National News

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.

Jacqui Heinrich grilled White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt over contradictory messages from Trump's administration over Elon Musk's email demands.

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.?