DOGE updates + Liberation Day Tariff Reactions with Ben Shapiro and Antonio Gracias

Antonio Gracias said DOGE traced a sharp rise in “Enumeration Beyond Entry” Social Security numbers to asylum, parole and notice-to-appear cases. He described a path from asylum filing to work authorization to an automatically mailed Social Security card, and said 23% of sampled records lacked fingerprints.

Gracias also claimed 1.3 million people in the examined cohort were on Medicaid and that thousands appeared on voter rolls, with more than 1,000 voting in one state. He said some cases were referred for prosecution, but acknowledged the review covered only a handful of states; NPR later described the voter-fraud claims as dubious. (OPB)

Ben Shapiro’s sharpest tariff critique was mechanical: the administration’s “reciprocal” figure was based on trade imbalances, not simply the foreign tariff rate. Israel had just moved to eliminate its remaining U.S. tariffs yet still faced a 17% U.S. tariff, making the reciprocity label hard to read literally. (United States Trade Representative)

Chamath Palihapitiya argued the White House may tolerate equity-market pain because lower long-term Treasury yields reduce the cost of refinancing roughly $6 trillion of debt. His model requires Fed cuts and bank deregulation to keep credit flowing; he explicitly said the strategy creates recession risk if those pieces fail.

Chamath said the tariffs instantly turned a profitable, century-old American family manufacturer into a business facing potential losses of hundreds of millions of dollars. It employs thousands in America and competes with China, but production in other countries exposed it to tariffs, illustrating how blunt country-level levies can hit intended beneficiaries.

Friedberg pointed to the last trade war’s hidden fiscal cost: USDA authorized up to $12 billion in 2018 and $16 billion in 2019 to cushion farmers from retaliatory trade damage. His warning was that tariffs can protect one sector while creating losses elsewhere that government later has to absorb. (GovDelivery)

Chamath’s January credit-default “insurance” trade had moved sharply in his favor, with a roughly $1 million premium on $1 billion of exposure becoming worth about $7 million. He said widening CDS spreads matter because tariff-driven revenue declines can trip debt covenants and turn recession risk into a corporate-default cycle.

Ben Shapiro disclosed that Daily Wire generated about $220 million in revenue last year and said a public listing has crossed management’s mind. The comment followed Newsmax’s volatile IPO; Shapiro viewed its surge as retail-driven and expected the valuation to settle far below its roughly $20 billion peak.