Round up the Clustery News! (Links go to AOL.)
A DOGE employee has been ordered to testify in court.
A federal judge Thursday ordered at least one official from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to testify and provide documents in response to a lawsuit against the Trump administration by the American Federation of Labor and other unions.
It will be the first time someone involved with DOGE has been required to answer questions under oath from an attorney outside the government, potentially providing new insights into the operations of an organization that U.S. District Judge John Bates of Washington, D.C., characterized as “opaque” in his order.
And, speaking of DOGE, the carpetagger from Suid-Afrika is causing friction in the White House.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump’s top aides are struggling to contain disputes at the White House and across the administration following billionaire Elon Musk’s ultimatum to federal workers to list their accomplishments or lose their jobs, said three government officials familiar with the tensions.
Before the weekend, the White House felt confident that coordination had been improving between senior staffers and Musk, two of those people said. In the first weeks of Trump’s new administration, some White House officials had expressed concerns over the tactics of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, as Reuters previously reported.
Chief of staff Susie Wiles had pulled Musk aside to ask him to loop her in on his plans instead of surprising her team with major decisions, according to two separate sources with knowledge of the conversation who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.
After that conversation, Musk had begun keeping Wiles informed of DOGE’s activities on a daily basis, said one of the officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The White House believed it had Musk’s agreement that he would seek approval from cabinet secretaries before he used the government’s human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management, to send emails directly to federal workers, two of the officials said.
But the plan appears to have quickly fallen apart. After Trump urged Musk to “get more aggressive” with DOGE in a post on his Truth Social site on Saturday, OPM ordered the nation’s 2.3 million civil-service workers in an email to detail their accomplishments at work. The email landed shortly after Musk posted on his social media site X that not responding to the request would be viewed as a resignation, an ultimatum that sent shockwaves through Washington.
And instead of a united front, felon47 is pushing for more friction.
The convict is still planning on dumping the Education Department even though the states say they are not prepared for that.
President Donald Trump has set his sights on abolishing the U.S. Education Department and has said he’d prefer to put education policy in the hands of the states.
But that may not be so simple, with state officials and lawmakers saying they’re wildly unprepared for such a huge undertaking.
NBC News reported this month that the White House is preparing an executive order to eliminate the agency, though the details of how that would work remain unclear. Trump cannot unilaterally get rid of a federal agency without congressional approval, and his nominee for education secretary, Linda McMahon, agreed at her recent Senate confirmation hearing that they hope to present a plan that Congress will support.
At a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Trump reiterated his plans for major changes at the agency, saying that “we want to move education back to the states where it belongs.”
Hey! This just occurred to me. If the feds are not involved in education policies anymore, then they cannot dictate anything whatsoever to schools. That includes patriotic exercises, pronoun usage, and even bathroom access.
More noravirus cases.
Dozens of passengers aboard a cruise ship that left from Florida have been sickened with norovirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vessel Sanitation Program.
Holland America Line’s Eurodam left Port Everglades, Florida, on Feb. 19, according to the tracking site cruisemapper.com. The cruise is scheduled to last 10 days and make multiple stops throughout the Caribbean before returning to Florida on March 1.
Seventy-nine passengers and nine crew members have reported feeling ill, according to the Vessel Sanitation Program, which said 2,057 passengers and 834 crew members are aboard the 12-deck vessel.
Why do I put this here? Oh, no particular reason, other than this bit:
Much of the United States has seen a surge in norovirus cases this year. In January, the CDC said a winter wave of infections reached levels more than double what was seen last year.
And the HHS secretary likely will have more of a “this happens every year” approach to it.
Speaking of that particular spraytanned accessory before, during, and after the crime, the current measles outbreak is situation normal according to him.
“We’re following the measles epidemic every day,” Kennedy said during President Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting since being sworn in Jan. 20. “Incidentally, there have been four measles outbreaks this year in this country. … So it’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year.”
If he and his antiscience ilk had not gotten such traction, this may have been prevented:
But the death of an unvaccinated school-age child in West Texas, confirmed by a state health official this week, is the first fatality in the U.S. since 2015.
So, yes, it is unusual.
Now let’s get serious about law enforcement. How would you, if you were the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, go about ensuring those federal coppers are fit? If you came up with the same idea as Patel did, you need to move out of the cave to avoid the guano and get your head examined for the mental health issue.*
Newly-installed FBI Director Kash Patel, whose proclaimed plans to overhaul the nation’s premier law enforcement agency have rattled many within the bureau, has proposed enhancing the FBI’s ranks with help from the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the martial-arts entertainment giant whose wealthy CEO, Dana White, helped boost President Donald Trump’s reelection, according to sources who were told of Patel’s proposal.
On a teleconference Wednesday with the heads of the FBI’s 55 field offices, Patel suggested that he wants the FBI to establish a formal relationship with the UFC, which could develop programs for agents to improve their physical fitness, said sources who had been briefed on Wednesday’s call.
*In case you were wondering, that’s an allusion to Patel being batshit insane.
Let’s revisit the Memos/E-mails of the Long Knives, shall we?
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Office of Personnel Management to rescind earlier instructions telling federal agencies to “promptly determine whether these employees should be retained at the agency.”
The directions, communicated in a Jan. 20 memo and Feb. 14 internal email, are “illegal” and “should be stopped, rescinded,” Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California said from the bench.
The ruling does not reinstate dismissed employees.
The judge instructed the Office of Personnel Management to communicate to the Department of Defense on Friday — ahead of expected probationary terminations — that he has ruled they are invalid.
That’s all my mental health can take for one day.