Editors’ Blog

Clearing Out OPM

According to a report from The Federal News Network out a half hour ago, at a meeting this morning Trump administration officials told staff of the Office of Personnel Management to prepare plans for a 70% cut in staff and programs at the agency. Agency executives were tasked with working over the weekend to prepare plans for the 70% staffing cut with final plans ready no later than Monday. Remember that OPM is essentially the HR department for the federal government — covering not only the immediate mechanics of employment but administering retirement and health care benefits as well as other programs. OPM is the source of those “resignation” emails and it’s the agency which appears to be most directly under the control of people working at the direction of Elon Musk.

Listen To This: Trump’s First Flop

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Trump’s embarrassing rollback of his funding freeze and his firing of the inspectors general.

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Trump DOJ Rolls Out New Payment Plans (Yeah, In That Way…) Prime Badge
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I wanted to note some details in the rapid evolution of Trump’s misrule over the criminal justice system. It is old hat, expected really, that a Trump-run Justice Department won’t investigate, let alone indict, Donald Trump or any of his top deputies. We also saw in Trump’s first term that accomplices and key supporters will be pardoned or have investigations shuttered. But the dawn of Trump’s second term now sees the rollout of a host of new Justice products and payment plans.

This week, matters took a degree of a step forward (or backward, depending on your metaphor) when Trump had his acting U.S. attorney abandon the criminal case against former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE). Fortenberry wasn’t some high-profile Trump ally. And his crimes weren’t particularly political or Trump-adjacent. He got caught taking laundered political contributions from a Nigerian billionaire and then repeatedly lied about it to the FBI. Pretty generic graft, pretty garden-variety political corruption.

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White House Says We Were Out of the Loop—ON EVERYTHING Prime Badge
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We’re getting clearer indications now that the effort to bamboozle, frighten and entice federal workers into resigning their positions in exchange for non-existent “buy outs” was very much a product of the Elon Musk/DOGE cabal now wilding through and embedding itself within the federal government. We don’t need a lot of confirmation: they left a slew of meme Easter eggs scattered through the process more or less announcing it. What’s notable is that the White House is now going out of its way to tell reporters that it definitely wasn’t them. They were, in that well-worn phrase, out of the loop, etc.

I suspect this is true, as far as it goes. But that understates — straight up ignores, really — the degree to which Donald Trump and his top advisors have, entirely by design and intentionally, spun up a series of independent fiefdoms, with Musk’s being the largest, to move fast and break things and push every boundary in the interest of a number of overlapping but distinct ideological agendas. In other words, they probably did “bypass key Trump officials.” But that’s pretty much the idea when you wind up guys like Elon Musk and Russell Vought with “let’s be legends” gusto and give them the keys.

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Trump-Musk Coup Joint Collapses One Day In

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.

Calm Amidst the Storm Prime Badge
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One of the features of Donald Trump’s flood-the-zone tactics is not only to overwhelm opponents but to spark a mix of overwhelm, angst and confusion that drives those opponents to fall into arguing amongst themselves. If you can’t meaningfully strike back at the instigator, that ravaged energy has to seek release somewhere and it erupts in doom-scrolling, competitive doomerism and most importantly infighting over who’s responsible for what the instigator is doing. If you can’t lash out at the boss you kick the dog. I’m as susceptible to all of this as anyone. But I would be lying if I didn’t confess that I find those responses eternally exhausting down to the depths of my soul. I’ll just share my own thoughts.

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Update

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.

BREAKING: Musk Takeover of OPM (Federal HR Office)

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.

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Trump Sparks Constitutional Crisis, Seizing Budget Authority from Congress Prime Badge
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So I write the following with the caveat that everything in the unfolding Trump administration is cloaked in secrecy and uncertain from one moment to the next. But overnight President Trump kicked off, what can only be called both a wide-ranging constitutional crisis, and also very likely a fiscal crisis. He has unilaterally halted – as of yesterday evening, according to an executive memorandum first reported by independent journalist Marisa Kabas – all “grant, loan and federal assistance programs” for at least 90 days. This appears to include everything the federal government does beyond the salaries of federal employees, direct checks to Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries and the US military. Mainstream media journalists are calling this “temporary” or a “pause.” But that’s like saying you’re “temporarily” shutting down Congress or “pausing” elections. “Temporary” isn’t a meaningful term in this case. It’s hard to think through everything affected. Already the halt to USAID budgets has cut off funding for the prison guards holding 9,500 ISIS prisoners in northeastern Syria, according to Syria expert Charles Lister. Cancer research, major parts of every state’s budget, the grants that keep the local daycare center running. This hits basically everything.

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Big Picture

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.

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