Over the weekend, billionaire Elon Musk gained some level of access to the Treasury Department’s federal payment system, thanks to the pliancy of newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Continue reading “Democrats Respond To Musk ‘Illegally Seizing Power’ Over Treasury Payment System”Trump II Punishes Fed Workers For Attending Trump I Diversity Training
In an ironic twist, the Trump administration appears to be punishing Department of Education employees for attending diversity training sessions that were held during his first term.
Continue reading “Trump II Punishes Fed Workers For Attending Trump I Diversity Training”Oy
From TPM Reader NL …
I called Senator Warner’s office to get a sense for what they are doing to raise the salience of Elon Musk’s illegal takeover of the Treasury Payments system.
The very polite staffer said that Senator Warner will be issuing a statement soon. She politely explained that this is how members of Congress communicate their position.
Dude, these people are just lost. They don’t get it or don’t want to get it.
There are many ways to skin a cat. But statements that go out via press release are meaningless. That is no longer how news works. Full stop.
Trump II Went On A Weekend Bender The Likes Of Which America Has Never Seen Before
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The Calamity Is Upon Us
The lawless events of the past 72 hours accelerated what has since Trump’s second inauguration been the most rapid tear-down of the nation’s constitutional structure that Americans have ever witnessed.
And yet … there’s no reason to think that we have anywhere near a full accounting of what has transpired over the last two weeks. The free and transparent flow of government information to the public is being strangled, making any such accounting increasingly difficult. Fear and uncertainty contributed to a degraded information environment in which rumors were rampant.
At this crucial moment, it is not at all clear that there is sufficient institutional or structural might anywhere in government or the private sector to counter the Trump-Musk anti-constitutional rampage. The Republican-controlled Congress is a cipher; business and industry continues to be a Trump patsy even in the face of an unprovoked trade war that he started over the weekend with devastating tariffs against close allies Canada and Mexico; the federal courts are a question mark at best.
We might get a read as soon as today on whether President Trump will go even more renegade by defying the federal judiciary and daring it to do something about it. Early but incomplete indications are that the Trump administration is at least partly abiding by a federal court injunction blocking the unprecedented spending freeze that OMB purported to initiate a week ago. As ordered, the administration seems to have distributed notice of the injunction throughout government; but there continue to be reports on the ground that the funding spigots remain shut off, especially at USAID and for its contractors.
Priority No. 1: DOJ
Morning Memo continues to be most focused on the purges at the Justice Department, including the FBI. They are part of broader plan to neuter and then co-opt federal law enforcement and prosecutors. Without independent, non-partisan enforcement of the law (both criminal and civil), there is little possibility of accountability for all of the degradations being committed by the Trump administration in other departments and agencies and in the wider world.
Oy, When The FBI Is The Resistance
The developments Friday and into the weekend extended the most serious crisis in the history of the Justice Department:
- More than two dozen federal prosecutors in DC who worked on the Jan. 6 cases were terminated by Acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, a political hack brought in from Missouri.
- Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, a member of Trump criminal defense team, ordered the sacking of career FBI agents in top leadership positions both in DC and in select field offices around the county.
- Bove also demanded a list of FBI personnel who worked on the Trump criminal cases. A questionnaire was sent out, purportedly bureau-wide, asking FBI personnel to self-report the specific roles they played in the Trump criminal cases.
The acting FBI director distinguished himself by resisting the most egregious of the moves and communicating transparently to bureau personnel. More on that in a moment.
Real World Harms: USAID
While sacking of the Justice Department is our main focus, it is not where the most immediate harm is being done to the most people. That dubious distinction goes to USAID, which funds programs that project American soft power around the world with health care, education, economic development, and civil society programs, to name just a few of the many categories of USAID work.
- USAID funding appears to be cut off either in whole or in part. Reports continue to come in that nonprofits, both at home and abroad, whose work is funded by USAID have had to not just cease providing services but begin to layoff workers due to the funding shutoff.
- USAID abruptly closed its DC headquarters today after Elon Musk announced that Trump had agreed to shutter the agency.
- President Trump is reportedly planning to exceed his lawful authority by folding USAID into the State Department, without any action from Congress approving such a move.
- Elon Musk and his DOGE minions ran amok through USAID all weekend. More on that in a moment.
Real America Harms: HHS
Like at USAID, the spending freeze at HHS is having acute real world impacts on an array of health services and the vendors that provide them. Services have been shuttered, layoffs by contractors have reportedly begun, and the time frame for when funding will resume remains uncertain. We’ll be keeping a close eye on whether the court injunction blocking the spending freeze may start to unlock funds here.
Headline I Could Not Have Imagined 6 Months Ago
Last March I wrote about the unholy alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but I can’t say that I anticipated Musk and his minions having free reign across government, including apparent access to classified and to some of the Treasury Department’s most sensitive processes and procedures. The WSJ, perhaps inadvertently captures the dynamic in a headline that feels like it came from a developing nation: “Musk Moves With Lightning Speed to Exert Control Over the Government.” It’s not that different from the spoof headline Garrett Graff came up with as he pretended to write about the weekend’s news as if it were happening abroad.
Elon Musk’s Deranged Weekend
In an unprecedented development, the world’s richest man turned the federal government into his own personal plaything. Using his perch at DOGE to target the Treasury Department’s payment processing system and to threaten to USAID with closure, Musk seemed to be taking his playbook for destroying Twitter and applying it to key components of the federal government:
- Musk and his team were given unprecedented and legally questionable access to Treasury Department payment systems, with the hare-brained notion that they could cut government spending at the payment processing level.
- Spewing disinformation, Musk falsely accused USAID of being a “criminal organization” and said it must “die,” among other things. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk bragged on X/Twitter.
- The two top security officials at USAID were put on administrative leave after trying – unsuccessfully – to block Musk’s team from accessing internal systems.
- Musk’s team has reportedly locked career staff at OPM out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees.
It Takes Guts To Make A Stand
I’m not much for performative resistance, but I’m damn near weepy when people risk their own lives, careers, financial security, and reputations to do the right thing. In the coming weeks, I want to highlight these profiles in courage without mythologizing them, which tends to make it seem like a vainglorious exercise rather than a tough choice made reluctantly:
- FBI HQ: Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll sent out a message to the bureau that made clear the purge orders were coming from Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove.
- FBI NY: The top FBI agent in NYC, James Dennehy, vowed in an email to staff to “dig in” as he called the FBI’s acting director and acting deputy director Robert C. Kissane “warriors” for defending bureau employees. ““Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy,” Dennehy wrote in the email.
- USAID: Director for Security John Vorhees and Deputy Director for Security Brian McGill were both put on leave Saturday night after trying to block Musk’s team from accessing classified information in restricted areas.
So Much More …
The pace of news precludes Morning Memo from flagging every major development. It is painful to have to leave out what’s happening at the National Science Foundation, or the way transgender Americans have been singled out for particular targeting, or the way even government workers who simply attended DEI training have been swept up in the anti-DEI purge.
The Logic of Destruction
Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.
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What Are Democrats Supposed to Do?
I wrote a series of posts over the weekend about how to make sense, politically, strategically and even emotionally of the unfolding crisis of governance in DC. Here’s a piece about messaging and morale and another on Trump and Musk’s “shock and awe” strategies. After reading those posts, a number of TPM Readers have asked, okay, what are we supposed to do? Or what are our electeds supposed to do? I want to dig into this more later, but in this post I want to give as best a quick answer to that as I can.
We start with a piece in this morning’s Punchbowl which is simultaneously encouraging and gobsmackingly disheartening. The headline reads: Democrats ask: Why would we help Trump and the Republicans?. Most of you are probably thinking, you’re just getting to this question, guys? Well, they are. As they should, though it’s far more tentative than it should be. I suspect that’s about to change.
Let’s repeat the core fact. Republicans are in charge. As I explained here, the levers Democrats have over any of this are very limited. This is fundamentally a battle over public opinion, one in which the opposition needs to be making the case about the disastrousness of Trump’s policies. But there are levers. And they need to use them. Because even those tiny levers are key to that larger battle. Talk in itself is meaningless. Begging especially is meaningless. In fact, on its own it can be demoralizing — same old, same old, just performatively illustrating either the inability or unwillingness to act.
Right now in Washington, DC, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dominating literally everything. That will start changing quickly, at least in a limited way, in the courts. But the overriding need is for Democrats to get a seat at the table. And they can do that in several ways. The biggest way is that Republicans will need help to pass a budget and raise the debt ceiling. The rubber starts meeting the road on that front next month. Real soon. You can talk as much as you want. But the White House and congressional Republicans absolutely need that help. And Democrats need to be crystal clear that the answer is absolutely no help — without meeting their conditions. That’s where you get the seat at the table.
Continue reading “What Are Democrats Supposed to Do?”Ars Longa Vita Brevis
“They say that, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge
To which a scoundrel clings’
Steal a little and they throw you in jail
Steal a lot and they make you king”
– Bob Dylan, Sweetheart Like You
Musk’s Little Green Men
One of my and our central points of interest is the identity of these “Musk operatives” who are actually doing these things we’re hearing about throughout the federal and especially the top administrative agencies (OPM, OMB, GAO, etc.). Notably some of the best reporting on this is being done at Wired. That’s not surprising. It plays to key strengths: it’s a top flight publication, heavily plugged into the tech and Silicon Valley worlds where these guys come from, and they do the kind of granular reporting that just isn’t what the big national/DC publications generally do. This article is a key read. Who are these guys? They’re generally between 19 and 24 years of age, often college dropouts who left to go into tech and various kinds of algorithmic financial trading, in most cases interns at Thiel’s or Musk’s companies, at least one “Thiel fellow.”
In other words, hard right, techno-red-pilled bros, who now have access to things like your social security checks (whether you get them or not), your financial and, likely in some cases, medical records and at least the ability to shut down whole sections of the federal government at will by simply turning off their funding spigots. (Not good!) It sounds crazy and absurd to think that individual people could have that kind of power absent anything the law recognizes. But this is what it means when you’re this far up (or down, choose your metaphor) in the brain stem of the national government. This is what it means when you have access to the central Treasury Department payment network. You can simply turn off a spigot of funding. (I’ve now had it described to me precisely how you do it.) If you have that access, whether it’s legal or not isn’t relevant. The best analogy I can provide is that there’s some person at your bank who could just change a setting and suddenly all your checks and payments would be rejected and your funds would be frozen. Now imagine if “you” is NIH or USAID or … well, Social Security.
Continue reading “Musk’s Little Green Men”Understanding Trump/Musk ‘Shock and Awe’
The central point in my post yesterday was trying to balance two facts: First, voters made a decision last November to shut Democrats out of all but a series of powers on the margins within the federal government. There’s no hyper-exertion or Mike Pence “if he has courage” that undoes that fact. Second, an effective opposition needs to provide the public not only with some sense of “hope” but also the outlines of a plan. Given point one that plan doesn’t need to be and probably can’t be terribly detailed. But a basic sense that we are now here and we’re going to get there. And here are the tools we’re going to use to get from A to B. And we are going to get to B and it’s going to take all of us to get there. See yesterday’s post for more on this.
There’s a separate and pretty critical part of this equation I want to discuss.
Continue reading “Understanding Trump/Musk ‘Shock and Awe’”A Few Thoughts on Messages and Morale
Over the last few days, as I’ve struggled with everyone else to stay on top of all this, I’ve tried to balance two things. One of those is trying to keep people focused on what an opposition can actually do and what it can’t. The other is that you can’t simply be, in effect, yelling at people who are bewildered and scared. I saw a DNC member who was at that cattle call Thursday saying how weird it was hearing elected officials talking like these were normal times when actually the house is burning down around everyone. So, how to reconcile primal screams and concrete plans, and, in the midst of that, try to make some progress on thinking outside the box? How to counteract and defeat performative displays of powerlessness?
Continue reading “A Few Thoughts on Messages and Morale”Most Vulnerable Republican Senator Sees No Reason To Say No To Trump
Hello. It’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) has every reason to at least perform independence.
Up for reelection in 2026 in a state where Democrats can win, he’s often plunked next to Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME) as a member who has either personal or political incentive to sometimes loudly buck their party.
Continue reading “Most Vulnerable Republican Senator Sees No Reason To Say No To Trump”