Pretty surreal moment today. Paul, Weiss is one of three firms targeted in new Trump executive orders. The firm’s chairman, Brad Karp, has reached an agreement with President Trump that essentially allows the White House to dictate its internal personnel policies as well as what cases it agrees to take on. Most notably it obligates the firm to provide $40 million of pro bono legal services to pro-Trump causes including “the President’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, and other mutually agreed projects.” Note that “other mutually agreed projects.” So this is essentially a pro-bono legal defense fund at President Trump’s personal disposal. It appears this “agreement” is between Karp and the President personally.

At this point I wouldn’t imagine that many potential clients will be choosing Paul, Weiss to sue the administration. But even on a more general standard of zealous representation, if you were involved in litigation antagonistic to the White House and represented by Paul, Weiss, is there any possible way you could feel confident in the integrity of your defense or its lawful loyalty to your interests?

My favorite congressman, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), has been cheering on the DOGE wilding spree down in DC. And now his constituents are paying the price.

In fairness to Rep. Lawler, he’s one of many Republicans who are cheering on DOGE in DC and fretting about its impact back home and trying to cut special deals with the White House or directly with Elon Musk to soften the blow in their districts. This cut has been on the books for a few weeks and it came up in my reporting on the SSA late last month.

I am and we are still putting together information on this. First, this is a call to see who reading this might have information about the situation today at the Institute of Museum and Library Services in DC. (This is a federal agency heavily involved in libraries around the country.) I’m also trying to find out details about IMLS contracts that were canceled today. If you have any information I hope you’ll contact me confidentially either on Signal at joshtpm.99 or via encrypted email at joshtpm at protonmail dot com.

The following information is tentative: I’m sharing it with you on that basis because I want to find other people who know details. I’m told DOGE showed up at the IMLS offices today and started sending employees home. This was presaged in an executive order from last week which ordered it to shut down to “statutory minimum” levels. A new “acting” director was sworn in in the lobby. From what I understood DOGE operatives immediately starting canceling contracts/grants. In at least one state, these cuts are draconian for the state library system. But I’m trying to understand whether this is happening across all states or whether states that Trump sees as hostile are getting hit especially hard. If you know anything about events today in DC or canceled grants through IMLS please be in touch.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss fallout from Senate Democrats’ decision to vote for the Republican continuing resolution as well as the ongoing menacing of Washington D.C.

Following up on my piece below about events at the U.S. Institute of Peace, you can see Kate Riga’s story based on the court hearing today.

I want to draw out a critical element of what happened on Monday which we learned today. DOGE went to the private security contractor working for USIP and essentially said, you don’t have a clear legal or ethical ability to do this. But if you don’t want to lose all your federal contracts, you have to. And they did.

Each time we hear more about the unfolding situation with the takeover of the U.S. Institute of Peace, the story gets darker and involves greater abuses of power. My colleague Kate Riga is, as I write, covering a hearing about the incident that happened yesterday. When I last wrote about the story yesterday, I focused on the fact that the DC Metropolitan Police Department had sided with DOGE and the purported new directors of the Institute and expelled the incumbent staff. That remains the case. But based on new filings which Kate told me about during the podcast we recorded a short time ago, I learned that there is an entirely new dimension of the story which is at least as important as the MPD issue and likely more so. I’ve now had a chance to do a brief review of the court filings from the USIP. I’m going to give you a very brief overview now and then probably either Kate or I or perhaps both of us will have more information later in the day.

So here’s the gist.

I got an email from TPM Reader DH this morning asking what people in their everyday lives, people who aren’t close to the levers of political power, can do to, for lack of better words, help to save their country. I took a moment to write down a few thoughts and I decided to share it with you not because there’s any particular wisdom in it or because the prose is very polished but just because I’ve gotten the same question a number of times recently.

That’s a good question. I’m not sure I always have in mind who I’m talking to. But I think it may be more “ordinary” people than you might think. What I learned from the last ten years is that one of the most potent things ordinary people do is become part of fairly normie organizing in their communities. In Trump’s first term Indivisible groups down at the town and county level were a big big deal. Not always visible. Not big performative demonstrations. But ground level organizing focused around electoral politics in people’s communities. I think at moments like this that can feel somehow inadequate to the moment. But it’s not. It’s some of the most important stuff. There’s contributing to political activity, whether or it’s campaigns or groups. There’s showing up at things like townhalls. Again those are big deals. And many things we’ll sort of know when we see them.

Since I published the piece below, I’ve been picking up some of the back and forth on the efforts of the DC Metro police to get its story together in response to questions from various members of the DC city council. They’ve now released their official statement.

It’s actually worse than what I suspected.

In the background over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to find out about the purported activities of the U.S. Marshals Service working at the behest of DOGE. When DOGE operatives took over the Foundation for African Development a couple of weeks ago, they reportedly made forced entry with the assistance of the U.S. Marshals. That’s not really what the Marshals do. They are housed within the Justice Department. But their job is to protect the federal judiciary and execute its orders. Special statutes exist that also allow them to enforce certain laws. But there was no court order here. So it didn’t really make sense.

When I poked around, it seemed like people just assumed they were Marshals. Or perhaps they identified themselves as such. But the more questions I asked, the less clear it was who they really were, notwithstanding the press reports that simply stated it as a fact. I put in a press request with the Marshals Service press office to confirm that these were in fact U.S. Marshalls. But I never heard back. Then yesterday there was a similar standoff at the U.S. Institute for Peace which ended with the Marshals again helping DOGE make forcible entry into the disputed premises. Or that’s what the initial reports in the Times said.

A couple weeks ago, the clarion of digital wrongdoing in the second Trump administration, Wired, published an article entitled ‘Startup Nation’ Groups Say They’re Meeting Trump Officials to Push for Deregulated ‘Freedom Cities’. I wrote about these guys, or one subset of them, in early January. Dryden Brown is chief of a startup called Praxis, which is in the “business” of founding new sovereign “start up societies.” On paper, he claims to have raised half a billion dollars for his company. But, actually, those are commitments contingent on his founding a new sovereign state. So that’s kind of like a lot of richies committing money to your new unicorn farm contingent on your finding two unicorns. In any case, Dryden had been focused on finding a chunk of land to found a new “network state” in the Mediterranean after getting bounced out of Africa. But once Donald Trump started making noises that Greenland might be on the market, he flew to Greenland to meet with officials and see if he could buy it.

In any case, that’s our boy Dryden. This new piece in Wired is about Trey Goff, the “chief of staff” of a thing called “Prospera,” which is a sorta, kinda “network state” recently established in Honduras, which the current government of Honduras is already trying to abolish. Prospera and a few other “network states” in the making are based on laws for “Special Economic Zones” which exist in some countries. The conceptual structure stems from certain duty-free areas that exist in certain countries, free ports of various kinds which have long existed and have often, but not always, been tied up with the history of European colonialism and, of course, the Special Administrative Regions of China, Hong Kong and Macau. U.S. urban policy has a sort of pale version of this in “enterprise zones” where businesses starting up in a certain area get certain tax benefits or expedited regulatory review. If you read about “Prospera,” a decent amount of at least the surface appeal is having these kind of boutique nerdvilles where tech micro-bros can high five each other because, like, if you want to buy a croissant at the coffee shop you have to pay in bitcoin. Stuff like that. The “government,” very much by design, follows the structure of venture investing, with different classes of stock and thus voting power. All that fun stuff.