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“Let’s be clear, the Democrat demand is really simple,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) told TPM, with a mocking emphasis on the word “demand” on Thursday. “It’s that the President commits to following the law. That’s it. It’s not a big deal.”

Emine Yücel has more here.

It’s not precisely a town hall event as we normally describe it. But a staffer for Rep. Jeff Hurd (R-CO) was set to appear a League of Women Voters town hall event at the Dolores Public Library in Montezuma County. But when she arrived and saw the crowd, she literally bolted and apparently then also left town. Here’s a write-up in the Durango Herald.

Thanks for TPM Reader EO for flagging this news to our attention.

A short time ago the Human Resources office of the Social Security Administration sent out what it titled a major “organizational restructuring” of the agency. As one SSA vet put it to me, this is a way to say “we are giving you a chance to leave on your own accord before we fire you.”

“Employees are going to jump at this,” the same person told me.

Memo after the jump.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh talk Congress, angry town halls and a chainsaw-wielding Musk.

There’s such a sea of chaotic information we’re all drifting through in these days that it is terribly difficult to find out precisely what is going on, to find the patterns that can bring the larger story into focus. I want to point to one of those patterns I noticed or which was brought to my attention last night. I think I’m the first to highlight this, though I may be wrong about that. Not trying to claim an exclusive; I want to point to the significance of the detail.

Let’s start with my story from last night about the abrupt and reckless cancelation of upwards of a thousand VA contracts totaling roughly $2 billion and covering a huge variety of work VA does, everything from funeral care to doctor recruitment. As I reported last night, VA contract officers were sent an Excel spreadsheet of almost a thousand contracts in the early morning of February 21st, told that all of these contracts should be canceled and that if anyone wanted to make a case to spare individual contracts they had until the end of business that day (February 21st) to make their case. My sources noted that the contract code on all of these contracts was NAICS – 541611, which is “Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services.” It’s very clear the DOGE people pulled up everything under that label and slated it to be cut. My sources’ impressions are that the DOGErs making these decisions read that label as basically, McKinsey/MBA consulting type bullshit, easy stuff to cut. At VA, most of it wasn’t that at all. But they didn’t seem to make any attempt to look under the hood at what those contracts were.

Reviewing a directive from DCPAS Director Daniel J. Hester. This applies to DOD civilian personnel. On Friday the 28th, they “must terminate the employment of all individuals who are currently serving probationary or trial periods in the DOD.” The document lists categories of exception: positions “designated mission critical,” “political appointees.” There are a few other technical exception categories. Document signed yesterday.

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.