Let us say that TPM Readers are almost unimaginably over-represented in the country’s colleges and universities, and perhaps even more so in the research arms, which are of course primarily in the sciences and medical research fields. So we’re getting quite a lot of you writing in with various details and context for this new NIH directive that went into effect overnight which drastically reduces federal support for university research arms and academic medical centers. I’m going to be publishing more of them but I wanted to start with this one from TPM Reader RM …
Continue reading “The Huge NIH Funding Cuts”As Congressional GOP Cheers Trump’s Rampage, The Courts Are The Last Hope To Stop Him
Hello. It’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
The country’s in a mighty precarious situation when the anti-Trump contingent is relying on John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett to save democracy.
But with congressional Republicans cheering, or, at best, shrugging at Trump and Elon Musk’s rampage, the judiciary is the only institution with the power and, perhaps, the fortitude to stop them.
So far — and it’s early days — the judiciary has indeed started to throw sand into the Trump/Musk gears.
A mix of federal judges appointed by Ronald Reagan, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have blocked Trump’s rollback of birthright citizenship, his executive order requiring incarcerated trans women to be transferred to male facilities, his federal funding freeze, DOGE’s breaching of the Treasury Department payment system and at least temporarily extended the deadline by which federal workers must decide whether to take the “buyout.”
Additional lawsuits have been filed, including by FBI agents arguing that they’re at risk of being run out of their jobs for political reasons, and by labor groups arguing that Trump has illegally spun down USAID.
The pessimistic take: This is all well and good, but the 6-3 hard-right Supreme Court looms. President Joe Biden was most successful at appointing liberal judges at the district court level, where these cases will begin; Trump got more of his extremist judges in at the appellate levels. That could be a recipe for only temporary relief.
The optimistic take: It still matters, even if the Supreme Court hands down a reversal in the coming months. Part of revving up the opposition to Trump depends on having time to tell people what he and Musk are doing — and courts are a critical impediment there, slowing things down as Musk, in particular, tries to move very quickly.
And while we shouldn’t be under any delusions about the conservative justices’ appetite to deliver losses for Trump (especially on big cases), he lost before many of these same justices a lot during his first term. It’s unlikely that they’ll greenlight all of this.
But, lest I leave you on a positive note — the galaxy brain pessimistic case here is that the Supreme Court will shoot down one of Trump’s power grabs, and he’ll ignore it (as JD Vance has repeatedly urged). That would put us in uncharted, and very scary waters.
For now, at least temporarily, the judiciary is pushing back. And its judges are not mincing words in the process.
“No court in the country has ever endorsed the president’s interpretation,” U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman said of Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship. “This court will not be the first.”
— Kate Riga
Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend:
- John Light looks at the South American president who claims to have helped inspire DOGE.
- Trump’s pick to lead the National Counterterrorism Center has, worryingly, long been known for his extreme positions, Hunter Walker writes.
- Republican senators are asking: when we’re all friends, can’t we just ignore the separation of powers? Emine Yücel has our weekly words of wisdom.
‘The Chainsaw Approach’
Before there was DOGE, there was the chainsaw-wielding political pundit who ran a long-shot campaign for president of Argentina on promises to radically slash government spending. In November 2023, he won.
Among Javier Milei’s first moves was setting up the Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation, which has gone on to shut down 250 government offices and removed 40,000 government workers from their jobs.
One thing that most Argentinians know about their president is that he loves Twitter, and he loves Elon Musk. (An Argentinian programmer set up a website to keep tabs on Milei’s Twitter activity called “How many tweets did our President like today?” There was no single day this week when Milei retweeted fewer than 100 posts.)
Beginning in 2024, Musk and Milei had a series of meetings that Milei went on to describe on the Lex Fridman podcast. He cast the billionaire as a great man of history, “helping the world nowadays to wake up once and and for all and become aware of the socialist virus, the woke virus — that in itself makes him a hero in the history of humanity.”
But most interestingly, Milei cast himself as something of an inspiration for what has now become DOGE.
“He’s very interested in what our Ministry of Deregulation is doing, which seeks to remove regulations,” he said of Musk. “At the same time, he works with another person who is also interested in ‘the chainsaw approach,’” he added, a reference to the chainsaw prop Milei hauls out to symbolize slashing government.
“And so I’m very pleased,” Milei continued, beaming. “Because they are going to try to replicate the model we are implementing in Argentina. And, also, Donald Trump himself is very enthusiastic about this.”
Economist Federico Sturzenegger, the head of Milei’s “State Transformation” office, has also reportedly met with Musk and has claimed Trump was directly inspired by Argentina.
It should go without saying that Argentina and the U.S. are countries with very different economies and democratic forms of government. The U.S. Congress, under the Constitution, controls the power of the purse; it makes spending decisions, it creates independent agencies. Musk and Trump’s push to simply shut down wide swaths of government and clamp down on broad areas of congressionally appropriated spending flies in the face of that — a massive infringement on legislative power. For now, the Republican majority in Congress appears unbothered.
— John Light
The Extreme Congressional Candidate Now Leading The National Counterterrorism Center
Back in September 2023, we told you that Joe Kent was “the most extreme House candidate you haven’t heard about.”
Well, now he’s the most extreme nominee to lead the national counterterrorism center that you might not have heard about.
On Feb. 3, President Donald Trump announced Kent as his pick to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, which helps coordinate and inform the government’s response to terrorist groups. Kent is a former Special Forces veteran and CIA officer whose wife died in 2019 while fighting ISIS. He’s also mounted two unsuccessful congressional bids in Washington State. During those races, Kent made headlines here at TPM and elsewhere for his many associations with extremists — including neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, Three Percenters, Proud Boys, and others. Along with questionable associations, Kent has a bunch of conspiratorial positions on the Jan. 6 attack, the COVID pandemic, and the “trans agenda.”
Kent ultimately disavowed Fuentes. He also vehemently denies being a white supremacist.
Needless to say, Kent’s extensive links to the far right are alarming given that he could become a major part of America’s counterterror response. And Kent also has repeatedly expressed a desire to target “antifa” and left wing groups as “terrorists.” In a slew of social media posts and interviews in recent years, Kent has described “antifa” and Black Lives Matter as “domestic terrorists” who should be targeted, “arrested,” and “prosecuted.”
“Antifa is a terrorist organization. Find, fix, finish,” Kent wrote in a post on Elon Musk’s “X” platform last May. “We know how to do this, we just lack a government that’s serious about protecting our nation. ….
Weakness invites predatory violence.”
Back in 2023 when we highlighted Kent’s extreme candidacy on TPM, we wrote that his campaign was evidence far right extremism was becoming “business as usual for some segments of the GOP.” Now, it might be business as usual in the National Counterterrorism Center.
— Hunter Walker
Words of Wisdom
“Nobody should bellyache about that … That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense … [but] it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.”
That’s Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) dismissing DOGE leader Elon Musk’s attempts to take over several government systems filled with sensitive and personal information, and his promises to block government spending approved by Congress and even shut down agencies.
Tillis, according to NOTUS, also acknowledged what Musk is doing is unconstitutional, and gave TPM a similar set of quotes this week.
I don’t know about you, but unconstitutional acts by a random, unelected, far-right billionaire is certainly on top of the list for what gives me bellyaches. It seems Tillis and other GOP senators might just have different priorities — or perhaps a stronger gastrointestinal tract when it comes to unilateral power grab attempts by MAGA allies.
— Emine Yücel
White House Declares War on Academic Medical Centers
Major news out of NIH tonight, which I’m told will have a dramatic impact on all academic medical centers and research universities generally. Anyone familiar with the sciences knows that scientists bring in grant money for various research projects and the grant money is split between the grantee, who might be a researcher or a lab, etc., and the host institution. So the hospital or the university, etc. The new directive limits what goes to the institution for “indirect costs” to 15%. I don’t know this area well enough to get into the precise rationales for which rates make the most sense in the abstract. But that’s not really the point. From what I can tell this directive slashes the kind of government research funding available to these institution by as much as 60% or 70%. (I want to keep those percentages vague because this isn’t my area but I think that captures at least the general scale.) So these sound like huge budget shortfalls for academic research institutions, academic medical centers and so forth. And this is above and beyond the “freezes” that are still mostly in effect, albeit in many cases unofficially.
Continue reading “White House Declares War on Academic Medical Centers”Elon Musk’s DOGE Is Expected To Examine Another Treasury System Next Week
This story first appeared at 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.
After creating an uproar last week for demanding access to a sensitive system at the Treasury Department, officials affiliated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are expected to turn their attention to another restricted database next week, according to two people with knowledge of their plans.
The new target, the sources said, is a database that tracks the flow of money across the government, from the Treasury to specific agencies and then to the ultimate destination of the funds.
The data in the system, known as the Central Accounting Reporting System, or CARS, is considered sensitive. Many transactions flowing to the same place, for example, can suggest a new national security priority for the U.S. government. People who work with the system have in the past been briefed that the database may be of interest to foreign intelligence agencies, said a third source who has familiarity with the system.
Musk’s affiliates are expected to arrive at Treasury offices in Parkersburg, West Virginia, next week, according to two sources, prompting concern among the staff there. The offices house a large number of staffers who work for the previously obscure Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the part of the Treasury that manages accounting and payments systems.
A spokesperson for DOGE did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Neither did a Treasury spokesperson.
CARS is intended to standardize accounting across government agencies and account for how money is moved. It’s unclear what specifically the DOGE team’s interest in the system is. When government auditors have examined the system in the past, the Treasury has pushed for them to do it in secure environments or on the Fiscal Service’s laptops.
DOGE’s earlier actions at the Treasury have become a focus of congressional scrutiny and a federal court battle in recent days. Musk’s team initially tried to halt money going to the U.S. Agency for International Development from the Treasury’s payment system.
A veteran career official within the Treasury pushed back and then retired in the face of the demands. On Friday morning, The Washington Post reported that one of the DOGE-affiliated staffers involved in that standoff, Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley tech executive, would be replacing the career official who resigned, which would give him power over the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s payment and accounting systems.
Federal workers unions took the matter to court, and a judge on Thursday temporarily limited Musk’s team to read-only access.
The Treasury has assured Congress that the DOGE-affiliated staffers have read-only privileges for the payment system, but Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has raised concerns that the agency may have misled lawmakers, citing reports from Wired that a DOGE staffer had “read-write” access for several days. “Treasury’s refusal to provide straight answers about DOGE’s actions, as well as its refusal to provide a briefing requested by several Senate committees only heightens my suspicions,” Wyden said in a statement on Friday.
One of the two Musk-affiliated officials probing the Treasury’s systems resigned Thursday after The Wall Street Journal discovered racist posts on a social media account linked to him.
The posts included “I was racist before it was cool” and “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
It’s not clear which personnel are scheduled to make the trip to West Virginia or if the resignation will affect those plans. By Friday morning, Musk was posting on X about bringing the staffer back, and Vice President JD Vance backed the idea, saying, “I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.” In a press conference, Trump said he wasn’t familiar with the situation but backed Vance’s take.
Do you have any information about DOGE and the Trump administration’s moves at Treasury that we should know? Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at robert.faturechi@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.
Alex Mierjeski contributed research.
Trump DOJ Crosses The Rubicon With Investigation Of The Investigators
On her first day as attorney general, Pam Bondi launched an investigation of the Biden-era investigators of President Donald Trump that will report its progress directly to the White House. It’s a crossing the Rubicon moment for DOJ independence that is compounded by the fact that Trump has made Stephen Miller the point person on the administration-wide effort to exact retribution for the criminal investigations of the president.
Bondi created what she has dubbed the “Weaponization Working Group” as part of her sweeping implementation of President Trump’s executive order, with its own Orwellian title: “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government.” She cites the executive order in her memo announcing the working group.
Bondi charged the working group with reviewing “the activities of all departments and agencies exercising civil or criminal enforcement authority of the United States over the last four years” – language that mirrors Trump’s executive order – for evidence that it improperly targeted Trump, the Jan. 6 rioters, and other MAGA hobbyhorses.
At the top of Bondi’s list is Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutions of Trump, but it also targets Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for his prosecution of Trump, and New York Attorney General Letitia James for her civil actions against Trump, his family, and his businesses.
Bondi has ordered the Justice Department to provide quarterly progress reports on the working group’s review directly to the White House in what experts tell TPM is a dramatic and unprecedented blow to the Justice Department’s independence.
“Trump 2.0 has let it be known that the Justice Department answers to the political objectives of the White House,” Stephen Gillers, law professor at New York University, said in an interview with TPM. “Now, it’s quite clear that the Trump administration is prepared to see the DOJ as subservient to the political goals of the White House.”
Making matters worse, Trump’s executive order to investigate the investigators directs the attorney general to submit her report to him via his deputy chief of staff for policy. That person is not named in the executive order, but it is Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s longest-serving, most controversial, and aggressive aides.
Neither the Department of Justice nor the White House responded to TPM’s request for clarification on Miller’s involvement.
Trump’s executive order also instructed his director of national intelligence to launch a similar investigation of the investigators and report back to his deputy chief of staff for policy, which again is Miller. Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination as DNI is still pending in the Senate, but she is expected to be confirmed after narrowly winning the Senate Intelligence Committee approval this week.
“The fact that the DOJ is reporting to someone in the White House itself crosses a rubicon,” noted Gillers, who did not have independent knowledge of Miller’s apparent role. “That’s a major shift. The fact that the person who’s getting the reports is Miller is, in my view, dangerous because of his ideological beliefs.”
Gillers further explained that Miller’s involvement would only aggravate the breach of DOJ independence simply because of how inflammatory he is.
Bondi’s working group and Trump’s executive order both explicitly target people who were simply “doing their jobs successfully and following the law based solely on the political context and considerations,” Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, told TPM.
“This is going to politicize the Department of Justice,” said Weiser. “This is going to chill and undermine the rule of law in really unprecedented ways.”
The impact of these very public and targeted counter-investigations will have a chilling effect on the federal workforce, Weiser said, giving them the impression that they will face dire consequences for simply upholding the law.
“There was no question that laws were violated in really flagrant and dangerous manners, that lives were lost and property was damaged and our constitutional order was attacked in violation of federal laws,” Weiser said of the first Trump term and its aftermath. “But more broadly, this is clearly part of a program of political retribution.”
This Ain’t The Apprentice. Stop Calling Them Firings. They’re Purges.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
A Purge By Another Name Is Still A Purge
As we come to the end of the third century week of the second Trump presidency, I want to highlight a failure of language that is subverting the coverage of the lawlessness. It’s so pervasive that you may not have noticed it, and it may already have creeped into the conceptual framework you’re building in your own mind to help explain what is happening in Trump II.
It’s about the purges of civil service employees throughout the federal government.
There is really no such thing as unilateral mass “firings” or “layoffs” in the federal government, and yet most of the coverage headlines Trump’s purges using exactly those words. Unilateral is the key there. Congress can pass laws to cut funding, to eliminate positions, to zero out programs, but it hasn’t. The president is doing this on his own in contravention of the laws Congress has already passed to fund these positions and to give them civil service protections.
Calling them “firings” or “layoffs” when Congress hasn’t voted on them in any way shape or form isn’t just imprecise; it concedes way too much. It bestows a powerfulness and a decisiveness on Trump that he neither has nor deserves. It gives the purges a conclusory gloss of lawfulness when the lawlessness is the whole point.
“Firings” and “layoffs” belong to a different body of language. They’re imported from business and pasted haphazardly on what is going on here. You may have also seen “hostile takeover” imported from the business world. Likewise, the misnomer “buyout” has been used to describe the dubious effort to encourage government workers to retire immediately even though no business would recognize the offer terms as amounting to a buyout.
Business terms provide a totally wrong conceptual framework for the purges underway. The misuse of the terms in turn makes the outcries over what is happening seem to casual observers like what you’d expect with corporate downsizing – self-interested parties decrying what is happening to them – instead of a broader reaction to the multi-front assault of the rule of law.
We may not have an alternative body of language that offers terms as striking and clear in our own minds as firings and layoffs. But if we focus on the power dynamic, on the unilateral component, and on the lawlessness, it may help us refine the language we use which in turn fine tunes our thinking.
In the meantime, “purge” is a splendid word.
The Purge Spreads Across Government
Among the latest developments:
- WSJ: EPA Begins to Put Environmental-Justice Workers On Leave
WaPo: Trump moves to shutter environmental offices across the government - WSJ: White House Preparing Order to Cut Thousands of Federal Health Workers
- NYT: “The Trump administration plans to reduce the number of workers at the U.S. Agency for International Development from more than 10,000 to about 290 positions, three people with knowledge of the plans said on Thursday.”
Trump Purports To Fire FEC Chair
Trump is not empowered to fire the FEC chair, but he’s trying to do so anyway. FEC Chair Ellen Weintraub says she’s considering her options.
Judge Blocks Trump-Musk Bogus Retirement Offer
A federal judge in Massachusetts has temporarily blocked the Trump-Musk push to encourage the immediate retirement of federal workers.
The New Symbol Of The Resistance: 🥄
Workers at GSA mocked the “Fork in the Road” email – Trump’s bogus immediate retirement offer – by raining down spoon emojis in a group chat during a video meeting. By the next day, they noticed that the spoon emoji had been removed from their videoconferencing platform.
Trump Does Not Have The Authority To Abolish USAID
In a new report, the Congressional Research Service says very clearly what we already know about Trump’s unlawful attack on USAID: “Because Congress established USAID as an independent establishment within the executive branch, the President does not have the authority to abolish it; congressional authorization would be required to abolish, move, or consolidate USAID.”
America’s Epic Self-Own
Samantha Power, who may go down as the last real administrator of USAID, on Trump’s lawless dismantling of the independent agency: “We are witnessing one of the worst and most costly foreign policy blunders in U.S. history.”
Real World Impacts Of Trump’s USAID Sabotage
Again, we know the destruction is the point:
- NYT: Foreign Aid Freeze Leaves Millions Without H.I.V. Treatment
- WaPo: Gutting USAID threatens billions of dollars for U.S. farms
- NYT: The stop-work order on USAID-funded research has left thousands of people around the world with experimental drugs and devices in their bodies, with no access to monitoring or care.
Who Let The DOGE Out?
Despite the public outcry, Elon Musk’s DOGE team continues to fan out across government:
- DOGE team spotted at the EPA, the Social Security Administration, and the Department of Energy.
- CNN confirmed and advanced NYT’s previous reporting that the target of Musk’s team at Treasury was USAID payments.
- TPM’s Josh Marshall: Here’s What Treasury and DOJ Mean By ‘Read-Only’ Access
- WaPo: Elon Musk’s DOGE is feeding sensitive federal data into AI to target cuts
100% On Brand
WSJ:
A key DOGE staff member who gained access to the Treasury Department’s central-payments system resigned Thursday after he was linked to a deleted social-media account that advocated racism and eugenics.
Marko Elez, a 25-year-old who is part of a cadre of Elon Musk lieutenants deployed by the Department of Government Efficiency to scrutinize federal spending, resigned after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.
Quote Of The Day
John Ganz, on groyperfication:
… every single person under say, the age of 40 on the right is exposed to extremely high levels of groyper content every day in group chats, on their social media timelines, in discord chats, etc. Groyperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right. While mainstream media is still chasing after master figures and hidden intellectuals shaping elite consensus, the real story is that young righties look at the opinions and trends among the groypers as being far more interesting and important than respectable intellectuals. Many young righties in staff and media positions are essentially groypers or seek to emulate them as much as possible.
The Hackiest Hack Who Ever Did Hack
DC acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin never disappoints for sheer buffoonery. After the colossal fail of dismissing Jan. 6 charges against a defendant he was still representing, the court clerk notified him that he can’t withdraw from the case because he failed to renew his admissions and is not in good standing in DC federal court.
The federal court in D.C. says the U.S. attorney cannot move to withdraw from the case in which he, as a prosecutor, dismissed the case against a January 6 rioter he represented as a defense lawyer. He is "not in good standing" with the federal court here, having not renewed his admission.
— Brad Heath (@bradheath.bsky.social) February 6, 2025 at 12:08 PM
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TPM On TV
TPM's own @kateriga.bsky.social appeared on @thebeat.msnbc.com this evening to discuss Trump's rhetoric vs. reality.
— TPM (@tpm.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 7:04 PM
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Making Sense Of It All
Brian Beutler offers a structured approach for how to triage the Trump transgressions.
A House Called Tomorrow
At the end of another hard week, perhaps you’ll find some solace as I did when a friend sent me this soul-nourishing poem by Alberto Rios. An excerpt:
You are made, fundamentally, from the good.
With this knowledge, you never march alone.You are the breaking news of the century.
You are the good who has come forwardThrough it all, even if so many days
Feel otherwise.…
All in service to a simple idea:
That we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,Is ourselves. And that’s all we need
To start. That’s everything we require to keep going.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
Here’s What Treasury and DOJ Mean By ‘Read-Only’ Access
One of the continuing mysteries about the DOGE intrusion into the super sensitive payments computer system housed at the Treasury Department is just what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as well as other administration officials and lawyers mean by “read-only” access. For starters, it’s not clear that “read-only” is actually a privilege level on the systems in question. But that’s kind of a technical detail. More importantly, both Wired and TPM have independently reported that now-defenestrated DOGE operative Marko Elez in fact had administrator-level privileges on the same system. In other words, not “read only,” but full access to do pretty much anything if they chose to. And that’s not what people are thinking when they hear “read-only.” So what is it? Are the Treasury Secretary or the DOJ lawyers who went into court lying? Is there some technicality we’re not thinking of?
Continue reading “Here’s What Treasury and DOJ Mean By ‘Read-Only’ Access”Dems Suggest They Got Johnson To Commit To Hearing On Elon’s Treasury Break-In
Two Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) Thursday in what appears to be a public attempt to remind the speaker to act on some sort of in-person commitment he apparently made to the two Democratic members of the House Ways and Means Committee during a closed-door conversation Wednesday.
Continue reading “Dems Suggest They Got Johnson To Commit To Hearing On Elon’s Treasury Break-In”Where’s the Real Power Nexus? How Does the Opposition Get To It?
I’ve made this point a few times in passing in other posts. But as events develop I wanted to explain it succinctly and with emphasis. Democrats are out of power and have very few actual levers to impact what’s happening. Yelling is important. Driving opposition in what is ultimately a battle for public opinion is important. Contesting everything through the courts is important. But there is only one hard lever of power currently available: that’s the help the White House needs from Democrats on a budget and the debt ceiling. This morning explainer from Punchbowl makes clear why that help is essential. It’s not just helpful. It’s essential. The GOP majorities are simply too small, especially in the House. The GOP is simply too fractious.
Continue reading “Where’s the Real Power Nexus? How Does the Opposition Get To It?”Listen To This: President Musk
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Elon Musk’s running roughshod over the federal government, along with some signs of life from the Democrats.
Continue reading “Listen To This: President Musk”