Be In Touch

Posted on by Josh Marshall

As I have for 25 years, I welcome your responses to every Editor’s Blog post. That’s why there are no comments on Editors’ Blog posts. I want to hear from you by email. You can send those to talk (at) talkingpointsmemo dot com. If you’re a government worker or anyone else who has sensitive or confidential information to share about what’s happening inside the federal government you can reach me via encrypted mail at joshtpm (at) protonmail dot com or via Signal at joshtpm dot 99. Please only use these encrypted channels for confidential communication.

If you are interested in reaching out by encrypted email, which you can do at that protonmail address, I recommend creating your own protonmail account. It’s free for a basic account and just as easy as spinning up a gmail account. Just google protonmail. But you don’t have end-to-end encryption, which is what you want, unless you’re using encrypted email on both ends.

Donald Trump is Now the Mayor of New York

Posted on by Josh Marshall

The Trump DOJ’s decision to drop charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams may not be the most serious act of prosecutorial corruption in decades but it’s almost certainly the most brazen. The stated reasons for dropping the charges were absurd on their face and, while everyone deserves their day in court, Adams appears to be guilty as sin. But there’s an aspect of this corrupt spectacle which, while certainly no secret, has been far too underplayed in most press accounts. As the words are normally understood, the government didn’t drop the charges (indeed, so far it’s not clear that the Trump DOJ has found anyone in the New York office to actually do the deed; there’s still no motion to drop the charges). It would be more accurate, as to common understanding, to say they suspended them — because the directive from DC was to drop the charges without prejudice. The letter from Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove states explicitly that DOJ will review the matter again after the November mayoral election and decide whether to reinstate the charges.

Continue reading “Donald Trump is Now the Mayor of New York” →

From the Trenches

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I’m told firings have started at TTS (Technology Transformation Services), basically an in-house tech consultancy serving the federal government. It’s housed within GSA. For now it’s hitting probationers — staff brought on in the last year — who have fewer civil service protections. Disproportionately women and minority staffers. So I’d imagine that’s a fringe benefit of the move for Trump appointees. I don’t have exact numbers of those affected. But it seems to be in the dozens who found out this afternoon.

House GOP Makes Official Its Plan For Devastating Cuts To Medicaid

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

In announcing their intentions to move forward with a mammoth one bill budget plan that will supposedly sweep up key elements of Donald Trump’s fiscal agenda, enact tax cuts and raise the debt ceiling, House Republicans have placed themselves on a collision course with not just members of their own conference but also Senate Republicans.

Continue reading “House GOP Makes Official Its Plan For Devastating Cuts To Medicaid” →

EXCLUSIVE: Judicial Branch Swept Up In Trump-Musk Lease Termination Spree 

Posted on by Josh Kovensky

Elements of the judicial branch, including public defender offices, have been caught up in the Trump administration’s headlong rush to terminate thousands of leases of government office space, TPM has learned. Unlike the vast majority of federal workers whose office leases are under review for termination, public defenders are not executive branch employees. They work for the judicial branch.

Continue reading “EXCLUSIVE: Judicial Branch Swept Up In Trump-Musk Lease Termination Spree “ →

Keep An Eye On the GOP’s Budget High Wire Act

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I wanted to direct your attention to the news today that House Republicans have introduced a budget outline. This is a big, big deal. It may seem like ordinary budget politics is moving on a separate path from the ongoing constitutional crisis. But they are deeply intertwined. Framing everything is the fact that House Republicans have only the tiniest of margins in the House — 1 to 3 votes, depending on a few different factors. It’s seemed highly doubtful that they can get everything they want to do or need to do in a single bill — Trump tax cuts, the massive spending cuts to pay for those tax cuts and also what the Freedom Caucus demands, a debt-ceiling hike, border spending, more. This is why the House and the Senate have been going back and forth on one massive bill or two bills.

Continue reading “Keep An Eye On the GOP’s Budget High Wire Act” →

DOGE Treasury Update

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I want to return to a subject that has been pushed a bit out of the headlines over the last few days: the DOGE story at the Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Service (BFS). Late yesterday afternoon the government filed a series of declarations from Treasury Department civil servants providing details to a federal judge in New York about what happened. The biggest news turns on USAID payments.

We’d heard from the Times a few days ago that what was motivating this whole effort at Treasury was that they wanted to block USAID payments. We’d first heard almost two weeks ago that a senior Treasury civil servant, David A. Lebryk, had resigned rather than assist in blocking payments. But everything we’d heard to date is that intentions notwithstanding, no blocking or interfering had actually happened. But according to these new documents that’s not true. The declaration of Treasury civil servant Vona S. Robinson says that in fact multiple payments were temporarily put on hold before being reviewed at the State Department and eventually cleared for payment and one was rejected altogether (see Robinson, paragraphs 13 and 14).

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The Musk-Trump Pact Is Sealed In Bizarre Oval Office Circus

Posted on by David Kurtz

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Commissar-in-Chief

In a bizarre and surreal Oval Office circus, Elon Musk and Donald Trump ratcheted up DOGE’s infiltration of the federal government.

The occasion was Trump signing a new executive order furthering seeding DOGE across government (except the military) and laying the groundwork for a new round of purges of the federal workforce.

The executive order lays out draconian and absurdist methods for extending the hiring freeze Trump previously ordered by, for example, limiting hiring to one employee for every four who depart.

But the true significance of the executive order was empowering DOGE, overseen by the world’s richest man, to have a key role in every department and agency. The result is an arrangement where Musk and his team operates as a layer superimposed between the White House and the rest of the federal government, positioning them as political enforcers in the style of the old Soviet commissars, as TPM’s Josh Marshall noted.

It still seems wildly improbable that the Musk-Trump pact survives for long with these two volatile and unstable personalities, but the damage they may do before they self-combust is almost unimaginable.

Elon Musk Watch

  • NYT: Elon Musk’s Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up
  • ProPublica: One Agency Tried to Regulate SpaceX. Now Its Fate Could Be in Elon Musk’s Hands.
  • NYT: Elon Musk’s Financial Disclosure Will Not Be Made Public

First Of All …

Reporter: You said an example of fraud that you have cited was $50 million of condoms was sent to Gaza but after a fact-check apparently it was Gaza in Mozambique meant to protect them against HIV.  Musk: First of all, some of the things I say will be incorrect

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) February 11, 2025 at 4:49 PM

Shoot Me Now

The Associated Press was not allowed to attend the Trump-Musk circus in the Oval Office as White House retaliation for the wire service not adopting Trump’s preferred moniker “Gulf of America” in its coverage.

Pay Attention To FEMA

The Trump administration sacked four FEMA employees and continues to freeze some of FEMA’s spending despite a court order blocking the freeze.

The Purge Continues …

In addition to the four sackings at FEMA:

  • USAID: The White House fired the USAID inspector general last night after he issued a report Monday warning of the impacts of the Trump administration’s unlawful dismantling of the independent agency.
  • MSPB: President Trump fired Cathy Harris, a Democratic member of the Merit Systems Protection Board.
  • DOJ: David Hubbert, a 40-year Justice Department employee who is now its chief tax official, is resigning rather than accept a forced transfer to a new unit, Bloomberg reports.
  • DOJ: Devin DeBacker, who the Trump administration installed as the acting head of the DOJ’s National Security Division, has been removed from that position after only a few weeks, ABC News reports.

Other Turmoil

  • CFPB: “Senior officials at the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were forced to resign on Tuesday after the Trump administration effectively shut down all major operations at the once-powerful agency,” Semafor reports.
  • CFPB: Oopsie! Russell Vought, the acting head of the CFPB, was forced to restore one of its key functions before it tanked mortgage markets, David Dayen reports.
  • CISA: “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency placed several members of its election security group on administrative leave last week,” CyberScoop reports.
  • ICE: Two top officials have been reassigned for allegedly failing to be sufficiently aggressive on deportations, WaPo reports.
  • SBA: Some probationary employees at the Small Business Administration have been terminated twice since Friday, Politico reports.

New Court Decisions Pushing Back On Trump

  • A federal judge in DC ordered health care information restored on the websites of HHS, CDC, and FDA.
  • The First Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s appeal of the temporary restraining order blocking the OMB spending freeze.

Predictably Absurd Results

President Trump’s executive orders are generating ham-handed efforts at compliance, like keyword searches of government contracts and websites for terms that may evoke DEI or illegal immigration – but which may appear in many other unrelated contexts. In one example reported by CNN, a Commerce Department office was ordered to review its contracts for nearly 150 terms, including:

  • immigrant
  • undocumented
  • foreign assistance
  • Green New Deal
  • climate change
  • diversity
  • equity
  • racism
  • discrimination
  • transgender
  • LGBT
  • abortion
  • pregnant
  • birth control
  • fetus

Durbin Claims Kash Patel Involved In FBI Purge

Senate Judiciary ranking member Dick Durbin (D-IL) is claiming that FBI director nominee Kash Patel has been involved in the purges of the FBI and that during his confirmation hearing misled senators about his involvement.

The Shockwaves Reverberate At DOJ

The acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan still hasn’t publicly moved to dismiss the criminal case against NYC Mayor Eric Adams as she was ordered to to do by Main Justice:

Danielle Sassoon, a longtime federal prosecutor whom Trump elevated to be the Manhattan U.S. attorney, is left with few options: to follow the Justice Department directive, to defy the order, or to resign, former prosecutors said. To obey the order would be an unprecedented blow to the Manhattan office’s prized independence from Washington. If she resigned or were fired, the Justice Department could handpick her successor.

Quote Of The Day

“Our founders were hellbent on ensuring that we didn’t have a monarchy, and the first way they thought of that was to give Congress the power of the purse.”–Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, speaking generally about the constitutional structure

Bannon Pleads Guilty

MAGA majordomo Steve Bannon has pleaded guilty to state charges in the We Build the Wall fraud case. As part of the plea agreement, he avoids jail time. The original federal case against Bannon was wiped away with a Trump pardon in 2021. Upon leaving the courthouse yesterday, Bannon called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to begin an immediate criminal investigation into New York Attorney General Leticia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

We Live In The Dumbest Timeline

Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Georgia) has introduced a bill to "authorize the President to enter into negotiations to acquire Greenland"—and to rename Greenland as "Red, White, and Blueland." “America is back and will soon be bigger than ever with the addition of Red, White, and Blueland,” Carter said.

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— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) February 11, 2025 at 12:13 PM

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Not Hyperbole Anymore: Musk Is In Charge of the US Government

Posted on by Josh Marshall

These are wild times at TPM because they’re wild times in the American government. It’s hard to keep up with everything happening from one moment to the next. I had not had a chance to look at the new DOGE executive order the President signed this afternoon with Elon Musk standing beside him. I don’t think it’s too much to say that it puts Musk functionally in control of the U.S. government. I know that sounds pretty wild. And that may not apply to high-profile policy — two budget bills or one on Capitol Hill, plans for Gaza. But let me explain what it does.

Continue reading “Not Hyperbole Anymore: Musk Is In Charge of the US Government” →

Trump & Co Decide Individual Federal Judges Do Have Too Much Power After All 

Posted on by Kate Riga

It’s no surprise that an expanding group of federal district judges, appointed by presidents of both parties, are systematically blocking President Trump’s and Elon Musk’s power grabs. This is, after all, how the system works. 

Continue reading “Trump & Co Decide Individual Federal Judges Do Have Too Much Power After All “ →