As you’ve no doubt seen the White House attempt to institute an illegal, unilateral government shutdown in the form of freezing all federal government grants, loans and financial assistance collapsed this afternoon when the Office of Management and Budget rescinded the “memo” on which the attempt was based. It’s a major defeat — technically, a faceplant — for the White House just over a week into the presidency. Trying to recover from the embarrassment, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted on Twitter that the freeze is ongoing on the basis of the earlier executive orders targeting “wokeness” which indefinitely froze funding of things like cancer research and foreign aid. Those comments were apparently part of what got a judge this afternoon to grant a restraining order since the White House has left unclear what it is and is not currently freezing.

As of late Tuesday evening the administration seems to be rolling out a series of “waivers,” “exceptions” and “oh, that’s not what we meants” as they realize what is funded by grants and the bad news stories proliferate. PEPFAR is now in the clear under a new “if it makes people die” waiver.

There’s a growing list of similar examples.

Meanwhile the Musk-inflected “buy out” offer seems to promise a level of “buy out” specifically prohibited by federal law and a close reading of the offer actually may require “resigned” federal workers to earn out their “buy out” money by continuing to work — even as the money can’t legally be paid out. It’s complicated.

This is a paywalled article at Wired. But it makes a pretty good case that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is now basically being run at its highest levels by people installed by and working with Elon Musk. In other words, “DOGE” seems to be calling the shots at OPM, even though it’s run by people who aren’t even federal employees. Most of these people appear to come from Musk’s various companies. Wired declined to publish the names of two of the people because of their age. One graduated from high school last summer.

Some of this is already known. The nominee to run the agency, Scott Kupor, is a partner at the Andreessen/Horowitz VC firm. They’re aligned with Musk politically. So that’s consistent with the rest of the story. But it seems the upper echelons of the agency has already been stocked with a mix of Musk’s people and Republican operatives, notwithstanding the fact that this is a federal agency which is usually made up almost entirely of career staff.

Going to do a post on this later this morning. But President Trump’s decision, revealed overnight, to unilaterally and illegally shut down broad swaths of the federal government is a full scale constitutional crisis. Democrats power to stop him is very limited. But there’s one cudgel on the table. Republicans have been begging for their help to raise the debt ceiling this spring. Because they can’t control their caucuses well enough to do it themselves, despite having the votes. The minimum requirement has to be: no assistance without the President’s agreement to follow the law and the Constitution.

Minor scoop here. Hearing that Sen. Gary Peters (D) of Michigan will announce his retirement this morning at 9:30 AM. That means an open seat election in 2026.

I’ve mentioned a few times that Donald Trump is giving Democrats a big, big opening by so conspicuously surrounding himself and seeking the counsel of almost all of the country’s super-billionaires. If you’re a bruised party looking to get a footing in a populist moment, having the billionaire (at least branded as such) head of the opposite party surround himself with the country’s top billionaires and basically say, “We’re Team Billinoaire” is a pretty good opening. And the American people seem to agree.

AP has a new poll out which asked whether people think it’s a good or bad thing that the President “relies on billionaires for advice about government policy.” When I first saw the results of this poll as “good” coming in at “+12” I thought they meant “net” 12% and I thought, “eeeesh, the honeymoon phase is more intense than I thought!” But no, 12%: as in, 12% of the public think it’s a good thing. 60% think it’s not. That’s U.S. adults. The only outliers are Republicans, 20% of whom think this is a good thing. But even that is pretty feeble. To put it simply, these are terrible numbers.

Another detail out of FDA. The agency has removed pages which provide guidance to medical researchers on conducting medical trials with representative numbers of men and women and ethnic and/or racial minority groups. I think most people know this: but this isn’t a matter of symbolic diversity. Many medications and/or diseases or conditions present differently in men and woman and in people with different genetic backgrounds.