The Post reports today that the IRS’ internal projections estimate that the DOGE-driven disruptions to the IRS since the inauguration are on track to have reduced tax receipts by more than $500 billion by April 15th. This, to be clear, is not a final tally. It’s not April 15th yet. It’s a projection based on historical data, the number of people who’ve filed, paid owed amounts of tax, etc. It’s worth taking a moment to put this number into some context in case half a trillion dollars doesn’t do it for you. Non-defense discretionary spending is the cost to fund the U.S. government once you take out mandatory spending (mostly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) and the cost of the U.S. military. For 2023 that number was $917 billion. So that’s most of the stuff we think of as the government, apart from those payment programs and the military. In other words, in about eight weeks DOGE managed to lose the U.S. government — more or less light on fire — more than half of what goes to all non-defense discretionary spending.
A Week Of Cracking Down On Education And Free Thought
Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
Much of what the Trump administration has done during the lawless rampage that has been its first two months has felt haphazard, reckless, at times almost random in nature — all of which, of course, is by design. It’s become well understood in the years since the MAGA movement’s takeover of the Republican Party that the cruelty — and, often, the accompanying chaos — is the point.
Continue reading “A Week Of Cracking Down On Education And Free Thought”Gettin’ Rocked For DOGE – News from the Town Halls
Meanwhile we have Musk/DOGE blowback town halls in Iowa (with Chuck Grassley) courtesy of TPM Reader BC; another from Utah where two Republicans at least had the integrity to hold a town hall, courtesy of TPM Reader AF; and finally Wyoming and Rep. Hageman, Liz Cheney’s successor, in Laramie, courtesy of TPM Reader JW.
As Hageman told the 500 person crowd: “You guys are going to have a heart attack if you don’t calm down. I’m sorry, you’re hysterical.”
Friday Firings—Becoming the Norm
Fridays are becoming bloodbath day in the federal workforce. In the same way that bad news stories used to be held for Friday late afternoon, that’s when we now hear about a lot of these firings. Midafternoon, I heard that the Department of Homeland Security had essentially abolished all its international civil rights and detention abuse agencies. They abolished the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman and the Office of the CIS Ombudsman. In other words, basically everyone in the department charged with providing some oversight of the treatment of people by the department’s various policing agencies or when in detention is gone. They’re all gone. The only exception is the department Inspector General. But an IG really has a much broader brief. In any case, all terminated immediately, out of the blue. Those are all, I believe, statutory offices. I know the Office of Civil Rights is. So you really can’t abolish those. Except when you do. So that’s where we are.
Continue reading “Friday Firings—Becoming the Norm”Unfortunate
So, the DOGE-appointed acting head of the Social Security Administration is threatening to shut the agency down, quite literally, in response to a judge’s order that DOGErs can’t look at the confidential data any more. Really.
Judge Upbraids DOJ For Defying His Orders In Alien Enemies Act Case
D.C.’s chief judge rhetorically nuked a Justice Department attorney at a Friday hearing, suggesting at one point that the lawyer had forfeited his reputation after the Trump administration spent a week giving the court the runaround over its deportations of Venezuelan nationals to an El Salvador prison under the Alien Enemies Act.
Continue reading “Judge Upbraids DOJ For Defying His Orders In Alien Enemies Act Case”Hang Together or Hang Separately, Part 2
So I had been led to believe, mostly by news reports but perhaps also by inertia, that that big amicus brief that some Big Law law firms had been trying to put together had fizzled. That seemed even more clear when news came out yesterday that Paul, Weiss had agreed to undergo a self-criticism session with President Trump and commit $40 million of pro bono work to Making American Great Again. But I’m told that effort is very much still underway. I’m not making any promises. I have no great insight or visibility into the effort. But I’ve been told by what I believe are knowledgable sources that that’s still very much underway and not in a slowly dying on the vine kind of way. So we’ll see.
Judge Orders DOGE Out Of Personal Social Security Data
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
No More Fishing For Needles In Haystacks With Sledgehammers
U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of Maryland issued a detailed enumerated temporary restraining order barring DOGE from accessing the personally identifiable information of Americans kept by the Social Security Administration. In her scathing 137-page opinion accompanying the order, Hollander berated the Trump administration for its actions and for its lame defense:
The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion. It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.
To facilitate the expedition, SSA provided members of the SSA DOGE Team with unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers’ license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses.
Yet, defendants, with so called experts on the DOGE Team, never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government. Indeed, the government has not even attempted to explain why a more tailored, measured, titrated approach is not suitable to the task. Instead, the government simply repeats its incantation of a need to modernize the system and uncover fraud. Its method of doing so is tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer
In response, Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek petulantly threatened to essentially shut down the Social Security Administration because the TRO broadly targeted “DOGE affiliates”:
“My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,” Dudek said. “As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems.”
He said he would ask the judge to immediately clarify her order. “Really, I want to turn it off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency,” he said.
Dudek, you’ll recall, was the low-level SSA bureaucrat who showed enough affinity for the arriving DOGE team to get himself elevated to the top spot.
‘Woefully Insufficient’
The Trump DOJ is pushing U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to the breaking point as he seeks to determine whether to hold the Trump administration in contempt of court for violating his order halting deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.
After asking for and getting a last-minute reprieve on a key filing deadline, the Justice Department missed its new deadline and filed a declaration from a low-level acting ICE official that essentially told the judge to pound sand.
Calling the government’s filing “woefully insufficient,” Boasberg quickly ordered the government to meet a new set of deadlines and began to set the stage for a contempt hearing, though he hasn’t scheduled one yet. The Justice Department met the first of those deadlines this morning with a terse, minimally compliant declaration from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that the administration is considering invoking the state secrets privilege.
A hearing later today will refocus the case for now on the substance of last weekend’s Alien Enemies Act deportations of Venezuelan nationals with claimed but unsubstantiated criminal gang ties. They remained imprisoned in a labor camp in El Salvador after the Trump administration rushed through the paperwork and flight logistics in what seems like a clear effort to avoid judicial scrutiny until after the fact.
Meanwhile, the NYT reports that the U.S. intelligence community issued an assessment last month that Tren de Aragua was not controlled by the Venezuelan government, undercutting a key portion of the Trump administration’s already dubious justification for invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
Quote Of The Day
“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it. We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse. These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”–Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism,” on the speed of Trump’s subversion of the judiciary
Capitulation
You’ve seen by now that President Trump played the Paul Weiss law firm like a drum, targeting it with an unlawful executive order, drawing it into a negotiation over how much of its professional ethics and independence it would get to keep, and then publicly holding the law firm’s scalp up high for everyone to see.
IMPORTANT
The Justice Department is now moving to short circuit the civil lawsuits against Donald Trump over Jan. 6.
Federal Judge Blocks Deportation Of Georgetown Fellow
U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles of Virginia issued an order blocking the deportation of Georgetown University fellow Badar Khan Suri until his habeas action can be heard. DHS says Suri, who had his visa unilaterally revoked without due process, was singled out because of his father-in-law’s ties to Hamas. In a new filing in the case, Suri’s wife, who is an American citizen, attested that her husband has only met her father twice, both times more than a decade ago.
The Destruction: Schools, Libraries, Museums
- DoE: President Trump issued an executive order purporting to abolish the Department of Education
- IMLS: DOGE descended on the DC offices of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the bedrock of federal support for the nation’s museums and libraries, has ignited fears among union leaders that the agency’s staff could be next on the chopping block, NBC News reports.
The Corruption: Treasury Secretary Touts Tesla Stock
“Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged Fox News viewers Wednesday night to buy Tesla stock, an apparent violation of federal ethics rules that prohibit officials from endorsing products or businesses,” WaPo reports.
What Elon Wants Elon Gets?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invited Elon Musk to the Pentagon for a briefing today that the NYT reports was going to the U.S. military’s highly secret contingency plan for a war with China. After the NYT report, President Trump and the Pentagon denied that the briefing session was going to be about military plans involving China.
The WSJ duplicated the NYT’s reporting and included this remarkable paragraph:
Musk, according to one person familiar with the arrangements, is receiving the briefing because he asked for one. He has a security clearance but isn’t in the military chain of command or known to be a military adviser to Trump.
Because he asked for one.
Brilliant
CNN: “Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s February memo ordering all diversity, equity and inclusion-related content to be removed from Pentagon websites was so vague that military units were instructed to simply use keyword searches like “racism,” “ethnicity,” “history” and “first” when searching for articles and photos to remove, and to interpret the directive “broadly,” multiple defense officials told CNN.”
Don’t Mess With Jackie Robinson
The Pentagon’s absurd purge of a Jackie Robinson tribute page has cost a controversial senior Defense Department spokesman his position.
Nonsense Watch
- Attorney General Pam Bondi has “as many as a thousand FBI agents” working day and night to scour investigative files on the late Jeffrey Epstein to satisfy right-wing demands that more materials be released, ABC News reports.
- The Trump White House scrambled to clean up the mess it created by exposing Social Security numbers when releasing JFK assassination files, WaPo reports.
Have A Good First Weekend Of Spring
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Hang Together or Hang Separately
From TPM Reader BM …
I was shocked that Paul Weiss, of all firms, capitulated, but not surprised.
When Trump singled out Perkins Coie, there was an effort to get all of the largest law firms to file an amicus brief and stand together with Perkins. As you’ve seen, that effort failed. Apparently, most firms wouldn’t join the brief, out of fear. Without collective action, they get picked off one by one.
I was really disappointed yesterday that the president of Princeton’s article in The Atlantic was not co-signed by all of the presidents of the major research universities. If they don’t stand together to oppose the illegal demands of the Administration, they will all hang separately.
Thanks for your reporting.
Paul, Weiss Has Gone ‘America First’
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?