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Concern over Elon Musk's increasing power in Washington, D.C. is growing rapidly now that the Federal Aviation Administration plans to use the billionaire's SpaceX’s Starlink to upgrade its networks.

The FAA posted on X Monday night, "This week, the FAA is testing one terminal at its facility in Atlantic City and two terminals at non-safety critical sites in Alaska."

The news comes as Musk's Department of Government Efficiency plans to make staffing cuts at the FAA, which has many observers crying foul. This isn't Musk's first potential conflict of interest, however. There's plenty of government interplay with Musk's other companies, including Tesla, Neuralink, and SpaceX.

CNN pundit S.E. Cupp recounted on Tuesday how Musk "reportedly fired a bunch of workers at the FDA that were looking at his Neuralink program" for possible approval.

ALSO READ: 'Gotta be kidding': Jim Jordan scrambles as he's confronted over Musk 'double standard'

"So, yes, he's got his hands in a lot of pots," Cupp continued. "And it's not just that he stands to gain financially; it's that he's overseeing agencies that are regulating his businesses, which is a little like, you know the old saying, ... making the arsonist the fire chief — but also head of HR, head of accounting — and then awarding him a contract for accelerants, is kind of like what all of this is."

Host Dana Bash added, "It just reminds me of the game I like to play: What if this was George Soros, right? And Barack Obama or Joe Biden doing all of this."

On Musk's social media platform X, users pointed out about what Cupp called, "all of these obvious conflicts."

Liberal pundit @ArtCandee posted, "The FAA has agreed to use SpaceX’s Starlink internet system to manage US airspace. Yet another contract for Elon Musk to profit from while he's slashing funding for others. The conflict of interest is appalling!"

Media outlet @TheTNHoller wrote, "Wild. Bond villain stuff. Conflict of interest doesn’t even begin to describe this. The national security concerns here are off the charts."

Watch the clip below via CNN.

The Department of Government Efficiency has removed its so-called "wall of receipts" detailing its cuts to the federal budget after its purported savings were found to be riddled with errors.

Elon Musk's budget-cutting initiative has deleted all of the five biggest “savings” that had been posted on its website. It followed fact checks from media outlets, although the group still claims it has saved the government $65 billion. The website provided no explanation for the removals or its methodology for determining how much had been slashed from the budget, reported the New York Times.

"The 'wall of receipts' is the only public ledger the organization has produced to document its work," the newspaper reported. "The scale of that ledger’s errors — and the misunderstandings and poor quality control that seemed to underlie them — has raised questions about the effort’s broader work, which has led to mass firings and cutbacks across the federal government."

The last of the top five disappeared early Tuesday morning from DOGE's website, and the Times reported that some of the new canceled contracts added this week appear to contain the same types of errors that plagued the original top five, which included a reported $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, $655 million cut at the U.S. Agency for International Development and $232 million at the Social Security Administration.

ALSO READ: 'Gotta be kidding': Jim Jordan scrambles as he's confronted over Musk 'double standard'

ICE's entire budget is about $8 billion, and the contract in question was worth $8 million, but DOGE seemed to rely on an earlier, erroneous entry in a federal contracting database as its metric for savings.

DOGE employees also erroneously counted a single cut three times in an apparent misunderstanding of how government contracts sometimes have "ceiling values" that are much higher than what is actually spent.

Musk's organization also seems to have mistakenly believed that SSA had canceled a massive information technology contract, but it had only ended a $560,000 portion of that project.

J.D. Vance has really done Ohio proud these last few weeks, hasn’t he? The lapdog vice-president, with evidently a lot of time on his hands, has managed to be firmly rebuked by Pope Francis, denounced by outraged NATO allies and widely ridiculed for his bizarre ‘masculinity’ rant at a weekend MAGAfest just a month into his tenure. Way to create a buzz/acute embarrassment back home!

What is wrong with J.D.? Have the wheels come all the way off? Why does the 40-year-old awkwardly playing VP keep stepping in it stateside and abroad? Is the “childless cat ladies” charmer acting out unresolved rage from a bad place? Working through some deep-seated anger? Seriously, Vance manifests juvenile cringe, not sober sway, as he settles into his nondescript role as an appendage in the Trump-Musk administration. Even Trump won’t name him as a slam dunk heir apparent. Not good.

For a supposed Ivy League intellectual, Vance sure spouts stupidity on the regular: Honestly, you’ve got to be really off base on Catholic theology for the Vatican to correct your twisted take on love with descending priorities as justification for mass deportations. In Vance’s godawful reading of the Christian order of love concept; (to mesh with his political ideology) family, community, and country come first and everyone outside that concentric circle later or not so much. Which puts migrant families outermost from Vance’s construct on brotherly love for me but not thee from outside our borders.

Francis rejected the VP’s sophomoric theoretical defense of cruel immigration crackdowns as flatly wrong. He urged the misguided millennial to meditate on the parable of the Good Samaritan, “on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” But “American citizens first” nativist Vance has no interest in building a “fraternity open to all,” just an all-white patriarchy focused on baby-making. To that point, he started a holy war (barely a week after inauguration) against charitable organizations across the country that feed, clothe and house refugees and immigrants (i.e., Catholic Charities and Catholic relief groups) by implying they perform their labor of love for federal money — not humanitarian concerns.

“Devout Catholic” convert Vance went all glib and combative on compassion and care for the “least of these” because they included Brown and Black mothers and fathers and children fleeing horrendous homelands for hope. But upholding the dignity of every human being (native-born or not) as a core tenet of Christianity clashes with the core MAGA mission to degrade, shackle and ship terrified families back to the foreign hellscapes they fled. Vance threw nasty and mean into the mix to look tough on dehumanized “illegals” and scorn mercy. He is a dutiful, if not decent, Trump toady.

But the swift rebuttals to Vance’s hollow broadsides from the Church and the pope himself only reinforced the veep’s smallness as a smug sycophant slinging ugly. Whatever reputation Vance may have enjoyed in the past as a thoughtful individual with at least a modicum of integrity is long gone. With a brief stint as a venture capitalist, an even briefer stint as Ohio senator and now VP, Vance is heady with power and hubris over his meteoric rise from bending the knee to a man he once derided as “America’s Hitler.” Then Vance went to the Munich Security Conference recently, not to collaborate with NATO allies on mutual security interests and Ukraine, but to turn on them.

Vance, the shameless election denier in service to an authoritarian regime lawlessly dismantling a democratic republic, had the towering audacity and historical blindness to lecture his European audience on democracy, downplay threats from Russia and China, and publicly court a far-right German party (AfD) that many Germans consider the heirs of Nazi ideas and that sanitizes the Holocaust. His blistering dress-down of European leaders, rightly dismayed over rising extremism and history repeating itself, coupled with his pronounced affection for far-right politicians a week before a crucial German election (U.S. election interference?) was obscene.

The last thing the world needs now is a U.S. vice-president trashing eighty years of foreign policy with America’s closest and most enduring friends. But that’s what a dangerously reckless Vance did on the world stage to compete with Elon Musk and boost his nascent brand as an uber-nihilist bent on destroying plurality for purity and seeding a new world order. It’s wing-nuttery on a disturbingly dark scale. But Vance, for all his performative bravado — whether it’s lashing out at European allies for not welcoming extremism, or engaging in petty posting on X, or weirdly obsessing about “the essence of masculinity” and a “broken culture” that tells you “You’re a bad person because you’re a man” — is a phony.

He morphed from Never-Trumper to groveling suck-up for unimagined power, but he can’t quite pull it off as a poser with a makeover beard spewing stupid and offensive and strange. Vance has been doing us proud by attacking friends, embracing enemies, insulting humanitarians, drawing papal ire, and pontificating laughably on what makes a man a man.

Seriously, what is wrong with J.D.?

Donald Trump admitted to making agreements he didn't quite understand with French President Emmanuel Macron.

The U.S. president met with his French counterpart Monday to discuss ending the war in Ukraine, which Macron says must come with security guarantees for the war-torn nation. Trump told a light anecdote about a previous dinner meeting the two had in Paris.

"I just want to tell you a little story," Trump said during a joint news conference at the White House. "So we were at the Eiffel Tower having dinner with your wonderful wife and with my wonderful wife, and we came out and he started speaking the French deal, and we didn't have an interpreter, and he was going on and on and on, and I was just nodding, 'Yes, yes, yes,' and he really sold me out.

"Because I got back the next day and I read the papers [and] I said, 'That's not what we said,'" Trump said, as he and Macron clasped hands and laughed. "He's a smart customer, I will tell you that. Do you remember? That wasn't exactly what we agreed to."

ALSO READ: 'Gotta be kidding': Jim Jordan scrambles as he's confronted over Musk 'double standard'

After Monday's meeting, a reporter asked if Trump would still call Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator, as he did last week, and Trump indicated that he would.

"I don't use those words lightly," Trump said. "I think that we're going to see how it all works out. Let's see what happens. I think we have a chance of a really good settlement between various countries, and, you know, you're talking about Europe and you're talking about Ukraine as part of that whole situation.

"The other side has a lot of a lot of support also, so let's see how it all works out. It might work out. Look, you can never make up lives, the one thing you can't – you can make up the money, but you can't make up the lives. A lot of lives lost, I think probably a lot more lives than people are talking about. It's been a rough war, but I think we're close to getting it solved."

Watch the video below or at this link.

- YouTube youtu.be

Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk has made no secret of his desire to take a hatchet to Medicaid, and now Congress is planning to vote on a huge domestic policy agenda that has even die-hard MAGA Republicans nervous.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is hoping to push the vote through this week, even though the enormous proposed cut to Medicaid — totaling more than $800 billion over the next 10 years — hasn't been endorsed by President Donald Trump, who has "expressed reservations" about the cuts.

That's because at last count, more than 72 million people were enrolled in Medicaid, and voters have been vowing to fight the cuts at all costs.

Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) told reporter Rachel Bade with Politico that he's "all in on DOGE" and that cutting the federal workforce is "wildly popular" with Republicans in his district.

ALSO READ: 'Gotta be kidding': Jim Jordan scrambles as he's confronted over Musk 'double standard'

When news broke in the Wall Street Journal that "Representatives of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have been working at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services [CMS], where they have gotten access to key payment and contracting systems," Musk posted to X that CMS "is where the big money fraud is happening."

“That’s where the battle’s coming,” Gonzales told Bade. “There’s no doubt that there’s waste, fraud and abuse in every program in the government, including Medicaid — but at what point do you stop cutting into the fat and start cutting into the bone? You can’t pull the rug out from millions of people.”

Bade wrote that Gonzales has co-authored a letter with seven other House Republicans representing large Hispanic communities "asking Johnson to rethink where the GOP is headed on Medicaid. And he said he plans to personally confront the speaker about the issue at a scheduled meeting" Monday night.

Read the Politico article here.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) defended his wife Casey's possible run for governor and slammed Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), a potential challenger, for missing votes in Congress.

During a Monday press conference in Tampa, DeSantis was asked about Donalds' recent hints that he might run for governor. President Donald Trump has suggested that he would back the lawmaker.

"You know, my view is, is Donald Trump just got into office," DeSantis said. "I want these congressmen focused on enacting his agenda. They haven't done very much yet. They're not putting his executive orders into place... We have such a narrow majority that to be trying to campaign other places and missing these votes, I think, is not something that's advisable at all."

"So I think people look at it and say, you know, you got a guy like Byron," he added, "he just hasn't been a part of any of the victories that we've had here over the left over these last years."

ALSO READ: 'Gotta be kidding': Jim Jordan scrambles as he's confronted over Musk 'double standard'

"He's just not been a part of it. He's been in other states campaigning, doing that. And that's fine. But okay, well, then deliver results up there."

During his time in office, Donalds has missed crucial votes on government funding.

Watch the video below.