A wild email out this afternoon from Acting NIH Director Matthew J. Memoli. On its face it’s an “upward and onward, we’ll get through this” letter. But along the way you have these notes like “when this transition is behind us, NIH may look different.” Yep, probably so.
He then explains that Bobby Kennedy Jr. believes deeply in NIH’s mission. As I told an NIH employee a short time ago, the claim that Kennedy believes deeply in NIH’s mission is probably a bigger hit to morale than saying we’ll all be out of a job in a month. But not to fear, says Memoli: “We will have many opportunities to demonstrate our value to Secretary Kennedy in the coming weeks and months.”
To share confidential tips about events unfolding in the federal government you can contact me on Signal at joshtpm dot 99 or via encrypted mail at joshtpm (at) protonmail dot com.
Against the backdrop of a month of chaos and destruction, something began to shift more or less in the middle of this week. I don’t want to overstate what it portends in the short term. Elon Musk remains firmly in the saddle. And even as many of Trump’s advisors grow concerned about the impact of Musk’s rampage, Donald Trump himself appears to be maintaining his support. The moment was captured yesterday at what are now the more or less constant CPACs where Steve Bannon tossed off a Nazi salute and Musk appeared in a “Dark MAGA” baseball cap sporting a chainsaw and basking in the adulation of the MAGA/CPAC faithful awash in the joy a certain kind of individual derives from destruction and pain. The picture itself is a key signpost in the story. Make a note of it. Musk himself posted it to Twitter, labeled with “The DogeFather” and flexing with the text: “This is a real picture.”
But there’s something else going on — not so much the tide turning as a certain battle being joined. Beginning this week, local TV stations around the country have begun running human interest stories about veterans, members of military families or Trump supporters getting fired as part of Elon’s purge. Meanwhile, we can see a growing cleavage between what congressional Republicans are saying in Washington and what they’re saying back in their districts.
A Manhattan federal judge signaled on Friday that he won’t rubber stamp the Trump DOJ’s effort to drop the prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, part of an allegedly corrupt quid pro quo acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove hammered out to secure Adams’ cooperation with an immigration crackdown in the five boroughs.
It goes against my basic nature to overstate things, but I don’t think it’s overdramatic to observe that the Justice Department has already been lost to the Trump II rampage. There are no guardrails, limits, or independence any longer – and it’s going to take some time for us to internalize this new reality. Days like yesterday may help hasten our acceptance of the new reality:
Kash Patel was confirmed by the Senate, 51-49, as FBI director – words I can scarcely believe I’m typing.
DOJ suddenly shifted its interpretation of President Trump’s Jan. 6 acts of clemency, broadening them to cover unrelated crimes – like illegal weapons possession – discovered in the course of the FBI’s investigation.
DOJ deleted a database tracking federal police misconduct.
In a mark of just how bad things are, the sitting attorney general, Pam Bondi, showed up at the annual right-wing confab CPAC and spewed vitriol against Joe Biden and his “drug addict son”:
the CPAC crowd cheers when AG Pam Bondi is asked about prosecuting Joe Biden
(i guess the immunity ruling only applies to Republican presidents … )
President Trump is close to crossing the line and openly defying courts in the USAID cases, but U.S. District Judge Amir Ali declined to hold the administration in contempt of court – at least for now. Within hours of that decision, the NYT reported that USAID funds remains frozen for emergency food, tuberculosis tests and HIV drugs.
Wildly Unlawful
President Trump is preparing to abolish the independence of the U.S. Postal Service and assert his own control over it by folding it into the Commerce Department, the WaPo reports. Unlike Trump’s other efforts to abolish agencies created by Congress via statute, this strikes directly at Congress’ explicit Article I power “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”
Purge Tracker
FBI/CISA: The Trump administration is targeting government officials combatting foreign interference in U.S. elections
NSF: The National Science Foundation provoked internal outcry when it cut staff beyond what was demanded by the Trump administration.
The Big Picture: The AP offers a comprehensive look at DOGE’s firings and layoffs.
Your Daily DOGE
WaPo: “The Trump White House and Treasury Department officials have agreed to prohibit the U.S. DOGE Service from accessing personal taxpayer data.”
ProPublica: “While Elon Musk and his underlings demand budget cuts and layoffs across the federal government, funding for their agency — the Department of Government Efficiency — has soared to nearly $40 million, ProPublica found in a review of Office of Management and Budget records.”
Wired: DOGE put a $1 spending limit on most credit cards belonging to employees and contractors of the GSA.
Elon Musk Watch
The U.S. Marshals Service has deputized members of Musk’s private security detail, CNN reports.
Trump DOJ drops civil case against Musk’s SpaceX with prejudice and without any explanation.
Musk showed up at CPAC – dressed all in black and wearing sunglasses indoors – where he was given a surprise gift by Argentinian President Javier Milei:
Major developments that at any other time would be top Morning Memo headlines:
RFK Jr.’s HHS ordered the CDC to stop some vaccine ads.
DOJ declared that the president has the right and power to fire administrative law judges at will.
President Trump is following through on his campaign trail threat against Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, by rolling back protections that had allowed many of them to remain in the country legally.
The Limp Noodle Caucus
Hill Republicans are beginning to make barely audible plaintive yelps about President Trump’s executive overreach:
Rep. Troy Balderson (R-OH) told a Chamber of Commerce gathering back home that the Trump executive orders are “getting out of control.”
Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS), who chairs the Veterans Affairs Committee, allows that he’s asking questions: “Certainly on the veterans side, we’re asking for information from the administration.”
Rep. Nick Begich (R) told angry fired government workers back home to “put together some materials for me” so he could review their situations: “If there’s something that I think we can do, then I will do it.”
Senate Passes Skinny Budget Bill
Just before dawn, the Senate passed its narrower-than-the House’s budget bill that doesn’t attempt to tackle the extension of the Trump tax cuts. Ball now firmly in Speaker Mike Johnson’s court but who knows what he will be able to wrangle out of his conference.
Mitch McConnell Will Not Seek Re-Election
The scourge of the Senate who paved the way for the Trump era and never had the courage to defy his party and rein in the reality TV star when he had the chance to do so will retire from the Senate at the end of his current term in 2027.
WTF?
A Mississippi state judge ordered a local newspaper to remove an editorial from its website less than a week after the Clarksdale Board of Mayor and Commissioners sued the newspaper for defamation.
Donald Trump’s Putinization of America
Susan Glasser compares the present moment to Putin’s initial takeover of Russia:
Washington today echoes with so many uncomfortable reminders of that transitional moment in Moscow—the sudden, fearful silence of critics who had previously spoken out, the business tycoons rushing to kiss the President’s ring, the lying and reality distortions to fit the official narrative. Trump’s consolidation of power this time has been fast and consequential.
Trump Abandons AND Extorts Ukraine
The United States is declining to co-sponsor a pro-Ukraine UN resolution marking the third anniversary of the Russian invasion.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to try to extort Ukraine into coughing up its mineral wealth to the United States as “payback” for aiding it against Russia’s invasion – while declining to offer future security guarantees. The WSJ has cringey new details of the effort to strong-arm President Volodymyr Zelensky.
If all of that wasn’t bad enough, Axios channels a bunch of White House shit-talking about Zelensky while reporting that Trump, in a personal pique over Zelensky’s failure to submit, almost withdrew U.S. military support in recent days.
It’s Time To Take The Trump 2028 Threat Seriously
While Steve Bannon was at CPAC touting an extra-constitutional third term for Trump, the president himself toyed with the idea in a speech to Republican governors:
Trump: And they tell me I'm not allowed to run. I'm not sure. Is that true? I'm not sure pic.twitter.com/JpsdamshLE
This article was first published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
While Elon Musk and his underlings demand budget cuts and layoffs across the federal government, funding for their agency — the Department of Government Efficiency — has soared to nearly $40 million, ProPublica found in a review of Office of Management and Budget records.
Billionaire investor Musk has called DOGE “maximally transparent.” President Donald Trump has said that some 100 people work for the group, but his administration has refused to make information about DOGE’s spending and operations public. In an effort to gain a clearer understanding of DOGE’s inner workings, ProPublica has gathered the names and backgrounds of the people employed there. We’ve identified some 46 people, including 12 new names we are adding to the list today.
Trump and Musk have defended DOGE as a tool for trimming fat from what they see as a bloated bureaucracy. The effects of those cuts have proved crippling, bringing a halt to programs that provided essential services to vulnerable populations across the country and the world.
The top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., told ProPublica she didn’t believe DOGE had the legal authority for the actions it’s taken. She called it a “made-up federal department” that’s wasting taxpayer dollars.
“This unlawful effort is stealing federal funds from American families and businesses,” DeLauro said.
Most of DOGE’s money, records show, has come in the form of payments from other federal agencies made possible by a nearly century-old law called the Economy Act. To steer those funds to the new department, the Trump administration has treated DOGE as if it were a federal agency. And by dispatching members of its staff to other agencies and having those staffers issue edicts about policy and personnel, DOGE has also behaved as if it has agency-level authority.
The use of the Economy Act would seem to subject DOGE to the same open-records laws that cover most federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the State Department. However, DOGE has refused to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests, saying it operates with executive privileges. Musk has also flip-flopped about whether DOGE’s staff members are paid. Initially he said they were not, but earlier this week he said some of them were.
The conflicting stances put the Trump administration in a bind, legal experts say. If DOGE is a federal agency, it can’t shield its records from the public. If it’s not an agency, then DOGE’s tens of millions of dollars in funding weren’t legally allocated and should be returned, some contend.
“The administration can’t have it both ways,” said Adam Grogg, a former deputy general counsel at OMB and now the legal director at Governing for Impact, a left-of-center think tank. “Either it’s an agency covered by FOIA with the authority to do what it’s doing, or it’s purely advising the president and can’t be directing agencies in the way it now is.”
A federal judge presiding over one of the many DOGE-related lawsuits also recently grilled the administration’s lawyers about its conflicting stances. In a recent hearing, U.S. District Judge John Bates characterized the government’s position as “we’re not an agency where we don’t want to be an agency, but we are an agency this one instance where we want to be.”
ProPublica has confirmed the names of 12 additional government staffers who are either part of DOGE or are linked to Musk’s constellation of companies and have roles in the new administration. We confirmed the names by cross-referencing agency records, speaking with dozens of sources inside the federal government, and poring through documents from ongoing litigation challenging DOGE’s authority.
They are spread across agencies. At the Department of Education, DOGE staffers are exploring how to expand the agency’s reliance on AI to both identify potential waste and interact with student loan recipients. At the EPA, they have reportedly gained access to contracting databases. Some staffers serve in executive-level roles while others have ambiguous titles, such as “senior adviser,” leaving unclear the nature of their work.
One of the names newly added to the tracker, Katherine Armstrong Loving, is the sibling of crypto executive Brian Armstrong, who runs the industry leader Coinbase. Coinbase donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, and Armstrong met with Trump to discuss appointments to administration posts, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Some employees work at more than one agency. None responded to requests for comment.
While Musk has celebrated DOGE’s cuts and disparaged targeted agencies, Trump officials now say he’s not actually running it.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Funding Floodgates
The Trump administration began funding DOGE soon after it took office. It started by tapping $750,000 from a White House fund for information technology initiatives in late January.
Since then, the funding has ballooned; the most recent apportionment came on Feb. 8 and included a $14 million chunk described as part of a “software modernization initiative.” In all, ProPublica found, more than $39 million has been earmarked to DOGE in the Trump administration’s first month.
For perspective, in recent years Congress had allocated around $50 million a year for the IT modernization initiative that DOGE supplanted, budget records show.
The Trump administration has not yet released enough details to trace the exact source of the funding flowing into DOGE or said who is being paid. The money could be coming from agency budgets that have money set aside for IT upgrades or other services. It’s also not yet clear what timeframe the allocation covers or whether it has funded salaries.
Funding one agency from another’s budget is not unusual, experts say. But money cannot be moved around for whatever purpose the White House wants — it is restricted by something called the “purpose statute,” which requires funds to pay for items Congress has specifically prescribed.
DOGE’s operating method “leaves questions about possible violations of the purpose statute,” said Christie Wentworth with the ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “If DOGE uses funds that are available only for IT-related purposes for initiatives that have nothing to do with IT, that use could violate federal law.”
There has been such little pushback or even engagement, among Senate Republicans, with questions surrounding the fact that Elon Musk’s DOGE rampage is stomping all over Congress’ authority to fund the federal government that the driest cough in the direction of disagreement with DOGE operations feels notable.
From the beginning of this drama going on a month ago, the White House has been laser-focused on shutting down government-supported medical research in the United States. Of course, much of that is research into cancer cures or fundamental research building toward the same. The precise goal of all this shutting down is difficult to uncover — likely one half an effort to destroy or exercise control over academic/research institutions mixed with post-COVID hostility to medical research itself. On paper the effort was put on hold by a mix of the White House backing off and the original orders being blocked by judges. But in fact the White House has found very effective workarounds to evade the impact of those court orders. And that evasion, or those alternative paths to shutting down research grants, has accelerated, clamping down even harder this week.
The Republican-controlled Senate confirmed Kash Patel as FBI Director in a 51-49 vote Thursday, despite his obvious loyalty to President Donald Trump’s retribution agenda and amid lingering questions about whether he perjured himself during his confirmation hearing.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the compromising of Eric Adams, Elon Musk’s role as heat shield for Donald Trump and a new executive order.
To share confidential tips about events unfolding in the federal government you can contact me on Signal at joshtpm dot 99 or via encrypted mail at joshtpm (at) protonmail dot com.
I don’t like to think in conspiratorial ways. But DOGE currently has far deeper and far more extensive access to U.S. government computer systems — and is far deeper into the national security space — than is conceivably necessary for anything related to their notional brief and goals. I don’t just mean this about the front-facing notional goals of making the federal government “efficient.” I mean it as well in the most sinister versions of the group’s goals — hollowing out the federal bureaucracy, destroying oversight agencies which pose threats to Musk’s business interests, building centralized command and control over budgets, employment, personal data, etc., etc.
WIRED is now reporting that two DOGE operatives, including the 19-year-old Edward Coristine (aka “Big Balls”), have gained access to the computer systems of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the agency charged with the defense of the federal government’s civilian computer networks as well as helping to organize the defense of the country’s critical infrastructure.
