Trump 1 was the most corrupt administration in US history. But it's already shaping up to be a sad runner-up to Trump 2.

This is what the unfettered fertility industry looks like. Thai women kept as slaves, human eggs forcibly harvested and sold, in Georgia

To be clear, what the @DOGE team and @USTreasury have jointly agreed makes sense is the following: - Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible. - All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING! - The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored. Also, it can currently take up to a year to get on this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily. The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees, not anyone from @DOGE. It is ridiculous that these changes didn’t exist already! Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious. When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!! This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.

Liz Warren is pissed she can't recklessly spend our money on drag shows in Ecuador anymore. Suck it up, Lizzy baby, the gravy train is over.

This is a huge deal. “Indirect costs”, as they’re called, from NIH still pay for direct science — eg, funding science labs, lab upkeep — but also university administration. Cutting this line item by billions of dollars is going to threaten university jobs but also potentially cut into science lab funding. There are absolutely controversies/concerns about wasteful indirect cost allocation. But it’s hard to imagine a cut this deep not affecting science labs directly. This is just not where I’d start cutting billions. Universities (including those that don’t have $10b endowments) are gonna scream, and I’d guess we’re gonna hear about extremely worthy programs relying on labs being endangered.