Government Executive: “The Veterans Affairs Department is requiring all employees working on its plans to slash tens of thousands of workers from its rolls to sign non-disclosure agreements, an unusual move that has prevented supervisors from sharing basic information with staff.”

Question: I’m looking for examples of medical schools which may just have received a letter from the Justice Department demanding detailed records of the school’s admissions going back five years. If you have information: Signal joshtpm.99 or joshtpm at protonmail dot com. All comms confidential.

This isn’t terribly surprising, given the broader budgetary situation at American universities, particularly in the sciences and biomedical research specifically. I’ve heard from faculty and graduate students at a number of schools around the country. Many programs are dramatically reducing the number of offers being made for PhD programs. One prestigious school of medicine cut the number of PhD students it’s admitting for next year by 50%. At another program, PhD students are being graduated on an expedited basis, sooner and with less work produced than would normally be allowed. The logic is simple. The program doesn’t think they’re going to have the money to allow these students to finish. I’ve heard multiple examples of offers being turned down to attend programs in other countries. Meanwhile and unsurprisingly, foreign students are turning down offers to study in the United States.

Let’s review some recent events.

The White House (yes, technically the GSA guy and the two lawyers) sent that letter to Harvard, demanding de facto control of the university’s hiring, admissions and various elements of its curriculum. Harvard replied with a flat rejection ten days ago. The White House immediately responded by freezing $2.3 billion in grants to Harvard. That was on April 14th. Then, four days later (April 18th), there was that weird article in the Times in which we learned that the White House said that the original demand letter had been sent by mistake. The White House wasn’t disowning the contents of the letter, or not exactly? They made what might best be described as a kind of low-energy and churlish demand or beg for Harvard to continue negotiating. It’s been reported that the White House made as many as three informal contacts to restart negotiations. Then, three days (April 21st) after that, Harvard sued. I noted yesterday that a majority of the University of Michigan Regents published an op-ed backing Harvard’s stand and denouncing the White House’s coercion tactics. The American Association of Colleges and Universities published an open letter doing the same which was signed by more than 150 university presidents.

This morning, the White House announced that trade talks with China continue, albeit at a staff level. This came after a flurry of reports that Trump is planning to unilaterally ramp back the embargo-level tariffs he imposed on China earlier this month, advance notice that cheered Wall Street. Then Chinese officials said that the White House is wrong. There actually are no talks. And Trump must take the first step, unilaterally undoing the tariffs he had already imposed.

He appears set to do just that.

This comes just three days after the CEOs of Walmart, Target and Home Depot met with Trump at the White House and reportedly told him that his tariffs would result in empty shelves and product shortages in as little as two weeks.

All of this is, to put it mildly, a humiliating climb down for the President. He upended the global economy and seems to have massively damaged the perception of American assets as a safe haven during times of economic uncertainty. The goal was to go toe-to-toe with China and see China blink. But it’s the U.S. that’s blinking. And that’s after the earlier reciprocal tariffs blink that already happened.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Pete Hegseth and Signal-gate part two, the Supreme Court’s extraordinary Alien Enemies Act order and the passing of Pope Francis.

I wanted to point your attention to this recent article from the Times on the battle between Trump and Harvard University. It captures the Times’ feature quality. It contains good factual detail, but it radiates what I can only describe as a Chernobyl-level condescension and contempt, not so much for anything “liberal” but anything not conservative, or not in line with what it terms the “rightward shift of the country” — anything that can be construed as a posture of opposition to Donald Trump. The Harvard board is portrayed as reflexively and out-of-touchedly liberal, repeatedly shocked in a weak-kneed sort of way and yet also, paradoxically, headstrong in its inability to resist outmoded Trump I-era “resistance” thinking. In a few words, weak, out-of-touch and contemptible.

Things are moving apace with the DOJ-in-Exile. A home in waiting for the project has been set up at DOJinExile.com. It even has a Bluesky and Twitter accounts. I introduced the concept here and I provided the key things it would need to do to be effective. I’ve been flooded by emails from people supporting the idea, wanting to contribute various kinds of expertise, wanting to work for it and even wanting to fund it. I’ve heard from a gratifyingly large number of DOJ alums or other former prosecutors who are very interested in being involved. If you’re in that category please do be in touch — both if you’d like to be directly involved or simply want to provide input or advice. I’d love both. I’m now turning my attention to that last question. I’m looking for people who might be interested in funding such a project. I’m not looking for actual money just yet, or even financial commitments. I’d like to hear from people who might seriously be interested in contributing significant sums of money to such a project.

This won’t be my project. I won’t be involved. I will try to bring together a group that will eventually run it and a group that will fund it. And when those two groups have come together sufficiently, I will hand it off to them.

If you’re in either of these groups and want to reach out, you can do so at our normal contact email or you can reach me on Signal at joshtpm.99 or encrypted email at joshtpm at protonmail dot com.

I wanted to share something with you. I was talking with TPM Reader LG (who in this case I will identify as Leo Gugerty, a professor at Clemson University) about the DOJ-in-Exile project and the conversation moved to something very different: the pace of border crossings at the southern U.S. border over the last 15 years. With his permission, I’m sharing with you here the graph he shared with me.

I’ve been gratified at just how much response and interest I’ve got to my proposal for a DOJ-in-Exile project. I’ve heard from so many people either wanting to volunteer their time or work for such a project or help get it off the ground that I haven’t even been able to respond to everyone yet. But I’m very encouraged by the interest. As I said yesterday, this isn’t something I am envisioning running. I don’t have the expertise and I’m already doing something. I’m trying to bring together interested people and potentially funders and thus hopefully play some role in bringing it into existence.

To help bring the idea into more focus, I thought I’d try to flesh out the concept.