Three federal judges will consider on Friday whether Elon Musk’s government cost-cutting team known as DOGE will have access to Treasury Department payment systems and potentially sensitive data at U.S. health, consumer protection, labor and education agencies.

The Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency has swept through federal agencies since Republican Donald Trump became president last month and put the chief executive of carmaker Tesla in charge of rooting out wasteful spending as part of Trump’s dramatic overhaul of government.

In Manhattan, U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas will consider a request by Democratic state attorneys general to extend a temporary block on DOGE that was put in place on Saturday, which prevented Musk’s team from accessing Treasury systems responsible for trillions of dollars of payments.

  • Snot Flickerman
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    1 day ago

    It honestly reminds me a bit of how the Israeli military co-opted Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus as a philosophical work backing their war machine.

    I asked Naveh why Deleuze and Guattari were so popular with the Israeli military. He replied that ‘several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaux became instrumental for us […] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise. It problematized our own paradigms. Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of “smooth” and “striated” space [which accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of the “war machine” and the “state apparatus”. In the IDF we now often use the term “to smooth out space” when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. […] Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as “striated” in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roads blocks and so on.’5 When I asked him if moving through walls was part of it, he explained that, ‘In Nablus the IDF understood urban fighting as a spatial problem. […] Travelling through walls is a simple mechanical solution that connects theory and practice.

    However, I don’t think Musk et. al. are in any way as philosophically rigorous as the Israeli military has been.