The fact that this is still going is absolutely insane. If you haven’t followed along with us in the saga of Katy Perry, the famous pop star, and Katie Perry, a local Australian clothing designer, and the trademark dispute between the two, I will happily catch you up in truncated form. Please note that I will stick mostly to first names to avoid confusion as much as is possible. Here we go.
Katie Taylor in Australia has a clothing line sold under the label “Katie Perry.” She sued Katy Perry because the singer sold clothing merch during a 2014 tour in Australia, nearly 9 years later. She claimed at the time that this was trademark infringement, indicating that she was concerned that the public would be confused into thinking the concert merch was produced by Katie’s company (keep this in mind, it will be very important later). Amazingly, the courts agreed and ruled that Katy’s company, Kitty Purry, was liable for infringement. Katy appealed the decision, which Katie indicated was a personal attack against her, despite her having initiated the trademark lawsuit to begin with. The courts ended up finding for Katy on appeal, reversing the lower court’s ruling that infringement had occurred and canceling Katie’s trademarks as a result. Part of the reasoning for that included evidence that Katie had actually attempted to associate her clothing line with Katy, rather than the other way around, and that Katy had used the nom de plume for several years before Katie’s clothing line had even been formed.
You would think that might have been enough, but Katie appealed the ruling up to the High Court, arguing both that it was trademark infringement for Katy Perry to sell Katy Perry merch and that the rescinded trademarks should be restored. Well, the latest reporting on how that appeal is going seems to be centered around just how famous Katy was in 2008.
How famous was Katy Perry in 2008?
That’s one of the questions Australia’s highest court is considering, after hearing arguments in a long-running trademark dispute between the pop star and a fashion designer with almost the same name. Ms Taylor registered a trade mark in 2007, and says she didn’t know of Perry’s existence at the time.
But it was a different story when she re-registered a year later, with documents lodged in the High Court showing she’d heard I Kissed a Girl on the radio and bought it on iTunes. More than a decade on, Ms Taylor took the singer to court, accusing her of infringing the “Katie Perry” trademark by selling branded shoes, clothing and headwear while on tour in Australia.
I Kissed A Girl was released in April of 2008, for what it’s worth, and was the song that launched Katy Perry into worldwide stardom. Besides that, this nitpicking over the level of fame at a single point in time largely ignores the analysis of the lower court and its stance that the limited nature of the type of clothing Katy Perry was releasing was such that public confusion wasn’t going to be a thing. These were concert items, not to be confused with a more typical fashion line.
Which, on the question of Katie’s trademarks, is something her own lawyers appear to agree with.
The designer sat in the front row of the courtroom’s public gallery wearing a black jacket and pants, accompanied by her mother and stepfather.
Her lawyers argued shoppers were savvy enough to distinguish between the two spellings, and would not think Ms Taylor’s clothes were linked to the pop star.
Except that if that’s true, then what in the hell are we doing here? If we trust the public to not make an association between the two, then this isn’t causing public confusion, and there is no need to have brought the trademark action against Katy Perry at all.
The larger point is that this is way, way too much time, energy, and effort for a trademark dispute that needn’t have occurred at all. Of all the folks invested in this dispute, it appears the Australian public has no stake in any of it.
“Qualified immunity” is included nowhere in the Bill of Rights. But that’s because it’s not your right. It’s a right that only exists because the Supreme Court said it should exist. And ever since it made this proclamation, it’s done everything it can to ensure this judicial doctrine can swallow nearly any rights violation thrown at it.
Qualified immunity giveth and taketh away. It giveth get-out-of-lawsuit-free cards to cops and taketh away their accountability. “No checks. No balances.,” to paraphrase the Ayn Randiest of our population.
Consequently, we get this sort of thing (highlighted by Gabriel Malor on Bluesky) far too often: the conclusion that rights have most likely been violated, followed by judges stating after a dramatic pause something to the effect of “well, but the people who make and enforce the laws really had no way of knowing that.”
That’s the conclusion the Seventh Circuit Appeals Court arrives [PDF] at following several pages of discussion, even when a lot of that discussion deals with credible claims of deliberate indifference and things that certainly look a whole lot like cruel (but, sadly, not all that unusual) punishment.
Prisoner Abre Jackson was sent to solitary confinement following an altercation with guards — something expedited by an “adjustment hearing,” which was a one-sided affair where Jackson was allowed to raise his claims against the officers, but not allowed to call witnesses or demand presentation of jail recordings of the altercation.
Things went from bad to worse following this so-called “hearing.” Jackson was sentenced to three months in solitary confinement. This is how Jackson described it in his lawsuit:
In a declaration opposing defendants’ motion for summary judgment, Jackson asserted that his disciplinary segregation cell, unlike Pontiac’s general population area, had feces and urine on the walls, constant noise with inmates banging on cell doors, water contaminated with bacteria that causes Legionnaire’s disease, and roaches and mice. He also said that inmates in the disciplinary segregation cells, unlike inmates in general population, throw feces and urine at other inmates when they are in the hallways.
The lower court couldn’t even be bothered to find anything wrong with this, ruling that Jackson had no “sufficient” protected liberty interest in being held in a cell that didn’t contain other people’s waste products, bacteria-infested water, vermin, or in the vicinity of other inmates who tended to use their human waste products as projectiles.
The Appeals Court says the allegations in this case sure look enough like rights violations they should probably be placed in front of a jury:
A reasonable jury could conclude that the combined effects of Jackson’s three-month assignment to disciplinary segregation and the conditions of his segregation imposed what Sandin called “an atypical and significant hardship.” 515 U.S. at 484. If so, then Jackson was deprived of a liberty interest entitling him to the “minimum procedures appropriate under the circumstances” to ensure the “protection of the individual against arbitrary action of government.”
Then it goes completely in the other direction:
We do not decide that issue because, as we explain next, the defendants are entitled to qualified immunity on the liberty interest question.
And that means guards and prisons can continue to shove inmates into filthy cells and generally ignore any obligation to care for their health and well-being because this court — for whatever reason — has decided it’s not actually going to make a judgment call on the constitutionality of the alleged acts. Instead, it will give the government the benefit of a doubt, because the fewer times the government exercises any common sense or discretion, the less likely it is that the next case with similar facts will result in the removal of qualified immunity protections.
Also, the court says that while the circumstances were admittedly awful, they just weren’t awful enough to either (1) declare this a rights violation with a precedential decision, or (2) roll back immunity so the facts could be further developed by the trial court.
On the conditions factor, the conditions Jackson alleges here, though “more severe than those found in the general prison population,” are “hardly analogous to a confinement that deprives a prisoner of all human contact or sensory stimuli,” Hardaway, 734 F.3d at 744, like the conditions the Supreme Court found sufficient to create a liberty interest in Wilkinson. And on the duration factor, Jackson has not “presented case law stating that a [three]-month period of confinement under conditions similar to [his] implicates a liberty interest.”
When your only “human contact” is the involuntary reception of their hurled fecal matter, harsher solitary conditions might actually be preferable, especially if those cells were a bit freer of vermin and/or contaminated water. And the court saying three months of confinement under these conditions just isn’t terrible enough to justify further examination by the judicial system says probably more than the court intended to say about its general attitude towards plaintiffs who also happen to be convicted criminals.
The government wins again and it’s a clean win that doesn’t establish any new boundaries for it to begrudgingly respect. This prison and its employees can go right back to doing the sorts of things they did to this plaintiff, virtually assured of escaping any future lawsuits by mumbling the same things about a lack of precedent that might indicate otherwise. And the government’s reaction to lawsuits like this is never “oh, that was close, maybe we’d better fix some stuff.” It’s always the same thing: let’s just keep abusing people repeatedly until someone finally makes us stop.
On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration’s Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that extended to 20 feet in length. It was a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Security’s many technological systems and processes. The paper was covered in flow charts, arrows and text so minuscule you almost needed a magnifying glass to read it. Dudek called it Social Security’s “Dead Sea Scroll.”
Dudek and a fellow Social Security Administration bureaucrat taped the scroll across a wall of a windowless executive office. This was where a team from the new Department of Government Efficiency was going to set up shop.
DOGE was already terrifying the federal bureaucracy with the prospect of mass job loss and intrusions into previously sacrosanct databases. Still, Dudek and a handful of his tech-oriented colleagues were hopeful: If any agency needed a dose of efficiency, it was theirs. “There was kind of an excitement, actually,” a longtime top agency official said. “I’d spent 29 years trying to use technology and data in ways that the agency would never get around to.”
The Social Security Administration is 90 years old. Even today, thousands of its physical records are stored in former limestone mines in Missouri and Pennsylvania. Its core software dates back to the early 1980s, and only a few programmers remain who understand the intricacies of its more than 60 million lines of code. The agency has been talking about switching from paper Social Security cards to electronic ones for two decades, without making it happen.
DOGE, billed as a squad of crack technologists, seemed perfectly designed to overcome such obstacles. And its young members were initially inquisitive about how Social Security worked and what most needed fixing. Several times over those first few days, Akash Bobba, a 21-year-old coder who’d been the first of them to arrive, held his face close to Dudek’s scroll, tracing connections between the agency’s venerable IT systems with his index finger. Bobba asked: “Who would know about this part of the architecture?”
Before long, though, he and the other DOGErs buried their heads in their laptops and plugged in their headphones. Their senior leaders had already written out goals on a whiteboard. At the top: Find fraud. Quickly.
Dudek’s scroll was forgotten. The heavy paper started to unpeel from the wall, and it eventually sagged to the floor.
It only got worse from there, said Dudek, who would — improbably — be named acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, a position he held through May. In 15 hours of interviews with ProPublica, Dudek described the chaos of working with DOGE and how he tried first to collaborate, and then to protect the agency, resulting in turns that were at various times alarming, confounding and tragicomic.
DOGE, he said, began acting like “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time.”
The shock troops of DOGE, at the Social Security Administration and myriad other federal agencies, were the advance guard in perhaps the most dramatic transformation of the U.S. government since the New Deal. And despite the highly public departure of DOGE’s leader, Elon Musk, that campaign continues today. Key DOGE team members have transitioned to permanent jobs at the SSA, including as the agency’s top technology officials. The 19-year-old whose self-anointed moniker — “Big Balls” — has made him one of the most memorable DOGErs joined the agency this summer.
The DOGE philosophy has been embraced by the SSA’s commissioner, Frank Bisignano, who was confirmed by the Senate in May. “Your bias has to be — because mine is — that DOGE is helping make things better,” Bisignano told senior officials weeks after replacing Dudek, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. “It may not feel that way, but don’t believe everything you read.”
In a statement, a Social Security Administration spokesperson said that Bisignano has made “notable” initial progress and that “the initiatives underway will continue to strengthen service delivery and enhance the integrity and efficiency of our systems.” The statement asserted that “under President Trump’s leadership and his commitment to protect and preserve Social Security, Commissioner Bisignano is strengthening Social Security and the programs it provides for Americans now and in the future.”
For all the controversy DOGE has generated, its time at the Social Security Administration has not amounted to looming armageddon, as some Democrats warn. What it’s been, as much as anything, is a missed opportunity, according to interviews with more than 35 current or recently departed Social Security officials and staff, who spoke on the condition of anonymity mostly out of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, and a review of hundreds of pages of internal documents, emails and court records.
The DOGE team, and Bisignano, have prioritized scoring quick wins that allow them to post triumphant tweets and press releases — especially, in the early months, about an essentially nonexistent form of fraud — while squandering the chance for systemic change at an agency that genuinely needs it.
They could have worked to modernize Social Security’s legacy software, the current and former staffers say. They could have tried to streamline the stupefying volume of documentation that many Social Security beneficiaries have to provide. They could have built search tools to help staff navigate the agency’s 60,000 pages of policies. (New hires often need at least three years to master the nuances of even one type of case.) They could have done something about wait times for disability claims and appeals, which often take over a year.
They did none of these things.
Ultimately, no one had a more complete view of the missed opportunity than Lee Dudek. A 48-year-old with a shaved pate and a broad build that suggests an aging former linebacker, Dudek is a figure seemingly native to the universe of President Donald Trump — an unlikely holder of a key post, elevated after little or no vetting, who briefly attains notoriety in Washington circles before vanishing into obscurity — not unlike Anthony Scaramucci in the first Trump administration.
Dudek, a midlevel bureaucrat with blunt confidence and a preference for his own ideas, had failed in his one past attempt to manage a small team within the SSA, leading him and his supervisors to conclude he shouldn’t oversee others. Despite that, Trump made him the boss of 57,500 people as acting commissioner of the agency this spring.
Dudek got the job, wittingly or not, through an end-run around his bosses. After Trump won the 2024 election and rumors of a cost-cutting-and-efficiency SWAT team began to swirl, Dudek asked people he knew at big tech companies for introductions to potential DOGE members. In December, a contact set him up with Musk’s right-hand man, Steve Davis, which led to conversations with other DOGE figures about how they could “hack” Social Security’s bureaucracy to “get to yes,” Dudek said.
By February, Dudek had become the conduit between DOGE and the SSA, alerting top agency officials that DOGE wanted to work at headquarters. And unlike Michelle King, the acting agency chief at the time, Dudek was willing to speed up the new-hire training process to give DOGE access to virtually all of the SSA’s databases. This precipitated a sequence of events that began with him being placed on administrative leave, where he wrote a LinkedIn post that propelled him into the public eye for the first time: “I confess,” he posted. “I helped DOGE understand SSA. … I confess. I … circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.” The same weekend, King resigned and Dudek, who was at home in his underwear watching MSNBC, got an email stating that the president of the United States had appointed him commissioner.
Between February and May, when Dudek’s tenure ended, his erratic rhetoric and decisions routinely madefront-page news. He was often portrayed as a DOGE patsy, perhaps even a fool. But in his interviews with ProPublica this summer, he revealed himself to be a much more complex figure, a disappointed believer in DOGE’s potential, who maintains he did what he could to protect Social Security’s mission under duress.
Dudek is the first agency head to speak in detail on the record about what it is like to be thrust into such an important position under Trump. He told ProPublica that he decided to speak because he wishes that “those who govern” would have more frank and honest conversations with the public.
To the 73 million Americans whose financial lives depend on the viability of Social Security, those first months were a seesaw of apprehension and rumor. Inside the agency, Dudek, ill-prepared for leadership or for DOGE’s murky agenda, was stumbling through the chaos in part by creating some of his own.
Dudek knows what it’s like to depend on Social Security. When he was a kid in Saginaw, Michigan, his mother turned to Social Security disability benefits to support him and his siblings after she got injured at a Ford-affiliated parts factory; she also had a mental-health breakdown. (Dudek’s now-deceased father, who worked for General Motors, was alternately abusive and absent, according to the family.)
At school, Dudek was isolated and bullied for being poor, his sister told ProPublica, and he’s had an underdog’s quick temper ever since. But he was always an advanced student, and he developed an early interest in computer science and politics. As a teenager, he often watched C-Span. He was fascinated, he said, by “how government worked and how it could change people’s lives.”
Dudek arrived in Washington in 1995 to attend Catholic University of America. He was the type of earnest young man who was enthralled by President Bill Clinton’s campaign at the time to “reinvent government” by injecting it with private sector-style efficiency, much as Trump and DOGE later said they would.
In college, he also displayed the tendency to buck authority that would mark his professional career. He had a night job running the university’s computer labs; if there were problems, he was supposed to call his boss. He wasn’t supposed to install new software on all the computers, but that’s what he did. It worked, although he got a talking-to about knowing his role.
After graduating, Dudek spent nearly a decade working for tech companies that contracted with the federal government on modernization projects, before migrating to several jobs within federal agencies themselves.
In 2009, he arrived at the Social Security Administration as an IT security official. The agency was just like the Saginaw he’d run from, Dudek said: an insular, hidebound place where everyone knew everyone and they all thought innovation would cost them their jobs.
But the SSA wasn’t the only institution at fault. Congress had enacted byzantine eligibility requirements for disability and Supplemental Security Income benefits, forcing the agency to expend huge amounts of time and money running those programs. At the same time, lawmakers had capped the agency’s administrative funding just as tens of millions of Baby Boomers were aging into retirement, exploding Social Security’s rolls. (The SSA is now at its lowest staffing level in a half-century, even as it has taken on 40 million more beneficiaries.)
Because of the SSA’s stultifying culture, Dudek said, he leaned into his insubordinate streak. He had the sense that he could do it better, and when he felt like his proposals weren’t receiving money or attention, he went around his superiors. In one instance, he approached potential partners at credit card companies, hoping they would like his ideas for combating fraud and would relay those ideas to the Social Security commissioner at the time. “Certainly from an internal perspective within SSA, certainly from a congressional perspective, I was violating rules,” Dudek said.
In part because of moves like this, Dudek got reassigned within the agency several times. Over the years, he was given multiple roles as a “senior adviser,” a title he said is for federal employees who are either incompetent but too established to fire or highly competent in a technical way but lacking in management or people skills.
Dudek was stubborn. He could come off as a know-it-all, and he tended to ramble when speaking. But he is also thoughtful and well read. In our interviews, he brought up everything from the origins of the concept of Social Security among sociologists and psychologists in the Depression era to the bureaucrats who were left behind in faraway places after the decline of the British Empire. He repeatedly cited James Q. Wilson’s seminal 1989 book, “Bureaucracy,” which spills considerable ink on the inefficiencies of the Social Security Administration — and on a businessman named Donald J. Trump who supposedly knew how to cut through red tape to get building projects done. (“No such law constrained Trump,” Wilson wrote.)
Dudek had been a lifelong Democrat and voted for Kamala Harris. But, like some other liberals, he was becoming exasperated with the “administrative state” and special-interest groups, including corporations, unions and social-justice organizations, that “capture” government and stifle reform. If it took Trump to cut through that, Dudek was open-minded. “The world has changed,” he scribbled in a note to himself. “We must change with it.”
Immediately after Dudek became commissioner in February, he got a call from Scott Coulter, a hedge fund manager with a $12 million Manhattan apartment who’d been picked to lead DOGE’s team at Social Security. “We’re coming,” Coulter said. “Be prepared.”
DOGE arrived ready to embark on a specific mission: Its operatives at the Treasury Department had seen data suggesting that the Social Security Administration wasn’t keeping its death records up to date. They thought they saw signs of fraudulent payments. Musk was very, very interested.
Dudek wasn’t initially concerned about this focus, which he and his colleagues viewed as misguided. To him, the young coders were nerdy outsiders just like he’d once been, albeit ones from privileged Ivy League and Silicon Valley backgrounds. They “reminded me of myself when I first got into computers,” he said. He thought he could mold them.
In particular, Dudek liked Bobba, who had a gentle air and a thick pile of dark hair that covered his forehead. Dudek had spent hours with Bobba, trying to get him to focus on concrete problems like how beneficiaries’ records were stored, often as cumbersome PDF and image files. Instead, Bobba, who did not respond to a request for comment, prioritized Musk’s quest to prove that dead people were receiving Social Security benefits.
Bobba had completed high school in New Jersey just three and a half years earlier. As a class speaker at his graduation, he’d encouraged his classmates not to ignore “nuance” and “complexity.” He’d lamented the “increasing willingness to simplify even the most complex narratives into sensational tidbits” like “280-character tweets,” which “perpetuates misinformation.”
Yet Dudek had barely settled in as commissioner when Bobba unintentionally sparked a national misinformation firestorm: A table he created appeared as a screenshot in a grossly misleading Musk tweet about “vampires” over the age of 100 allegedly collecting Social Security checks. Bobba had sorted people with a Social Security number by age and found more than 12 million over 120 years old still listed in the agency’s data.
Bobba said he knew these people weren’t actually receiving benefits and tried to tell Musk so, to no avail, according to SSA officials. Dudek watched in horror as Trump then shared the same statistics with both houses of Congress and a national television audience, claiming the numbers proved “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors.” (The White House declined to comment on this episode. Bisignano, the new SSA commissioner, has repeatedlysaid that “the work that DOGE did was 100% accurate.”)
Inside the SSA, the DOGE team tried to find proof of the fraud that Musk and Trump had proclaimed, but it didn’t seem to know how to go about it, jumping from tactic to tactic. “It was a maelstrom of topic A to topic G to topic C to topic Q,” said a senior SSA official who was in the room. “Were we still helping anything by explaining stuff?” the official said. “It really wasn’t clear by that point.”
Dudek began to realize that the problem wasn’t primarily the people he called the “DOGE kids.” It was the senior leaders who were issuing orders without heeding what the young DOGErs were learning.
Dudek was perhaps the most favorably disposed to the outsiders. Plenty of agency officials were already put off by the DOGErs, who often issued peremptory orders to meet with them and answer questions.
Michelle Kowalski, an analyst who has since departed the agency, was instructed to take one of the DOGE people, Cole Killian, through earnings data and historical records to analyze the cases of extremely old people whose deaths had not been recorded in Social Security data. She found herself having to explain to him, again and again, that many of these people were born before states reported births and deaths to the federal government and decades before the advent of electronic record keeping. In the early days of the agency, some people didn’t even know their birthdays.
Kowalski had assumed that Killian was middle-aged, since he was issuing instructions to her team. But he usually kept his camera turned off during video meetings. When he finally turned it on for one call, the face she saw seemed like that of a teenager.
Killian was actually 24, just six years removed from performing “Hotel California” at his high school talent show at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School outside of Boston. (Killian, whose DOGE responsibilities also involved work at the Environmental Protection Agency, did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.)
Kowalski was exasperated by having to answer to such inexperience, even as so many of her colleagues were being pushed out the door by the Trump administration. She was not alone.
“Many of us had actually believed in the marketed idea of genius technologists coming in to make things work better,” one senior SSA official said. But DOGE ended up being more interested, the official said, in “trying to prove that the Social Security Administration was entirely incompetent” than in suggesting improvements.
Employees at headquarters took their time walking past the glass-walled conference room where DOGE staffers had set up, glaring in at them as they worked among stacks of laptops that they used for assignments at different agencies. On a blog popular among SSA staffers, the mood in the comments section turned dark, with some anonymous posters identifying where in the building the “incel DOGE boys” were located and saying that “they are just warming up … just think what will come next.”
Dudek sensed the growing tension. He felt it, too. He’d been getting anonymous death threats mailed to his house. He decided to move the DOGE operatives to a more secluded area of the campus and assigned an armed security detail to protect them.
During his first month as commissioner, Dudek ran his executive meetings in bombastic fashion, as if he were Trump on “The Apprentice.” And he sent out insulting full-staff emails pressuring career employees to retire. (Some 5,500 have left, with 1,500 more expected to follow.)
Dudek says this behavior stemmed partly from being in over his head, amazed by who he was suddenly answering to. “When the president of the United States asks you to do stuff,” he said, “you get caught up.”
But he also claims he was just performing a role. “Early on, I put on a persona of a yeller,” Dudek said. (Multiple longtime colleagues and friends noticed the change, they told ProPublica. As one put it, “There’s Lee, and then there’s Leland-performingly-Dudek.”)
This, he hoped, would convince the White House and DOGE of his commitment, which could in turn give him credibility as he kept trying to push them toward the real issues at Social Security.
But the Trump administration kept having other plans. Its demands usually came through Coulter, the DOGE lead with the Harvard and hedge fund background, who early on dropped by Dudek’s office unannounced multiple times a week, Dudek said.
“I really think it would be helpful if you were to do this tomorrow,” Coulter would say to Dudek about eliminating an entire division of the SSA or cutting more staff, according to Dudek. To him, these suggestions felt like orders. If he responded, “I don’t know, let me think about it,” Coulter would call a few hours later on the encrypted-messaging app Signal to ask, “You really aren’t catching on, are you?” and “Do you know how many times I’ve defended you?”
“I was supposed to get the message — and it would be ‘my own decision,’ so I’d be stuck with it,” Dudek said. “He can say he never told me to do anything.” (Coulter, who has been working for DOGE at NASA in recent months, did not respond to a request for comment.)
One of Coulter’s suggestions involved the SSA’s Office of Transformation, which had been doing the seemingly DOGE-like work of developing an online application to replace many of the agency’s paper-based forms and in-person interviews. The office had been working with elderly, low-income and disabled people to see what most confused them about SSA processes and what would most help them if these were redesigned.
But instead of facilitating this effort at greater efficiency, Coulter told Dudek to close the office, according to Dudek, claiming it was wasteful. Agency staff joked that DOGE shut it down because its name included a word that began with “trans.”
Dudek and his colleagues sometimes attempted to co-opt DOGE’s obsessions in the hope that they could address a genuine problem at the agency. This strategy was not successful.
Such was the case with the issue of phone fraud. Knowing that the DOGErs would perk up at the mention of anything fraud-related, Dudek and other officials made a point of explaining that they’d been working on an initiative to block bots that had been calling the agency. The bots would impersonate beneficiaries, using dates of birth and other information that can be found on the internet, to try to change the beneficiaries’ bank-routing information and steal their benefits.
In 2024, Dudek had been on a team that spearheaded an effort to combat this type of fraud. The plans included running all phone-based requests for bank account changes against a Treasury Department database of suspicious accounts and analyzing such calls to verify whether they were being made from the vicinity of the address on file of the person purportedly calling.
DOGE ignored the proposed solutions. Instead, the White House instructed Dudek to end all claims and direct-deposit transactions by phone. Beneficiaries would have to verify their own identities by using an often-confusing web portal or by traveling to a field office to do it in person. For millions of elderly or disabled people, these were daunting or impossible options.
When this policy was rolled out at the end of March, beneficiaries panicked. Many flocked to field offices to preemptively provide proof of their identities even when they didn’t need to.
Back at headquarters, in a weekly staff meeting, Dudek asked who could jump on the increasingly urgent task of making it easier to schedule field office appointments via the SSA website. “Well, Lee, you just fired that team,” one official answered, referring to the Office of Transformation. (Dudek said he asked this question on purpose to make sure DOGE heard the answer.)
Over the course of six weeks under Dudek, the phone policy zigged and zagged a half dozen times — for example, the SSA adopted, then abandoned, a three-day waiting period to conduct an algorithmic fraud check on all calls — before finally ending up nearly where it began. Transactions could be carried out by phone again.
Throughout this saga, Dudek was still getting calls from White House officials — most often from Katie Miller, DOGE’s spokesperson and the wife of Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest advisers. (Katie Miller went on to work for Musk before announcing plans to launch her own podcast. She did not respond to a request for comment.) Miller often called well into the evening, Dudek said, to chastise him about anything the press had reported that day that had caught the administration off guard.
As Dudek restored the phone policy to its pre-Trump version, Miller got angrier. “You changed the president’s policy,” she said, according to Dudek.
“I’m like, ‘No, I’m still with the president’s policy,’” Dudek told Miller. But, if Social Security officials could implement the anti-fraud measures that he and his team had previously been planning, he said, they could “achieve the same end.” In that case, Dudek said, “we will do so and ease the friction point on the public.”
“How dare you,” Miller said.
Increasingly dismayed, Dudek hatched a plan that seemed to embody his mix of good intentions, hubris and melodrama. He decided he would continue to play along with DOGE on the surface, in part so that Coulter and the other bigwigs would think he was still handling their business and thus spend less time at the agency. The younger DOGE team members, he said, were “easier to work with when their masters weren’t around.”
But behind the scenes, he began to undermine DOGE however he could. Sometimes he did this by making intemperate statements that he knew would find their way into the press and draw attention to what DOGE was asking him to do. “Have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?” he said of the Trump administration’s leadership in one meeting.
Other times Dudek himself was the leaker. As commissioner, he was often an anonymous source for articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times. “If it was stupid stuff from the DOGE team, a lot of times I would go out to the press and immediately tattletale on myself so that it would blow up the next day,” Dudek said, adding that he did this in part to help Social Security advocates understand and bring attention to the growing crisis at the agency.
Rebecca Vallas, CEO of the nonprofit National Academy of Social Insurance, said she was in a one-on-one meeting with Dudek in March when he started getting calls from DOGE officials and the media. The calls were about his recent public comments claiming he might have to shut down the entire Social Security Administration if a federal judge continued to deny DOGE access to sensitive Social Security data. “He just let me sit there with the volume up high,” Vallas said.
On one of the calls, she said, someone told Dudek, “Elon loved that, but now it’s time to walk it back.” Afterward, Dudek told her, “I don’t know how we get out of this without hurting huge numbers of people. … I’m just trying to give advocates some ammunition.”
Dudek’s strategy was easier to pull off without DOGE catching on if it came off as the blundering of an amateur, he told ProPublica. In the most striking example, DOGE instructed Dudek to cancel two contracts that the SSA had with the state of Maine, according to Dudek and other SSA officials. The contracts, which all 50 states have long had versions of, allowed Maine to automatically report births and deaths to Social Security. Canceling them would impede government efficiency: Births and deaths in the state would take weeks or months longer to enter the federal system. That would likely cause benefits to continue to be sent to thousands of Mainers after they’ve died, exactly the kind of thing that Trump and Musk had been railing against.
It seemed clear to Dudek that he was being told to do this only because Trump was publicly feuding with Maine’s governor about transgender athletes. (The White House declined to comment on this episode.) So he decided to “write the hell out of” an email directing that the contracts be canceled. He did so in a way he thought would still earn him points with Trump and DOGE but that would, simultaneously, be so inflammatory that it would create a major storyline for reporters, advocates and Congress.
“Please cancel the contracts,” Dudek’s email read. “While our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child.” That last phrase referred to Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, the one Trump had been fighting with. (“Do I care about Janet Mills? No,” Dudek told ProPublica.)
As Dudek had hoped, the press attention he generated compelled him to do what he already wanted to do: reinstate the contracts. In a written apology, he explained that he was only belatedly realizing the potential harm of what he (alone) had done. “I screwed up,” he told reporters. “I’m new at this job.”
Once again, Miller called Dudek and excoriated him. “What the hell is going on?” she said.
“This place leaks like a sieve,” he answered. “What can I tell you?”
Looking back on his tenure, Dudek maintains that his three months working alongside DOGE were not as harmful as they could have been, especially compared with what happened this spring at other federal agencies, some of which were essentially vaporized. Social Security checks, he points out, are still going out the door.
Still, the SSA is reduced in his wake, with thousands fewer staff members to process claims and improve systems. These departed employees were disproportionately experienced and knowledgeable; they were the ones able to get other jobs or to retire with a pension. They took a lot of know-how with them.
And the emotional harm that DOGE caused to older people and to people with disabilities — worsened by Dudek’s confusing actions — lingers. Many of these people have had money taken out of their paychecks their entire careers to pay for something more than just retirement benefits: security. It’s a feeling that may now be lost to them forever.
Indeed, DOGE and Dudek caused so much consternation about the stability of the system that hundreds of thousands of people have filed early for retirement in recent months, even though doing so is not financially wise in the long term. The SSA must now pay out more in benefits than expected, contrary to DOGE’s cost-saving mission.
Dudek’s sister back in Saginaw, Ana Dudek, relies on Social Security disability benefits. “I would talk to my brother when he was commissioner and be like, dude, the decisions you’re making are causing people to feel terror,” she said. “Terror is an apt descriptor.”
Dudek acknowledges much of this. “I’m not a cold, callous son of a bitch, I really do get it,” he said. “I’ll forever be associated with the pain of DOGE. … But so much went on in such a short amount of time. I tried to make the best decisions I could given the circumstances.”
Since being dismissed from the agency in June, Dudek has been struggling to find another job. “My name is mud,” he said. “It is as if I no longer exist.”
As a former SSA colleague put it, Dudek’s story is “the story of a disposable pawn, and there’s lots of those under Trump. They just used him, and then they disposed of him.”
The White House, presented with extensive questions for this article, sent a one-paragraph statement disparaging ProPublica and Dudek. ProPublica’s story, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said, “is largely based around the comments of a disgruntled former employee who openly admitted to leaking to the media, manipulating his colleagues, and repeatedly telling lies from his official position. On his last day as Acting Commissioner, Leland Dudek showered praise upon President Trump in an op-ed and touted the ‘real results’ of the Social Security Administration, but now that he’s bitter about being out of the top job — he’s singing a different tune.”
Dudek said the administration asked him to write the op-ed and then vetted it. Referring to the litany of extravagant praise that cabinet secretaries lavished on Trump recently, he said, “you saw the cabinet meeting.”
Bisignano, the Social Security commissioner, comes to the role with a very different professional background than Dudek (though, like Dudek, he has working-class roots, in his case in Brooklyn). Until this job, Bisignano, 66, spent his career in the private sector. He was a top executive in operations and technology at massive banks like Citigroup and JPMorganChase and went on to become CEO of the payment processor Fiserv.
Yet, like DOGE, he appears to have embraced the appearance of efficiency rather than efficiency itself. He has repeatedly told staff that Social Security should be run more like Amazon, with AI handling more customer interactions. But disability claims are more complicated than ordering toothpaste, according to SSA officials and experts, and Social Security’s customer base is older and more likely to have an intellectual disability than the average Amazon Prime member.
Bisignano has also fixated on how much time it takes to reach an agent on the SSA’s 800 number. In a July press release, he claimed that the average was down to six minutes, an 80% reduction from 2024. He achieved this in part by reassigning 1,000 field office employees to phone duty. That means initial calls are getting answered faster, but there are significantly fewer staff members available to handle complex, in-person cases. And “reaching an agent” turns out to mean speaking to a human being — or an AI bot. Internal SSA statistics obtained by ProPublica reveal that Bisignano’s estimate treats cases in which beneficiaries interact with a chatbot and opt for a callback as “zero-minute” waits, skewing the average. If you actually stay on the line, USA Today has found, it often takes over an hour to reach a live representative.
In its statement, the SSA reiterated that call wait times have dramatically improved and that “using technology on our national 800 number has enabled 90 percent of calls handled to be served via automated self-service options or convenient callbacks.”
Even the latest phone fraud policy feels like a rerun from DOGE’s earlier season. In late July, Bisignano’s team quietly posted a document to the Office of Management and Budget website stating that 3.4 million more people would have to go into field offices to verify their identities instead of being able to do so by phone, starting Aug. 18. Days later, the SSA announced that this was actually optional.
The DOGE era may officially be over at the agency, but the approach, it seems, is the same. As one SSA official put it, Bisignano is “doing all the same fundamentally inefficient things, more efficiently.”
This is the sort of thing any organized government would consider truly embarrassing. We don’t have one of those at the moment, so if there’s any embarrassment to be had, it has to be experienced on behalf of the Trump administration because this administration is thoroughly incapable of feeling shame itself.
Let’s lay a bit of groundwork quickly. Trump gets elected again for some fucking reason. He hires Elon Musk to run a government-destroying government agency for some fucking reason. Trump signs a big ugly budget bill that makes a mockery of the extremely mock-able (and hideously destructive) “work” performed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (or D.O.G.E. to those who like cheap laughs and mass layoffs). Musk quits, gets in a social media fight with Trump, and suggests there’s a good reason Trump won’t release the Epstein files despite leveraging claims of a Democratic party underground sex fight club (or whatever) to get himself elected, but this time with bit more of the popular vote.
Trump, after spending months claiming the files are filled with evidence of Democratic pedophiles preying on minors, suddenly decides there’s nothing to see here. Some members of his vocal fan base are far from amused by this sudden reluctance to release the files they’ve been assured for months, if not years, will finally bury the opposing party once and for all.
The more Trump avoids the issue, the more guilty he looks. But the entire government works for Trump now, and that means the agencies involved in the Epstein investigation are now obliged to act as though there’s nothing Trump to see here.
Enter James O’Keefe and his quasi-journalistic enterprise. Project Veritas has mainly been used as a “gotcha” effort to lead unsuspecting victims into saying things Project Veritas can then edit into proverbial smoking guns, even if that means employing further deception while engaging in the editing process.
Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files has apparently rubbed O’Keefe the wrong way. Project Veritas engaged in some undercover work that apparently resulted in acting deputy chief of the DOJ’s Office of Enforcement Operations telling a woman he wanted to fuck (but in the sexual sense) that he and the DOJ were going to “redact every Republican” from any future release of Epstein investigation files.
While that is all very hilarious, what’s even funnier is the DOJ’s attempt to distance itself from this mini-scandal while somehow hoping to salvage a bit of its Trump-tainted reputation. You won’t believe it unless you see it with your own eyes, but here’s the DOJ’s official response, which appears to be a dying phone’s screenshot of a Notes app note that looks for all the world like a digital approximation of a forced confession… especially when a separate font is used to denote who’s confessing to this egregious error in judgment.
The official DOJ Twitter account posting the equivalent of a screenshotted Notes app apology from a phone on 30% battery after the acting director got honeypotted on Hinge and confirmed plans of an Epstein/Maxwell coverup.
If you can’t see the embed, I truly feel for you. Click the blue link above and transport yourself to Bluesky to see the original. Trust me, it’s worth it.
But here’s the text contained in the (deep breath) DOJ’s X post of a screenshot from a phone with 30% battery life, repeated verbatim:
Acting Director Pollak:
I met a woman named Skylar on Hinge, a dating app, in July 2025, her profile is no longer findable. We had two dates (August 4 and August 16). She claimed to be an au pair in Georgetown. She gave no clues that she was a reporter or recording our dates. Had I a clue, the first date would have ended immediately and there never would have been a second one.
Let’s pause here briefly to consider what’s being said here and who it’s being said by. This is the Acting Director for the DOJ’s Office of Enforcement Operations. And the defense he’s offering is this: had I known I was being tricked, I never would have agreed to continue being tricked. That’s something that (1) should go without saying no matter who’s saying it, and (2) a pretty stupid thing for someone in his position to be saying after they’ve already been successfully snowed.
Back to the alleged confession:
My profile indicated I did “Government” work but did not specify for which agency. I have never discussed what I do at DOJ.
We’ll stop here as well. The recording shows Schnitt not only telling “Skylar” that he has worked at the DOJ for “twenty-three years” but also telling her he’s going to be the “acting deputy chief” for the “next few months” and that he works closely with federal law enforcement, US attorneys’ offices, and DOJ prosecutors. So, that’s just a lie stuck in the middle of a “I was thinking with my dick” confession.
But before I ride Schnitt any harder, let’s continue with the alleged apology/confession:
The comments I made were my own personal comments on what I’ve learned in the media and not from anything I’ve done or learned via work. I have no knowledge of the circumstances surrounding [Ghislane] Maxwell other than what is reported in the news. I also never divulged anything about what I do at work. I recall that she asked if I had any knowledge about Maxwell and I specifically said I only know what’s been reported in the media.
Obviously, they’re his “personal” comments. He didn’t think he was speaking on the record. And, given Trump and the DOJ’s extreme reluctance to engage in a substantive release of the Epstein investigation files, there’s no way he ever would have been cleared to speak on the record about the case. But he definitely said stuff that hasn’t been reported in the media, most particularly the stuff no member of the administration would dare to state on the record: specifically, the whole “redact all the Republicans” thing.
I don’t doubt that Schnitt is en route to the DOJ exit doors, but it’s hard to believe this is something he wrote himself and handed over voluntarily to his superiors at the DOJ. An official statement generally is delivered via a press release or emailed memo.
This is a screenshot of an app — one so carelessly made the people posting it didn’t even bother to crop the screenshot. And the font used for Schnitt’s alleged signature is a completely different font than the body of the post, which suggests someone else entirely composed this statement and copy-pasted Schnitt’s email signature block into the Notes note.
But even if this is all on the up-and-up and this is actually Schnitt’s confession, why was it handled this way? The DOJ is a multi-billion dollar enterprise and lapses of judgment like these should be treated with firings, not the casual uploading of phone screenshots to the government’s official social media accounts. And no matter what the DOJ says or Schnitt has to say for himself after being suckered into a honey trap, the general public knows better than to believe Trump’s DOJ is going to do anything other than protect the president and party officials from being exposed as committing the sexual crimes they’ve spent years accusing Democratic party members of engaging in.
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The verdict is in on Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation,” and it’s devastating. A new piece in TES Magazine systematically demolishes Haidt’s claims by doing something revolutionary: actually asking experts who study this stuff what they think.
The result reads like an academic execution:
“When I read the book,I found it really hard to believe it was written by a fellow academic,” admits Tamsin Ford, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Cambridge.
“What Jon is selling is fear,” argues Andrew Przybylski, professor of human behaviour and technology at the University of Oxford. “It’s not scientific.”
And this isn’t some fringe criticism. TES is the Times Educational Supplement, which has been around since 1910 and is basically the trade magazine for educators in the UK. At a time when many educators have been swallowing Haidt’s misleading claims, seeing a respected educational trade magazine systematically shred his arguments is remarkable.
But here’s the truly damning part: this expert demolition came out the exact same day that Politico published a breathless piece claiming Haidt’s crusade represents “the only true bipartisan issue left,” gushing about how governors from both parties are embracing policy reform based on his work.
The contrast couldn’t be starker: while actual experts are calling Haidt’s work unscientific garbage, politicians are treating it like gospel.
The TES piece doesn’t just criticize—it comprehensibly destroys Haidt’s core arguments with the precision of actual scientists who know what they’re talking about.
First, his claim that there’s a mental health “epidemic” among teenagers caused by social media. Ford points out the fundamental problems with Haidt’s use of data:
Ford argues that using self-report data for prevalence estimates is tricky owing to a “lack of methodological soundness and ‘noisy’ data”.
“A teenager with high scores on a mental health questionnaire at a single time point will include a mixture of those who have not fully understood the question or are mucking around, those who are having a one-off bad day or adjusting to a life stress and those with persistent difficulties that impair their function. The last are those with mental health conditions,” she explains.
When you look at the actual robust data from the UK’s NHS Mental Health survey, the picture is quite different from Haidt’s “tidal wave” narrative:
In terms of the best UK prevalence data, she says theNHS Mental Health of Children and Young People (MHCYP) survey(which includes input from parents, teachers and clinical assessors) found prevalence of mental disorders in those between 5 and 15 years old increased between 1999 and 2004 by 0.4 percentage points and again between 2004 and 2017 by 1.1 percentage points (data for older teens has only been collected once, in 2017, so there is no data over time).
It’s an increase, but Ford says the data does not support Haidt’s description of a “tidal wave” of mental health challenges, nor a “surge of suffering”.
“He is going beyond the data,” she argues.
The experts also systematically debunk Haidt’s claims about causation. Candice Odgers, professor of psychology and informatics at University of California Irvine and a former Techdirt podcast guest, concludes:
“It is perfectly reasonable to take a safety-first approach to kids and social media,” she argues. “But when these decisions are made, it should not be because someone tells you science has discovered social media is the cause of serious mental disorders or will harm our children’s brains. That is the story that is being told, but not what the science says.”
Meanwhile, Przybylski (another former podcast guest) points out a basic logical flaw in Haidt’s argument:
“By the logic of his argument, the correlation between the use of technology and the outcome should be stronger,” he says. “As the algorithms have got more pernicious, more sophisticated, things should be getting progressively worse. [That hasn’t happened.] There is no sense of mechanism here.”
The article also details how experts are particularly concerned about missing the real causes of mental health issues. Ford notes:
Ford says he has missed some other obvious contributing factors in the UK data, including closures of youth clubs and other safe spaces for young people, the world becoming more expensive and difficult to navigate, social changes with looser community bonds and more.
“One of the strongest and most consistent associations for poor mental health is poverty, and we’ve got more children living in poverty, and then we have this huge drop in accessibility to services…[so] there is no early intervention,” she says. “To pin this on phones doesn’t just go way beyond the evidence – it is actually dangerous, as it does not address these other critical factors.”
The experts are also scathing about Haidt’s proposed solutions, which include banning phones in schools and raising age limits for social media. David Ellis has been a leading critic of the addiction narrative:
“We did a satirical paper a couple of years ago and we followed the mathematical formulas that people had used [in this research],” he says. “We managed to create a friendship addiction scale that demonstrated that 80 per cent of our sample were addicted to their friends, which of course is nonsense.”
Even Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the US and one of the world’s leading experts on dopamine and addiction, disputes Haidt’s claims:
“there’s not a clear-cut definition of what addiction to a phone would be, [so] it is difficult to estimate the prevalence,” she says, addingshe knows of no studies that would support Haidt’s 10 per cent addiction figure.
The piece also highlights how Haidt’s claims about educational decline don’t hold up to scrutiny. While he claims there’s been a global decline in learning since smartphones arrived, Christian Bokhove from the University of Southampton points out:
And although “average trajectories” in reading and science were downward, Christian Bokhove, professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton, argues that beyond the general picture, “many countries were not declining” in that period in any of the three subjects.
Echoing many of the other academics when it comes to their criticisms of Haidt, he argues that even if the data did show a universal decline, “there can be numerous causes for this”.
This aligns perfectly with what I wrote in the Daily Beast piece last year, which was based on many experts as well:
Over the last decade, numerous studies on the impact of phones and social media on children, including a study of studies, conclude that social media is good for some kids, helping them find like-minded individuals. It’s mostly neutral for many kids, and problematic for only a very small group (studies suggest less than 10 percent).
I also highlighted how the country-by-country evidence doesn’t support Haidt’s claims either… unless you cherry-pick your countries, which anyone can do.
Looking at suicide rates (which are more indicative of actual depression rates, rather than self-reported data, given the decreasing stigma associated with admitting to dealing with mental health issues), the numbers show that in many countries it hasremained flat or decreasedover the past 20 years. Indeed, in countries like France, Ireland, Denmark, Spain, and New Zealand, you see a noticeable decline in youth suicide rates.
If social media were inherently causing an increase in depression, that would be an unlikely result.
But here’s where this gets truly maddening. While experts are thoroughly demolishing Haidt’s claims, politicians are doubling down. That same-day Politico piece reveals the scope of the damage:
39 states now have some sort of phone restrictions in schools, and 18 states and Washington, D.C. have bell-to-bell bans — which ban phones for the entire school day — according to Haidt. After the next legislative sessions, which in many state capitols begin after the new year, more states are sure to enact full bans. The issue has rallied conservatives and liberals, and its potency with parents has largely steamrolled libertarian objections and big tech lobbying.
I first realized a remarkable story was sitting in plain view when I witnessed two governors who are almost comically far apart on the political spectrum both embrace Haidt. Last year, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders sent a copy of Haidt’s book to every other governor. She then hosted Haidt in her home state before joining him earlier this year on stage at Davos, not typically a lovefest forum for Arkansas governors and New York academics.
Shortly after that, at the winter meeting at the National Governors Association, I got to talking to New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and one of his top aides, and they also were trumpeting Haidt’s work. A liberal, former Goldman Sachs executive turned northeastern governor, Murphy, 68, sounded a lot like his 43-year-old conservative counterpart from Little Rock.
Different regions, different politics and different generations.
But here’s the thing: bipartisan support doesn’t make something right. It just makes it bipartisanly wrong. As I noted in my original piece, every generation has its moral panic, and this appears to be ours.
The TES piece concludes with the most important point of all, from Pete Etchells, professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University:
“It is becoming increasingly difficult to say, ‘hang on, that’s not what the evidence says’, or ‘we don’t have evidence for that yet’, and I really, really worry about this,” he concludes. “There’s a road here where [people say], ‘well, we don’t need science and evidence because we can see it with our own eyes’.”
And that’s exactly what’s happening. Politicians across the spectrum are implementing policies based on Haidt’s work despite an overwhelming expert consensus that his claims are scientifically unfounded. We’re watching evidence-based policy get steamrolled by moral panic in real time.
Incredibly, even with all these quotes, there’s way more in the TES piece, which should leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that the actual experts in the field find Haidt’s book a horrific attack on science and evidence-based policy making.
When professors of child and adolescent psychiatry are saying they can’t believe a fellow academic wrote this book, when experts in human behavior and technology are calling it “fear” rather than science, when leading researchers are pointing out basic logical flaws in the arguments—maybe, just maybe, we should listen to them instead of the guy selling books and giving TED talks.
The verdict from people who actually study this stuff is clear: Haidt’s claims don’t hold up to scrutiny. The fact that politicians find his message appealing doesn’t make it true. It just makes it politically convenient.
And that’s a much scarier prospect than kids having phones.
What if I told you the Trump FCC just leveraged a fake investigation into an American company to force it to sell valuable assets to companies and billionaires loyal to the administration? Well that’s exactly what’s happening with the news that Dish Network and Echostar are selling $17 billion in valuable spectrum to Elon Musk, after being repeatedly threatened by Trump’s lackey at the FCC, Brendan Carr.
That task completed, the second administration is now forcing Dish to strip the project for parts and send its valuable assets to administration friends. AT&T recently scored $23 billion in valuable spectrum from Dish, with Musk now hoovering up much of the rest. This puts to bed the lie that the Trump administration was ever serious about Dish becoming a serious fourth wireless competitor.
Using Dish Network as a prop to justify this consolidation — then letting the biggest industry players hoover up the spectrum when the gambit inevitably failed — was always the play. Though Carr, when he first launched this “investigation” into Dish last May, did his best to pretend he was a serious adult regulator simply worried about rural ‘merica:
“As you know, buildout obligations are one way that the FCC can ensure that Americans, including those living in rural communities, have a fair shot at next-generation connectivity. After all, failure to meet buildout obligations leaves these communities behind.“
Carr’s primary focus has been in destroying whatever’s left of FCC corporate oversight and consumer protection authority, yet he’s curiously involved when it comes to things like pressuring CBS to kiss Trump’s ass, or forcing Dish to sell valuable assets to rich Trump donors. Keep in mind, Dish was technically meeting these requirements; they’d struck an extension with the FCC last year.
Carr’s bullying of Dish pissed off everybody across the political spectrum, from consumer groups incensed at the obvious corrupt cronyism (see this lawsuit against the FCC by Nina Burleigh and Frequency Forward), to “free market” Libertarian groups clearly pissed at the FCC bullying Dish into selling assets less than a year after the previous FCC had granted Dish an extension for its 5G network build (there are probably some lessons here in seeking dependable common cause with authoritarians).
Curiously, most of the media coverage I’ve seen on this Musk sale so far (from TechCrunch to Deadline to the LA Times) doesn’t mention any of the cronyism despite pretty broad bipartisan complaints about it.
And those that do mention it, like this Fast Company report, frame the FCC’s efforts as clinical and in good faith:
“The deal also has one other benefit for EchoStar—it’s another step in helping the company resolve concerns by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over its wireless spectrum licenses.
Notably, SpaceX has long argued that EchoStar’s spectrum was being underutilized. Earlier this year, the FCC opened an investigation into the matter.
“EchoStar anticipates this transaction with SpaceX along with the previously announced spectrum sale will resolve the Federal Communications Commission’s inquiries,” EchoStar said in a statement.”
Again, neither the Trump administration — or its top donors like AT&T — ever wanted this Dish Network 5G gambit to succeed. Neither Trumpism nor Brendan Carr give a fleeting fuck about improving real world connectivity or market competition, and AT&T and Verizon (long GOP allies) never wanted serious wireless competition to materialize. And Dish CEO Charlie Ergen is happy to sell hugely appreciated spectrum assets hoarded over decades and head off into retirement.
