Senate Republicans barely advanced President Donald Trump’s $9 billion rescissions package into debate time late Tuesday night, following two tight procedural votes that required Vice President JD Vance’s presence to tie-break.
Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) broke with the Senate Republican caucus and opposed both of the procedural votes, citing concerns about the bill — and, apparently, a lack of clarity from the White House on where exactly the cuts will come from.
TPM has obtained and analyzed over a dozen contracts and invoices related to the construction and operation of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention camp in the Everglades. The documents identify eight previously undisclosed companies — including two firms with a Fortune 500 pedigree — involved with the controversial facility. They also show that, in at least one instance, resources allocated for the state’s “disaster preparedness” apparatus were diverted to the site as DeSantis’ office used emergency powers to quickly establish the camp, causing a shortfall that needs to be addressed during the ongoing hurricane season.
WASHINGTON DC—This past Sunday, Pastor Jared Longshore looked out at his congregants, gathered to hear him deliver the first sermon of a new church within sight of the U.S. Capitol. The group included Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as well as a prominent conservative think tanker and assorted Republican political operatives.
Longshore began with a choice. “The option before you is quite plain,” he said. “It is Christ or chaos, Christ or destruction.”
I’ll be answering reader questions Friday in a special bonus edition of Morning Memo.
Have a question? Submit it in the comments section of the Substack version of today’s Morning Memo. (The comments section at TPM proper is too robustly active for me to easily find your questions.)
This is the first time we’ve tried this, so your patience is appreciated as we work out any kinks. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!
Trump Retribution: As Corrupt as It Gets
The Trump administration is corruptly targeting Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) with criminal investigation using the same tactic it has used against New York Attorney General Letitia James: allegations of mortgage fraud.
Fannie Mae has reportedly made a criminal referral against Schiff to the Trump Justice Department. President Trump happily touted the news about his former impeacher on social media.
In any other era, this would be the defining story of the day. The President of the United States running the DOJ out of his White House and using it to launch politically motivated criminal investigations of his Democratic foes.
Trump’s not targeting just any Democrats. He’s targeting precisely who he has promised to target: Democrats who came after him. James, among other things, won that massive $300+ million fraud case against the Trump Org. Schiff, then in the House, was the lead prosecutor in the first Trump impeachment and has continued to be a chief Trump antagonist.
We don’t have to peel back the layers of the underlying mortgage fraud allegations. Why was the the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae, looking at James and Schiff in the first place? Just out of the blue, we’re supposed to believe?
The WaPo obtained from an anonymous administration official a confidential Fannie Mae memo address to Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte: “The memo said that on May 12, Fannie’s financial crimes investigations unit received a document demand from FHFA’s inspector general concerning Schiff’s home, including requests for loan files and other documents.”
We all know what’s going on here.
In Other Trump DOJ News …
Criminal defense lawyers have been lobbying the Trump DOJ’s “Weaponization Working Group” to try to get their clients off the hook, Bloomberg reports. In an ironic twist, the attorney for the Utah plastic surgeon accused of selling false Covid vaccination cards said the group turned her down when she asked it to intervene. It was only later, when pressure was building over the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory, that Attorney General Pam Bondi abruptly dismissed the case against the doctor.
After the federal judges in the Northern District of New York declined to extend the interim term of U.S. Attorney John A. Sarcone III, the Trump administration has orchestrated things (legally, I think) so that Sarcone may continue in the role for a limited period.
‘Legalistic Noncompliance’
University of Michigan law professors Daniel Deacon and Leah Litman have a new legal research paper out (I promise to only rarely inflict legal research papers on you) that tries to give some shape and form to the Trump administration’s defiance of court orders. They dub the practice “legalistic noncompliance” and observe how it has manifested itself on the ground in the three ways:
In the first, the executive deploys specious arguments—arguments that seem facially plausible but in fact lack support—in order to evade enforcement of judicial orders. The second involves employing tactics, including legal-sounding claims that certain information cannot be shared, as a way to impede investigation into whether the administration is in fact complying. The third consists of occasions where the administration has, in the face of a judicial order, used different legal means in order to effect a policy substantially similar to the one enjoined.
Texas Walkout Redux?
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and DNC Chair Ken Martin held a conference call Monday night with 40 Democrats in the Texas House of Representatives, and while they stopped short of asking them to walk out of the special session later this month to block a Republican redistricting scheme, “they left the impression that it should be considered,” the NYT reports. Texas Democrats famously fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum during the mid-decade redistricting fiasco of 2003.
It’s not just Texas, where Republicans hope a newly drawn map will help them pick up five additional seats. “There could be some other states we’re going to get another three, or four or five in addition. Texas would be the biggest one,” President Trump said yesterday.
Anything to hold on to the House and not lose the GOP’s trifecta of White House, Senate, and House control.
Census Citizenship Question Is Baaack
The census citizenship issue is raising its head again. House Republicans have introduced three bills this year that would exclude noncitizens for the purposes of apportioning House seats and Electoral College votes, NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang reports. The census citizenship push during President Trump’s first term was foiled by legal challenges.
W. Virginia Abortion Pill Ban Upheld
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld West Virginia’s near-total ban on the abortion pill mifepristone. “The decision marks the first time a federal appeals court has allowed a state to strictly limit the drug, teeing up a key test of states’ powers to ban medication approved by the Food and Drug Administration,” the WaPo reports.
Hospitals are closing or actively considering doing so, cutting programs, and laying off staff. Planned Parenthood is warning patients it can no longer accept Medicaid insurance and in one region says it can’t provide services to Medicaid recipients at all, even if the patient doesn’t use Medicaid to pay. And lawmakers in at least five states are planning special sessions to revamp their already-enacted budgets and determine how to handle the cuts, including what cuts they should enact and how to administer the new Medicaid work requirement.
Trump Attack on Higher Ed: Wolverines Edition
University of Michigan: In its trumped up “investigation” of foreign donations, the Trump administration has made an extensive and invasive demand for records, including “personnel files on university students and employees, records on research projects, tax records and records on other partnerships with foreign universities, governments and other entities,” the NYT reports.
Columbia University: The university could settle with the Trump administration as soon as next week, paying hundred of millions of dollars in fines and implement various “reforms” to re-start cut off federal funding, the NYT reports.
George Mason University: The Trump administration has opened two anti-DEI investigations into the public university in Virginia, after it helped force the resignation of the president of the University of Virginia.
A Report From the Academic Trenches
Those of us not in academia and far removed from student life may not fully appreciate how grim things have become on campus. President Trump’s attack on higher education is a big part of the story, but it’s just one of the dramatic changes that have swept universities. Political scientist Paul Musgrave wrote a thoughtful essay to try to convey to non-academics the scale and scope of the changes:
I find it hard to explain to people who are unfamiliar with academia or how scholarship actually works how devastating these changes are. These disruptions, cumulatively, seem—from my perspective—to be more dramatic in their effects in a far shorter time than the impact of computerization and the Internet on higher education. Moreover, there does not seem to be any reason to think that U.S. policymakers are concerned with, or even sad about, any of these changes. To the contrary: they are pouring gasoline on the flames. Warnings about the risks and long-term effects fall on ears deafened by an ideology that says that those consequences are desirable or by an incapacity to imagine that actions have consequences.
Meanwhile, in the Fox News Alt-Universe …
Gutfeld: “We need to learn from the blacks. The way they were able to remove the power from the n-word word by using it. So from now on it’s: What up, my Nazi? Hey, what up, my Nazi? Hey, what's hanging, my Nazi?”Kennedy: “Nazi, please!”Gutfeld: “Thank God you did a hard ‘i’ there.”
Today’s the day we kick off our big ask for the year, the TPM Journalism Fund annual drive. I just called it our “big ask.” But I want to be clear that if you’re a member, you shouldn’t feel any obligation. You’ve done your part to support our work. More than 35,000 of you make TPM possible. But the TPM Journalism Fund plays a critical role in keeping TPM vital, prepared for the unexpected and able to expand our capacity to meet the public crisis of the moment. We truly need your support. What we’re doing today at TPM, responding as we are to public crisis of the second Trump Presidency would not be possible without it. If you’ve heard enough and are able to contribute in any amount, please click right here.
A bit of professional disappointment since we were also tipped about this and were hoping to get on it tomorrow. (D’oh!) But the Washington Post beat us to it. The gist is what’s important. Eric Schnabel, the chief operating office of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — ground-zero of the Trump war on science research -— was fired and literally escorted off the premises yesterday apparently directing a hefty sole-source contract to a company which employs his wife. It seems Trish Duffy Schnabel often goes by her maiden name and he may have thought that was strong enough OpSec to get away with it.
Schnabel, a 25 year Army vet, had always raised concern and harrumphs within the non-toady echelon at NIH because he apparently had no scientific or biomedical background, despite science and biomedicine playing a rather large role in the NIH brief.
President Trump has reportedly been calling some of the highest profile and, typically, most loyal MAGA influencers in recent days to tell them to stop talking about the infamous Epstein files and his administration’s botched handling of their release. This comes as more and more Republicans in Congress try to walk a tightrope, supporting the president while also not saying anything that might upset the online hordes of Trump supporters whose votes they need.
Is it a harmonic convergence? Is the Rep. Corey Mills (R-FL) alleged assault case finally coming into focus? Let me try to explain the moving parts here. Remember back in February, D.C. police went to home of Mills responding to reports that he had assaulted a woman who D.C. publications delicately noted was not his wife. Prosecuting something like this in D.C. is in the hands of the U.S. Attorney for D.C., who, at the time, was Jan. 6 attorney Ed Martin. Through some mix of Martin doing Mills a solid and the D.C. police spoiling the case because of who Mills was, charges were never brought. So, big win for Mills, as D.C. goes. You can’t be charged with a crime in Washington, D.C. if you’re a Republican these days. I don’t make the rules.
Last night, Daily Beast reporter Roger Sollenberger posted on Twitter that Mills is being evicted from his D.C. apartment on which he owes $85,000. The rent is $20,833 a month.
Senate Republicans will tweak President Donald Trump’s $9.4 billion rescission request — the White House’s attempt to give a figleaf of legitimacy to the Department of Government Efficiency’s rampage through the federal government — in order to get key Senate GOP holdouts onboard.
This story first appeared at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
The Internal Revenue Service is building a computer program that would give deportation officers unprecedented access to confidential tax data.
ProPublica has obtained a blueprint of the system, which would create an “on demand” process allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain the home addresses of people it’s seeking to deport.
Last month, in a previously undisclosed dispute, the acting general counsel at the IRS, Andrew De Mello, refused to turn over the addresses of 7.3 million taxpayers sought by ICE. In an email obtained by ProPublica, De Mello said he had identified multiple legal “deficiencies” in the agency’s request.
Two days later, on June 27, De Mello was forced out of his job, people familiar with the dispute said. The addresses have not yet been released to ICE. De Mello did not respond to requests for comment, and the administration did not address questions sent by ProPublica about his departure.
The Department of Government Efficiency began pushing the IRS to provide taxpayer data to immigration agents soon after President Donald Trump took office. The tax agency’s acting general counsel refused and was replaced by De Mello, who Trump administration officials viewed as more willing to carry out the president’s agenda. Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, and the IRS negotiated a “memorandum of understanding” that included specific legal guardrails to safeguard taxpayers’ private information.
In his email, De Mello said ICE’s request for millions of records did not meet those requirements, which include having a written assurance that each taxpayer whose address is being sought was under active criminal investigation.
“There’s just no way ICE has 7 million real criminal investigations, that’s a fantasy,” said a former senior IRS official who had been advising the agency on this issue. The demands from the DHS were “unprecedented,” the official added, saying the agency was pressing the IRS to do what amounted to “a big data dump.”
In the past, when law enforcement sought IRS data to support its investigations, agencies would give the IRS the full legal name of the target, an address on file and an explanation of why the information was relevant to a criminal inquiry. Such requests rarely involved more than a dozen people at a time, former IRS officials said.
Danny Werfel, IRS commissioner during the Biden administration, said the privacy laws allowing federal investigators to obtain taxpayer data have never “been read to open the door to the sharing of thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of tax records for a broad-based enforcement initiative.”
A spokesperson for the White House said the planned use of IRS data was legal and a means of fulfilling Trump’s campaign pledge to carry out mass deportations of “illegal criminal aliens.”
Taxpayer data is among the most confidential in the federal government and is protected by strict privacy laws, which have historically limited its transfer to law enforcement and other government agencies. Unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer return information is a felony that can carry a penalty of up to five years in prison.
The system that the IRS is now creating would give ICE automated access to home addresses en masse, limiting the ability of IRS officials to consider the legality of transfers. IRS insiders who reviewed a copy of the blueprint said it could result in immigration agents raiding wrong or outdated addresses.
“If this program is implemented in its current form, it’s extremely likely that incorrect addresses will be given to DHS and individuals will be wrongly targeted,” said an IRS engineer who examined the blueprints and who, like other officials, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
The dispute that ended in De Mello’s ouster was the culmination of months of pressure on the IRS to turn over massive amounts of data in ways that would redefine the relationship between the agency and law enforcement and reduce taxpayers’ privacy, records and interviews show.
In one meeting in late March between senior IRS and DHS officials, a top ICE official made a suggestion: Why doesn’t Homeland Security simply provide the name and state of its targets and have the IRS return the addresses of everyone who matches that criteria?
The IRS lawyers were stunned. They feared they could face criminal liability if they handed over the addresses of individuals who were not under a criminal investigation. The conversation and news of deeper collaboration with ICE so disturbed career staff that it led to a series of departures in late March and early April across the IRS’ legal, IT and privacy offices.
They were “pushing the boundaries of the law,” one official said. “Everyone at IRS felt the same way.”
The Blueprint
The technical blueprint obtained by ProPublica shows that engineers at the agency are preparing to give DHS what it wants: a system that enables massive automated data sharing. The goal is to launch the new system before the end of July, two people familiar with the matter said.
The DHS effort to obtain IRS data comes as top immigration enforcement leaders face escalating White House pressure to deport some 3,000 people per day, according to reports.
One federal agent tasked with assisting ICE on deportations said recent operations have been hamstrung by outdated addresses. Better information could dramatically speed up arrests. “Some of the leads that they were giving us were old,” said the agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press. “They’re like from two administrations ago.”
In early March, immigrants rights groups sued the IRS hoping to block the plan, arguing that the memorandum of understanding between DHS and the IRS is illegal. But a judge in early May ruled against them, saying the broader agreement complied with Section 6103, the existing law regulating IRS data sharing. That opened the door for engineers to begin building the system.
The judge did not address the technical blueprint, which didn’t exist at the time of the ruling. But the case is pending, which means the new system could still come under legal review.
Until now, little was known about the push and pull between the two agencies or the exact technical mechanics behind the arrangement.
The plan has been shrouded in secrecy even within the IRS, with details of its development withheld from regular communications. Several IRS engineers and lawyers have avoided working on the project out of concerns about personal legal risk.
Asked about the new system, a spokesperson for IRS parent agency the Treasury Department said the memorandum of understanding, often called an MOU, “has been litigated and determined to be a lawful application of Section 6103, which provides for information sharing by the IRS in precise circumstances associated with law enforcement requests.”
At a time when Trump is making threats to deport not only undocumented immigrants but also U.S. citizens, the scope of information-sharing with the IRS could continue to grow, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica and sources familiar with the matter: DHS has been looking for ways to expand the agreement that could allow Homeland Security officials to seek IRS data on Americans being investigated for various crimes.
Last month, an ICE attorney proposed updating the MOU to authorize new data requests on people “associated with criminal activities which may include United States citizens or lawful permanent residents,” according to a document seen by ProPublica. The status of this proposal is unclear. De Mello, at the time, rejected it and called for senior Treasury Department leadership to personally sign off on such a significant change.
The White House described DHS’ work with the IRS as a good-faith effort to identify and deport those who are living in the country illegally.
“ProPublica continues to degrade their already terrible reputation by suggesting we should turn a blind eye to criminal illegal aliens present in the United States for the sake of trying to collect tax payments from them,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement after receiving questions about the blueprint from ProPublica.
She pointed to the April MOU as giving the government the authority to create the new system and added, “This isn’t a surveillance system. … It’s part of President Trump’s promise to carry out the mass deportation of criminal illegal aliens — the promise that the American people elected him on and he is committed to fulfilling.”
In a separate statement, a senior DHS official also cited the court’s approval of the MOU, saying that it “outlines a process to ensure that sensitive taxpayer information is protected while allowing law enforcement to effectively pursue criminal violations.”
How the System Works
The new system would represent a sea change, allowing law enforcement to request enormous swaths of confidential data in bulk through an automated, computerized process.
The system, according to the blueprint and interviews with IRS engineers, would work like this:
First, DHS would send the IRS a spreadsheet containing the names and previous addresses of the people it’s targeting. The request would include the date of a final removal order, a relevant criminal statute ICE is using to investigate the individual, and the tax period for which information is sought. If DHS fails to include any of this information, the system would reject the request.
The system then attempts to match the information provided by the DHS to a specific taxpayer identification number, which is the primary method by which the IRS identifies an individual in its databases.
If the system makes a match, it accesses the individual’s associated tax file and pulls the address listed during the most recent tax period. Then the system would produce a new spreadsheet enriched with taxpayer data that contains DHS’ targets’ last known addresses. The spreadsheet would include a record of names rejected for lack of required information and names for which it could not make a match.
Tax and privacy experts say they worry about how such a powerful yet crude platform could make dangerous mistakes. Because the search starts with a name instead of a taxpayer identification number, it risks returning the address of an innocent person with the same name as or a similar address to that of one of ICE’s targets. The proposed system assumes the data provided by DHS is accurate and that each targeted individual is the subject of a valid criminal investigation. In effect, the IRS has no way to independently check the bases of these requests, experts told ProPublica.
In addition, the blueprint does not limit the amount of data that can be transferred or how often DHS can request it. The system could easily be expanded to acquire all the information the IRS holds on taxpayers, said technical experts and IRS engineers who reviewed the documents. By shifting a single parameter, the program could return more information than just a target’s address, said an engineer familiar with the plan, including employer and familial relationships.
Engineers based at IRS offices in Lanham, Maryland, and Dallas are developing the blueprint.
“Gone Back on Its Word”
For decades, the American government has encouraged everyone who makes an income in the U.S. to pay taxes — regardless of immigration status — with an implicit promise that their information would be protected. Now that same data may be used to locate and deport noncitizens.
“For years, the IRS has told immigrants that it only cares that they pay their taxes,” said Nandan Joshi, an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, which is seeking to block the data-sharing agreement in federal court. “By agreeing to share taxpayer data with ICE on a mass basis, the IRS has gone back on its word.”
The push to share IRS data with DHS emerged while Elon Musk’s DOGE reshaped the engineering staff of the IRS. Sam Corcos, a Silicon Valley startup founder with no government experience, pushed out more than 50 IRS engineers and restructured the agency’s engineering priorities while he was the senior DOGE official at the agency. He later became chief information officer at Treasury. He has also led a separate IRS effort to create a master database using products from Silicon Valley giant Palantir Technologies, enabling the government to link and search large swaths of data.
Corcos didn’t respond to a request for comment. The White House said DOGE is not part of the DHS-IRS pact.
Sen. Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Finance, which oversees the IRS, told ProPublica the system being built was ripe for abuse. It “would allow an outside agency unprecedented access to IRS records for reasons that have nothing to do with tax administration, opening the door to endless fishing expeditions,” he said.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the department’s internal watchdog, is already probing efforts by Trump and DOGEto obtain private taxpayer data and other sensitive information, ProPublica reported in April.
The Trump administration continues to add government agencies to its deportation drive.
DOGE and DHS are also working to build a national citizenship database, NPR reported last month. The database links information from the Social Security Administration and the DHS, ostensibly for the purpose of allowing state and local election officials to verify U.S. citizenship.
And in May, a senior Treasury Department official directed 250 IRS criminal investigative agents to help deportation operations, a significant shift for two agencies that historically have had separate missions.
