More clown show breaking this afternoon out of TTS, the in-show tech consultancy housed within GSA. I told you last night that the new leadership had started firing people yesterday starting with a few dozen probationers — people in their first year on the job who are easier to fire under Civil Service law. But apparently the new bosses are still learning how to do things, most specifically, how to fire people. Yesterday the fired staffers found out about their terminations when they were summoned to hastily arranged meetings in which they were verbally told they were fired. But then people started to notice that the formal letters of termination they were told to expect weren’t showing up in their inboxes. And they couldn’t easily ask their supervisors what was up since their supervisors hadn’t been looped in on the fact that members of their teams had been fired in the first place.

So what happened?

It seems that the new bosses got down to firing people before they learned how you fire people. Finally Thomas Shedd, the Musk associate who was appointed as the new head of TTS, sent a message this afternoon to the whole team that it turns out … well, they’re not quite fired yet. “We don’t yet have the go-ahead from HR,” a presumably somewhat sad-sack Shedd Slacked colleagues a bit after 2 this afternoon.

The acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, has submitted her resignation to Attorney General Pam Bondi, an implicit refusal to seek the dismissal of charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, as Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered her to do on Monday. I’ve noted several times over recent days that despite that order, which most people — including me, before this was flagged to me — thought ended the matter, the dismissal hadn’t actually been carried out. A motion to dismiss should have shown up in the trial docket. But it wasn’t. And, as I noted, that suggested they couldn’t find someone in the New York office (SDNY) to carry it out.

Now we have our answer.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the threat of the Trump administration defying a court order and the overarching threat to democracy itself.

I wrote this post back in July. But it’s more relevant now than it was then. The headline is that Thomas Jefferson very clearly didn’t agree with John Roberts about presidential immunity. Jefferson didn’t write the Constitution, of course. He wasn’t even there. He was in France at the time. But his argument about this question has been rattling around my head ever since I happened upon this particular letter of his written in 1810, a couple years after he left the presidency. In short, Jefferson’s argument was that there are some occasions in which it would not only be permissible for a president to break the law or act outside the Constitution — he might in fact be obligated to do so. The key was that the president must submit himself for judgment, or as he put it, “throw himself on the justice of his country and the rectitude of his motives.” In other words, a president would be obligated to act and then, in essence, turn himself in. Far from having any immunity for his actions, it is precisely the responsibility of such high office to take on the risk of punishment. Again, as he put it: “The officer who is called to act on this superior ground, does indeed risk himself on the justice of the controlling powers of the Constitution, and his station makes it his duty to incur the risk.”

It is an additional signifier in Jefferson’s mind that he speaks here of the president as the chief “officer” of the state. In other words, the President isn’t a king. He is at the end of the day simply the most senior officer of the state, the chief executive, shall we say. We are far, far at the moment from the theoretical possibility of Donald Trump facing justice for the crimes he is now authorizing or committing himself. But it’s highly relevant to remember that the President is just another citizen, authorized by the constitution to perform certain duties for the American people. He’s not above the law, no matter what the corrupt Court says. Here’s the post.

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The Trump DOJ’s decision to drop charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams may not be the most serious act of prosecutorial corruption in decades but it’s almost certainly the most brazen. The stated reasons for dropping the charges were absurd on their face and, while everyone deserves their day in court, Adams appears to be guilty as sin. But there’s an aspect of this corrupt spectacle which, while certainly no secret, has been far too underplayed in most press accounts. As the words are normally understood, the government didn’t drop the charges (indeed, so far it’s not clear that the Trump DOJ has found anyone in the New York office to actually do the deed; there’s still no motion to drop the charges). It would be more accurate, as to common understanding, to say they suspended them — because the directive from DC was to drop the charges without prejudice. The letter from Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove states explicitly that DOJ will review the matter again after the November mayoral election and decide whether to reinstate the charges.

I’m told firings have started at TTS (Technology Transformation Services), basically an in-house tech consultancy serving the federal government. It’s housed within GSA. For now it’s hitting probationers — staff brought on in the last year — who have fewer civil service protections. Disproportionately women and minority staffers. So I’d imagine that’s a fringe benefit of the move for Trump appointees. I don’t have exact numbers of those affected. But it seems to be in the dozens who found out this afternoon.

I wanted to direct your attention to the news today that House Republicans have introduced a budget outline. This is a big, big deal. It may seem like ordinary budget politics is moving on a separate path from the ongoing constitutional crisis. But they are deeply intertwined. Framing everything is the fact that House Republicans have only the tiniest of margins in the House — 1 to 3 votes, depending on a few different factors. It’s seemed highly doubtful that they can get everything they want to do or need to do in a single bill — Trump tax cuts, the massive spending cuts to pay for those tax cuts and also what the Freedom Caucus demands, a debt-ceiling hike, border spending, more. This is why the House and the Senate have been going back and forth on one massive bill or two bills.

I want to return to a subject that has been pushed a bit out of the headlines over the last few days: the DOGE story at the Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Service (BFS). Late yesterday afternoon the government filed a series of declarations from Treasury Department civil servants providing details to a federal judge in New York about what happened. The biggest news turns on USAID payments.

We’d heard from the Times a few days ago that what was motivating this whole effort at Treasury was that they wanted to block USAID payments. We’d first heard almost two weeks ago that a senior Treasury civil servant, David A. Lebryk, had resigned rather than assist in blocking payments. But everything we’d heard to date is that intentions notwithstanding, no blocking or interfering had actually happened. But according to these new documents that’s not true. The declaration of Treasury civil servant Vona S. Robinson says that in fact multiple payments were temporarily put on hold before being reviewed at the State Department and eventually cleared for payment and one was rejected altogether (see Robinson, paragraphs 13 and 14).

These are wild times at TPM because they’re wild times in the American government. It’s hard to keep up with everything happening from one moment to the next. I had not had a chance to look at the new DOGE executive order the President signed this afternoon with Elon Musk standing beside him. I don’t think it’s too much to say that it puts Musk functionally in control of the U.S. government. I know that sounds pretty wild. And that may not apply to high-profile policy — two budget bills or one on Capitol Hill, plans for Gaza. But let me explain what it does.