Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has not been backing the historically bipartisan appropriations process used to compile the federal government’s budget for the next fiscal year in protest of the Trump administrations’ power grab on Congress’ power of the purse.
Continue reading “Another Senate Dem Refuses to Participate in Budgeting to Protest Trump’s Power Grab”The Courts Can’t and Won’t Save Us, Part 805
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
RIP USAID
Yesterday brought another example of the extreme difficulty of litigating the constitutional structure of government in court and its inadequacy in reining in Trump’s lawless rampage in a timely fashion.
You may have seen that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision by Republican appointees Karen Henderson and Gregory Katsas, effectively ratified the Trump administration’s freezing of foreign aid funding. It was a bit more nuanced than that.
The court ruled that foreign aid groups could not legally challenge the impoundment of the foreign aid funding. Under the law, the court concluded, only the Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress, can challenge the president’s impoundment of funds. To date, the comptroller general, who heads the GAO, hasn’t take that step. To emphasize, the GAO hasn’t even commenced a lawsuit yet. (Joyce Vance has more on this mechanism.)
The upshot is that after months of litigation, during which United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been dismantled, it’s back to square one to hold Trump to account for his lawlessness. Or to put it another way, the damage has already been done and cannot now or at some future date be rectified in any meaningful way. One caveat: It’s possible the full court of appeals could overturn the panel decision.
The dissent by Judge Florence Pan, a Democratic appointee, was scalding of the majority:
My colleagues in the majority excuse the government’s forfeiture of what they perceive to be a key argument, and then rule in the President’s favor on that ground, thus departing from procedural norms that are designed to safeguard the court’s impartiality and independence. Moreover, the court’s holding that the grantees have no constitutional cause of action is as startling as it is erroneous.
In her dissent, Pan was clear about the structural constitutional issues at stake and the enforcement role that the two-judge majority was abdicating:
At bottom, the court’s acquiescence in and facilitation of the Executive’s unlawful behavior derails the “carefully crafted system of checked and balanced power” that serves as the “greatest security against tyranny — the accumulation of excessive authority in a single Branch.” Because the court turns a blind eye to the “serious implications” of this case for the rule of law and the very structure of our government, I respectfully dissent.
The USAID debacle remains one of the most haunting aspects of the first months of the Trump II presidency. And the collective inability, unwillingness, and indifference of the courts to rein it in is a sobering sign of the limits of judicial power against this executive.
Law Firms Who Struck Deals With Trump Now Pay the Piper
NYT:
Two of the law firms that reached deals with President Trump this year to avoid punitive executive orders were connected in recent months with the Commerce Department about working on trade deals, according to three people briefed on the matter.
The firms, Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden Arps, were connected to the department by Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, two of the people said.
Quote of the Day
“Only historians and trained museum professionals are qualified to conduct such a review, which is intended to ensure historical accuracy. To suggest otherwise is an affront to the professional integrity of curators, historians, educators and everyone involved in the creation of solid, evidence-based content.”–Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the American Historical Association, on President Trump’s politicization of the Smithsonian Institution.
Trump White House Wants to Tamper With Jobs Numbers
The Trump White House is involved in discussions about changing the way the government collects and reports jobs data, the WSJ reports. It is clearly another way that the White House is trying to tinker with the jobs report to placate the president and minimize political damage from bad jobs numbers.
Oh?
NBC News reported that E.J. Antoni, President Trump’s egregiously unqualified nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, can be seen in multiple videos on the grounds of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, before leaving the area. The White House says Antoni was merely a curious “bystander” who wandered over to the Capitol after seeing news reports and did not cross any barricades or demonstrate.
The Corruption: Trump Pentagon Edition
Donald Trump’s Navy and Air Force are poised to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined to develop, work initially aimed at overhauling antiquated human resources systems.
The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel’s Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.
More Medicaid Cuts in the Works?
Politico: “An influential group of House Republicans has invited a chief architect of the hard-right push for deep Medicaid spending cuts to brief congressional aides Thursday as GOP leaders quietly map out a possible second party-line reconciliation package.”
Notable
The good government group Common Cause is backing away from its longtime opposition to gerrymandering and partisan redistricting, saying it will not actively oppose mid-decade redistricting in blue states.
Good Read
How Ukraine is scrambling to make sure Donald Trump doesn’t sell it out in tomorrow’s summit meeting in Alaska with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
80 Years
Solomon Peña, the failed New Mexico candidate who was convicted of shooting up the homes of four Democratic officeholders in 2022-23, was sentenced to 80 years in prison.
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Pete Hegseth’s Pastor Wants ‘Spiritual Warfare’ Waged On All
The man who led a congregation that gave birth to the religious movement Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth now follows has a few principles for you to understand. A former Navy man, they’re informed by his career in the armed forces. But the kind of warfare he envisions isn’t always physical: it’s spiritual.
Continue reading “Pete Hegseth’s Pastor Wants ‘Spiritual Warfare’ Waged On All”Texas Republicans’ Bid to Out-Hard Ass Each Other Continues
As Texas Democrats mull when and how exactly they will return to the state, potentially later this week — despite the fact that Gov. Greg Abbott has vowed to keep calling for special sessions until his Trumped up congressional maps are approved — Texas Republicans’ efforts to outdo one another by attempting to arrest and punish Dems in creative ways are ongoing.
Continue reading “Texas Republicans’ Bid to Out-Hard Ass Each Other Continues”We Did It. You Did It.
As you can see we hit our goal of raising $500,000 during this year’s drive. The drive will continue until later in the month. So if you didn’t get a chance to contribute, by all means the door remains very wide open. We can always put more dollars to good use. But $500,000 was the goal because that’s the number we need/needed to make good on our plans. So we’ll ramp back the reminders and pleas and so forth. We hit the finish line we needed to hit. We’re all set.
I’m writing this to thank you. One of our challenges running TPM is not treating things as routine even as they become in some sense factually routine. Our audience, you, just contributed half a million dollars in four weeks simply because we asked and said we would put it to good use. That’s amazing. And you’ve had our back, caught us in this organizational trust fall every time we’ve done this, which now goes back five years. It’s a testament to the trust you put in our team and the quality you see in their work. I’m thankful to them for doing that work. I’m thankful to you for recognizing it, for valuing it. This organization, this community has an extraordinary commerce in dedication and trust, passing those back and forth between the people who write the articles and those who read them. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be associated with all of it. Truly.
Was It Ghislaine All Along?
I’m mildly fascinated by this piece in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer section. It’s the review of a new biography of Andrew, Duke of York, by a guy named Andrew Lownie. (The piece appears to be free for a limited time.) What sparked my interest is the major if not central role of Ghislaine Maxwell and thus Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, the upshot of the whole thing is to make Maxwell much more central and dominating figure in the Epstein story than perhaps even Epstein himself, certainly in Andrew’s life and perhaps in Epstein’s as well.
At one level I could not care less about any of these people. As I’ve noted in my other Epstein posts, I’m interested in the story because of the way other people are interested in it — lots of people — and how that interest both intersects with our politics and in some material ways explains our politics.
Continue reading “Was It Ghislaine All Along?”Inside One Native American Tribe’s Fight Against The ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Detention Camp
When President Donald Trump toured Florida’s so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention camp on July 1, he cast its location in the Big Cypress National Preserve as a remote and inhospitable place.
Continue reading “Inside One Native American Tribe’s Fight Against The ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Detention Camp”Trump Forces His Brand of ‘Americanism’ on the Smithsonian
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Punchier Headlines, Please
The involvement of any White House in the content of the Smithsonian Institution crosses a critical line of politicization, let alone this White House, in this moment with its expressed intent of white-washing American history by minimizing references to people of color and any past unpleasantness that makes sensitive white people uncomfortable.
Yet major outlets headlined the news of the Trump White House’s new demands on the Smithsonian as if auditors were going in to count toilet paper rolls rather than turning one of America’s national treasures into a tool of MAGA ideology:
- NYT: “White House Announces Comprehensive Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions”
- WaPo: “White House announces more aggressive review of Smithsonian museums”
The WSJ, which first broke the news, was a lot closer to the mark: “White House to Vet Smithsonian Museums to Fit Trump’s Historical Vision.”
I urge you to the read the full letter to the Smithsonian from Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s personal attorney turned White House aide; Vince Haley, director of White House Domestic Policy Council; and Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought. Their demands on the Smithsonian and its member museums are extensive, timed to exert maximum control over exhibits and curatorial decisions around the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next July.
“This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” the letter says.
The egregiousness of the politicization is two-fold. First, this move subverts the normal professional curation process, which is grounded in intellectual honesty, academic study, and the rigorous standards of archival and preservation work. Then, it supplants that framework with an intellectually bankrupt, ideologically driven, sanitized version of American history, art, and culture in service of a white nationalist worldview.
“Museums should begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions,” the letter says, providing a time frame for such “corrections” of 120 days.
The real goal, highlighted in bold toward the end of the letter, is to force the Smithsonian to embrace a MAGA-brand of “Americanism” that defines which people, which values, and which events are truly American and discards the rest.
“By focusing on Americanism—the people, principles, and progress that define our nation—we can work together to renew the Smithsonian’s role as the world’s leading museum institution,” the White House letter concludes.
Quote of the Day
“The fact that it moves markets tells you that it’s valuable information, it’s credible information, it’s the best available information at the time that it’s released, and suppressing that information is like gouging out our eyes. It hurts our ability to see what’s happening around us; it forces us into making worse decisions.”–Aaron Sojourner, senior researcher at the non-partisan W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, on the threat to suspend the monthly jobs reports by E.J. Antoni, Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Trump Attack on Higher Ed
- George Washington University: The private university in D.C. is the latest target of the White House’s trumped-up charges of antisemitism on college campuses as a pretext for extorting concessions from higher education institutions. Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, notified GW of the the results of her “investigation” in an Aug. 12 letter and gave it 10 days to respond to her “offer” of a “voluntary resolution agreement”
- UCLA: A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to partially restore some of the UCLA’s frozen federal research funding, a decision that comes as the White House is seeking to extract a $1 billion settlement from the public university ostensibly for antisemitism on campus.
The Retribution: Union-Busting Edition
After favorable court rulings, the Trump administration has begun cancelling union contracts effecting hundreds of thousands of federal workers at the VA, EPA, FEMA, and USCIS.
DOGE Watch: Personal Info Edition
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals lifted an injunction that had prevented DOGE staffers from accessing the personal information of union workers at the Education Department and the Office of Personnel Management.
Arkansas Trans Ban Upheld
The full 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld Arkansas’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors.
New Evidence That CDC Shooter Was Critical of COVID Vax
Authorities further confirmed that the man who fired more than 500 rounds at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Atlanta headquarters and killed a police officer Friday was critical of the COVID vaccine and blamed it for his health problems.
Thread of the Day
Russia Involved in Federal Court Hack
The hack of the federal court filing system at least partially involved Russia, the NYT reports.
2026 Ephemera
OH-Sen: Former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), the liberal lion who lost re-election in 2024 to Bernie Moreno (R), has decided to run in the 2026 special election to fill JD Vance’s old Senate seat. Brown, 72, will be taking on Republican Sen. Jon Husted, 57, who was appointed earlier this year by Gov. Mike DeWine (R).
We Did It. Thank You.
The TPM community rallied and together we hit our goal of raising $500,000 for the TPM Journalism Fund. We zoomed past the mark last evening. It took four weeks, which is exactly what we’d set aside for the annual fundraising drive. Nicely done!
In TPM’s 25th year, our finances have never been stronger. We have a robust and sustainable business model that’s not easily replicated elsewhere. It comes down to the TPM community, which has proven itself over and over again to be reliable and unstinting in supporting the journalism we do. We don’t take that for granted. It feels like a special relationship between us every single day.
You can, of course, still contribute to the TPM Journalism Fund or become a TPM member (or both!) any day of the year. But for now, we’re going to back off a little on the active pitching and get back to the journalism that drives everything we do here.
Thanks again.
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Cusp
Our drive is currently at $499,844. The assist is in motion. Come in for the slam dunk. Click here.
BLS Commissioner Nominee’s Suggestion to Suspend Monthly Jobs Report Is ‘Like Gouging Our Eyes Out’
President Donald Trump on Monday evening nominated a Heritage Foundation economist who has publicly criticized federal data collection at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to lead the agency.
On Tuesday, Fox Business published an interview with the nominee, E.J. Antoni, during which Antoni suggested halting the release of the monthly jobs report and echoed Trump’s unfounded claims that the reports included misleading information.
“How on earth are businesses supposed to plan — or how is the Fed supposed to conduct monetary policy — when they don’t know how many jobs are being added or lost in our economy? It’s a serious problem that needs to be fixed immediately,” Antoni told Fox News Digital in an interview conducted on August 4. “Until it is corrected, the BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports but keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data.”
The comments, which came after Trump fired the previous BLS commissioner over lackluster job numbers, drew ire on social media and ignited anxiety in economists who underscored the importance of the monthly jobs report, and of the bureau’s freedom from political pressure, in interviews with TPM.
“The fact that it moves markets tells you that it’s valuable information, it’s credible information, it’s the best available information at the time that it’s released, and suppressing that information is like gouging out our eyes,” said Aaron Sojourner, a senior researcher at the non-partisan W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “It hurts our ability to see what’s happening around us; it forces us into making worse decisions.”
Michael Horrigan, president of the Upjohn Institute, said in a separate interview that the Trump administration’s general “lack of faith” in federal statistics is concerning, but hopes the next BLS commissioner would understand the gravity of the agency’s nonpartisan reputation.
“If someone were to come in with a political agenda,” said Horrigan, “they should have a different job.”
In response to a TPM inquiry about whether Trump has considered or would consider issuing an executive order to halt the publishing of legally mandated federal monthly jobs data, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers responded saying the president nominated Antoni to “restore America’s trust” in BLS jobs data.
“Antoni’s education and vast experience as an economist has prepared him to produce accurate public data for businesses, households, and policymakers to inform their decision-making,” Rogers said in an email. “Unlike the previous Commissioner, Antoni will produce overdue solutions to long-term issues at the Bureau and provide Americans with the accurate data they deserve.”
Antoni must now be confirmed by the Senate.
William Beach, the former Trump-appointed BLS commissioner, expressed skepticism that Antoni or any BLS commissioner would actually cease the collection and publication of monthly jobs data, in an interview with TPM. The report is mandated by federal law, and suspending its publication would require an executive order.
“And he may be able to get that,” Beach said, “but there would be a lot of blowback from Wall Street…who use these monthly reports for guidance on their business decisions.”
Notably, Antoni has been hypercritical of federal economic data in general, and the BLS jobs report specifically. In May, he suggested routine revisions to BLS jobs data meant the Biden administration had created “fake” jobs, and conflated two different kinds of BLS datasets in an op-ed for conservative publication Townhall.
Trump fired former BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer on Aug. 1 mere hours after the July jobs report showed a slowdown in the labor market and revised May and June employment downward by 258,000 jobs. Her dismissal was decried by economists, some Republican senators and Beach, the former Trump-appointed BLS Commissioner.
“It’s a much bigger job than it was on July 31 before Erika was fired,” Beach told TPM on Tuesday. “The incoming commissioner, whoever that person is, has to restore trust and really work with his staff.”
Beach, who also worked at the Heritage Foundation and was the founding director of its Center for Data Analysis, said he’d spoken with Antoni, as he had with McEntarfer before she joined the BLS.
Antoni has worked at a succession of advocacy groups and conservative think tanks since 2020, according to his public LinkedIn. Antoni served as a fellow at Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a conservative economic thinktank. He then joined The Heritage Foundation, the conservative organization that authored the Project 2025 presidential policy directive that has served as the roadmap for much of the second Trump administration. Antoni contributed to Project 2025, according to a report from the Washington Post, and was promoted to chief economist at The Heritage Foundation in May.
His nomination caused a firestorm among economists and researchers on social media. Jessica Riedl, an economist at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy think tank, criticized Trump’s nomination of Antoni in a post on X.
“The sad thing is that there are countless competent, respected conservative economists (especially at universities) who could do a terrific job running BLS,” Riedl wrote. “But no credible economist would take a job in which you’d get fired for publishing accurate data.”
Jason Furman, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Obama, called Antoni completely unqualified in a social media post. “He is an extreme partisan and does not have any relevant expertise,” wrote Furman.
Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics, posted a thread to X purportedly showing several times Antoni was hyper-partisan or displayed insufficient economic knowledge.
Economist Sojourner said Antoni’s partisan leanings are exactly why Trump picked him. “I think he was chosen because what he has built a record on over the last few years is attacking the BLS; for making the same kind of charges against the BLS as the president made on [Aug. 1].
“A statistical agency that’s subject to political control,” Sojourner added, “has no credible economic value. It’s kind of pointless.”
Beach, however, expressed confidence in Antoni’s potential leadership.
“I think his reputation — I had a very similar reputation — that follows you into the Bureau, and you need to immediately align yourself with the staff in leadership positions,” Beach said. “His reputation doesn’t matter,” he continued later. “It’s irrelevant because what you do inside the BLS is way different than what you do at a think tank.”
All eyes will now be on Sens. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Rand Paul (R-KY) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who each expressed concerns after the president dismissed McEntarfer. Antoni can only lose support from three Republican senators to be successfully confirmed.