Laura Barron-Lopez:
So, to date, Musk and his team have accessed at least 11 agencies, Amna. And the count is growing every day. So that includes USAID, Treasury, Education Department, FAA, FBI. And what does that mean? That means that, with access to these agencies, he has access to the government’s biggest payment systems, to personnel information, to the personal information of many Americans, H.R. systems, and much more.
The New York Times also recently reported that DOGE has access to the Center — Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which has contracts totaling in $1 trillion. And, now, we asked the White House about all this access. And the White House claims that Musk and DOGE have — quote — “the appropriate security clearances” and that DOGE employees are employees of relevant agencies. But it’s not just about gaining access, Amna. Elon Musk has also gleefully tweeted on X about dismantling entire agencies beyond USAID, including the Education Department.
Trump’s anti-trans effort is an agenda cornerstone with echoes in history
Hours after an army helicopter and an American Airlines jet collided near Reagan National Airport last week, killing all on board both craft, social media erupted with the claim that the pilot manning the Black Hawk was a transgender service member. But it wasn’t true. Jo Ellis, a transgender, Black Hawk pilot with the Virginia National Guard, took to Facebook to post proof of life and rebut the false accusation about her. “It is insulting to the families to try to tie this to some sort of political agenda,” Ellis said in the online post.
“They don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve this.” But her experience is just the latest in a pattern where Republican leaders and high-reach social media accounts scapegoat transgender people in the wake of high-profile tragedies. Similar false claims were made about perpetrators of mass shootings in Texas, Georgia, Wisconsin and Iowa.
For extremism experts and some within the trans community, the accusations speak to a highly dangerous political strategy to sow division and expand authoritarian control. The intensity of the Trump administration’s focus on one marginalized group is raising alarm among extremism experts, who note that trans people make up less than 1 percent of adults in the U.S. “It’s ushering in a new era of efforts toward segregation in our society,” said Hanah Stiverson, associate director of Democracy Protection at Human Rights First, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. “It’s incredibly dangerous.” Stiverson said the politicization of trans people has troubling historical precedent.
