Important Takeaways:

• The years-old contract was discovered by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and reveals that the Pentagon awarded $9.15 million to Thomson Reuters Special Services, LLC (TRSS).
• The contract was filed under the Pentagon’s ‘Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services’ and ‘Research and Development’ programs.
• The connection to the media company is likely what led to the outrage from DOGE, Musk and Trump over the huge contract.
• In a post to his Truth Social account on Thursday, Trump wrote: ‘DOGE: Looks like Radical Left Reuters was paid $9,000,000 by the Department of Defense to study ‘large scale social deception.’ GIVE BACK THE MONEY, NOW!’
• On the government website that tracks and publishes contracts the $9 million award to TRSS is listed on the purchase order as being for ‘Active Social Engineering Defense (ASED) Large Scale Social Deception (LSD).’
• The goal of the ASED programs is to enhance U.S. cybersecurity by creating systems that detect, analyze and mitigate threats that exploit human psychology.
• There is a note on the contract award stating that some funding provided in 2020 and beyond was related to COVID-19 and included Disaster Emergency Fund Code (DEFC) ‘N,’ which means that money was distributed in an emergency capacity.

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