U.S. Treasury Department

Re “Treasury official quits after resisting Musk push to access payment system” (Feb. 1):

Who would you rather trust sending out trillions of dollars of American taxpayer’s man, the world’s richest man or David Lebryk, a career civil servant? Mr. Lebryk noted, “our work may be unknown to most of the public,” which is the scary truth. Some “unknown” career bureaucrat is sending out trillions of our hard-earned money with zero transparency to the American public? At a $37 trillion debt load, an untrained, blindfolded monkey could distribute payments willy nilly and never get to a double digit trillion dollar deficit in two lifetimes. I’ll take my chances with Elon Musk.

— William David Stone, Irvine

Immigration protest

Re: “Thousands rally, block freeway to protest Trump’s deportation plans” (Feb. 3):

Protest organizer Ariana Gonzalez asks “why do you hate us?” in an attempt to portray law enforcement as some kind of personal insult. Entering the U.S. illegally is a crime, and everyone knows that the penalty is deportation. However, this protest may inspire hatred of the methods used. Blocking a freeway, spray-painting walls and vandalizing cars are not likely to win the hearts and minds of the people. If you want to increase the public groundswell toward proper enforcement of immigration laws, this is a good start.

— David Gee, Palmdale

Trump’s tariffs

Trump has outlined a plan to avoid the continuous money gouging from the U.S. by foreign countries. We’re still in inflationary times, brought on by the Biden administration. Prices were not going down during Biden’s time in office. Now we have hope that prices will go down by a little maneuvering from Trump’s presidential powers. Trump needs to get the country’s deficit down from the trillions that we’re indebted for. We all want good end results in what we’re trying to achieve by prices going down and money in our pockets. My analogy would be this fact: During WWII America had a policy of “meatless days” well before the terminological expression we use today. It was for citizens to go without meat products on certain days so that our soldiers were well fed under wartime conditions to which we won WWII. It’s the end results that are rewarding after “some pain.”

— Lou Solo, Gardena