The Times this morning has an apparent explanation for why DOGE operatives were so eager to take control of the unified government payment system at the Treasury: they wanted to be able to shut off payments to USAID projects without going through USAID personnel. They say this is based on emails between Elon-backed Trump appointees now at Treasury. I assume this is accurate in itself but I wouldn’t be sure this is the only reason and perhaps not even the main reason. But it’s the only non-speculative explanation we have so far.
David Kurtz notes this morning that the judge overseeing a lawsuit aimed at halting the actions at Treasury is almost certainly being given false information about what’s actually happening, though as David notes we can’t say for certain the Justice Department lawyers representing the administration are affirmatively lying. (They may use weasel words; they may not themselves know; many possibilities.) Those lawyers continue to insist that the Musk operatives at Treasury only have “read-only” access to the computers. As Wired and I have independently reported, that’s not true. They have full administrator privileges and, as I have reported, they’ve already altered the code.
IRS staffers (precisely how many is unclear) who opted for deferred resignation program (i.e., the “buy out”) have now been informed that they need to work through May 15th.
Hello to all of the new Morning Memo readers. Since Trump’s second inaugural, a surge of about 1,500 new people have signed up to receive Morning Memo via email. Welcome!
A quick note on what Morning Memo is and is not. It doesn’t seek to be comprehensive but rather essential: It won’t waste your time with fluff or sensationalize. It’s a carefully curated selection of the day’s news with some long-running threads on particular areas of interest. It stays abreast of the news, but tries not to lose the big picture in the flurry of daily headlines.
That said, the Morning Memo you’ve seen over the past three weeks or so as been a little different than usual simply because there has been so … much … essential … news. It’s been hard to cram it all in and not lose the thread in this chaotic, unprecedented time. I suspect that the current intensity level will eventually subside somewhat and Morning Memo will return to being a little more digestible so that you walk away feeling like you’ve done your duty to be a well-informed citizen without losing yourself to doom-scrolling.
Is A Federal Judge Getting The Whole Story On Musk?
A lot of new reporting this morning on what Elon Musk’s team has been up to at Treasury. The substance of it matters for what are obvious reasons, and I’ll get to that in a moment.
But there’s important new context in which this is happening: The Justice Department is making representations in court to a federal judge in DC about what has and had not occurred at Treasury, and the judge is relying on those representations to issue a temporary restraining order to try to lock in the previous status quo.
It is not at all clear that what DOJ is telling the judge is accurate or complete. Whether that’s because the judge hasn’t asked the right questions or the Justice Department lawyers haven’t been given complete information from Treasury or everyone is operating from a deficiency of technical knowledge, there are plausible explanations that stop well short of outright lying or deceit. But whether it’s bad information or nefariousness, the stakes are a lot higher with an active court case on the matter pending.
Much of the confusion comes down to Treasury’s repeated claim that Musk team members designated as “special employees” have only had “read-only” access to sensitive payment systems. Without getting into technical details that are over my head, it seems increasingly likely that to whatever extent that is true, it doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story.
As Wired and TPM have reported, the Muskovites have been working on changing the underlying code that the payments systems run on. The most important new overnight reporting comes from the NYT, which says that the reason Musk’s team wanted to get access to the Treasury payment system in the first place was to cut off USAID payments at the source:
But emails reviewed by The New York Times show that the Treasury’s chief of staff originally pushed for Tom Krause, a software executive affiliated with Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to receive access to the closely held payment system so that the Treasury could freeze U.S. Agency for International Development payments. …
The emails viewed by The Times undercut the Treasury’s explanation for why Mr. Krause and his team were given access to the payment system last week.
A reasonable read of the judge’s TRO is that it’s mostly targeted at limiting access to the database that contains records of the payments and sensitive payee information. It’s not clear that it would keep Musk’s flunkies from blocking payments, rewriting code, or meddling with the payment system while still being limited to “read-only access.”
Agents of billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have gained access to highly restricted government records on millions of federal employees — including Treasury and State Department officials in sensitive security positions — as part of a broader effort to wrest control over the government’s main personnel agency, according to four U.S. officials with knowledge of the developments.
Other New Developments On The Musk Takeover
The Guardian goes inside the USAID standoff on the night the DOGE team tried to infiltrate secure spaces holding sensitive and classified data.
The DOGE team has gotten access to key payment and contracting systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the WSJ reports.
The DOGE team has arrived at the Labor Department and CDC.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is trying to establish whether DOGE is planning to load the sensitive Treasury payment data onto outside servers to employ artificial intelligence on it, Greg Sargent reports.
Musk et al. have zeroed in on the obscure Technology Transformation Services section of the General Services Administration, the WaPo reports.
Bondi Gets Right To Work Weaponizing DOJ
In a blizzard of some 14 memos, newly confirmed Attorney General Pam Bondi set the Justice Department on a perilous new course. Among the most directives:
serve President Trump as “his lawyers,” a devastating blow to DOJ independence and its prior historic role.
Inside The FBI’s Standoff With DOJ
WSJ: How Trump’s Sweeping Expulsions Have Thrown the FBI Into Chaos
Fox News: Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove accused Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll of “insubordination.”
READ: Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove memo ordering the FBI purge
Only The Best
Acting DC U.S. Attorney Ed Martin is a piece of work:
Left: Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin dismisses Jan. 6 case of Jose Padilla on Jan. 21, 2025
Right: Interim US Attorney Ed Martin seeks withdraw as Padilla’s counsel of record on Feb. 5, 2025
He signed a dismissal for a client he was still recorded as representing.
CIA: In a “counterintelligence disaster,” the White House ordered the CIA to send via unclassified email a list of all employees hired by the spy agency over the last two years, the NYT reports.
Army: In response to the anti-DEI executive order, West Point has banned existing student clubs at the service academy with any whiff of ethnic or cultural affinity.
Coast Guard: Reportedly on orders from President Trump, fired Coast Guard Commandant Linda Fagan was evicted from her home Tuesday on three-hours notice and forced to leave her personal belongings behind, NBC News reports.
Judge Blocks Birthright Citizenship Executive Order
In an opinion issued late yesterday, a federal judge in Maryland has blocked President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order nationwide. For more context, Marty Lederman examines the most indefensible aspects of the government’s position in the case.
Trump Essentially Makes It Illegal To Be Trans
The degree to which transgender Americans are not just being vilified and stripped of legal status and protection but denied the ability to even exist makes it perhaps the most egregious attack on civil rights we’ve yet witnessed. The trans attacks are coming on so many fronts that it’s hard to keep track, but with Trump’s new executive order banning trans women from sports, here are two decent overviews:
WSJ: Trump’s Lightning-Speed Rollback of Transgender Rights Sparks Lawsuits
WaPo: Trump’s new ban on athletes is latest attack on transgender policies
For more granular day-to-day coverage of the legal landscape for trans rights, Chris Geidner at Law Dork is an experienced and indispensable reporter.
Quote Of The Day
“Today, right now, right here, is the easiest moment to draw the line against Donald Trump. Every day from here, it will get harder — the politics more inevitable, the destruction more irreversible, the sheer waste more costly, the downstream impacts on American life and the world beyond more catastrophic. The challenge is that fact has also been true every day for the last nine years.”–Garrett Graff
As Elon Musk and Donald Trump, in a secondary role, steamroll through the federal government, there’s a taxonomy to the players that is important to understand. It’s semi-hidden at the moment. But you can see it showing up if you look up close and it will likely become more visible over time.
There are three big factions operating in Trump’s government with currently overlapping but very distinct aims and strategies. First, you have MAGA, which wants to punish and displace the people who made life hard for Trump in his first term and replace them with loyalists. That’s mostly about power and personal fealty to Trump. Ideology is mostly secondary to the core aim. Second, you have Christian nationalists who want to seize the power of the state to execute a top down re-traditionalization of American society and culture. Russell Vought is key to this group. The basic theory goes back into the aughts, when a faction of conservatives decided (essentially a counsel of despair) that they had lost control of American culture and that state power was required to get it back. Third are people like Elon Musk who want to radically hollow out the government, outsource its functions and replace many of those functions with novel technologies — AI, cryptocurrency, etc. This is a mix of Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” business culture combined with “dark enlightenment” Yarvinian degenerate thought.
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.
In the face of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to reshape the Environmental Protection Agency and drive out its workers, more than 300 career employees have left their jobs since the election, according to a ProPublica analysis of personnel data.
The numbers account for a relatively small share of the overall workforce at the EPA, but those who have departed include specialist civil servants crucial to its mission: toxicologists, lawyers, engineers, biologists, toxic waste specialists, emergency workers, and water and air quality experts.
Gary Jonesi made the decision to leave on election night. An attorney who helped enforce environmental laws for almost 40 years, he had loved working for the agency under both Democratic and Republican presidents. But he feared what the incoming administration might do.
In the past weeks, as the Trump administration has signaled radical changes at the agency and attempted to entice workers into leaving, he feels he made the right choice. “I didn’t know it was going to be this bad,” said Jonesi, who worked on litigation related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico as well as cases that involved both water and air pollution. “I feel for my old colleagues. And I feel for the American public, who are being put in danger.”
Other career employees expressed a mixture of fear, resignation and quiet defiance as they faced a painful decision: quit or work for an administration that has openly proclaimed its intention to radically transform the agency in addition to rolling back environmental protections.
In his first weeks in office, President Donald Trump announced plans to reverse efforts to address climate change, abandon the EPA’s decadeslong focus on protecting the most vulnerable communities from pollution and step away from other key initiatives at the heart of the agency’s work.
At the same time, Trump has embarked on an unprecedented government-wide campaign to drive workers from their jobs. Employees throughout the federal government received offers to resign but get paid through September — a move experts say is legally questionable and unions have challenged in court. Some recently hired workers who are still on probation have been told their agencies have the right to immediately let them go.
EPA workers face additional threats. Trump’s team has discussed relocating the agency’s headquarters outside of Washington, D.C., a move that would likely force many of the roughly 7,000 employees who work there to quit. And he issued an executive order on “radical and wasteful government DEI programs,” which included a directive to terminate, “to the maximum extent allowed by law,” all environmental justice offices and positions. The order could result in the firing of hundreds of staff members who work on pollution in disproportionately burdened areas, which often have lower incomes, higher percentages of residents of color or both.
At a sometimes tearful meeting held at EPA headquarters and online on Wednesday, leaders of the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights told staff members that the EPA was beginning to implement that directive. “We’re all preparing for the worst,” said one environmental protection specialist who attended the meeting, where workers were instructed to prepare for the possibility of being placed on administrative leave and download their human resources files. “We’re preparing to be laid off.”
Employees in other parts of the agency are similarly distraught.
“We feel terrorized,” said one of the more than 20 current EPA employees who communicated with ProPublica about their experience of working at the agency under the second Trump administration. None said they planned to take up the offer to resign, a proposal that the agency said in numerous emails is open to staff until Thursday.
While there is an obvious appeal of quitting a job when your employer is aggressively trying to oust you, the EPA staffer, whose work involves measuring pollution levels in air, water and soil at contaminated sites, said he felt a moral obligation to stay.
“If I leave, my experience would go with me and there would be no replacement,” he said. (Along with the other EPA employees quoted in this story, the scientist spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retribution by the Trump administration.)
Others found the financial enticements to leave insulting. “I don’t work here for the fucking money,” said one longtime agency employee who works on air pollution. “I work here because I believe in it, and I want to serve the public.”
An emergency worker who responds to chemical fires, oil spills and national disasters echoed that sentiment, saying he has no intention of walking away from the work he’s done for more than 20 years, which he described as “the most challenging and amazing job there is.”
Other EPA employees are already bracing themselves for the possible end of their stints at the agency. One young scientist was winding down a day spent reviewing reports on drinking water last week when she received the email informing her that she had been identified as likely being on a probationary period and laying out the process for terminating her.
Until that point, she had been thinking of her first months in what she described as a “dream job” at the EPA as the beginning of a long career in civil service. “All that came crashing down when I got that email,” said the scientist, who recently finished graduate school and is now steeling herself for the likelihood that she will have to move back in with her parents.
If she goes, the scientist will join the more than 300 career staffers who have left since the election. That group is part of a brain drain of more than 500 EPA workers ProPublica identified as having departed since Nov. 22; the full group includes political appointees and short-term staff. Changes in administrations typically trigger turnovers at federal agencies, but ProPublica found the number leaving the EPA appears to have already eclipsed by more than 60 the number that left after President Joe Biden was elected in 2020. It is unclear exactly what motivated staffers to leave in recent weeks and how many more might be forced out or quit on their own terms in the coming days.
The shakeup is unprecedented, according to some veteran employees. “When you take a job at a federal agency, you know there are elections every four years. You know there are going to be changes in administration priorities,” said a scientist who has weathered many of these transitions during her more than 20 years working in the federal government. “This is something else.”
The EPA did not respond to questions for this story, including how many employees had taken the agency up on its offers to resign.
Taking the Side of Polluters
The EPA’s mission to protect human health and the environment requires it to do the often difficult work of regulating powerful companies. Under any administration, the agency faces intense lobbying from these entities as they seek to avoid expense and the burdens of compliance. Corporate pressure on the EPA was considerable under Biden as his administration attempted to tackle climate pollution.
But Trump appears eager to both scale back the agency, which has more than 15,000 employees, and align what remains of it with the companies it regulates. During the campaign, he asked oil executives for $1 billion while promising to cut environmental regulations, according to The Washington Post.
On Friday, two days after the Senate confirmed Lee Zeldin as EPA administrator, the agency put out a press release supporting Zeldin’s ability to “Unleash American Greatness.” Among those quoted were representatives of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Mining Association, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, all of which have recently challenged the agency in court.
In a brief welcome address, Zeldin discussed making the nation “energy dominant” and “turning the U.S. into the AI capital of the world.” (AI is widely recognized as a climate threat because it consumes vast amounts of energy.) Other Trump appointees have worked for fossil fuel and chemical companies and have previously opposed stricter environmental regulation. David Fotouhi, whom Trump nominated to be second-in-command of the agency, recently tried to overturn its ban on asbestos.
The administration is planning to remove civil service protections from certain federal workers, which would allow some positions now held by highly skilled personnel to be reclassified so they could be filled based on loyalty to the administration rather than expertise. The move could have tremendous implications for the EPA, whose workforce includes thousands of highly trained experts.
“If he replaces EPA scientists and lawyers with people who just want to say yes to him, it will be the death knell for the EPA,” said Kyla Bennett, director of science policy at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
The Human Costs
The redirection of the agency and the loss of experienced professionals who respond to emergencies, monitor pollution, clean up highly contaminated areas and enforce environmental laws will have profound effects across the country.
“Nastier stuff than usual will come out of factories. More people will get cancer. More people will get heart disease. People will die sooner and they’ll be sicker,” said one Ph.D. scientist who works at the agency.
Because he spends part of his time focusing on health in particularly polluted areas, the scientist may find himself in the crosshairs of Trump’s order to eliminate all environmental justice work and positions. The order could directly affect as many as 250 EPA employees, according to Matthew Tejada, who served as the EPA deputy assistant administrator for environmental justice during the Biden administration.
The Ph.D. scientist described the mood within his office as “a combination of exhaustion and exasperation with what’s very clearly a calculated campaign of harassment.” Still, he is hoping he will escape the apparently imminent purge of EPA staff working on environmental justice.
For some staff, the rapid changes are a bridge too far. One chemist who has worked at the agency for more than a decade described himself as seriously thinking about leaving — though on his terms, not in response to the administration’s resignation offer. “My motivation to work at EPA was because I want to protect human health and the environment and the lure of a stable job,” he told ProPublica. “But now all that’s gone.”
Others say the administration’s aggressive efforts to drive them out of the EPA have left them only more determined to stay. “Personally, it makes me want to hang on until I have the chance to do (or not do) something worth getting fired for,” one lawyer said.
Another scientist, who oversees the cleanup of highly contaminated sites, agreed. He saw the departures from EPA norms and repeated offers to resign as designed to scare him and others out of the agency — and vowed that the tactics would not work on him.
“It won’t make me quit,” the scientist said. “Nothing is going to make me quit.”
Instead, the scientist recently bought a new Black history month T-shirt that he plans to wear when he is required to return to the office full time in late February. “I’m going to dare somebody to say something to me,” he said. He acknowledged that the move, which would broadcast his derision for the Trump administration’s retreat from environmental justice, could get him fired. But he said he didn’t care.
“I’m going to stand up to them,” the scientist said. “I may lose the battle, but principally I will have won the war.”
My colleague Kate Riga was on Capitol Hill Tuesday trying to pin Senate Republicans down on the unmitigated disaster unfolding this week as Elon Musk and his DOGE tech guys bust down doors at a handful of federal departments and bureaus, breaching sensitive data, promising to defund agencies, and, in doing so, dropping a bomb on the constitutional separation of power.
Made a point over the weekend about “shock and awe” and how one reacts to that when often there doesn’t seem like there’s much you can do. As we see in most of history, the key in many cases is simply holding on. As I tried to convey in that post, “shock and awe” is primarily a psychological operation meant to trigger confusion, paralysis and collapse. But the impact of speed and multiplicity diminishes over time and fairly quickly. So for the literally millions of people on the direct receiving end of what’s happening right now, primarily in the federal workforce, simply holding on is “doing something.” The whole point of this effort is to create lots of faits accompli during that initial phase of disorientation and paralysis. Pretty quickly the impact of that shock and disorientation and paralysis wears off. So simply holding on through that first period is a big thing. The balance of powers and levers available start to shift. And in some cases rapidly. I’m not being pollyannaish about it. The situation still remains grave and with most of the power on one side. But they do become relatively less powerful with each day that passes. Not by much but by some.
Many of these actions are unprecedented. Some appear to be illegal and unconstitutional, according to legal experts and judges. But none of them should come as a surprise — nearly all of them were outlined in 2022 in a plan called Project 2025.
Project 2025 is a multifaceted strategy to advance conservative policies in the federal government. Part of this effort revolves around the “Mandate for Leadership,” a 922-page document published in April 2023 that outlines a slew of proposed governmental policy changes.
In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Project 2025 participants wrote on the plan’s website that “to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left,” they would “need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.”
In my research on think tanks, I’ve investigated how these research organizations can influence public policymaking. The most potent strategy is to ally with a political party and support its objectives through research and advocacy. This is exactly what the Heritage Foundation has done via Project 2025.
For example, on Jan. 20, 2025, Trump echoed the plan’s statement that “men and women are biological realities” when he signed an executive order that, in part, recognizes “two sexes, male and female” that are “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” This order led to the removal of transgender references from government websites.
Other orders are similarly aligned with Project 2025. Take Trump’s executive order that, in part, eliminated the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, or OFCCP, a government office previously charged with ensuring companies working with the government did not discriminate against any employees. Project 2025 recommended, quite simply, to “eliminate OFCCP.”
Project 2025’s influence on Trump reflects the Heritage Foundation’s growing importance to the Republican Party.
In my forthcoming book about the polarization and politicization of policy research organizations, I show the many ways that think tanks like the Heritage Foundation have become embedded within partisan networks and intimately connected to politicians. Increasingly, Heritage and other partisan-aligned think tanks, including progressive groups like the Center for American Progress, use their research to consistently support partisan agendas that align with their policy goals.
The relationship between the Heritage Foundation and the GOP represents the most extreme version of this dynamic. The think tank has supported Republican presidents as far back as Ronald Reagan, using another policy document — also called the “Mandate for Leadership” — to secure significant policy gains through his administration. But the symbiosis between the Heritage Foundation and the GOP has been particularly notable since Trump gained more influence in the party.
At the start of Trump’s first term, as one Heritage Foundation researcher told me in 2017, the think tank recognized that the “administration didn’t have much policy depth, so when they won the election they were sort of like, ‘Now what do we do?’ And that’s where Heritage comes in. … We work on these issues year-round, so we’ll stand by your side.”
As the think tank’s president, Kevin Roberts, said in 2024, Heritage views its job as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”
The people connecting Trump to Project 2025
Many of the contributors to the “Mandate for Leadership” had been Trump administration officials, like Russ Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget and current nominee for the same position.
In all, more than half of the plan’s 312 authors, editors and contributors previously worked in the first Trump administration.
An incredibly important but often underappreciated part of Project 2025 was its staffing effort: The coalition worked to identify, vet and train potential staffers and appointees who are now making their way into the Trump administration and executive agencies.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer gestures toward a visual aid about Project 2025 during a news conference in September 2024 in Washington. Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
What people – and the law – say about Project 2025
Even during the presidential campaign, both Project 2025 itself and the policy ideas it advocated were broadlyunpopular. Democrats consistently warned about the plan in their attacks against Republicans.
The lack of popular approval for Project 2025 and its proposals is notable because the Heritage Foundation has historically invested time and money into gaining public support for its work. It even operates an initiative that polls citizens on how they “interpret arguments for and against our policy recommendations and how we can best gain their understanding and support.”
How successful the Heritage Foundation is in helping Trump implement Project 2025 proposals will partially depend on how the public reacts. Whether Congress asserts its control over budgetary matters and exercises general oversight of the executive branch will also matter, as will the decisions made by the American judicial system.
These checks and balances have helped sustain American democracy for nearly 250 years – whether they will continue to do so remains to be seen.
President Trump’s extraordinary assault on the constitutional order is inflicting unimaginable damage on democracy at home, on U.S. national interests abroad, on individual rights, and on the health, safety and welfare of all Americans. It is a full frontal assault on the people and on the government they elected him to run.
What now?
With congressional Republicans in abject subservience to Trump, the only potential constraint on his lawlessness are the federal courts. Emphasis on “potential.” But even if a judiciary stacked with Trump appointees stands tall, it’s critical to understand that the courts alone cannot save us from the constitutional disorder of a sidelined legislative branch over which the executive runs roughshod or of an immunized president who is not only failing to take care that the laws be faithfully executed but is violating the laws on a near-daily basis.
As I’ve emphasized this week, one important measure of how bad things will get is whether Trump begins to ignore court orders. That wouldn’t spell a constitutional crisis only because this already is a constitutional crisis. But it would mean that we’ve well and truly crossed the Rubicon into something that is no longer a democracy, with Trump as an American strongman, even if he continues to prop up some of the trappings of the former republic, like Congress. We may already be there.
Whether the judicial branch serves as a bulwark against Trump’s worst excesses or is merely the next domino to fall will play out over the coming weeks. But even if the judiciary holds the line, it cannot undo all the colossal damage already wreaked by Trump and his billionaire wingman. It can’t fully stop ongoing damage from what has already been done or fully corral future yet-to-be-done damage from a renegade Trump.
While the focus is now shifting to the courts and the dozens of important lawsuits that have been filed in recent days to try to rein in all manner of blatant presidential lawlessness, judges can only do so much. While fighting Trump in the courts is critical and could shape much of the next four years and beyond, it an extremely limited response to the breakdown in the constitutional order that is underway.
FBI agents suing to stop the release of the names of employees involved in the Trump and Jan. 6 prosecutions;
federal employee unions suing over Trump’s bogus deferred retirement offer;
a doctors group suing over the removal of public health data from government websites;
two anonymous federal workers suing to stop Elon Musk’s team from continuing to use an unauthorized server at OPM to send blast emails to everyone in government;
a coalition of labor unions suing to block the Musk team from continuing to access sensitive payment systems at Treasury.
This is only a partial list and excludes a whole different category of lawsuits by targets of Trump seeking to vindicate their individual rights, like trans prisoners.
Keeping A Close Eye On The FBI Purge
Among the developments:
The FBI turned over to the Trump Justice Department the names of some 5,000 employees who worked on the Jan. 6 cases, the Trump cases, and, less noticed, an investigation into the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.
Marcy Wheeler has a insightful analysis on the two FBI lawsuits, one a class action, that were filed in DC yesterday over the purge and why filing in DC matters.
I still can’t get over the fact that the acting FBI director is only in that position because the White House made an error on its website and refused to fix it. Despite that ignominious route to the position, Brian Driscoll has not been a pushover.
Benjamin Wittes: “A lot of people at the bureau—leadership and street agents, analysts and staff alike—are flirting with heroism right now.”
Treasury Downplays Musk Intrusion
As grim as I was entering Trump II, I didn’t have protests outside the Treasury Department on my February 2025 bingo card. But Elon Musk having any kind of access to government systems that contain sensitive information about all Americans has a way of agitating people.
Treasury continues to downplay the access Musk has. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made private assurances Monday to GOP lawmakers, and the department sent a letter yesterday to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) making similar assurances that the Musk team had “read-only” access.
That flies in the face of reporting otherwise, including from TPM’s Josh Marshall.
As the WSJ observed, “The letter didn’t specifically say whether the employees were being given access to the underlying software that runs the payment systems or whether DOGE-affiliated workers could potentially edit computer code.”
The Tragedy Of Trump’s Lawlessness
Trump’s lawlessness and the very real human costs it is imposing converge most dramatically at USAID. The president is proceeding to wipe a congressionally created independent agency off the map without approval from Congress, and the consequences for American interests abroad, foreign aid recipients, and USAID employees and contractors are dire:
All USAID workers abroad are being ordered to return home. This is on top closing USAID headquarters in DC this week and putting most U.S.-based workers on leave.
Anecdote of the day: “The cuts came so fast that one dismissed employee had to be rehired to process other employees’ time sheets.”
Headline Of The Day
NYT: Foreign Strongmen Cheer as Musk Dismantles U.S. Aid Agency
Who’s Next?
CIA: The CIA offered dubious deferred retirements to its entire workforce.
GSA: Trump and Musk have demanded the termination of the approximately 7,500 government office leases around the country.
NOAA: Doge staffers enter Noaa headquarters and incite reports of cuts and threats
NSF: The National Science Foundation is planning to layoff from one-quarter to one-half of its staff.
Trump II Clown Show
The Senate confirmedPam Bondi as attorney general, with only Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) crossing the aisle.
The nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was saved by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a longtime vaccine advocate, passing the Senate Finance Committee with a 14-13 vote.
Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination for director of national intelligence was approved 9-8 by the Senate Intelligence Committee, with an assist from former Sen. Krysten Sinema (I-AZ).
Kennedy and Gabbard are now likely to be confirmed by the full Senate.
Quote Of The Day
“If upon reflection, you feel like now would be a good time to take a vacation and resign from your position, please ‘reply all’ to this email and put ‘I’d Like to Occupy Mars!’ in the subject line.”–a defiant administrative law judge at the EEOC, in an email to acting Chair Andrea Lucas that copied most of the commission’s staff
