One more point to keep an eye on. You’ve likely seen that the White House is doing a series of executive orders and sending letters to employees demanding “DEI” be rooted out of agencies. News organizations have mostly used this terminology. But whatever you think about DEI, this is deeply and intentionally misleading. This gives the impression that they’re clawing back various #MeToo and post-George Floyd government policies. But they’re actually repealing a host of executive orders and departmental policies going all the way back to the Johnson administration. A lot of it is very basic employment non-discrimination rules and contracting non-discrimination rules.

For the purposes of this post I’m not trying to get into what “DEI” is or whether it’s good or bad. I’m focused on this more general point that under the pretext of a DEI rollback they’re basically stripping out non-discrimination policies across the government.

This is a quick follow up to yesterday’s post about the “pause” on funding for essentially all medical research in the United States. This is a big, big deal and our team, notwithstanding its very small size, is very much on it. And if you’re in that community your tips are very important.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh break down the beginning of the second Trump administration.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

Here’s a simple but inarguable point: Trump’s decision to pardon (and/or commute release of) all the January 6th insurrectionists is deeply unpopular. Your best evidence for that is the responses of Republicans who are asked to react to or justify it. They’re doing the most practical thing: dodge the questions and wait for those questions to subside. Wait for it to become old news, something that happened in the past. Democrats’ job is to prolong the period of questions for as long as possible. There are many ways to do it, as I explained yesterday. The job of a political opposition is to spend every day illustrating for the public what’s bad about the current government being in power. That’s not tawdry or institutionally selfish or unhelpful. It’s a functional, essential feature of our political system. To the extent you’re not able to do that, the folks in power must be doing a fairly good job. And that’s a good thing to know, even if it’s an unpleasant reality for the opposition. It’s quite literally what you’re supposed to do for the broader framework of government to function.

In order to combat the scourge of “DEI,” the DOJ yesterday indefinitely suspended observance of events like Black History Month, Women’s History Month and other long observed (and one would imagine fairly innocuous) commemorations.

The details are as follows.

Yesterday as part of the implementation of Trump’s anti-DEI executive order and the related anti-DEI guidance memorandum from the Office of Personal Management, the Executive Office of United States Attorneys immediately “suspend[ed] observance programs until further notice” and advised regional U.S. Attorneys Offices that “we believe it would also be prudent for the USAOs to suspend all observance events at this time.”

For what it’s worth, Black History Month isn’t something that BLM activists came up with. President Gerald Ford recognized February in 1976 and Congress passed a law designating February as National Black History Month in 1986.

The news was contained in a circular email sent to all U.S. Attorney’s Offices and shared with TPM.

Wanted to share some information on the RFK Jr. nomination before the Senate.

It probably won’t surprise you that RFK Jr., along with Tulsi Gabbard, are among the few Trump nominees who might actually not get confirmed. But I’m told that one senator who Democratic senators and health care advocates have real concerns about is none other than Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). To be clear, Whitehouse isn’t confirmed as voting for Kennedy. But he appears to be actively considering it. (Ed Note: WTF?)

Another detail out of FDA. The agency has removed pages which provide guidance to medical researchers on conducting medical trials with representative numbers of men and women and ethnic and/or racial minority groups. I think most people know this: but this isn’t a matter of symbolic diversity. Many medications and/or diseases or conditions present differently in men and woman and in people with different genetic backgrounds.

I’ve mentioned a few times that Donald Trump is giving Democrats a big, big opening by so conspicuously surrounding himself and seeking the counsel of almost all of the country’s super-billionaires. If you’re a bruised party looking to get a footing in a populist moment, having the billionaire (at least branded as such) head of the opposite party surround himself with the country’s top billionaires and basically say, “We’re Team Billinoaire” is a pretty good opening. And the American people seem to agree.

AP has a new poll out which asked whether people think it’s a good or bad thing that the President “relies on billionaires for advice about government policy.” When I first saw the results of this poll as “good” coming in at “+12” I thought they meant “net” 12% and I thought, “eeeesh, the honeymoon phase is more intense than I thought!” But no, 12%: as in, 12% of the public think it’s a good thing. 60% think it’s not. That’s U.S. adults. The only outliers are Republicans, 20% of whom think this is a good thing. But even that is pretty feeble. To put it simply, these are terrible numbers.

Back in June I asked you to tell me about your favorite TPM posts. I read through your responses at the time. But the project I was investigating was soon overtaken by the rush of campaign events, particularly the aftermath of the Trump-Biden presidential debate at the end of the month. I was finally able to go through them more systematically this weekend. First, thank you for the attention and thought so many of you put into those contributions. They were gratifying and illuminating to read. My aim with this exercise was to pull together a list of posts for something kind of but not precisely like an anthology.

Minor scoop here. Hearing that Sen. Gary Peters (D) of Michigan will announce his retirement this morning at 9:30 AM. That means an open seat election in 2026.