As I wrote below, yesterday VA Secretary Collins was out bragging that he and DOGE had found more than $2 billion of BS professional services contracts that they were cutting right away. Then today the whole thing blew up in their faces. The contracts weren’t at all what they’d described and they either didn’t know or didn’t care that the great majority of those contracts were with what are called service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses — SDVOSBs. I’ve done some poking around and I can share a bit more about how this seems to have happened. It’s probably a microcosm of damage being wrought across the executive branch.

Here’s my understanding. DOGE is looking for contracts to cut at the VA, a repeat of what we’ve seen across numerous agencies. They come across a contract code (NAICs 541611) that is listed as “Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services.” So they figure, okay, this is some McKinsey-type BS. We can definitely cut that.

Yesterday I saw a video from VA Secretary Doug Collins (former member of Congress from Georgia) bragging about how they were cutting $2 billion worth of what were clearly, in his estimation, worthless and stupid contracts. They were in fact almost one thousand different contracts tied to everything from medical and burial services to cancer prevention and doctor recruiting programs. I’ve posted that video below. This afternoon I received this email from a longtime reader …

I’m a contractor working for a service-disabled veteran-owned small business (SDVOSB) for 15 years. I’ve worked on projects with the Veterans Benefit Administration and the Veterans Health Administration. During that time, I’ve run marketing campaigns to get veterans to enroll in healthcare, conducted program evaluations and process improvement efforts, and provided strategic communications support.

Often there’s business news on at the gym where I go to work out each day. I’ve noticed over the last handful of days that CNBC has had a series of chyrons over their panels, all of which are some version of “why is the market so downbeat all of a sudden?” There are also some similar ones about consumer confidence, which has also been dropping. Economies are complex and no shift — including temporary ones — can be definitively ascribed to a single factor. But as I’ve watched this, I’ve been struck by how little discussion there is of one fairly straightforward explanation.

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.