I think anyone watching the whole horizon will sense something similar. But I wanted to state it clearly. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are if not hitting the gas than becoming more publicly aggressive and hostile just as a public backlash of great breadth appears to be forming and members of Congress are becoming skittish. This is a highly combustible collision in the making.
Elon Sends Wild Saturday Harassment Email to All Federal Employees
A short time ago Elon Musk posted this to Twitter.
I have now seen three separate copies of this email sent to federal employees in three separate federal agencies/departments. They’re all identical. In one of those cases it is to an agency where all but a literal handful of employees have been under a stop work order for more than a week. The emails have the subject line “What did you do last week?” followed by an urgent-response red emoji exclamation point.
Continue reading “Elon Sends Wild Saturday Harassment Email to All Federal Employees”CDC Shutters PRAMS Program on Maternal and Infant Health
The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) is a federal data collection system, run out of CDC, “designed to identify groups of women and infants at high risk for health problems, to monitor changes in health status, and to measure progress towards goals in improving the health of mothers and infants,” in the words of the program’s website. It has run continuously since 1988 and covers everything from the particulars of newborn health and morbidity to issues like post-partum depression in mothers. I can report that the Trump CDC has shuttered the program as part of its general clampdown on medical research and public health information.
Continue reading “CDC Shutters PRAMS Program on Maternal and Infant Health”Ye Olde GOP Town Hall List
I’m trying to compile a list of all the town halls where GOP members of Congress got rocked by constituents this past week while they were on break. There are so many now that I can’t really write a whole post about each one. But I wanted to ask if you could send me links if there are examples where your member of Congress or Senator had a similar experience so I can add it to the list.
Diana Harshbarger (Tennessee) Friday townhall in Tennessee
Keith Self (Texas) Saturday (3/1) townhall (video) in Wylie.
Roger Marshall (Kansas) Saturday (3/1) townhall in Oakley
Glenn Grothman (Wisconsin) Friday morning town hall in Oshkosh
Scott Fitzgerald (Wisconsin) town hall in West Bend on Thursday.
Kevin Hern (Oklahoma) town hall in Glenpool on Thursday.
Cliff Bentz (Oregon) mutliple town halls in eastern Oregon this week.
Nick Begich (Alaska) confronted at airport last week.
Rich McCormick (Georgia) town hall in Roswell on Thursday.
Jay Obernolte (California) Yucca Valley townhall on Saturday.
Mark Alford (Missouri) Belton townhall on Monday.
If your Rep. or Senator got rocked at a townhall last week and he or she isn’t on our list please send us a link with the story. You can send us an email at talk at talkingpointsmemo dot com.
Eric Adams’ Table of Success
Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
NYC Mayor Eric Adams has a line that he trots out about life. It’s a clunky bit of received wisdom: “All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success.”
Continue reading “Eric Adams’ Table of Success”Another Town Hall(s) Goes Off the Rails – Oregon 2nd District Edition
In Oregon’s 2nd district, Rep. Cliff Bentz (R) got a rude awakening in four town halls he held in this past week. At one point in his town hall in La Grande he chided the audience, saying a lot of representatives had refused to even hold town halls. So they should be grateful he decided to show up.
Note that this is an R+15 district — basically the eastern two-thirds of the state.
From the La Grande Observer …
Continue reading “Another Town Hall(s) Goes Off the Rails – Oregon 2nd District Edition”Ominous
President Trump has abruptly fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Charles Q. Brown Jr., and is replacing him with a retired three star general, Dan Caine. This portends a future grave crisis as the President attempts to restructure the military into one personally loyal to him. Caine has not been a service chief or held a combatant command or been the head of the air forces of a combatant command. So basically he’s held none of the assignments which normally precedes elevation to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
I don’t know enough about the internal workings of the Joint Staff to know how big a problem that is in itself. But this is the President reaching far down the pecking order to someone who isn’t even on active duty in the military for the critical position not only as the chief military advisory to the President (the Chairman’s statutory role) but the key person at the contact point of civilian control over the military. Given Trump’s well-known impulses and ambitions, we must be very, very wary and suspicious of what understandings Trump has or believes he has with Caine.
This one is really, really bad.
Late Update: In its own way equally ominous, Trump tonight fired the Judge Advocates General of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Among many other things it’s the military lawyers who determine what is a legal order and what’s not. If you’re planning to give illegal orders they are an obvious obstacle.
Following
Important new Times story on issue I discussed here in the Ed Blog earlier this week: how the White House is using notifications to the Federal Register as a way to get around judges’ orders unfreezing NIH grant funding.
Precious
According to Politico, the White House has a new buzzword: Precision. Gone are the days — i.e., yesterday — when DOGE indiscriminately torched the livelihoods of federal employees in the tens of thousands. Now they’re indiscriminately torching the livelihoods of tens of thousands under the new branding of “precision,” or something like that. Politico runs with the new branding but is then forced to concede that the firings continuing pretty much exactly as they have been.
Let Me Know What You Hear
Following up on my post below about the beginnings of a visible backlash against Elon Musk’s wilding spree throughout the federal government, I remain very eager to hear from you about what you might be hearing from your senators and representatives. From the beginning of the DOGE wilding spree there’s been a disconnect between what Republican members of Congress are saying in DC and what they’re telling constituents back home. As I noted in today’s Backchannel, that cleavage has expanded dramatically over the last week. They’re hearing from angry constituents in their districts. Some are telling local press that Elon is out of control. Some are saying that while they’re fully in support of President Trump’s goals, they think Elon is going about it in the wrong way. (If you haven’t read today’s Backchannel it includes a lot of important context.) It’s time to ask members of Congress whether they support DOGE or not — as close to a yes or no question as one can get it. Every response you forward to me will help me greatly in charting the evolution of the public response to the DOGE attack on the American republic.