Lawyers Warned DOGE Staffer About Shady Investments. He Fired Them.
A 25-year old DOGE bro oversaw the termination of lawyers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last month, just days after they warned him certain stocks he owned were prohibited by employees, according to a Wednesday report by ProPublica.
Gavin Kliger had been detailed to the CFPB in early March as part of DOGE’s efforts to take over and ultimately dismantle the ethics watchdog that oversees banks and manages vast troves of consumer data.
But Kliger had committed a big no-no at the CFPB. His financial records indicated that he owned up to $365,000 in stock in companies that the CFPB was charged with regulating, including Tesla, which has been the subject of hundreds of consumer complaints. Kliger also owned stock in Apple and two cryptocurrencies, as well as additional companies on a “Prohibited Holdings” list, including Alphabet, Alibaba, and Berkshire Hathaway. In total, Kliger had made up to $715,000 in investments in seven barred companies.
Kliger received an ethics notice on April 10, ProPublica reported. Shortly afterward, OMB Director Russell Vought moved forward with sweeping layoffs of federal employees, and sent Kliger and other DOGE officials an email with the subject line “CFPB RIF Work.” Another note sent to Kliger told him he’d been given access to the agency’s computer systems that “should allow you to do what you need to do.”
Kliger spent the next few days “screaming at people he did not believe were working fast enough” to disseminate termination notices, said one federal employee who used the pseudonym Alex Doe, in a sworn statement about the layoffs. On April 17, the termination notices went out, including to the ethics team, which had alerted Kliger to his prohibited investments.
A White House spokesperson told ProPublica that Kliger “did not even manage” the layoffs, “making this entire narrative an outright lie.”
In April, the CFPB fired nearly 1,500 employees at DOGE’s direction, leaving only about 200 people employed there. The remaining workers have been forced to work around the clock to manage the transition, and they’ve begun including themselves in the layoffs.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has a plan to protect autism-related data from RFK Jr.’s absurd plans to create a disease registry tracking autistic people.
Pritzker plans to sign an executive order Wednesday that will prevent state agencies from obtaining or disclosing data that personally identifies people with autism, unless it’s required for medical care or legal matters, according to a copy of the order obtained by the Chicago-Sun Times.
“Every Illinoisan deserves dignity, privacy, and the freedom to live without fear of surveillance or discrimination,” Pritzker said in a statement. “As Donald Trump and DOGE threaten these freedoms, we are taking steps to ensure that our state remains a leader in protecting the rights of individuals with autism and all people with disabilities.”
Pritzker’s order comes as RFK Jr. announced the National Institutes of Health is collecting private medical data from government and commercial databases to create a registry of people with autism in the United States. The data will be collected from prescription records, lab testing, and private insurance claims. While the NIH denies it’s a “registry,” RFK Jr. used the word again just this week.
The announcement sparked widespread outrage among autism advocacy groups across the country. A petition against the registry garnered thousands of signatures within 24 hours.
“They are building a list. A list of people like my children. A list of autistic individuals— tracked, labeled, and filed under the guise of public health,” Ryan Smith, the petition starter, wrote in the petition’s description. “This is not support. It is surveillance.”
RFK Jr. has long dehumanized people with autism and spread unbacked claims about the disorder. “These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use the toilet unassisted,” Kennedy said at a press conference in April.
The lifelong vaccine skeptic has compared the rising rates of autism diagnoses in the U.S. to a preventable epidemic. Autism is not an infectious diseas; it is a lifelong developmental disorder.
With Pritzker’s executive order, Illinois will become the first state to legally restrict the sharing of autism-related data—a clear message to RFK Jr. that every American, even those he looks down upon, has the right to privacy.
Donald Trump’s quest to conquer Greenland is becoming increasingly serious.
The intelligence community directed intelligence agency chiefs to conduct a spy campaign on the Denmark-controlled island territory last week, issuing a “collection emphasis message” for information pertaining to Greenland’s independence movement, as well as an examination of local attitudes regarding “American resource extraction,” reported The Wall Street Journal. It also tasked agencies to identify individuals living in Greenland and Denmark who support the Trump administration’s goals for the island.
The directive came from several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, according to the paper, but Gabbard was not happy to hear that the news of the initiative had gotten out.
“The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed of aiding deep state actors who seek to undermine the President by politicizing and leaking classified information,” Gabbard told the Journal in a statement. “They are breaking the law and undermining our nation’s security and democracy.”
The Greenland order, which went out to multiple departments including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency, is the first tangible step the Trump administration has made to satiate the president’s desire to own the self-governing island.
One intelligence official explained to the Journal that because collection resources are “inherently limited,” they are typically used for “perceived threats, not allied countries.”
The order is just another reminder that American voters should take Donald Trump at his word. In an interview with © New Republic
