Disney spent 18 months negotiating to create a digital version of Dwayne Johnson for the live-action Moana film. Johnson agreed. The technology was ready. Then Disney’s lawyers killed the whole thing—not because of privacy concerns or actor rights, but because they worried parts of the film might end up in the public domain.
This is exactly what we predicted would happen. While everyone obsessed over whether AI training infringes copyright, the more fascinating question was always what happens when AI-generated works can’t get copyright protection at all. Early cases established that copyright only covers human-created works, and the Copyright Office has since clarified that most AI-generated images have no copyright protection (with limited exceptions depending on human creativity added). This should be a boon for the public domain.
Remember the Hollywood strikes from a few years ago? Actors demanded stronger copyright protections, convinced that was their shield against AI replacement by the studios. At the time, I argued they had it backwards. The lack of copyright in AI-generated works actually served to protect actors better than any new law could—because copyright-obsessed studios would never risk having their precious IP fall into the public domain.
Turns out I was right. A new report reveals that Disney—the company that spent decades lobbying to extend copyright terms to protect Mickey Mouse—abandoned a deepfake Dwayne Johnson project purely over public domain fears.
Johnson approved the plan, but the use of a new technology had Disney attorneys hammering out details over how it could be deployed, what security precautions would protect the data and a host of other concerns.They also worried that the studio ultimately couldn’t claim ownership over every element of the film if AI generated parts of it, people involved in the negotiations said.
Disney and Metaphysic spent 18 months negotiating on and off over the terms of the contract and work on the digital double. But none of the footage will be in the final film when it’s released next summer.
This is kind of hilarious on multiple levels. As predicted, that one simple trick (AI-generated works being in the public domain) actually acts as a tool against Hollywood relying on AI tools. The actors who called for stronger copyright got it backwards. Stronger copyright would, as always, give more power to the studio who would control the copyright and use it to squeeze more out of actors for less.
The fact that it’s public domain actually gives the actors much more power over how studios can use AI.
Of course, studios shouldn’t be so damned afraid of using public domain works. If some bits of the movie are not covered by copyright it’s not going to diminish people’s interest in seeing the full official release via authorized means. It might just mean that some clips are used by fans to remix it in fun ways, possibly driving more attention.
This is the beautiful irony of copyright maximalism eating itself: Disney’s own obsession with controlling every frame of content now prevents them from using the very technology they hoped would let them replace human performers. The actors who called for stronger copyright protections got exactly what they needed—just not how they expected.
Once again, weaker copyright serves creators better than the iron grip of the middlemen who profit from aggregating and controlling their work.
It’s funny just how often the actions of so-called “strong men” actually show just how scared and fragile they are. And if you want a more specific example of what I’m talking about, you can typically tell when a national government is feeling scared or weak, because that usually comes along with restrictions on a free and open internet. Worried that your horror-show of a government from a human rights standpoint might generate pushback and protests? Construct the Great Firewall of China. Concerned that social media sites might serve as rallying points against your election in Brazil? Have the actual police actually police the internet for anything you don’t like.
Launched a war of aggression against your neighbor because you thought you could annex an entire country in a few months, only to find out that you’re in a prolonged war of attrition that your own people might get severely tired of? Well, then you do what the Kremlin did, and iteratively crackdown on internet access and freedoms over several years. And Putin isn’t stopping.
Russia appears to be degrading performance or access to some targeted internet sites, such as YouTube, while also building out state-controlled alternatives to Western technology, which will inevitably be banned.
YouTube videos that won’t load. A visit to a popular independent media website that produces only a blank page. Cellphone internet connections that are down for hours or days. While it’s still possible to circumvent restrictions by using virtual private network apps, those are routinely blocked, too.
Authorities further restricted internet access this summer with widespread shutdowns of cellphone internet connections and adopting a law punishing users for searching for content they deem illicit.
They also are threatening to go after the popular WhatsApp platform while rolling out a new “national” messaging app that’s widely expected to be heavily monitored.
So it’s a three-pronged approach, designed purely to silence dissent and prevent the distribution of anti-government speech online as well as any coordination from opposition groups that could occur there. The banning or degradation of websites controls the information Russian citizens will see, the attacks on VPNs prevents them from getting around that control, and the mandated use of state-controlled messaging apps ensures that Russians won’t try to coordinate dissent activities online or, if they mistakenly do, provide the Russian government with a way to monitor that activity.
Starting next month, all new smartphones sold in Russia will come pre-installed with MAX, a government-developed messaging and services app. Officials describe MAX as Russia’s answer to China’s WeChat: an all-in-one platform for chatting, posting updates, making payments, and accessing government services.
The Kremlin has already begun testing MAX in schools, with authorities hinting it could soon become mandatory for teachers, parents, and even students. Experts warn that this level of integration will make MAX unavoidable in everyday Russian life.
Deputy head of Russia’s IT committee, Anton Gorelkin, recently warned WhatsApp to “prepare to leave the Russian market.” With nearly 100 million Russian users, losing WhatsApp would mark a massive shift in how people communicate.
Make no mistake, this is all a symptom of fear. Russia wouldn’t try to silence online information unless Russians were hungry for it and unless the Russian government didn’t want that information to get out. Ditto when it comes to the use of VPNs. And the Kremlin wouldn’t be trying to control how Russian citizens communicate online unless it feared it would be used to threaten government control. None of this represents strength, nor confidence. It’s fear.
Maybe this will work, though I doubt it, if given a long enough timeline for all of this to play out. The internet tends to route around censorship, as the saying goes, and I’m not sure the Russian people have been conditioned to accept the government’s word in the same way the Chinese people may have been.
But what I do know is that Putin and his government aren’t taking these actions because everything is going so well for them.
Two weeks into President Donald Trump’s second presidency, and just days after he pardoned hundreds of Capitol rioters, officials Trump had placed in charge of the Justice Department made a sweeping demand. They wanted the names of the thousands of FBI employees who had played a role in investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Fearing mass firings, or worse, retaliation by the people they helped prosecute, a group of agents scrambled to enlist a legal team who could stop the administration in court. Norm Eisen, a prominent ethics lawyer now leading dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration, agreed within hours to represent the agents pro bono, along with Mark Zaid, a veteran whistleblower attorney. For more firepower, the two approached the giant Chicago-based law firm Winston & Strawn, which has a history of providing free representation to people and organizations that squared off against Trump’s first administration.
But Winston declined to represent the FBI agents, three people with knowledge of the matter said. It was one of several cases Winston turned down in quick succession, they added, that would have pitted the firm against an openly retributive president.
Some of the country’s largest law firms have declined to represent clients challenging the Trump administration, more than a dozen attorneys and nonprofit leaders told ProPublica, while others have sought to avoid any clients that Trump might perceive as his enemies. That includes both clients willing to pay the firms’ steep rates, and those who receive free representation. Big Law firms are also refusing to take on legal work involving environmental protections, LGBTQ+ rights and police accountability or to represent elected Democrats and federal workers purged in Trump’s war on the “deep state.” Advocacy groups say this is beginning to hamper their efforts to challenge the Trump administration.
Their fears intensified after Trump signed a battery of executive orders aimed at punishing top firms over old associations with his adversaries. But as the Winston episode shows, Big Law began to back away from some clients almost the minute he returned to power. The country’s top firms remain deeply wary, even though the president has lost all four initial court challenges to those executive orders.
“The President’s Policy is working as designed,” said a lawsuit the American Bar Association filed against the administration in June. “Even as federal judges have ruled over and over that the Law Firm Orders are plainly unconstitutional, law firms that once proudly contributed thousands of hours of pro bono work to a host of causes — including causes championed by the ABA — have withdrawn from such work because it is disfavored by the Administration.”
The bar association itself has struggled to find representation, the lawsuit said. One unnamed firm, which has represented the association since the 1980s in lawsuits related to ABA’s accreditation of law schools, “is no longer willing to represent the ABA in any litigation against or potentially adverse to the Administration and its policies.” Sidley Austin, the sixth-ranked corporate firm by revenue in the world, has represented the ABA in at least five lawsuits over its accreditation practices since 1989.
The ABA and Susman Godfrey, which is representing the association in its lawsuit against the administration, declined to comment. Winston, Sidley and the White House did not respond to questions sent in writing.
Trump’s grievances with Big Law stem partly from its role in blocking his first-term agenda. In his executive order targeting Jenner & Block, a firm with close ties to the Democratic Party that fought Trump on transgender rights and immigration, he assailed the firm for allegedly “abus[ing] its pro bono practice to engage in activities that undermine justice.” Another firm, WilmerHale, was where former Special Counsel Robert Mueller worked before and after leading the Russian interference investigation.
The executive orders barred attorneys working for the firms from entering federal buildings where they represent clients, terminated the firms’ government contracts, revoked partners’ security clearances and required government contractors to disclose if they work with the targeted firms. Perkins Coie, one of Trump’s first targets, began to lose business “within hours,” its suit said. The judge who halted the executive order against WilmerHale wrote that the firm “faces crippling losses and its very survival is at stake.”
“I just think that the law firms have to behave themselves,” Trump said at a press conference in late March.
Nine corporate law firms behaved themselves in the form of reaching public settlements with Trump. The deals require them to provide $940 million in total of pro bono support for Trump-approved causes. There has been no public indication of the White House calling on them to perform specific work, and Trump has not released any new executive orders against firms since April.
Yet organizations that challenge the government are still feeling the chill.
“There’s been a real, noticeable shift,” said Lauren Bonds, the executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, a national nonprofit that brings lawsuits over alleged police abuse and was a frequent pro bono client of Big Law.
In November, as soon as Trump won reelection, a top firm that was helping NPAP develop a lawsuit against a city’s police force abruptly stopped attending all planning calls, Bonds said. Later, the firm became one of the nine that struck a deal with Trump, after which the firm half-heartedly told Bonds, she said, that it would reconsider the case in the future. Bonds declined to identify the firm.
Activist nonprofits have long relied on free representation because they typically lack the resources to mount major lawsuits on their own. Civil rights cases in particular are complex undertakings usually lasting years. Many call for hundreds of hours spent deposing witnesses and performing research, as well as upfront costs of tens of thousands of dollars. Big Law, with its deep ranks of attorneys and paying clients to subsidize their volunteer work, is in a unique position to help. In exchange, the work burnishes the firm’s reputation and serves as a draw for idealistic young associates.
“I know that [cases] have been shot down that in Trump Administration 1, firms would crawl over each other to get our name at the top of the case so that we could get the New York Times headline,” said a Big Law partner whose firm has not been one of Trump’s targets. “That’s the environment. What’s become radioactive has grown from a very small number of things to anything this administration and Trump might notice and get angry about.”
Jill Collen Jefferson, the president and founder of Julian, a small nonprofit that investigates civil rights violations, has felt the chill too.
Three years ago, Julian partnered with the elite law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the country’s No. 1 corporate firm most years by per-partner revenue, to bring lawsuits against the town of Lexington, Mississippi, and its police force for racial discrimination.
“It wasn’t hard at all to get help,” she recalled. George Floyd’s death had raised public support for police accountability, and the details Julian was exposing in Lexington were especially grim. The police chief was secretly recorded promising to cover for a fellow officer if he killed someone “in cold blood.” A DOJ investigation released in 2024 found Lexington police operated in “a system where officers can relentlessly violate the law.” (The town’s board fired the chief, Sam Dobbins, over the recording. In a court filing, Dobbins said he was not guilty of “any actionable conduct” and denied Julian’s characterization of the recording, asserting that “the recording speaks for itself.” Julian’s litigation is still ongoing.)
Since January, when Trump began gutting police accountability measures, Jefferson’s efforts to recruit pro bono help have yielded almost no commitments. The official explanation many firms offer is that they lack the capacity to help, she said, though lawyers at those firms have privately told her that was false. Wachtell did not respond to a request for comment.
Jefferson now doubts Julian’s ability to bring a police abuse lawsuit it had planned to file before the statute of limitations expires this month.
“It’s been a nightmare,” she said. “People don’t want to stand up, and because of that, people are suffering.”
NPAP ultimately joined forces with another civil rights organization to salvage the case after its co-counsel disappeared from planning calls last November. But the suit will be “less robust” without the firepower of a major law firm, Bonds said. And NPAP’s capacity to file future suits is in question. Civil rights attorneys in NPAP’s network have developed novel legal theories for challenging arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement under state constitutions, but they lack enough outside partnerships.
“There are cases that aren’t being brought at a time when civil rights abuses are maybe at the highest they’ve been in modern times,” Bonds said.
Big Law was often in the vanguard of fighting Trump’s first administration. After he signed the 2017 travel ban affecting several predominantly Muslim countries, partners from Kirkland & Ellis and Davis Polk rushed alongside hundreds of other lawyers to international airports to help travelers stuck in limbo. Kirkland teamed up with the LGBTQ+ legal advocacy organization Lambda Legal to challenge Trump’s transgender military ban.
Now, Davis Polk is among the many firms that are avoiding pro bono immigration cases, The New York Times reported. Kirkland, by some measures the top moneymaker in Big Law, entered a deal with Trump to provide $125 million in pro bono work, and the firm is notably absent from Lambda’s nearly identical challenge to Trump’s reinstated ban on transgender military service members. Kirkland and Davis Polk did not respond to requests for comment.
Winston & Strawn’s annual pro bono reports show how its focus — or at least, its language — has changed. The firm’s 2023 impact report highlighted its advocacy on behalf of a transgender competitive marathoner. “I am also pleased to report that Winston dedicated 30% of our pro bono hours to racial justice and equity matters in 2023,” nearly double its share in 2020, wrote Angela Smedley, the pro bono committee chair. The 2024 report, published after Trump’s reelection, contained zero mentions of “equity” and spotlighted attorneys who helped small nonprofits navigate “complex mergers and business challenges.”
Eisen and Zaid, the lawyers representing the FBI agents, themselves became the target of a presidential memorandum in March that revoked their access to classified material. Both have aggravated Trump for years. Zaid represented a whistleblower who helped bring about Trump’s first impeachment.
Zaid sued to restore his security clearance in May, in a case that is ongoing. His lawyer, Abbe Lowell, is a high-profile defense attorney who left Winston this spring in order to form his own firm. Lowell said his goal is to represent those “unlawfully and inappropriately targeted.” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won a fraud judgment against Trump and is now a target of his DOJ, was one of his first clients.
“The Administration’s attempt at retribution against Mark for doing his job — representing whistleblowers without regard to politics — is as illegal as its similar efforts against law firms that have been enjoined in every case,” Lowell wrote in an email to ProPublica.
Good-government groups and small and mid-sized law firms have stepped into the breach, helping to file hundreds of lawsuits against the Trump administration. And the four firms that sued Trump over his executive orders are devoting thousands of pro bono hours to others challenging the administration. Perkins Coie, for example, has replaced Kirkland as Lambda Legal’s partner in challenging Trump’s transgender military ban.
But until they build up the capacity to fully replace Big Law, Bonds said, some of the administration’s legally dubious actions will go unchallenged.
“There’s a financial resources piece that we’re really missing when we can’t engage a firm,” Bonds said. “Even if there’s a big case and we feel really confident about it, we’ll just have to pass on it.”
Arrest/ticketing quotas have almost always been found illegal by courts. They used to be commonplace, but courts (at all levels) have generally ruled that quotas pervert incentives so much they encourage open, deliberate abuse of constitutional rights.
Enter the Trump administration, which only considers the Second Amendment to be sacrosanct. Trump deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has spent the early months of his return to office berating ICE for not being willing to raid more Home Depots while pressuring immigration agencies to deliver 3,000 migration-related arrests per day.
Obviously, this means DHS components no longer need to concern themselves with finding dangerous criminals. Anyone looking Latino enough is grist for the deportation mill, which leverages the inherent bigotry of the current administration, along with tons of questionable law enforcement techniques, to generate hundreds of arrests per day, with most of those slated for immediate removal.
Even so, ICE has still failed to hit the 3,000/day quota. And that means every day moves it further away from the Trump administration’s desire to remove 1,000,000 migrants a year from the United States. (*Brown people only. White “refugees” are welcomed to exploit white flight conspiracy theories to secure protective asylum.)
The administration is turtles all the way down, but with racist garbage instead of turtles. Deputy Ghoul Miller thinks 3,000 racially motivated arrests is good government business. Donald Trump – who’s always been a fan of unreasonable numbers so long as they’re big enough — thinks the Land of Free should just push Lady Liberty’s corpse into the sea and send at least 1,000,000 people seeking a better life to whatever hellhole is willing to turn deportees into dead people. And that’s why this government is doing steady migration business with places like El Salvador (overseen by another authoritarian “populist”) and South Sudan (Vietnam circa 1967 but with less water and more random missile fire).
Courts have been kind of reluctant to engage with the Trump administration. There are several reasons for this.
First, some courts seem actually gobsmacked that an American administration would do the sorts of things the Trump regime has been willing to do.
Second, courts are having trouble squaring this new reality with far more sedate court filings by litigants, meaning the government tends to be given more space to operate, even when it’s clearly in the wrong.
Third, courts are seeing their orders ignored by the Trump administration, which is extremely demoralizing for courts, not to mention for the hundreds of millions of Americans the courts are supposed to be protecting.
And that brings us to the Supreme Court. More courts are being dissuaded from challenging the open consolidation of executive power because it’s become extremely clear that the nation’s top court doesn’t really consider itself to be part of the checks and balances envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Instead, this lying ass court touts “originalism” in support of its action/inaction in subservience to the Second Coming of King George III, embodied by a guy in an ill-fitting white polo who openly cheats while playing a game no one but the people playing actually care about.
Not breaking news by Trump has been caught cheating at golf again. In just 7 months, he’s spent 43 days on the course, costing US taxpayers $60.2M. Golf courses are widely known as hotspots for organized crime and clandestine meetings or information drop offs.
The Trump administration internally has set a goal of deporting 1 million people during Trump’s first year and has changed ICE leadership personnel three times, according to the Washington Post.
At the end of May 2025, “Stephen Miller, a senior White House official, told Fox News that the White House was looking for ICE to arrest 3,000 people a day, a major increase in enforcement. The agency had arrested more than 66,000 people in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, an average of about 660 arrests a day,” reported the New York Times. Arresting 3,000 people daily would surpass 1 million arrests in a calendar year.
If there’s no actual quota, Trump admin officials wouldn’t be doing the things they’re doing. Getting 3,000 arrests per day would accomplish 1,000,000 arrests per year. Miller has applied pressure of his own, demanding to know why ICE isn’t just raiding any place that might contain non-whites, including (direct quote) “Home Depot.” And that’s why we were unfortunate enough to witness a Fallujah-style raid of a Los Angeles swap meet with plenty of military troops in tow. Unfortunately for the reanimated corpse that is Stephen Miller, this massive raid only resulted in a handful of arrests.
[W]hen federal judges pressed for details about that figure last week [3,000 per day arrest quota], the administration denied any such quota existed. The contradiction came in a lawsuit that alleged the intense pressure to rack up arrests had led ICE to conduct illegal sweeps in Los Angeles.
Judge Jia Cobb has already declared this quota to be illegal, ruling against the Trump administration in a lawsuit filed in Washington. Another federal judge in California (Trina Thompson) came to the same conclusion while blocking the administration’s arbitrary decision to end the protected status of thousands of refugees.
What does the administration have to say in response to these obvious rulings in favor of justice? Not much, actually. Just more of the same “might means right” wet-brain thinking that has always defined any Trump administration:
[O]n Friday, the Justice Department said no such orders had ever been given.
“DHS has confirmed that neither ICE leadership nor its field offices have been directed to meet any numerical quota or target for arrests, detentions, removals, field encounters, or any other operational activities that ICE or its components undertake in the course of enforcing federal immigration law,” a Justice Department attorney reported to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Wednesday.
It’s all a lie. And it’s an obvious lie. DOJ lawyers claim the quota directly attributed to Stephen Miller on multiple occasions is nothing more than conjecture by journalists quoting “anonymous sources.” It’s nice to know the Trump administration doesn’t actually believe Fox News employs any journalists, because this is what always goes ignored when Trump officials start pretending there are no deportation/arrest quotas in place:
While DOJ attorney Yaakov Roth attributed the quota claim to “anonymous reports in the newspapers,” he didn’t mention that Miller — Trump’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser — had publicly confirmed the 3,000-daily-arrest “goal” in the televised interview on Fox.
The Orwellians are alive and well. But they’re not the “Deep State.” They’re the officials demanding everyone acknowledge their version of the truth — the ones who view us as millions of inconvenient Winston Smiths that should be humiliated and silenced for daring to question the state. We are subject to a succession of racist, lying fucks. Meanwhile, Second Amendment enthusiasts are uttering their full support for encroaching authoritarianism, practically daring us to follow through with the prying of the guns from their cold, dead fingers.
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We’ve talked plenty about how Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) was always more about performative cruelty than actual efficiency. But a new Senate report reveals just how spectacularly DOGE failed at its supposed core mission while causing immeasurable human suffering in the process. The entire concept blew up more spectacularly than one of Musk’s Starships.
The numbers are damning. The report from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations shows that DOGE wasted at least $21.7 billion in just six months—between January 20 and July 18, 2025. But hey, at least they got to feel like they were “draining the swamp,” right?
As Senator Richard Blumenthal put it in the report’s release:
“This report is a searing indictment of DOGE’s false claims. At the very same time that the Trump Administration is cutting health care, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘savings,’ they have enabled DOGE’s reckless waste of at least $21.7 billion dollars.”
To recap the “efficiency”: Musk promised to save trillions, actually wasted over $21 billion. That’s some galaxy-brain efficiency right there.
To be fair, much of that “waste” comes from Musk’s Twitter-style “resign now and we’ll pay you for many months” plan to rid the government of employees. As the report notes, that cost the government $14.8 billion in salaries of people who couldn’t actually do any work and then another $6.1 billion from people DOGE fired. And I’m sure that DOGE-supporting MAGA types will try to claim that this is fine, because it’s a one-time cost and will lower government expenses going forward.
But that is untrue. Part of the problem here is that—contrary to the popular belief in MAGA circles—most people in the government were actually doing important work that the government needs to do. Firing all of them doesn’t change that. Every few weeks there are another set of stories about how the Trump admin has to scramble to try to rehire the people that DOGE fired.
Doing things that way almost certainly increases costs, because of the level of painful inconsistency and the need to convince workers to come back to this shitshow after being treated so horribly. And, when they won’t come back, then the government has to go out and find new people to fill those roles, which is also a very expensive proposition—and one the report didn’t even explore.
Not only was much of this wasteful, it was wasteful for the stupidest of reasons: much of this destruction was based on conspiracy theories that Musk found on social media.
The destruction of USAID was remarkable in that it did not reflect any sort of broad-based consensus. While other actors in Trump’s political environment—such as the Project 2025, or the budget blueprint from the Center for Renewing America, led by Trump’s budget chief Russ Vought—called for reductions in USAID spending, they did not seek to eliminate it. The assault on USAID seemed disproportionately driven by the beliefs of one person, Musk. And those beliefs were largely disconnected from the reality of what USAID did.
For example:
Musk said that 90% of USAID spending never reaches communities, implying that most funding was wasted. But this claim demonstrates a misunderstanding of the budget. While 10% of the budget goes to direct payments to local organizations, another 46% goes to funding to multilateral agencies and 31% to American companies and nonprofits, much of which goes to direct provision, such as HIV programs, anti-malaria products, and emergency food services.
Musk claimed that $50 million was spent to send condoms to Hamas. Trump repeated this false claim, as did members of Congress. The organization that receives the funds does provide family planning, but its USAID funds were providing emergency health support to refugees in Gaza.
Musk has repeated other conspiracy theories about USAID found online including that it helped to create COVID-19, is rigging elections, and manufacturing media consent.
Musk elevated claims that USAID was protected by journalists because it had been secretly funding the media, based on government subscription services to media outlets.
Musk was not atypical of the broader Trump movement, which held conspiratorial worldviews about other parts of government it labeled as “the deep state,” but the effect on USAID was the most immediate and consequential. Such views could have been easily debunked, had DOGE been willing to talk to and trust career officials. But Musk displayed deep distrust of civil servants, labeling USAID “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,” and “a criminal organization.”
Musk elevated these conspiracy theories to the mainstream on his social media platform X, reposting a small group of fringe accounts on X and promoting posts from Mike Benz, a former Trump administration official and key voice behind USAID conspiracy theories. Benz has argued that “USAID is notorious for funding the darkest, most controversial, most horrifying projects known to all of mankind” and Musk believed him. In the space of a year, Musk engaged with or elevated Benz’s messaging160 times. Unsurprisingly, Benz has also embracedwhite supremacypolitics.
The richest man in the world, put in charge of government efficiency, made life-and-death decisions based on conspiracy theories from fringe social media accounts. What could go wrong?
Well, everything, as it turns out.
DOGE’s crown jewel achievement was completely destroying USAID based on—and I feel the need to repeat this—conspiracy theories. A study published in The Lancet found that USAID had prevented 92 million deaths between 2001 and 2021. The agency’s destruction is now projected to cause 14 million avoidable deaths over the next five years, including 4.5 million children under age 5.
This is blood on the hands of Musk and the ridiculous nonsense peddlers he believed, rather than talking to actual experts.
In the southeastern African country of Malawi, U.S. funding cuts to the United Nations’ World Food Programme have “yielded a sharp increase in criminality, sexual violence, and instances of human trafficking” within a large refugee camp, U.S. embassy officials told the State Department in late April.
[….]
“We are living off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025,” Landis said. On a recent visit to a facility treating malnourished children younger than 5, she said she saw kids who were “walking skeletons like I haven’t seen in a decade.”
Makwindi says the termination of funding “was a shock” that baffles him to this day. He takes a generous view of the U.S. motivation: “I still believe that someone didn’t do due diligence and just terminated us.” Nuha Ceesay, Eswatini country director for the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), has a harsher assessment. What the Trump administration has done is akin to saying, “I am going to unplug this life support machine from you,” he says. “It is up to you to find an alternative, and whether you perish or not, that’s not my business.”
The “efficiency” here is breathtaking. Rather than deliver emergency food supplies to starving people, the Trump administration chose to incinerate them instead. According to the Senate report, $110 million worth of food aid and medical supplies are spoiling in warehouses, with some literally being trucked to France to be burned at taxpayer expense.
The waste caused by lost investment is perhaps most starkly illustrated by supplies purchased by USAID sitting in warehouses around the globe that sat rotting rather than supporting their intended recipients. In February, the USAID Office of Inspector General warned that hundreds of thousands of tons of goods were at risk of spoilage as a result of DOGE’s attempt to shutter the agency. By May, 66,000 metric tons of food valued at $98 million remained warehoused at multiple facilities in Djibouti, South Africa, Dubai and Houston. Recent reporting indicated that a portion (approximately 622 metric tons) of the 1,100 metric tons of food aid stored in Dubai was spared from destruction in June but the remaining 496 metric tons valued at $793,000.00 are to be “turned into landfill or incinerated” at a cost of $100,000.00 to taxpayers. Additionally, as of June, USAID had abandoned approximately $12.4 million worth of “contraceptives and HIV-prevention medications” in Belgium and Dubai. Approximately $9.7 million of these contraceptives stuck in Belgium were being “trucked to France” to be incinerated at a cost of $160,000.00 because USAID allegedly refused to sell or otherwise transfer them to a third-party distributor at anything less than “full market value.”
But wait, there’s more! The report details how DOGE’s bureaucratic “Defend the Spend” initiative—supposedly designed to eliminate waste—actually created massive new forms of red tape. NASA employees were forced to write “several detailed paragraphs, across multiple rounds of emails” just to purchase simple fastening bolts. The FAA required written justifications for window-washing and buying pens and pencils.
Efficiency!
And let’s not forget the comedy gold of forcing nearly a million federal employees to send weekly “5-things” emails justifying their existence. The Senate report estimates this pointless exercise wasted $155 million in lost productivity. The best part? OPM had no intention of actually reviewing these emails and eventually sent auto-replies saying its mailbox was full.
The demand for weekly accomplishment reports was an unnecessary waste of time, primarily because OPM, as an external agency outside the management chain of command, is ill-equipped to meaningfully assess the work of other agencies’ employees. Moreover, employees would be forced to redact or omit any specific details to avoid confidentiality concerns, further diminishing the utility of these reports. Beyond what should have been immediately apparent, the pointlessness of this exercise was underscored when OPM briefed agencies that it intended to do nothing with the emails, and then a few weeks later, sent automatic replies back to employees stating that its “mailbox is full and can’t accept messages now.” Although the project continued through May, approximately 13 weeks in, news emerged that this project was “dying a slow, quiet death” across the government with agencies no longer requiring weekly reports.
Want to see a bunch of inefficient waste created by DOGE?
This is what happens when you put conspiracy theorists in charge of complex systems. DOGE didn’t just fail at its stated mission—it actively made government less efficient while causing humanitarian catastrophes on a massive scale. And that’s just with USAID. We’re not even looking most of the other cuts. And the report only briefly mentions the likely impact on the economy of some of these slash and burn efforts:
The full extent of the waste and harm caused by DOGE’s disruptive activities is difficult to quantify because costs remain hidden and many of the consequences have yet to fully materialize. While some analyses, such as an independent review of DOGE’s cuts at just seven agencies—CFPB, NIH, USDA, USAID, IRS, ED, and DOJ—determined that these actions could result in over $10 billion in lost economic activity in the U.S., these figures only scratch the surface
They also note that they’re not even counting the legal costs incurred from the long and ever-growing list of lawsuits DOGE’s cuts have spurred, many of which have already resulted in losses for the federal government in court.
The broader lesson here is one we’ve seen repeatedly: when you prioritize performative cruelty over actual governance, you get neither efficiency nor effectiveness. You get waste, chaos, and suffering.
DOGE should go down in history as one of the most grotesquely incompetent government initiatives ever attempted. An agency supposedly created to eliminate waste that managed to waste billions in six months, create tremendous inefficiencies in the workforce, while destroying programs that actually worked and saved lives.
The only thing it efficiently accomplished was proving that putting conspiracy theorists and tech bros in charge of life-and-death decisions with no oversight, guardrails, or expertise is a recipe for disaster on an unprecedented scale.
But hey, at least Musk got to feel important for a few months while millions of people faced death and suffering. Efficiency!
We’ve well documented how the AOL–>AT&T->Warner Brothers->Discovery series of mergers were among some of the most destructive and pointless “business deals” ever conceived by modern man. Just decades of “savvy deal-making” that resulted in an increasingly shittier product.
The mergers resulted in bottomless layoffs, the closure of numerous valuable and popular brands and shows, and much worse product as incompetent, fail-upward executives shifted the company’s focus away from quality programming toward lowest-common-denominator engagement slop.
After endless chaos, the companies are effectively unwinding the original deal, splitting the media giant back into two companies: Warner Bros. and Discovery Global. The actually semi-valuable stuff — including HBO, HBO Max streaming, and their gaming properties will be part of a slimmed-down Warner Bros.
The more problematic albatross around the company’s neck, its dying cable networks (including TNT, CNN, HGTV and Animal Planet) will be spun off into Discovery Global. This will, violently overcompensated CEO David Zaslav insists, continue a legacy of excellence at the media giant:
“We will proudly continue the more than century-long legacy of Warner Bros. through our commitment to bringing culture-defining stories, characters and entertainment to audiences around the world,” Zaslav said.”
Part of this proud legacy, you might recall, included sidelining the HBO brand, which Zaslav initially claimed reflected a savvy evolution in the company’s thinking. Executives believed that the “the HBO name turns off many potential subscribers,” so they renamed their streaming service “Max” in the belief this would give them a fresh branding start.
Executives like Zaslav are all out of any sort of original ideas, assuming they had any in the first place. The kind of stuff that truly pleases customers (low prices, higher quality, improved customer support, better feature sets) costs money and erodes quarterly earnings and the goal of impossible growth.
So instead, these executives have embraced a purely extractive “growth for growth’s sake” mindset in which they pursue purposeless consolidation whose only function is to temporarily goose stock valuations, provide big tax cuts, and flimsily justify outsized compensation for fail-upward brunchlord media executives who fancy themselves savvy dealmakers (see the Ellison family and CBS).
And there’s been an entire generation of this, if you extend your view back to the original, equally disastrous AOL deal back in 2001. When the press covers these pointless deals, they very rarely think it’s worth mentioning the generation worth of carnage and layoffs this sort of consolidation always creates; a tone-deafness that itself is a direct result of consolidation and bad management.
Zaslav has stated repeatedly that he sees Trump 2.0 as an opportunity for more harmful media consolidation, which will only continue to make the underlying products worse. Wash, rinse, repeat, with absolutely nobody learning anything from the experience thanks to all manner of perverse financial incentives that have nothing to do with building real value or making your customers happy.
