After a dizzying back and forth that involved House Republican leadership delaying, pulling and abruptly restarting a vote on the conference’s budget blueprint Tuesday evening, Republicans’ “big, beautiful” budget resolution narrowly passed the House in a 217-215 vote.
Continue reading “House GOP Passes Trump’s Budget Resolution As Admin Takes Sledgehammer To Separation Of Powers”Youngkin Offers Constituents Insulting ‘Job Fair’ As Musk Purges Virginian Federal Workers
Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin is trying to figure out how to help his party keep the governor’s mansion when his term is up this year — a challenge that may become more difficult as Elon Musk’s lawless DOGE rampage continues to directly impact the more than 140,000 federal workers who live in the state.
Continue reading “Youngkin Offers Constituents Insulting ‘Job Fair’ As Musk Purges Virginian Federal Workers”A Little of the Pre-History of DOGE/USDS
There are a couple stories today that require understanding something about DOGE’s predecessor institution. So here goes.
Continue reading “A Little of the Pre-History of DOGE/USDS”DOJ Hires A State Judge Who Was Once Suspended To Advise The Deputy AG
A new top Justice Department appointee brings a bizarre past to the job: he was a state judge in Oregon but was, in 2018, suspended by a state ethics board over misconduct allegations.
Continue reading “DOJ Hires A State Judge Who Was Once Suspended To Advise The Deputy AG”BREAKING: SSA Division Abolished
A short time ago, I broke the news that the acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration has abolishing CREO, the SSA’s statutory civil rights and equal opportunity division. He also put all employees of the division on immediate leave; that’s the standard DOGE approach, the closest you can get to firing those people, which will presumably become formal soon. Acting Commission Leland Dudek was a mid-level SSA staffer until about a week ago, when he was caught making unauthorized leaks of SSA information to DOGE. He was in the process of being fired when he was elevated over at least one hundred more senior agency executives to running the whole agency.
I am told that other steps of similar gravity and equally questionable legality are also either in process or expected.
This is a developing story.
What To Tell Your Member of Congress
In response to last night’s “red alert” post, a number of TPM Readers have written in to say, okay, okay, fine but what exactly do I tell my member of Congress? This takes me a bit out of my lane. I’m not a strategist. But I can say how I see the situation, where the weak points seem to be.
So here’s my take.
Republicans control the White House and Congress. They’re the majority. The current “continuing resolution” that’s funding the government runs out on March 14th. They’re also trying to put together a budget to take away your health care coverage and give Elon a huge tax cut. But that new budget won’t kick in until later this year. They’re just starting that budget process. But they need to fund the government in the meantime. They’re in the majority. So they need to do that. But they only have a tiny majority and they’re clowns and they can’t manage to do this simple thing — basically because they can’t get the Freedom Caucus freaks to vote for something that their few moderates will also support. So they’re coming to Democrats basically hat in hand: “Friends, we are clowns. And we are about to do a shut down the government on ourselves. Can you help us?”
Continue reading “What To Tell Your Member of Congress”BREAKING: Elon’s Epic Email Rake-Stomp Finally Explained!
Winston Churchill once said, “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” One might also say there’s nothing so fun as being right about a big story totally by accident. Or rather, in this case, I actually knew about what I’m about to describe to you but forgot. Early February was at least a hundred years ago and I’ve been working on a million different stories since then — and, so, I’d totally forgotten about these details. But seriously, people, let’s not make it about me.
Here’s the story.
As you know, Elon Musk went on Twitter on Saturday and said federal workers had to list their accomplishments for him or else. The email was sent out over something called The Government-Wide Email System (GWES), a DOGE creation from the first days after the takeover of the Office of Personnel Management. (This will be a key point.) The email itself didn’t include Elon’s threat of termination (or, technically, a constructive resignation). But the message was heard loud and clear. Then pretty much the entire federal government spent 72 hours trying to figure out whether compliance was or wasn’t required. On Sunday morning, I flagged this Privacy Impact Statement (PIA) which OPM prepared for the GWES system back on February 5th. That document was flagged to me by a government tech. And as I noted, it states very clearly that compliance with any requests you receive via GWES is totally voluntary. You can respond to these emails or not. You can share information or not. It’s totally up to you. It’s very clear.
But I didn’t really have any clear idea of why this document existed or why it made such strong representations about the voluntariness of anything tied to GWES. (As is often the case, Marcy Wheeler had already put it a lot of this together even though I hadn’t.)
Well, here’s the story.
Continue reading “BREAKING: Elon’s Epic Email Rake-Stomp Finally Explained!”As Trump Marauds Through Executive Branch, SCOTUS May—MAY—Have A Red Line
As President Donald Trump and his billionaire compatriot Elon Musk rampage lawlessly through the federal government, they’ve pointedly ignored a key distinction within the executive branch: agencies that are explicitly under the president’s control versus independent agencies that Congress set up to be insulated from elections, presidents and politics.
The administration has already fired board members at such agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, teeing up a Supreme Court showdown over one of the last safe havens of independent federal government decision-making — agencies led by bipartisan, Senate-confirmed panels, where a power-hungry president can’t just fire leaders and replace them with partisan stooges.
If Trump prevails, it’ll bring to life the right-wing vision of a unitary executive — where the president controls the entire executive branch — realizing a longtime goal of many in the conservative legal movement.
Continue reading “As Trump Marauds Through Executive Branch, SCOTUS May—MAY—Have A Red Line”Bongino Has Long Pushed Conspiracy Theories About An ‘Irredeemably Corrupt’ FBI In Need Of A Purge
MAGA conspiracy theorist and podcaster Dan Bongino, who was recently announced as deputy director of the FBI, has for years publicly signaled his commitment to rooting out Trump’s perceived political enemies from the bureau.
Continue reading “Bongino Has Long Pushed Conspiracy Theories About An ‘Irredeemably Corrupt’ FBI In Need Of A Purge”It’s Taking Judges An Awfully Long Time To Get To The Bottom Of Who’s Running DOGE
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Who Is Running DOGE???
The Trump White House won’t say exactly, the Trump Justice Department professes not to know, and so far federal judges have not been able to obtain an answer to the most basic question: Who is the administrator of Elon Musk’s DOGE?
The judge to confront the question most directly has been U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of Washington, D.C. During a surreal hearing Monday in which the judge called into question the constitutionality of DOGE, Justice Department lawyers still could not tell her who the official administering DOGE is.
It led to Kafkaesque exchanges like these, helpfully posted by Lawfare’s Anna Bower:
[Silence.]
— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) February 24, 2025 at 10:57 PM
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BY WHOM INDEED
— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) February 24, 2025 at 7:15 PM
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Kollar-Kotelly is hearing a case seeking to bar DOGE from accessing sensitive records maintained by the Treasury Department. Meanwhile, in a new ruling, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman of Maryland blocked DOGE’s access to personally identifiable information at the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management.
It’s an answerable question, but still nada from the Trump administration.
The Great ‘5 Things’ Email Fiasco Of 2025
It was impossible to find a clear through-line in the messaging coming out of the Trump administration about Elon Musk’s ridiculous weekend email:
- President Trump, famous for his reality TV “You’re fired,” tepidly said workers would be “semi-fired” if they did not respond.
- OPM said workers were not required to respond after various government components had wrestled all day with what to tell their employees, in some cases sending mixed messages
- By the end of the day, Musk himself had re-upped his demand and threatened firings yet again:
Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 25, 2025
Failure to respond a second time will result in termination. https://t.co/04xzgScXfj
IMPORTANT
An independent federal oversight agency has deemed at least some of President Trump’s mass firings of probationary period employees unlawful, creating a pathway for those employees to regain their jobs.
The Office of Special Counsel, the agency responsible for investigating illegal actions taken against federal employees, issued its decision for six employees, each at different agencies. While the decision was technically limited in scope, it could have immediate impact on all terminated staff at those six agencies and could set a wide-ranging precedent across government. It has not been made public and was provided to Government Executive by a source within the government. OSC, which did not provide the document to Government Executive, verified its authenticity.
The Unpurging
Another example of the Trump clusterfuckery: The FDA has reinstated dozens of specialists involved in food safety, review of medical devices and other areas who were laid off last week.
Go Deeper On The Trump Purges
University of Minnesota Law School professor Nick Bednar has some helpful backgrounders on the existing legal frameworks that the DOGE-driven purges of federal workers are running hard up against:
Trump’s Attack On Independent Agencies
A key element of President Trump’s executive power grab is disregarding any congressional limitations imposed on firing the people who sit atop the independent agencies of the executive branch. We’re talking a host of key agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Merit Systems Protection Board. It will be a defining legal battle of his second presidency and one that the Supreme Court will likely weigh in on sooner than later, with implications for the Federal Reserve as well. TPM’s Kate Riga has an early primer on the structural power dynamics and the legal landscape.
Everything You Need to Know About Dan Bongino
The FBI is reeling from the one-two punch of Kash Patel and Dan Bongino as the new director and deputy director:
- NYT: Before Ascending to Top Tier of F.B.I., Bongino Fueled Right-Wing Disbelief
- WSJ: Dan Bongino Called the FBI ‘Irredeemably Corrupt.’ Now He’ll Help Run It.
We’ve Seen This Type Before
I’ve long been fascinated by how scattered through the federal government are just enough misguided, disenchanted, peevish, grievance-filled, and maladaptive personalities for bad actors to raise up for their own corrupt ends when they take power.
It’s a recurring theme of our coverage over the years how these willing stooges get their chance to “shine” and try to make the most of it. Former Trump DOJer Jeffrey Clark is a classic of the genre. It almost always ends badly, but not as badly as it should (Clark is now back in the new Trump administration).
Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove appears to be the latest in the long line of these passed-over and overlooked opportunists who seize on suddenly no longer being the odd man out. And, yes, they seem chronically to be men.
How Screwed Are We? This Screwed …
Acting DC U.S. attorney Ed Martin proudly tweeting his corrupt notion of the role of the Justice Department as a defender and weapon of President Donald Trump:
— U.S. Attorney DC (@USAO_DC) February 24, 2025
The Best Of The Best
Former West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner – who as recently as last year claimed that the CIA stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump – is now overseeing the Justice Department’s vaunted Civil Rights Division on an acting basis.
‘Uniformly Unhelpful’
U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden of Washington, D.C., declined to restore immediately the Associated Press’ access to presidential events, but he urged the Trump White House to reconsider its ban over the wire service’s refusal to use “Gulf Of America,” saying the case law “is uniformly unhelpful to the White House.”
Retribution In Action
Within hours of President Trump publicly threatening to end the political career of Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D), his Department of Education initiated a purported Title IX investigation of the University of Maine of transgender women in sports.
EXCLUSIVE
A group of prominent military contractors, including former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, has pitched the Trump White House on a proposal to carry out mass deportations through a network of “processing camps” on military bases, a private fleet of 100 planes, and a “small army” of private citizens empowered to make arrests.
The blueprint — laid out in a 26-page document President Donald Trump’s advisers received before the inauguration — carries an estimated price tag of $25 billion and recommends a range of aggressive tactics to rapidly deport 12 million people before the 2026 midterms, including some that would likely face legal and operational challenges, according to a copy obtained by POLITICO.
Surreal Headline Of The Day
CNN: US joins Russia to vote against UN resolution condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine
‘Long Live The Real King’
Pranksters had a memorable stunt waiting for workers returning to mandatory in-office work at HUD headquarters:
This morning at Dept of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) HQ in DC as mandatory return to office began, this video played on loop for ~5 mins on screens throughout the building, per agency source. Building staff couldn’t figure out how to turn it off so sent people to every floor to unplug TVs.
— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) February 24, 2025 at 9:51 AM
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