I just learned that the Department of Justice has shelved its plan to essentially shutter the Department’s Tax Division. The plan had been to disperse the Division’s lawyers to U.S. Attorney’s Offices around the country and maintain a very small residual oversight office at Main Justice. This would satisfy, at least in the view of DOJ’s current political leadership, statutory requirements. But it would trigger big departures of lawyers unwilling to relocate around the country and dilute and dissipate institutional knowledge and organizational focus.

In my late 2024 post-election brainstorming, another idea of mine was to create a structure for pressing Republican Reps who threatened to cancel the green energy investments in their districts under the Inflation Reduction Act. It was a matter of some consternation for Democrats at the time, but those investments were overwhelmingly in Republican districts — like something like 75% of them. There were a few explanations of that at the time, one of which was that it was focused on those areas that were in whatever way “passed over” in the city-centric prosperity of the early 21st century. But we’re seeing another one of the benefits now and it’s precisely that dynamic I was keen mobilize: it makes these investments much harder to claw back by a future Republican administration.

NYT reports a second Hegseth Signal chat in which the secretary of defense shared Houthi attack plans. This one included his wife and brother.

Since January 20th, and actually back into November, I’ve had a series of projects I’ve desperately wanted to see done. My first was a simple but clean and easily shareable site to track core economic statistics from the end of the Biden administration through Trump’s presidency. Simple, objective, core economic data — here’s where Biden left off, here’s where Trump is. At the time I envisioned a different start to the administration. I figured it would be like 2017 where Trump took the quite good economy he inherited, mostly left it alone, maybe juiced it with tax cuts and rebranded it as his own. I was pretty confident this was a good bet since most of the Biden numbers were about as good as they could be. For employment, inflation, growth they would be pretty hard to top. So there wasn’t much chance Trump would end up looking much better than Biden. You simply can’t get unemployment much lower than 3%. I saw it as a way of deflating what I figured would be the standard Trumpian rebrand, where he talked constantly of the catastrophic Biden economy and his own era of prosperity with data that was actually marginally worse.

This is a two day old article. But with so much else going on I hadn’t seen it. If you haven’t, you really must read it. It’s one of growing number of examples that the U.S. government is at present essentially being held hostage by the clique surrounding Elon Musk.

Donald Trump got really jazzed up about Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. Based on that, he decided that the U.S. should build one as well. But the U.S. is quite a bit larger than Israel. And because of that nothing like that is really feasible at all. So the plan quickly evolved into a new version of Reagan’s SDI. All of this was contained in a late January executive order in which Trump committed the country (purportedly) to building it. There are many reasons why this is a bad idea, both destabilizing but also unfeasible. But let’s set that aside for the moment.

It now emerges that Musk’s SpaceX, Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril have combined forces to build what Trump is calling “Golden Dome.” Needless to say, since Musk basically controls federal contracting, he’s essentially giving the contract to himself. Through the article, there are gently phrased characterizations of the situation like this (emphasis added).

New from The Miami Herald …

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has directed state law enforcement officers to stand down on enforcing a new state immigration law, guidance that came shortly after a federal judge in Miami said she was “astounded” that state authorities had continued to make arrests despite her ordering them not to.

In a hearing in Miami federal court on Friday, it was disclosed that as many as 15 arrests have been made by Florida law enforcement officers over the past two weeks in violation of an April 4 order issued by U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams. One of the people arrested was a U.S. citizen born in Georgia.

One of the most important stories in some time came out two days ago. But with so much else going it didn’t get quite as much attention as it should have. It’s from ProPublica. And it’s about a Peter Thiel-backed start up called Ramp. It’s a corporate credit card processing outfit. The game here is pretty straightforward. Trump and Musk are looking to hand some or all of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program (SmartPay) over to Ramp. A bunch of the meetings were organized by Josh Gruenbaum, a private equity guy who Trump and Musk installed as chief acquisitions officer at the GSA. (He was also the lead signatory on the demand letter to Harvard we’re now told, as of last night, was accidentally sent. So Gruenbaum’s got a lot going on.) Ramp’s value add is supposed to be the use of AI to monitor spending.

The overall picture is a standard one: Come in, take over the data and financial architecture; discredit it by having your media arms dish out mountains of phony stories about fraud and abuse; fire all the employees and hand a cash-drenched, sweetheart contract to yours and your friends company.

Or maybe it’s a start up, which has already raised about $2 billion from the likes of Peter Thiel and the Kushner family, among others, and thus needs a pretty big exit. It all comes together quite nicely. It’s good to be the king, as Mel Brooks once put it. And I suspect that’s just a prelude to a vastly bigger prize: contracts to manage payments of the more than $1.5 trillion that goes to Social Security recipients and likely other government programs that disperse money directly to individuals.

The White House is now saying that the demand letter to Harvard was sent by mistake and Trump is mad Harvard didn’t realize that.

For a couple weeks, the green world has been rife with rumors that the Trump White House was preparing a series of executive orders to strip climate groups of their non-profit status. In some versions of the story there were attacks far beyond revoking nonprofit status. But it was all rumors, nothing nailed down or tied to a specific source with direct knowledge, at least in any way that a news organization was able to confirm. Then, last night, Bloomberg finally reported the outlines of the story. Climate groups are in the crosshairs, as is CREW, the corruption in government group. As in the earlier scuttlebutt, Earth Day is purported to be the day when the axe may fall. The full scope of the assault remains unclear. (There is chatter that they’ll soon move on to immigration, voting rights and pro-democracy groups.)

Let’s start with the standard disclaimer: this is all completely illegal. There are a series of criteria for nonprofit status tied to the avoidance of explicitly electoral political activity, financial management, internal governance and other matters. You can lose your status for those reasons. The President cannot remove the status because he doesn’t like you or he doesn’t like your ideas.

I learned this afternoon that the entire NIH payment system is currently frozen. So this applies to all grantees. This is because of DOGE’s new “Defend the Spend” caper, which was reported this morning in the Post and which has already led to cutoffs in payments to doctors and health workers serving the poor. The idea behind the plan is to require itemized lists and justifications for all items purchased or money spent with each draw down of funds from a grant account. I’m not clear yet whether this is merely a policy DOGE has imposed or policy backed by an additional software layer they’ve built on to the current system. It sounds like it may be the latter. But I don’t have clarity on that. Intentional sabotage aside, the whole idea seems wholly unworkable without creating crazy bottlenecks. But that sounds like the point.