'Maybe they should start there?' Ex-prosecutor turns tables on Trump and Elon Musk

David McAfee

Feb. 12, 2025, 12:23 p.m.

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, are ignoring the obvious as they attempt to gut federal research funding, an ex-prosecutor said Wednesday.

Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance weighed in on the Trump administration's recent budget cuts, specifically noting that one of the targeted cuts affects her own daughter's work.

"Sometimes, it gets personal," Vance said in a Substack post dated Wednesday.

ALSO READ: Elon Musk's DOGE boys think this is a video game as Trump plots his 2nd coup

Vance noted that her daughter "is finishing up a master’s degree."

"Her work is completely over my head, but it involves the intersection of nutrition, agriculture, and climate change," Vance wrote, adding, "In other words, she’s doing important work, real work that could help make many lives better. She hopes to continue her work at the Ph.D. level, but it’s the kind of work the Trump administration’s new policy on NIH grants, which is now the subject of two lawsuits, would seriously hamper."

Vance further said that, "All sorts of important research, and the training of Ph.D. candidates and others to do the work itself would suffer."

But, according to the TV legal analyst, there is a line item on the federal budget that Trump is ballooning instead of cutting.

"As for waste, Donald Trump’s weekend trip to the Super Bowl reportedly could have cost as much as tens of millions of dollars between the flight and the security. During his first term in office, Trump family members’ travel, much of it business related, cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. As the Washington Post put it following his first month in office, 'Barely a month into the Trump presidency, the unusually elaborate lifestyle of America’s new first family is straining the Secret Service and security officials, stirring financial and logistical concerns in several local communities, and costing far beyond what has been typical for past presidents — a price tag that, based on past assessments of presidential travel and security costs, could balloon into the hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a four-year term,'" the attorney wrote. "If DOGE wants to cut costs, maybe instead of gutting cancer research, they should start there?"

Read it here.