"Elon Musk will not be fully exiting the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—and its activities are only intensifying. On Friday, President Donald Trump threw cold water on the idea that Musk would fully disappear from DOGE and the White House forever. "Elon's really not leaving,” Trump said in a joint press conference with Musk in the Oval Office. “He's gonna be back and forth. It's his baby, he's going to be doing a lot of things."

“I expect to continue to provide advice," Musk, wearing a black hat with DOGE written on it and a black shirt reading “DOGEFATHER,” said during Friday's press conference, while noting that his legal limit for service as a special government employee was coming to an end. "I expect to remain a friend and an advisor.”

Both new and familiar DOGE faces have also been recently detailed to new agencies, according to sources. Members of Musk’s early DOGE team, including Luke Farritor, Gavin Kliger, Edward Coristine, and Sam Corcos, have met with a number of departments and agencies—including the Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, and the FBI—in recent days, seemingly continuing business as usual, WIRED has learned.

The team also appears to be actively recruiting, according to documents viewed by WIRED."

https://www.wired.com/story/doge-elon-musk-really-not-leaving/

#USA #Trump #DOGE #Musk #Austerity #Privatization #Privatopia

"Last month, the Trump administration placed a $1 spending limit on most government-issued credit cards that federal employees use to cover travel and work expenses. The impacts are already widely felt.

At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists aren’t able to order equipment used to repair ships and radars. At the Food and Drug Administration, laboratories are experiencing delays in ordering basic supplies. At the National Park Service, employees are canceling trips to oversee crucial maintenance work. And at the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Aviation Administration, employees worry that mission-critical projects could be stalled. In many cases, employees are already unable to carry out the basic functions of their job.
“The longer this disruption lasts, the more the system will break,” says a USDA official who was granted anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak to the media about the looming crisis.
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A researcher at the National Institutes of Health who tests new vaccines and treatments in rodents says he has had to put experiments on hold; his lab is not able to get certain necessary materials, such as antibodies, which are needed to assess immune response. “We have animals here that are aging that will pretty soon be too old to work with,” says the researcher, who requested anonymity as they aren’t authorized to speak publicly about the agency. Young mice and rats that are 6 to 8 weeks old are typically used for drug and vaccine studies, but some of the animals in their lab have now aged out of that window and may have to be euthanized."

https://www.wired.com/story/doge-elon-musk-spending-cuts-federal-workers/

#USA #Trump #Musk #DOGE #Austerity #Privatopia

"The majority of people in Argentina (53%) are now living in poverty. Their purchasing power and standard of living have been crushed by Milei’s brutal austerity.

Nearly three-quarters (72%) of Argentines said in June 2024, after half a year of Milei’s rule, that they were worse off economically.

While Argentina’s real economy is in crisis, the stock market has boomed, enriching local oligarchs and rich foreign investors.

Milei’s government has also promoted a notorious carry trade scheme known as the “bicicleta financiera” (financial bicycle) that has guaranteed massive returns for the few Argentines wealthy enough to invest.

Aside from finance, the few other sectors of the economy that are growing under Milei are agriculture and mining — extractive industries that rely on exports and benefit from a falling currency and weak domestic demand.

In short, Argentina is being turned into an impoverished, deindustrialized resource colony for foreign corporations and oligarchs."

https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/02/28/javier-milei-argentina-economy-resource-colony/

#Argentina #Milei #Privatopia #AnarchoCapitalism #Libertarianism

"Billionaire Elon Musk’s blitzkrieg on Washington has brought into focus his vision for a dramatically smaller and weaker government, as he and a coterie of aides move to control, automate — and substantially diminish — hundreds if not thousands of public functions.

In less than three weeks, Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service has followed the same playbook at one federal agency after another: Install loyalists in leadership. Hoover up internal data, including the sensitive and the classified. Gain control of the flow of funds. And push hard — by means legal or otherwise — to eliminate jobs and programs not ideologically aligned with Trump administration goals.

The DOGE campaign has generated chaos on a near-hourly basis across the nation’s capital. But it appears carefully choreographed in service of a broader agenda to gut the civilian workforce, assert power over the vast federal bureaucracy and shrink it to levels unseen in at least 20 years. The aim is a diminished government that exerts less oversight over private business, delivers fewer services and comprises a smaller share of the U.S. economy — but is far more responsive to the directives of the president."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/08/doge-musk-goals/

#USA #Trump #Musk #DOGE #Austerity #Privatopia #Plutocracy

"A lot of the money and people in such places come from Silicon Valley. Consider Próspera, a private town in Honduras, financed in part by funds backed by Andreessen, Thiel and Sam Altman. Here businesses can create their own bespoke regulatory frameworks, entrepreneurs can run wacky medical trials free from Food and Drug Administration standards and citizens are protected from crime (though presumably not the white-collar kind) by a private firm of armed guards. Its goal says it all: “building the future of human governance: privately run and for-profit”.

That might well be the Trump administration’s mantra, too. But investors should remember that techno-libertarianism often peaks before a fall. In 2006, Richard Haass, a former George W Bush state department official, wrote a piece arguing for corporations to be elevated to near nation state status. Companies such as Microsoft and Goldman Sachs had a role to play in “regional and global deliberations”, as the “near monopoly power” of states was eroded.

The great financial crisis made that notion both passé and politically toxic, at least for a time. Now, we are about to see what private monopoly power in the guise of government looks like. I wonder how long the dream — or perhaps nightmare — will last before the world once again wakes up."

https://www.ft.com/content/13cc2796-6e91-4002-92e6-3a31cf2dfeb3

#USA #Trump #TechnoLibertarianism #Libertarianism #Privatopia #SiliconValley #Monopolies