Phyllis Fong, who was investigating Neuralink, "forcefully removed "

[mellosouls]

Less annoying web page here, same story:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/29/usda-inspect...

[r0ckarong]

Nothing to see here. Just a massive conflict of interest from an unelected foreigner exacting power over your government.

[monocasa]

She was born in Philadelphia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Fong

[amazingamazing]

i actually have no clue - but isnt musk a u.s. citizen? it would actually surprise me if he were not.

[bmitc]

An illegal immigrant at that.

[gdilla]

Lots of bros here who support this for some reason. Wait till they come for your 500K salary.

[smsm42]

Trump was elected, and he was born in the US, though he does have German ancestry. As an immigrant myself, I personally find it very worrying though that it becomes normal to use foreign descent as a slur in the American political debate. I thought at least the left is supportive of immigrants, but looks like it's conditional on political views and no person of foreign descent can feel safe from attack because of their origin.

[jmye]

While Republicans cheer.

[bmitc]

Our government is literally falling in a matter of weeks. It's being assaulted, and we're all just standing by.

[khazhoux]

The people spoke very clearly in November: they wanted this.

[agieocean]

Not everyone's standing by I've been working on hardened long range communications for cheap so the people that need it can have it. But thats just me, there's tons of people fighting back but those stories don't tend to make the news because it spits in the face of the prevailing narrative that people want this.

[sleazy_b]

One thing you can do is shun employees of associated companies (Amazon, Tesla, Facebook) and refuse to give them a job. That requires some sacrifice though.

[zfg]

Hitler got rid of Germany's democracy in 53 days:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/hitler-ger...

Maybe Musk and Trump can beat his record.

[amazingamazing]

I wonder about the purpose of many of these actions. Since they’re done via EOs they can easily be reversed.

[therealcamino]

The purpose of firing Inspectors General en masse is so that there are no independent overseers to investigate illegal or corrupt actions within the executive branch during your term in office.

Reversing it four years later is just too late.

[nico]

If this continues, it won’t be easy to track and revert 4 years of EOs. And it will be impossible to undo all the consequences

[llamaimperative]

The specific law that Trump is very obviously breaking is the Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022, which says Congress must be notified 30 days in advance and given "substantive" rationale for dismissing inspectors general.

This law was passed specifically in response to Trump breaking the antecedent law, Inspector General Reform Act of 2008, during his first term.

Will the "party of law and order" do anything? Nope.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11546

Good on Ms Fong for refusing to leave.

[93po]

Title makes it sound like she was in an Neuralink office and physically shoved out the door. The non-clickbait version is that she is in the same agency that started a Neuralink investigation (due to perceive conflicts of interest in its board) and her dismissal has zero substantive connection to neuralink or elon.

[sho_hn]

Are there any good blogs that are chronicling the USA Federal gov's slow descent into facism and overt corruption, just collecting and archiving pieces like this with a classiciation/categorization etc.?

I think it's an unprecedented opportunity to record the history of a downfall using modern tools, and future generations might benefit enormously.

When I learned about the disruption of the Weimar Republic in highschool, a thing our teacher did was make copious use of newspaper clippings to explain the delta between ground truth and public sentiment, and how certain narratives increased in frequency, etc. He had personally spent quite some time in old archives and on microfilm readers to create his little library. Something like this, but with much more data.

A friend of mine did her master's in political science on crawling data in Islamic extremist social media cycles and trying to correlate activity there with a dataset on terrorist events, trying to find out if you could anticipate them somehow.

This is a loose collection of thoughts, but I think there's something there in the signal.

[NicoJuicy]

US is becoming a banana republic

[drowsspa]

Brazilians were joking "welcome to CONMEBOL, South Korea" when their president tried that coup. I guess the US wants to join in as well

(CONMEBOL being South America's soccer/football association)

[apples_oranges]

I thought this was to be the American century, now I'm just fascinated and wonder what it will be instead.

[burgerrito]

Oh, Banana Co...

[fuzztester]

becoming? past tense is more like it. also Google your own term in Wikipedia to see the history of it.

[darkwater]

The US is starting to look like Berlusconi's Italy 30 years ago in this regard... The only difference is that Berlusconi was Italian and could be elected, when politicians were not obeying as he expected.

[JumpCrisscross]

> US is starting to look like Berlusconi's Italy 30 years ago

Call a spade a spade. It’s looking like South Africa. Our government has been coöpted by South African patronage politics.

[fuzztester]

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/phy...

hmmm. let's see ...

$ echo "Phyllis Fong, who was investigating Elon Musk's brain implant startup Neuralink, "forcefully removed from office" after refusing termination order" | ...

oh, never mind.

I'm too lazy to write the regex for getting this output from the above input:

Elon Musk's brain implant forcefully removed after termination order

[shitter]

  echo "Phyllis Fong, who was investigating Elon Musk's brain implant startup Neuralink, "forcefully removed from office" after refusing termination order" | sed -E "s/Phyllis Fong, who was investigating (.*) startup Neuralink,(.*) from office(.*) refusing/\1\2\3/"

[I_dream_of_Gen1]

I have to laugh at the trump administration idiocy with saying they are removing "these rogue, partisan bureaucrats", when, clearly, she's been there through 6 administrations... SMH.

[tzs]

Inspector Generals are there to try to stop waste, fraud, and abuse. They aren't there to try to enforce competence.

[smitty1e]

I gather that I'm further right than much of the HN crowd, having been on the edge of the Tea Party movement &c.

The presence of the Citrus Caesar and the billionaire boys is due to substantial, ongoing problems. The U.S. Government, like any code base, has accrued much cruft over the last century. Whether or not DJT has any lasting positive effect isn't knowable yet.

The risk of this current course being a cure worse than the disease is substantial. The two things to keep in mind in any case are:

- trust, but verify

- look for the substantive reform, not lipstick on the pig

[malfist]

What part of the cure is illegally firing someone who was investigating you for a valid, non political reason?

There's no cure in that, just corruption.

[projektfu]

Sure, fine, whatever. However, when you fire all the inspectors general, without any evidence that they're being bribed, you're basically saying that you're planning corruption. The whole purpose of the position is to make sure the government is doing its job and firing them sends a signal that you are putting the watchdog role in a political light.

[dralley]

>- look for the substantive reform, not lipstick on the pig

Mitch McConnell made it his personal mission to prevent "substantive reform" of any kind from being passed through the Senate.

[llamaimperative]

A third thing to keep in mind: law is law and must be followed.

[watwut]

They are looking to kill the pig, eat the meat, blame women, trans and minorities for no one else being able to benefit from the pig anymore. And then their supporters will consider themselves primary victims and blame everyone except themselves and people they voted for for harm caused to them too.

[likeabatterycar]

Nice truncating the title and removing context.

If you got fired from literally any private sector company and refused to leave your office, security would escort you out immediately.

[anigbrowl]

Except that the rules about firing public officials and inspector generals in particular are different, by law. Accusing the headline writers of omitting context while ignoring that key difference makes your comment reek of hypocrisy.

[iancmceachern]

Title was trimmed to fit into the character limits imposed by HN. I did my best to preserve meaning.