HOLY SMOKES

With everything happening at USAID and the unending flow of jaw-dropping, infuriating revelations, I hadn't really thought about anything else the DOGE team had on their plate as far as crawling up the internal pipes at other departments.

But of course, they have other places to visit and get to work, and golly Nell, if it isn't sending the shivers up the spine of some folks.

Over at the Labor Department, nervous Nellies have already filed lawsuits to keep Elon's Wonder Boys out before they ever step foot in the building.

Why so twitchy, I wonder?

A coalition of labor groups filed suit Wednesday seeking to stop DOGE from coming to the Labor Department and gaining access to some of the world's most vital macroeconomic data.

Why it matters: This isn't the first lawsuit against Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but appears to be one of the first filed as a preventative measure — instead of after some major action.

The big picture: The Labor Department houses an enormous amount of confidential data, and includes the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces important economic data, including inflation readings and market-critical employment statistics.

Now, this Axios story tries to insinuate [Beege fix] that it's a matter of employee complaints being stored there from Musk's various companies.

I mean, come on, dudes. You didn't really write that.

Adults familiar with the way these early forays into the dank underbelly of longtime bureaucratic Washington have a more cynical suspicion than Elon hunting down disgruntled Tesla mechs.

And it has to do with the last sentence in the quote I used above:

The Labor Department houses an enormous amount of confidential data, and includes the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces important economic data, including inflation readings and market-critical employment statistics

What if - what IF - the Wonder Boys get in there and find out the past four years of #Bidenomincs have been a manipulated fantasy?

A badly managed fraud?

A theater piece for the gullible who didn't pay attention to the numerous, massive, downward revisions in data quietly done months after publication.

Who never said a word when data - like 818,000 jobs - just...vanished. Then they kept on truckin' as if nothing had happened.

Job growth in the United States in the year ending in March was far less robust than previously reported by the federal government, giving ammunition to critics who suggest the Federal Reserve may be late to cutting interest rates.

The government reported Wednesday that the economy created 818,000 fewer jobs from April 2023 through March 2024, in the biggest revision to federal jobs data in 15 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

How bad is the economy they’re handing Trump?

The Philly Fed is flagging another 653,000 fake jobs. On top of the 818,000 BLS revised away last year.

Of course left-wing media will blame it all on Trump. pic.twitter.com/8kyPKQGtCW

— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) December 30, 2024

BUREAU OF LIES & STATISTICS

What IF it's all been lies to protect the Democratic party and the fable that was #Bidenomics?

I’m more interested to what the Doge guys find when they start looking at the BLS data. They’ll be able to figure out if it is accurate or if it has been managed.

— Mike Derscher (@MDerscher) February 6, 2025

What do these hardworking number crunchers have to be scared of otherwise if they were doing their jobs correctly?

This is pretty weak tea from the union complaint.

...In a lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C. federal court, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) asked U.S. District Judge John Bates to block what they called DOGE's imminent plan to access the Labor Department's information systems.

The union said that would potentially give Musk access to non-public information from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) probes into his SpaceX, Tesla, and his tunneling company, The Boring Company, as well as investigations into his competitors.

...If DOGE representatives gain access to OSHA's databases, they could potentially give Musk information about people who filed complaints against Tesla and its competitors that would not normally be available to the public, the AFL-CIO's lawsuit said.

And as much as everyone sounds like parrots squawking 'ELON! ELON! ELON!' it might not do them a lick of good legally, as it is the DOGE team, not Musk, doing the house cleaning. According to this fellow below, the entire DOGE department was set up very carefully to be within all the legal parameters from the beginning to prevent challenges based on its legality.

This is part of his thread explaining what the Trump team did and it is so interesting. They didn't create a new department out of whole cloth. They renamed an existing one that was already authorized within the scope of the president's authority to oversee (an executive branch department) and had all the funding, etc, in situ.

You see Trump has power to set priorities for Executive branch departments but there are limits. In the case of DOGE, Trump clearly had a team of lawyers looking at ways to accomplish this goal legally.

USDS was already there and funded for the specific purpose. 44 USCS Chapter… pic.twitter.com/mDdj2FtLYq

— Tom Renz (@RenzTom) February 5, 2025

More here:

...At the same time Trump also wanted to bring in @elonmusk (and at the time @VivekGRamaswamy) and his team for an initial major audit/clean sweep. To do this Trump referenced another law 5 USC 3161. This law governs the creation of and staffing for what is known as a “temporary organization” in the government. This group will focus on pushing the DOGE agenda and will exist for 18 months (though their work will survive). By including this group as temporary, Trump dodged several potential lawsuits as he may not have been able to create his own new administrative entity on a permanent basis without Congressional approval.

A Threadreader version of his entire thread on the creation of DOGE can be found here.

The Trump team did their homework. I can't say that enough, and we're witnessing the fruits of it every single day - damn near something new every hour.

I expect that the Labor Department is going to be as big as a bag of different worms as USAID once this lawsuit gets tossed or negotiated.

I remember how we all kept getting told things were so wonderful if only our lying eyes would allow us to see it.

Since Kamala Harris is trying to distance herself from Joe Biden.

It would be a shame if this clip of her praising Bidenomics went viral. pic.twitter.com/D1xWrZGjvz

— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) August 14, 2024

They all fell out of a coconut tree.