One feature of the current moment is that there are so many things going on, so much corruption and wrongdoing that it is hard to focus on any one thing. What would otherwise be historic scandals blow by almost unnoticed. Today I wanted to zero in on a couple storylines we should all be following.
One comes from the Broadview Six/Four case. I explained the outlines of the story here. It’s now being referenced in numerous federal cases to persuade judges to deny prosecutors the presumption of “regularity,” i.e. the foundational assumption that the government is following the rules and operating in good faith in its prosecutions. The end of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case is getting similar treatment. But there’s clearly a deeper scandal brewing here, especially with grand juries. It’s not clear to me how much of this is coming from explicit instructions from the DOJ to violate the rules or simply a climate of permissive lawlessness in which prosecutors start breaking the rules because they see their superiors doing the same.
Some of this has come in high-profile cases like those into former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, though those have generally involved DOJ incompetence than bright-line misconduct. But there’s a growing number of cases like the Broadview Four case, less high-profile and only starting to get sustained attention now. Keep an eye on this and please let me know of other examples you may see in your local area.
A second issue is one that has rapidly gained attention in the world of the sciences and federal research and development but hasn’t quite broken out into the mainstream news. It’s a big deal. The Office of Management and Budget is trying to promulgate a new set of rules which, in essence, put OMB officials in charge of all federal scientific grants and encourage them to overrule peer review panels. They can also cancel grants at any time for essentially any reason.
This is one of those cases that does not involve what you’d call a hot populist issue. And it would take some work to explain to the average person just why this is a problem, or what a peer review panel even is. As one reader in the federal medical research establishment told me, this basically takes what everyone always knew was the goal of the DOGE chainsaw massacre of a year ago and states it all explicitly, making those goals and procedures official policy. As law professor Josh Chafetz put it, this is unitary executive authority “on steroids.”
Another way to put it is that it purports to end the current system which Congress created, in which the federal government provides funding for the sciences and medical research. Instead, it makes the entire apparatus into a kind of political patronage system, with any research or research institutions liable to be immediately cut off if they offend the current occupant of the White House.
This isn’t how the sciences work, and it’s basically a dagger aimed at the sciences and medical research, which makes sense because the Trumpers see these fields generally as political enemies to be defunded. This move is also against the law. What we see here is that under Roberts Court doctrine, Congress can’t designate what the rules or laws are that the president has to follow, how a program is supposed to work. All of that gets left to the president under that untrammeled power he has under unitary executive theory.
Lawyers and academics and researchers have always been well represented in TPM’s readership. If you’re from the world of the sciences and medical research, I want to hear from you about this.