IRS Lawyer Ousted as Elon Musk’s DOGE Plans Even More Cuts

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is shaking up the Internal Revenue Service, running into resistance from career staff as it seeks sensitive taxpayer information.

The IRS’s top lawyer, William Paul, was removed from his position Thursday despite only having the job for two months. It’s part of DOGE’s plans to cut nearly 20 percent of the tax agency’s staff despite income taxes being due in less than a month. The acting IRS commissioner was told by DOGE to eliminate 18,141 jobs from the agency by May 15, according to The Washington Post.

The largest cuts would come from the tax compliance department, which would lose 8,260 jobs, followed by taxpayer services with 3,247 cuts, followed by information technology. This would only be the first level of cuts, with DOGE signaling even more terminations to come. None of this would help with processing tax returns, but the Trump administration has other concerns: getting the addresses of undocumented immigrants.

The Department of Homeland Security wants the IRS to hand over the addresses of about 700,000 undocumented immigrants, which career employees believe is illegal. Along with Paul’s departure, DOGE’s ongoing purge of the federal workforce has left longtime IRS employees worried. One IRS veteran who had worked at the agency for decades, Doug O’Donnell, left the agency last month.

Musk and DOGE hope to use IRS records in their goal to go after fraud in spending on federal benefits, hoping to check those benefits against tax records. The agency’s staff is concerned about legal protections against the use of such sensitive information, joining their counterparts in other agencies, including the Social Security Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services.

These moves could damage an important government agency, but that may be by design. Conservatives have long opposed the IRS, and Trump has claimed that his tariffs could supplant income tax revenue with his new “External Revenue Service.” It remains to be seen how the government will function with a severely weakened IRS.

Donald Trump can only point to big businesses as the potential benefactors of his trade war.

“Many American small-business owners say they are concerned that these tariffs are going to hurt them,” a reporter asked during a White House press conference Thursday. “What’s your message to them?”

“They are gonna be so much richer than they are right now,” the president said. “We have many—yesterday General Motors was in, they want to invest $16 billion—the people from Facebook were in yesterday, they’re going to invest $60 billion by the end of the year.”

Facebook announced in January plans to build a Manhattan-size datacenter in Louisiana to power the company’s latest AI model, Llama 4.

“Other people are talking about numbers,” Trump continued. “Apple, as you know, a few days ago announced a $500 billion investment. They’re going to build their plants in the United States, which as you know, almost all of their plants are in China. Now they’re building in the United States.”

Apple announced in February that it would invest in AI development and silicon engineering, and expand its facilities in Michigan, Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Iowa, Oregon, North Carolina, and Washington, as well as build a new factory in Texas. Altogether, the company said it would add as many as 20,000 jobs to the U.S. market over the next four years.

But General Motors, Facebook, and Apple do not count as small businesses.

Nearly half of all private-sector workers are employed by more than 33 million small businesses in the U.S., according to data from the Small Business Administration. The vast majority of companies in the country are, in fact, small—approximately 99.9 percent of them.

Polls show that small-business optimism has plummeted in the wake of Trump’s tariff rollercoaster. The National Federation of Independent Business’s Uncertainty Index recorded its second-highest reading on record in February, marking the smallest number of respondents who believe now is a good time to expand their business since April 2020.

Trump has admitted that his tariffs will destabilize the economy. ​​During an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that aired Sunday, Trump dodged a question on whether the country would dive headlong into a recession, sending stock indexes reeling.

He also floated that the “little disruption” caused by his aggressive trade policies could go on for quite a bit longer, suggesting that Americans should model their economic projections on a 100-year-model—like China—rather than assess his performance on a quarterly basis.

The market, in turn, has tumbled as Trump’s trade war sparks fears of a forthcoming recession. Last week, the Dow dropped 670 points. This week, the slump continued, reacting to Trump’s 25 percent levy on all steel and aluminum imports and the retaliatory tariffs slapped on American goods by countries around the globe in protest.

Still, Trump was quick to ignore the facts and pat himself on the back for what he viewed as the seeding ground for future U.S. growth.

“Look, the reason is two things. Number one, the election, November 5. And the other thing is tariffs, I think probably in that order,” he added Thursday.

Hundreds of Jewish New Yorkers and allies staged a sit-in at Trump Tower in support of Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestine activist and recent Columbia University graduate who was kidnapped by ICE agents last Saturday night.

Over 300 protesters, many of them affiliated with anti-Zionist organizing group Jewish Voice for Peace, took over the tower around 11:30 a.m. They chanted, “We want justice. You say, how? Bring Mahmoud home now!” and “Fight Nazis, not students.” About 100 protesters were arrested, according to NBC News.

“My grandmother lost her cousins in the Holocaust. I grew up on these stories. We know what happens when authoritarian regimes begin targeting people, begin abducting them at night, separating their families and scapegoating,” JVP spokesperson Sonya Meyerson-Knox told NBC. “And we know that it’s one step from here to losing all right to protest and then further horrors happening, as we have seen too well in our history. We’re calling on everyone to speak up today because otherwise we won’t be able to tomorrow.”

Republicans are trying to spin Donald Trump’s decision to kneecap the U.S. stock market by arguing that the United States doesn’t actually want to have a booming economy.

Montana Senator Tim Sheehy appeared on CNN Wednesday evening, where he was faced with a brutal CNN poll that found a whopping 56 percent of respondents disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy.

Earlier this week, the stock market plummeted after Trump refused to say that the U.S. wasn’t heading toward a recession caused by his steep tariffs against its closest trading partners.

Sheehy had his own explanation for why Wall Street falling was actually OK.

“Well, first of all the stock market’s been on a sugar high for a long time,” he said.

“There’s a fundamental difference between public spending and private spending. And what we’ve seen over the past several years, past three and a half years specifically, is unprecedented money printing into the market. And to be quite frank, a lot of companies benefited from that,” Sheehy said.

Sheehy claimed that a handful of mega-tech companies had driven the stock market index to an all-time high.

“We all love a good stock market, but the reality is that stock market imbalance didn’t necessarily benefit the smaller, midsize companies and average shareholders across the country,” he said.

And Sheehy knows something about big business. He recently won his seat in Montana thanks to the backing of 12 billionaires, including members of the Walton family and organizations linked to Charles Koch and Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone—which owns the Wyoming oil and gas pipeline company Tallgrass Energy, of which Sheehy’s brother is the president.*

Sheehy insisted Wednesday that the “stock market is not the economy,” and said that “uncertainty” would cause disruptions as Trump attempted to create a new “economic landscape.”

Sheehy’s coping mechanism was similar to that of the dumbest U.S. senator, Tommy Tuberville, who was interviewed on Fox Business Monday.

“People are looking at the stock market like, ‘Hey this is how it’s going to continue to be for months and months and months’—that’s not gonna happen,” Tuberville said. “We were probably over-bloated with the stock market here, for a while.”

* This piece has been updated to clarify who is the CEO of Blackstone.

The Trump administration has asked the U.S. military to draw up options for retaking the Panama Canal. 

President Trump has been pushing for retaking the canal since December, and repeated his desire in a joint address to Congress last week, without any elaboration. The rest of the Trump administration hasn’t attempted to explain what he means, either. 

The military is drawing up options, according to NBC News, that range from a closer partnership with the Panamanian military to soldiers seizing the Panama Canal by force, according to unnamed officials. The use of force depends on how much Panama’s military is willing to work with the United States, the officials told NBC News. 

The commander of U.S. Southern Command, Admiral Alvin Holsey, presented the different strategies to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth earlier this week. The plan to use military force against Panama will only be considered if posting additional U.S. military personnel does not accomplish Trump’s goal of “reclaiming” the canal, the officials said.  

Right now, the U.S. has more than 200 troops in the country, including Special Forces units working with Panamanian units to combat internal unrest. Trump claims China has troops in the canal, which Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino denies, as does China. In February, Panama decided not to renew an infrastructure agreement with China, drawing criticism from the country toward the U.S. 

China “firmly opposes the U.S. smearing and undermining the Belt and Road cooperation through means of pressure and coercion,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian, referring to the country’s Belt and Road development initiative. 

Later this month, Hegseth is expected to visit Panama, where discussions on increasing U.S. troop presence in the canal zone will take place. The Cabinet secretary is fully on board with Trump’s desire to retake the canal, saying in January that the U.S. has “the right—we retain the right—to do what is necessary to make sure there is free navigation in the Panama Canal.”

The canal is one of the busiest waterways in the world, with most of the cargo passing through heading to or from the U.S. Any disruption or blocking of the canal would have devastating effects on the U.S. as well as the world economy. But Trump has proven during his presidency that his personal wishes outweigh any economic concerns, no matter how absurd.

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the mass firing of federal employees was an “unlawful” directive by the Office of Personnel Management.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered several agencies to “immediately” reinstate all fired probationary employees. Those agencies included the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as the Departments of Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury, and Agriculture. That would also restore numbers at the Internal Revenue Service, which falls under the helm of the Treasury Department and has been hit hard by job cuts in recent weeks.

In a hearing leading up to the decision, Alsup torched the Trump administration’s decision not to submit OPM director Chad Ezell for questioning as a “sham,” and accused the White House’s effort to cast the firings as performance failures as “a gimmick.”

“It is sad, a sad day, when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” Alsup said, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

The Trump administration has fired at least 30,000 employees with the help of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE has made a point to target probationary employees still within the first year of their roles. Some of those employees have been called to return, but most are still not working, reported Axios.

Alsup’s order comes as federal agencies are due to submit “reduction memos” to the White House that could affect as many as 250,000 additional federal employees who fit that criteria.

Alsup further accused the administration of hiding the facts of who directed the layoffs.

“You will not bring the people in here to be cross-examined. You’re afraid to do so because you know cross-examination would reveal the truth,” the California judge told a DOJ attorney, according to Politico. “I tend to doubt that you’re telling me the truth.… I’m tired of seeing you stonewall on trying to get at the truth.”

This story has been updated.

Elon Musk has promised that his efforts to slash the government would be “maximally transparent”—but instead, the billionaire’s Department of Government Efficiency has only worked to obscure the facts of its operation to slash the federal government.

DOGE’s first batch of published savings was riddled with errors, with experts pointing out that the math wasn’t adding up in its accounting. By Wednesday, the group reported—without receipts—that it had saved the government $115 billion through a “combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”

Fact-checking DOGE’s details, however, revealed that the organization has confused billions with millions, tripled the savings from nixing one contract, claimed credit for canceling programs that ended under the Bush administration, and said it spared $1.9 billion for ending an IRS contract that was actually axed under President Joe Biden. The group later deleted these details from its “savings” page.

But rather than push to improve accuracy in its reporting, DOGE decided to go the opposite route and make its new claims even harder to check.

On March 2, Musk’s group posted a note that it had saved taxpayers another $10 billion by terminating thousands of federal grants. But instead of pointing to specifics for the savings—as it had done before—DOGE opted not to include identifying details related to the slashed grants, The New York Times reported Thursday. The White House claimed the new policy was instituted for security reasons.

Regardless, the Times was able to identify the relevant receipts by examining DOGE’s publicly available source code, which momentarily retained the federal identification numbers of the grants, and discovered that DOGE’s latest batch of savings was just as dishonest and illegitimate as previous rounds. DOGE deleted the ID numbers from their source code shortly after the grant details became known—but not before the Times retained a copy.

“At least five of the 20 largest ‘savings’ appeared to be exaggerated, according to federal data and interviews with the nonprofits whose grants were on the list,” the Times reported.

The largest item DOGE claimed to have produced savings from included a $1.75 billion grant distributed by USAID. But the recipient of the grant, a public health nonprofit called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, told the Times that not only had the grant not been terminated but the funds had already been fully distributed. That means that slashing the program would have resulted in exactly $0.00 in federal savings.

The MAGA right is seething after anti-vax conspiracy theorist Dave Weldon—Trump’s pick to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—had his nomination pulled at the last minute.

Weldon, a former physician and representative, was getting ready for his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday when the call to withdraw his nomination came down, according to Axios. Even Robert F. Kennedy expressed doubt with Weldon’s confirmation, a source told Axios. But the far right is taking Weldon’s axing personally. 

“Weldon—who is ‘Make America Healthy Again’—his nomination was pulled. The rumor is about they didn’t want questioning on measles,” Steve Bannon said on his War Room podcast. “That would be unsatisfactory. You can’t pull him over measles. No way. Impossible. So we gotta get to the bottom of that. 

“This just puts the last nail in the coffin. CDC is no longer a legitimate agency.  No one is going to believe anything they say anymore,” one far-right account posted on X. “Just SHUT IT DOWN and let the states make their own health recommendations.”

“This is absolutely devastating for MAHA. The antisemites are out for blood, and Trump is showing weakness in the last area he should: commitment to @SecKennedy agenda. It’s beginning to look very bleak,” said another. 

“Dave Weldon, a good man, no longer in the running for CDC.  Weldon recognizes the problem with mercury in vaccines, supports parents who do not want to have their newborns vaxxed vs STDs, and drafted the ‘Weldon Amendment’ protecting physicians of conscience. If not Dave—who?” one supporter opined.

“Personally, I’m devastated to hear this news. Dave Weldon has been a figure in this fight before RFKjr. He’s remained out of the spotlight since he left congress, but the groundwork he laid made those of us with vax injured children hopeful when Trump nominated him,” yet another MAHA supporter wrote on X. “This is such a profound loss. Whoever they get won’t be nearly as aware & committed to doing the research that should have been done decades ago. The autism epidemic marches on. Sad day.”

Donald Trump’s family members are in discussions to take a financial stake into Binance, a cryptocurrency firm that pleaded guilty in 2023 to money laundering.

Meanwhile, the company’s founder and largest shareholder, Changpeng Zhao, who served four months in prison on related charges, is also seeking a pardon from President Trump, The Wall Street Journal reports. Binance reached out to Trump allies in 2024, hoping to strike a business deal with the family to restore the company’s presence in the U.S.

The details of the financial stake, or whether it’s contingent on a pardon are not yet known. The Trumps could make a direct investment or go through World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency venture launched in September in which the Trump family has a stake. Steve Witkoff, who works in the Trump administration as an envoy to the Middle East and for the war in Ukraine, is also reportedly involved with the talks, although the Trump administration denies it.

The move would raise questions of a conflict of interest, especially if a pardon comes with it. Trump’s businesses have been involved in dealings that seem to conflict with his duties as president, especially the Trump Organization’s deal with Saudi Arabia for a new Trump Tower.

Trump’s decision to create a cryptocurrency “strategic reserve” seems to be aimed at making his wealthy associates richer, and the launch of “meme coins” by himself and his wife Melania are a blatant grift designed to line the couple’s pockets. If a deal with Binance goes through, the president and his family will once again prove that all they care about is money.

Donald Trump railed against The Wall Street Journal Thursday, after the paper revealed that business leaders were being two-faced about the president’s disastrous tariffs. 

“The Globalist Wall Street Journal has no idea what they are doing or saying. They are owned by the polluted thinking of the European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of ‘screwing’ the United States of America,” Trump raged in a post on Truth Social. 

“Their (WSJ!) thinking is antiquated and weak, and very bad for the USA. But have no fear, we will WIN on everything!!! Egg prices are down, oil is down, interest rates are down, and TARIFF RELATED MONEY IS POURING INTO THE UNITED STATES. ‘The only thing you have to fear, is fear itself!’”

Trump’s absurd meltdown appears to be in response to an article published Thursday in The Wall Street Journal airing the concerns of American business leaders who have been forced to come to terms with just how disastrous Trump’s tariffs are for the U.S. market. 

Trump could also have been blowing up in response to a Fox Business interview Thursday with the Journal’s editor in chief Emma Tucker, who discussed the article and described how the once “upbeat” attitude American business executives had about the Trump administration had gone sour since the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. 

“The American chief execs that were there were all so excited, the talk was all of deregulation  growth, no tax rises. Boom, boom! America! And Europe was absolutely stuck in the doldrums, very unhappy,” Tucker explained. “But, it’s very interesting how that mood has shifted—pretty much since all the tariffs started coming in.

“I think businesses realize this now, Trump is serious about this. But the problem they’ve got is that they’re being imposed in a very haphazard way, and that’s creating so much instability,” Tucker said.

During his address at Davos, Trump had openly warned business leaders to move their manufacturing to the United States or face steep tariffs. At the time, CEOs must not have taken his threats seriously. But Trump’s tariffs have since swapped U.S. soft power for a tit-for-tat trade war, sure to decimate the U.S. economy. 

Tucker also said that Trump’s “no pain, no gain” rhetoric during his interview Sunday with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo had only made the situation worse. Trump had refused to say that he wasn’t about to drag Americans into a recession, sending the stock market plummeting the next day. 

Tucker said that CEOs were “reluctant to say anything publicly,” and were waiting until the market dropped 20 percent before they would go on record saying anything critical about the president. 

Trump’s meltdown over the Journal comes as he threatened a new round of tariffs Thursday—this time a whopping 200 percent tariff on alcohol from the European Union, in response to entirely predictable reciprocal tariffs on U.S. exports.