Back in the days when reporters occasionally had to search around for stories, back before anyone spoke of a “fedpocalypse” or conceived of a tech zillionaire becoming shadow emperor of the nation, my go-to, last-ditch source for news was the incredible Federal Register, the official journal of the U.S. government.
The Washington Post
Where the government is strangely silent on its own ransacking
The Federal Register records everything the government does. Except, apparently, Elon Musk and DOGE.
February 6, 2025
Let’s take a quick whirl through just two days of the Register. The government is saving babies’ lives: Here’s the nearly seven-page-long new safety standard for “non-full-size baby cribs,” a notice from the Consumer Product Safety Commission requiring warning labels stating that “Children have STRANGLED when their necks became trapped between accessories and play yard frames.”
But the government is also deep into regulating, well, cheese: The International Trade Administration, part of the Commerce Department, hereby issues its “Quarterly Update to Annual Listing of Foreign Government Subsidies on Articles of Cheese Subject to an In-Quota Rate of Duty.” You’ll be relieved (or distressed) to know that this quarter there are no updates to report.
I do not want to know how many federal workers it took to produce that gem, but the report was filed by a guy who describes himself as “AD/CVD Operations, Office III, Enforcement and Compliance, International Trade Administration,” and signed by the acting assistant secretary for enforcement and compliance.
More satisfyingly, the U.S. Sentencing Commission seeks public comment by May 1 on whether to jack up punishments for drug crimes that involve fentanyl. Curiously, there’s a nine-page list of Americans who over the last three months of 2024 gave up their U.S. citizenship, from Danaca Ackerson to Zoltan Zsidai.
I was pleased to see that the deputy assistant secretary for policy in the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs issued a notice of determination that “certain objects being imported … in the exhibition ‘Modern Art and Politics in Germany, 1910-1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin’ at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; [and] the Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico; … are of cultural significance, and, further, that their temporary exhibition or display within the United States as aforementioned is in the national interest.”
I was less thrilled to learn that a Committee for Purchase From People Who Are Blind or Severely Disabled issues edicts requiring federal agencies “to procure the product(s) listed below from nonprofit agencies employing persons who are blind or have other severe disabilities.” The Defense Logistics Agency has now been ordered to buy its nylon twisted slings from Dallas Lighthouse for the Blind but will no longer be required to purchase foliage-green helmet chin straps from the San Antonio Lighthouse.
But here’s the thing about the Register’s recent editions: They contain not a word about a Department of Government Efficiency, or even its bureaucratic fig leaf, the U.S. Digital Service. Nothing about governmental authority being granted to a corporate executive who donated $288 million to Trump and other Republicans in last year’s campaigns. Nothing about his young minions being slipped into federal agencies to dismantle their work and usher out their employees.
Powered by a root disdain for all things Washington, Shadow Emperor Elon, unofficial overlord of the federal bureaucracy, would love for Americans to believe that their government is a creepy creature of the bad, bad District of Columbia. (Crime! Radicals! Rich, overeducated people!) But the federal government is the biggest employer in lots of places, even in the heartland (Kansas City, for example).
There is no accountability for the actions of Musk’s operatives. (Who are they? Who pays their salaries? Have they undergone security checks?) Yet they are now conducting a frenzied deconstruction of our uncomfortably huge government.
What will result from this sacking spree? Will planes fall out of the sky? Will vital checks stop flowing? Will ailing vets go untreated? When bad things happen, the president and his new friend, himself a huge government contractor, will blame enemies and phantoms.
There’s nothing in the Register about the Musk tech bros who have moved sofa beds into federal offices and launched Silicon Valley-style purges, nothing recording their pillaging.
In Musk’s worldview, eliminating jobs and severing public services is progress — just like driverless cars and largely unregulated AI. He sees no responsibility to record his deeds in the Register. The rules don’t matter. All in keeping with how Donald Trump has run his life. Remember his “Access Hollywood” moment: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
You can go in and fire them all. Ignore the rules. You don’t even have to put it in the Federal Register.
@mffisher