Officials at both NASA and those working at the Pentagon reacted with “alarm” over Elon Musk’s stunning falling out with Donald Trump on Thursday and started sending out feelers to alternative companies who may need to step into the void if both the president and the billionaire make good on their threats.

According to the Washington Post, dueling social media posts by Trump and Musk over pulling the plug on Musk company contracts with the government, and Musk threatening to shutter the Dragon spacecraft program, has set off a panic.

The Post’s Christian Davenport is reporting that, although Musk backed off the Dragon threat, the race is on to prod other companies to step into the breach.

The report notes that one NASA official initially found the Trump/Musk break up “entertaining” until the Dragon program threat turned it “terrifying.”

Noting that the Pentagon is highly dependent on Musk’s SpaceX for launching its most sensitive satellites, “There was a similar reaction in the Pentagon, where a person said staff officers ‘looked at each other and said, ‘oh, it’s not funny anymore.’ There was a realization that we’re not watching TV. This is a real issue,” the Post is reporting.

“The worried reaction within space and national security agencies highlights the risks of thegovernment’s heavydependence on SpaceX for crucial tasks, including classified missions,” the Post’s Davenport wrote before adding that inquiries elsewhere were promptly initiated.

“Since Thursday’s exchange, at least three commercial space companies, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, have been contacted by government officials about the status of their rockets and when they might be available for government missions, according to four people familiar with the inquiries. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)” the report states. “Officials at Sierra Space, which is developing a Dream Chaser spaceplane that could deliver cargo to the space station, were in a meeting with NASA officials on Thursday as the Trump-Musk feud was getting underway.”

Todd Harrison, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, raised a red flag over the split between to the two billionaires.

“It’s almost like an embargo of the space station,” he pointed out. “Musk was saying he is going to cut NASA off from its own laboratory in space.”

Harrison added that defense officials should be”rattled” by the“idea that the nation’s missile defenses could be held hostage to the twittering whims of Elon Musk.”

You can read more here.

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“If I cared about subsidies,” Elon Musk said in 2015, “I would have entered the oil and gas industry.”

Yet the history of Musk’s business empire tells another story.

Musk’s companies have long been fueled by taxpayer money, whether in the form of massive government contracts, low-interest loans, tax breaks and other support that helped make Musk one of the world’s richest people.

Over the past two decades, companies run by Musk have received tens of billions of dollars in federal backing.

One tally, by The Washington Post, found that at least $38 billion in government support has been funneled to Musk’s companies, an estimate that likely undercounts the breadth of support since some defense and intelligence contracts are not publicly available.

In turn, the U.S. government has become reliant on Musk, from space travel, to national security to the future of green transportation.

So when President Trump on Thursday threatened to end Musk’s government subsidies and contracts in a spiraling feud between the former political allies, it was greeted with some skepticism.

Musk has deep ties to the U.S. space program and intelligence community

Musk’s companies have become inextricably tied to the federal government, particularly SpaceX’s crucial role in the U.S. space program.

The company’s rockets now provide the only way for U.S. astronauts to get to and from the International Space Station.

“While their political partnership appears to be at an end, it is difficult to imagine the government canceling SpaceX contracts anytime soon,” said Dan Grazier, senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center, a think tank focused on national security.

“It will be some time before any of the company’s competitors will be able to take up the slack, so it looks like the president and the tech mogul will have to find a way to get along,” he said.

It’s unclear if Musk was trolling or being serious, but he responded to Trump’s threats by saying SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft, which has been used for years to ferry crews and cargo to the space station.

In fact, there are now astronauts at the station. They were taken there by a SpaceX capsule.

Walking away from the federal government would strand those crew members and complicate the Trump administration’s goal of landing astronauts on the moon in the coming years.

Later on Thursday, Musk appeared to backtrack, writing on X: “OK, we won’t decommission Dragon.”

SpaceX is also building hundreds of spy satellites for the Pentagon, Reuters reported in March, work that, if abandoned, could have national security implications and prompt a backlash from the intelligence community.

In addition, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network is a player in a multibillion-dollar federal effort to expand internet access to underserved parts of the country.

Ukraine has also relied heavily on Starlink services since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the country in 2022, leading top Pentagon officials to coordinate directly with Musk, The New Yorker has reported.

Federal support for Tesla and electric vehicle infrastructure in doubt

Tesla, the biggest electric vehicle company in the U.S. (which also controls the country’s largest charging network), has been a major beneficiary of federal support.

That’s likely to change under the massive congressional reconciliation bill being championed by Trump.

The version of the bill passed by the House would chop consumer tax credits for buying electric vehicles and slash federal funding for charging stations.

While auto industry experts view those cuts as hurting legacy automakers more than Tesla, Trump accused Musk of not supporting the bill because it gutted subsidies for electric vehicles.

President Trump and Musk inspect Tesla vehicles in front of the White House on March 11. Andrew Harnik / Getty Images )

Musk has previously opposed the EV tax credits, viewing them as mostly benefiting his competitors, but he changed his tune as Tesla’s profits and sales plummeted globally since Musk began overseeing mass layoffs and other shake-ups to the federal government through the cost-cutting unit, the Department of Government Efficiency.

The end of federal programs aimed at growing the EV sector would not damage Tesla as severely as other problems the automaker is confronting, said John Helveston, a professor at George Washington University who studies the electric vehicle industry.

“Musk hasn’t done Tesla any favors by taking extremely unpopular actions in his time at DOGE, and globally the business is struggling from other decisions, like focusing on the Cybertruck instead of releasing more new practical models that consumers actually want,” he said. “In the European Union, sales are down heavily from the political damage, and sales in China are down from intense competition of very competitive Chinese EVs.”

During the Biden administration, Congress devoted billions of dollars to expand electric vehicle charging stations nationwide. A major pillar of this plan was having Tesla make its chargers compatible with other vehicles, something Tesla agreed to in exchange for a slice of the federal funds. That plan has been halted by the Trump administration, even before Congress tried to pass the Trump-backed tax policy bill that would roll back support for EVs even more.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, an associate dean at the Yale School of Management, said further pain for Tesla could eventually plunge Musk’s riches.

“Tesla is hugely reliant on federal largesse for the build-out of EV charging infrastructure, not to mention federal regulatory approval for his continued autonomous driving and robotics experiments,” Sonnenfeld said.

“His wealth is highly precarious,” he said, noting that most of Musk’s fortune is tied to his stake in Tesla. “The reality is that Musk’s position is far weaker than many realize.”

Subsidies or not, Musk will “continue to thrive”

The acrimonious Trump-Musk implosion on Thursday came only months after Trump transformed the driveway of the White House’s South Lawn into a Tesla showroom, and after the White House tapped Starlink to help expand internet across the White House campus.

Both were performative gestures that crystalized the billionaire’s cozy relationship with the president, who was willing to shill for Musk after he dished out more than a quarter-billion dollars to support Trump’s run for president.

So will the Trump-Musk breakup cut the opposite way and inflict pain on Musk’s companies?

Paul Levinson, a professor at Fordham University, said perhaps it will lead to more short-term stock market drops for Tesla and a hit to his wealth. But even if some of the federal money that flows to Musk’s business empire disappears, it will not likely hamper the billionaire in the long run, he said.

“Musk has ample resources to sustain those losses, reshuffle and rebuild his companies and holdings, and come out ahead and on top,” Levinson said. “Bottom line: if all the Trump government does in its feud with Musk is attack his financial interests, Musk is very likely to not only survive but continue to thrive.”

Copyright 2025 NPR

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President Donald Trump has granted Elon Musk unprecedented power to carry out his war on the “deep state.” The justification for this is supposed to be that the government is corrupted to its core precisely because it is stocked with unelected bureaucrats who are unaccountable to the people.

Musk, goes this story, will employ his fearsome tech wizardry to root them out, restoring not just efficiency to government but also the democratic accountability that “deep state” denizens have snuffed out—supposedly a major cause of many of our social ills.

The startling news that a top Treasury Department official is departing after a dispute with Musk shows how deeply wrong that story truly is—and why it’s actively dangerous. The Washington Post reports that David Lebryk, who has carried out senior nonpolitical roles at the department for decades, is leaving after officials on Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, sought access to Treasury’s payment system:

Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.

The news raises a complicated question: WTF??? Why is Musk’s DOGE trying to access payment systems inside the Treasury Department? It’s not clear what relevance this would have to his ostensible role, which is to search for savings and inefficiencies in government, not to directly influence whether previously authorized government obligations are honored.

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Another question: Did Trump directly authorize Musk to do this, or did he not? Either answer is bad. If Trump did, he may be authorizing an unelected billionaire to exert unprecedented control over the internal workings of government payment systems. If he did not, then Musk may be going rogue to an even greater extent than we thought.

I contacted a few former officials at the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, to try to gauge what this means. What was striking is the level of alarm they evinced about it. Here’s how the Post describes these systems:

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

Former officials I spoke with were at a loss to explain why Musk would want such access. They noted that while we don’t yet know Musk’s motive, the move could potentially give DOGE the power to turn off all kinds of government payments in a targeted way. They said we now must establish if Musk is seeking to carry out what Trump tried via his federal funding freeze: Turn off government payments previously authorized by Congress. The White House rescinded the freeze after a national outcry, but Trump’s spokesperson vowed the hunt for spending to halt will continue. The former officials are asking: Is this Treasury power grab a way to execute that?

“Anybody who would have access to these systems is in a position to turn off funding selectively,” said Michael Linden, a former OMB official who is now director of Families Over Billionaires, a group fighting Trump’s tax cuts for the rich. “The only reason Musk wants to get himself in there must be because he wants to turn some things off.”

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These officials describe these systems as almost akin to a series of faucets. Congress, by authorizing payments, fills the tanks and decides where the water will ultimately flow. The team overseen by the now-departing Lebryk in effect is in control of the spigots, these officials said.

What also alarms these officials is that this is unfolding even as a debt ceiling crisis looms. When the government is on the verge of defaulting on its obligations, these officials tell me, it’s Lebryk and his team who carefully monitor the situation to determine, to the greatest extent possible, on what date it will no longer be able to meet its obligations. This team monitors the water levels, these officials say, noting that this is how Treasury knows what to say in those letters that periodically warn Congress that a breach is approaching.

As it happens, this is precisely why we want career, nonpolitical civil servants to be in charge of the spigots. To put it delicately, this is some really complicated shit, and we want the process to be administered in a totally nonpoliticized way. Letting someone like Musk anywhere near it risks corrupting it quite deeply.

“The payment systems are controlled by a small number of career officials precisely to protect them and the full faith and credit of the United States from political interference,” said Jesse Lee, who was a senior adviser to the National Economic Council under President Joe Biden. Or as Linden put it: “This is exactly the kind of thing you do not want political appointees getting involved in.”

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All of which is why it’s critical to know whether Trump directly authorized this move by Musk. Trump’s executive order creating DOGE orders agencies to give it access to “all” unclassified records and systems. As the Post notes, that would appear to include these Treasury ones.

But we need to know whether Trump was aware of or directly authorized this particular effort by DOGE to access Treasury’s payment systems. Even if a relatively innocent explanation for this is possible—maybe DOGE merely hopes to study how efficient they are—the move clearly alarmed this longtime government veteran enough to prompt his resignation. Did Trump want Musk to have this access, and if so, for what purpose?

“Is this something that has authorization and approval from the White House and specifically the president?” asked Bradley Moss, a national security lawyer, in an interview. “Or is this Musk going rogue within the federal bureaucracy?”

If Trump did greenlight it, Moss said, it would mean he’s “authorizing Elon to shove his weight into the most crucial parts of our financial mechanisms,” and “exposes the basic functions of government to the whims of a nongovernmental employee.” If Trump did not, it would represent a “complete abuse of authority and discretion” on Musk’s part: “He has no possible need for access to those systems.”

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Whatever more we learn, this saga already demonstrates exactly why we want an apolitical, professionalized civil service, one in which career officials enjoy a variety of protections to safeguard their independence. As Jonathan Chait points out at The Atlantic, the whole point of the civil service system is precisely that it ensures that challenging, consequential government jobs go to people who are actually qualified to execute them.

Whatever Musk intends with this new effort, this isn’t part of any war on the “deep state.” We’re witnessing a broad assault on that genuinely meritocratic achievement, the civil service—one that could enable right-wing elites to corruptly loot the place, or install a highly “personalist” government marked above all by loyalty to Trump himself, or some combination of the two. And by all indications, that larger war is fully backed by the president himself.

If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Charlie and Ian on Signal at @cwarzel.92 and @ibogost.47.

Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control. This week, we spoke with four federal-government IT professionals—all experienced contractors and civil servants who have built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure that Musk’s inexperienced employees at his newly created Department of Government Efficiency are attempting to access. In our conversations, each expert was unequivocal: They are terrified and struggling to articulate the scale of the crisis.

Even if the president of the United States, the head of the executive branch, supports (and, importantly, understands) these efforts by DOGE, these experts told us, they would still consider Musk’s campaign to be a reckless and dangerous breach of the complex systems that keep America running. Federal IT systems facilitate operations as varied as sending payments from the Treasury Department and making sure that airplanes stay in the air, the sources told us.

Based on what has been reported, DOGE representatives have obtained or requested access to certain systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with eyes toward others, including the Federal Aviation Administration. “This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”

Read: If DOGE goes nuclear

What exactly they want is unclear. And much remains unknown about what, exactly, is happening here. The contractor emphasized that nobody yet knows which information DOGE has access to, or what it plans to do with it. Spokespeople for the White House, and Musk himself, did not respond to emailed requests for comment. Some reports have revealed the scope of DOGE’s incursions at individual agencies; still, it has been difficult to see the broader context of DOGE’s ambition.

The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, “I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.”

Each of our four sources, three of whom requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, made three points very clear: These systems are immense, they are complex, and they are critical. A single program run by the FAA to help air-traffic controllers, En Route Automation Modernization, contains nearly 2 million lines of code; an average iPhone app, for comparison, has about 50,000. The Treasury Department disburses trillions of dollars in payments per year.

Many systems and databases in a given agency feed into others, but access to them is restricted. Employees, contractors, civil-service government workers, and political appointees have strict controls on what they can access and limited visibility into the system as a whole. This is by design, as even the most mundane government databases can contain highly sensitive personal information. A security-clearance database such as those used by the Department of Justice or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, one contractor told us, could include information about a person’s mental-health or sexual history, as well as disclosures about any information that a foreign government could use to blackmail them.

Even if DOGE has not tapped into these particular databases, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the group has accessed sensitive personnel data at OPM. Mother Jones also reported on Wednesday that an effort may be under way to effectively give Musk control over IT for the entire federal government, broadening his access to these agencies. Trump has said that Musk is acting only with his permission. “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval,” he said to reporters recently. “And we will give him the approval where appropriate. Where it’s not appropriate, we won’t.” The specter of what DOGE might do with that approval is still keeping the government employees we spoke with up at night. With relatively basic “read only” access, Musk’s people could easily find individuals in databases or clone entire servers and transfer that secure information somewhere else. Even if Musk eventually loses access to these systems—owing to a temporary court order such as the one approved yesterday, say—whatever data he siphons now could be his forever.

Read: Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE

With a higher level of access—“write access”—a motivated person may be able to put their own code into the system, potentially without any oversight. The possibilities here are staggering. One could alter the data these systems process, or they could change the way the software operates—without any of the testing that would normally accompany changes to a critical system. Still another level of access, administrator privileges, could grant the broad ability to control a system, including hiding evidence of other alterations. “They could change or manipulate treasury data directly in the database with no way for people to audit or capture it,” one contractor told us. “We’d have very little way to know it even happened.”

The specific levels of access that Musk and his team have remain unclear and likely vary between agencies. On Tuesday, the Treasury said that DOGE had been given “read only” access to the department’s federal payment system, though Wired then reported that one member of DOGE was able to write code on the system. Any focus on access tiers, for that matter, may actually simplify the problem at hand. These systems aren’t just complex at the code level—they are multifaceted in their architecture. Systems can have subsystems; each of these can have its own permission structures. It’s hard to talk about any agency’s tech infrastructure as monolithic. It’s less a database than it is a Russian nesting doll of databases, the experts said.

Musk’s efforts represent a dramatic shift in the way the government’s business has traditionally been conducted. Previously, security protocols were so strict that a contractor plugging a non-government-issued computer into an Ethernet port in a government agency office was considered a major security violation. Contrast that with DOGE’s incursion. CNN reported yesterday that a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern without a background check was given a basic, low tier of access to Department of Energy IT systems, despite objections from department lawyers and information experts. “That these guys, who may not even have clearances, are just pulling up and plugging in their own servers is madness,” one source told us, referring to an allegation that DOGE had connected its own server at OPM. “It’s really hard to find good analogies for how big of a deal this is.” The simple fact that Musk loyalists are in the building with their own computers is the heart of the problem—and helps explain why activities ostensibly authorized by the president are widely viewed as a catastrophic data breach.

The four systems professionals we spoke with do not know what damage might already have been done. “The longer this goes on, the greater the risk of potential fatal compromise increases,” Scott Cory, a former CIO for an agency in the HHS, told us. At the Treasury, this could mean stopping payments to government organizations or outside contracts it doesn’t want to pay. It could also mean diverting funds to other recipients. Or gumming up the works in the attempt to do those, or other, things.

In the FAA, even a small systems disruption could cause mass grounding of flights, a halt in global shipping, or worse, downed planes. For instance, the agency oversees the Traffic Flow Management System, which calculates the overall demand for airspace in U.S. airports and which airlines depend on. “Going into these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in death and economic harm to our nation,” one FAA employee who has nearly a decade of experience with its system architecture told us. “‘Upgrading’ a system of which you know nothing about is a good way to break it, and breaking air travel is a worst-case scenario with consequences that will ripple out into all aspects of civilian life. It could easily get to a place where you can’t guarantee the safety of flights taking off and landing.” Nevertheless, on Wednesday Musk posted that “the DOGE team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.”

Even if DOGE members are looking to modernize these systems, they may find themselves flummoxed. The government is big and old and complicated. One former official with experience in government IT systems, including at the Treasury, told us that old could mean that the systems were installed in 1962, 1992, or 2012. They might use a combination of software written in different programming languages: a little COBOL in the 1970s, a bit of Java in the 1990s. Knowledge about one system doesn’t give anyone—including Musk’s DOGE workers, some of whom were not even alive for Y2K—the ability to make intricate changes to another.

Read: The “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the United States government

The internet economy, characterized by youth and disruption, favors inventing new systems and disposing of old ones. And the nation’s computer systems, like its roads and bridges, could certainly benefit from upgrades. But old computers don’t necessarily make for bad infrastructure, and government infrastructure isn’t always old anyway. The former Treasury official told us that mainframes—and COBOL, the ancient programming language they often run—are really good for what they do, such as batch processing for financial transactions.

Like the FAA employee, the payment-systems expert also fears that the most likely result of DOGE activity on federal systems will be breaking them, especially because of incompetence and lack of proper care. DOGE, he observed, may be prepared to view or hoover up data, but it doesn’t appear to be prepared to carry out savvy and effective alterations to how the system operates. This should perhaps be reassuring. “If you were going to organize a heist of the U.S. Treasury,” he said, “why in the world would you bring a handful of college students?” They would be useless. Your crew would need, at a minimum, a couple of guys with a decade or two of experience with COBOL, he said.

Unless, of course, you had the confidence that you could figure anything out, including a lumbering government system you don’t respect in the first place. That interpretation of DOGE’s theory of self seems both likely and even more scary, at the Treasury, the FAA, and beyond. Would they even know what to do after logging in to such a machine? we asked. “No, they’d have no idea,” the payment expert said. “The sanguine thing to think about is that the code in these systems and the process and functions they manage are unbelievably complicated,” Scott Cory said. “You’d have to be extremely knowledgeable if you were going into these systems and wanting to make changes with an impact on functionality.”

But DOGE workers could try anyway. Mainframe computers have a keyboard and display, unlike the cloud-computing servers in data centers. According to the former Treasury IT expert, someone who could get into the room and had credentials for the system could access it and, via the same machine or a networked one, probably also deploy software changes to it. It’s far more likely that they would break, rather than improve, a Treasury disbursement system in so doing, one source told us. “The volume of information they deal with [at the Treasury] is absolutely enormous, well beyond what anyone would deal with at SpaceX,” the source said. Even a small alteration to a part of the system that has to do with the distribution of funds could wreak havoc, preventing those funds from being distributed or distributing them wrongly, for example. “It’s like walking into a nuclear reactor and deciding to handle some plutonium.”

DOGE is many things—a dismantling of the federal government, a political project to flex power and punish perceived enemies—but it is also the logical end point of a strain of thought that’s become popular in Silicon Valley during the boom times of Big Tech and easy money: that building software and writing code aren’t just dominant skills for the 21st century, but proof of competence in any realm. In a post on X this week, John Shedletsky, a developer and an early employee at the popular gaming platform Roblox, summed up the philosophy nicely: “Silicon Valley built the modern world. Why shouldn’t we run it?”

This attitude disgusted one of the officials we spoke with. “There’s this bizarre belief that being able to do things with computers means you have to be super smart about everything else.” Silicon Valley may have built the computational part of the modern world, but the rest of that world—the money, the airplanes, the roads, and the waterways—still exists. Knowing something, even a lot, about computers guarantees no knowledge about the world beyond them.

“I’d like to think that this is all so massive and complex that they won’t succeed in whatever it is they’re trying to do,” one of the experts told us. “But I wouldn’t want to wager that outcome against their egos.”

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Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways

We already can see that Donald Trump’s impending presidency will be a tumultuous one that could potentially put people of color and marginalized groups in danger of further persecution. Aside from attacks on the Haitian population and bias claims against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump has made a slew of promises for the first day he’s back in the Oval Office. Here are a list of those claims.

Pardon Jan. 6 Rioters

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Trump has said he would immediately pardon Jan. 6 rioters on numerous occasions despite their attack on the U.S. Capitol. In an interview with Time magazine published last year, Trump said “I’ll be looking at J6 early on, maybe the first nine minutes.” More than 1,580 defendants were charged and more than 1,200 have been convicted in the Jan. 6 investigation. The charges ranged from seditious conspiracy to unlawful parading.

Get Rid Of Birthright Citizenship

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Trump wants to change a crucial part of the 14th amendment which gives anyone who is born in the U.S. automatic citizenship. Of course, this will definitely lead to an array of legal battles.

Enact Mass Deportation At Record Rates

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Trump has consistently vowed to deport undocumented migrants. Just days before the election, Trump said at a campaign rally in NYC: “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out.”

Implement Tariffs

Photo: Qilai Shen (Getty Images)

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After winning the presidential election in November, Trump insisted that he would sign an executive order to implement a 25 percent tariff on products imported from Mexico and Canada. These are two of this country’s most significant trading partners.

“On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media site Truth Social.

End War In Ukraine

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One of Trump’s most ridiculous promises was that he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of his presidency.

“That is a war that’s dying to be settled. I will get it settled before I even become president,” Trump said during a September debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. “I know [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy very well, and I know [Russian President Vladimir] Putin very well.”

Increase Oil Drilling

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Trump has been unrelenting in his commitment to increase oil drilling in the U.S. Trump has regularly stated that increasing U.S. oil production would significantly reduce energy costs.

Ban Transgender Women From Women’s Sports

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Trump has constantly referred to transgender women as men and told his followers that he will make sure that transgender women cannot compete in women’s sports. He also promised to sign an executive order on his first day in office to reduce federal funding for schools that push “transgender insanity.”

Put An End To Gender-Affirming Care

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Trump has spoken out against gender-affirming care, which sometimes includes hormone therapy. He said he will revoke the Biden administration’s policies that provided resources and guidance about care options.

Make The Auto Industry ‘American’

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Trump has pushed for a future in which the automobile will be made in America. He wants the auto industry to be “fueled by American energy,” “sourced by American suppliers” and built by American workers. Trump said that will happen his first day in office.

Abandon “Electric Vehicle Mandates”

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Back in 2021, Biden signed an order that focused on 50 percent of new cars and trucks sold by 2030 to be zero-emission. The Environmental Protection Agency finalized emission limits, and electric vehicles were expected to help meet the goals. California has a law requiring that all new car sales in the state be zero-emission with the next decade.

Trump has referred to this as “electric vehicle mandates” and said he would cancel it as soon as he assumed office.

Erase Biden’s Border Policy

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Trump has said on his first day in office he will “terminate every open-borders policy of the Biden administration.” This means he plans on restoring all of his first term’s stringent border policies.

Cut Federal Money To Schools Promote Diversity

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Trump has been an infamous adversary of America’s diversity efforts. He has vowed to divest federal money to schools that encourage “critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto the shoulders of our children.” Trump also vowed to cut money to any schools that have vaccine or mask mandates.

Reduce Inflation

Photo: Scott Olson (Getty Images)

Trump has promised to end inflation, though he never outlined a plan for it. “I will instruct my cabinet that I expect results within the first 100 days, or much sooner than that,” Trump said in 2024.

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