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      I’m a recent Stem grad. Here’s why the right is winning us over

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      When my friends and I graduated with our math degrees this past May, we felt like we could do anything.After long nights spent on problem sets, the most aimless and ambitious of us will forgo grad school and become interns and employees at the shiniest, slimiest corporations in America – big banks, the military industrial complex, big tech, big pharma – where we will solve interesting, difficult problems on cushy salaries.Working at the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) seems to require the same skillset. Fueled by unbridled techno-optimism and edgy cultural capital, Doge seems less like a government agency and more like another one of Elon Musk’s shaky startups. While bewildered pundits including Fareed Zakaria struggle to diagnose and process the new technocracy in DC, our new Doge overlords are infinitely familiar to my classmates and me: they might as well be guys we knew from school.This is the new generation of young technocrats who helped lift Trump into office: they are the crypto-obsessed love-children of Musk and Donald Trump, of Silicon Valley and the Heritage Foundation, of “effective altruism” and “effective accelerationism”. Meanwhile, graduates who lean left are simply out of luck: outside of academia, it can feel nearly impossible to find a progressive job in tech. Progressive Data Jobs, a major hub for jobs in this space, currently lists 96 open positions across all experience levels. By contrast, the careers portal at Goldman Sachs alone boasts 1,943 open jobs.That’s because, for decades, the progressive movement worldwide has failed to organize technical talent for its own interests.Upon graduation, an average science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) student often faces a binary choice between industry and academia: BlackRock or grad school. Sure, there’s a handful of research non-profits out there, like Radical Data or the inactive Algorithmic Justice League; but they mostly focus on advocacy instead of governance. While there is excellent progressive work in data science being done by organizations such as OpenSecrets, Split Ticket, ProPublica’s Data Store, and even Twitter accounts such as Stats for Lefties, there is no systematic effort by progressives to recruit technical talent at scale.Meanwhile, financial and tech industries begin targeting Stem students with aggressive recruitment tactics as early as freshman year: over time, these industries become the only careers students can imagine outside of grad school. It’s no wonder that Stem students are more conservative than humanities and social science students, even though scientists tend to be more liberal. There are really only two things you can do with a Stem degree: stay in the ivory tower, or – to paraphrase Audre Lorde – go build the master’s house.In an interview with Ross Douthat, the tech investor Marc Andreessen claims that the left alienated Silicon Valley because “companies are being hijacked as engines of social change”: gone are the days of the agitprop 1984 Apple ads, or the naive “coding for good” movements of the 2010s. After the term “Stem” was coined in 2001, the next two decades saw the further division of science and the humanities into two opposing, irreconcilable systems of knowledge at the institutional level. While educational policy-makers obsess over Stem enrollments, funding and research as metrics to assess an education’s worth, students were incentivized to concentrate on one discipline, all while a liberal arts education diminished in appeal and practical utility.This made a generation of Stem students into technical ideologues. Starting from high school olympiads, they learn to worship technical capability above all else – and value the acquisition of technical skills above everything else. In college, they are never taught problem-solving frameworks outside those offered by programming or economics courses: game theory, homo economicus, Pareto efficiency. Crucially, these approaches always attempt to simplify the world instead of tackling society’s complexities head on: simplifying, as an impulse, has given rise to neoliberal, Silicon Valley-funded social movements such as “effective altruism” that do nothing to tackle crucial inequalities. Without alternative paradigms, these theories become real and universal ways to see the world and solve its problems.And so, empowered by Trump and Musk, it is the rightist technocrats who get to change the world today. With flashy tech stacks and a blind confidence to code up a solution to any and every problem, they set out to fix our government once and for all, armed with only three principles – simplify, automate, optimize. And so Doge runs the government as if solving an optimization problem: cut employees, retain key workers, minimize losses, simplify the structure. But already, Doge is reinstating fired federal workers who were working on crucial issues. Classic tech bro blunder: what else did they expect from trying to solve the problems of society without even bothering to understand their nuances?As the technocrat right rises into power, a luddite left also emerges in America – a narrowing base of grassroots organizers, local politicians, activists, academics and non-profits, that increasingly disaffiliate from technology with fear and distrust. As technical industries become more explicitly aligned with the agendas of the new American right in the post-Covid years, there has been little effort from progressive political organizations to recruit self-starting hackers and radical technologists, who exist in abundance on the decentralized internet. Did anyone even try to scoop up the workers who walked out of Google in 2018? Now, in 2025, we realize that a generation of politically naive engineers have already built a singular matrix of algorithmic oppression and universal surveillance that we cannot opt out of. Today’s progressives not only do not understand technology; worse, we have completely ceded technological power to the right.The dearth of efforts to recruit technical talent on the left essentially create a failure of imagination. Talented young engineers fail to imagine how their skills can be used to challenge existing power structures, and movements fail to imagine how technology can be used as a tactic to seize power. As Justin Joque argued in Revolutionary Mathematics, progressive movements need technical people who “understand the current metaphysics of capitalism – not in order to de-reify them, but rather to understand how they can be replaced”. One wonders whether more sophisticated data scientists could have made past Democratic campaigns more effective, or whether a collaboration between engineers and progressive thinkers could have led to more online platforms such as Bluesky.In order to hack and dismantle the technocrat right, American progressives must teach the engineers to dream again. Today’s engineers may be hard at work building the master’s house, but with the right organization and renewed senses of purpose, they, too, can learn to turn the master’s tools against him.

      Jaye Chen is a writer based in New York City More

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      Democrats train fire on Musk as unelected billionaire dips in popularity

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      For most of the 17-minute interview, Elon Musk stuck to a script. He was just a tech guy on a mission to “eliminate waste and fraud” from government.His slash-and-burn cost-cutting crusade was making “good progress actually”, he told the Fox Business commentator Larry Kudlow on Monday, despite sparking a backlash that has reverberated far beyond Washington.“Really, I just don’t want America to go bankrupt,” he said.But then Kudlow asked Musk to look forward. Would the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) still be in place in a year? He thought so – his assignment wasn’t quite complete. Musk, the world’s richest man, then pointed to social security, a widely popular federal program that provides monthly benefits to retirees and people with disabilities, and other social safety net programs: “Most of the federal spending is entitlements. That’s the big one to eliminate.”For weeks, Donald Trump and Republicans have insisted that social security, Medicaid or Medicare would not “be touched”. Now Musk was suggesting the programs would be a primary target. Almost as soon as the words left his mouth, Democrats pounced.“The average social security recipient in this country receives $65 a day. They have to survive on $65 a day. But you want to take a chainsaw to social security, when Elon Musk and his tens of billions of dollars of government contracts essentially makes at least $8m a day from the taxpayers,” Hakeem Jeffries, the US House minority leader, said in a floor speech the following day. “If you want to uncover waste, fraud or abuse, start there.”As the second Trump era comes into focus, Democrats have found a new villain: an “unelected billionaire” whose bravado – and sinking popularity – they believe may offer their party a path out of the political wilderness.“There’s nowhere in America where it is popular to cut disease research, to gut Medicaid and to turn off social security,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. “So it’s hard to see a place where what Musk is doing for Trump doesn’t become an albatross for Republicans.”The White House has championed Doge’s work while reiterating that Trump would “protect” social security and other entitlement programs. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.The Social Security Administration , which serves more than 70 million Americans, has announced plans to reduce its workforce by more than 10% and close dozens of offices nationwide as part of Doge’s federal overhaul. Officials with the group have been installed at the agency since early last month.Despite mounting criticism of Musk, the president has embraced his beleaguered ally, who spent close to $300m helping elect him to the White House. This week, Trump hailed Musk as a “patriot” as he showcased Teslas from the south lawn of the White House. The president selected a red sedan, hoping to boost the electric car company, which has suffered a sharp decline in sales and stock prices since its chief executive launched his Doge operation. The White House has said that if conflicts of interest arise, “Elon will excuse himself from those contracts”.But Musk and his chainsaw-wielding approach to downsizing government is playing a starring role in early Democratic ads and fundraising appeals. Progressive activists have staged “nobody elected Elon” protests across the country while other groups are targeting Tesla showrooms and dealerships. On a “fighting oligarchy” tour across the country, Senator Bernie Sanders pointed to Musk’s growing political influence as a central threat to American democracy.“Most American people, they can’t name us. They don’t know who Chuck Schumer is, but they do know what this administration and Elon Musk and the GOP are planning for them,” Katherine Clark, the House minority whip, said on Friday. “It’s why you’re seeing this uproar in town halls.”While Democrats have much to say about Musk, they are less sure of how to stop him.Many of Doge’s actions have been halted or stopped in the courts. This week two federal judges ordered government agencies to rehire tens of thousands of probationary employees who were fired as part of Doge’s purge of the federal workforce.Locked out of power in Washington, Democrats are under enormous pressure to use any leverage they have to block Trump and Musk. A Republican-authored bill to fund federal agencies through September and avert a shutdown fiercely divided Democrats this week. House Democrats and progressive activists erupted in anger at Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, who ultimately relented and helped pass the measure rather than risk a funding lapse and, in his words, give Musk and Doge an opportunity to “exploit the crisis for maximum destruction”.Public polling underlines Democrats’ interest in Musk. A new CNN survey found that just 35% of Americans held a positive view of the billionaire Trump adviser, a full 10 percentage points lower than the president. The poll also found that he is notably better known and more unpopular than the vice-president, JD Vance.More than six in 10 Americans said Musk had neither the right experience nor the judgment to carry out a unilateral overhaul of the federal government, though views broke sharply along partisan lines. Roughly the same share said they were worried the reductions would go “too far”, resulting in the loss of critical government programs.A survey conducted by the left-leaning Navigator Research polling firm late last month found that views of Doge as a standalone cost-cutting initiative were marginally favorable, in line with other polls that have found Americans are broadly supportive of its stated mission to root out waste and improve efficiency. But there are signs Americans don’t like the approach or implementation so far.When the effort was framed as “Elon Musk’s Doge”, views turned sharply more negative. The poll also captured the far-reaching impact of the cuts: 20% say they or someone they know has lost access to a federal service, 19% say they or someone they know has lost access to a federal grant, and 17% say they or someone they know has quit or been laid off from a federal government job.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Musk is the face of everything that people are worried about in the Trump administration,” Ferguson said, adding: “To a lot of people, putting Elon Musk in charge of protecting the middle class is like putting Jeffrey Dahmer in charge of protecting a morgue.”Democrats believe Musk’s comments on entitlement programs are particularly potent – the world’s wealthiest man advocating for steep cuts to programs designed to help retirees and vulnerable Americans.In the Fox Business interview, Musk claimed the programs were rife with waste and fraud, suggesting as much as $600bn to $700bn – or nearly a quarter of their budget – could to be cut. Federal watchdogs have long identified improper spending as a problem, but Musk’s figure exceeds their estimates.Musk has derided social security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”. As evidence of widespread fraud, Musk repeated a debunked theory, favored by Trump, that social security benefits are being paid to dead centenarians. The head of the agency has rejected the premise. Democrats have warned that Trump and Musk were using false or exaggerated claims of fraud as a “prelude” to slash the program or privatize it, as many conservatives have long desired.After Musk’s comments aired, the White House swiftly issued a “fact check” insisting that Musk had only advocated for eliminating waste and highlighted several occasions in which Trump has vowed to protect Americans’ benefits.Republicans also rushed to clarify Musk’s comments. “Look, Elon Musk is a brainiac with an IQ that I cannot even fathom. He is not a master of artful language,” Mark Alford, a Republican representative of Missouri, said on CNN. “We are not going to eliminate social security, Medicare and Medicaid. That’s sheer nonsense.”It was a rare break with Musk, whom Republicans have been loath to cross, well aware that he not only has the president’s full support and ear but a fortune to squash any dissent within the ranks. During Trump’s address to Congress earlier this month, Republicans gave Musk a standing ovation as the president heaped praise on his work. They publicly warn that Democrats oppose Musk’s fraud-and-waste removal efforts at their own political peril.Yet there are signs that Republicans are beginning to worry. Despite Trump’s close alliance with Musk, even he seemed to indicate it was time to rein him in. “We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet’,” the president wrote in a social media post.House Republicans have reportedly been advised not to hold in-person town halls after several widely publicized confrontations with constituents furious over loss of government jobs and services. At the few meetings that did take place this weekend, constituents confronted Republican members of Congress with their concerns about possible cuts to social security.Republicans are weighing deep cuts to entitlement programs as a way to offset the cost of extending Trump’s sweeping tax cuts aimed largely at the wealthy. Trump has praised the House plan.“The Republican party at this point has wrapped both arms around the third rail and is holding on as the electricity flows,” said Ben Wikler, the chair of the Democratic party in Wisconsin, where a contest next month will provide an early test of the party’s anti-Musk strategy.On Thursday night, Wikler hosted a People v Musk grassroots event to discuss the billionaire’s impact on the 1 April state supreme court race, which will determine the balance of power between conservative and liberal justices on Wisconsin’s highest bench. Musk has spent millions of dollars through his America Pac in an effort to tip the scales in favor of Brad Schimel, a county judge and former Republican attorney general. Democrats are supporting Susan Crawford, a county judge and former attorney for Planned Parenthood.Wikler said Musk’s ascendancy in Washington – and his influence in the race – has turned liberal voters in the state from “concerned to panicked to outraged with the heat of 1,000 suns”.“If Susan Crawford wins this race, and Musk and Schimel lose,” he said, “then that will be a big bat signal in the sky to Democrats everywhere that fighting back is not only the right thing to do, it’s good politics.” More

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      How an obscure US government office has become a target of Elon Musk

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      Federal employees in a little-known office dedicated to tech and consulting services were at work on the afternoon of 3 February when Elon Musk tweeted about their agency for the first time.“That group has been deleted,” Musk wrote.The richest man in the world was responding to a tweet from a rightwing activist who falsely claimed that 18F, an office within the General Services Administration (GSA), was a far-left cell inside the government. The activist accused 18F of building a program to put bureaucrats in charge of preparing people’s tax returns. It was one of several false claims about the office circulating on X, the social media platform that Musk owns and spends much of his day on.Musk’s tweet immediately set off widespread confusion in 18F, which, rather than a radical leftist cabal, is tasked with partnering with agencies across the government to consult and develop software solutions. Former staffers and a current GSA employee described 18F as a workforce that focused on delivering tech services and increasing efficiency within bureaucracy – exactly the work that Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is ostensibly designed to carry out.At the time Musk claimed deletion, partner agencies were expecting the office’s help on civic tech projects that were already in the works and would be key to updating their operations. Would they still get that assistance? What did Musk mean by “deleted”? What would happen to the tech tools that 18F was building? Staff at the sub-agency couldn’t get a definitive answer from the new Musk-allied leadership, according to three former workers, and didn’t know what to tell other agencies.The confusion would last for weeks, until on Saturday 1 March, staff at 18F received an email at around 1am telling them that they would all be laid off and their office would be shut down “with explicit direction from the top levels of leadership within both the Administration and GSA”.The 18F episode fits a common pattern of how Musk appears to ingest and amplify misinformation online. It is also a window into the influence of rightwing media and activists on Musk as he attacks and disbands parts of the government he believes don’t fit with his ideological worldview.The week after cutting 18F, the recently appointed head of the GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, which oversees 18F, held a meeting explaining the decision. Thomas Shedd, a 28-year-old former Tesla software engineer and Musk ally who sent the mass layoff email, told staffers that 18F was shut down because employees’ hourly rates were too high and that outside consultants would cost less. Shedd did not directly respond to a request for comment on this article.“After a thorough review of 18F, GSA leadership – with concurrence from the administration and following all OPM guidelines – determined that the business unit was not aligned with the presidential EOs, statutorily required or critical activities,” a GSA spokesperson said, adding that the office was not recovering its costs.The explanation misunderstands how 18F operated and its cost structures, according to former staffers, as well as ignores that the group frequently saved agencies money by advising them against costly and unnecessary contracts with private vendors. Former employees and a current staffer at the GSA instead saw the layoffs as politically motivated.“The only reason I can see for 18F being singled out for elimination ahead of other offices would be to make Elon Musk happy,” said a GSA employee, who spoke anonymously out of fear of reprisal.Misleading tweets and Musk doom workers dedicated to government efficiencyAlthough 18F worked with various government agencies and created popular services, it was largely unknown to the public. The group quietly helped create dozens of services across different bureaus each year, however, including the IRS Direct File free tax filing system. Many 18F software projects, such as streamlining the government’s weather website for easier use in the case of natural disasters, bore the explicit intention of making government services more efficient and reducing taxpayer cost.When Musk claimed he had “deleted” 18F, he was retweeting a 3 February post from rightwing activist Alex Lorusso, a producer for the conservative media influencer Benny Johnson, who frequently interacts with Musk on X. Lorusso, who was formerly banned from Twitter in 2020 for violating the company’s policies on platform manipulation and spam, is one of several rightwing influencers regularly amplified by Musk on X, and one that Donald Trump’s administration has courted. He has worked as a paid consultant for Musk’s Super Pac, and he’s also a fan: the first post on his X profile, pinned to the top so no others will push it out of sight, is a 2023 photo of himself smiling with Musk.Lorusso’s post claimed 18F “puts the government in charge of preparing people’s tax returns for them” and suggested it was a “far left government wide computer office”. His claims about 18F were later corrected by other X users in a community note. It explained that the office had instead helped build a service that allowed Americans to file their taxes for free online – a popular pilot project that saved an estimated millions in tax fees and was set to expand nationwide.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLorusso’s post on X, like Musk’s, was a retweet of another conservative media figure. Luke Rosiak, a writer for the conservative news site the Daily Wire, had posted a long thread on 31 January attacking 18F. He framed the tech consulting unit as a “far-left agency” and “coven of transgenders and queers hiring each other”. The thread included the profiles of several former 18F employees who used “they” pronouns in their bios, as well as images of an employee’s crowdfunding campaign for gender-affirming healthcare. It also drew on articles published in 2023 by Rosiak about the GSA and 18F, in which he suggested that the agency’s focus on diversity had resulted in major security failures, which ex-employees said was false. The first post in the Rosiak’s chain received over 13.5m views and was retweeted by Musk.Rosiak’s attack on 18F contained misleading statements, according to former employees. The Daily Wire writer asserted that 18F jeopardized security for one million Americans because it refused to insert facial recognition software into government website login.gov because of “racial equity”. The claim conflated multiple different parts of the GSA and misunderstood security issues around facial recognition, one former employee said, as well as blamed 18F for leadership decisions pertaining to an entirely different business unit.The GSA did face a legitimate scandal when its former Technology Transformation Services director, Dave Zvenyach, misrepresented the level of security that login.gov operated with, according to a 2023 inspector general’s report, but login.gov has for years been a separate entity from 18F and has no direct staffing overlap with the office. A racial equity test of facial recognition technology did take place, according to a former 18F employee, because facial recognition software is notoriously less able to recognize non-white faces, and therefore using it as a tool for identity verification would have created security problems for users.“I think it’s impossible for people who are hyper-partisan to imagine people setting aside partisanship while working for the government,” a former 18F employee said in response to the conservative vitriol against 18F.In response to a request for comment on the statements in the thread, a Daily Wire spokesperson said that Rosiak’s reporting on 18F speaks for itself.Following the mass layoffs at 18F, some former staffers set up a website attempting to correct the rightwing narrative that their group was a partisan faction within the government and instead highlight the variety of projects they completed. Others warned that their group was an early warning sign for how Doge and the Trump administration would target other agencies based on ideological grounds, rather than the content of their work.“We were living proof that the talking points of this administration were false. Government services can be efficient,” Lindsay Young, the former executive director of 18F, said in a post on LinkedIn. “This made us a target”. More

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      Elon Musk faces week of harsh setbacks amid Tesla selloff and Doge backlash

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      Elon Musk began the week of 10 March with a friendly sit-down interview on Fox Business to talk about his work with the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and the state of his businesses. Already, it had been a trying few days for the world’s richest man, who was facing a Tesla stock selloff and fierce backlash over his attempts to radically overhaul the federal government. His net worth declined over $22bn on Monday alone.After Musk jokingly brushed off initial questions about the mounting pressure, host Larry Kudlow asked the Tesla and SpaceX CEO how he was managing to run his numerous companies amid the chaos.“With great difficulty,” Musk answered, at first chuckling then taking a long sigh and staring off into the middle distance. “I mean … yeah”.The past 10 days have marked several of the most significant setbacks for Musk in months. Tesla, arguably his marquee company, continued to fall in value as investors worried about the threat of trade war and possible recession – as well as declining profits. Escalating protests against the company over the billionaire’s role in the government also grew in number and intensity across the US, coupled with rising cases of vandalism and social stigma against his cars. SpaceX has also struggled, with one of its rockets dramatically exploding in midflight last week and then an announcement on Wednesday that it was delaying a rescue mission to retrieve “stranded” astronauts. The company tried again two days later.Adding to Musk’s headaches, his social media platform, X, experienced widespread outages throughout the day on Monday. During his Fox Business interview, he claimed that it was the result of a “massive cyberattack” that the company had traced to the area of Ukraine.Musk is also dealing with increasing pushback over his role at Doge. Multiple outlets reported that the “first buddy”, as he’s christened himself, got into a heated exchange with Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, during a White House meeting last week, which ended with Donald Trump appearing to rein in Musk’s power to make staffing decisions at government agencies with a Truth social post. A federal judge in California also issued a preliminary injunction on Thursday to reinstate thousands of the workers that Doge mass fired. Meanwhile, polling this week from Quinnipiac University shows that despite Musk repeatedly declaring that the public loves what Doge is doing, a strong majority of people disapprove of his initiative.After a long string of victories for Musk that included soaring share prices and a period of seemingly unchecked power following Trump’s inauguration, some signs of strain are beginning to show on his grip on his empire. He has lost around $119bn this year so far, although staggeringly still boasts a fortune $100bn greater than the next richest man in the world, and faces questions from investors on whether his political activity is hurting his companies.Rather than step away from his role in the White House, however, Musk appears to be doubling down.Musk turns to Maga world to turn Tesla’s fortunes aroundTwo days after his labored appearance on Fox Business, Musk was once again in front of the cameras. This time, he was smiling alongside Trump on the White House lawn as the president cooed over a new red Tesla Model S and gushed to reporters about what a wonderful car it was.“Everything is computer,” Trump said, sitting in the driver’s seat. “That’s beautiful!”At the climax of the transformation of the White House into a car dealership, Trump announced that he had bought the Model S. He likewise spoke out in support of Musk and told reporters that Americans should “cherish” the billionaire. Others in the Maga world soon followed suit, declaring their backing for Tesla and urging their followers to do the same.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I just ordered my new self driving Tesla!” Fox News host Sean Hannity posted the same day on X. “Details on how to win the Tesla of your Choice soon on Hannity.com!”The scene at the White House was a striking use of the presidency to endorse the business of the commander-in-chief’s biggest financial backer. However, the display also gave the impression that Musk needed Trump to reverse his string of losses and quell the backlash against him. Trump stated at the event that he would label demonstrations against Tesla showrooms as domestic terrorism. Attorney general Pam Bondi announced on Friday she would launch an investigation into vandalism targeting the company.“They fought the law and the law won,” Musk posted on X above news that Bondi was threatening vandals with up to 20 years in prison for attacking Tesla dealerships.The backlash against Tesla does not appear to be slowing; more protests against Tesla are set for the coming week. In response, Musk is deepening his embrace with the Maga world, including its most distasteful denizens. He spent a sizable part of Friday afternoon posting support for Tesla and Doge from rightwing media influencer accounts and Fox News clips. At one point, he retweeted a post that compared attacks against Tesla vehicles and dealerships to Kristallnacht, the infamous Nazi pogrom against Jewish-owned businesses that took place at the onset of the Holocaust. More

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      Elon Musk targeted me over Tesla protests. That proves our movement is working

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      On Saturday morning, I woke up to a nightmare of notifications. On Sunday, it got worse. Elon Musk had tweeted and amplified inflammatory lies about me and Tesla Takedown, a growing national grassroots movement peacefully protesting at Tesla showrooms that I’m proudly a part of. Musk tweeted: “Costa is committing crimes.”As a longtime local activist and organizer in Seattle, I’m accustomed to some conflict with powerful forces. The intention of the Tesla Takedown movement is to make a strong public stand against the tech oligarchy behind the Trump administration’s cruel and illegal actions, and to encourage Americans to sell their Teslas and dump the company’s stock. Protests like these – peaceful, locally organized, and spreading across the world – are at the heart of free speech in a democracy and a cornerstone of US political traditions. So it’s telling that the response from so-called “free speech absolutist” Musk has been to single out individuals – and spread lies about us and our movement. The harassment that’s followed his post has been frightening.It’s also proof that the Tesla Takedown campaign is working.I’d like to address the lies spread about me by the world’s richest man and X users. I have not committed any crimes. I have not been funded by ActBlue, or by George Soros – that name is simply a tired antisemitic dog whistle. I’m not inspired by Luigi Mangione nor have I ever said that I am. I am not encouraging any vandalism. Nobody is getting paid to come to these protests. I am not the leader of Tesla Takedown. In fact, no one is.Here is the truth: Tesla Takedown is a completely decentralized movement with hundreds of protests taking place around the globe, drawing many thousands of people out of their homes and on to the public sidewalks to stand up for programs that support poor people, older people, veterans, the sick. Out of care and concern for others – a foreign concept to those currently in power – people are offering what they can to help. I’ve offered to schlep supplies, and helped someone find a bullhorn. The environmentally focused Seattle organization I’m a part of, Troublemakers, hosts a map where other people and groups can post the locations of forthcoming demonstrations. Troublemakers has about $3,500 in its bank accounts. All of this is a bare-bones, low-budget, people-powered movement – which is exactly why Musk is afraid of it, and casting about to find a villain.There are currently 91 Tesla Takedown protests planned across the world this coming weekend, and there will be more the weekend after that. If there isn’t one at the Tesla showroom nearest you, you can start one just by showing up with some friends or family, maybe making some cardboard signs. This exercise of our fundamental first amendment right to peaceably assemble is giving an effective outlet to the outrage this administration has caused here and around the globe, and we’re making a difference. Tesla stock has fallen precipitously, losing a quarter of its value in the months since the protests began. On Wednesday, JP Morgan analysts told Quartz: “We struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly.” Donald Trump even got on X this week to defensively claim that he’ll be buying a Tesla to support his good friend Musk. More and more people are unloading the company’s stock and selling their cars. The movement is growing and the administration is taking notice. When enough of us come together to do what we can, this is what effective opposition can be.Musk’s false accusations against me won’t stop this movement, because he is inflicting real harm on the American public and people around the world. In fact, Musk and Trump are the ones committing crimes. Just this week they have announced their intentions to slash social security, Medicare, unemployment insurance and food stamps. They are gutting public institutions, stripping environmental protections, destabilizing the economy and people’s lives. Musk is openly and gleefully firing federal workers en masse and dismantling programs that serve millions at home and across the globe. They’ve ignored multiple judicial orders, and refused to restart payments that they were ordered to. The unofficial agency Musk leads, the “department of government efficiency”, is digging into systems and pushing out public servants, when its own staff hasn’t received so much as a background check. Musk’s conflicts of interest are piling up without any disclosures. All of the programs this administration is destroying are paid for by people like you and me through our taxes. Tesla – a billion-dollar company – shelled out zero income tax last year. Justice through government processes will be slow, if it comes at all.If we can’t show our opposition to what the government is doing, we are living in a dictatorship. If we are criminalized for calling out the rich and powerful for their illegal actions, that is a dictatorship. I don’t want to live in a dictatorship.Make no mistake, it’s scary to be personally called out by the richest man in the world on the platform he owns. It’s scary to be targeted by a seemingly endless number of his devoted trolls and bots. To be doxxed, to have one’s life pored over and exposed, to be smeared, attacked, and falsely accused. It’s scarier still when the FBI director gets tagged into the threads and asked to investigate. But I’m not backing down – and even if I did, it wouldn’t make a dent in this movement. Hundreds if not thousands of people have participated in the ways that I have.The truth is, the people are powerful. I’ve always believed that. And now we know that Elon Musk does too.

      Valerie Costa is the co-founder of Troublemakers and a longtime activist for environmental justice More

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      Trump administration briefing: education department to be halved as Trump walks back Canada tariffs

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      The US Department of Education intends to lay off nearly half of its workforce, the department has announced. The layoffs of 1,300 people were announced by the department on Tuesday and described by the education secretary, Linda McMahon, as a “significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system”.In a post on X, McMahon said: “Today’s [reduction in force] reflects our commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers.”After the most recent round of layoffs, the department’s staff will be roughly half of its previous 4,100, the agency said in a statement. According to the department, another 572 employees had already accepted “voluntary resignation opportunities and retirement” over the last seven weeks. The newly laid-off employees will be placed on administrative leave at the end of next week.US education department to lay off 1,300 people as Trump vows to close agencyThe announcement that the US Department of Education intends to lay off nearly half of its workforce has been met with swift condemnation from Democratic and progressive officials. The Texas representative Greg Casar wrote in a post on X that those in charge were “Stealing from our children to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.”Trump campaigned on a promise to close the Department of Education, claiming it had been overtaken by “radicals, zealots and Marxists”. At McMahon’s confirmation hearing, she acknowledged that only Congress had the power to abolish the agency but said it might be due for cuts and a reorganization.Read the full storyTrump walks back 50% Canada tariffs after tit-for-tat dayDonald Trump announced he was doubling tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum from 25% to 50% as a retaliation for the province of Ontario’s imposition of a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to several US states – and then walked back the decision after Ontario relented hours later.Tuesday was marked by chaos as the US and Canada escalated their trade war. New tariffs of 25% on all imported steel and aluminum are still scheduled to take effect at midnight on Wednesday, including against allies and top US suppliers Canada and Mexico, the White House confirmed to Reuters.Read the full storyUS resumes help for Ukraine as Kyiv accepts 30-day ceasefire deal Ukraine said it was ready to accept an immediate 30-day ceasefire in the war with Russia, as the US announced it would immediately lift its restrictions on military aid and intelligence sharing after high-stakes talks in Saudi Arabia.Donald Trump said he now hoped Vladimir Putin would reciprocate. If the Russian president did, it would mark the first ceasefire in the more than three years since he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.Read the full storyJudge blocks Trump administration plan to cut millions for teacher trainingA federal judge in Boston on Tuesday blocked the Donald Trump administration’s plan to cut hundreds of millions of dollars for teacher training, finding that cuts are already affecting training programs aimed at addressing a nationwide teacher shortage.Read the full storyJudge halts Louisiana’s first death row execution in 15 yearsA federal judge has halted Louisiana’s first death row execution using nitrogen gas scheduled to take place next week. US district court judge Shelly Dick issued a preliminary injunction on Tuesday, stopping the state from immediately moving forward with the execution – which would have been Louisiana’s first execution in 15 years. Liz Murrill, the attorney general, said the state will immediately appeal against the decision.Read the full storyWhite House says Columbia University refusing to shop students for arrestThe Trump administration said on Tuesday that Columbia University was “refusing to help” the Department of Homeland Security identify people for arrest on campus, after immigration authorities detained a prominent Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate over the weekend.Read the full storyHouse Republicans pass Trump-backed spending billHouse Republicans pulled off a near party-line vote on Tuesday to pass their controversial funding bill to curb the looming government shutdown, shipping it off to the Senate, where it still will face an uphill battle to pass.The Trump-backed bill passed 217 to 213, with the Kentucky representative Thomas Massie casting the sole Republican “no” vote. The Democrat Jared Golden of Maine joined Republicans in backing the measure. The stopgap bill would fund the government through September.Read the full storyTrump says he’s buying a Tesla amid Musk boycottDonald Trump said he is buying a “brand new Tesla” and blamed “Radical Left Lunatics” for “illegally” boycotting Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company. The announcement came a day after Tesla suffered its worst share price fall in nearly five years.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      At Tuesday’s promotional event for Elon Musk’s line of Tesla electric vehicles at the White House, Trump refused to drive one of the cars, and scoffed at the idea that his predecessor, Joe Biden, had done so at a similar event. There is video of Biden doing so, in August 2021, at an event to promote electric vehicles that Musk reportedly was angry at being excluded from over anti-union policies.

      Elon Musk is “not a serious guy”, said Mark Kelly, the US fighter pilot and astronaut turned Arizona Democratic senator, after the Tesla owner and close Donald Trump ally called him a “traitor” for visiting Ukraine in support of its fight against Russia’s invading troops.

      Former Democratic House member Katie Porter announced she is entering California’s 2026 gubernatorial contest.

      Perkins Coie, a prominent law firm Trump is seeking to punish with an executive order, sued the Trump administration in federal court on Tuesday, saying the firm “cannot allow its clients to be bullied”. The 6 March executive order stripped the firm’s lawyers of security clearances and access to federal buildings, and said the government would review contracts with any of the firm’s clients. More

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      in US Politics

      Ice accessed car trackers in sanctuary cities that could help in raids, files show

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      As Donald Trump’s administration ramps up its crackdown on undocumented immigrants to the US, advocates are increasingly worried immigration agents will turn to surveillance technology to round up those targeted for deportation, even in so-called “sanctuary cities” that limit the ways local law enforcement can cooperate with immigration officials.That’s because US Customs and Immigration Enforcement (Ice) in past years has gained access to troves of data from sanctuary cities that could aid its raids and enforcement actions. Among that information is data from the vast network of license plate readers active across the US, according to documents obtained by the Guardian.Local agencies across the country use license plate readers, high-speed cameras that scan and capture images and videos of every vehicle that passes, to collect information on vehicular activity, including the direction a vehicle is moving. They store those details in databases that are often shared with other local law enforcement agencies as well as federal ones. The volume of data gathered along with the wide breadth of bureaus that have access to it mean that federal agents in practice can often obtain information on individual immigrants gathered by local authorities those same agents are legally not allowed to work with.Take the example of Westchester county, New York, where police work with a license plate reader company named Rekor.Westchester, a 450-sq-mile mostly suburban area just north of New York City – has had laws limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities on the books since 2018. But documents including emails and access logs newly made public show Ice has had access in the past to a major database that holds license plate reader information collected across the county.Westchester county police said they managed a network of 480 such cameras as of January 2023. Westchester police provided these figures in response to a freedom of information law request and are the most up-to-date figures available on the scale of the county’s license plate surveillance network. In just the last week of January 2023, the cameras scanned 16.2m cars, according to these documents. That’s up from 14m scans across 346 cameras in March 2022, these emails show. Ice, Customs and Border Protection and the agency they fall under, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), have all had access to this database as of February 2022, as do local law enforcement agencies outside New York state, these documents show. The license plate information that is stored in this database came from more than 20 cities across Westchester and spans two years.Neither Ice nor the Westchester county police department responded to questions about whether the federal agency still has access to the database.In the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s administration, a flurry of immigration enforcement activity across Westchester county prompted local mayors to reassure residents they were complying with local sanctuary laws and were not cooperating with Ice on these investigations. These laws “prohibit members of the police department from engaging in law enforcement activities solely for the purpose of enforcing federal immigration law, unless required to do so by a judicial warrant or other federal law”, the Peekskill mayor, Vivian C McKenzie, told the Westfair Business Journal.The data sharing between the county police and Ice, illustrated in the documents the Guardian reviewed, appear to have sidestepped and undermined the county’s sanctuary city laws. It also means that Ice can potentially use data captured in Westchester to pursue immigration cases elsewhere, including in other sanctuary cities.“Westchester can be a sanctuary county or a surveillance state. It can’t be both. This sort of mass tracking violates the promise made to undocumented residents that they will be safe in the county,” Albert Fox Cahn, the director of the privacy advocacy group the Surveillance Tech Oversight Project, said. “It’s unclear if Westchester county [was] violating the letter of its law, or merely its spirit, but either way it’s clear that immigrant communities are at risk.”Westchester county police, Ice and the mayors of several cities in the county did not respond to multiple requests for comment.The documents, which Westchester county police made public in response to a freedom of information law request by a legal non-profit and shared exclusively with the Guardian, include a list of its “users”, or organizations that had access to this database as of February 2022. The non-profit asked not to be named to avoid compromising the federal grants the organization was awarded. In addition to Ice and the DHS, agencies listed as having access include the Department of Justice, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Secret Service and the FBI.A separate list details individual users who have access to the database. Among the users were five individuals who had email addresses that ended in @ice.dhs.gov and two people with Secret Service email addresses ending in USSS.dhs.gov. There were 44 users with email addresses that end in FBI.gov, 40 with DOJ.gov addresses and just over a dozen featuring DEA.gov. Many of those included on the list indicated they were part of the investigative unit of their agency. It was not clear whether that list was current as of 2025 and if those users have ongoing access to the database.A nationwide surveillance netRekor sells license plate readers and the software used to analyze their data to law enforcement agencies, though it is among the smaller companies in an ecosystem of many working in similar ways. Together, these companies’ license plate readers blanket the majority of the US. Access to more than one major network can enable law enforcement agencies to monitor people’s movements across the country.In addition to accessing local networks like Westchester’s, Ice uses the national database of Vigilant Solutions, a Motorola subsidiary which offers license-plate reading technology that competes with Rekor for contracts with local law enforcement and business across the US. In 2019, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed 9,000 Ice agents had access to the database of Vigilant Solutions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPrivacy and civil liberty experts argue these technologies create a vast surveillance dragnet wherein the movement of every vehicle in the US is being tracked and examined regardless of whether there is an active investigation. Residents of places where these cameras have been set up are beginning to push back.In October, residents of Norfolk, Virginia, sued the city for allegedly violating their fourth amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by installing license plate readers from another Rekor competitor called Flock Safety. When announcing the contract to install 172 Flock cameras across Norfolk, the police chief, Mark Talbot, said his office wanted to create “a nice curtain of technology” that would make it “difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere”. Lee Schmidt, one of the plaintiffs, said four of the cameras had fenced in his neighborhood.“He was outraged by the loss of privacy,” said Michael Soyfer, an attorney at the Institute of Justice who is representing the plaintiffs on this case. “He noticed that he basically couldn’t leave his neighborhood without one of the cameras picking it up.”Local law enforcement across the country sharing license plate data with each other and with federal agencies means that anyone’s movements are in effect being tracked across state lines, experts say.“We’re moving to a day where someone getting in their car in New York City could drive to Boston or Washington and have their car basically map every moment of the drive,” Fox Cahn said. “It is profoundly and painfully ironic that American highways went from the symbol of freedom and the liberty of the open road to this metaphor for creeping surveillance and police control.”Westchester police discuss more surveillanceIn addition to informal data-sharing with various federal and local agencies inside and outside of New York state, emails show Westchester police actively discussed creating formal data-sharing relationships to enable a cross-county surveillance network, including with the New York police department and fire departments, as well as an out-of-state agency in Stamford, Connecticut.“If you get a chance I would love to discuss what possibilities exist with a Data Sharing plan,” a Westchester police lieutenant wrote in an email to an NYPD officer dated 10 March 2022. “We are currently at 346 cameras in Westchester with about 14 million reads per week. A lot of those reads are along the city line (Bronx).”The range of agencies and individuals that have access to this database is potentially far more expansive than those listed. Rekor advertises a nationwide law enforcement platform that allows any agency that uses it “to access real time data from any part of the network at no cost”, according to a company press release. Announced in 2019, the platform would make real-time data on the “150 million plate reads” a month that Rekor collects across 30 states available to any agency that wanted to opt in. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump calls Tesla boycott ‘illegal’ and says he’s buying one to support Musk

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      Donald Trump said he intends to buy a “brand new Tesla” and blamed “Radical Left Lunatics” for “illegally” boycotting Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company a day after Tesla suffered its worst share price fall in nearly five years.On Tuesday, several Tesla vehicles were parked in the driveway of the White House for Trump to pick which vehicle to buy, accompanied by Musk and his young son. In August 2024, a podcaster gifted Trump a Cybertruck.“Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday morning.Tesla’s shares fell hard on Monday as markets reacted to the threat of a recession and Trump’s tariff plans. Tesla’s slide came amid widespread protests over the billionaire Musk’s influence in the federal government at Tesla dealerships, a boycott campaign, car owners selling their Tesla vehicles, and activists pushing members of the public to sell Tesla shares.“In any event, I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American. Why should he be punished for putting his tremendous skills to work in order to help MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN???”Trump’s claim the boycott is “illegal” is false. The supreme court ruled in 1972 that the first amendment of the US constitution protects Americans’ right to protest against private businesses.View image in fullscreenMusk’s net worth decreased by $29bn yesterday alone, and has fallen by $132bn over the past 12 months, as Tesla shares’ gains have been wiped out. Tesla shares have declined every week since Trump took office, declining 15% on Monday alone. He remains the richest man in the world with a fortune of more than $320bn, according to Forbes.Tesla’s board members, including Musk’s brother Kimbal Musk, have offloaded millions of dollars worth of shares in recent months. Tesla vehicle sales abroad have also dropped significantly, including by 76.3% in Germany in February 2025 compared with February 2024.The boycott has emerged as Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has wreaked havoc throughout the federal government in a proclaimed effort to reduce federal spending. The access and actions by Musk and his team have incited concerns over the lack of transparency, false claims about cancelled contracts and grants and the amount of savings made.Polls have shown public support for Doge is mixed to unfavorable, with the vast majority of Democratic voters polling that Musk has too much power. More