I’ve spent the last 24 hours trying to confirm or refute pervasive rumors throughout the Social Security Administration that the agency is about to announce an across-the-board cut of 50% of staff. The decision was purportedly announced at an afternoon meeting yesterday by Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek. He asked for a plan for 50% cuts to be presented to him this afternoon. I have not been able to confirm this. But David Dayen at The American Prospect appears to have found two people who were in the meeting and do confirm it. Here’s David’s report.

It’s been hard to imagine that they were actually contemplating this, not because it’s horrible but because it’s likely to have such dramatic (and likely political costly) impacts on tens of millions of Americans. But here we are.

I had been planning, today or tomorrow, to write a post giving everyone a heads up that next week we kick off our annual TPM membership drive. I like to do that because when the drives coincide with major news events, or even public crises, I want to remind people that these are fixed annual events, a key part of our business model, etc. We’re not dropping one in just because it’s a period of high news interest. But my thinking about this changed a bit when I saw the news this morning that Jeff Bezos appears to be taking direct control of the paper’s opinion pages, saying they will now focus on promoting “personal liberties” and “free markets,” and will not publish contrary opinions. As I’ve noted before, the editorial page is literally where the paper itself speaks. It speaks for the ownership. Owners bringing those voices into line with their personal beliefs isn’t a crazy thing — entirely different from putting a thumb on the direction and integrity of news reporting.

I took a moment to think what “personal liberties” meant. If the line were “democracy and free markets” or “the rule of law and free markets” or even “freedom and free markets,” that reads quite different. In context, it’s pretty clear the meaning of this is a hard right/libertarian kind of politics. Bezos is the owner. He calls the shots. But if we are now moving into a world and a politics of the oligarchs vs. the people, it’s pretty clear that the Washington Post as an institution is firmly attached to Team Oligarch.

Which brings us back to our drive, kicking off next week. We’re in a new era. We’re not new. But the ways we differ from other news organization are much more consequential now than they have been at really any other point in our history. So when we kick off this year’s drive, please keep that in mind. Please consider subscribing if you don’t already. Consider suggesting it to your friends.

We mentioned on Monday that the Office of Special Counsel had found that six federal civil servants from six separate agencies had been unlawfully terminated from their positions. Now the Merit Systems Protection Board has granted the request to halt those terminations. Needless to say, this all sounds very technical and bureaucratic, and it’s not at all clear just what it means. I’m kind of there too. I think the best way to put it is that there are agencies within the federal government charged with deciding what kinds of dismissals are and are not okay. The OSC is a sort of finder of fact. It decided these terminations were unlawful. Then it brings it to this board and ask them to reinstate these people. That’s what just happened.

There are a couple stories today that require understanding something about DOGE’s predecessor institution. So here goes.

A short time ago, I broke the news that the acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration has abolishing CREO, the SSA’s statutory civil rights and equal opportunity division. He also put all employees of the division on immediate leave; that’s the standard DOGE approach, the closest you can get to firing those people, which will presumably become formal soon. Acting Commission Leland Dudek was a mid-level SSA staffer until about a week ago, when he was caught making unauthorized leaks of SSA information to DOGE. He was in the process of being fired when he was elevated over at least one hundred more senior agency executives to running the whole agency.

I am told that other steps of similar gravity and equally questionable legality are also either in process or expected.

This is a developing story.

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.”