🚀 The Department of Gaslighting Everyone (DOGE)

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🎧 On Lever Time: The anxious generation, brought to you by the algorithm.

⬇️ Spend five minutes reading this 995-word newsletter to learn about:

• LEVER SCOOP: Musk targets ed contracts while getting a new deal with NASA.
• A potential bid to trade California for Greenland.
• The big bills funding the pro-penny lobby.
• A new push to get teenagers off “behavioral cocaine.”

🤝 A match made in Greenland — or Red, White, and Blueland. Just weeks after a California initiative to secede from the union advanced, more than 200,000 Danes signed a petition in support of buying the West Coast state. Will California be traded for Greenland and a first-round draft pick for a country to be named later? And will Greenland get renamed, as one Republican congressman is proposing? Weirder things have happened (here’s looking at you, Gulf of America).

• Today on the Hill, Sen. Ted Cruz is convening a committee hearing titled “Nuuk and Cranny: Looking at the Arctic and Greenland’s Geostrategic Importance to U.S. Interests.” A recent investigation by The Lever found that a U.S. takeover of Greenland would most likely enrich the president’s billionaire tech donors, whose investments target the island’s natural resources.

🎢 We’re all trying to find the guys who did this. Disney executives are suddenly concerned that their $200-per-person park tickets are pricing out middle-class families. Insert Hot Dog Guy Meme.

👹 Mask off. Inflation jumped by more than expected last month, a new poll shows Americans think Trump isn’t focused on lowering costs, and one GOP politician just went on CNN admitting that Republicans do not want to lower prices. 

🚱 But they campaigned on Making America Healthy Again. The Trump administration is withdrawing a proposed rule to limit the amount of toxic chemicals known as PFASthat can be dumped into water supplies. The move — torn out of the Project 2025 playbook that Trump previously disavowed — came days after the president’s EPA nominee Lee Zeldin promised tough regulation of PFAS, which have been linked to increased cancer risk. Read more about how chemical companies hid the dangers of PFAS.

🚔 Fortress predicted everything. For-profit detention company CoreCivic has already offered ICE an increase of 28,000 beds since Trump took office — which could mean $1.5 billion in new revenue, its CEO told investors yesterday. The Lever recently reported that the CEO of the prison giant GEO Group — which Attorney General Pam Bondi used to lobby for — told investors “we’re looking at a theoretical potential doubling of all of our services.” The two contractors already receive more than $1 billion annually in government contracts. This 1992 sci-fi movie now seems like a prophecy.

Futurism, (02/11/2025)

Connecticut lawmakers are considering a new bill that would limit minors’ exposure to social media algorithms designed to get them addicted to scrolling. State Attorney General William Tong likened algorithms used by platforms like TikTok to “behavioral cocaine” for children. Tong previously sued Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) in 2023, accusing the app of targeting children and preteens for “compulsive and extended use.”

Elon Musk speaks during an event in the Oval Office as President Donald Trump and Musk’s son listen. (AP Photo / Alex Brandon)

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Musk targets ed contracts, while getting a new space contract. As Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was reportedly canceling federal education contracts in the name of frugality, Musk’s rocket company SpaceX this week cemented an updated NASA contract adding millions of dollars to its already massive deal with the space agency. It’s a reminder that Gil Scott Heron’s lyrics predicted everything. 

The SpaceX-NASA partnership is worth billions. The new “supplemental” contract dated Feb. 10 adds $7.5 million to SpaceX’s work on NASA’s human landing system. The transaction this week obligated $38 million to Musk's company, as part of its overall deal with NASA. The agency has already committed $3.9 billion to the SpaceX project, which is estimated to cost up to $4.4 billion by the middle of President Donald Trump’s term.

Houston, we have a problem. Trump has nominated Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator. Isaacman is a billionaire Musk associate who runs a payment processing company that is regulated by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Musk has been trying to dismantle. Last month, Isaacman’s company was fined by federal securities regulators for not properly disclosing millions of dollars of payments to company executives’ relatives. 

The Department of Gaslighting Everyone. Musk’s DOGE has not announced it is reviewing NASA contracts – a reminder that his selective definition of government “efficiency” seems designed to gaslight everyone into ignoring his own federal largesse. Asked yesterday about potential conflicts of interest in his dual roles as government auditor and government contractor, he insisted: “If you see any contract where it was awarded to SpaceX and it wasn’t by far the best value for money for the taxpayer, let me know, because every one of them was.”

In 2023, 350 tech industry leaders — including Musk, OpenAI chief Sam Altman, and a top Google AI researcher — signed an open letter warning that “the risk of extinction from [artificial intelligence] should be a global priority.” Two years later, The New York Times reports that at this week’s AI summit in Paris, “there’s much less talk about AI risks” because “executives seemed to have realized it’s easier to get policymakers excited about AI if they’re not worried it’s going to kill them.”

43 years old

Median U.S. renter’s age in 2024, up from 33 years old in 2021. (Source: Fortune)

🦈 Shark attacks declined sharply in 2024. It’s not clear why.

🥜 If you love peanut butter but hate the mess of a new jar, this kitchen gadget is a game changer. Trust us.

🎄If you ever doubted that Die Hard was a Christmas movie, this will put your doubts to rest (volume up).

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