Government Executive reports that contrary to MAGA's expectations, one of Musk's DOGE employees discovered that government worked pretty well and wasn't corrupt, so he got fired for saying that in public:
VA-based DOGE associate gets ‘the boot’ after publicly discussing his work
Sahil Lavingia detailed in a personal blog how the reality of hunting inefficiencies at the Department of Veterans Affairs was not what he had expected.Sahil Lavingia — an engineer, tech startup founder and CEO of Gumroad, an e-commerce platform for content creators — wrote in a recent personal blog that he “got the boot” from DOGE without warning the day after Fast Company published an interview in which he spoke about finding less inefficiencies than he expected in the government during his DOGE assignment as senior advisor to the chief of staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” Lavingia told Fast Company in the piece, which also noted that he noticed the number of mission-driven people working in government. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.”
This is more evidence that the point of DOGE is not waste, fraud and abuse, but instead it is about building a kleptocratic dictatorship and accumulating power and wealth at the expense of democracy and the public interest. Poor Mr. Lavingia -- he was banboozled. He didn't understand what his real job was. Quaint naïvety, or childish gullibility?
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A reddit post, The consequences of Trump selling pardons, by a former pardons attorney in the DoJ is keeping track of how much money djt has saved the criminals being pardoned. So far, djt has saved the criminals $1.34 billion in fines and restitution payments they had been on the hook for. One can reasonably wonder what djt's cut of the payback was.
One of the Peanuts commented: This money was owed the victims of those crimes. Trump is therefore stealing money from the victims of crime and fraud through the power of pardon. How nice.
Another responded: I wonder whether one of the victims will try to assert a 5th Amendment taking claim. It would be unprecedented, as far as I know, but the logic seems sound to me. Those victims had a right to compensation from the criminal and that right was enforceable at least by the federal judge who imposed the sentence. Now, due to Trump's pardon, there is no more right to compensation.
Pxy analyzed the legal question: While victims who lose access to restitution payments due to presidential pardons may intuitively feel their property has been "taken" by government action, the legal reality is significantly more nuanced and generally unfavorable to such claims. The Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause provides that private property shall not "be taken for public use, without just compensation." The critical legal barrier facing victims seeking takings claims lies in the requirement that property rights must be "vested" to receive constitutional protection. Legal analysis is clear that victims deprived of court-ordered restitution due to presidential pardons face significant barriers to successful Fifth Amendment takings claims. The established legal doctrine treats restitution orders as penal sanctions rather than vested property rights, eliminating the foundation necessary for takings claims.
Bottom line: djt has (1) screwed innocent people and businesses out of $1.34 billion, and (2) rewarded criminals with $1.34 billion minus djt's cut, maybe 20%? How nice. /s
Context: A president can condition pardons on the payment of court-ordered restitution, provided the clemency grant explicitly includes this term. The legal foundation for this exists in centuries of precedent and DOJ guidance. Thus, djt intentionally chooses not to make the crooks pay.