As you can see, we’ve been following this Elon Threat Email drama pretty aggressively over the weekend. But there’s a small but also large part of the story I flagged over the weekend which I now realize I hadn’t yet done a full post on here. Notwithstanding that what amounts to a prank email has had the entire federal government debating with itself over the last 48 hours, Musk’s own Office of Personnel Management says that federal employees never have to respond to any of these emails.
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Yesterday I broke the news that the CDC has indefinitely shuttered the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), a comprehensive federal data collection program “designed to identify groups of women and infants at high risk for health problems, to monitor changes in health status, and to measure progress towards goals in improving the health of mothers and infants,” which has been in operation since 1988. CDC ordered a halt to collection of 2024 data effective January 31st of this year and put the entire 2025 program on indefinite hold.
This matches of course with the general HHS-wide crackdown on public health and research. But it still wasn’t clear precisely why the program had been shuttered or whether it might ever come back. Based on my sources, I can now report that the issue does not appear to be the various ways that comprehensive research on pregnancy might be perceived as bumping up against controversies over abortion and other politicized issues of reproductive health care. The issue is what the administration calls “DEI.” The questionnaires include questions about racism, discrimination, sexual orientation and identity, and an array of questions which look at how socioeconomic status can affect health. Some but not all of those question were new as of 2023 and basically all of them have to go.
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We’ve got a fascinating story unfolding with the new Musk email I reported on below. And yes, something can be fascinating while also being grave, dangerous and in its own way terrifying. Over the course of the evening top leadership at the FBI, the State Department, the VA, the Department of the Navy (to its civilian employees) and other parts of the government have explicitly instructed employees in their departments and agencies to ignore the email. Meanwhile the DOJ seems to be instructing its employees to follow it. (And yes, FBI is sort of under DOJ and that’s kind of weird but that’s where we are.)
Read MoreI think anyone watching the whole horizon will sense something similar. But I wanted to state it clearly. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are if not hitting the gas than becoming more publicly aggressive and hostile just as a public backlash of great breadth appears to be forming and members of Congress are becoming skittish. This is a highly combustible collision in the making.
A short time ago Elon Musk posted this to Twitter.
I have now seen three separate copies of this email sent to federal employees in three separate federal agencies/departments. They’re all identical. In one of those cases it is to an agency where all but a literal handful of employees have been under a stop work order for more than a week. The emails have the subject line “What did you do last week?” followed by an urgent-response red emoji exclamation point.
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The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) is a federal data collection system, run out of CDC, “designed to identify groups of women and infants at high risk for health problems, to monitor changes in health status, and to measure progress towards goals in improving the health of mothers and infants,” in the words of the program’s website. It has run continuously since 1988 and covers everything from the particulars of newborn health and morbidity to issues like post-partum depression in mothers. I can report that the Trump CDC has shuttered the program as part of its general clampdown on medical research and public health information.
Read MoreI’m trying to compile a list of all the town halls where GOP members of Congress got rocked by constituents this past week while they were on break. There are so many now that I can’t really write a whole post about each one. But I wanted to ask if you could send me links if there are examples where your member of Congress or Senator had a similar experience so I can add it to the list.
Diana Harshbarger (Tennessee) Friday townhall in Tennessee
Keith Self (Texas) Saturday (3/1) townhall (video) in Wylie.
Roger Marshall (Kansas) Saturday (3/1) townhall in Oakley
Glenn Grothman (Wisconsin) Friday morning town hall in Oshkosh
Scott Fitzgerald (Wisconsin) town hall in West Bend on Thursday.
Kevin Hern (Oklahoma) town hall in Glenpool on Thursday.
Cliff Bentz (Oregon) mutliple town halls in eastern Oregon this week.
Nick Begich (Alaska) confronted at airport last week.
Rich McCormick (Georgia) town hall in Roswell on Thursday.
Jay Obernolte (California) Yucca Valley townhall on Saturday.
Mark Alford (Missouri) Belton townhall on Monday.
If your Rep. or Senator got rocked at a townhall last week and he or she isn’t on our list please send us a link with the story. You can send us an email at talk at talkingpointsmemo dot com.
In Oregon’s 2nd district, Rep. Cliff Bentz (R) got a rude awakening in four town halls he held in this past week. At one point in his town hall in La Grande he chided the audience, saying a lot of representatives had refused to even hold town halls. So they should be grateful he decided to show up.
Note that this is an R+15 district — basically the eastern two-thirds of the state.
From the La Grande Observer …
Read MorePresident 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.