a specific reason given.”
Geidner said it's unfortunate that medical providers will not be able to attend the accessible, virtual conference to best learn how to care for LGBTQ+ patients.
“Their patients aren’t going away just because the Trump administration says certain words aren’t allowed,” he said. “They’re still going to have to deal with those patients.”
I’m really glad that they followed up on this. It’s important that local publications explain the direct local effects of government actions. Whether this cancellation was purportedly justified by some specific anti-transgender Trump administration effort or a Trump or Braun administration anti-civil rights effort, they are all related and the effect is the same: local communities are losing programs that help people.
Local journalists must document that to their readers.
And, as to student journalists specifically, it is essential that their universities — including their faculty and their staff — strongly support those students in learning and practicing journalism.
Closing my tabs
This Sunday, here are the tabs I’m closing:
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