News Brief: Media Continues Painting Musk’s Far Right Coup as Good Faith “Cost-Cutting Effort”
Citations Needed | February 5, 2025 | Transcript
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Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can find Citations Needed on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes. And today, Adam, we wanted to discuss a recent piece you wrote on the credulous reporting about what is currently a full-scale assault on the federal government by not only Donald Trump but his empowered deputy president, Elon Musk, and how the media is reporting this assault as, you know, kind of good-faith cost-cutting measures, you know, going line by line in federal budgets, that so far is seeing real, real threats, sometimes shutting down, a lot of full-scale firings and dismantling of government agencies from the US Treasury to the Office of Personnel Management, that’s OPM, General Services Administration, the GSA, Small Business Administration, the SBA, tons of other agencies, including USAID. And yes, there are problems with all of these offices, but what Musk is doing is not actually talking about the root causes of, say, quote-unquote, “government waste,” but rather, is fully assaulting the federal government on purpose.
Adam: 100% of people concerned with government waste don’t give a shit about government waste. It is obviously pretextual. Anyone with half a brain cell who’s read any kind of Heritage Foundation or Manhattan Institute report can tell you that government waste is always pretextual. Nobody gives a shit about waste. Maybe, like, five guys at the OMB kind of care. Make sure you fill out your TPS report or whatever. Make sure you’re dotting your I’s and crossing your T’s, sure. But obviously what Musk, in his, what appears to be like Zoomer flunkies, weird Silicon Valley incel types who are his cultish followers, have been gaining unprecedented and deeply insecure access in every sense of the term. It’s both insecure and that Musk clearly needs everyone to love him, and also just not good protocol in terms of leaking people’s information, is gaining unprecedented access to trillions of dollars worth of federal spending, ostensibly, again, to sort of find theft or inefficiencies, but they haven’t actually found any, because there’s already systems in place for that. And obviously it’s fake.
Nima: And that’s also not the point, exactly. It’s totally fake, let alone illegal, but it is totally fake, and the credulous reporting we’re seeing is kind of taking all this at face value as, like, a good-faith attempt to slash the federal budget.
Adam: Yeah, recently, there’s been a slightly more critical tone, which we can get into, although they’re still indulging the idea that it’s a quote-unquote “cost cutting” panel, but for the months leading up to DOGE, which, I can’t believe I have to say this. I can’t believe the fact that I have to think about this fucking dickhead, is its own transgression, same for everyone else in this country. But nevertheless, we have to, because he’s effectively the president-slash-dictator. And what we’re seeing truly is a rightwing coup, which is to say it is illegal, illegitimate. Nobody voted for it, and the executive branch, by design, certainly by the arrangement that the voters were voting for, cannot unilaterally shut down entire federal programs and does not control the budget. Congress controls the budget for very good reason, because, ostensibly, Congress is controlled by the people.
Nima: That’s right. For the time being, there is still a certain level of separation of the branches of government. Congress has the power of the purse, still, for the time being, as I said.
Adam: So leading up to this moment, and I’ve been pulling my hair out about this on social media, I’ve written about it for In These Times, the way that the press, I focus specifically on CNN, New York Times and Washington Post, because they’re kind of three mainstream outlets. I’m sure a bunch of other outlets have been just as bad, but we’ll focus on them for the purposes of this News Brief, just to limit the scope here, have repeatedly for months been treating DOGE and Musk’s efforts as genuine cost-cutting efforts. Again, he is not presented as ideological. He’s not presented as rightwing. It’s not presented as an attack on the liberal state. And obviously there’s years of evidence that Trump is a rightwing ideologue. He publishes and posts nonstop #whitegenocide conspiracy theories, complains about land theft in South Africa, wink-wink. Anti-trans, sort of Knockout Game-type schlock, constantly sharing memes that originate from white supremacist websites. He did a Sieg Heil at the inauguration, clear as day, three different times, in HD, as we’ve already discussed. This is not really something that one can dispute. He clearly exhibits, displays, and makes clear his far-rightwing ideology, and has for several years. So this is not like something the New York Times is not aware of, despite their best efforts, and somewhat infamously in 2022 to act like he’s this sort of enigma who is both liberal and conservative.
But this ideological position which, clearly, again, the richest person in the world, almost worth half a trillion dollars, with a long history of bigoted statements. It was completely erased from discussions of DOGE, and he was treated as someone who was simply interested in finding savings. So let’s find some of those. These are just, you know, main examples. There are thousands of other examples, but we’ll just give you a sampling here to give you a sense of, we’re calling it credulity, but it’s not really credulity. They know what they’re doing. But credulity as it reads. This is from the New York Times, November 27, 2024. The headline reads, “Musk’s Slashing of the Federal Budget Faces Big Hurdles,” in which they say DOGE is quote-unquote, “looking for savings.” They’re quote-unquote, “budget-cutters.”
This from December 6, 2024, also the New York Times. Quote, “Musk Cost-Cutting Effort Is Being Guided by Health Entrepreneur.” The article would go on to say it was a cost cutting effort, a, quote, “efficiency panel,” a, quote “cost-cutting project,” unquote. Another article from January 12, 2025, headline would read, “Inside Elon Musk’s Plan for DOGE to Slash Government Costs.” It was referred to as a cost-cutting project, quote-unquote, “a potential savings” is what he was looking for. In none of these articles, and we’ll go into this later, is the word “rightwing,” “conservative,” “neo-Nazi,” any sense or any hint of that. Musk has an ideology which may, I don’t know, selectively pick out the liberal parts of government. Meanwhile, Musk is so concerned with, quote-unquote, “finding savings” and quote-unquote “cost cutting,” he mysteriously has not addressed the $14.5 billion in government contracts that his companies have. We’ll get to that later. The Washington Post would indulge this cost-cutting efficiency, post-ideological, expense streamlining framework as well.
Nima: Media view from nowhere is like in full effect here. So you know, you have the Washington Post, December 21, 2024 with the headline “Elon Musk’s wish list for DOGE,” in which it calls the clearly ideological project with a snarky name, a, quote, “government efficiency commission,” end quote. The Washington Post would also say nearly a month later, January 16, 2025, quote, “Musk’s DOGE weighs recommendations to cut federal diversity programs,” end, quote. Oh, you know, it’s just weighing recommendations. In that article, it talks about DOGE being a, quote, “non-governmental fiscal efficiency group,” calls it efficiency again. It’s going to suggest, quote, “proposed savings.” We see this feigned credulity again and again across mainstream media, never talking about the ideology behind this, just taking at face value what DOGE is set up to do, which is to clearly make poor people even poorer, to cut any kind of government services that improve the lives, or at least, you know, sustain the lives, make people able to survive in an already unfair system. This is the point. He’s not, you know, going after massive military spending. Of course, savings won’t be found there. No, no, no. They’re going to be found in social services that keep people alive.
Adam: And here’s CNN in their article from December 24, 2024, quote, “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead new ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ in Trump administration,” in which they refer to the DOGE committee as, quote, “a government efficiency commission,” quote, “reducing waste in government spending,” quote, “combating waste, fraud and abuse,” unquote. They would write an article on CNN on December 19, the week prior: “DOGE vs. DEI: Republicans’ promise to purge government diversity initiatives could be wide-ranging, and hard to pull off.” The sort of critique people would make is that it was going to be difficult. Congress was going to stop them, process critique, removing all the far-right ideology at work here. Quote, “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the two billionaires tasked with slashing government waste.” Quote, “Republicans looking to cut spending across Washington,” unquote. So again, you have this image of a sort of post-partisan, they want to get rid of waste, efficiencies, and in none of these articles, CNN, Washington Post or the New York Times, are the obvious far-right ideological preferences of Musk mentioned at all. He’s simply presented as a patriotic billionaire who wants, the reader gets the impression they’re vaguely Republican, but they’re treated as these kind of post-ideological, patriotic billionaires.
Nima: Because hand in hand with this, Adam, is also the idea that billionaires know how to be efficient with money, right? Kind of baked into these articles is the assumption, the kind of framing of, you know, super-rich people know how to make budgets, they know how to address waste, they know how to cut costs and gain savings. That’s what makes them such deft businessmen. This is baked into all of these articles, rather than talking about the abuse, the subsidies that they themselves get, the contracts that they themselves get, that are, of course, never on the chopping block, where this wealth comes from. No, they are just successful billionaires, and so therefore they know where to find costs to cut. It’s kind of the, you know, what makes Bruce Wayne a superhero? It’s that he’s rich, you know? That’s the whole point behind Batman. We’ve talked about that before. That’s the authority that they have, being, quote-unquote, “successful.”
Adam: And to be clear, it’s not as if the New York Times cannot telegraph or clearly state the ideology or the ideological preferences of those who are about to or are seeking to enter government to influence policy. So a 2020 article about democratic activists within the potential Biden administration, specifically a Biden-Sanders task force about policing that was set up in June of 2020 talking about those that wish to redirect resources from police into community care programs, mentions the word “progressive” five times and the word “activist” four times. Which is totally fine, right? They have ideology. They have an ideological preference, and that’s perfectly how you should report on that.
Nima: But it only goes one way.
Adam: It only goes one way when it comes to reporting on obviously fascistic, obviously white nationalists, half-trillionaires. Suddenly, they’re just cost cutting. They’re just concerned with efficiency. They have the word “rightwing,” the word “conservative.” Again, mentioning of his Sieg Heil. And the most batshit example of this, because we saved the best for last, as we usually do, was an article by Michael Shear that came out on January 30. This was less than a week ago, right? This was 10 days after Musk clearly did a Sieg Heil at the inauguration three different times. 165 Jewish organizations just published a rejection of the ADL’s, ‘Oh, he was just, you know, an excited gesture,’ have come out and said, No, this was clearly a Sieg Heil. Advertisers need to pull the advertising from X and not invest in Tesla, etc. Clear-as-day Sieg Heil, right? Anyone with any intellectual honesty would look at that and go, Oh, yeah. That was deliberate, and that was clearly what he was doing. But no, that’s not gonna stop the New York Times from doing this post-partisan, cost-cutting framing. This is genuinely fucking batshit. When I read this, I was like, Oh my God. Even for the New York Times, this is bad. So what they tried to do is orient the DOGE cost cutting. Again, we’re 10 days into this bloodbath of the liberal state, right, as part of a kind of bipartisan continuum, and this is just sort of a more extreme version of it, the headline would read, “Beneath Trump’s Chaotic Spending Freeze: An Idea That Crosses Party Lines.” So he’d orient this in kind of normal balance-the-budget politics, writing, quote, “There is a long, bipartisan history of attempts to rein in spending and address concerns about government inefficiencies, though the parties have grown increasingly divided about what to cut.” And you truly have to read it. It presents this kind of Obama, Bowles-Simpson, Biden sort of tighten-your-belt, balance-the-budget rhetoric as comparable to what Musk is doing.
Nima: That somehow doesn’t mention that the family dinner-table conversation right now in the Trump administration is about how much of a Nazi to be.
Adam: Well, that and stripping Congress of any oversight of this processes, right? The Bowles-Simpson committee was a series of recommendations that presumably would manifest into some bill in Congress that would actually be passed by representatives that actually represent people, not the unilateral dictates of a stimulant-addled fucking billionaire who just arbitrarily decides what to cut, without any input from, I don’t know, 330 million people in this country. So again, this has been a long whitewashing that goes up to this day. Just two days ago, on February 3, 2025, The New York Times finally did a kind of semi-critical article about Musk’s gutting of the federal, liberal state, the administrative state. But even that, the whole thing was just drenched in, again, still made no mention of his far-right ideology at all, and was drenched in euphemism. So this is “Inside Musk’s Aggressive Incursion Into the Federal Government,” from February 3, 2025. It’s got 9,000 reporters, so I’m not going to list them all off, but just know that one of them is Maggie Haberman, of course. It referred to the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, haha, get it? They refer to it as, quote, “a cost-cutting initiative.” So we have three different mentions. Every time they mention DOGE, they call it a cost-cutting effort. But of course, it’s not a cost-cutting effort, and actually is not going to cut anything, because it can’t really cut anything, because the federal budget is allotted by Congress. It’s not like the money is going to mysteriously go back into the federal government. That’s not how this works.
And of course, even if that was true, which it’s not, the goal is not to cut costs. They want to gut the administrative and liberal state because Musk believes that it keeps Black people and brown people too comfortable and too secure in their jobs and doesn’t allow workers to be abused. And again, name it, saves the environment, protects endangered species, everything that sort of represents the already pretty razed-within liberal state we have, he doesn’t like, because he’s a fucking Nazi, and I know that because he did a Sieg Heil on television and constantly publishes Nazi content all the time. But again, and we talked about this in our News Brief two weeks ago, Musk is just simply too big to fail. The fact that he’s an overt white nationalist and is clearly testing the limits of how overt he can be in his white nationalism, again now he won’t shut up about South Africa. That’s a favorite bugbear of VDARE and all these other white nationalist websites, is that he simply can’t fail, because if we have to acknowledge that he’s a white supremacist on a white supremacist agenda to cut anything he perceives, including USAID, which he perceives as being beneficial to Black and brown people and poor people in general, then that takes the media to a dark place where they have to acknowledge ideology. Which, again, if you’re out of power, right, if you’re an activist, or you’re poor, or if you’re an enemy state, it’s taken for granted that you have an ideological agenda. It’s taken for granted that you have an ideological motive.
Nima: It’s part of the descriptor. It’s part of like, the kind of Homeric epithet of the way that these organizations or these approaches, these ideas, they are always framed. This is progressive, this is activist, this is supporting the liberal state. But you don’t get it on the other side, you don’t get it when it’s Musk, you don’t get it when it’s Trump.
Adam: No, they’re just concerned with cost cutting. They’re just concerned with cost cutting. I mean, I can’t tell you, again, I read every one of these articles and dozens more, and I can’t find any that mention, much less lead with or center or make obvious, the ideological agenda at work here. And one would think that, I don’t know, two weeks into this, this rightwing purge, where he’s obviously again talking about, quote-unquote, “diversity initiatives” and going after people with disabilities and going after trans people and going after minorities, and basically outlawing the acknowledgement of the existence of minorities and trans people and queer people and people with disabilities, you would think, I don’t know, they would lead with his fucking rightwing ideology at all. But again, that’s just not something they’re programmed to do, because they are fundamentally, editorially deferential to those in power. And those in power must be assumed to have good intentions and good faith. They cannot be assumed to have any ideological or sinister motives. So we keep getting this idea that again, up until fucking today, and they’re still doing it, that DOGE is just some government efficiency panel, and I am, obviously, as if it’s not obvious, kind of losing my mind.
Nima: Well, because they’ve set this up, and now they’re delivering on their setup, which is to continue to have this kind of good-faith argument to just, you know, report on this government department, this kind of extra-constitutional, non-judicial, non-budgetary, rightwing, ideological project, reporting on it like it’s just something that’s happening in the Beltway, and we’re just going to do, you know, political reporting. And this isn’t really about ideology. It’s really just about finding lines to cut. It’s just about finding savings. And remember, they’re businessmen, so they know how to cut costs efficiently. You know? They know really where the waste is to find. And without framing this as an ideological project, which it is, which we keep saying, we’re gonna keep saying. If it sounds like we’re being redundant, it’s because we are. It’s because the media is not doing their job in reporting this accurately, and so therefore, because of these frameworks, any reader, casual or otherwise, of the mainstream press, and then it bleeds into other outlets, you know, kind of comes from the Right, bleeds into the mainstream, is established and embedded in the mainstream, and then it becomes kind of this, like, Washington DC law, both politically and in the press, that these are just good-faith efforts to report on.
And if you mention ideology, then you are yourself ideological in your reportage, right? That you as a journalist are not looking at this at just normal face value, but rather, you have an agenda, which also is fine, because human beings have ideologies, right? Human beings have different perspectives which allow them to view what they’re seeing and analyze it in a certain way, but this is somehow, you know, verboten in our press, and we’re supposed to just take this bullshit at face value as good-faith efforts to get, you know, more quote-unquote, “efficiency,” when really it is so clear what is going on here. Arms are not being prohibited from being sent to continue a genocide in Palestine. That is not part of the efficiency. No. But if there are social services that allow children to eat breakfast, well, that’s going to be cut, because, you know, too many people are living on the government dole for too long. And now finally, Musk and Ramaswamy are here to, you know, make things more efficient. And not calling this out for what it is is a total abdication of responsibility, potentially not surprising, considering what we do on this show, Adam. We see this again and again. But I think the commitment to refusing to call this out as what it is has reached levels at which it’s not just sort of a gotcha. This has real implications on people’s lives.
Adam: Yeah. I mean, everyone’s kind of sitting around going, Well, what the fuck are, the courts and liberals in Congress are supposed to reassert their authority. And as I note my piece, Democrats have, at least up to this point, been more checked out than the dad from Home Alone. And people are kind of wondering, well, who’s going to come save us? And the reality is that, well, it’s going to have to come from, God forbid, activists or sort of a more bottom-up thing, and I think that’s how it’s emerging. You see people already, you know, organizing rallies. I know a lot of people actually, the cutting of USAID lit a flame under the ass, because it is a meddling imperial project to a great extent, and quite openly. I mean, Chris Murphy said that at a rally. But it is also sustains a lot of people’s lives.
Nima: And it was set up as such during the ’60s by the Kennedy administration as, like, a specifically anti-communist. But that doesn’t mean, as you write in your own piece, Adam, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t also do really important things. That doesn’t mean that, if you just stop funding it, all the bad stuff goes away and things are good again. There’s also a lot of really important lifesaving.
Adam: Well, the lifesaving stuff they do will go away.
Nima: Exactly.
Adam: The sinister manipulation stuff, because again, Trump used USAID with John Bolton and Elliott Abrams used USAID to foment a coup in Venezuela, as we noted at the time.
Nima: No one’s removing money from this. They’ll just, if anything, shift money to the CIA or to the DoD.
Adam: Or Rubio’s State Department. I mean, they’ve said as much. Rubio explicitly said, like, Don’t worry. The really important shit–
Nima: No costs are being cut. People are being cut.
Adam: Well, again, it’s all part of Trump’s very 19th-century idea of how imperialism works. I don’t think he quite understands, and a lot of these Nazi chuds don’t quite understand, that the way you project US power is a little more sophisticated than this, you know, Trump thinks it’s a game of Risk, right? He sort of wants to invade Kinshasa. He doesn’t understand the way in which modern imperialism works, which is its own episode. Which is why I think the, quote-unquote, “deep state,” or the Marco Rubios of the world, will ultimately just preserve most of these systems in their entirety. Because what he’s really doing, and what Musk is doing, is they’re on a Russiagate revenge tour. Aside from the sort of Nazi incident of itself, of gutting things that are perceived as being beneficial to Black and brown people and women and queer people, they also are kind of on a Russiagate revenge tour. And USAID funded a lot of democracy integrity projects, information stuff, or disinformation stuff. So I think they’re wanting to gut that because they view that as being hostile to their agenda. But ultimately, I think that stuff will be preserved and we’ll just be left with, again, cutting Grandma’s Social Security and children not getting WIC. And that’s why they’re doing this whole like, you know, move-quickly-and-break-things Silicon Valley ethos, because they don’t give a shit about the human cost. I mean, Trump especially, but Musk is genuinely an internet-addled, he has completely dehumanized entire populations in his head. He absolutely views them as subhuman and doesn’t care if they suffer. He is a genuine psychopath, and I don’t like to pathologize generally, but in his case, just the way he talks about people, the way he posts, he is completely devoid and incapable of empathy, even faking empathy. And that’s not good. That is very bad.
Nima: And so by not framing every bit of reporting that way, there’s just this feigned credulity, good-faith bullshit that really just allows this to happen. I mean, that’s ultimately what happens on the other end of shitty reporting. The lack of accountability, the lack of allowing people to understand where this comes from and why. So it allows this to continue to happen, and allows a lot of people to be hurt in the process. And so we’re going to keep on this. I urge everyone to read Adam’s piece in The Column. The headline is, quote, “US Media’s Credulous Depiction of ‘DOGE’ as a Good Faith “Efficiency Panel” Has Aged Poorly.” Just came out the other day. Everyone check that out, and continue please to listen to Citations Needed. We will be back with more News Briefs and full-length episodes, so stay tuned for that. No lack of media shittery to continue to analyze and talk about, so thanks again for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show, so we can keep doing this, through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are, again, 100% listener funded. But that will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Our senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again for listening, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, February 5, 2025.
