M. Wuerker: Politico
* * * *
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
March 21, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
Mar 22, 2025
These days, I keep coming back to the quotation recorded by journalist Ron Suskind in a New York Times Magazine article in 2004. A senior advisor to President George W. Bush told Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernible reality. But, the aide continued, such a worldview was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore…. We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
In 2004 that quotation seemed a reflection on how members of an administration hoped to shape the globe and public perceptions of their actions. Twenty-one years later, it seems we are seeing what happens when members of an administration believe they can shape not just perceptions but reality itself, and discover that reality is stubborn.
After news broke last night that the Pentagon was preparing a top-secret presentation for billionaire Elon Musk on plans for fighting a potential war with China, members of the administration denied that Musk’s visit to the Pentagon would include such a meeting. This morning, Musk posted on social media that the “leakers” “will be found.” “I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT,” he posted.
Aside from appearing to confirm the story—one can’t “leak” a false story—Sophia Cai, Danny Nguyen, Daniel Payne, Amy MacKinnon, and Eli Stokols of Politico suggest that Musk’s threat has backfired. “We are public servants, not Elon’s servants,” one Food and Drug Administration employee told the reporters, adding, “[t]he public deserves to know how dysfunctional, destructive, and deceptive all of this has been and continues to be.”
A senior Federal Aviation Administration official said, referring to Musk, “He IS A LEAKER. When you put hard drives on data systems at government agencies you are creating the biggest security breaches we have seen in years and years. Possibly ever.” A Department of Agriculture staffer said: “If the Biden administration or Obama had acted like this, no one would have tolerated it. The Trump administration doesn’t get a pass.”
Those angry at Musk and the cuts his Department of Government Efficiency team has made to the government have demonstrated their anger by launching a grassroots movement called “TeslaTakedown” that protests peacefully at Tesla dealerships. Law enforcement officers and experts in domestic extremism say they have found no evidence that acts of vandalism against cars, charging stations, and dealerships—there have been at least ten such instances—are coordinated.
Trump tried to shore up the brand with a sales pitch for Teslas at the White House on March 11, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Wednesday urged the Fox News Channel audience to buy Tesla stock, an endorsement that violated federal ethics rules but did nothing to prop up the stock price.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi called vandalism of Teslas “domestic terrorism,” and today President Donald Trump insisted that the vandalism of Tesla products is far more serious than the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol when rioters tried to stop the counting of electoral votes and thus overturn the will of American voters. Trump issued a blanket pardon for those rioters, including those convicted of violence against law enforcement officers, but today he posted about Tesla vandals on social media: “I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla. Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”
At the Social Security Administration, acting commissioner Leland Dudek is threatening to shut down the agency in response to the temporary restraining order issued yesterday by U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander. In that order, Hollander noted that the “Department of Government Efficiency” was “essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” and “never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems.”
She prohibited Social Security officials from sharing with DOGE any personally identifiable information (PII) that would make it possible to identify specific individuals. Dudek suggested that Hollander’s order could apply to all SSA employees because the administration has ordered them to cooperate with DOGE. “Everything in this agency is PII,” he said. “Unless I get a clarification, I’ll just start to shut it down. I don’t have much of a choice here.”
Dudek was a mid-level staffer at SSA until he won his position atop the agency by secretly cooperating with DOGE’s demands to review sensitive records after SSA’s head, Michelle King, stood in the way. “I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
SSA oversees Social Security benefits for nearly 70 million people and, according to the agency, was expected to distribute about $1.6 trillion in benefits in 2025. For many people, that check is vital to survival. But billionaire Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick suggested that concerns about a stoppage in checks were overblown. He told billionaire podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya: “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling, and complaining.”
Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, disagreed: “For almost 90 years, Social Security has never missed a paycheck—but 60 days into this administration, Social Security is now on the brink…. Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek has proven again that he is in way over his head, compromising the privacy of millions of Americans, shutting down services that senior citizens rely on and planning debilitating layoffs, all in service to Elon Musk’s lies.”
Hollander responded to Dudek’s threat by calling his interpretation of the order “inaccurate” and specifying that SSA employees who are not members of DOGE or working on DOGE’s agenda are not subject to the order. “Moreover, any suggestion that the Order may require the delay or suspension of benefit payments is incorrect.” After Dudek continued to insist that SSA employees and DOGE are intertwined, Hollander issued another clarification tonight, saying that if that is the case, she “was misled by counsel for the government,” who said that just ten people at SSA are working for DOGE.
“More to the point,” she added, “in my earlier letter today…I directed the government to contact [the Court] immediately if there is any need for clarification of the [order]. As I write this letter, it is well after 6:00 p.m. and the government has yet to contact the Court.”
Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post observed today that “the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ [is making] the federal government almost comically inefficient.” She wrote that Internal Revenue Service employees line up at shared computers on Mondays to submit their “five things I did last week” emails to DOGE while taxpayer service calls go unanswered. Federal surveyors at the Bureau of Land Management are no longer allowed to buy replacement equipment, so when a shovel breaks they can’t simply replace it; they have to locate a manager authorized to file an official procurement form and order one. Many have had to ignore their actual jobs in order to scrub words from official documents.
After interviewing frustrated civil servants for weeks, Rampell said, she has learned that “routine tasks take longer to complete, grinding down worker productivity,” while DOGE bogs workers down with “meaningless busywork, which sets them up to be punished for neglecting their actual duties.”
“All this talk of warfighter ethos, and our ‘priority’ is making sure there are no three-year-old tweets with the word ‘diversity’ in them,” one Pentagon staffer told Rampell. “Crazy town.”
Administration officials are discovering that their idea of slashing through government might not have adequately considered how actual people might react to that destruction. As constituents erupt with anger, Republican lawmakers are refusing to hold town hall meetings. Yesterday, Representative Harriet Hageman (R-WY) responded to boos and heckling by saying: “It’s so bizarre to me how obsessed you are with federal government…. [Y]our hysteria is just really over the top.” When protesters dressed as chickens to goad Representative James Comer (R-KY) into holding a town hall, he issued a statement: “Congressman Comer does not plan on holding therapy sessions for left-wing activists suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
In place of Republican town halls, Democrats are holding their own packed events in Republican districts. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are on a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour across the country because, as Sanders says, people are “profoundly disgusted with what is going on here in Washington, D.C.”
Today, 11,000 people turned out to hear Sanders and AOC in Republican-led Greeley, Colorado. Another 34,000 turned out in Denver.
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
