Perhaps you find this chaotic. Perhaps you think this administration lacks ideological coherence. That’s an understandable conclusion to draw, but it’s not the whole picture.
Elon Musk, the “special government employee” heading the newly created, legally embattled Department of Government Efficiency, has been refining this strategy for weeks. The dominant message from DOGE, initially, was that it was cutting down on government waste and inefficiency. A few weeks into the administration, as people began to question whether Musk and some random acolytes below the age of prefrontal cortex maturity should really be getting access to sensitive data, the fraud assertions started escalating. A day after a judge challenged the fraud claims, Musk and Trump held their joint Oval Office presser, on February 11, alleging “massive amounts of fraud,” “billions of dollars of abuse, incompetence, and corruption,” “foreign fraud rings” in “entitlement programs,” 150-year-old people receiving Social Security benefits, and “tens of billions of dollars” of positively identified fraudulent payments. (You can read The Washington Post’s debunking of this, and of the White House press secretary’s subsequent effort to substantiate these claims, here.)
Lee Zeldin, the Trump loyalist appointed to head the Environmental Protection Agency, seems to be following Musk’s lead. On Tuesday, he announced the termination of $20 billion in grants that have already been promised to institutions via the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program, which Congress established in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. He cited “substantial concerns regarding program integrity, objections to the award process, programmatic fraud, waste, and abuse, and misalignment with the agency’s priorities,” but provided no evidence to support such widespread fraud claims. The best he came up with was that “a group linked to Stacey Abrams received two billion dollars after reporting a mere 100 dollars in total revenue the year before” (a debunking of which you can read here) and that “the founding director of the EPA’s program dished out $5 billion to his former employer.”
The Greenhouse Gas Reduction fund has elements that conservatives should celebrate: It aimed to reduce energy bills in cash-strapped locations, and to do so while minimizing government spending (by essentially using it only as seed money for private capital). But Zeldin, implementing Musk’s narrative strategy, has now turned the program into an increasingly colorful heist story. The administration’s crusade against it can be traced to a December video by right-wing sting group Project Veritas, in which a twentysomething EPA employee in the lame-duck Biden administration said that they were trying to get grants awarded as quickly as possible: “It truly like feels we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge.” This isn’t really evidence of anything aside from a single twentysomething having a big mouth (and the analogy falls apart as soon as you think about it for more than two seconds). But as legal challenges to its extra-procedural spending freezes mounted, the Trump administration has clung to this analogy ever more closely. In recent statements, Zeldin has even adjusted his language in a way that implies his team has “located BILLIONS of dollars’ worth” of literal gold bars that the Biden administration tried to hide at Citibank.
The White House may be filled with people dressed in clown costumes throwing spaghetti at a wall. But they have a story about why they’re throwing spaghetti at the wall, and they’re sticking to it—and right-wing news networks are dutifully transmitting it to voters. If Democrats want to get a different message to voters, they’re not going to get anywhere by standing next to the clowns hurling spaghetti with a sign reading, “This is not normal.” Their only option is to go find some people who’ve been smacked in the face by projectile pasta, stick those people in front of a camera, and start making the case that the Trump administration is, in fact, hurting people.
What I’m Reading
What the world needs now is more fossil fuels, says Trump’s energy secretary
“The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side-effect of building the modern world,” he added. “Everything in life involves trade-off.”
“Where is the Cop conference for this far more urgent global challenge,” he said, referring to the annual United Nations climate talks, known as the Conference of the Parties (Cop). “I look forward to working with all of you to better energize the world and fully unleash human potential.”
This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.
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