MAGA Republicans Lash Out as Trump Delays Release of Epstein Files

The Trump administration’s plan to release files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein appears to have been nothing more than a poorly disguised public relations scheme that has the MAGA fringe infuriated.

On Thursday, a cadre of MAGA influencers—DC Draino’s Rogan O’Handley, Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik, Liz Wheeler, and Mike Cernovich—marched out of the White House smiling and waving glossy white binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.”

But Attorney General Pam Bondi had promised to release to the public both Epstein’s flight logs and the names of people tied to the disgraced financier on Thursday. That still hasn’t happened—infuriating MAGA Republicans in Congress.

“I nor the task force were given or reviewed the Epstein documents being released today.… A NY Post story just revealed that the documents will simply be Epstein’s phonebook,” MAGA Representative Anna Paulina Luna noted on X. “THIS IS NOT WHAT WE OR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ASKED FOR and a complete disappointment. GET US THE INFORMATION WE ASKED FOR!”

“1) If the Epstein files are out, where do we find them? (2) What’s the difference between ‘phase 1’ and ‘phase 2’?” asked Senator Mike Lee. “Will the Epstein files tell us whether he killed himself?” he asked later.

“THERE ARE NO EPSTEIN FILES!!!” MAGA talking head Laura Loomer raged on X. “THE BINDERS ARE PROPS. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE RIGHT WING PAID INFLUENCERS LIED TO ALL OF YOU TODAY! THEY ENGAGED IN DECEPTION TO RUN COVER FOR PEDOPHILES!!! THEY POSTED SELFIES WITH PROP BINDERS! LIARS AND DECEIVERS.”

Epstein raped an untold number of young girls for years on his private island and killed himself in his jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking of minors. The “Epstein files” are something of a white whale for the QAnon wing of MAGA, as they believe that their release would reveal the villainous liberal cabal that secretly coordinates international child sex trafficking. Many in the conspiracy community believe that Epstein’s death—and the botched release of this list—is part of a greater “deep state” cover-up.

“Skip to the end: The celebrities that your Facebook uncle says are on the Epstein List are not in any of the documents, and the story becomes ‘the deep state purged the documents,’” wrote Semafor’s David Wiegel.

By Thursday afternoon, Bondi claimed the FBI refused to hand over “thousands of pages” on the Epstein files and the real drop will happen on Friday, February 28.

The Trump administration is having trouble bringing back fired avian flu experts to take on the spread of the disease, which has caused egg prices to skyrocket.

Earlier this month, the administration fired 25 percent of the employees in an office testing for avian flu, as well as scientists and inspectors, as part of its mass purge of federal workers. The layoffs partially shut down a research facility at the Department of Agriculture, interrupting anti-bird flu efforts.

Administration officials are attempting to tout a $1 billion plan to combat the disease, as well as plans to import eggs from overseas. But that plan doesn’t include bringing back fired avian flu workers, whom the USDA is struggling to rehire. The agency is running into logistical issues as well as skeptical ex-employees, some of whom aren’t convinced they should return as Trump and Elon Musk continue to fire federal workers indiscriminately.

“I don’t know if people are going to want to come back,” one anonymous USDA employee told Politico. “Now there’s this perception that federal jobs are not secure. I think they permanently damaged these services.”

USDA supervisors have also been told to justify every bird flu employee being rehired, and some employees who have come back still don’t have laptop computers. It’s not clear if all of the fired avian flu employees have been asked to come back, and some of the reinstated workers were even sent emails urging them to take the Trump administration’s deferred resignation plan, according to two sources.

“Rather than measure twice and cut once, it’s more like everyone is on the chopping block and then, ‘Oh shit we cut the wrong people,’” a USDA employee told Politico.

This could be the first test of how the Trump administration handles a crisis with Musk wielding so much power within the government. Will Trump and Musk prioritize the need to combat the disease, prevent a potential pandemic, and safeguard the country? Or will they stubbornly continue to claim achievements while they gut crucial parts of the government?

Elon Musk suddenly wants to increase the size of the federal workforce.

“There is a shortage of top notch air traffic controllers,” Musk wrote in a post on X Thursday. “If you have retired, but are open to returning to work, please consider doing so.”

Musk’s desperate call to bring retired federal employees back into the fray after single-handedly undermining the security of every single government job is inane on its face. It gets even more so when considering the actual requirements for the job.

Individuals interested in becoming an air traffic controller must be younger than 31 years of age to apply for the position, according to the Federal Aviation Administration website. Air traffic controllers are permitted to serve in the position until they are 56 years old.

So, it’s immediately unclear how Musk’s plan to lure retirees back would even be possible.

Although the solution proposed by the unelected bureaucrat is decidedly unserious, the problem straining air traffic control towers is anything but.

The New York Times reported in 2023 that nearly every air traffic control site in the country was understaffed, leading to the staffers in the high-stress position being overworked. After a deadly plane crash at the Reagan National Airport outside Washington, D.C., earlier this month, the Times reported that its air traffic control tower had a staff of 19 controllers—as opposed to the 30 recommended by the FAA and controllers’ union.

As of September 2024, the FAA had 14,000 air traffic controllers in its employ, having surpassed its yearly goal to bring aboard 1,800 new hires. The hiring spree was implemented to reverse a “decades-long air traffic controller staffing level decline,” according to a post from the FAA.

But earlier this month, as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping layoffs, a whopping 400 FAA jobs were eliminated. According to the Trump administration, none of them were air traffic controllers.

“On the layoffs, these were probationary employees—meaning they had only been at the FAA for less than two years, represented less than 1 percent of FAA’s more than 45,000 employees,” said Department of Transportation spokesperson Halee Dobbins.

Last month, Trump issued an executive order to “immediately stop Biden DEI hiring programs and return to non-discriminatory, merit-based hiring” at the FAA, claiming that it “prioritized diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over safety and efficiency.”

Elon Musk may be throwing his weight around the federal government, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of Donald Trump’s Cabinet are happy about it.

Trump’s aides are reportedly struggling to contain internal administration disputes after Musk threatened mass layoffs over the weekend for federal employees who refused to submit a progress report to the Department of Government Efficiency, Reuters reported Thursday.

Responding to the president’s request that he become “more aggressive” in sizing down the federal government, Musk wrote in a social media post Saturday that all federal employees must self-report five things that they achieved in the previous week before midnight on Monday, or else they would face immediate termination.

Federal workers reportedly received an email from the Office of Personnel Management shortly afterward that echoed Musk’s post. But by Monday, many federal agencies fronted by Trump’s own appointees had simply told their staffers not to respond. Those included the Department of Defense, the FBI, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, as well as the agency that issued the directive: the Office of Personnel Management.

The notice to ignore Musk reportedly came as a shocking reversal in the White House, which had been under the impression before the weekend that internal relations between Musk and the rest of Trump’s senior staffers were improving after Musk had agreed to loop White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in on his plans, Reuters reported earlier this month.

But Trump and Wiles did not sign off on the email, according to three sources that spoke on the condition of anonymity with the newswire, despite Musk’s assurance during Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting that the president had given him the OK.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that Reuters’s sources were “wrong,” that Trump had signed off on the idea, that DOGE and OPM had given the White House advance notice of the email’s release, and that the “White House was not caught off guard.”

Massive cuts at the Department of Veterans Affairs that would have had devastating effects for veterans were paused late Wednesday.  

Lawmakers and veterans’ organizations protested over concerns that the cuts would have hurt critical veterans’ health services. On Tuesday, VA Secretary Doug Collins had bragged the department was merely slashing consulting deals to the tune of $2 billion. 

“No more paying consultants to do things like make Power Point slides and write meeting minutes!” Collins said in an X post Tuesday. 

In reality, the 875 contracts on the chopping block dealt with everything from assessing veterans’ exposure to toxic materials to cancer treatment. On Wednesday, a VA spokesperson sought to backtrack, saying in a statement that its review of department contracts “is ongoing and not final.”

“We will not be eliminating any benefits or services to Veterans or VA beneficiaries, and there will be no negative impact to VA health care, benefits or beneficiaries. We are always going to take care of Veterans at VA. Period,” VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz said in the statement.

One of the targeted contracts had to do with reviewing veterans’ disability ratings, a critical step needed for a veteran to qualify for medical coverage and draw medical compensation if they were injured due to their military service. If a veteran doesn’t receive an accurate rating, they could end up getting worse financial support and treatment options.

According to an internal VA email, one contracting official in the agency said that the Department of Government Efficiency said it was targeting “consulting” contracts, but in reality, the cuts included chemotherapy and imaging services. Other contracts that would have been axed included radiation detection equipment, cancer care support, veterans’ cemetery management, and the ability to assess toxic exposure.  

“With funding suddenly stripped from contractors processing claims, conducting medical screenings and expanding outreach, there are growing concerns veterans will face delays, denials and disruptions in accessing critical services,” Rosie Torres, executive director of Burn Pits 360, told the AP. The organization advocates for veterans who suffer from respiratory illnesses and cancers due to toxic exposure from trash-burning fires near military bases overseas.

There’s no guarantee that the planned cuts aren’t suddenly resurrected. President Trump and Elon Musk’s efforts to slash what they call fraud, waste, and abuse from the federal government has largely been haphazard, resulting in multiple cases where they had to undo the firing of critical staff or the cancellation of lifesaving programs, such as some at the VA. In some cases, cuts haven’t been reversed despite promises otherwise, and whether money is even being saved is debatable at best. The question is how many lives have been ruined by Musk and Trump just a month into this presidency.

Donald Trump screamed Republican Representative Victoria Spartz into submission on his disastrous budget bill, Puck reported Thursday.

The Indiana congresswoman, one of the three initial holdouts on the reconciliation bill, claimed Wednesday she was a “hard no” on the resolution, which would force the Committee on Energy and Commerce to reduce the deficit by at least $880 billion from 2025 to 2034. That committee oversees Medicaid, sparking widespread concerns that Republicans were simply seeking a way to slash the crucial program.

When asked by CNN’s Manu Raju whether she would bend to pressure from her colleagues, Spartz replied, “You don’t know me well enough.… You should know better than that by now.

“We cannot be weak, and we have to do the right thing for the people,” she said.

But that was before Spartz took a furious phone call from the president, whose screaming could be heard by the congresswoman’s colleagues across the Republican cloakroom, according to Puck. Trump shouted that Spartz was a fake Republican set on undermining his agenda, and loudly reminded Spartz that he was the president, Puck reported.

As a freshly scolded Spartz walked out of the cloakroom, Mike Johnson patted her on the back. “You know what you have to do,” the House speaker said.

Spartz flipped, telling reporters later that she’d had a “great conversation” with Trump, who was “on board to get some great things done on health care.”

“I trust his word,” she told reporters. It seems like Spartz doesn’t know Trump well enough and should know better than that by now.

Trump claimed after his Cabinet meeting Wednesday that he was “not going to touch” Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security. But without severe slashing to federal programs, Republicans will fail to accumulate the savings required to offset the cost of the tax breaks imposed by the budget bill.

Representative Warren Davidson also flipped from “nay” to “yay” after a call from Trump. In the end, the only Republican holdout was Representative Thomas Massie.

The New York Times identified several dozen employees working for the Department of Government Efficiency, but conservatives were surprisingly unhappy about the transparency.

“The so-called New York Times outs 45 people working for DOGE,” posted the Washington Examiner’s Byron York on Thursday, alongside a screenshot of the Times article, apparently frustrated to see one of the nation’s largest newspapers doing its job in rooting out government corruption.

DOGE employees have been handed the monumental task of slashing federal spending. So far, the group has gained access to and gutted portions of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Education, Commerce, Defense, and Energy Departments, the Inflation Reduction Act, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Agency for International Development, and, among other agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration, even as the nation experiences an unprecedented uptick in critical aviation crashes.

Elon Musk predicted Wednesday that the organization would meet its goal of hacking $1 trillion from the budget. Many of the staffers employed under the helm of Musk’s organization come equipped with minimal Washington experience, according to the Times, while a large number of them have former working relationships with Musk.

But knowing who’s behind the seismic cuts is apparently not a priority for conservatives, who would seemingly rather keep DOGE’s operators in a literal deep state.

Former Newsmax employee Breanna Morello posted on X that identifying the individuals working for the White House was somehow “putting the lives of DOGE employees at risk.”

“You’ll notice they have no problem detailing the individuals cutting fraud and wasteful federal spend, while hiding the names of the so-called reporters who worked on this hit piece,” Morello continued, outing herself for not finishing the article, where the bylines of some 15 Times reporters are listed.

But despite DOGE’s mandate, some experts believe that the organization’s haphazard work chopping the government into nonfunctional bits will actually add to the deficit. On Tuesday, The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait argued that DOGE’s “inflated” savings thus far had amounted to little more than a “rounding error” and that the group’s decision to take a metaphorical chain saw to the IRS had effectively decimated the government’s ability to collect revenue (taxes)—moves that could actually increase the nation’s debt.

“There’s a reason that none of the innumerable budget experts who have studied the deficit have proposed anything resembling what DOGE has come up with,” Chait wrote. “By almost any ideological standard, it is the worst possible approach.”

It seems that Trump’s massive tariffs are back on.

Earlier this month, Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada—which he inaccurately used drug trafficking to justify—were paused at the last minute. But on Thursday, President Trump announced the tariffs on the two countries, along with 10 percent tariffs on China, will begin on March 4. And he’s still hung up on the drugs.

“Drugs are still pouring into our Country from Mexico and Canada at very high and unacceptable levels. A large percentage of these Drugs, much of them in the form of Fentanyl, are made in, and supplied by, China,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “We cannot allow this scourge to continue to harm the USA, and therefore, until it stops, or is seriously limited, the proposed TARIFFS scheduled to go into effect on MARCH FOURTH will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled. China will likewise be charged an additional 10% Tariff on that date. The April Second Reciprocal Tariff date will remain in full force and effect. Thank you for your attention to this matter. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”

These tariffs will likely cause the price of various goods—from cars to gaming consoles, to over-the-counter pills—to increase dramatically.

“Trump says 25% Canada/Mexico tariffs and another 10% China tariffs are coming next week. Meanwhile, US steel prices spiked 9%-20% last week and US manufacturers just reported their highest input costs in two years,” wrote Scott Lincicome, the vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

Earlier this week, it was reported that Trump’s spending freeze has halted a counter-narcotics program at the U.S.-Mexico border. Meanwhile, Trump is also threatening the entire European Union with a similar 25 percent tariff, further isolating the U.S. from its economic allies.

The Federal Aviation Administration is reportedly planning to ditch a $2.4 billion contract with Verizon in favor of a deal with Elon Musk’s Starlink.

The move would be a blatant favor to the tech mogul, as it would result in overhauling a communications system underpinning America’s air traffic control system and further increase the wealth and power of the world’s richest man, The Washington Post reports.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative has been granted unprecedented power and access in the federal government by President Trump, which has proven quite beneficial to Musk’s personal interests. The billionaire owes much of his fortune to government contracts, subsidies, and loans to his various companies.

The FAA’s contract with Verizon dates back to 2023, and was meant to upgrade a communications platform used by air traffic controllers and FAA offices. Switching to Starlink would give Musk a larger foothold at the FAA, which Musk has frequently clashed with over safety and regulatory violations. The agency is responsible for the safety and stability of America’s air travel.

Musk himself attacked Verizon on his X account Monday, claiming that “the Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk.” Several employees from his SpaceX company have been working inside the FAA, ostensibly to upgrade old technology, and despite no decisions having been made, the agency said in a statement Monday that it was already testing Starlink systems in New Jersey and Alaska.

The move increases Musk’s many conflicts of interest regarding SpaceX and the FAA, and proves that Musk can get whatever he wants from the Trump administration, while claiming to overhaul government agencies in favor of greater efficiency.

“Who’s looking out for the public interest here when you get the person who’s cutting budgets and personnel from the FAA, suddenly trying to benefit from still another government contract?” John P. Pelissero, who directs an ethics center at Santa Clara University, said to the Post.

During the first meeting of White House Cabinet officials, Elon Musk admitted that the Department of Government Efficiency cut to Ebola prevention programs was a mistake that would be reversed—but federal officials say the money still isn’t flowing in yet.

“We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly,” Musk, a Trump-appointed special government employee, said Wednesday in defense of his group’s haphazard cuts while looming over the Cabinet table. “So for example with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled—very briefly—was Ebola prevention.

“So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately. And there was no interruption,” the world’s richest man added.

But federal officials have said there was nothing brief about the cut, which involved hacking away at several arms of the federal government’s disease response, and which has apparently still not been reversed.

“There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention” when it comes to Ebola or other diseases, former U.S. Agency for International Development official Nidhi Bouri told The Washington Post Thursday.

Earlier this month, news of an Ebola outbreak in Kampala, Uganda, was reported via a USAID mission, just prior to the seismic cuts. Public health experts have argued that choosing to nix the agency would force the U.S. into an information dark age that could see the country caught off guard in future health crises.

Other public health officials were more blunt, arguing that Musk was flat-out lying in telling Americans that the nation’s disease prevention programs had been restored.

“This is bunk from Elon,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former USAID official who led the agency’s Ebola response during a 2014–2015 outbreak in West Africa. “They have laid off most of the experts, they’re bankrupting most of the partner orgs, have withdrawn from WHO, and muzzled CDC.

“What’s left is a fig-leaf effort to cover their asses politically,” Konyndyk continued.

Konyndyk noted that before the Trump administration’s cuts, there would have been a robust interagency and international response to an Ebola outbreak that would have included resources pushed to the host government, a coalition of teams deployed to the region by USAID, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Defense Department, as well as real-time cooperation and data sharing with the World Health Organization.

“But not this time,” Konyndyk wrote. “Most experts and operations staff at USAID have been pushed out … USAID’s capacity to deploy response teams is totally broken.

“Bottom line: Elon’s vendetta against USAID and the federal workforce is shredding all of the systems that the USG has built up to protect the US homeland against global outbreak risks,” Konyndyk added. “Scrambling to recall a few staff and issue some belated funding is just window dressing.”