If You Didn’t Think Elon Musk Was Insane Before … – CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

Last Updated on: 4th February 2025, 12:36 pm

This is absolutely bonkers. Even after a bonkers 12 months, or a bonkers 5 years, or a bonkers 9 years, they continue to shock. In particular, Elon Musk continues to shock.

Regulations — Completely Gone, Eliminated, by Default

Reportedly, Elon Musk said on a call early Monday morning, just after midnight, that they should engage in “wholesale removal of regulations.”

If you think you must be misunderstanding that, because it would be totally insane to advocate for complete removal of federal regulations, here’s more:

“Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” Musk said. “Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”

I’ll let you reread that.

This is completely insane.

There are countless federal regulations — on financial matters, environmental matters, worker safety matters, health and public safety matters, and so on. These are critical for a healthy and safe modern society. Without them, we will have anarchy.

Also, how or why does Musk think they have to power to completely eliminate federal regulations?!?!? Laws are made by Congress, and federal agencies are then required to carry out those laws. Elon Musk can’t just step in and say “We’re starting over. There are no more federal regulations. We’ll just add ones back we shouldn’t have trashed.”

I mean, honestly, we are well beyond breaking norms and laws. We are into complete Wacky Land.

Are there too many regulations? Yes, and no one denies that. Obama had a focus on going in and surgically cutting regulations in order to improve society. But this idea that we’re going to completely, indiscriminately flatten the federal government and start adding federal regulations back one at a time (by King’s decree, I imagine, or Musk’s decree) is beyond imagination. It’s the idea of a 1st grader who has been spoon fed MAGA propaganda.

“The public call was hosted on his website X, formerly Twitter, and included two senators and the Trump ally Vivek Ramaswamy,” Huffington Post reports. That’s right, Huffington Post, not The Onion.

“These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done,” Musk said, adding later: “If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom. We’ve got to restore freedom.”

FREEDUMB!

Idiocracy, we have arrived at our destination.

“Later, Ramaswamy — who briefly co-led Musk’s White House DOGE project — said, ‘I think it’s possible now, it’s actually possible’ thanks to Trump’s second term and a conservative-dominated Supreme Court.

“Musk replied, ‘If it’s not possible now, it’ll never be possible. This is our shot. This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have. And if we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen, so we’re going to do it.’

“‘Now or never,’ Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Ramaswamy agreed. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) also spoke on the call.”

Goodbye, federal regulations. It was nice knowing you.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more ridiculous, they prove you wrong.

Complete Halt to Humanitarian Aid — How Many Will Die?

This is after Musk and his crew shut down USAID, something which will cost countless lives and is a direct ambush on humanitarian aid and relief in critical regions around the world. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk proudly chirped, almost like a Nazi general eager to see people suffer and die. Don’t call this hyperbole — or find a better comparison. USAID, established back in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, is “the US government’s main international humanitarian and development arm.”

“The loss of services supported by USAID will affect millions of the world’s most vulnerable people,” Doctors Without Borders writes. “The broad halt in foreign assistance, coupled with limitations to and a lack of clarity around humanitarian waivers, has already resulted in the loss of lifesaving medical humanitarian aid and harmful impacts on patient communities. In the last week, MSF’s medical teams have witnessed confusion as clinics and other critical services previously supported by USAID were shut down without warning.”

USAID “has around 10,000 employees and a budget of nearly $40bn (£32.25bn), out of a total of $68bn in US government foreign aid spending,” BBC reports.

“The turmoil was felt in countries including Afghanistan, where American aid has been funding life-saving services for women and children. One midwife told the BBC that all medical centres funded by USAID had closed and dozens of workers had told to stay at home.

“In Syria, a ‘stop work’ message was also received by hundreds of staff operating the Al-Hol displacement camp in the north-east. There, it is the job of humanitarian workers to stabilise the site — which holds 40,000 people, mostly women and children — displaced from areas previously controlled by the Islamic State group.”

“No one feels safe to go anywhere near the Ronald Reagan building,” one USAID official told NBC News. “We just had Elon Musk call us a criminal organization. Our security chief was escorted out.”

“If we were watching this happen in Venezuela or Malawi […] we would call it a coup”

This also follows Musk and a crew of young men, including one college student, taking over the federal government’s payment system. “The payment system, traditionally managed by career civil servants and non-political staff, handles trillions of dollars annually, including Social Security and Medicare benefits and tax credits,” USA TODAY writes.

“If we were watching this happen in Venezuela or Malawi and we saw a billionaire seize the money supply and the checkbook of the government, we would call it a coup,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative economic policy group and a former Senate senior economic policy advisor.

Indeed.

And none of these people had security clearances or approval to access classified materials.

Democratic leaders are saying this could be the biggest privacy and security breach in American history. Can you think of anything that compared?

“By Monday, the Senate staffers had concluded that the DOGE workers spent the weekend accessing the Treasury Department’s massive federal payment system, Wyden said, including ‘the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans, bank accounts and tax data, Social Security numbers and home addresses.’”

“We got on it, and what is clear now is that unqualified and unaccountable people have seized control of the flow of taxpayer funds and a trove of very sensitive data, and they are seizing the tools they need for a coup,” Wyden said. “The Musk hatchet brigade has infiltrated a gold mine of data that every foreign spy and corrupt actor would love to see. … It is a prescription for nightmares.”

Furthermore, it’s still not clear why they thought they needed access or what they are trying to do. “A Democratic staff official on the Senate Finance Committee told USA TODAY on Monday that Musk’s comment suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of how the process works. The system, he said on the condition of anonymity, is basically the U.S. government’s checkbook for payments already approved by Congress. To find waste, fraud and abuse, the staffer said, Musk would need to go to the agencies that are actually spending the money.”

“Wyden said the breach poses an extraordinary and unprecedented threat to U.S. national security given the nature of the information contained in the Treasury system that is now in the hands of Musk’s staffers.”

Back to the Regs

The level of insanity here is mind boggling. The idea that we’d just eliminate all federal regulations immediately is so unbelievable that I can’t believe I’m not sleeping.

Try to make a list for a minute all of the things in your house, car, and office/worksite that are regulated in some way for consumer safety, public health, financial stability, and to prevent cons and scams.

This is insanity. It reminds me of the high schoolers in the 1990s who loved to use the anarchy “A” branding. These guys have taken control of the United States. Actually, I’m sure most of those people came to realize anarchy wouldn’t be a great solution. I guess it’s the ones whose minds got stuck on a teenage level who are now running the show.