DOGE’s American Carnage: Then and Now
"I've been Doged." Over 300,000 federal workers were purged by drug-fueled sociopath Elon Musk and his "Department of Government Efficiency." In this week’s Gaslit Nation, we’re joined by Sasha Abramsky, contributor to The Nation and author of the explosive new book American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the U.S. Government. Abramsky details how Musk and his "Hitler Youth" tech bros, led by Edward "Big Balls" Coristine, infiltrated government agencies like a wrecking ball. They were set on sadistic public humiliation, bullying the survivors into submission to carry out a lawless coup to hijack our democracy.
DOGE carried out the greatest data heist in global history. The personal information for nearly 300 million Americans, including Social Security numbers and Medicare data, has been exposed to tech oligarchs. This data is already being weaponized to purge voter rolls and hunt immigrants and dissidents.
Trump and Musk depend on your demoralization. They want you to think they’re invincible Bond villains, but as the resistance in Minneapolis showed, we can and must stand up to them–for the sake of our very lives and the security of the world.
Have you or your community felt the impact of the DOGE purges? Share your story with us at GaslitNation@gmail.com. We may report on it, anonymously if you choose, on the show. Stay strong. Gaslit Nation is here for you.
Join Andrea in New York City for the launch of her new graphic novel Mrs. Orwell. This special live-taping will share the incredible story of Eileen Blair, the unsung heroine of literature and wife of George Orwell, who saved her husband’s life twice and shaped his greatest works. Details here: https://powerhousearena.com/events/book-launch-mrs-orwell-by-andrea-chalupa-in-conversation-with-nomiki-konst/
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Show Notes:
DOGE staffer had ‘God-level’ Social Security access and expected Trump’s pardon, whistleblower says https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/doge-social-security-data-whistleblower-b2935908.html
Elon Musk’s DOGE Staffer ‘Big Balls’ Related to KGB Defector: Report https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-doge-edward-coristine-big-balls-kgb-agent-2036520
Doge cuts to USAid blamed for 300,000 deaths — most of them children https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/usaid-doge-deaths-children-cuts-7nb83dfkp?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqcVzjZ_td4qU0vyr-xG_CgGOlTqkglEvufyMil2saeIo4sfDLbK8HIVQeZ-IHc%3D&gaa_ts=69b0d995&gaa_sig=ZVvlsPXRuxrYyW6L9eA4lEbo1EG_Vjg1-CiS5mFa7qlVjY9zdtc18EbEHPxglD0f-pxJDLWqvvxK-U_IjWKBjg%3D%3D
14 Million People Could Die in Next 5 Years Due to USAID Cuts, Study Finds https://gizmodo.com/14-million-people-could-die-in-next-5-years-due-to-usaid-cuts-study-finds-2000622755
American Carnage How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government https://lettersandsciencemag.ucdavis.edu/bookshelf/american-carnage
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Andrea Chalupa (01:13):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine, the film The Kremlin doesn't want you to see -- so be sure to watch it.
(01:27):
This week we are joined by Sasha Abramsky, a contributing writer to The Nation and author of the new book American Carnage: How Trump, Musk and DOGE Butchered the US Government. So this will be an extra furious episode of the show for all the reasons many of you have experienced yourself. I've gotten messages from listeners who have written to me these words, "I've been DOGEd," meaning their jobs were, their livelihood, all of it was axed. And so we're going to get into the massive carnage created by Elon Musk. Sasha, walk us through how DOGE came to be. In the 2024 election, was there some deal between Elon Musk and Trump that Trump would let a drug adult psychopath into our government, no holds bars, just give him the keys to social security and all of it and just let him go to town on his bond-villain whims.
Sasha Abramsky (02:31):
Yeah. I mean, there kind of was because Elon Musk throughout 2024 had been ingratiating himself with the Trump machine. And in the summer of 2024, he not only wholeheartedly endorsed Donald Trump, but he put in a ton of money into the election campaign and he liberated a bunch of technology for use to sort of try and access these infrequent voters. And Musk is very bad at a lot of things, but one thing he's very good at is micro targeting, especially young, angry white men. And he did it brilliantly. He got people out to vote who never usually voted and who came out in droves in key states to help elect Donald Trump. And the trade off was Musk wanted access to government and he wanted access not only to cutting parts of government he didn't like, but to the vast troves of information that those would get from government information systems.
(03:22):
And Trump was only too happy to oblige. Trump went into the 2024 election backed by Project 2025 and heritage, even though he kept sort of saying, "Oh, I don't know these people. " It was a lie. Trump not only knew the Project 2025 people, but he was absolutely embracing their extreme agenda. And a large part of that agenda, as articulated by a man called Russell Vought, was to quote unquote, put federal workers into trauma. That's a direct quote from Russell Vought in 2024. And they came in with a mission and the mission was to set up this thing which they would call the Department of Government Efficiency. I'm going to put air quotes around department because you can't will a department into being with a few social media posts. That's not how it works. Congress has to legislate to create departments. Congress also has to legislate to dismantle agencies and departments that it's already created.
(04:13):
But DOGE comes in with a wrecking ball mission. And the mission is basically, we're going to screw around not with the entirety of government. We're not going to defund ICE. We're not going to defund the military industrial complex, but we are going to defund anything to do with the environment, anything to do with social justice, anything to do with public health, anything to do with overseas aid or workplace regulation or consumer protection. And just coincidentally, those were the things that the oligarchs most detested because they stood in the way of profit. If you have public health and you're saying, "Well, in the event of a pandemic, we may need to close businesses to social distance people that stands in the way of profit." If you have environmental regulations that say, "Well, you have to regulate how much you put into the atmosphere, how many toxins you put into the atmosphere, or what kind of pesticides you put into the ground and so on, that stands in the way of the oligarchs profit." So Musk came in with this mission to dismantle anything that stood in the way of private profit.
(05:12):
And he and his tech bros said to work, you mentioned the verb to DOGE someone that didn't exist a year and a half ago, but now about 300,000 federal workers and their families and their friends and their community members all know what that means. If I go down the street and I meet a federal worker and they say, "I've been DOGEd." I know immediately what it means. It means they've been fired and they've been humiliated. And that's what my book's about. It follows 11 federal workers from eight agencies and it doesn't just follow them a little bit. It tells their story intimately over six months as they're repeatedly humiliated and repeatedly sort of put through these rituals of economic insecurity and destruction. This was a deliberate wrecking ball system, and that's the story that I tell in American Carnage. And that was a really long answer to your question.
Andrea Chalupa (06:00):
No, absolutely. That's what we're looking for, but it also sounds sadistic.
Sasha Abramsky (06:05):
Yeah. Look, I mean, you've lived through the Trump era. I've lived through the Trump era. Your audience members have lived through the Trump era. We all know it's sadistic and we all know that the iron fist and the jackboot isn't incidental to any of this. It's absolutely core to the project, whether that's detaining and brutalizing immigrants or refugees, or whether it's firing DOGE workers, or whether it's stomping on alliances and gratuitously insulting allies. You just go down the list, whether it's transgendered people, whether it's African Americans who Trump says are only in positions of authority because of DEI, whether it's law firms that stand up against Trump, whether it's political figures who dare to say, "Don't obey illegal orders in the military." Time and again, cruelty is the point. If you can fuck around with somebody's economic security, you do it. If you can fuck around with their employment, you do it.
(07:04):
Everything about this is a project designed to say, "We are authoritarians. We're in charge. It's our way of the highway. And if you don't get on board with the program, you are going to be treated not just marginally badly, but you're going to have the full might of the state aimed at you." And Trump a must may be really, really bad at an awful lot of things, but they're very, very effective at aiming the full force of the state at their enemies.
Andrea Chalupa (07:30):
Yeah. It's just the classic authoritarian playbook of bullying people into submission. Could you talk about some of the ritual humiliation that they're putting these individuals through that you were talking to for your book?
Sasha Abramsky (07:44):
Yeah, absolutely. So I had 11 workers and I wanted to make sure that they weren't sort of identicate. I didn't want 11 people all from Washington DC, all sort of at the same level in their career. I wanted variety. So I spent a lot of time in January, February of last year finding people who met that diversity. And so they're black and white, they're young and old, they're senior, they're junior, and most importantly, they live all over the country. And the common denominator is that they weren't just fired, but they were fired in a way designed to traumatize. And before they were fired, their work experience was changed in a way, designed to humiliate and traumatize. So I'll give you a couple examples. One of the people I write about in my book is a middle-aged scientist called Natasha Miles, and she had worked for many, many years on climate change and emissions work, CO2 and methane emissions work for Penn State.
(08:38):
And she moves over to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to take a research position there. And she gets onboarded just about the time of the inauguration last January. So she packs up her house in Pennsylvania, she puts her dog in her car, she packs up her sort of vitals, whatever she needs to live out west, and she goes on a road trip for five days to her new job in Boulder, Colorado. So that's 2,000 miles away. And she gets all the way to Boulder and an hour outside of town, she gets a phone call from her new boss saying, "Look, you've got to check your email." And she pulls over to the side of the road and she checks her email and there's a note there saying, this is 2:30 in the afternoon, there's a note saying, "As of 5:00 PM today, your job is being eliminated because you no longer meet the needs of the new administration." She's 53, she has health issues and suddenly she's unemployed with two hours notice.
(09:37):
Her health insurance is discontinued. And this was a common denominator I found that even though legally a lot of these people were supposed to get health insurance for several weeks, it was just abruptly canceled. And not only that, they weren't given the paperwork that would allow them to enroll in the government equivalent of COBRA. So they weren't even given an opportunity to say, "You know what? You have no health insurance, but you can buy in for a few months." They were just left on the side of the street with nothing. And to me, that was an extraordinary way to treat a human being. So that's one example. Another example is a couple of people who work for the CDC and they're in Atlanta, Georgia. And they were doing really important work. They weren't scientists, they were communication specialists, but their job was to educate the public on anti-smoking campaigns.
(10:22):
And you'd kind of think this was a no-brainer. It doesn't matter if you're a Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, you've probably read that lung cancer is one of the side effects of smoking and various other cancers, the side effects of smoking. Therefore, it's a pretty good idea to educate the public saying bad idea to smoke. But suddenly that also was no longer a priority of the new administration. And so these guys were also put, first of all, they were fired. And then the court said, "Well, you can't actually fire these guys with no leave because a lot of the people who were fired sued and their unions sued and the court started intervening." So very reluctantly, the government rehired them and said, "All right, you're coming back to work, but ... " And the butt was, "You're not allowed to work." And this was the story I heard time and time again that people would be brought back under court order, but the government would then say, "You can't work.You're on what's called administrative leave." So essentially what that means is the government was paying hundreds of thousands of workers for many, many months to sit on their hands and do nothing.
(11:26):
The workers hated it because they had a mission. They wanted to be doing the job they were paid to do. Now, if you're a taxpayer, which we all are, you should hate that as well, because what it means is in the name of government efficiency, DOGE was basically telling people, "We're going to pay you to do nothing." Well, that makes no sense. It makes no sense for the workers who are being humiliated. It makes no sense for the taxpayers who are paying people to do nothing, and it makes no sense for the general public because all of this vital work in public health and all these other areas is not getting done anymore. So those are just a few examples from the book. And when readers read it, and I really do hope you read these stories, it's a short book. It's about 170 pages, but I think it captures the stories, again, not just of 11 people, but by extension, the stories of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of federal workers who were told their lives are, well, their public lives are worthless, that everything they've done in their careers are worthless.
(12:21):
And they thought they were public servants in it, not to make money, but to do public good. And suddenly they're being told by Elon Musk, the world's richest man, and by Donald Trump, America's most corrupt president, they're being told, "You are the enemy within." And oftentimes quite literally that language, that you are the enemy within, you are working for government agencies we don't like, you are part of this quote unquote deep state, and therefore we reserve the right to humiliate you. And those stories shouldn't be forgotten. I did a reading in Powells, which is one of my favorite bookstores in the world in Portland, Oregon, about a month and a half ago. And a friend of mine came to the reading and she said, "Look, how quaint I haven't thought of DOGE for a year." And I said, "Well, here's why you should think about it.
(13:04):
" And we talked and I said, "Look, A, these are stories of people, not abstractions, but of real people and their lives mean something and their work means something and we owe it to them. The government's humiliated them. The government has declared them to be the enemy. The government's tried to render them invisible. We owe it to them to tell their stories and to read their stories." But the second thing I said to her is, "Look, you can't understand the broader authoritarian project that is being implemented in 2025 and into 2026, unless you understand what happened with the DOGE purchase. And here's why. Here's a way of understanding it. The Romans had a fighting force called the Legion. That was the central fighting force in the Roman world. And when the Legions lost a battle, the survivors would be brought into the barracks by their leadership, and one in 10 of them would be publicly executed in front of their colleagues.
(13:57):
And the idea was if you publicly execute, you decimate one in 10 of the legioneers, it's going to provide a tremendous incentive to the survivors to fight better next time so they aren't decimated. And the more I've reported this, the more I've talked about it, the more I think that this was our version of decimation. We didn't actually execute one in 10 federal workers, but we took away the income security and the career stability of one in seven federal workers, 300,000 people. And the message was clear to the survivors, you better abide by the rules or you're out. So if you then have a public health agenda that's completely antithetical to public health, which RFKs is, if you've decimated the CDC and the NIH, at least some of the survivors will kowtow to the new rules. They may not believe in their heart of hearts vaccines are bad.
(14:49):
They may not believe the new dietary guidelines or any of the other snake oil that RFK is peddling, but a goodly number of them will go along because they want to keep their jobs. If you want to turn the function of the EPA on its head, which they've done, so that it's now basically a polluters charter, they've said they're no longer going to even consider the cost in human lives of pollution when they're deciding whether or not to regulate. If you want the EPA to do that, well, if you fire a large number of EPA staffers, again, some of the survivors, not all, but some will go along in crafting this insane new agenda. Same with the National Park Service. If you fire a thousand National Parks people, which they did, some of the survivors are going to be so terrified that when you ask them to scrub the National Park Service letters and memos and plaques that talk about slavery, because even the mention of slavery is seen as somehow bowing down to DEI.
(15:50):
Well, some of them will resign in protest, but a goodly number of them will say, "All right, you want me to rewrite to make invisible the story of slavery?" I'm good with that, and they'll do it. So if you want to understand how we've reached this moment of utter irrationality and utter authoritarianism in the federal government, understanding that dog softened up the civil service is a pretty good entry point into that conversation. So that's why I'd say, look, if you want to really get a handle on what Trump 2.0 means, read my book, read what happened in early 2025, and it will help you. It will give you a roadmap to understanding what is happening in 2026.
Andrea Chalupa (16:30):
I remember it was just such a gleeful mass murder. They were so gleeful about it and it was like a DOGE asteroid hit our country.
Sasha Abramsky (16:43):
Well, yeah, look, I'll hold this up. I don't know if the audience can see, but on the front of the book is a picture of Elon Musk with a chainsaw.
Andrea Chalupa (16:51):
Yes.
Sasha Abramsky (16:51):
That's a real image. Elon Musk went to the Conservative Political Action Conference Convention and he wielded a chainsaw on stage. He literally danced with the chainsaw and he started gloating about how he had been chopping up agencies like USAID into little pieces. Well, A, it looked ridiculous and B, was an insane agenda. I mean, USAID had had bipartisan support for 60 years, more than 60 years, since its founding by John Kennedy. And the reason USAID had bipartisan support is for not very much money, a few tens of billions of dollars a year, which in the federal budget is almost nothing. It was saving millions of lives a year all over the world. It was introducing anti-starvation treatments, vaccines for all kinds of diseases from polio through to measles, treatments for diseases from tuberculosis to HIV/AIDS.
(17:47):
It was researching potential pandemics. It was stopping disasters from cascading. It was doing a huge amount of good and saving millions of lives. And Trump must decided this was antithetical to their agenda. And in the space of two weeks, they bulldozed USAID out of existence. And one of the people I write about in my book was a very senior USAID person called Tali Lind. And if you read the book, you'll see what happened to her, not just over the space of one week, two weeks, three weeks, but over the space of the first half of 2025. And in her story, you'll see what happened when USAID was abandoned. Because you talked about this being a sort of murderous project. Quite literally, in the case of USAID, we know there's a body count. There are mathematical modelers at Boston College and other places that are tracking in real time global excess mortality rates because of the ending of USAID and all its contracts around the world.
(18:41):
And it's many, many hundreds of thousands already, and it's predicted to be over the coming decade, many, many millions. Those are avoidable deaths. They're deaths that we chose as a country to deem acceptable because our government no longer is willing to fund overseas aid. And so again, that's another part of the story, but it's something you'll read about in the pages of American carnage.
Andrea Chalupa (19:05):
And when he was going through this, did you report or get any insight into his drug use?
Sasha Abramsky (19:12):
No, that was not a part of what I was working on, but it's in the public record. He's admitted and acknowledged that he was using ketamine. Well, that's an incredibly destabilizing drug. You don't want somebody who's got a ketamine problem to be making major decisions around the functioning of government and around the income or non-income of hundreds of thousands of federal workers. So no, I didn't study that sort of as a separate issue, but I mean, look, Musk has posted about it on X. There's been voluminous writings by journalists and others about this, but I think in a way, that's a secondary story. The biggest story is must attitude to empathy, because a lot of this is about whether or not governments should care for people who are vulnerable, should care for people on the margins. The kinds of government agencies that were decimated were the agencies that dealt with inequality.
(20:13):
So it was things like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helps poor people when they're being preyed on by predatory lenders, or NIOSH, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, which helps workers when they're at risk of being exposed to cancer producing chemicals and toxics, or USAID, which helps people in poor countries, as I said, to access basic medicines or the CDC, which works to create public health infrastructure. But Musk doesn't believe in any of that. And we know he doesn't because he's posted on social media that too much empathy equals civilization or death. Well, I mean, I don't know what kind of upbringing Elon Musk had, but what a terrible thing. I mean, what a terrible thing to become.
Andrea Chalupa (20:55):
A Nazi upbringing in South Africa.
Sasha Abramsky (20:57):
Yeah. I mean, quite literally, but the idea that you would inculcate in a young kid the notion that if you can empathize or sympathize with vulnerable, poor people, that makes you somehow weak and somehow prone to being preyed on and somehow prone to having your civilization being destroyed. What an ugly, insane, and above all myopic agenda, but that is Must's agenda. He believes that empathy is a bad thing in government. And I think that explains a huge amount of the direction that Doj took. And again, we can personalize it and say, this is all about Musk, but it really isn't. I mean, this is about Musk, but it's also about the entire oligarchy surrounding Donald Trump. It is the wealthiest cabinet in American history. Trump is the wealthiest president in American history. Trump has been using his power to accumulate more and more and more wealth and then using that wealth to feed back into his power.
(21:52):
So he's created this extraordinary loop for himself and for the oligarchs, the tech oligarchs, the crypto oligarchs, the people who are redefining at speed what American society and by extension global society looks like. And this is their agenda. They don't believe in anything that stands in the way of ultimate profit. No regulations, no public health concerns, nothing is allowed to get in the way of a quick short buck. And I think one of the wondrous things, I use wondrous not in a sort of admirable way, but I'm amazed when I look at this that you have two megalomaniacs, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, both of whom quite literally think they have the right and the ability to rule and to reshape the world at their win. And both of them at the same time ended up with an extraordinary outsized amount of political power in Washington DC.
(22:48):
And we saw, I mean, it was almost like a real time, real life experiment. We saw the damage that can be done when megal and maniacs are given unfettered charge over the US government, and it's really an ugly spectacle.
Andrea Chalupa (23:05):
If somehow, by some miracle, a small D Democrat president wins in 2028, do they have a mandate and a path to bring back those 300,000 jobs?
Sasha Abramsky (23:20):
No, not really. It's much easier to break things than to fix things. Always has been, always will be. You can recreate agencies, but those agencies took decades to fully get up to speed. USAID would be a case in point. It took years and years and years to create the global infrastructure, the contracts with local providers, the expertise, the people who could distribute vaccines. None of that stuff came easily, and it took the goodwill and trust of local public health authorities to get it together. All of that goodwill and trust was shredded in the space of two or three weeks in early 2025. The contracts were voided. People who thought they had jobs suddenly didn't have jobs. People who thought they had a legal contract with the US government that would fund their work, suddenly they were being told by the US government, "We don't actually abide by our own contracts anymore." Well, that's absolutely stunning for the US government to renege on already existing contracts.
(24:16):
So all of that expertise and all of that goodwill has gone. Same thing with the scientists. There are thousands upon thousands of highly skilled scientists who were just let go or were humiliated and then let go from the CDC, from the NIH, from EPA, NOAA and all these other agencies. Well, they're not going to hang around. Some of them will go to state governments, some will go to private sector, and some of them will go overseas because there are many countries, including the European Union block and including Canada and including Australia who've made it abundantly clear, we're open for business. If your government is shortsighted enough to fire you and to ignore your science and your research, we'll take you on. And so they're going elsewhere. So when we say, "Well, is it easy to recreate?" The answer is no, because we were in this remarkably privileged position from World War II all the way through to the early 21st century where we were the, in a sense, the masters of the universe.
(25:15):
Everybody with skills wanted to come and work in America. Many of those people with skills wanted to use those skills to work for the United States government. The entire world was willing to send us money to fund our debt and thus our consumption because we were seen as a trustworthy country with a stable economy and with good researchers in government who would keep that economy stable. All of that's gone. All of that is gone. So yes, we can recreate certain parts of what was lost. More importantly, we can create new things rather than sort of seeking to go back. We can actually look for new institutions and new engagements with the world. So I'm not sort of saying this is all doom and gloom. We may end up in a better place in five or 10 or 15 years, but we're not going to end up in the same place as...
Andrea Chalupa (26:03):
I do want to point out Obama won the Pulitzer ... Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in, what was it, 2008, just by not being George W. Bush. And so I feel like if America survives this and we get a small D Democrat into the White House, I feel like there will be some encouragement, some sort of show of welcome back America on one condition that you start reforming yourselves. But I feel like there's so much need in the world, and I know with the four years of a Democrat presidency, we would be able to build out a lot of those structures again. I have fought for federal grants before, and I know that there's a lot of great talent out there. So I think I'm optimistic that we could rebuild. What I actually dread more is what we experienced under Biden, where we all ... Biden told us, vote for me, I'm going to protect the soul of this country, and then let Merrick yor Garland sit on his hands while the January 6th traitor got away with trying to overthrow our democracy of the violence.
(27:14):
But I wanted to ask you about some of these characters that became notorious through DOGE, most famously Big Balls. Do you have any insight into the sort of Hitler youth that hung out around Elon Musk that was doing a lot of the prying through our private records and so on, and were completely taken care of. There are all these reports that they were having these lavish dinners and really enjoying themselves while being addled on all sorts of drugs, late into the night working, axing our entire government. So can you tell us a little bit about ... I call them the Hitler youth. So have you had any insight into the DOGE Hitler youth, like Big Balls, whatever happened to that guy.
Sasha Abramsky (28:03):
Guy? Yeah. I mean, look, the fact that we call him Big Balls says it all, we don't know the guy's real name. I mean, some people know his name, his parents know his real name, but in the public imagination, this kid is known as Big Balls. And I think that says something that these were young tech bros, very highly skilled in the computer world. They came out of the Ivy Leagues or the top state universities like UC Berkeley. They were very good at one thing. And one thing they were good at was coding and accessing information using computers, but none of them were government experts. They hadn't gone through courses in constitutional government. They hadn't gone through courses and the separation of powers between the executive and the legislator and the courts. And frankly, they gave no sign of caring. So when they sort of bulldozed into government agencies, often backed by US Armed Marshals, and they would force their way into the computer systems of those agencies, and then they would get all of this information.
(28:56):
There was no sense of limits, and constitutional government is definitionally about limits, that even if you can do something technically, it doesn't mean you have a moral or ethical or legal right to do it, but they didn't respect those moral, ethical, or legal limits. They may not have even known about them because they were behaving like fast charges. And you said they were Hitler youth. And some of them, I think there's a lot of evidence. Some of them were ideologically very white wing and they were posting very inflammatory racial and sexual sexist stuff on their social media accounts. But I think a lot of them were more apolitical. They just didn't think in terms of politics. They were given this project and the project was slash government by quota, essentially, find the low hanging fruit, find the people with least job protections, and then fire them on mass, make up whatever excuses you can.
(29:39):
Say they're being fired for poor performance, whatever the excuse is, just get rid of them and get rid of them quickly. And they did it and they did it not because they were skilled at government, they did it because they were skilled at hacking computer systems. And so they were able to access all this information that had been quite carefully compartmentalized. And it's called the Department The government efficiency, it really didn't have very much to do with efficiency at all because if you fire by quota, you fire the wrong people quite apart from anything else. You fire the people who are new to government, in other words, fresh blood and any government agency, any agency full stop wants fresh blood always coming in. You want young up and comers. But the people with lease protections are the new hires. So young people got fired. But the second group with the least protections are the people who are going up the chain the fastest, the most ambitious, the most successful, the most skillful, people who go from one job to the next to the next.
(30:32):
And each step of the ladder, as they go up, they're a new employee. So you could have been with an agency 20 years, but if you're in a new job at the wrong moment, you're what's called a probationary employee and you're easy to fire. So they fire the young people, then they fire the most highly skilled workers, the ones who are going up the chain, and then they fired veterans because veterans get preferential hiring into the civil service after they end their term with the military. And oftentimes they're middle aged, but they're new to the civil service. And so you had a culling of thousands and thousands of veterans who were also deemed to be probationary employees. Well, none of that makes government run more efficiently. What it does do is terrify the civil service into compliance with the MAGA agenda. And I think the DOGE people realized that they were good at information hacking and therefore they sort of fed their offerings to Musk on a daily basis.
(31:23):
Musk wanted people fired. Big Balls and his colleagues would go into the agencies, get the information that would allow the firings to take place. But the other thing it did was it gave information to Elon Musk and to Elon Musk cronies. And that in the long run may be even more damaging because we all have vast amounts of our personal information in one or other government agency. We've paid taxes, so our social security information is in there. If we're over the age of 65, Medicare and healthcare information is in. If we've used public benefits like Medicaid or food stamps or unemployment, all of that stuff is in government databases. And now it's all in Elon Musk databases. So one way of looking at DOGE is it was probably the greatest data breach or heist of data in global history, that all of the data of 330 million Americans was exposed by the breakdown of all the protocols in government that DOGE bulldozed through.
(32:23):
And I think that's a huge risk to each and every one of us because it means that some really unsavory actors basically took our data and we don't know what they're going to do with it. We don't know what they've already done with it, except we have hints. We know that it's being used to help ICE in tracking down and hunting immigrants. We assume it's being used to monitor and identify protestors. There's no reason to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt that they're handling this information wisely or responsibly because they haven't done anything wisely or responsibly. Everything they can do over the top, they have done over the top. And we have to assume it's the same with how they use information.
Andrea Chalupa (33:02):
Yes. And Big Balls, real name, Edward Coristine, he jumped across to many various departments after DOGE, getting his hands on everything, including Social Security, a whistleblower report from last August 2025, claims that Edward Coristine hacked the social security numbers and other personal information of 300 million Americans and uploaded it to a vulnerable cloud server where it could easily be hacked and lead to all sorts of crimes of identity, theft and fraud and so on. 300 million Americans, there's about 330 million of us. So I'm guessing the 30 million they didn't target were probably the people that voted for them. I don't know. But there's speculation that they could also use this to wipe people off the voter rolls and to force some sort of larger ... Because Trump is like trying to force the states to submit their voter rolls. They want to get all that information and maybe they want to crosscheck it with these 300 millions.
(34:15):
Maybe Big Balls Ed Coristine has some big plan he's running to try to create chaos at the polls where you show up and your name's no longer on the list and you can't cast a ballot or you have to cast a provisional ballot that Trump's goon squad of lawyers will then challenge in court. So do you foresee all of this data as possibly being taken, stolen, manipulated in order to suppress the vote in some way?
Sasha Abramsky (34:43):
Absolutely. I mean, in a younger life, when I was in my 20s and 30s, I did a lot of work on the criminal justice system. And one of the things I studied and actually wrote a book on was voter purges because in a lot of states, especially in the deep south, if you had a criminal conviction, you can't ever vote again. Florida was one of those states. They've changed it a little bit in the years since, but there were 13 states where once you had a felony record, it was extremely hard to ever get the right to vote. And in the run up to the George Bush elections in 2000 and 2004, Florida in particular, which was being governed by Jeb Bush, George Bush's brother, moved very aggressively to what they called purging the voter walls. So they were trying to overlap lists of people with criminal convictions with lists of people in Florida on the voter rolls.
(35:32):
But the thing is, there's no easy match. So you get an awful lot of false positives. You get people who have a similar name to somebody with a criminal conviction or lived at a similar address. And you end up with an abundance of people being disenfranchised who even if you believe in felon disenfranchisement, shouldn't be disenfranchised because they're the wrong person. And that is at the very least likely to happen if you have big bulls and his colleagues at speed channeling data about voter rolls to all these government agencies or to MAGA affiliated groups that have an enormous incentive to challenge people on the voter rolls. And so yes, in the run up to 2026 and 2028, it's extremely likely you're going to have organized campaigns where people are trying to mix a match and saying, "Well, we found your name on one role of suspected undocumented immigrants or whatever it might be and another name on the voter role, and we're going to mix and match, assume it's the same person, and therefore we're going to take you off the voter role." And that happened to hundreds of thousands of people during the felon disenfranchisement purchase.
(36:41):
There's no reason to assume it won't happen to hundreds of thousands or millions in the immigrant purchase that we're likely to see. Now again, I don't want people to sort of listen to me and then say, "Well, why should I bother voting?" Quite the opposite. If you have a right to vote, you should absolutely defend that right to vote. And if people are going to try and intimidate you into not voting by mixing and matching these databases, sue, because if you have a right to vote and you let the government deprive you of that right, you are losing one of the great, great participatory benefits of citizenship. So I don't want my people listening to this to go away thinking, "Oh, I shouldn't vote. I can't be bothered to vote." I want people to say, "I will protect my rights because the government clearly isn't going to protect my rights.
(37:33):
I will protect my rights and if need be, I will get lawyers to help me protect my rights." And I think that is the only way around the misuse of this data that's likely to happen.
Andrea Chalupa (37:45):
Do you think that Elon Musk did anything in the 2024 election other than the usual Republican rat fucking to try to suppress the vote? It was a close election yet again with Trump. Obviously they had a lot of disinformation. It was a bad year for incumbents around the world, black woman running for office in America, and of course it was a really weird election with Biden dropping out last minute. So there are all these unusual factors in it. So of course, maybe it was a fair and square election on top of the voter suppression that already exists, but there was speculation that Elon Musk was doing things. There was Starlink acting up. Did you get a sense of any of that given your deep expertise on these topics?
Sasha Abramsky (38:31):
I mean, that is sort of a little bit outside my wheelhouse from this past election cycle. I wasn't focusing on manipulation of the vote by Musk. I've read the same reports you've read. There are certainly some reports that sort of say, "Well, Musk may have played around with this, that and the other." I haven't studied it and therefore I can't comment on it. That wouldn't be fair. But I do think that what we do know is that Musk was extremely good at micro targeting what are called infrequent voters and he was extremely good at accessing their resentments and at fueling their resentments with a stream of misinformation. And he turned X in particular into essentially an agitprop machine, a nonstop 24 hour a day propaganda machine for the outright. And he unleashed Grock, this ghastly AI system, which keeps mimicking Nazi propaganda. And there've been so many stories about this that Grock sort of leans Nazi.
(39:27):
Well, A, it's bizarre and B, it's deeply disconcerting if one of the major AI entry points into the internet is mimicking Nazi language and that seems to have must imprint on it. So whether he was physically or technically manipulating vote counts and vote tallies, I think that's secondary to the fact that we know without a shadow of a doubt that he was feeding vast amounts of misinformation into the political machine. And we know that the Trump team thrives on misinformation, which is why they're against any attempt to regulate and to hold accountable social media companies. It's why they're against any and every attempt to regulate AI. Their agenda relies on a constant drip, drip, drip of misinformation and falsehood into the political discourse. And that makes democracy incredibly difficult because the more they do that, the more sort of the boundaries between truth and falsehood get blurred and the more the boundaries between right and wrong get blurred.
(40:33):
And at the end of the day, this becomes a game of raw power who has more power to fuel the misinformation rivers that we're now seeing. And at the moment, Trump and Musk are immensely good at using social media and using AI to fuel misinformation.
Andrea Chalupa (40:51):
Do you think we're going to have free and fair elections in the midterms?
Sasha Abramsky (40:56):
If the people stay engaged, yes. But if we sit back and say there's nothing we could do and watch as Trump sort of ramps up the rhetoric about a national emergency and ramps up the rhetoric about executive orders that will ban mail-in voting and demand proof of citizenship at the polls and all this stuff that he's talking about, then it's going to be harder and harder and harder. And Trump has certainly mulled, he mulled in 2020 and he certainly talked aloud this time around again about using either National Guard or the military to seize ballot boxes in cities or states where things are going against him. Well, as soon as that happens, the concept of a genuinely fair election goes out the window entirely. So if you're asking me, could I place odds on whether or not we have a fair election? No, I can't do that.
(41:43):
But I think there's at least a risk that if Trump thinks he's going to lose, he will do everything he can to put the fingers on the scale to ensure that he doesn't.
Andrea Chalupa (41:55):
Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by signing up at the truth teller level or higher on Patreon. Discounted annual memberships are available and you can give the gift of membership. Get bonus shows, invites to exclusive events, all our shows at free, and more at patreon.com/gaslit. That's patreon.com/gaslit. Thank you to everyone who supports the show.
(42:18):
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(42:47):
Gaslit Nation is produced by Andrea Chalupa. Our associate producer is Karlyn Daigle, and our founding production manager is a Nicholas Torres. If you like what we do, please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners.
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Original music on Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenberg, Nick Barr, Damien Arriaga, and Karlyn Daigle. Our logo design was generously donated by Hamish Smythe of the New York-based firm Order. Thank you so much, Hamish.
(43:17):
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