The Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision on Friday limited the ability of courts to block presidential actions that they deem illegal, with all three liberals dissenting.
Continue reading “6-3 SCOTUS Curtails Courts’ Power to Check Illegal White House Actions”The Heist Continues, Now with a Semi at the Loading Dock
From Politico …
On the federal employee pension plan: In order to pay for the megabill, Senate Republicans are considering substantially hiking “federal employees’ retirement contributions to 15.6 percent of their salary — compared with the 9.4 percent required in the initial version of the bill — while carving out an exemption for members of Congress and their staff,” POLITICO’s Lawrence Ukenye reports.
I think “substantially” manages to understate the hike here.
Trump Says He Gave Iran Permission to Bomb U.S. Base in Qatar and…Well, Mostly Crickets?
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Alarming Verbal Diarrhea From the President
When political scientist Seth Masket shared this story on Bluesky yesterday, I couldn’t believe it was real. The right-wing Washington Times reported that at a press conference at the NATO Summit in the Netherlands on Wednesday, Trump revealed that he had given Iran permission to bomb the U.S.’s Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in retaliation for the American bombing of their nuclear sites.
“They said, ‘We’re going to shoot them. Is one o’clock OK?’ I said it’s fine,” Trump said. “And everybody was emptied off the base so they couldn’t get hurt, except for the gunners.”
I poked around for other major coverage of this extraordinary admission, and landed only on a transcript of the press conference. And yes, amid a characteristically meandering monologue, Trump actually said that he let a foreign adversary bomb an American military installation. But this story has pretty much come and gone with virtually no attention and certainly none of the outrage commensurate with what Trump said.
Let’s consider what Trump’s verbal diarrhea here could mean. Suppose he is (for once) telling the truth. Wouldn’t that represent the most shocking dereliction of duty one could imagine for the commander-in-chief? (A high crime or misdemeanor, perhaps?) Is he saying he let Iran get its retaliation out of its system with what he called “a very weak response” to bring an end to hostilities? Perhaps Trump simply was rambling incoherently as he basked in his new “daddy” glow at NATO.
What would have happened if a Democratic president, particularly one named Joe Biden, had said he let a foreign adversary fire on an American military installation? As you consider that hypothetical, keep in mind that House Republicans are currently spending their precious oversight time investigating the former president’s mental acuity.
Flailing Administration Attacks Press for “Lies” About Iran Nuclear Intel
Trump loyalists are taking up his charge to attack any journalist who reported on intelligence contradicting Trump’s claim to have “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites in last weekend’s strikes. The tenor of this authoritarian campaign is that reporters are not permitted to contradict the president.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth came out swinging against his former Fox News colleague, national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin, in an early morning press conference yesterday. In response to a question from Griffin about whether the Pentagon was certain that Tehran had not moved highly enriched uranium from the Fordow site prior to the American strike, Hegseth lashed out, “Jennifer, you’ve been about the worst, the one who misrepresents the most intentionally what the president says.”
Later in the day, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went after CNN’s Natasha Bertrand, after Trump had demanded she be “thrown out like a dog.” Leavitt claimed Bertrand is “being used to push a fake narrative to try to undermine the President of the United States and more importantly the brave fighter pilots who conducted one of the most successful operations in United States history.” CNN issued a statement standing by Bertrand’s reporting.
Meanwhile Senate Democrats remain unconvinced of Trump’s obliteration claims following a classified intelligence briefing yesterday. Trump ally Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who also attended the briefing, struggled to save face for the president, telling reporters afterwards, “The real question is, have we obliterated their desire to have a nuclear weapon.” Graham went on to tread lightly around Trump’s feelings. “I don’t want people to think that the site wasn’t severely damaged or obliterated,” he said. “It was. But having said that, I don’t want people to think the problem is over, because it’s not.”
Republicans Incite Hostility at the Senate Parliamentarian
Following a pattern of dangerous social media attacks on perceived political enemies, some Senate Republicans have begun to assail Elizabeth MacDonough, the nonpartisan Senate Parliamentarian who has struck numerous provisions out of the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill. NBC reports:
“The WOKE Senate Parliamentarian, who was appointed by Harry Reid and advised Al Gore, just STRUCK DOWN a provision BANNING illegals from stealing Medicaid from American citizens,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., wrote on X. “This is a perfect example of why Americans hate THE SWAMP.”
“THE SENATE PARLIAMENTARIAN SHOULD BE FIRED ASAP,” he said.
MacDonough was appointed by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., in 2012, and is well-respected by leaders on both sides of the aisle. But Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, also said MacDonough needs to go and called for term limits for parliamentarians.
“She’s been here since 2012; she has a lot of power,” Marshall told reporters. “I don’t think anyone should stay here that long and have power where she doesn’t answer to anybody.”
While other Senate Republicans seem less eager for such a fight, their failure to firmly and publicly tamp down these inflammatory statements in the current climate is disheartening, to say the least.
Trump Has Cut Funding for Political Violence and Terrorism Prevention
At Mother Jones, Mark Follman reports on the dangers of Trump’s dismantling of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3), a Department of Homeland Security initiative tasked with developing evidence-based community programs to prevent political violence and terrorism. The administration has diverted resources from this and other programs to fund Trump’s brutal deportation agenda.
“We’re at real risk of normalizing political violence as a part of our democracy,” CP3’s former director William Braniff told Follman. “[W]hen these norms are accepted at a societal level and encouraged at a political level, they become entrenched and really difficult to reverse.”
The Trump Administration Continues to Turn Civil Rights Upside Down
The Republican goal of eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion and “gender ideology” is aimed squarely at rolling back hard-won civil rights protections for people who aren’t white, straight, or cisgender. The Trump administration is carrying out this agenda, in part, through investigations and pressure campaigns against educational institutions, threatening to cut their federal funding.
Yesterday, the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services announced it is investigating the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota State High School League over trans girls playing sports, part of what it says is a “larger initiative to defend women and restore biological truth to the Federal government.”
In another arena, the New York Times reports the Justice Department is pressuring the University of Virginia to fire its president, James Ryan, “over what the department says is the school’s disregard for civil rights law over its diversity practices.” In other words, the Department of Justice, which historically has enforced civil rights laws protecting against race discrimination, is now strong-arming educational institutions it claims have discriminated against white people.
The Tough-on-Crime President Wants More Guns on the Street
The Washington Post reports this morning that staffers from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are setting up shop at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives with a “goal of revising or eliminating dozens of rules and gun restrictions by July 4.” DOGE might want to run roughshod over it, but there’s a legal process for amending or ending federal regulations. You can count on litigation over any such efforts, not to mention public outcry.
Put a Pin in This
According to the Associated Press, in a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought committed to restoring funding for foreign aid and public broadcasting if the Senate votes down a House-passed “rescissions” package to make billions of dollars in DOGE-led cuts permanent.
Actually, Big Balls Never Left
Earlier this week I linked to a piece in Wired, reporting that Edward Coristine, the 19 year-old Department of Government Efficiency staffer also known as Big Balls, no longer worked for the federal government. The New York Times had matched Wired’s reporting, and then, yesterday, issued a correction. Coristine, who before joining DOGE had been fired from a job at a data security firm for leaking company information, is now a “special employee” at the Social Security Administration.
GOP’s New Red Scare Is About Muslims, Particularly Zohran Mamdani
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, asking her to “denaturalize” and deport New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, falsely claiming he failed to disclose material support for terrorism prior to becoming a U.S. citizen.
Religious Freedom Is Only for Trump’s Supporters
The House Homeland Security Committee has launched an investigation into hundreds of religious organizations and even entire denominations, claiming they were “involved in providing services or support to inadmissible aliens during the Biden-Harris administration’s historic border crisis.” Ominously, the letter the committee is sending religious organizations includes questions about their federal government funding through grants or contracts, their provision of services to immigrants, and whether they have ever sued the government.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
SCOTUS Allows States To Defund Planned Parenthood Without Recourse From Those Who Rely On It
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Having the freedom to choose your own health care provider is something many Americans take for granted. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority ruled on June 25, 2025, in a 6-3 decision that people who rely on Medicaid for their health insurance don’t have that right.
The case, Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, is focused on a technical legal issue: whether people covered by Medicaid have the right to sue state officials for preventing them from choosing their health care provider. In his majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that they don’t because the Medicaid statute did not “clearly and unambiguously” give individuals that right.
As law professors who teach courses about health and poverty law as well as reproductive justice, we think this ruling could restrict access to health care for the more than 78 million Americans who get their health insurance coverage through the Medicaid program.
Excluding Planned Parenthood
The case started with a predicament for South Carolina resident Julie Edwards, who is enrolled in Medicaid. After Edwards struggled to get contraceptive services, she was able to receive care from a Planned Parenthood South Atlantic clinic in Columbia, South Carolina.
Planned Parenthood, an array of nonprofits with roots that date back more than a century, is among the nation’s top providers of reproductive services. It operates two clinics in South Carolina, where patients can get physical exams, cancer screenings, contraception and other services. It also provides same-day appointments and keeps long hours.
In July 2018, however, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster issued an executive order that barred Medicaid reimbursement for health care providers in the state that offer abortion care.
That meant Planned Parenthood, a longtime target of conservatives’ ire, would no longer be reimbursed for any type of care for Medicaid patients, preventing Edwards from transferring all her gynecological care to that office as she had hoped to do.
Planned Parenthood and Edwards sued South Carolina. They argued that the state was violating the federal Medicare and Medicaid Act, which Congress passed in 1965, by not letting Edwards obtain care from the provider of her choice.
A ‘free-choice-of-provider’ requirement
Medicaid, which mainly covers low-income people, their children and people with disabilities, operates as a partnership between the federal government and the states. Congress passed the law that led to its creation based on its power under the Constitution’s spending clause, which allows Congress to subject federal funds to certain requirements.
Two years later, due to concerns that states were restricting which providers Medicaid recipients could choose, Congress added a “free-choice-of-provider” requirement to the program. It states that people enrolled in Medicaid “may obtain such assistance from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required.”
While the Medicaid statute does not, by itself, allow people enrolled in that program to enforce this free-choice clause, the question at the core of this case was whether another federal statute, known as Section 1983, did give them a right to sue.
The Supreme Court has long recognized that Section 1983 protects an individual’s ability to sue when their rights under a federal statute have been violated. In fact, in 2023, it found such a right under the Medicaid Nursing Home Reform Act. The court held that Section 1983 confers the right to sue when a statute’s provisions “unambiguously confer individual federal rights.”
In Medina, however, the court found that there was no right to sue. Instead, the court emphasized that “the typical remedy” is for the federal government to cut off Medicaid funds to a state if a state is not complying with the Medicaid statute.
The ruling overturned lower-court decisions in favor of Edwards. It also expressly rejected the Supreme Court’s earlier rulings, which the majority criticized as taking a more “expansive view of its power to imply private causes of action to enforce federal laws.”
Restricting Medicaid funds
This dispute is just one chapter in the long fight over access to abortion in the U.S. In addition to the question of whether it should be legal, proponents and opponents of abortion rights have battled over whether the government should pay for it – even if that funding happens indirectly.
Through a federal law known as the Hyde Amendment, Medicaid cannot reimburse health care providers for the cost of abortions, with a few exceptions: when a patient’s life is at risk, or her pregnancy is due to rape or incest. Some states do cover abortion when their laws allow it, without using any federal funds.
As a result, Planned Parenthood rarely gets any federal Medicaid funds for abortions.
McMaster explained that he removed “abortion clinics,” including Planned Parenthood, from the South Carolina Medicaid program because he didn’t want state funds to indirectly subsidize abortions.
After the Supreme Court ruled on this case, McMaster said he had taken “a stand to protect the sanctity of life and defend South Carolina’s authority and values – and today, we are finally victorious.”
But only about 4% of Planned Parenthood’s services nationwide were related to abortion, as of 2022. Its most common service is testing for sexually transmitted diseases. Across the nation, Planned Parenthood provides health care to more than 2 million patients per year, most of whom have low incomes.
Consequences beyond South Carolina
This ruling’s consequences are not limited to Medicaid access in South Carolina.
It may make it harder for individuals to use Section 1983 to bring claims under any federal statute. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, wrote in her dissent, the court “continues the project of stymying one of the country’s great civil rights laws.”
Enacted in 1871, the civil rights law has been invoked to challenge violations of rights by state officials against individuals. Jackson wrote that the court now limits the ability to use Section 1983 to vindicate personal rights only if the statutes use the correct “magic words.”
The dissent also criticized the majority decision as likely “to result in tangible harm to real people.” Not only will it potentially deprive “Medicaid recipients in South Carolina of their only meaningful way of enforcing a right that Congress has expressly granted to them,” Jackson wrote, but it could also “strip those South Carolinians – and countless other Medicaid recipients around the country – of a deeply personal freedom: the ‘ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable.’”
The decision could also have far-reaching consequences. Arkansas, Missouri and Texas have already barred Planned Parenthood from getting reimbursed by Medicaid for any kind of health care. More states could follow suit.
In addition, given Planned Parenthood’s role in providing contraceptive care, disqualifying it from Medicaid could restrict access to health care and increase the already-high unintended pregnancy rate in America.
States could also try to exclude providers based on other characteristics, such as whether their employees belong to unions or if they provide their patients with gender-affirming care, further restricting patients’ choices.
With this ruling, the court is allowing a patchwork of state exclusions of Planned Parenthood and other medical providers from the Medicaid program that could soon resemble the patchwork already seen with abortion access.
Portions of this article first appeared in another article published on April 2, 2025. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
House GOP Wants To Gut Legislative Agency That Advocates For Their Own Constitutional Authority
A pattern has emerged during Trump II that we have noted repeatedly in recent months, and it continues to reveal itself in new ways. Observing the executive branch’s goal of running roughshod over the separation of powers, Trump’s allies in Congress have gone out of their way to help with that mission — and, in doing so, have ceded their own authority to the executive.
Continue reading “House GOP Wants To Gut Legislative Agency That Advocates For Their Own Constitutional Authority”On the Trail of the HUD/NSF Switcheroo and the Mystery of the Top Floor Sky Mansion
I wanted to update you on the story I flagged yesterday in which the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Scott Turner, decided to bogart the offices of the Trump-beleaguered National Science Foundation (NSF) at least in part to build a Sky Mansion for himself on the building’s top floors. Stories like this have always had a special fascination for me. You can’t say it’s a bigger story than the US going to war with Iran or the US military low-fi occupying a major American city. But in addition to its immediate impact on three or four thousand people — the employees of HUD and NSF — it captures so much of what 2025 Trump-era Washington is about. As probably goes without saying, there appears to have been no formal process behind this at all. There’s a very Sopranos feel to the whole caper: ‘Nice place you got here. It’s mine now.’
Continue reading “On the Trail of the HUD/NSF Switcheroo and the Mystery of the Top Floor Sky Mansion”ICERaid: The App That Asks You To Report Illegal Immigrants For Crypto
A new app dares to pose a question that nobody has thought to ask: what happens when you combine right-wing fervor over hunting down undocumented immigrants, cryptocurrency speculation, and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio?
Continue reading “ICERaid: The App That Asks You To Report Illegal Immigrants For Crypto”The Trump Administration’s Assault on Federal Courts Gets More Shockingly Authoritarian
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Trump’s DOJ Just Sued Every Federal Judge in Maryland
It is really starting to look like Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is carrying out a completely unprecedented and coordinated vendetta to undermine the authority of federal district courts. In its latest move, the Department of Justice has sued every sitting judge in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland. Government attorneys are seeking to invalidate the court’s standing order ensuring an automatic two-day reprieve for immigrant detainees, an effort to preserve their due process rights from Trump’s rapid-fire deportation machine.
This extraordinary escalation is part of a growing pattern of overt defiance directed from the highest levels of the DOJ. At the confirmation hearing yesterday for top DOJ official Emil Bove to become an appellate judge, Republican senators appeared unbothered by the whistleblower account of Bove encouraging DOJ attorneys to say “fuck you” to district court judges. If confirmed, Bove will have a lifetime appointment to review and rule on the orders of the very district court judges for whom he has exhibited this disdain.
Thanks to the Supreme Court, too, the Trump administration is very much having its way with court orders. Stanford University political scientist Adam Bonica compiled data on the administration’s win/loss record in federal courts from May 1 through June 23. He found that in cases brought against its sprawling excesses the Trump administration has lost 94% of the time at the district court level. That’s a truly terrible litigation record. But at the Supreme Court, Bonica found, DOJ won 94% of the time.
“We are witnessing something without precedent,” Bonica wrote. “[A] Supreme Court that appears to be at war with the federal judiciary’s core constitutional function.”
Administration officials are well aware of how their Supreme Court allies have their back in this campaign to delegitimize the trial courts. “All these district courts throughout the country are tying our hands,” complained Attorney General Pam Bondi, under questioning from Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing yesterday. “And here’s how we will follow them—when we get to SCOTUS, we’re winning.”
The Looming Vaccine Crisis RFK Jr. Is Creating
Yesterday, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s panel of anti-vaccine cranks held its first meeting, at which it announced it would be reevaluating the existing schedule of childhood vaccinations. The ultimate decision of Kennedy’s handpicked Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) could upend the entire process by which infants, toddlers, and children receive vaccinations, including school requirements, insurance coverage, and federal programs for free shots administered to about half of America’s children.
That means, if you’re a parent who would rather your child not be sickened by eradicated, preventable, and potentially fatal diseases, you need to keep your eye on ACIP’s next moves. “Kennedy’s decision to replace ACIP wholesale and the comments he has made about deviating from standard vaccine policy making practice suggest that new recommendations won’t be backed by established vaccine science,” warns Scientific American.
The magazine has compiled a chart of ACIP’s recommended childhood vaccine schedules that were in place as of the end of 2024, prior to Kennedy’s ACIP purge. The normal, scientific ACIP recommended a very specific schedule for vaccinating infants and toddlers against diseases including measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, COVID, influenza, chickenpox, and RSV. It might be worth keeping that chart handy, to compare it to what Kennedy’s lackeys ultimately recommend.
Mike Johnson, Phone Home
Republicans in Louisiana are panicking about Medicaid cuts in the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s home state “is poorer, sicker and hungrier than most states, and the deep cuts to Medicaid have a growing number of Republicans in Louisiana worried that Congress and the White House are going too far,” Politico reports.
Thirty-five percent of Louisianans rely on Medicaid for health coverage, which is why the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a unanimous resolution pleading with Congress for no cuts to the program. One Republican state representative, Jack McFarland, assessed the bill’s projected impact on rural hospitals this way: “I live an hour from the closest hospital, and I’m in a rural community. You close my rural hospital? People are going to die because they will not make it.”
Some Grant Money Flowing From NIH Following Judge’s Order Against Racist Terminations
The National Institutes of Health appears to have begun restoring some grant funding following Judge William Young’s scathing order excoriating the Trump administration for its discriminatory cancellations of $12 billion in research grants the Trump administration arbitrarily deemed to be part of “DEI” or “gender ideology.” Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee, said while ruling in the case, “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.” He later denied the government’s request to stay his ruling pending appeal, saying that his order merely requires the agency to spend money appropriated by Congress, “rather than sequestering funds (probably forever) during the course of the appeal.” Still, some grant recipients are still uncertain whether theirs is funding that will be unblocked.
Russell Vought Takes Aim at the Impoundment Control Act
Led by Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, the administration “appears to be readying to push the boundaries of the law meant to prevent the president from unilaterally overturning spending decisions made by Congress,” the Washington Post reports.
Thank You for Your Service, Trump-Style
As if the Trump administration’s heartless treatment of career federal employees was not bad enough, subjecting them to abuse by Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), arbitrary layoffs, mass confusion, re-hirings and re-firings, there’s yet another indignity the administration is inflicting on former feds. NBC News reports that several employees fired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) received demand letters for payments of their health insurance premiums—even though their coverage had lapsed following their dismissal.
McIver Pleads Not Guilty
Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) pled not guilty yesterday to federal charges alleging that she interfered with immigration agents’ arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka for trespassing at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. (The charges against Baraka were later dropped.) McIver pledged that the administration’s “intimidation and bullying” of elected officials would not deter her from carrying out her oversight responsibilities.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has launched an investigation into a “politically-motivated abuse of prosecutorial power” by the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, Alina Habba, previously a personal lawyer to Trump. The McIver prosecution is part of what Raskin called “a concerted strategy to deter congressional oversight and relentlessly pursue Donald Trump’s extreme immigration policy with complete disregard for the rule of law and the lawmaking branch of the government.”
Trump Profits from … Bible Sales
In White House financial disclosures, Trump has reported receiving $1.3 million in royalties for his endorsement of the “God Bless America” Bible last year. Just in case you were concerned that it’s very tacky and possibly blasphemous to profit from appropriating a sacred text in this way, the amount is just a tiny fraction of the $600 million Trump made in 2024. That total came from his golf courses, crypto ventures, Trump-branded items like sneakers, watches, and guitars, as well as a coffee table book about the failed attempt on his life.
Gird Yourself for the Ugliest Islamophobia
With the prospect of Zohran Mamdani becoming mayor of New York City, right-wing influencers promptly began flooding the zone with anti-Muslim hate. Numerous MAGA figures, including Donald Trump, Jr., Rep. Nancy Mace (R-NC), Laura Loomer, and Charlie Kirk insinuated that if elected, Mamdani would bring about another 9/11.
Important Read
Laura Rozen reports Trump is using the belief that his bombing strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities, disputed by the government’s own intelligence, as a loyalty test. Remind you of anything?
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
Musk’s DOGE Cuts to the Federal Workforce Are Already Upending the D.C. Area Housing Market
Melissa Harris had her future meticulously planned. But after more than 37 years in public service, those plans fell apart when President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) ravaged her workplace at the National Institute of Health (NIH).
So Harris took an early retirement at the end of April, packed up her Gaithersburg, Md. home, and relocated to North Carolina.
“Right now, I can’t imagine anybody wanting to go to D.C. and live there,” she said.
Harris, 60, had planned to retire in two years so she could receive the maximum payout after about four decades of service. Instead, she expects she’ll be receiving less than what she would have, “even with the bonus that they offered,” she said. The day she came into the office to enjoy her early retirement celebration was the day mass firings hit NIH. Obviously, the party was cancelled. But DOGE’s blow to Harris was more than just symbolic. The unexpectedly rushed retirement pushed her to leave the area sooner than planned and buy a home in North Carolina before she had the chance to sell her Maryland property.
“[I] am paying for two homes until I get my other one fixed up to sell,” Harris said.
Two months later, Harris says she hasn’t been paid and isn’t sure when exactly she’ll receive her first check. “Nobody’s gotten in touch with me,” Harris said. “It’s kind of scary.”
The radio silence, she said, has forced Harris and her partner to cut costs amid the financial uncertainty.
“We just got a new house,” she said, “and we’re just going to pretend to be house poor for a while before we find out what’s going on.”
Stories such as Harris’ may turn out to be part of a trend that real estate experts are watching for closely: Public servants fired or otherwise impacted by DOGE cuts leaving the Beltway. In the DMV region, encompassing D.C., parts of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, more than 500,000 people work directly for the federal government, according to data from the 2023 American Community Survey and 2025 Current Employment Statistics compiled by the Economic Policy Institute this year. These numbers don’t account for the vast network of external government contractors reliant on federal dollars. Massive job and contract cuts stand to alter the socioeconomic geography of the Beltway in a way the New York Times compared to the devastating impact of the collapse of manufacturing on the Midwest.
The complete picture of the number of workers who have lost their jobs as a result of the Trump administration’s “reduction-in-force” initiative is difficult to paint. About 75,000 workers took a buyout offer, Reuters reported in February, while more took the early retirement program Harris trusted most. In total, Reuters estimates that 260,000 federal workers were fired, accepted buyouts, or took early retirements.
They’re now struggling to find work, said Karen F. Lee of FedsForward. Her organization, launched after DOGE cuts started, helps federal workers transition to the private sector. “There are absolutely hardships,” she said, including people trying to afford camp for their kids this summer. “We’re at a place where, I think, there is absolutely worry.”
Newly jobless workers are afraid about making rent or not having healthcare. Some have dropped out of the labor force all together.
Paying for a home is another area being upended by the federal government shakeup.
A Bright MLS report released Tuesday surveyed DMV-area realtors in May and found nearly 40% of them said they’d had real estate transactions affected by federal government job cuts.
Specifically, the real estate agents in the D.C. metro area “said they have worked with a client whose decision to buy or sell was due to federal workforce layoffs and cuts,” according to the Bright MLS survey. Titled “Tracking the impact of DOGE on the housing market,” the report found, among other things, that retirees in the region like Harris were more likely to be home sellers, “suggesting that federal workforce cuts and uncertainty had a bigger impact on older workers in the D.C. metro area this spring.”
Sam Medvene is the president of the D.C. Association of Realtors and has seen the consequences of federal job loss in real time. Medvene said realtors in his association have worked with buyers who had to abruptly rescind contracts when their probationary government job offers were revoked.
“We had a lot of under-contract individuals lose jobs,” Medvene said.
The shakeups are also impacting sellers who wanted to sell their homes, came under contract, and then had those offers pulled because of the fallout from federal job loss.
“The combination of both the economic uncertainty and changes federally that are happening, as well as locally, has led to this retraction,” of buyer interest and an increase in inventory, said Medvene. For now, though, he said the situation is more wait-and-see than a dire retrenchment in the housing market.
May saw active listings in the D.C. metro area hit their highest level in four years, said Redfin senior economist Asad Khan. The region ranks in the top 10 among the 50 largest metro areas by active listings, Khan said.
There are signs that the area housing market is holding strong, but it’s on wobbly footing.
According to Bright MLS, younger families hit by DOGE layoffs and cuts may also be looking to leave the region, but may start the process later this year because of school and childcare.
That’s what DMV area realtor Richard Pearrell predicts. Pearrell maintains an online database tracking housing and condo inventory and average sales prices. On one hand, Pearrell sees panicked reports about federal layoffs as “hype,” and emphasized that the region still hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels of housing inventory. On the other hand, he acknowledged the toll economic uncertainty has taken especially on buyers.
“It’s just more of, ‘let’s sit back and wait until all of this irons itself out,’” Pearrell said. “‘Am I going to have a job or not? Or, is the spouse going to have a job or not?’ Those are the conversations I’m having.”
Noting that workers who took buyouts have months of runway before the rubber meets the road, Pearrell expects to see an uptick in people trying to sell their homes beginning as early as August.
“That’s when people are going to have to make the decision,” he said. “‘Well if I don’t have a job because I have taken the severance, what am I going to do?’”
And the D.C. metro area isn’t the only one that’ll be hit by the government’s job-slashing effort. Pearrell has seen the amount of homes for sale in Texas and Florida increasing “astronomically,” while fewer are being sold, creating a spike in housing inventory.
Mortgage broker and President-elect of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers, Kimber White, is based in Ft. Lauderdale and points to Florida as a hub for remote government workers who settled in the area during the COVID pandemic, and are being forced to return to Washington to comply with return-to-work mandates. He notes there’s been a slight uptick in mortgage delinquencies in the first part of 2025, but not enough to point to a crisis.
“Right now, no,” White said. “Do I think we’re going to see some [increases in delinquencies]? Yeah. We’re going to see an uptick,” he said.
For her part, Harris considers herself lucky. Though her lifelong service was cut short and retirement plans nearly thwarted, she was able to skip town and is settling down elsewhere. But what she faced at NIH still stings.
“Seeing the president and [Musk] on television, that affected us a lot,” Harris said. “Because seeing that, it’s almost like a personal attack… ‘You’re the problem.’ That’s what they’re saying.”
Mutiny?
Politico says there’s the beginning of a Big Beautiful Bill mutiny. I’ll still place my chits on they’ll find a way to make it work. But the key states where Senators are up for reelection face crushing cuts to the funds that keep rural hospitals going. Enough? Probably not. But definitely real enough to keep an eye on.