A Canadian tribunal’s $72,000 fine against X for refusing to globally remove non-consensual intimate images (NCII) exposes a fundamental tension that courts have been dodging for years: When can one country order worldwide content takedowns, and when should platforms comply regardless of legal compulsion?
Unfortunately, almost all the commentary on the case is ignoring those tensions and going for the easy layup of just framing it as “Elon Musk ignoring the law again.” That’s a fun framing, but it’s too easy for this particular case.
It actually presents two distinct questions that are getting dangerously conflated: whether Canada has jurisdiction to demand global removals, and whether X should remove credibly reported NCII as basic platform governance. Getting this distinction right matters—not just for this case, but for the future of cross-border content regulation.
The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal apparently ordered X and other platforms to remove an intimate image of a woman identified as “TR” back in March. But X chose to geofence the content rather than delete it entirely—blocking Canadian users from seeing it while leaving it accessible to the rest of the world. The tribunal wasn’t having it:
Regehr dismissed that argument, noting X’s position would call into question whether British Columbia’s law overstepped the province’s authority under Canada’s constitution.
“I have no authority to consider constitutional arguments,” he wrote. “The question about X’s compliance is a very simple one. I ordered internet intermediaries, which includes X, to remove the intimate image. X received the order, but it did not remove the intimate image. Instead, it did something less. X did not comply with the protection order.”
This hits on a fundamental tension that’s been brewing in internet law for decades: can one country’s courts order global takedowns, and when should they?
Canada actually has some history here. In the troubling landmark Equustek case, the Supreme Court of Canada made a radical departure from traditional jurisdictional limits, ruling that BC courts could issue worldwide injunctions against Google, requiring global de-indexing of websites. The Court essentially argued that the borderless nature of the internet justifies borderless judicial authority—a breathtaking expansion of territorial jurisdiction that upended decades of international law principles.
But that decision was controversial precisely because of its extraterritorial reach. Google challenged the order in U.S. courts, where judges found it conflicted with U.S. law and principles of international comity. The result? A jurisdictional standoff that highlighted how messy cross-border enforcement gets when courts start issuing global orders.
The jurisdictional issues the Equustek case raised haven’t been resolved—they’ve just been papered over by companies generally complying rather than fighting every single order. But X’s approach here suggests those tensions are far from settled.
This case actually presents two distinct issues that shouldn’t be conflated:
First, the jurisdictional question: Should a Canadian provincial tribunal be able to order a global takedown? X’s argument that it would comply within Canadian jurisdiction but not globally is actually pretty reasonable from a legal standpoint. Countries generally can’t impose their laws extraterritorially, and expecting every platform to comply with the most restrictive jurisdiction’s rules worldwide creates a race to the bottom for global speech.
Second, the trust and safety question: Separate from what Canada can legally compel, there’s the other issue: should X be taking down credibly reported NCII as part of basic platform governance? Here the answer seems pretty obvious—most platforms do remove NCII when properly reported because it’s harmful, often illegal, and violates their terms of service.
The tribunal seemed to dodge the first question entirely, with the judge explicitly saying, “I have no authority to consider constitutional arguments.” But dismissing jurisdictional concerns doesn’t make them go away—it just kicks the can down the road.
X’s geofencing response was legally defensible but ethically questionable. The tribunal’s global order was ethically motivated but legally problematic. Neither approach really serves the interests of victims or the broader internet ecosystem.
What makes this case particularly notable is how rare such jurisdictional standoffs have become. The shift toward comprehensive regulatory frameworks—from the EU’s Digital Services Act to various national online harms bills—has largely eliminated the need for case-by-case civil litigation. Platforms now face systematic compliance requirements rather than ad hoc court orders.
But X’s willingness to fight this particular battle suggests we may be entering a new phase where at least some platforms are more selective about which jurisdictional claims they’ll accept. The question, though, is where this all ends up. And whether or not the idea of a global, not fractured, internet can survive.
As a reminder, I’mon the board at Bluesky, which means you should consider me extremely biased, even as this article isn’t really about Bluesky.
The writer Jerusalem Demsas wants you to stay on Twitter. In “The case for staying on Twitter,” she admits the site is effectively overrun by neo-Nazis, but she argues that people should remain on Elon Musk’s platform to fight for it.
Her argument boils down to this:
Twitter is — without question — the most influential public square we have. At one point, in 2021, a Pew Research poll indicated that Twitter served nearly one in four Americans. By 2024, two years after Musk had bought the platform, 21% of people reported using it.
More anecdotally, no other venue sees elected officials mingling with academics, Fortune 500 CEOs, and celebrities. In Washington, Twitter is still one of the best places for a young think tanker or journalist to gain attention for their work. The posting-to-policy pipeline is alive and well.
But here’s the thing about that “influential public square”: you can’t “win back” a platform that’s owned and controlled by someone who actively opposes everything you stand for. You can’t “win back” something you have no ability to control at all.
Demsas’s central concern is about what she calls a “politics of hygiene”:
What I take issue with is the idea that staying on the platform is somehow failing a purity test. What I take issue with is a politics of hygiene, of cleanliness, a politics where you are judged not by the ultimate impact of your actions but by your ability to demonstrate your total and complete separation from that which you deem evil.
This framing recasts leaving a broken platform as performative “virtue signaling” rather than strategic action. But it’s a false dichotomy. The choice isn’t between purity and pragmatism—it’s about where you can actually have impact.
When a platform is designed to suppress your reach while amplifying extremists, staying isn’t pragmatic. It’s masochistic.
This all fundamentally misunderstands the nature of power on these platforms. Success on social media is about building community. And you can’t build community if someone else has all the control over how that community works.
Elon Musk bought Twitter specifically to reshape it according to his vision. It was never about “free speech” or the “public square.” It has always been about creating the world in which he holds all the cards, in which everything is designed to give him more power over you. He controls the algorithm. He decides what gets amplified and what gets buried. He can (and does) change the rules whenever—and however—he wants.
In fact, it is useful and important to look at this question not through the lens of persuasion but the lens of power. Your engagement and your work, not unlike your vote, is a form of power, something you can choose to grant to others. Those others, particularly organizations and companies, accrue that power to use as they see fit.
Demsas’s argument represents a broader problem: the learned helplessness that has infected how we think about the internet. We’ve been trained to believe our only options are to beg tech billionaires to be nicer, lobby the government to regulate them better, or hope a “good” billionaire swoops in to save us.
This mindset is exactly what the tech oligarchs want. The more we believe we need them to solve our problems, the more power they accumulate. We’ve forgotten that the whole promise of the internet was to put power in the hands of users, not centralized authorities.
What Actually Building Looks Like
So what does it actually look like to build something better? We’re seeing it happen in real time on platforms like Bluesky, where genuine communities are not just migrating but flourishing.
Take the science community, which has decisively moved to Bluesky. A recent study found that research posts get substantially more engagement than similar posts on X:
Per Shiffman and Wester, an “overwhelming majority” of respondents said that Bluesky has a “vibrant and healthy online science community,” while Twitter no longer does. And many Bluesky users reported getting more bang for their buck, so to speak, on Bluesky. They might have a lower follower count, but those followers are far more engaged: Someone with 50,000 Twitter/X followers, for example, might get five likes on a given post; but on Bluesky, they may only have 5,000 followers, but their posts will get 100 likes.
According to Shiffman, Twitter always used to be in the top three in terms of referral traffic for posts on Southern Fried Science. Then came the “Muskification,” and suddenly Twitter referrals weren’t even cracking the top 10. By contrast, in 2025 thus far, Bluesky has driven “a hundred times as many page views” to Southern Fried Science as Twitter. Ironically, “theblog postthat’s gotten the most page views from Twitter is the one about this paper,” said Shiffman.
But it’s not just about higher engagement—it’s about better engagement. As one marine biologist who studied this migration noted:
“When I talk about fish on Bluesky, people ask me questions about fish. When I talk about fish on Twitter, people threaten to murder my family because we’re Jewish.”
The same pattern is happening with NFL communities, which have created thriving spaces on Bluesky that are more engaging and less toxic than what they left behind on X. This isn’t about finding a “safer space”—it’s about building better spaces. Spaces where users have actual control over their experience through features like custom feeds, moderation tools, and algorithmic choice.
What makes this different from past platform migrations is the underlying architecture. Bluesky isn’t just another corporate silo—it’s built on the AT Protocol, which gives users genuine ownership of their identities and relationships. You can take your followers with you. You can choose your own algorithms. You can even run your own infrastructure if you want.
This is building, not begging.
Building Beyond the Screen
The contrast between begging and building extends beyond social media. And, once again, it has to do with building genuine communities.
The same weekend Demsas published her piece, NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani showed what actual building looks like in the political context. His citywide scavenger hunt drew thousands of New Yorkers out into their city:
The scavenger hunt was announced on social media Saturday night. The first clue was posted at 11 a.m. Sunday.
The Mamdani campaign prepared 500 participant cards, and thousands of people showed up to the first location at 2 p.m. Sunday. All of the cards were gone in less than 15 minutes, according to the campaign.
The hunt wasn’t just fun—it was a demonstration of building versus begging. Mamdani didn’t petition the current mayor to make NYC more engaging. He didn’t “work the refs” to get permission for civic participation. He just created it. In a single afternoon, he built the kind of engaged public square that Demsas claims only exists on X—except this one gave participants actual agency instead of subjecting them to an algorithm they can’t control.
As one participant noted:
I think actually trying to have fun in politics and do a little bit of a community building exercise, a way to actually learn about our city — I’ve never known another politician to do it.
Regardless of political parties or even policies, Mamdani was showing how to build communities built not around anger at and complaining, but about possibility and promise.
The theme of the scavenger hunt was telling: it focused on NYC mayors who fought corruption, who built great public works, who expanded opportunity. Leaders who didn’t wait for permission to make their city better—they just built. Thousands of people showed up not because an algorithm promoted it or a billionaire allowed it, but because someone created something worth participating in.
This is the fundamental difference between building and begging. Demsas says “stay and fight” in Musk’s sandbox, hoping your presence might somehow influence him. Mamdani looks at NYC and sees a vast fascinating place, calling people out to “create your own spaces.” Bluesky is giving people the power of choice to create their own communities. One version perpetuates learned helplessness. The other demonstrates actual empowerment and community.
The Power of Building vs. the Powerlessness of Begging
The contrast couldn’t be clearer. While Demsas argues for “staying and fighting” in spaces we have no control over, actual builders—whether creating new social platforms or new forms of civic engagement—are demonstrating that we don’t need to beg for better. We can build it ourselves.
Demsas argues that leaving Twitter is just “deplatforming yourself”:
But leaving Twitter in 2025 is not deplatforming Nazis, it is deplatforming yourself. The Nazis have already taken over the bar. The question is who will come to take it back.
But this assumes there’s something to take back. There isn’t. And before you say “but X still has more users”—that’s precisely the learned helplessness talking. Yes, X might have more accounts. But what good is a larger audience if the algorithm ensures they never see your work?
It also guarantees more organic rather than forced engagement.
Bluesky’s growth isn’t just about people fleeing X’s toxicity—it’s about people discovering they can have actual agency over their online experience. They can choose their own algorithms, create their own moderation rules, build their own communities. They can, quite literally, build the social media experience they want rather than accepting whatever some billionaire decides to serve them.
Stop Begging. Start Building.
The lesson isn’t that we should abandon all existing institutions or retreat from public engagement. It’s that we should be strategic about where we invest our energy, efforts, and attention.
We should build new systems that give users actual agency and choice. We should support candidates who demonstrate what better governance looks like through their actions, not just their words. We should create communities and institutions that embody our values rather than tilting at windmills and pretending to fix ones that actively oppose them.
Most importantly, we should stop accepting the premise that the systems we have now are the best we can do. They’re not. We can build better. We are building better.
The question isn’t whether we should stay and fight in broken systems or build new ones. It’s whether we want to spend our time making Elon Musk richer and more powerful, or whether we want to actually build the future we want to live in.
Demsas worries that leaving X means “deplatforming yourself.” But staying on a platform where you have no control, no voice in governance, and no ability to shape the rules isn’t exercising power—it’s surrendering it.
Real power doesn’t come from begging oligarchs to be nicer. It comes from building alternatives that make their monopolies irrelevant.
The choice isn’t between purity tests and pragmatism. It’s between learned helplessness and taking control. Between begging for scraps from digital landlords and building our own damn table.
The answer should be obvious. But for those still clinging to their spot at the Nazi bar, hoping the bartender will suddenly start serving something other than poison, let me be clearer: You’re not fighting. You’re not resisting. You’re just giving Elon Musk your data, your engagement, and your tacit endorsement while getting nothing in return.
The builders have already left. They’re creating something better. The only question is how long you’ll keep begging for scraps before you join them.
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.”
And it appears to be getting worse as Musk (and other companies, like Amazon) launch more LEO satellites. A new study (hat tip, Gizmodo) found that all of the launched satellites exceed brightness limits established by the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky (CPS), harming scientists’ ability to conduct scientific research:
“Although there are no official regulations in place, the CPS established recommendations for maximum acceptable brightness for satellites orbiting below 341 miles (550 kilometers). The IAU established a maximum brightness of +7 magnitude for professional astronomy and below +6 magnitude as the aesthetic reference so it does not impact the public’s ability to stargaze without interference from satellites.”
Again, it’s worth reiterating that Musk initially stated this would never be a problem. While the study found that the brightness levels of Starlink satellites have improved some, the lower orbiting altitude of some of the newer Starlink satellites means the brightness impact is actually worse.
Despite Musk’s endless whining about “burdensome regulations,” the U.S. doesn’t really regulate this sort of thing. And the damage goes well beyond astronomy.
Last June scientists warned that low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites constantly burning up in orbit could release chemicals that could undermine the progress we’ve made repairing the ozone layer. Researchers at USC noted that at peak, 1,005 U.S. tons of aluminum will fall to Earth, releasing 397 U.S. tons of aluminum oxides per year to the atmosphere, an increase of 646% over natural levels.
Starlink’s about to get a big boost by taxpayers, too. Republicans are rewriting the 2021 infrastructure bill to redirect billions in subsidies to Elon Musk and Starlink, despite the service’s high costs, congestion problems, and increasingly problematic environmental impact. And, of course, Starlink is just one of several emerging competitors in the LEO space, all jockeying for a huge boost in taxpayer subsidies.
The lawsuit also points out that Trump’s FCC and agency boss Brendan Carr have “acted favorably on several Starlink initiatives,” and recently opened a dodgy “investigation” into Dish Network, which the suit alleges is flimsy cover to force Dish to sell its valuable spectrum holdings to Elon Musk and Starlink.
The lawsuit also claims that the Trump FCC violated the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by wrongfully withholding records on DOGE’s activities at the FCC.
The Judge managing the lawsuit apparently doesn’t think much of Trump and Brendan Carr’s FCC responses to the inquiry so far. The plaintiffs in the case filed a motion for preliminary injunction last week (hat tip, Ars Technica) and received a quick ruling from US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in the District of Columbia.
While Jackson said the plaintiffs failed to meet the legal requirements for an injunction, she did take time to point out that Trump’s FCC is stonewalling on providing documentation:
“On July 2, 2025, the Court ordered that defendant “must file a dispositive motion or, in the alternative, a report setting forth the schedule for the completion of its production of documents to plaintiff, on or before July 23, 2025.” However, defendant’s July 23, 2025 status report provided no timeline, and it was vague and uninformative. Further, the anticipated “initial production” defendant referred to [in] that filing, amounted to only 35 pages.”
DOGE has also provided flimsy “innovation efficiency” cover in the press for the brutal dismantling of both corporate oversight and the social safety net, in addition to just generally being a wasteful, costly mess all by itself. What’s left of federal consumer protection and corporate oversight really is being summarily executed by radical assholes, and the impact will be massive and generational. Yet, with scattered exception, most U.S. journalists, politicians, and policy folks don’t seem particularly interested.
It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, got a panicked message from his son. Halimi’s name had just appeared in a viral post on X, shared by none other than the site’s owner and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
Halimi thought his son was joking. It was April Fools’ Day after all. Musk had been assigned a big job in the Trump administration, running the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency that was established to comb through the government to root out waste and fraud.
Halimi had a much smaller job, working on a contract for the United States Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit funded by Congress that promotes conflict resolution efforts around the world, including in Halimi’s native Afghanistan. There was no way, he thought to himself, that someone like him would have landed on Musk’s radar.
But Halimi’s son was not joking. He told Halimi to go online and see for himself. The post, which Musk shared with his 222 million followers, was real. It had already been picked up by the local press back home. And it was potentially deadly.
“United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban,” the post read. At the bottom, the post named Halimi and described him as a “former Taliban member,” and the payments to him as U.S. support for the militants. Below that, thousands of comments tumbled in, calling him a terrorist and a grifter. Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia later chimed in to congratulate Musk for discovering that “the federal government is paying the Taliban and they covered it up.”
Halimi couldn’t make any sense of it. Critics of U.S. foreign aid efforts might argue that his small contract of $132,000 with USIP amounted to waste. But if there was one thing Washington should have known about Halimi, it was that he was no enemy of America.
It was true that he’d once worked for the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, but he had switched sides after the United States invaded following 9/11. He had even served as a cabinet minister in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, where he often shared his knowledge of the Taliban’s internal workings with intelligence officials and military leaders.
In fact, during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, Halimi was part of a team of advisers that helped the U.S. prepare for difficult diplomatic talks with the Taliban, which eventually included guarantees to allow American troops safe passage out.
And his political views were easy to figure out: Halimi had made numerous media appearances as one of the Taliban’s more ardent critics, accusing them of straying from Islam’s true principles.
This all made him an obvious target. The Taliban had attempted to assassinate Halimi as a traitor at least three times during the U.S. occupation. And the U.S. government knew he had faced real danger in the past. He narrowly managed to flee Afghanistan in the final days before the U.S.-backed government fell to the Taliban, with the help of the second-highest-ranking CIA officer in the country. Since then, he had tried to live a mostly quiet life, partly to keep the relatives he’d left behind safe from retribution.
The work he was pursuing with USIP had nothing to do with supporting the Taliban. It was the opposite.
ProPublica has obtained records making clear that Musk and his team at the newly formed DOGE should have known this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in precise detail in the agency’s records, down to the tasks he performed on specific days. His role at the institute was far from top secret, but it had been treated as highly sensitive and confidential. Among other tasks, it involved a program gathering information on the ground about living conditions for Afghan women, who are largely barred from education past primary school or from having a role in public life.
Partly because of Halimi’s contentious history with the Taliban, the militants might equate his work at USIP to espionage and severely punish anyone involved with it. By exposing him, Musk and his team endangered those working with Halimi, as well his relatives who were still in Afghanistan. The White House and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Multiple senior government officials at the State Department were warned about the danger that DOGE’s callout posed to Halimi’s family, according to two USIP staffers interviewed by ProPublica. They were trying to stop the damage from spreading. But Musk’s crew was then locked in a pitched battle for control of USIP. The misleading narrative about Halimi became central to DOGE’s argument; American foreign aid was corrupt and even, at times, funding America’s enemies — and that’s why DOGE had to take over.
Those battles were playing out across the government at the time. DOGE often won, but ultimately Musk’s tenure was short-lived. He resigned from DOGE at the end of May, shortly before a public falling-out with Trump. DOGE’s hard-charging takeovers of government agencies brought chaos and confusion and left many qualified bureaucrats jobless. But Halimi risked losing a lot more.
Shortly after Halimi spoke to his son, a flood of threatening messages began appearing on his phone. The most ominous came from members of the Taliban. Just as Halimi had worried, they accused him of being a thief and traitor, which could be like a death sentence for anyone connected to him back home. “My family was in great danger,” Halimi thought to himself.
About a week after DOGE outed him, Halimi’s worst fears were realized. Taliban intelligence agents in Kabul descended on the homes of his relatives and detained three of his family members. They were blindfolded, thrown into the backs of 4×4 pickup trucks and driven to a small remote prison. They were held incommunicado over several days and repeatedly beaten and questioned about Halimi and his recently publicized yet ambiguous work for the United States.
The account of the beatings is based on interviews with multiple people familiar with the events. ProPublica did not interview any sources in Afghanistan, a country where people are sometimes imprisoned for speaking out against the government.
Zabihullah Mujahid, chief government spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, said Halimi “is not important to us and we do not want to talk about him that much.” He added that there was no active criminal investigation targeting him. The spokesperson did not answer questions about the treatment of Halimi’s family, saying, “I do not consider it necessary to answer.”
While Halimi felt powerless to do anything, his relatives in Afghanistan braced themselves for even worse. He tried to put on a brave face, though he knew from his own near-death experiences with the Taliban that the situation was increasingly bleak.
“To keep the morale of the family high, I did not show them my panic,” he told ProPublica in one of multiple interviews conducted through a translator.
He’d been frantically reaching out to his bosses in Washington to ask what was behind Musk’s social media blasts against him and to seek help clearing his name. But everyone Halimi worked with had been fired.
A 28-year-old college dropout named Nate Cavanaugh had been installed as USIP’s new president. DOGE had ousted its leader, State Department veteran George E. Moose.
Halimi and his loved ones were on their own. Maybe, they hoped, this would all pass if they stayed quiet and lay low. Then Musk and DOGE took their campaign against USIP and Halimi to another level.
In May, a little more than a month later, DOGE invited Fox News host Jesse Watters to sit in and film one of its team meetings. It was the first major media appearance by the larger DOGE team. For nearly 30 minutes on prime-time TV, Musk and more than a dozen triumphant young men in suits sat around a table congratulating one another. They swapped war stories about the government fraud they had exposed and the wasteful bureaucrats they had brought to heel.
At that point, DOGE was riding high: It had mostly shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main foreign aid agency. The watchdog Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been reduced to a skeleton crew. And at the Department of Education, DOGE had cut hundreds of millions of dollars to an internal research arm that tracks the performance of public schools.
For weeks, DOGE had been posting online hundreds of contracts it had canceled and tallying up the savings — though in multiple cases, the totals were later found to be wildly off, or the contracts mostly misrepresented. The White House has defended the accuracy of DOGE’s claims, with a spokesperson recently saying, “All numbers are rigorously scrubbed with agency procurement officials.”
With Watters, the DOGE team zeroed in on government spending. Steve Davis, Musk’s right-hand man at DOGE, shared an eye-popping example of waste from the Education Department. He said that the department had misused taxpayer money by funding parties at Caesars Palace, a casino and hotel in Las Vegas, before DOGE implemented new requirements to submit receipts. The claim appeared to have little resemblance to the truth: One school district in Utah had used DOE funds to send teachers to an education conference hosted at a Caesars hotel. Davis did not reply to a request for comment.
Musk went around the table, prodding the other members of the team as they one-upped one another with outrageous examples of their own. With each story, Watters egged them on, raising his eyebrows in disbelief. Every so often, the DOGE team would burst into laughter.
“The Taliban Gets DOGED”
At one point, Musk cued Cavanaugh with an awkward joke about how the work he’d found being done at the United States Institute of Peace was actually “the opposite of the title.”
Cavanaugh agreed, saying, “It was by far the least peaceful agency we worked with.” To prove his point, he turned toward Watters and said he’d uncovered documents showing that the agency was making payments to a contractor associated with the Taliban.
Watters looked at Cavanaugh in disbelief: “Get out of here.”
“This is real,” Cavanaugh said. Watters raised a hand, pressing on: “What was the money going to the Taliban for? … Was it for opium, or weapons, or a bribe?”
“Or nothing,” Musk interjected.
He and Watters burst into laughter. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read, “THE TALIBAN GETS DOGED.”
In a statement, a spokesperson with Fox News said, “It’s clear ProPublica is trying to insert FOX News into this story despite acknowledging the network having no part in any unmasking or identification of the independent contractor.” The spokesperson added, “At no point was the contractor identified, and the focus of the interview was on extreme spending practices and potential billing fraud within government agencies.”
In an email, Cavanaugh said he was mandated by Trump to dismantle the USIP, and “that includes the contract with former Taliban member Mohammad Qasem Halimi.” Cavanaugh added, “An overwhelming majority of Americans would agree that the Federal Government should not be funding former members of the Taliban when our country is $36T in debt.” He did not respond to questions about why DOGE chose to publicize Halimi’s contract or whether it knew the risk in doing so.
While DOGE initially referred to Halimi as a “former Taliban member,” the distinction was sometimes lost as Halimi’s contract became a viral social media and news story. For example, one social media post claiming that USIP had been “funding multiple terrorist organizations” was viewed by more than 180,000 people. And on Fox News, Cavanaugh dropped the reference that Halimi was a “former” Taliban member, describing his USIP work simply as payments to the Taliban.
Cavanaugh told Watters that DOGE was unable to find any justification for those payments. But ProPublica’s reporting showed that four weeks earlier, Cavanaugh had been sent dozens of pages of internal records from USIP outlining Halimi’s work in detail, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. There were invoices, project descriptions, and dates and times showing what Halimi was supposed to be doing on specific days. Cavanaugh did not respond to questions about his access to these records or how they appeared to conflict with his statements on Fox News.
Timeline of Events
Mar. 17: DOGE staffers, standing alongside local law enforcement officers, work their way into the USIP headquarters in downtown Washington.
Mar. 313:58pm EST: DOGE sends Halimi an email notifying him that his contract with USIP has been terminated.
Mar. 317:17pm EST: In a post on X, DOGE exposes Halimi’s work with the USIP, worth $132,000, and calls him a former Taliban member.
Mar. 31 to Apr. 17:29 p.m. ESTto 2:41 p.m. EST: Two USIP holdover employees — who supported Musk’s initiative and, as IT staffers, had wide access to USIP systems — sent Cavanaugh and his DOGE team a series of emails with documents about Halimi’s employment, including receipts and a scope of work, making it clear his duties were well documented.
Apr. 17:46 a.m. EST: DOGE’s post about Halimi’s USIP contract is picked up by local press in Afghanistan, where the Taliban notice the development.
Around Apr. 9: Members of Halimi’s family are picked up by Taliban security forces around Kabul, taken to prison and beaten.
May 1: Cavanaugh, Musk and other DOGE staffers meet with Jesse Watters on Fox News, where they describe the payments to Halimi as a rogue contract with a Taliban member. Watters asks whether taxpayer money was really being used to run drugs and guns inside Afghanistan — allegations that are untrue.
USIP’s own records, obtained by ProPublica, show that none of the institute’s work involved payments to the Taliban. Much of what Halimi did was actually routine foreign policy consulting: He provided expert advice to the State Department to help U.S. diplomats understand religious dynamics and civil society in Afghanistan. He was paid to attend Islamic conferences, where he made contact with other prominent political and religious figures across the Middle East on behalf of the USIP.
He was also an adviser to USIP on women’s issues in Islam, something he was uniquely qualified to do both personally and professionally. Years earlier, Halimi’s sister had been murdered by her husband in an act of domestic violence, and Halimi spoke about her openly and emotionally, recalled Mary Akrami, an Afghan women’s rights advocate who opened the country’s first women’s shelter after the Taliban fell.
As an official in the government of Hamid Karzai, Halimi was an outspoken advocate for the shelter. “He was one of the most supportive and open-minded religious scholars I have ever known,” Akrami said in an interview.
Halimi went on to serve in a number of high-profile posts in the U.S.-backed government, including as an investigator at the Supreme Court, a spokesperson for the national religious council, an adviser to the national security council, and finally the minister for religious affairs and hajj under the last democratically elected president, Ashraf Ghani.
After the Fox News interview, Halimi was struggling to move forward. By early spring, the Taliban had released his beaten and terrified family members. But they made it clear that they expected Halimi to publicly admit that he was an American spy. There were no good options. Such an admission would mean that his family would never be safe again, since they’d forever be associated with a traitor. But if he refused, they would also be under constant pressure.
Halimi had barely escaped the country four years earlier, when the U.S.-backed government he worked for collapsed in the face of a rapid Taliban military advance into the capital. A prominent Taliban cleric had publicly singled him out as an apostate — a traitor to Islam — placing a bullseye on his head. And Halimi said that a broad amnesty offer from the Taliban, extended to most of their enemies, would not apply to him. (The Taliban spokesperson told ProPublica that Halimi was free to return to Afghanistan.)
The situation was dire, and the U.S. government knew it too. In those final days, a CIA operative reached out to Halimi and directed him to catch an evacuation flight. Disguised as an ambulance driver and with his nephew donning a nurse outfit, Halimi evaded multiple Taliban checkpoints en route to the U.S.-controlled airbase at Bagram. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment. The Pentagon declined to comment and referred questions about Halimi’s past work with the U.S. to the State Department.
“I never cried harder in my life than I did that night when I left my country,” he told ProPublica. “But I had no choice.”
It wasn’t Halimi’s first time in exile.
When he was 7 years old, his mother took him and his six siblings across the border to Pakistan to escape the civil war that engulfed Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. “My earliest recollections are just of war, of violence, of blood and of killings,” Halimi said. “My mother used to tell me Afghanistan was a peaceful place in the past. I have no memory of it.”
Halimi’s father, the town imam in a rural Afghan village, had died when Halimi was young. He and his siblings grew up in a tent across the border within a refugee camp. From a dirt-floored classroom, Halimi found a way out through a scholarship to study Islamic law in Egypt.
Halimi’s time in Cairo, where he socialized with international students from across the globe, changed him. He began looking at the world differently, he said, with a curiosity about other cultures and a lifelong interest in foreign languages.
But by the time he returned home, a group of conservative religious students turned rebel fighters were dominating Afghanistan’s messy, multisided civil war and had consolidated power over the capital. They were known as the Taliban.
Halimi took a job in a government office responsible for dealing with foreign diplomats, not because he believed in Taliban ideology, but because, for a man with a college degree and political aspirations, “it was the only good job I could find,” he said.
Then came the U.S. invasion, which ousted the Taliban government and ushered in a bloody, protracted war. The George W. Bush administration ordered the detention of swaths of the Taliban government at a giant prison at Bagram Airfield. Halimi was among them. The treatment was brutal. He was constantly shackled by his hands and feet, except for short bathroom breaks. But along the way, he said, he learned English and built an understanding of his captors.
While some prominent Taliban fighters and leaders were sent to Guantanamo, Halimi, as a relatively unknown bureaucrat, was part of a group that was gradually let out. Some people were enlisted to join the U.S.-backed government; their experience made them useful to Washington and its local allies’ efforts to understand, and even communicate with, the Taliban.
In those early days of the conflict, the U.S. military and intelligence communities were under tremendous pressure to stop further attacks on the homeland. Yet they knew virtually nothing about their assumed enemy. What followed was two decades of American military intervention across the region that led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the resurgence of the very groups the U.S. once sought to unseat.
When U.S. forces finally withdrew for good from Afghanistan in late 2021, so did Halimi. His country had been savaged by warring powers for decades. Somehow, he had managed to stay alive through all of it, but now there was no place for him.
Nate Cavanaugh had nothing in his background to suggest he would be chosen to wind down an international conflict-resolution agency. His 15 minutes of fame on Fox News represented an unlikely turn for a young man who’d spent his short career founding niche tech startups.
Cavanaugh comes from a wealthy family — his father built a $100 million sports supplement company — and he told people he was inspired by the tech mogul Peter Thiel. He started two small companies, which focused on specialized software tools to help companies manage their finances and intellectual property. But investors in both told ProPublica that neither company successfully took off.
When DOGE was announced, Cavanaugh was eager to join up, a former co-worker told ProPublica. It’s not clear how he ultimately got connected to the group, but DOGE recruited heavily from young right-wing tech circles in California.
Friends and former colleagues said they’d never heard him discuss American foreign policy or show an interest in geopolitics. Yet in January, as a leader in Musk’s DOGE, he was assigned to evaluate and oversee budget cuts across a variety of federally funded international programs. Among the agencies in Cavanaugh’s portfolio were the Inter-American Foundation and African Development Foundation. He was part of the DOGE team that sought cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities and redirected its funds to build a park full of statues of “American Heroes,” according to a lawsuit by NEH grant recipients.
But it was the U.S. Institute of Peace, housed in a futuristic, glass-encased building overlooking the Potomac River in downtown Washington, where Cavanaugh hit resistance. Established under President Ronald Reagan, the agency had once enjoyed bipartisan support. While it’s largely taxpayer funded, USIP is not a government agency; its contracts have not typically been posted publicly, and its employees operate with a degree of removal from U.S. officialdom. That gives the institute some ability to operate behind the scenes and establish relationships with figures at the center of complex conflicts — figures such as Mohammad Halimi.
It’s often pushing informal diplomacy: In 2023, for example, USIP staff helped facilitate a ceasefire between Islamic rebels and the government of the Philippines in the country’s restive south.
But in 2024, the Heritage Foundation — which led Project 2025 — published a report arguing that USIP had become a partisan, Democrat-controlled institution.
When Cavanaugh and several other DOGE officials first showed up to take control of the USIP in March, he was physically blocked from entering the building by its security chief, Colin O’Brien, who spent 15 years working as a police officer before joining the institute. Cavanaugh tried to enter again a little later, this time with two FBI agents in tow. O’Brien blocked him again, believing Cavanaugh and DOGE had no business dismantling the USIP, which had been established by Congress as an independent entity.
Over the next few days, DOGE put more pressure on O’Brien. FBI agents indicated O’Brien was the subject of a new Justice Department investigation. And they visited the home of one of his subordinates for questioning. Ultimately, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington at the time, Trump ally Edward Martin, demanded that USIP officials give DOGE access to the building.
The next time Cavanaugh appeared at the agency’s door, he and a phalanx of local police officers forced their way in. “I am a firm believer that what makes this country special is that we follow laws and process,” O’Brien said. “What happened that day was the antithesis of everything I believe in.”
An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the role of FBI personnel in the takeover. Martin did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police Department of D.C. referred ProPublica to a published statement, which said that police officers spoke with the new acting USIP president and assisted him in removing “unauthorized individuals” from the building.
Once in possession of its offices and information systems, Cavanaugh and his team fired virtually all USIP personnel, including over 100 overseas staff. With little warning or awareness of the potential danger to overseas employees, former staffers said, they shuttered USIP offices in Pakistan, Nigeria and El Salvador. After DOGE fired USIP’s international security team, its staff in Libya feared for their safety and were forced to flee on their own across the border. Cavanaugh and his staff canceled more than 700 contracts over 12 days.
They rifled through other USIP files, spotlighting expenditures they used to publicly embarrass the institute. On Fox, DOGE also bragged about uncovering payments for “private jets,” when, in fact, records show that USIP chartered a single plane for an evacuation mission out of a war zone for its staff. Cavanaugh did not answer a question about the assertion.
Over the following weeks, the DOGE team celebrated its newfound power inside the USIP building. Members were seen smoking cigars in the office and drinking beer as they worked late into the night. The agency’s insignia was torn from the entryway.
“DOGE was completely indifferent to the effect their actions had on human beings,” said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert who has served as a senior adviser for the United Nations and State Department. All it cared about, he said, was making “its enemies look bad.”
Months after Musk’s fateful retweet, Halimi is still picking up the pieces and trying to get answers.
During his long career as an official in the Afghan government, Halimi often rubbed shoulders with senior U.S. diplomats and generals, but now no one in the Trump administration is calling him back. He proudly showed ProPublica a letter he received from Stephen Hadley, the former U.S. national security adviser under George W. Bush, thanking him for his contributions to “promoting democracy” in Afghanistan.
A letter on White House letterhead sent to Halimi in 2005 from Stephen Hadley, assistant to the president for national security affairs, thanking him for his work Credit:Obtained by ProPublica
Former senior State Department, White House and national security officials who worked on Afghanistan over the last two decades described the Trump administration’s attack on Halimi as not only absurd, but also dangerous.
Johnny Walsh, a former State Department official who worked with Halimi, recalled that “he wanted the same thing as the Trump administration,” which was for a peaceful end to the war.
Lisa Curtis, a former senior adviser to the National Security Council who focused on Afghanistan in the first Trump administration, said, “DOGE did not do their homework. They are putting at risk individuals who are helping the United States.”
As for the graying Afghan scholar, the Taliban relented just long enough for several family members to make it out of the country. ProPublica is not disclosing how that happened or where they are for their safety, but they remain stranded without immigration status.
Cavanaugh, DOGE’s man inside USIP, announced he was leaving government service on Aug. 6. In a tweet, Cavanaugh thanked Trump “for the opportunity to help reduce wasteful spending” and said that “I’m hopeful the United States continues to prioritize sensible spending — I believe it is critical to maintain our supremacy 🇺🇸.”
USIP’s operations have been essentially frozen. Its headquarters is under federal control — standing empty aside from a few security guards monitoring the entrances. A new acting president, Darren Beattie, was named in late July.
Beattie is a former Duke University professor and Trump speechwriter who was fired in 2018 after it came out that he spoke at a conference regularly attended by white nationalists. Beattie did not address a ProPublica question about the event but previously dismissed the criticism, calling it “an honor to be attacked by the far-left.”
At USIP, he has promised to rebuild the organization to match the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities.
In an emailed statement to ProPublica, Beattie defended the administration’s treatment of Halimi. The takeover of USIP, he wrote, “underscores President Trump’s resolve to end the weaponization of government, cut off funding to adversaries, and shut down reckless so-called peacebuilding programs that end up undermining our national security.”
George Foote, the former head lawyer of USIP who still represents its old leadership in ongoing litigation against the Trump administration, called DOGE’s outing of Halimi “criminally careless.”
Halimi remains without work. He wonders how he will support his wife and children and whether there’s any chance he can clear his name. At the very least, he hopes that the Trump administration will admit the error that has caused his family so much harm.
In one of ProPublica’s final interviews, Halimi made a last request: Could we help him get an audience with Musk?
“Why would one of the richest men in the world commit such an act of injustice?” Halimi asked. “Sometimes I think that if Elon Musk himself were fully informed about this matter, he would likely be deeply ashamed.”
So I’ve noted how Republicans are rewriting the 2021 infrastructure bill (they voted against) to ensure that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded broadband grants wind up in the back pocket of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (and their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband ventures, Starlink and Project Kuiper).
I’ve also explained in detail why that’s a problem: these networks may be initially cheaper to deploy, but the networks lack the capacity to actually scale to meet demand. Data indicates they harm astronomy research and the ozone layer. Money directed toward Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is also money directed away from higher-capacity, faster, locally-owned (and usually cheaper) fiber and wireless alternatives.
Quick background: the 2021 infrastructure bill created a $42.5 billion grant program dubbed the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program (BEAD). BEAD is overseen on the federal level by the NTIA, but individual states are largely going to be in charge of how money is spent.
A few months ago, the Trump administration retooled the program in order to strip away any language related to climate, fair labor practices, equity, or affordability. But the changes also urged states to redirect as much money as possible to Bezos and Musk.
Most states were happy to purge their BEAD plans of any language ensuring that taxpayer-funded broadband is actually affordable. But not all states have been quite as quick to slather Musk with the kind of subsidies he wants. Virginia, for example, released a plan that continues to primarily fund fiber networks over satellite, something Space X and Starlink immediately started to whine about.
Colorado doled out $25.4 million BEAD award to Amazon, despite the fact that the company’s LEO network is barely operational. Starlink received $9.16 million for 5,400 locations. The two companies won the bids because they promised to do it so much more cheaply than other companies, including cellular or fixed wireless providers:
“The LEOs were primarily picked because they could do it much cheaper than everyone else, Reitter said.
“LEO was really aggressive in their coverage and also their pricing,” she said. “They decreased their cost per BSL (broadband serviceable location) quite a bit to be more competitive against the other technologies. Fixed wireless is probably their main competitor.”
But again, simply stating that these LEO satellite systems are cheaper to deploy that cellular, fixed wireless, or fiber is extremely misleading.
One recent study found that Starlink struggles to deliver the FCC’s already flimsy definition of broadband – 100 megabits per second (Mbps) down, 20 Mbps up – in any areas where Starlink subscribership exceeds 6 households per square mile. In many areas, these capacity constraints are causing Starlink to issue “congestion” charges as high as $750.
Ideally, if you’re going to spend taxpayer money on broadband, you want to prioritize pushing fiber as deeply into rural America as you can. From there, you want to leverage higher-capacity cellular and fixed wireless. After that, you can leverage LEO satellite broadband to fill the gaps. And you probably want competent regulators to prevent telecoms from ripping off captive customers in monopolized areas.
Especially given that one of the two companies is led by a highly erratic, extremely conspiratorial, overt white supremacist with a history of empty promises and labor violations.
Hoping to appease their billionaire friends, Republicans have turned this program on its head. So unfortunately, that means in many states, a big chunk of your taxpayer money is being directed away from locally-owned fiber and wireless companies, cooperatives, or city-owned utilities, and toward unproven LEO satellite ventures with a long list of caveats.
This is, of course, complicated by the fact that lobbyists for our biggest, shittiest cable and phone companies (also traditionally directly allied with Republicans) are also in the mix, trying to direct money their way, and away from more popular alternatives (like the surging number of municipal broadband projects scattered around the U.S., or the kind of popular city-owned utilities in cities like Chattanooga).
States that resist the Trump administration’s desires to ignore affordability and slather Musk with subsidies risk having their funding plans rejected entirely by the NTIA, potentially losing out on billions in historic broadband subsidies. So it will be interesting to see how hard states are willing to fight over the next six months or so.
Should Musk and friends get what they want, in a few years, when these LEO networks are overloaded and over-billing captive customers in rural locations, a lot of these policymakers will slap a stupid look on their faces and wonder how it happened. But because the Trump administration has also taken a hatchet to federal regulatory oversight, holding these satellite companies (or giant telecom monopolies) accountable when they once again fail to deliver will be an uphill climb.
The rewrites delayed the underlying grant program, forcing many states to revamp their plans for the already earmarked funds. That includes states like Virginia, which recently tried to finalize their plans to spend $1.48 billion on faster, better broadband across the state. But they immediately ran into complaints by Elon Musk’s Starlink for not giving Elon Musk enough subsidies:
“The Virginia plan “represents a massive waste of federal taxpayer money, reverting to the Biden Administration’s failed approach to BEAD and completely disregarding the Trump Administration’s effort to restructure the program to accelerate broadband deployment and reduce spending,” SpaceX alleged. “Simply put, Virginia has put its heavy thumb on the scale in favor of expensive, slow-to-build fiber bias over speedy, low-cost, and technology neutral competition.”
Ideally, you want to spend most of taxpayer-funded broadband grant money on high capacity, future-proof, fiber optic broadband. From there, you want to fill in many of the remaining gaps with 5G cellular and fixed wireless. After that, you can fill in any remaining gaps with Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband services, which generally lack the capacity to be anything more than a niche player.
Musk and Republicans are demanding that states reverse that order, prioritizing Starlink service. The argument is that Starlink is cheaper to deploy than fiber.
And while technically true, Starlink has a long list of caveats. It’s often too expensive for users most in need of affordable broadband. The network is congested and can’t really handle a massive influx of users. It also harms the ozone layer and astronomy research. It’s not entirely guaranteed the service will even exist in ten years, making Starlink only “cheaper” if you ignore objective reality.
This is all before you get to the fact that the company is run by an overt white supremacist asshole.
Because they want more taxpayer subsidies, Starlink and SpaceX are urging the NTIA to reject Virginia’s latest plan. States now have to risk potentially losing out on billions in historic broadband grants if they fail to pander to Elon Musk, or dare to include provisions that actually try to ensure the resulting broadband access is affordable and evenly deployed to marginalized communities.
That means not only more expensive and less reliable broadband, but it means redirecting a lot of taxpayer money away from things like open access community-owned broadband and cooperatives, and toward a less reliable, more expensive, more congested alternative. All so the country’s richest man (who pretends to hate subsidies) can get even richer on the taxpayer dime.
This is going to be playing out in every state in the country over the next six months, and obviously the Republican states are going to be more likely to sell out their own constituents in order to make Elon Musk happy. But Democratic states may also be quick to fold on issues like Starlink subsidies and affordability provisions for fear of incurring Trump administration ire.
This pandering to Elon Musk is causing significant new delays in broadband deployments in a program Republicans complained during election season was taking too long to deploy broadband.
When Starlink inevitably struggles to handle the influx of new subsidized users and overcharges rural Americans for service, Republicans, as per tradition, will be nowhere to be found. And because a core component of the second Trump term is destroying all functional federal regulators, nobody will be able to hold Starlink accountable when that inevitable disappointment comes.
A federal judge has delivered an extraordinary rebuke to the FTC’s Andrew Ferguson, finding that his investigation into Media Matters was motivated by “retaliatory animus” rather than legitimate antitrust concerns. In a scathing ruling, Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan granted Media Matters’ motion for a preliminary injunction, calling out not just the investigation’s pretextual nature, but the systematic pattern of harassment the organization has faced for accurate reporting.
Courts almost never find that federal agencies act with improper retaliatory motives. That Judge Sooknanan felt compelled to make such a finding—explicitly stating that “retaliatory animus was the but-for cause of the FTC’s CID”—signals just how egregious Ferguson’s conduct has been.
For those keeping score at home, this is now the third time federal courts have had to block frivolous, retaliatory government investigations targeting Media Matters for the heinous crime of… accurately reporting that ads appeared next to Nazi content on X. Because apparently, in Trump’s America, doing your job as a journalist is grounds for federal investigation.
Let’s recap this absolutely ridiculous saga. In November 2023, Media Matters published an article showing that major brand advertisements were appearing next to literal neo-Nazi content on Elon’s platform. This happened right after Musk endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory with his now-infamous “You have said the actual truth” response.
The report was factually accurate. Even Musk’s own lawsuit admits this. But rather than fix the problem or take responsibility, Musk decided to shoot the messenger. He promised a “thermonuclear lawsuit” and then followed through, filing ridiculously frivolous litigation against Media Matters in multiple countries.
But that wasn’t enough. Trump advisor Stephen Miller then essentially put out a public call (on Twitter, of course) for state prosecutors to pile on, leading to “investigations” by Texas AG Ken Paxton and Missouri AG Andrew Bailey. Both of those got smacked down by federal courts for the obvious First Amendment violations they were.
And now we have Andrew Ferguson’s FTC taking up the cause with an equally bogus “antitrust” investigation, in the form of a “civil investigatory demand” (effectively a subpoena).
Judge Sooknanan’s ruling is a masterclass in judicial restraint while still absolutely eviscerating the government’s case. She starts by noting just how extraordinary it is for a court to find that a federal agency acted with improper retaliatory motives:
Speech on matters of public concern is the heartland of the First Amendment. The principle that public issues should be debated freely has long been woven into the very fabric of who we are as a Nation. Without it, our democracy stands on shaky ground.It should alarm all Americans when the Government retaliates against individuals or organizations for engaging in constitutionally protected public debate.And that alarm should ring even louder when the Government retaliates against those engaged in newsgathering and reporting.
The judge then details the pattern of harassment that Media Matters has faced, noting how Ferguson basically auditioned for his FTC role by promising to go after the organization:
Before President Trump selected him to head the FTC, Mr. Ferguson appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast, where he said that it is “really important that the FTC take investigative steps in the new administration under President Trump” because “progressives” and others who are “fighting “disinformation” were “not going to give up just because of the election.” One of his supporters, Mike Davis, who urged President Trump to nominate him to the role, made several public comments about Media Matters, including that Mr. Musk should “nuke” the media company. And after taking the reins, Chairman Ferguson brought on several senior staffers at the FTC who previously made public comments about Media Matters.
But it gets better. The judge highlights how Ferguson’s supporters and appointees have made their motivations crystal clear. Mike Davis, mentioned above, has been quite explicit about his goals:
One of Mr. Ferguson’s supporters was Mike Davis, who wrote on X that “Donald Trump should nominate digital freedom fighter Andrew Ferguson to chair FTC.” Id. ¶ 63 (Mike Davis (@mrddmia), X (Dec. 7, 2024, 2:09 pm),https://perma.cc/V9XL-J7UX). Mr. Davis has made many comments about Media Matters throughout this controversy. On December 1, 2022, Mr. Davis posted on X that Mr. Musk “should nuke @MMFA [Media Matters’ account] and all staff accounts” because “[t]hey’re a cancer to free speech.” Id. ¶ 64 (quoting Mike Davis (@mrddmia), X (Dec. 1, 2022, 11:54am),https://perma.cc/VVD5-NAR5). Later, on November 10, 2023, he solicited money to help push back against Media Matters: “If you want to help @Article3Project build our (growing) list of leftists to throw in the DC gulag with @MMFA’s @ehananoki and @MattGertz, please donate here.” Id. (quoting Mike Davis (@mrddmia), X (Nov. 10, 2023, 1:53 pm),https://perma.cc/L8E8-ZSJF). And he cheered on Mr. Musk’s eventual lawsuits against Media Matters, writing that “[a]dvertiser boycotts are highly effective tactics leftists use to cow media executives to destroy free speech—and control the political narrative. @MMFA is the driving force behind conservative media getting crushed— and conservative voices silenced. Cheers to @ElonMusk.” Id. (quoting Mike Davis (@mrddmia), X (Nov. 29, 2023, 5:42 pm),https://perma.cc/G88S-YC3U). Mr. Davis “is now an outside adviser to the Trump administration.”
The supposed “free speech warrior” wants to literally destroy an organization for exercising its free speech rights and bragged about it publicly online. Great job.
Judge Sooknanan also calls out how Ferguson stacked his team with people who had publicly expressed hatred for Media Matters:
When Mr. Ferguson became Chairman of the FTC, he brought in several senior staffers who had previously made comments about Media Matters. Joe Simonson, the FTC’s Director of Public Affairs, had posted on X in May 2024 that Media Matters employed “a number of stupid and resentful Democrats who went to like American University and didn’t have the emotional stability to work as an assistant press aide for a House member.” Jon Schweppe, a Senior Policy Advisor to Chairman Ferguson, had said in June 2023 that Media Matters “wants to weaponize powerful institutions to censor conservatives,” before celebrating one of Mr. Musk’s lawsuits against Media Matters, which he called “the scum of the earth.”… And Jake Denton, the FTC’s Chief Technology Officer, had stated in June 2023 that Media Matters was “an organization devoted to pressuring companies into silencing conservative voices.”
This isn’t even subtle. Ferguson hired a bunch of people who spent years calling for Media Matters to be destroyed for its speech and cheering on every earlier attempt to punish the company for its speech. They can’t really act shocked when people question the investigation’s legitimacy.
Of course, it also doesn’t help that the FTC’s theory for this “investigation” is utterly absurd. They’re arguing that accurate reporting about a platform’s content problems somehow constitutes illegal “collusion” because it might cause advertisers to make informed business decisions.
This is not how antitrust law works. At all. It’s not how anything works.
The judge notes the obvious problems with this theory, particularly the complete lack of evidence that Media Matters has any actual information about the “brand safety lists” that supposedly form the basis of this investigation:
The FTC claims that it believes Media Matters has information about the use of brand suitable or brand safe lists to coordinate ad placement… But they never explain why they have reason to believe that Media Matters has information relating to the use of… lists to coordinate ad placement. So the record is utterly devoid of evidence to support such a claim.
The judge also points out how the scope of the FTC’s demands goes far beyond any legitimate antitrust investigation:
Nor does the sweeping scope of the FTC’s CID square with the proffered reason. The FTC claims that it believes Media Matters has information about the use of “brand suitable” or “brand safe” lists to “coordinate ad placement.”… it also includes other demands that go well beyond the investigation’s purported scope. See, e.g., id. at 5 (“Provide each financial statement, budget, profit and loss statement, cost center report, profitability report, and any other financial report regularly prepared by or for Media Matters on any periodic basis. For each such statement, budget, or report, state how often it is prepared, and identify the employees responsible for its preparation.”); id. at 3 (“Provide all documents that Media Matters either produced or received in discovery in any litigation between Media Matters and X Corp. related to advertiser boycotts since 2023). As a whole, then, the scope of the CIDsuggests pretext on the part of the FTC, which is fatal to the Defendants’ causation arguments.
That “pretext” finding is the ballgame on causation. Agencies almost always get deference on subpoenas; courts almost never call pretext. She did.
One of the most important aspects of this ruling is how it documents the actual harm that this coordinated campaign of harassment has inflicted on Media Matters’ ability to do journalism. The chilling effects of this kind of lawfare are not just real, but they’re a significant drag on any organization. The judge quotes extensively from Media Matters staff about how the investigation has chilled their reporting:
And Media Matters has demonstrated that the FTC’s CID chilled its activity. One declarant has sworn that “the prospect of relaxing Media Matters’ posture on research and reporting about government entities” after winning legal victories against the state CIDs “was stymied by the FTC’s CID.” Dimiero Decl. ¶ 19; see also Padera Decl. ¶ 17 (similar). “For example, without the investigation, Media Matters would likely have looked into reporting about Andrew Ferguson’s merger requirements for Omnicom and IPG, which placed unprecedented limitations on their speech in a transparent attempt to aid media platforms, like X, with limited content moderation efforts.” Dimiero Decl. ¶ 20. The declarant even identified particular stories that Media Matters would have pursued but for the FTC CID:
Furthermore, because of the FTC CID, we have refrained from reporting on the FTC’s relationship with right-wing media or Musk’s relationship with the FTC, as we would have in the past. We have also refrained from publishing research related to right-wing media’s long-running list of companies that they have boycotted or celebrated damaging financially in light of Ferguson’s claims about advertising boycotts. We have even refrained from reporting on our own story of the FTC’s investigation into Media Matters out of fear of retaliation, also turning down a number of media requests for information and appearances on various shows and outlets about a wide range of topics related to the investigation. We also turned down a high-profile interview that was unrelated to the FTC but was about right-wing content creators, deciding that the risk of engaging with the subject matter was too high in the wake of the FTC’s CID. In the past, we likely would have written about a federal agency pressuring companies to adopt policies favored by the Administration or about Media Matters’ experience of being subject to a government investigation because of our speech. Such fears about FTC reporting did not exist in the past. For example, during the first Trump Administration, Mr. Hananoki repeatedly wrote about subjects that were within the scope of the FTC’s work. Now, any reference to the FTC or commissioners must be approved by senior staff and the legal team, burdening an already cumbersome editing process.
This is the point. The process is the punishment. Even when these investigations ultimately fail in court, they succeed in their real goal: making it too expensive and risky for organizations to criticize powerful people.
The New York Times recently reported on just how devastating this campaign has been for Media Matters:
[Media Matters] has racked up about $15 million in legal fees over the past 20 months to defend itself against lawsuits by Elon Musk, in addition to investigations by Mr. Trump’s Federal Trade Commission and Republican state attorneys general.
The group hasslashed the size of its staffand scrambled to raise more cash from skittish donors, according to documents and interviews with 11 people familiar with the organization’s fight to survive.
That might not be enough. Media Matters tried to settle with Mr. Musk by offering concessions, but the sides were far apart and talks fizzled. Even when the group has triumphed in court, Mr. Musk has appealed or filed new cases elsewhere.
This is what success looks like for Musk and his political allies. They don’t need to win these cases. They just need to make criticism so expensive that organizations like Media Matters either shut up or shut down.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this ruling is how explicitly Judge Sooknanan calls out the government’s bad faith. Courts are generally very deferential to government investigations, operating under a presumption that prosecutors act in good faith.
But this case was so egregious that the judge felt compelled to state the obvious:
Finally, given the comments by Chairman Ferguson and his colleagues about Media Matters, the timing of the CID, and evidence of pretext, Media Matters is likely to show that retaliatory animus was the but-for cause of the FTC’s CID.
This ruling matters far beyond Media Matters. What we’re seeing is a systematic attempt to weaponize government power against critics and journalists who challenge those in power or their allies. It’s a form of censorial lawfare, and it’s particularly ridiculous coming from those who claim to be free speech supporters.
This is authoritarianism 101. And it’s happening here, right now, in broad daylight.
The good news is that at least some federal courts are still functioning as a check on government overreach. Three different rulings have now recognized these investigations for what they are: politically motivated attacks on free speech.
But the damage has already been done. As the Times reports, Media Matters is struggling to survive financially.
Even worse, the organization has been “removed from coalition communications about FTC actions” and has had to turn down media appearances for fear of further retaliation. This is actually an important point, and I’m glad the judge called it out. The fact that others have removed Media Matters from communications out of fear that it will end up in the hands of a vindictive FTC following a vexatious investigation is really harmful.
This is the chilling effect in action. Even when the First Amendment ultimately wins in court, the process of getting there can be devastating to the organizations trying to exercise their constitutional rights.
The real question is whether other news organizations and advocacy groups will learn the wrong lesson from this. Will they decide it’s too risky to hold powerful people accountable? Will they self-censor rather than face years of expensive litigation and government harassment?
If so, then Musk and Ferguson will have achieved their real goal, even while losing in court. The First Amendment only works if people are willing to exercise their rights under it. And making those rights impossibly expensive to exercise is just another form of censorship.
At least for now, we can celebrate that the courts are still willing to call out government retaliation for what it is. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the broader threat to press freedom that this case represents.
When the world’s richest man and his political allies can spur multiple investigations targeting a nonprofit for accurate reporting—and when those investigations can nearly destroy that organization even when they ultimately fail—then we have a serious problem with the state of free speech in America.
Judge Sooknanan’s ruling is a victory. But it’s a victory in a war that shouldn’t have to be fought in the first place.
Remember back in February when the DOJ told a court that, despite multiple public statements from both Elon Musk and Donald Trump to the contrary, Elon Musk was not associated one bit with DOGE and therefore should not be subject to litigation regarding DOGE’s wildly illegal actions? And remember how lots of people just kinda pretended this was fine and normal?
Well, in the ruling that Cathy Gellis just wrote about, the judge clearly recognizes the reality that Elon Musk absolutely was DOGE:
Musk, assisted by his DOGE subordinates, “continued to exercise control over USAID systems . . . to systematically block access to all systems by USAID personnel.”
Later, the judge makes it clear that the plaintiffs alleged—plausibly, despite the DOJ’s spin—that Musk ran DOGE, by his own public admissions. The judge is responding to the DOJ’s claim that Musk isn’t subject to the Appointments Clause because he had no real authority in his role. As the judge notes, nobody who wasn’t born yesterday would believe this:
This argument, however, fails to account for Plaintiffs’ allegations which strongly support the inference that Musk directed the actions to shut down USAID without authorization from any USAID official, including the closure of USAID headquarters and the removal of the USAID website, between January 31, 2025 and February 2, 2025. Consistent with its analysis in Does 1, 771 F. Supp. 3d at 668-69, such an inference is supported by the allegations in the Second Amended Complaint that Musk took a leading role in DOGE’s efforts to take physical control of USAID headquarters, including its secured spaces, and that Musk publicly took credit for the dismantling of USAID during this time period in multiple posts on X, including the February 2 and 3 posts in which he stated that “we spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” that “we’re in the process of . . . shutting down USAID,” that “USAID is a criminal organization,” and that it was “[t]ime for it to die.” SAC ¶ 87-88.Collectively, these allegations support the inference that, as the de facto administrator of DOGE at the time, Musk directed these actions.
Obviously this is motion-to-dismiss posture, not a factual finding. But when a federal judge is drawing reasonable inferences from well-pleaded allegations and concluding Musk was the “de facto administrator” of DOGE, the DOJ’s “he was just an advisor with no authority” line becomes harder to sell with each filing.
Cathy had mentioned this ruling on Bluesky as she was working on her article, and apparently that alerted lawyer Kel McClanahan of a judge officially recognizing Elon as DOGE administrator.
OK full disclosure I only found this because @cathygellis.bsky.social was complaining about OCR and I was like wtf opinion is she talking about
And that matters because Kel is representing multiple clients who are suing Musk and DOGE in cases where the DOJ continues to deny Musk’s role. So Kel took this information he learned from Cathy and made sure the judges in his cases learned about it as well.
Plaintiffs respectfully draw the Court’s attention to today’s opinion in Does v. Musk, No. 25-462 (D. Md.), in which Judge Chuang finds not once but twice that the plaintiffs had sufficiently alleged that Elon Musk was in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency” or “DOGE,” however that term was defined
