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My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

 

Elon Musk’s DOGE team is battering federal institutions that serve communities like ours across America.

Employees at the USDA, EPA, SBA, FAA and many other alphabet agencies have received termination notices. These are not faceless technocrats, they are dedicated civil servants. They are people like us.

DOGE is also attacking the Department of Education, and Trump wants to eliminate it altogether. The Tribune recently reported that about 21% of Albert Lea Schools’ students receive special education services. It’s the DOE that backs up their right to a free and appropriate public education, thanks to the landmark Individuals with Disabilities Education Act signed in 1975. About 20% of the DOE’s budget is dedicated to this purpose. Do you want to end these protections?

The University of St. Thomas was rocked last week when 185 students who had accepted scholarships of $10,000 per year to study special education discovered that their DOE funding for these scholarships had been yanked. Now the university has to appeal and fight for this money, taking time and money away from other work.

The grant in question was targeted because it’s linked to DEI. DEI is simply civil rights. Anytime someone demonizes DEI, substitute “civil rights” so you understand more fully what they are trying to sabotage. DEI includes disability rights. We all know people who live with disabilities and families who care for them, and we should protect their rights.

You may think, wait, I just don’t like trans people having access to gender-affirming care, I didn’t sign on to hurting special education students. But attacks on DEI is a package deal, and it doesn’t stop with trans people. When you protect trans people, you protect a much bigger group of people.

Fundamentally, attacks on trans rights and disability rights are attacks on labor rights. Ending labor rights for everyone is the real prize. There is no resource more valuable to billionaires like Elon Musk than cheap, submissive, unprotected labor.

Do these attacks sound like a “golden age for America” to you? It’s surely a golden age for white collar crime, as AG Pam Bondi is re-assigning agents from many of the FBI’s financial crimes enforcement units, including a task force that confiscated billions of dollars in yachts and real estate from corrupt Russian oligarchs sanctioned over the war in Ukraine. Her moves are a gift to Putin and a signal that the Trump White House is open for bribes.

Our president is, to his core, a con artist. As Tim Miller put it, “his whole career has been premised on leveraging fraud successfully.”

Many people’s news and information sources failed to warn them adequately of this threat, distracting them with prejudices and fluff rather than arming them with facts that could have helped them protect our republic in a hinge point election.

Last week Trump hunched in the shadow of the world’s wealthiest man during a bizarre press conference in the Oval Office. Musk, whose wealth has grown exponentially due to government contracts fueling his businesses, is not directing “DOGE” to look into any of his contracts. Musk recently reposted a meme stating that only people in the “parasite class” are getting hurt by DOGE’s unconstitutional activities.

He means us. We’re the parasite class to him. Look around you. Nearly 25% of our county population is 65 and older, and most of our seniors receive Medicare and Social Security. About 23% of our population is on Medicaid, including roughly half of our nursing home residents who are funded through Medicaid.

Are you prepared to quit your paid employment to care for a loved one whose nursing home care is no longer funded because Elon Musk thinks they’re a “parasite”? Do you understand what would happen to Freeborn County if a chunk of our federal funding disappears because Musk is funneling it directly to the billionaire class instead?

Billionaires, if you haven’t realized it yet, are the parasite class destroying our republic.

We can’t depend on Rep. Finstad to beg and bootlick whatever he can for us after passively surrendering Congress’s power (our power) to Trump and Musk. We have to stand up for each other and demand that Finstad follow the oath he took to defend the U.S. Constitution.

We’re going to need solidarity and organizing power to get out of this snare. Reach out to your neighbors and friends, grow your networks. The stabilizing force of government we took for granted for generations is already in the kill chute.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.