Did Elon Just Shut Down Head Start? SEEMS LIKE.
And we're gonna put all Treasury payments 'on the blockchain'? Cool cool cool.
While America’s felonious figurehead was making plans for some ethnic cleansing in Gaza and pulling out Bibi Netanyahu’s chair like some kind of butler, Elon Musk and his sad virgin squad continued breaking shit and poking around inside classified government computer systems, and OMG he wants to put the whole US Treasury on a blockchain?? He Xitted:
Sure, Elon, let’s look at that code:
(a) A disbursing official in the executive branch of the United States Government shall—
(1) disburse money only as provided by a voucher certified by—
(A) the head of the executive agency concerned; or
(B) an officer or employee of the executive agency having written authorization from the head of the agency to certify vouchers;
Kinda sounds like that that’s what they’re doing, then!
Meanwhile, DOGE is not a government agency. Elon and his squad are not heads of an executive agency, or officers. According to Karoline Leavitt, Musk is a “special” temporary employee, so, no authority to disburse money. The executive branch legally must spend the money Congress has allotted. And who is paying his “DOGE Team”? They may be working for bags of Hot Takis and “resume building,” for all we know.
“Should the Treasury be put on the blockchain so this doesn’t happen?” queried Mario Nawfal, crypto consultant and Twitter Spaces host, and Musk squealed back, “Yes!”
At what point does the stock market start shitting its pants about the full faith and credit of the US government being compromised by some randoms? And, WHAT blockchain is he talking about? Bitcoin? Dogecoin? Some new blockchain he cobbled together himself? And then what, the government will pay out Social Security checks, T-bills and soldiers in Dogecoin? He could just funnel all the Treasury’s money to himself, who would stop him? Who the hell knows where all of this is headed, but at least one of his minions has administrative privileges at the Treasury Department’s payment system, so whatever it is, it is already happening, and there is a catalog of “contract terminations” and “lease terminations” on the DOGE Twitter feed.
Musk is now claiming: “We just renamed US Digital Services, created by Obama, to US DOGE Services, with a mandate to modernize all computer systems in the US government.” Oh.
And he and felon Michael Flynn are coming after the Lutherans:
Lutheran organizations partner with the government and get federal grants to resettle legally admitted refugees, and have for more than 85 years. They care for unaccompanied refugee children and partner with USAID (which Elon bragged was fed “into the woodchipper” last weekend), and also work in mental health and recovery services, food assistance, low-income housing, old folks’ homes, and disaster relief. It IS transparent, that’s how Flynn got the screen shot. There’s no evidence of any kind of “money laundering.” And why is “Lutheran” in “quotes”? Guess QAnon kook Michael Flynn gets to decide who is a Christian and who is not, and Sharpie out the parts of the Bible about not bearing false witness and being welcoming to foreigners.
Refugee programs — even the evangelical, non-Lutheran ones — are being shut down, and World Relief says that they are not even being reimbursed for work done before Trump assumed office.
ANNND whoever has been twiddling around in the payment system froze funds to Head Start programs across the country starting on January 28, and the system is still giving out “proxy error” and “system maintenance” messages, in spite of Karoline Leavitt saying “we expect the portal will be back online shortly.” You aren’t crazy, two judges just issued restraining orders against what one called “the Executive Orders’ wide-ranging, all-encompassing, and ambiguous ‘pause’ of critical funding.” But laws only matter if somebody enforces them, or if somebody even can. Elon Musk could have put all the code for the payment portal in a blender with some of RFK Jr.’s baby birds by now for all we know.
Like so much of the fuckery that’s going on, eliminating Head Start is right off the pages (starting at 482) of Project 2025, which confidently and falsely asserts that it has “little or no long-term academic value for children” and that it is dangerous because between 2015 and 2020 there were 1,029 “incidents” of kids unsupervised, released to the wrong adult, or of abuse. Of course the acceptable number of any of those things is zero, but the program served about 850,000 children a year, or more than four million children over five years. Children are literally more likely to be murdered at home than to be accidentally left on the playground in a Head Start program.
Head Start’s effectiveness has been studied exhaustively; kids who attended programs have been found to have better social-emotional, language, and cognitive development and better physical health, and are even more likely to graduate high school and go to college. The high return on investment there is why it’s had bipartisan support over six decades and 11 administrations, until recently, anyway. Ronald Reagan declared October “Head Start Awareness Month,” and Bushes H.W. and Dubya made shows of support too. It was a cornerstone of that “compassionate conservatism” that was going to help children pull themselves up by their little bootstraps and also get their parents back to work. Childcare is fucking expensive, averaging about $12,000 a year. And now programs are already shutting down, great.
Virginia community health centers are now closing too. God only knows what else has been shut off in the meantime.
Senator Tim Kaine and the Democrats have written a “what the hell is going on?” letter, so, there’s that.
OH, and the WSJ is now reporting that Musk’s rando “representatives” have been “working at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where they have gotten access to key payment and contracting systems,” lamping around under the auspices of looking for “fraud” and “waste.” Which states get the most federal dollars for Medicare and Medicaid? Why, the red ones! Just an observation.
Where this stops, nobody knows, but we will keep you posted.
PREVIOUSLY!
Drag this fucking shitbag out of the building! This is war and Republicans have declared it.
This fucker and his little goblin squad all belong in jail RIGHT NOW. This is fucking insane. If Republicans think their constituents aren't going to be hurt and pissed about this, they're fucking wrong.