<Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) delivered a forceful pushback to President Donald Trump’s shedding the security clearance for former President Joe Biden – a move of “retribution” he said is "unworthy of a president."

“I’m saddened and angered that he is using security clearances as a means of revenge against political enemies, or adversaries, or generals like Mark Milley,” Blumenthal said Friday.

The comments came moments after Trump announced on his Truth Social platform that he was “immediately revoking” Biden’s security clearances and stopping his intelligence briefings because “there is no need” for him to continue receiving classified information.

But Blumenthal took his criticism a step further, as he seized the opportunity on CNN’s “The Situation Room” Friday to attack Trump’s close billionaire ally Elon Musk’s invasion of the U.S. government using the newly created Department of Government Efficiency as his vessel.

“It fits the pattern that you've just articulated in the earlier story about referring a list of people who may be prosecuted as a result of Elon Musk recommending them,” Blumenthal said, referencing a report involving a U.S. attorney promising in a letter to Musk that the people he referred to the Department of Justice would be investigated.

“Elon Musk is responsible for the biggest public corruption scandal ongoing in real time, right before our eyes, stealing information, controlling agencies that provide contracts to his companies, SpaceX and Starlink and Tesla – billions of dollars – and regulate those companies,” Blumenthal told viewers.

The Connecticut senator added that anybody worried about government corruption “should be investigating what Elon Musk is doing with DOGE.”

“And that's exactly what I am doing through the permanent subcommittee on investigations,” Blumenthal said, pointing out that letters have already been sent out “to all those companies asking what they're doing with the information, who controls it, who's involved.”

Blumenthal then concluded his interview by circling back to his outrage over Trump’s most recent move targeting his political enemies since returning to the White House last month.

“This kind of retribution really should have no place in the United States government,” he said.>

<[Event "Wolff-Gurevich m"] [Site "Worcester Mass"]
[Date "1986.06.13"]
[EventDate "1986"]
[Round "2"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Gurevich, Ilya"]
[Black "Wolff, Patrick"]
[ECO "B09"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "First Boston Futurity"] [Site "Boston Mass"]
[Date "1981.04.??"]
[EventDate "1981"]
[Round "1"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[White "Rizzitano, James"]
[Black "Leverett, Bruce"]
[ECO "D01"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

Ed was always a decent man. RIP. We shall not see his like again.

<[Event "23rd Queen City Open"] [Site "Manchester NH"]
[Date "1999.02.28"]
[Round "5"]
[White "Epp, Edward"]
[Black "Downing, Bruce"]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "A30"]
[WhiteElo "2059"]
[BlackElo "2203"]

<On Friday, at 8:29 a.m., markets across the world will slow what they’re doing to wait for data—specifically, the monthly jobs report, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases at 8:30 a.m. It’s not an exaggeration to say that trillions of dollars (U.S. equity markets alone are worth $62 trillion) turn on what the BLS says. The stock market, bond market, and Federal Reserve act and react based on this report.

But Friday’s release, which covers the month of January, also has the unfortunate distinction of relying in part on government data that was taken offline this week and is, as of this writing, inaccessible to the public. Economists, business owners, and even everyday people are entitled to understand the full picture of who lives and works in this country, and the Trump administration just made that harder.

Allow me to wonk out for a moment here. The report is technically called the Employment Situation, and it’s a monthly picture of who was hired, who was fired, what race and gender they are, which sectors they work in, what education they completed, even whether they could find only part-time work that month. The BLS collects data in two ways: from employers and from households. And once a year, it revises that data based on a bunch of different factors (I’m grossly simplifying), including details on the U.S. population according to census data. That is the report we’re expecting Friday—a 30,000-foot view of the American population and labor force over the year. And this week, census.gov went offline, to try to comply with the Trump administration’s executive orders on gender and sex, diversity, and foreign aid. (The main census site is back now, but not all the census datasets are.)

Yes, researchers and economists have downloaded and backed up the data, but confidence in government statistics is a precious commodity. “When we think about general public trust in government data, anything that happens at one statistical agency affects trust in the whole system,” Jed Kolko, who served in the Biden administration as the Commerce Department’s undersecretary for economic affairs, told me. “It’s not just about a trust halo effect across the agencies. It’s also that agencies often use each other’s data as input for their own statistics.”

That brings us back to the jobs report. To be clear, there is no evidence that any data at BLS have been deleted or changed—to do so would incite panic in the markets, something Trump does not want to do. The BLS is housed in the Department of Labor. The Census Bureau is part of the Department of Commerce. They share! Across the government’s 13 statistical agencies, it’s data sharing all the way down. All sorts of disparate issues, including immigration, job training, congressional redistricting, public health, and anti-poverty aid (to name just a few), depend on correct and careful data collection—and the sharing of that data with the public.

This is part of the reason it has been so frightening to watch the Trump administration delete, alter, and disappear federal data over the past two weeks. Since Jan. 20, data on health risks and chronic disease, teen health habits, HIV drugs, foreign aid, environmental justice, how to take care of vulnerable people in a disaster, and more have been taken down, disappeared, then reappeared or severely limited. According to Wired’s excellent analysis, more than 450 government domains have gone offline. The New York Times reports that more than 8,000 U.S. government webpages have been shuttered too.

Scientists, doctors, and public health researchers have loudly campaigned to restore the data, and some have come back online. But certainly not all. In her newsletter published Tuesday, epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina writes that public health data and communication are “as valuable as gold, for protecting American lives.” She notes that incomplete and inaccurate data can be dangerous. American health and even natural security rely on understanding. “Their power lies in their purity: reliability, accuracy, and accessibility,” she wrote. “The longer this instability and information drip-feed continues, the greater the biosecurity risk.”

Imagine you’re a doctor or nurse and want to understand how to stop mpox transmission in your community. What’s the current vaccine guidance? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should be able to tell you that, but right now that information is gone.

And maybe you might say that the federal government doesn’t need all this. That the data bureaucracy is too big and unwieldy. And that private information—collected by companies like ADP, which processes payrolls—can fill the gap....>

<....Government data is certainly not perfect, true. But the private sector relies heavily on government information. Economists Ellen Hughes-Cromwick and Julia Coronado wrote a 2019 paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives showing how a vast range of companies depend on U.S. government data to understand their customers and make decisions about how to run their businesses.

Let’s say that you run, oh, I don’t know, an electric car company. According to Hughes-Cromwick and Coronado’s work, you might use government reports on auto sales (the Bureau of Economic Analysis), consumer credit (the Fed), the consumer price index for new vehicles (BLS), the consumer price index for all items (BLS), disposable personal income (BEA), employment and unemployment (BLS), energy prices (BLS and the Energy Information Administration), the GDP (BEA), interest rates (the Fed), inventories (the census), regional income, prices, and consumer spending (BEA and the census). And that’s just for short-term decisionmaking purposes!

Government data is particularly important to high-tech companies too. The World Bank noted that unicorn companies like Zillow and Waze grew to their impressive valuations on the back of open data. And it’s important that this kind of data stay available. “At a time when data capabilities and information technology are advancing rapidly,” the authors write, “public data collection and dissemination requires ongoing investment and modernization to keep pace with rapid economic structural change.”

There is another big risk from this data destruction, beyond the disappearing websites and fragmented statistics. Once the government starts deleting datasets or changing what the public can see about our own country, it sets the stage for distrust and conspiracy theories.

Some already exist. When I covered the BLS during the Bush and Obama administrations, I would occasionally get emails claiming that the data had been faked or massaged to make the numbers look better. That’s a long-running hobbyhorse among certain market watchers, mostly on the right.

“It’s bulls***,” George Pearkes, a global macro strategist at Bespoke Investment Group, told me. “I’m sorry—the BLS is not perfect, but the idea that there is any political intervention into what the economists there are doing is nonsense conspiracy theories.”

But at least under the Biden administration, the theories had some high-profile devotees. In October, then-Sen. Marco Rubio threw his lot in with the “fake jobs report” conspiracists. Possibly because in August, his now boss, Trump, had. Neither Pearkes nor Kolko worries about “faked” data. Both say that heavy-handed intervention in government data would be clear to traders and economists alike.

But here’s the thing about casting subtler doubt on data, making it hard to find, or removing it wholesale. It could quietly erode the very foundations of our economy—and our trust in public agencies. “There are many ways to undermine trust in public data if that were someone’s goal,” said Kolko. “Depriving the federal agencies of money, encouraging their staff to quit—these are all ways that could end up undermining trust in public data.” And that should worry us all.>

<[Event "First Boston Futurity"] [Site "Boston Mass"]
[Date "1981.04.??"]
[EventDate "1981"]
[Round "2"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Webb, Roger"]
[Black "Leverett, Bruce"]
[ECO "A04"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "John Curdo Open"] [Site "Billerica Mass"]
[Date "1999.02.15"]
[Round "5"]
[White "Polizoti, Geoffrey"]
[Black "Curdo, John"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[ECO "C48"]
[WhiteElo "2033"]
[BlackElo "2412"]

[Source 'Tournament Book"] should be [Source "Tournament Book"]

[Source" Chess Horizons, Aug-Sept 1986"] should be [Source "Chess Horizons, Aug-Sept 1986"]

[Source" Terrie DB"] should be [Source "Terrie DB"]

<Unelected President Elon Musk and Puppet Donald Trump claim to be so interested in saving government money they’re sending teams of unelected outsiders to snoop through our most sensitive government systems. But they seem to have no problem with taxpayers footing the bill for wealthy Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth’s so-called “emergency” paint job to the tune of nearly $50,000. He also wants more than $80,000 from taxpayers for other maintenance and repairs to his government housing.

It seems Democrats are the only people asking questions about those eye-popping figures.

Via Bloomberg:

[Reps.] Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and Connecticut’s Rosa DeLauro demanded an explanation from Hegseth in a letter Friday, as well as answers to several other questions about his housing maintenance and repairs, which they said total $137,297.

“Why is $49,900 for emergency painting necessary and how does that use of funds comply with the Administration’s stated goal of government efficiency?” they wrote. They also asked what monthly rent he will pay for the home on a military base near the Pentagon, whose location they didn’t disclose. They’re seeking answers by Feb. 21.

Wasserman Schultz and DeLauro also asked for a commitment to provide other servicemembers with a similarly high quality of housing, given that many “currently live in unacceptable housing conditions including houses with mold, lead paint, and other hazards.”

It’s not like Hegseth is hurting for money, or at least he shouldn’t be. In a press release, Wasserman Schultz noted he supports the Musk/Trump “funding freezes and cuts to federal programs, services and jobs” in the name of government efficiency. Yet Hegseth thinks he should dip into public coffers while likely earning $246,000 a year in his public post, and reportedly having earned $6 million in the last two years as a Fox News TV personality.

This should come as no surprise, though. You may recall that Hegseth was pushed out of two non-profit jobs for financial mismanagement and overspending.

Alleged sexual predator Hegseth seems rather touchy (no pun intended) about his extravagant paint job. He attacked his own former Fox News colleague, Jennifer Griffin, for daring to share the Wasserman Schultz/DeLauro letter on Xitter. “Any/all house repairs were going to happen no matter who was moving in–and were all initiated by DoD,” Hegseth sniped. “But Dems/Jen don’t care about facts; they’re just Trump haters.”

I look forward to Hegseth’s documented explanation to Congress.>