IRS staffers (precisely how many is unclear) who opted for deferred resignation program (i.e., the “buy out”) have now been informed that they need to work through May 15th.

As Elon Musk and Donald Trump, in a secondary role, steamroll through the federal government, there’s a taxonomy to the players that is important to understand. It’s semi-hidden at the moment. But you can see it showing up if you look up close and it will likely become more visible over time.

There are three big factions operating in Trump’s government with currently overlapping but very distinct aims and strategies. First, you have MAGA, which wants to punish and displace the people who made life hard for Trump in his first term and replace them with loyalists. That’s mostly about power and personal fealty to Trump. Ideology is mostly secondary to the core aim. Second, you have Christian nationalists who want to seize the power of the state to execute a top down re-traditionalization of American society and culture. Russell Vought is key to this group. The basic theory goes back into the aughts, when a faction of conservatives decided (essentially a counsel of despair) that they had lost control of American culture and that state power was required to get it back. Third are people like Elon Musk who want to radically hollow out the government, outsource its functions and replace many of those functions with novel technologies — AI, cryptocurrency, etc. This is a mix of Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” business culture combined with “dark enlightenment” Yarvinian degenerate thought.

Made a point over the weekend about “shock and awe” and how one reacts to that when often there doesn’t seem like there’s much you can do. As we see in most of history, the key in many cases is simply holding on. As I tried to convey in that post, “shock and awe” is primarily a psychological operation meant to trigger confusion, paralysis and collapse. But the impact of speed and multiplicity diminishes over time and fairly quickly. So for the literally millions of people on the direct receiving end of what’s happening right now, primarily in the federal workforce, simply holding on is “doing something.” The whole point of this effort is to create lots of faits accompli during that initial phase of disorientation and paralysis. Pretty quickly the impact of that shock and disorientation and paralysis wears off. So simply holding on through that first period is a big thing. The balance of powers and levers available start to shift. And in some cases rapidly. I’m not being pollyannaish about it. The situation still remains grave and with most of the power on one side. But they do become relatively less powerful with each day that passes. Not by much but by some.

Overnight, Wired reported that, contrary to published reports that DOGE operatives at the Treasury Department are limited to “read only” access to department payment systems, this is not true. A 25-year-old DOGE operative named Marko Elez in fact has admin privileges on these critical systems, which directly control and pay out roughly 95% of payments made by the U.S. government, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and virtually all contract payments. I can independently confirm these details based on conversations going back to the weekend. I can further report that Elez not only has full access to these systems, he has already made extensive changes to the code base for these critical payment system.

OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell released a memo this afternoon to agency heads which says that “provisions of collective bargaining agreements that conflict with management rights are unlawful and unenforceable.” The memo addresses telework issues. At least for now the memo remains online on this government server. The title of the memo is ‘Guidance on Collective Bargaining Obligations in Connection with Return to InPerson Work’.

From TPM Reader NL …

I called Senator Warner’s office to get a sense for what they are doing to raise the salience of Elon Musk’s illegal takeover of the Treasury Payments system.

The very polite staffer said that Senator Warner will be issuing a statement soon. She politely explained that this is how members of Congress communicate their position.

Dude, these people are just lost. They don’t get it or don’t want to get it.

There are many ways to skin a cat. But statements that go out via press release are meaningless. That is no longer how news works. Full stop.

I wrote a series of posts over the weekend about how to make sense, politically, strategically and even emotionally of the unfolding crisis of governance in DC. Here’s a piece about messaging and morale and another on Trump and Musk’s “shock and awe” strategies. After reading those posts, a number of TPM Readers have asked, okay, what are we supposed to do? Or what are our electeds supposed to do? I want to dig into this more later, but in this post I want to give as best a quick answer to that as I can.

We start with a piece in this morning’s Punchbowl which is simultaneously encouraging and gobsmackingly disheartening. The headline reads: Democrats ask: Why would we help Trump and the Republicans?. Most of you are probably thinking, you’re just getting to this question, guys? Well, they are. As they should, though it’s far more tentative than it should be. I suspect that’s about to change.

Let’s repeat the core fact. Republicans are in charge. As I explained here, the levers Democrats have over any of this are very limited. This is fundamentally a battle over public opinion, one in which the opposition needs to be making the case about the disastrousness of Trump’s policies. But there are levers. And they need to use them. Because even those tiny levers are key to that larger battle. Talk in itself is meaningless. Begging especially is meaningless. In fact, on its own it can be demoralizing — same old, same old, just performatively illustrating either the inability or unwillingness to act.

Right now in Washington, DC, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dominating literally everything. That will start changing quickly, at least in a limited way, in the courts. But the overriding need is for Democrats to get a seat at the table. And they can do that in several ways. The biggest way is that Republicans will need help to pass a budget and raise the debt ceiling. The rubber starts meeting the road on that front next month. Real soon. You can talk as much as you want. But the White House and congressional Republicans absolutely need that help. And Democrats need to be crystal clear that the answer is absolutely no help — without meeting their conditions. That’s where you get the seat at the table.

“They say that, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge
To which a scoundrel clings’
Steal a little and they throw you in jail
Steal a lot and they make you king”

– Bob Dylan, Sweetheart Like You

One of my and our central points of interest is the identity of these “Musk operatives” who are actually doing these things we’re hearing about throughout the federal and especially the top administrative agencies (OPM, OMB, GAO, etc.). Notably some of the best reporting on this is being done at Wired. That’s not surprising. It plays to key strengths: it’s a top flight publication, heavily plugged into the tech and Silicon Valley worlds where these guys come from, and they do the kind of granular reporting that just isn’t what the big national/DC publications generally do. This article is a key read. Who are these guys? They’re generally between 19 and 24 years of age, often college dropouts who left to go into tech and various kinds of algorithmic financial trading, in most cases interns at Thiel’s or Musk’s companies, at least one “Thiel fellow.”

In other words, hard right, techno-red-pilled bros, who now have access to things like your social security checks (whether you get them or not), your financial and, likely in some cases, medical records and at least the ability to shut down whole sections of the federal government at will by simply turning off their funding spigots. (Not good!) It sounds crazy and absurd to think that individual people could have that kind of power absent anything the law recognizes. But this is what it means when you’re this far up (or down, choose your metaphor) in the brain stem of the national government. This is what it means when you have access to the central Treasury Department payment network. You can simply turn off a spigot of funding. (I’ve now had it described to me precisely how you do it.) If you have that access, whether it’s legal or not isn’t relevant. The best analogy I can provide is that there’s some person at your bank who could just change a setting and suddenly all your checks and payments would be rejected and your funds would be frozen. Now imagine if “you” is NIH or USAID or … well, Social Security.

The central point in my post yesterday was trying to balance two facts: First, voters made a decision last November to shut Democrats out of all but a series of powers on the margins within the federal government. There’s no hyper-exertion or Mike Pence “if he has courage” that undoes that fact. Second, an effective opposition needs to provide the public not only with some sense of “hope” but also the outlines of a plan. Given point one that plan doesn’t need to be and probably can’t be terribly detailed. But a basic sense that we are now here and we’re going to get there. And here are the tools we’re going to use to get from A to B. And we are going to get to B and it’s going to take all of us to get there. See yesterday’s post for more on this.

There’s a separate and pretty critical part of this equation I want to discuss.