— Senate Republicans plan to launch their own investigation next month that delves into the alleged ‘conspiracy’ behind former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. 

Senators Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, announced plans to hold a Senate Judiciary hearing June 18 to look into the alleged cover-up of the 82-year-old former president’s mental decline while in office by the media and those closest to him.

The lawmakers are still gathering witnesses for the probe, which would be the first full congressional committee hearing on the subject.

‘It’s time to expose how a cadre of Biden aides and family members were the de facto commander in chief, while President Biden was sidelined,’ Schmitt said in a statement to Fox News Digital. ‘I look forward to getting the American people the answers they deserve.’

Both lawmakers contend Biden’s decline was hidden for ‘years.’ 

Cornyn argued the country depended ‘on having a president who has the mental capacity to do the job, and it’s clear that President Biden did not, so we must use this hearing to uncover the facts.’

‘For this conspiracy between the mainstream media, Joe Biden’s family and his inner circle to have hidden the impairment of the president of the United States for years, and lied consistently to the American people about his capacity to make decisions, which are solely vested by the Constitution, is unacceptable,’ Cornyn said in a statement to Fox News Digital.  

Schmitt and Cornyn join a growing chorus of Republicans demanding answers about what really went on behind the scenes during Biden’s presidency. 

In the House, lawmakers are pushing to create a select committee that would investigate the Biden administration’s alleged cover-up. 

Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., is leading the charge to create the panel and introduced legislation Thursday to start the committee that would dive into ‘the potential concealment of information from the American public’ regarding Biden’s health.  

And House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., has called on several high-ranking staffers from the Biden White House to participate in transcribed interviews regarding their alleged roles in covering up the former president’s decline. 

Comer called on Neera Tanden, the former director of the Domestic Policy Council; former assistant to the President and deputy chief of staff Annie Tomasini; former senior adviser to the first lady Anthony Bernal; former deputy director of Oval Office operations Ashley Williams; and Biden’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, to participate. 

The growing fervor among Republicans to uncover whether Biden’s allies and family hid concerns about his health from the public comes after the release of ‘Original Sin’ by CNN host Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson. 

Their book claimed the Biden White House was trying to control the narrative about the former president’s health and that his allies worked to cover up his decline. 

GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin indicated that he does not want to run for a fourth Senate term, but he isn’t ruling it out.

Johnson, who is serving his third six-year Senate term, said during remarks at a Wednesday event hosted by the Milwaukee Press Club and WisPolitics.com that he learned from his run for a second term that ‘you can’t say … never.’

In a 2022 Wall Street Journal piece, Johnson explained his about-face on seeking another term.

‘During the 2016 campaign, I said it would be my last campaign and final term. That was my strong preference and my wife’s. We both looked forward to a normal private life,’ he said. ‘I believe America is in peril. Much as I’d like to ease into a quiet retirement, I don’t feel I should.’

The senator, who has been vocal in objecting to the Trump-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act that most in the House GOP voted to pass last week, said during his remarks on Wednesday that he would like to place America on a ‘sustainable course’ and return home.

‘I don’t covet the position,’ he said.

But while he’s not slamming the door on the possibility of running for Senate again, he flatly ruled out the prospect of a presidential bid.

‘No, God, what an awful job,’ he said when asked whether he’d ever run for the presidency. He said he wouldn’t want to make the decisions that a commander in chief must make.

Only a single member of former President Joe Biden’s Cabinet responded to a massive outreach effort from Fox News Digital asking if the more than two dozen Cabinet-level officials stood by previous remarks that Biden was mentally and physically fit to serve as president.

And even that lone statement, from former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, skirted addressing head-on whether he had witnessed instances of Biden’s now widely acknowledged cognitive issues.

‘I met with President Biden when needed to make important decisions and to execute with my team at HHS,’ Becerra said. ‘It’s clear the President was getting older, but he made the mission clear: run the largest health agency in the world, expand care to millions more Americans than ever before, negotiate down the cost of prescription drugs, and pull us out of a world-wide pandemic. And we delivered.’

Roughly four months after Biden’s Oval Office exit, a handful of political books detailing the 2024 campaign and Biden administration have hit store shelves and are painting a bleak picture of Biden’s health. Adding fuel to the fire, audio recordings of Biden’s October 2023 interview with former Special Counsel Robert Hur showed the former president tripping over his words, slurring sentences, taking long pauses between answers and struggling to remember key moments in his life, including the year his son Beau died of cancer.

Fox News Digital has written extensively dating back to the 2020 presidential campaign about Biden’s cognitive decline and his inner circle’s role in covering it up.

Becerra’s statement stood in marked contrast to the silence emanating from the rest of his former colleagues. Fox News Digital reached out to 26 Biden administration officials with Cabinet-level positions — from former Vice President Kamala Harris to former Chief of Staff Jeff Zients — asking whether they still believe that Biden was fit to serve as president, or whether they’ve had a change of heart amid the cascade of damning evidence and anecdotes portraying a mental decline.

If a majority of those Cabinet-level officials believed Biden to be unable to perform his duties, they could have attempted to remove him from office through the 25th Amendment. Instead, those officials repeatedly said at the time that Biden was competent and in command.

That talking point hasn’t abated among the former officials.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg weighed in on Biden’s presidential health earlier in May during a town hall with veterans and military families in Iowa. 

When asked during the event whether Biden experienced cognitive decline, Buttigieg told reporters that ‘every time I needed something from him from the West Wing, I got it.’ 

‘The time I worked closest with him in his final year was around the Baltimore bridge collapse,’ he added. ‘And what I can tell you is that the same president the world saw addressing that was the president I was in the Oval with, insisting that we do a good job, do right by Baltimore. And that was characteristic of my experience with him.’ 

Buttigieg did not elaborate when responding to a separate inquiry from Fox News Digital. 

Biden’s office recently revealed that the former president was diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer that had metastasized and was undergoing treatment. 

The diagnosis sparked an outpouring of well-wishes from political leaders across both aisles, and shock from some doctors who said such cancer should have been caught before it advanced and metastasized. 

None of Biden’s annual physical health reports as president tested for prostate cancer, Fox News Digital previously reported, with a representative confirming Biden’s last-known prostate blood test was conducted in 2014. 

‘FULL CONFIDENCE’ 

The 2024 presidential debate between Biden and President Donald Trump opened the floodgates of criticism surrounding Biden’s mental acuity after the 46th president’s poor performance, which included Biden losing his train of thought and stumbling over his words.

Concerns over Biden’s mental acuity had simmered for years among conservatives, but it wasn’t until the June 2024 presidential debate that traditional Democrat allies and media outlets began questioning Biden’s health and openly called for him to drop out of the race. 

Despite mounting concerns, members of Biden’s Cabinet vowed he was of sound health and mind.

Then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement in September 2024, for example, that he has ‘full confidence in President Biden’s ability to carry out his job.’ 

‘As I’ve said before, I come fully prepared for my meetings with President Biden, knowing his questions will be detail-oriented, probing, and exacting,’ he said. ‘In our exchanges, the President always draws upon our prior conversations and past events in analyzing the issues and reaching his conclusions.’ 

Conservatives in 2024 floated calling for the invocation of the 25th Amendment to remove Biden, which would have required Harris and the majority of the Cabinet to declare him unfit to lead. Harris and the Cabinet did not take such steps during the administration, and instead defended his health. 

In July 2024, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo called Biden ‘one of the most accomplished presidents in American history and continues to effectively lead our country with a steady hand.’ 

‘As someone who is actually in the room when the President meets with the Cabinet and foreign leaders, I can tell you he is an incisive and extraordinary leader,’ Raimondo said at the time. 

‘PHYSICAL DETERIORATION’ 

Since Biden’s exit from the White House in January, political journalists have published a handful of books arguing that, behind the scenes of the administration, staffers were concerned about Biden’s health. 

‘Biden’s physical deterioration — most apparent in his halting walk — had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn’t do so until after the election,’ according to a new book written by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, ‘Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.’ 

‘Given Biden’s age, (his physician Kevin O’Connor) also privately said that if he had another bad fall, a wheelchair might be necessary for what could be a difficult recovery,’ the authors wrote. 

While another newly released book by longtime D.C. reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, ‘Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,’ investigated Biden’s mental decline in the lead-up to the general election, calling him a ‘shell of himself.’

‘All of them,’ Parnes told Vanity Fair in April of who in Biden’s inner circle was most to blame for covering up his mental decline when he was in office. 

‘It’s pretty remarkable how they kept him very closed off,’ Parnes said. ‘He was a shell of himself. When he entered the White House, he was so, so different from the man who I covered as vice president, a guy who would hold court in the Naval Observatory with reporters until the wee hours.’

‘We’d been watching Biden’s decline for a long period of time and, honestly, thought he had lost his fastball some when he was running in 2020,’ Allen added of Biden’s mental decline. ‘And it was still so shocking to see the leader of the free world so bereft of coherent thought.’ 

Earlier in May, hours of Biden’s October 2023 interview with Hur’s office were released to the public and underscored the president’s apparent mental decline from his days as a senator from Delaware.

Hur led an investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents after Biden’s departure as vice president during the Obama administration. The then-special counsel announced in February 2024 he would not recommend criminal charges against Biden for possessing classified materials after his vice presidency, saying Biden is ‘a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.’

Hur came under fire from Biden, Harris and other Democrats in 2024 for suggesting in the report that Biden could not remember when his son Beau died. Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015. 

In February 2024, following the release of the report, Biden shot back at Hur: ‘There’s some attention paid to some language in the report about my recollection of events. There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that?’

Harris called the report ‘gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate.’

The recently released audio recordings show it was Biden who brought up his son and could not remember when Beau died. 

‘So, during this time when you were living at Chain Bridge Road and there were documents relating to the Penn Biden Center, or the Biden Institute, or the Cancer Moonshot or your book, where did you keep papers that related to those things that you were actively working on?’ Hur asked Biden in the interview. 

‘Well, um … I, I, I, I, I don’t know. This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?’ Biden responded. 

‘Yes, sir,’ Hur said. 

‘Remember, in this timeframe, my son is either been deployed or is dying, and, and so it was and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the president,’ Biden continued. ‘I’m not — and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she (Hillary Clinton) had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did. And so I hadn’t, I hadn’t, at this point — even though I’m at Penn, I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I’d be running for president. And, and so what was happening, though — what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th.’ 

Others present during the interview responded that Beau Biden died in 2015. 

Trump has called an alleged cover-up of Biden’s health a ‘scandal’ and has argued that White House staffers were controlling the administration through the use of an autopen. 

Autopen signatures are automatically produced by a machine, as opposed to an authentic, handwritten signature. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project first investigated the Biden administration’s use of an autopen earlier in 2025 and found that the same signature was on a bevvy of executive orders and other official documents, while Biden’s signature on the document announcing his departure from the 2024 race varied from the apparent machine-produced signature.

‘Whoever had control of the ‘AUTOPEN’ is looking to be a bigger and bigger scandal by the moment,’ Trump posted to Truth Social in May.

President Donald Trump and members of his Cabinet will spearhead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts, now that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is stepping aside from leading the initiative. 

‘The DOGE leaders are each and every member of the president’s cabinet and the president himself, who is wholeheartedly committed to cutting waste, fraud and abuse from our government,’ White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday at a White House press briefing. 

‘The entire Cabinet understands the need to cut government waste, fraud and abuse,’ Leavitt said. ‘And each Cabinet secretary at their respective agencies is committed to that. That’s why they were working hand in hand with Elon Musk. And they’ll continue to work with their respective DOGE employees who have onboarded as political appointees at all of these agencies. So surely the mission of DOGE will continue, and many DOGE employees are now political appointees and employees of our government.’

Since January, Musk has been heading up DOGE, which was tasked with cutting $2 trillion from the federal government’s budget through efforts to slash spending, government programs and the federal workforce.

DOGE’s efforts to cut waste has led to roughly $175 billion in savings due to asset sales, contract cancellations, fraud payment cuts, in addition to other steps to eliminate costs, according to a May 26 update from DOGE’s website. That translates to roughly $1,086.96 in savings per taxpayer, according to the website. 

Musk announced his departure in an X post. 

‘As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,’ Musk said on X Wednesday. ‘The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.’

Fox News’ Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this report. 

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., sided with a Chicago-area toy company on Thursday, blocking five executive orders signed by President Donald Trump that imposed tariffs on Chinese imports.

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras determined the International Economic Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorize Trump to impose the tariffs in his executive orders.

Contreras granted a motion for a preliminary injunction, filed by the toy company, Learning Resources, Inc., which will be stayed for 14 days in case the administration decides to appeal the decision.

Trump announced his ‘Liberation Day’ reciprocal tariff plan on April 2, imposing a 10% baseline tariff on all countries.

In certain countries, hostile negotiations led to even higher levies, with taxes on Chinese imports reaching 145%.

Rick Woldenberg, CEO of Learning Resources, said in April the third-generation family business that had been manufacturing in China for four decades would face an almost 98% increase in its tariff bill.

He said the $2.3 million the company paid in 2024 would jump to $100.2 million in 2025. 

‘I wish I had $100 million,’ Woldenberg wrote in a statement. ‘Honest to God, no exaggeration: It feels like the end of days.’

China produces 97% of America’s imported baby carriages, 96% of its artificial flowers and umbrellas, 95% of its fireworks, 93% of its children’s coloring books and 90% of its combs, according to a report from the Macquarie investment bank.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled the administration overstepped its authority over tariffs under IEEPA.

‘The Constitution assigns Congress the exclusive powers to ‘lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,’ and to ‘regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,’’ the court wrote in its opinion. ‘The question in the two cases before the court is whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (‘IEEPA’) delegates these powers to the President in the form of authority to impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world.’

Three judges, appointed by former Presidents Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and Trump, found IEEPA did not ‘confer such unbounded authority.’

The Trump administration appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, but it is unclear what goods will be subject to tariffs in the meantime, Reuters reported.

‘Foreign countries’ nonreciprocal treatment of the United States has fueled America’s historic and persistent trade deficits,’ White House spokesperson Kush Desai told FOX Business after the decision. ‘These deficits have created a national emergency that has decimated American communities, left our workers behind, and weakened our defense industrial base — facts that the court did not dispute.’ 

‘It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency,’ Desai added. ‘President Trump pledged to put America First, and the Administration is committed to using every lever of executive power to address this crisis and restore American Greatness.’

FOX Business’ Greg Wehner and Bill Mears, and Reuters contributed to this report.

Agents and directors at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) received an email from leadership on Thursday instructing them not to participate in Pride Month in their professional capacity, a departure from the tone of the Biden administration’s bureau.

‘I’ve received several questions about the FBI’s stance on Pride Month and what related activities FBI divisions and employees should or should not participate in,’ FBI Assistant Director for Public Affairs Ben Williamson said in an email obtained by Fox News Digital addressed to assistant directors in charge and special agents in charge on Thursday morning. 

‘So, I want to take the opportunity to make FBI leadership’s expectations clear: There should be no official FBI actions, events, or messaging regarding Pride Month.’

The email explains that employees are ‘free to do as you like’ in their ‘personal capacity’ or ‘on your own time.’

‘But on FBI time, using FBI resources and your Bureau affiliation, you and your divisions are expected to take no official actions or issue any specific messaging,’ Williamson said, adding that the ‘stance in no way lessens the FBI’s commitment to serve and protect every American in our country or welcoming colleagues from all walks of life.’

‘What it does mean is ensuring that the American people see we are focused only on our core mission.’

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment. 

Shifting away from official celebrations of Pride Month represents a shift from messaging during the Biden administration, which saw several examples of the bureau promoting the month, including taking part in a Kansas City Pridefest and mentioning Pride Month in press releases.

The Biden administration faced criticism from conservatives in recent years after the White House and departments vocally supported Pride Month, which is observed for the month of June, with formal celebrations. 

Then-President Joe Biden hosted a ‘Pride Month 2023’ event on the White House lawn, decorating the area with rainbow motifs and the ‘Progress Pride flag.’

‘Today, the #FBI raised the #pride flag at our headquarters in support of our #LGBTQ colleagues,’ the FBI posted on social media in June 2021. ‘We thank them for their contributions to the FBI and the country. #PrideMonth.’

The email comes after the Trump administration has shifted away from diversity, equity and inclusion messaging and programs in federal government, instead focusing on meritocracy and the individual missions of departments.

‘Let good cops be cops—and rebuild trust in the FBI,’ FBI Director Kash Patel said in his first statement after being sworn in to lead the bureau. 

The Louisiana rapper who was pardoned by President Donald Trump once said ‘F— Donald Trump’ in a 2017 song. 

NBA YoungBoy, whose real name is Kentrell Gaulden, has been thanking Trump for the reprieve, writing in a recent Instagram post that the president is ‘giving me the opportunity to keep building — as a man, as a father, and as an artist.’ 

However, in his song ‘Red Rum,’ the 25-year-old Gaulden once rapped ‘And f— Donald Trump b—-, that NBA s—.’ 

Pardon czar Alice Marie Johnson was asked about the remark during an appearance on ‘Fox & Friends’ earlier this morning. 

‘So a couple of rappers have come out or let’s say one in particular — YoungBoy. One of his lyrics in 2017 that he put out is ‘F Donald Trump’ and some more disparaging things to say. He had a violent past of assault and battery. Multiple cases of that, and firearm, drug and fraud charges. What sold you on him getting a second chance?’ co-host Brian Kilmeade asked her. 

‘I looked at the age and how this young man grew up. He grew up in a very impoverished neighborhood. And the things that he had to face, NBA YoungBoy growing up. Most of those were gun charges without the guns being discharged,’ she said. 

‘But I also looked at what happened to him on a set where he was filming a video and he had a prop in the set. That’s really where this came from. He didn’t come out of prison. He was given a pardon so he could have a new beginning. And the officers who in this particular case they came at him as though he was a terrorist and he was on a set, filming for a video. They gave him a gun charge for that… the officers who did this were all investigated and fired. So I look at the elements of what happened to this young man,’ Johnson added. 

Last year, Gaulden was sentenced by a federal judge in Utah after he acknowledged possessing weapons despite being a convicted felon. However, he reached an agreement that resolved Utah state charges against him and settled two sets of federal charges against him — one carried a 23-month sentence and the other ordered five years of probation and a $200,000 fine.  

‘I want to thank President Trump for granting me a pardon and for giving me the opportunity to keep building — as a man, as a father, and as an artist,’ Gaulden, whose stage moniker stands for ‘Never Broke Again,’ wrote on his Instagram. ‘This moment means a lot.’  

‘It opens the door to a future I’ve worked hard for and I am fully prepared to step into this,’ Gaulden added.  

Gaulden was released from federal prison in March and sent to home confinement after receiving credit for time served, his attorney Drew Findling told the Associated Press. With home confinement finished last month, the pardon means he won’t have to follow the terms of his probation, including drug testing, he said. 

The rapper has acknowledged that he possessed a Glock 21 .45-caliber pistol and a Masterpiece Arms MPA30T 9mm handgun while filming a rap video in Baton Rouge. He has also said he had a Sig Sauer 9mm semi-automatic pistol at his home in Huntsville, Utah. He had agreed to give up the guns.  

Gaulden had previously been convicted in Louisiana of aggravated assault with a firearm. He had also pleaded guilty in November to his role in a prescription drug fraud ring that operated out of his home in Utah. He had to pay a $25,000 fine and was given no prison time. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

The moment that Elon Musk’s most ardent critics have been waiting for has finally arrived as he exits the Trump administration and hands over control of the Department of Government Efficiency. They will assure us that the results have been an embarrassing failure, but they could not be more wrong. 

Musk has forever changed how Americans look at federal spending, and that is a wonderful thing.

First of all, DOGE estimates that it has saved taxpayers $160 billion. A sneering NPR claims that there is only data to prove $63 billion, but even if that is true, that’s an enormous amount of waste being cut. 

Was Musk shooting for a higher number? Sure. This is, after all, a guy who is literally trying to get to Mars. But the savings DOGE has already found and will continue to find until it sunsets in July of next year are nothing to sneeze at.

The impact of Musk and DOGE also goes well beyond the mere grand total dollar figure. It is the speed with which they identified wasteful spending and the absurdity of many of the programs they uncovered and cut that has proven to be a game-changer.

Who can forget the discovery that we gave a former Taliban member $132,000 to promote peace, or $20 million for Sesame Street to be broadcast in Iraq, along with boatloads of dollars for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs throughout our government and around the globe?

Over the first 60 days of the Trump administration, it seemed like every hour some new and ridiculous spending was being identified. What Americans had felt as a vague sense that the federal government is wasteful became one concrete example after another of blatant and frivolous waste.

These revelations have moved the Overton window in American discourse around spending. We will no longer accept blue-ribbon commissions with no power studying the problem for years on end, only to do nothing. We want action now.

And while DOGE still requires approval from cabinet secretaries to finalize its cuts, they have generally been willing and able to do so.

Musk and DOGE have also shown that it is OK to make mistakes when zealously safeguarding the taxpayer’s dime, because errors can be quickly fixed.

For example, when funding for the National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg, Md., was cut early in the administration, officials appealed to Homeland Security Secretary Kristie Noem, who recognized the importance of the program which trains100,000 firefighters a year. Funding was restored.

Slashing federal spending is not like a haircut. You can put back things that are wrongly cut, so there is no reason to be paralyzed by fear when trimming.

Perhaps more than anything else, what Musk has succeeded in doing with DOGE is to open up the hood of federal spending and give us all a sobering look at the engine.

This is very similar to what he did when he bought Twitter and allowed journalists to produce the Twitter Files, revealing many shady secrets that proved the platform had been harshly censoring conservative viewpoints.

This kind of radical transparency is anathema to a deep state that demands to be like a black box, where our money flows in, never comes out, and we don’t get to look inside.

Bureaucrats have clearly been treating the federal budget like a slush fund for all manner of pet projects and silly endeavors, and boy do they hate having any light exposed on their massive contracts to export condoms everywhere or study trans animals.

For decades, federal spending has been like a giant Rock of Gibraltar that nobody could get their arms or heads around. But now, instead of focusing on the gigantic forest of spending, Musk has found ways to identify the dying trees.

It is natural that Musk and his supporters feel some measure of disappointment that more could not have been cut, and that some Republicans in Congress don’t seem eager to codify cuts to what has been found. But politics is, as they say, the art of the possible.

Today, thanks to Musk, there are far more possibilities out there, far more programs that bring little value to be exposed, far more opportunity for the American people to see the senseless spending in black and white.

Finally, and it’s an important point, federal bureaucrats, the people who spend our money, suddenly have to look over their shoulder and be prepared to justify that spending, and when they glance up to see who is peeking at their work, it’s not just Musk, it’s not just DOGE, it is the American people.