In response to last night’s “red alert” post, a number of TPM Readers have written in to say, okay, okay, fine but what exactly do I tell my member of Congress? This takes me a bit out of my lane. I’m not a strategist. But I can say how I see the situation, where the weak points seem to be.

So here’s my take.

Republicans control the White House and Congress. They’re the majority. The current “continuing resolution” that’s funding the government runs out on March 14th. They’re also trying to put together a budget to take away your health care coverage and give Elon a huge tax cut. But that new budget won’t kick in until later this year. They’re just starting that budget process. But they need to fund the government in the meantime. They’re in the majority. So they need to do that. But they only have a tiny majority and they’re clowns and they can’t manage to do this simple thing — basically because they can’t get the Freedom Caucus freaks to vote for something that their few moderates will also support. So they’re coming to Democrats basically hat in hand: “Friends, we are clowns. And we are about to do a shut down the government on ourselves. Can you help us?”

Winston Churchill once said, “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” One might also say there’s nothing so fun as being right about a big story totally by accident. Or rather, in this case, I actually knew about what I’m about to describe to you but forgot. Early February was at least a hundred years ago and I’ve been working on a million different stories since then — and, so, I’d totally forgotten about these details. But seriously, people, let’s not make it about me.

Here’s the story.

As you know, Elon Musk went on Twitter on Saturday and said federal workers had to list their accomplishments for him or else. The email was sent out over something called The Government-Wide Email System (GWES), a DOGE creation from the first days after the takeover of the Office of Personnel Management. (This will be a key point.) The email itself didn’t include Elon’s threat of termination (or, technically, a constructive resignation). But the message was heard loud and clear. Then pretty much the entire federal government spent 72 hours trying to figure out whether compliance was or wasn’t required. On Sunday morning, I flagged this Privacy Impact Statement (PIA) which OPM prepared for the GWES system back on February 5th. That document was flagged to me by a government tech. And as I noted, it states very clearly that compliance with any requests you receive via GWES is totally voluntary. You can respond to these emails or not. You can share information or not. It’s totally up to you. It’s very clear.

But I didn’t really have any clear idea of why this document existed or why it made such strong representations about the voluntariness of anything tied to GWES. (As is often the case, Marcy Wheeler had already put it a lot of this together even though I hadn’t.)

Well, here’s the story.

Over recent weeks I’ve told you several times that while Democrats are shut out of power in Washington and have few means of arresting the Trump-Musk spree of criminal conduct across the executive branch, they do have two points of leverage: the need for a new “continuing resolution” by March 14th to keep the government funded, and the need to raise the debt ceiling at some point in the coming months — the exact date on that isn’t clear. At present, Republicans are on course to shut down the government on March 14th. Essentially, the Freedom Caucus is holding them hostage, demanding not the draconian budget cuts favored by most of the GOP caucus but draconian-plus cuts, the kind that they fear will get their members in swing districts defeated. So Republican leadership is coming to Democrats, hat in hand, asking for help. I’ve explained in probably a dozen posts over the last month that this is the line not just on policy and anti-constitutional actions but also a key moment in the drama of performative power between President Trump and the opposition that will have repercussions and reverberations for months and perhaps years to come. There are already plenty of signs the public is turning against Musk’s wilding spree of criminal conduct through the federal government. To put it in the vulgar and rapacious terms that are the only ones that do it justice, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have spent the last month slapping around like bitches the Constitution, federal workers, the Democrats and really the sovereignty of the American people. Democrats have this moment to decide whether they’ll not only arrest the damage but change the tone through the idiom of power.

Well, now we appear to be at the crunch moment.

After getting rocked at a highly publicized town hall in Roswell, Georgia, last week, Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) is deciding that Elon may have been a bit hasty about things. McCormick tells the AJC’s “Politically Georgia” podcast …

There’s a big, big scandal brewing beneath the already big scandal of the alleged assault by Florida congressman Corey Mills (R). But as yet no one seems inclined to pull on the dangling thread. As you’ve probably already seen, Mills is accused of assaulting a woman, who is not his wife, at his home in Washington, DC. DC’s Metropolitan Police Department thought it was serious enough to send to U.S. Attorney’s Office, which handles both federal and “local” crimes in Washington, DC, a warrant for Mills’ arrest. But as Politico puts it, “that warrant was never signed.”

I hear Acting IRS Commissioner Doug O’Donnell will be announcing his “retirement” tomorrow. Next up in the hot seat, Melanie Krause.

Acting Commissioner Thunderdome continues.

There was a very important development today, still only little-noted in the national press. Government Executive magazine has a good piece on it. The news turns on a decision by the Office of Special Counsel, the head of which, Hampton Dellinger, Trump had only recently tried to fire before being blocked from doing so by a federal judge. The decision specifically deals with six federal employees, each from a different agency, who were recently fired as probationary employees as part of the DOGE purge. Technically, the decision only applies to those six employees. But in a way that is analogous, though not identical, to the way a court ruling works, the findings would likely apply to many other recent DOGE-terminated employees across the federal government.

After turning the entire Social Security Administration upside-down over this Elon Threat email, which I described barely a half hour ago in this post, an email was just sent out basically saying “never mind.”

“Pursuant to updated OPM guidance, responses to the email from sender “HR” dated Saturday, February 22, are voluntary. Non-responses are not considered a resignation.”

This seems to follow the OPM guidance memo issued on February 5th, which I described here this morning.

I just did some reporting where I got a tangible and upsetting wake-up call about the real-world impacts of Elon Musk’s weekend email stunt. You’ve likely heard that last week acting Social Security Commissioner Michelle King was abruptly compelled to resign after raising objections about DOGE accessing confidential Social Security information. She was replaced by a mid-level Social Security Administration data analyst named Leland Dudek, who at the time of his elevation was being investigated by SSA officials for providing to DOGE unauthorized access to SSA data. Presumably because Dudek is now the acting Social Security Commissioner, SSA is one of the federal agencies telling employees they must respond to the DOGE/Musk email. Because of this, the public’s access to the national Social Security 800 line is being immediately impacted.

One point about the Musk firing spree that was barely getting any attention at first is now starting to break through into mainstream media accounts: veterans are hugely overrepresented among federal civil servants, and even more so among probationary employees. They’re getting hit hard by these erratic and needless firings.