President Trump has abruptly fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Charles Q. Brown Jr., and is replacing him with a retired three star general, Dan Caine. This portends a future grave crisis as the President attempts to restructure the military into one personally loyal to him. Caine has not been a service chief or held a combatant command or been the head of the air forces of a combatant command. So basically he’s held none of the assignments which normally precedes elevation to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

I don’t know enough about the internal workings of the Joint Staff to know how big a problem that is in itself. But this is the President reaching far down the pecking order to someone who isn’t even on active duty in the military for the critical position not only as the chief military advisory to the President (the Chairman’s statutory role) but the key person at the contact point of civilian control over the military. Given Trump’s well-known impulses and ambitions, we must be very, very wary and suspicious of what understandings Trump has or believes he has with Caine.

This one is really, really bad.

Late Update: In its own way equally ominous, Trump tonight fired the Judge Advocates General of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Among many other things it’s the military lawyers who determine what is a legal order and what’s not. If you’re planning to give illegal orders they are an obvious obstacle.

Important new Times story on issue I discussed here in the Ed Blog earlier this week: how the White House is using notifications to the Federal Register as a way to get around judges’ orders unfreezing NIH grant funding.

According to Politico, the White House has a new buzzword: Precision. Gone are the days — i.e., yesterday — when DOGE indiscriminately torched the livelihoods of federal employees in the tens of thousands. Now they’re indiscriminately torching the livelihoods of tens of thousands under the new branding of “precision,” or something like that. Politico runs with the new branding but is then forced to concede that the firings continuing pretty much exactly as they have been.

Following up on my post below about the beginnings of a visible backlash against Elon Musk’s wilding spree throughout the federal government, I remain very eager to hear from you about what you might be hearing from your senators and representatives. From the beginning of the DOGE wilding spree there’s been a disconnect between what Republican members of Congress are saying in DC and what they’re telling constituents back home. As I noted in today’s Backchannel, that cleavage has expanded dramatically over the last week. They’re hearing from angry constituents in their districts. Some are telling local press that Elon is out of control. Some are saying that while they’re fully in support of President Trump’s goals, they think Elon is going about it in the wrong way. (If you haven’t read today’s Backchannel it includes a lot of important context.) It’s time to ask members of Congress whether they support DOGE or not — as close to a yes or no question as one can get it. Every response you forward to me will help me greatly in charting the evolution of the public response to the DOGE attack on the American republic.

A wild email out this afternoon from Acting NIH Director Matthew J. Memoli. On its face it’s an “upward and onward, we’ll get through this” letter. But along the way you have these notes like “when this transition is behind us, NIH may look different.” Yep, probably so.

He then explains that Bobby Kennedy Jr. believes deeply in NIH’s mission. As I told an NIH employee a short time ago, the claim that Kennedy believes deeply in NIH’s mission is probably a bigger hit to morale than saying we’ll all be out of a job in a month. But not to fear, says Memoli: “We will have many opportunities to demonstrate our value to Secretary Kennedy in the coming weeks and months.”

To share confidential tips about events unfolding in the federal government you can contact me on Signal at joshtpm dot 99 or via encrypted mail at joshtpm (at) protonmail dot com.

Against the backdrop of a month of chaos and destruction, something began to shift more or less in the middle of this week. I don’t want to overstate what it portends in the short term. Elon Musk remains firmly in the saddle. And even as many of Trump’s advisors grow concerned about the impact of Musk’s rampage, Donald Trump himself appears to be maintaining his support. The moment was captured yesterday at what are now the more or less constant CPACs where Steve Bannon tossed off a Nazi salute and Musk appeared in a “Dark MAGA” baseball cap sporting a chainsaw and basking in the adulation of the MAGA/CPAC faithful awash in the joy a certain kind of individual derives from destruction and pain. The picture itself is a key signpost in the story. Make a note of it. Musk himself posted it to Twitter, labeled with “The DogeFather” and flexing with the text: “This is a real picture.”

But there’s something else going on — not so much the tide turning as a certain battle being joined. Beginning this week, local TV stations around the country have begun running human interest stories about veterans, members of military families or Trump supporters getting fired as part of Elon’s purge. Meanwhile, we can see a growing cleavage between what congressional Republicans are saying in Washington and what they’re saying back in their districts.

From the beginning of this drama going on a month ago, the White House has been laser-focused on shutting down government-supported medical research in the United States. Of course, much of that is research into cancer cures or fundamental research building toward the same. The precise goal of all this shutting down is difficult to uncover — likely one half an effort to destroy or exercise control over academic/research institutions mixed with post-COVID hostility to medical research itself. On paper the effort was put on hold by a mix of the White House backing off and the original orders being blocked by judges. But in fact the White House has found very effective workarounds to evade the impact of those court orders. And that evasion, or those alternative paths to shutting down research grants, has accelerated, clamping down even harder this week.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the compromising of Eric Adams, Elon Musk’s role as heat shield for Donald Trump and a new executive order.

To share confidential tips about events unfolding in the federal government you can contact me on Signal at joshtpm dot 99 or via encrypted mail at joshtpm (at) protonmail dot com.

I don’t like to think in conspiratorial ways. But DOGE currently has far deeper and far more extensive access to U.S. government computer systems — and is far deeper into the national security space — than is conceivably necessary for anything related to their notional brief and goals. I don’t just mean this about the front-facing notional goals of making the federal government “efficient.” I mean it as well in the most sinister versions of the group’s goals — hollowing out the federal bureaucracy, destroying oversight agencies which pose threats to Musk’s business interests, building centralized command and control over budgets, employment, personal data, etc., etc.

WIRED is now reporting that two DOGE operatives, including the 19-year-old Edward Coristine (aka “Big Balls”), have gained access to the computer systems of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the agency charged with the defense of the federal government’s civilian computer networks as well as helping to organize the defense of the country’s critical infrastructure.

I continue to hear new accounts of the pulverizing of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The news focuses on funds and employees, each of which of course are pivotal. But less reported on is the administration systematically shutting down the various portals created to allow citizens to report abuses, the systems for monitoring of key agencies in response to complaints, various materials created to educate citizens about how to protect their rights in the financial world. It’s all collectively awful. But it reminds me of issues tied to branding.

The CFPB is more than a decade old and I’m a bit shamefaced to admit that I still often forget the precise order of the initials that function as its de facto name. This may be its relative youth or my own neurology. I remember NLRB and NIH more or less well. But it reminds me that the name of the agency and how it is discussed in the political space is half the battle and one that its supporters in the political space (as opposed to the people who work there) have more or less conceded. Any politicians discussing this should never be referring to the CFPB or even the spelled-out four-word name. It’s more like the National Consumer Help Line. Or the National Business Complaint Line. “Line” dates those ideas a bit. I hear there are now computers too. Some version of “Financial” should be in there to specify its focus. But “financial” is a bit arcane. National Bank and Credit Card Complaint Line? I’m sure others could come up with something snappier. But everybody but everybody has a complaint about bad service or businesses (banks, credit cards, payment processors, etc.) that are ripping them off. And you just can’t concede any ground on making it crystal clear to people that that is what this is.