DC Circuit rules that Trump administration can remove Hampton Dellinger while the case about whether he ultimately can be removed continues.

Dellinger is the head (or was) of the Office of Special Counsel that found that a bunch of Trump/DOGE firings had been unlawful. (This is tied to a series of posts I’ve done about rulings against DOGE firings.) OSC was then backed up by the Merit Systems Protection Board. Trump has been trying to fire basically everyone involved at both entities. And he’s been losing those cases. But this is obviously a win for the White House, though how much I’m not quite sure yet.

Will try to provide more context later. For now, see this update from the Post.

Here’s one of the more entertaining memos I’ve read recently coming out of the DOGE-tossed federal bureaucracy. This one’s from NIH, dated today and from the NIH Office of Defensive Counterintelligence and Personnel Security (ODCPS). And the gist is management is saying that while we’re busy making your lives hell, banning travel, communication and research reviews, defunding your projects and firing you one by one to drag out the torture, we need you to be extra vigilant because apparently foreign governments are trying to recruit you guys because you’re so upset.

I’m taking a bit of liberty with the language but not much.

The National Cancer Institute will be a no-show this year at the annual meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research, per an internal guidance memo dated March 4th, 2025 written by Kimberly Blair of the NCI Office of Communications.

Democrats need to be on the ground in states like Iowa, supporting local Democrats who can start building the case now against Sen. Joni Ernst (R) and other pro-Trump politicians, whoever ends up winning the right to challenge her as the Democratic nominee. I’m not saying Ernst will lose. It will be a very difficult race. Iowa has rapidly gone from a textbook swing state to a reliably red one in presidential elections. But people forget how rapidly things can change in a political climate in which visible, core political decisions by elected officials have tangible and deep impacts on ordinary people’s lives. People forget what happened between 2004 and 2006. They forget what happened between 2008 and 2010, though I think the first is the more relevant analog. There’s 2018 too. But I think we’ll find 2018 isn’t that true an analog.

As DOGE continues it’s federal government wilding spree, purportedly searching for examples of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, we seem to have had another case of keyword search gone awry. One of the leases DOGE decided to cancel is the lease for Skeen-Whitlock Building in Carlsbad, New Mexico, a 90,000 square foot facility which manages the nation’s only storage area for DOD-created nuclear waste and the only operating deep geologic nuclear waste storage facility in the world.

Alas, due to scheduling conflicts, The Josh Marshall Podcast will be out tomorrow, Thursday, March 6, instead of our usual Wednesday drop.

In the meantime, the team is hitting the road, and we want to hear from you! Want us to visit your neck of the woods? Vote now.

It’s not the people who directly compile the economic statistics at the Commerce Department precisely. It’s an expert panel which advises those people on how to do it correctly. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick fired them at the end of last month.

In case you didn’t hear the GSA today announced it’s going to sell off many if not all of the central buildings making up the headquarters of the American republic. Those buildings include FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, the buildings which are the headquarters of the DOJ, HHS, DOL and more – more than 400 buildings across the country. Here’s the listing and here’s a Politico piece which gives an overview.

Late Update: A rather bizarre coda to this story. Or, perhaps not a coda, just an update. Several hours after GSA posted this and after the first round of press they removed all the DC buildings from the list. Given how unexplained and arbitrary the decision-making seems to be it seems entirely possible they’ll be back on the list soon. But at least for now we’re not selling the Department of Justice, at least in the sense of the literal building.

Even Later Update: And now the entire list is gone.

For almost a year I’ve been thinking through an idea that now seems especially timely and relevant in the last six weeks. I think of it as a form of civic sede vacantism. The reference is, ironically, to a strain of hyper-traditionalist Catholic thought which held (still holds) that none of Vatican II canons or the successive Popes counted because they were heretical and heretics. A bit more complicated than that. But details of that really aren’t relevant for us. I just found the defining metaphor or concept helpful. The key is their idea that the papal throne was empty. That’s the meaning of the Latin phrase, sede vacante. My interest and concern with this grew out of my belief that civic democrats in the US have far too great an essentialism about the law and constitutional jurisprudence, especially under the corrupted federal judiciary as it now exists. It breeds a kind of fatalism and passivity which casts a pall over thought and political action.

I know I’ve thrown around a lot of big and perhaps obscure ideas. So let me get down to concrete specifics. In Trump v. United States last year the Supreme Court claimed that Presidents have wide immunity from criminal law after they leave the presidency. For many people this was an ‘everything changed’ moment. It did in effect end Trump’s prosecution. But now that’s the law, as so many people I know put it. Only it’s not. This isn’t a decision I disagree with. It’s simply wrong. I’m not going to rehearse all the arguments. To me, among all the other areas of flawed and disingenuous reasoning, we have the simple fact that the authors of the constitution knew precisely how to confer immunity on public officials. They did it with Congress. But again, I’m not trying to rehearse the specific arguments. Others have already made them on the particulars better than I can. I’m saying that we must disengage from the idea that this is what the law is. It’s not. These are fraudulent decisions.

A quick note on our annual membership drive. It kicks off tomorrow. We have a very ambitious goal. Normally we really lean into it; I do a lot of posts about it. It’s kind of a thing and it works and it’s great. But precisely the things that I believe make TPM so important right now also have us slammed trying to cover it all. I certainly feel slammed trying to keep up with multiple different streams of reporting while also trying to write pieces which provide some perspective and a broader view of what’s happening. So, just to be totally candid, if you can help us make this drive a success while letting us just keep on the reporting that would be awesome … If you’re not a member, please consider subscribing. If you are a member, please help us spread the word – both about TPM and the fact that we’re in our annual drive. Perhaps I flatter us but I think what we do is more important now than it has ever been, both because of the crisis of the moment and because the larger tides of that crisis have knocked the posts out from under so many of the big bulwarks of American journalism. I want us not only to continue to do what we do but do more of it. And to do that we need to keep focused on our core reporting in the short term and remain robust and up to the challenge of upping our game over time. I hope you can support us during this drive in whatever way make sense, depending on whether you’re currently a member or not. Thank you.