KAROLINE LEAVITT: If you just watched that video, but shut your eyes and listen to the words from those Democrat politicians, you would think you are listening to President Trump, Elon Musk and our entire administration, who are saying the exact same things that Democrat politicians promised the American people they would do for decades. President Trump is just the first president in our lifetimes to actually do it. And now you see the Democrat Party and the mainstream media spiraling out of control about a very simple promise: rooting out waste, fraud and abuse from our federal bureaucracy. This is a promise President Trump campaigned on. He is now delivering on it.

I've been fighting fake news reporters all day long here in the Washington, D.C. swamp who are trying to fearmonger the American people into believing that this administration is going after their hard-earned tax dollars and their hard-earned Social Security checks. So I want to set the record straight on your show tonight, Sean, and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to do so. President Trump has directed Elon Musk and the Doge team to identify fraud at the Social Security Administration. They haven't dug into the books yet, but they suspect that there are tens of millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent Social Security payments and so their goal in going into the Social Security Administration is to identify three things: Number one, to identify duplicate payments and to end them, Number two, to identify payments that are going to deceased people who are no longer living and should no longer be receiving that money and number three, to protect the integrity of the system for hardworking Americans who have been paying into it their entire lives.

reported earlier on Tuesday how they discovered that there was a missing code in regard to $4.7 trillion in payments, that would link a treasury payment to a line item, that the code was optional and was often left blank, making tracing the payments almost impossible. Yikes. I'm sure no one has taken advantage of that (/sarcasm). //

Even MSNBC is now recognizing there's a problem, in a bit of a stunning report. They acknowledge that there had been $71.8 billion in improper Social Security payments over eight years, which had been discovered by the inspector general in 2024. That's billion, not million. //

Even for anchor Jose Diaz Balart, that sounds crazy. He isn't buying it: "72 billion! And that's without a comprehensive search!"

What could they find with a comprehensive search? And if there is that much of a problem resulting in such massive overpayments, then yes, this is more evidence of a systemic problem that DOGE needs to help resolve. We already saw the concerning issue of the active Social Security numbers for millions of people over 120 years old that could be used for all kinds of nefarious things, yet hasn't been addressed. //

DOGE is supposed to end in 2026, but we need to have something in place to continuously review all this stuff, so these issues cannot come back after they are resolved. Otherwise, there can be backsliding unless the whole system is changed to one of responsibility and accountability. Obviously, what has been in play hasn't been enough to stop these crazy things.

The crux of the case brought before Chutkan is that Musk's participation in government is illegal as the US Senate has not confirmed him as a "principal officer" as required by Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 or the Constitution and Congress does not have oversight of DOGE because it exists within the Executive Office of the President. This sounds rather bizarre to me as the President has clear authority, in my view, to set up an ad hoc task force to carry out a time-limited mission and to appoint anyone he wishes to lead it. But I'm not a judge on the DC Circuit.

In these circumstances, it must be indisputable that this court acts within the bounds of its authority. Accordingly, it cannot issue a TRO, especially one as wide-ranging as Plaintiffs request, without clear evidence of imminent, irreparable harm to these Plaintiffs. The current record does not meet that standard. //

NavyVet
32 minutes ago
I am sick and tired of this "unelected official" BS. It is "unelected officials" that have been malfeasant allowing massive fraud waste and abuse. That's the way it works.

So the entire "unelected official" mantra is a smokescreen for the ignorant and stupid. That means it works on democrats and their media bootlickers, but has no credibility with the rest of us.

In fact, all it shows us is that the democrats are corrupt and stupid.

"Death field set to false" means the number is still active, according to the system.

His chart showed more than 20 million over 100 years old "including more than 3.9 million in the 130-139 age range, more than 3.5 million in the 140-149 range and more than 1.3 million in the 150-159 range." Not to mention the couple of folks who must be the original vampires who are between 240 and 369 years old.

Musk also noted how there were unresolved inconsistencies between the Social Security and Treasury files.

"The logic flow diagram for the Social Security system looks INSANE. No one person actually knows how it works. The payment files that move between Social Security and Treasury have significant inconsistencies that are not reconciled. It’s wild," Musk declared in a post on X.

In another post, Musk said "there are FAR more ‘eligible’ social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA. This might be the biggest fraud in history."

The fact that the numbers are active in regard to people who can't be alive doesn't necessarily mean that money is going out to them. Musk seems to be implying at least some of it is, as he talks about "vampires collecting Social Security." But it does mean that the numbers are active, and for more people than are in the U.S. So that means there's a big problem in the system, with these numbers theoretically still active. //

Quiverfull
39 minutes ago edited
Amazing that the same people who cheered about getting 87,00 new IRS agents to audit us, are the same ones screaming to high heaven about the one guy auditing the government, and he's doing it for free. //

SouthernRoots
a minute ago
These numbers add up to 398,416,213. According to http://census.gov , the US population today is 341,356,247.

There are 57,059,966 more individuals active in SS than the population of the US. If all of these get $24,000 a year, that is a waste of $1.369 Trillion a year.

The cadre of elite disease detectives at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to be left in ruin today as the Trump administration continues to slash the federal workforce.

Many members of the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service, EIS—a globally revered public health training program—were informed earlier Friday that they were about to be fired, according to reporting from Stat News. Multiple sources told CBS News that half of EIS officers are among the ongoing cuts.

The Trump administration is ousting thousands of probationary federal workers in a wide-scale effort to dramatically slim agencies.

The EIS is a two-year program filled with competitively selected, highly educated and trained experts. EIS officers are the ones deployed in critical public health situations, such as deadly outbreaks or bioterror attacks. The program has a long, rich history since its establishment in 1951, which includes contributing to the eradication of smallpox, among other achievements.

Now we have another example. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner has formed a DOGE task force to work with the larger effort to comb through HUD's books, and one of the first things they found was $1.9 billion - that's "billion" as in a "b" followed by an "illion" - that had been "misplaced" by the Biden administration.

How, for the luvva Pete, do you "misplace" almost two billion taxpayer dollars? //

There has to be more to this story than a huge block of money confiscated by force of law from American taxpayers just being "misplaced." Remember that the Biden administration was marked by corruption and incompetence, from the very top down, and it's hard to credit that this money was just "misplaced."

Slowly but surely, these multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration, often for exercising the barest amount of oversight of agency expenditures, are being settled. The Trump agenda is being slowed, but not as much as the first time around. The actions by the administration are much better planned and coordinated than they were in 2017, and the lawyering is much superior. When the dust settles, Trump will have had his way on these ridiculous ankle-biter cases, and I think he will score a huge win at SCOTUS that will crush the administrative state. More on that to come in a VIP post.

Axios is confirming this sentiment in a focus group of swing voters that they surveyed. The focus group included 11 people who had voted for Biden in 2020 but switched to Trump in the 2024 election. Eight were independents, two were Republicans, and one was a Democrat.

Every Arizona swing voter in our latest Engagious/Sago focus groups said they approve of President Trump's actions since taking office — and most also support Elon Musk's efforts to slash government.

Margot Cleveland
@ProfMJCleveland
·
Follow
🚨🚨🚨Judge in ⬇️case denies stay pending appeal. Court's reasoning based on his huge walk back of what he really enjoined saying basically "oh, I've only ordered you to not do what you can't legally do." 1/. //

The pattern seems to be that judges respond immediately to requests for temporary restraining orders with overbroad language, then quietly walk the language back once the headlines pass.

“The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over”

Mongoose
7 hours ago
Really, Mr. Wyden? Refund delayed? Let me tell you a story. I was working financial intelligence and got a call from a local bank. Seems they had a guy who wanted to deposit a million dollar+ check from the IRS. His tax refund, he said. The bank, which is supposed to report sketchy-looking activity on Treasury Suspicious Activity Report forms, thought this was... suspicious. On account of this guy had a W-2 job that paid him about $50,000/year. The bank really, really, really did NOT want to do this transaction, which they were certain was fraudulent.
It sounded squirrelly to me, so I called the IRS-CID special agent who handled refund frauds and was surprised to hear he already knew about it. The guy was pulling a 1099 OID fraud (it's on Wikipedia), and the bank had already told the IRS about it. I said, "Well, good, you can stop payment on the check, nip this fraud in the bud."
Nope, they'd been instructed not to interfere with the deposits/cashing of any refund checks. Go ahead and do the transaction, they told the bank. If it's fraudulent, we'll try to get the money back later. They couldn't even delay the check for a couple of weeks to do an investigation. Why? Because of Ron Wyden and people (Senators and Congressmen) like him. Apparently taxpayers(?) had been complaining to their congress folks about not getting their refunds (especially the fraudulent ones) in a timely fashion, and Ron and his buddies don't like those kinds of calls and can earn some easy constituent gratitude by squeezing IRS to push out that check post haste, so that's what IRS did.
I told the S/A that I thought he and IRS were f'n morons and told him I was going to tell the bank that I believed their deposit of the check would be a potential money laundering violation (thereby guaranteeing they wouldn't touch it or that customer with a hazmat suit). Which I did. (And in fairness, the refund fraud S/A was as distressed about it as I was.)
The crook took his business elsewhere, deposited his check, moved all the money out and when IRS finally went to get it, it was gone.
Now, multiply that little piece of insanity by a couple hundred thousand taxpayers(?) and we're starting to talk real money. Wikipedia says one 1099 OID fraud case involved three quarters of a billion dollars in false claims.
But those checks all went out because Ron Wyden doesn't want your refund delayed.

Elon Musk @elonmusk
·
If ANY judge ANYWHERE can stop EVERY Presidential action EVERYWHERE, we do NOT live in a democracy.
10:57 PM · Feb 13, 2025. //

TK421
4 hours ago
To that moron from the union: It doesn't matter whether there's precedent, just whether it's legal. And, your use of the term 'dismantling' is meaningless in a legal sense. What would be unconstitutional would be the Executive branch eliminating a Congressionally created agency. That hasn't happened. It was moved under the auspices of the State Department, so it still exists. One of the things the Executive can do, is determine the staffing level, and you have no right to argue otherwise. If the Executive branch determines that only 10 people are needed to administer the agency's programs (especially because those programs have been scaled back), tough luck. //

anon-tk7z NavyVet
37 minutes ago
do you know how many companies just gave up because of unions? This is exactly their position. Businesses were not negotiating with their people , they were negotiating with a distant entity that showed up for a day or two, threatened the company, left, destroyed the company, and left the workers with no jobs unless they moved. Bread companies, gum companies, toy companies, glass companies, local metalists, on and on and on, small businesses of 50-60 people. So, the companies just closed. Poverty and lack of self worth flourished. The good things unions did are now hard-wired into any business here in this country.

Eco-activists protests are nearly non-existent. Meanwhile, Romanians may be getting the president they wanted after their country’s USAID-funded NGOs were gutted. //

The damage done by the exposure of USAID’s extensive, expensive meddling could be far-reaching as other countries in Eastern Europe that have governments that were unpopular with the Americans are left to wonder how much of their unpopularity in their own country was bought and paid for with American dollars. And how much of it was in concert with their like-minded globalist bug-buddies in Brussels. //

schmuul | February 12, 2025 at 9:53 am
You are also seeing the impact in Israel as well where US interference through fake NGO’s almost took down Netanyahu and the whole Knesset. It’s insane how much we meddled in other countries in ways that weren’t in the best interest of any stability or peace let alone self determination. I guess they were in the best interest of George Soros and some insane “progressive “ vision.

Engelmayer is the first judge ever to grant a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the president of the United States that also forbids a cabinet secretary from accessing his own records without giving these parties an opportunity to respond. He offered zero analysis of his constitutional authority to make such a radical ruling, the federal rule governing injunctions and temporary restraining orders, or why he is enabling fraud and grift by blocking access to records that show who got government money and for what. //

The situation is actually worse than that. Here’s the timeline of the court filings. All these initial documents were filed by New York Special Trial Counsel Colleen Faherty. //

1:04 a.m. — Faherty e-mailed four items — the complaint, the legal memorandum, her prior affirmation, and the order granting the TRO — to two government lawyers, only one of whom had been a recipient of her 7:32 p.m. email.

1:14 a.m. — The complaint was refiled with the deficiency corrected. Note that a properly filed complaint was not filed until more than a half-hour after Judge Engelmayer had already entered his order. //

The accelerated timeline is simply incredible, especially in view of the voluminous materials that any diligent judge would analyze to render a proper opinion. And I mean “incredible” in its literal sense of “not to be believed.”

The last documents filed in support of the request for a TRO were at 10:13 and 10:15 p.m. These included the legal memorandum with its citation to 54 court opinions. Did Engelmayer read these? Not a chance. Did he read any of them? If he did, you can’t tell it from his order, other than one citation from him to a single case that had no resemblance to the case before him. //

Even if Engelmayer had received and began to study these materials immediately after he had them all, he spent less than two-and-one-half hours reviewing and analyzing the materials presented to him before entering his order at 12:39 a.m.

That’s not even counting the time it would have taken Engelmeyer to write his order. If he took only a half-hour to do that, he spent less than two hours to peruse the voluminous record and then begin to write his order. He could not possibly have considered more than a small fraction of the cited cases and other authorities in that time. It raises the question of how much of this order was AI-generated.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) ramped up grants for migrants from 2020 to 2024 — which included cash assistance to buy cars, homes and even build credit for startup businesses, according to a shocking watchdog report that found taxpayers were left on the hook for $22.6 billion. //

Non-governmental groups bilked taxpayers for up to $1.7 billion in services including dollar-for-dollar matching savings plans for cars, homes, college educations or startups; small-business loans of up to $15,000; loans to repair credit history of up to $1,500; “cultural orientation,” “emergency housing support,” legal assistance and Medicaid care. //

Dieter Schultz NavyVet
15 minutes ago edited
We have an audit trail. This is theft from American taxpayers.

Follow the audit trail. Confiscate the cars, homes, or businesses purchased with our dollars. Deport the thieves - they are compact in theft. Auction off confiscated items to American citizens.
For the big items that might work, I'm not sure I'd put money on it but... I watched the press event with Musk in the WH and one of the things that struck me from his audit was that he mentioned the lack of standard accountability, traceability, fields in treasury's payment system. Things like requirements to enter information in the 'notes' field, or forcing the data entry person to reference a payment authorization number, and more... were all things Musk noted was common to private/public companies were all not required or not used.

Musk noted that the system as it was being used was designed to minimize challenges to a payment, and therefore minimize the work associated with the authorizing/managing payment the payment process, were all, by design, making it nearly impossible to audit and/or account for the money that was being spent.

Protesters began unfurling banners and chanting "PEPFAR saves lives. Restore AIDS funding now" and continued to do so as they were being escorted out.

Mast didn't skip a beat, and had just a few short, sweet, simple, and to-the-point words for the protesters:

"I guess these guys don't watch the news. They didn't realize that PEPFAR was one of the many programs that did prove to be life-saving, so the funding was restored. Somebody better give them a link to, I don't know, maybe Fox News or something like that."

PEPFAR, which was started in 2003, stands for "the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief," and DOGE leader Elon Musk indicated on the Twitter/X platform Wednesday that its funding was mostly preserved:

Elon Musk @elonmusk
·
Replying to @iAnonPatriot
Funding for Ebola prevention and the parts of PEPFAR that appeared to be useful were not cut
6:03 AM · Feb 12, 2025

From his confirmation hearing, it was clear that RFK Jr. knows his most significant challenge will be bringing Medicare and Medicaid under control and improving the quality of service to consumers. He also understands the nature of the opposition he will face from monied interests who make money off of keeping us on drugs for a lifetime rather than focusing on exercise and nutrition as critical factors in keeping us healthy. Just remember, we don't have a health care system -- we have a sick care system. There is no money to be made off healthy, active people.

Even though RFK Jr. is not in sync with the Trump administration on everything, abortion comes to mind. I have no doubt that he will be a team player and color within the lines because this is the last chance of his lifetime to make a difference, and he is more focused on being a change agent than an ideologue.

The nomination of RFK Jr. to HHS has the possibility of being a brilliant pick that puts the US on track to better health and a much more sane use of health care and medical research dollars, or an utter disaster. But like with Tulsi Gabbard, Trump is the guy who will pay the price if RFK Jr. self-immolates and if he is fine with that risk, he deserves to have his man in place.

Now he does. //

anon-j4cj
4 hours ago
This guy Kennedy is supposedly a Democrat, and how many Democrats voted for him ? ZERO! Don't ever buy that "reaching across the aisle" BS again! It doesn't exist. This is our triangulation of the Democrats with RFK, Jr. and Tulsi. WE are the ones with the coalition; Americans are throwing off the chains of Marxist slavery. //

epaddon
4 hours ago
The irony for all those Dems and liberals who have spent decades with their silly Camelot nostalgia and pining for a restoration that the first Kennedy to serve in a Cabinet since 1964 is in a Republican Administration. :). //

GBenton ECoolidge19
3 hours ago
The political spectrum is changed. It's the elite vs the people more than right or left, at least with most Americans who are not hardcore partisans. I've come to believe that the Uniparty divided us into R vs D and then played pretend like there was an actual difference. Reality was the RINOs made sure the limited government Christian conservatives never won. Government only ever grew. We were told that was inevitable. Real reformers like Reagan were impeded by establishment RINOs like the Bushes who support bigger government in perhaps only marginally different ways than establishment Dems. Thus, the progressive Commies are mad they never got their full Communism and conservatives are mad we keep losing to the left. Now, Trump has taken populist ideas and shown that we can agree on more than we disagree on the core stuff like health and liberty. We'll have to agree to disagree on some things and let voters decide at the state level, but that's Federalism. Either way, the Uniparty can no longer divide us into fake party lines.

AKERMAN: That stuff [government bureaucracy] is sacrosanct, and you've got people going in there who don't know anything about...(crosstalk)...Elon Musk doing this, he knows nothing about it.

JENNINGS: What you just said is so profound. You said these people don't know anything and they don't know what they're doing.

AKERMAN: That's right. I'm talking about Elon Musk.

JENNINGS: I understand, but they are appointees of the duly elected president so your view, you're here as our legal expert, but your view is because you don't personally believe they know enough, that the duly-elected president who appointed a treasury secretary and who appoints special appointees like Elon Musk shouldn't be able to act as the president because you don't personally believe they know enough? Is that how it works? Do elections mean anything to you?

AKERMAN: It's got nothing to do with elections. //

What they believe in is an unaccountable bureaucratic system that allows them to thumb their noses at American voters. It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" setup, and it has been the basis of Democratic Party power stretching back to the Woodrow Wilson era.

On Friday, February 7, Trump set off a megaton blast by reducing the allowable overhead rate for NIH grants to 15%. This is how NIH says the overhead works. //

The average rate inside NIH stood at about 25 percent; that is, $9 billion of the $35 billion in research grants was skimmed off the top. Allegedly, this money went to support the lab, but "support" is an expansive term that might be used to describe a DEI administrator or business class airfare to a five-star hotel for a "conference.". //

But, in the media, you'd have thought that Donald Trump was personally destroying America's competitive advantage in science, never mind that the overhead rate from the Gates Foundation is 10%, and none of the big private grant funders exceed 15%. //

Ten years ago, the GAO pointed out how overhead was killing scientific research; see NIH Should Assess the Impact of Growth in Indirect Costs on Its Mission. Just five years ago, it was common to find articles demanding a lowering of the overhead rates: The NIH needs to become leaner and more innovative. Here's how | STAT. //

Five years ago, overhead rates were killing science, but with Trump as president, lowering overhead hurts science. Go figure.

Stephen L. Miller @redsteeze
·
Elon Musk answering more questions in the Oval Office than Joe Biden did in 4 years.
9:45 PM · Feb 11, 2025. //

Standing next to President Donald Trump, Musk lambasted the bureaucratic state, noting that it is antithetical to democracy to have unelected officials operating outside the authority of elected representatives. No doubt, he was referencing several recent court decisions that have sought to prevent Trump from being president despite his holding of the office. //

Rapid Response 47 @RapidResponse47
·
ELON MUSK: "If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives... then we don't live in a democracy... It's incredibly important that we fix that..."

9:31 PM · Feb 11, 2025. //

Well, we have this unelected fourth, unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy, which has, in a lot of ways, currently more power than any elected representative. That's not something that people want, and does not match the will of the people. It's something we've got to fix. //

This is what Democrats refuse to accept, and for completely cynical reasons. You do not have a democracy if federal bureaucrats can simply override, either directly or through lawfare, any change to the status quo made by the President of the United States. If an agency has such total control that it can stop the executive branch from even changing the content of government websites, that is authoritarianism despite the faceless nature of federal employees. American voters voted for change by electing Donald Trump. They did not vote for federal judges to stop any and all reforms under absurd legal theories.

Democrats see the bureaucracy as a protection of their power structure. As long as it persists, they don't have to win elections. They can simply continue their reign of terror from the shadows, hiding behind millions of federal employees exercising immense control without any accountability. That's what Trump is seeking to stop, and it has Democrats screaming bloody murder. //

MUSK: You know there's crazy things like, we just finished the examination of Social Security, and we've got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone that is 150? I don't, okay. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records. They're missing out. So, you know that's a case where I think they're probably dead, or they should be very famous. One of the two. //

The federal bureaucracy has been a gravy train for Democrat partisans for decades. Somehow, despite relatively normal salaries (though far too high in some cases), many of these people become fabulously wealthy. How did Samantha Power, who headed USAID during the Biden administration, see her wealth surge up to $30 million holding the position she did? These are questions that deserve answers. //

Brigitte Gabriel @ACTBrigitte
·
Cuteness overload!

Elon Musk is talking about how he's going to cut the deficit in half and his son X is whispering to President Trump and picking his nose.

Little boys will be boys! It's nice to see beautiful young families back inside the White House!
0:22 / 0:22
9:41 PM · Feb 11, 2025. //

There's something wholesome and refreshing about children being normalized in public spaces again. Whether it's Musk or Vice President JD Vance, we are seeing a return of kids not being seen as a burden but as a blessing worth cherishing. Once again, it represents a stark contrast to the hateful resentment shown by the left, and Musk calmly answering questions while Democrats screech like banshees is why the latter keep losing.