Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief.

I'm Nima Shirazi.

I'm Adam Johnson.

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We do these newsrease in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes.

And today, Adam, we wanted to discuss a recent piece you wrote on the credulous reporting about what is currently a full-scale assault on the federal

government by not only Donald Trump, but his empowered deputy president, Elon Musk, and how the

media is reporting this assault as, you know, kind of good faith, cost-cutting measures, you know, going line by line in federal, but, you know, kind of good faith cost-cutting measures, you know, going line by line

in federal budgets that so far is seeing real, real threats, sometimes shutting down

a lot of full-scale firings and dismantling of government agencies from the U.S. Treasury to the Office of Personnel Management,

that's OPM, General Services Administration, the GSA, small business administration, the SBA,

tons of other agencies, including USAID.

And yes, there are problems with all of these offices.

But what Musk is doing is not actually

talking about the root causes of, say, quote unquote, government waste, but rather is

fully assaulting the federal government on purpose.

100% of people concerned with government waste, don't give a shit about government waste.

It is obviously pretextual, anyone with half a brain cell who's read any kind of heritage or manhattan institute

report can tell you the government waste is always pretextual nobody gives a shit about waste maybe like

...