A quick note on our annual membership drive. It kicks off tomorrow. We have a very ambitious goal. Normally we really lean into it; I do a lot of posts about it. It’s kind of a thing and it works and it’s great. But precisely the things that I believe make TPM so important right now also have us slammed trying to cover it all. I certainly feel slammed trying to keep up with multiple different streams of reporting while also trying to write pieces which provide some perspective and a broader view of what’s happening. So, just to be totally candid, if you can help us make this drive a success while letting us just keep on the reporting that would be awesome … If you’re not a member, please consider subscribing. If you are a member, please help us spread the word – both about TPM and the fact that we’re in our annual drive. Perhaps I flatter us but I think what we do is more important now than it has ever been, both because of the crisis of the moment and because the larger tides of that crisis have knocked the posts out from under so many of the big bulwarks of American journalism. I want us not only to continue to do what we do but do more of it. And to do that we need to keep focused on our core reporting in the short term and remain robust and up to the challenge of upping our game over time. I hope you can support us during this drive in whatever way make sense, depending on whether you’re currently a member or not. Thank you.

So much is going on that a lot of it, I don’t get a chance to share with you, or discuss with you. One pretty important thing has to do with the privacy of IRS records, your tax returns. DOGE operatives embedded at IRS last week were putting together a plan to allow IRS to share confidential tax records with agencies and civil servants across the government. As near as I can tell, and except for in very specific and limited circumstances, that’s illegal. The IRS lawyers said, wait, that’s illegal. You can’t do that. So that got shut down. But now they’re looking for creative ways to do it anyway. In other words, the illegality appears not to matter. They’re also creating an ‘agreement’ through which the Department of Homeland Security can request that certain businesses be audited. In theory, that’s because ICE suspects they’re employing undocumented immigrants. Again, against the law. But they seem to be on the way to doing it anyway. It’s that next step which is the big thing here and which we are seeing again and again. 1. That’s illegal. 2. Try harder. 3. Okay.

One of the great truisms about economics is that people assume CEOs have a deep understanding of economics when in fact most evidence suggests they don’t. This isn’t just the general and often true fact that people think captains of industry type CEOs are smarter than they really are. It’s more specific: what’s good for an economy isn’t just not identical to what is good for a company. Often they’re precisely opposite. You really don’t need to do anything more than actually read Adam Smith to know this. (You could actually argue it’s one of his central points.) And the point I’m making here is one that is almost a commonplace in policy circles if not on TV stock market news. I note it here because it’s possible, frighteningly possible, that we’re in the midst of a real world illustration of this reality, maybe one of the biggest or even the first.

It hasn’t gotten a lot of attention but Donald Trump’s February 11th “workforce optimization” executive order provides a very clear framework for the end stage goal of all the cutting. After a bunch of specific imperatives listed under Section 3-C of that executive order, it includes the following language: government department and agencies must plan to cut “all components and employees performing functions not mandated by statute or other law who are not typically designated as essential during a lapse in appropriations as provided in the Agency Contingency Plans on the Office of Management and Budget website.”

As you probably know a second version of the Elon/DOGE threat email went out this weekend, actually on Friday evening, and it’s due tonight at 11:59 PM. From what I can tell everyone in the leadership of the different agencies, with like one and a half exceptions, has gotten their ducks in a row and now everyone has to respond. I haven’t done a systematic survey. I’m not even sure that’s possible. But every agency or department I’ve heard about or from is telling their employees they have to reply. So that mix of kinks, bobbled communication and soft insubordination seems all ironed out now.

The only exception I’d heard about before mid-morning was the Commerce Department, which is odd since Secretary Lutnick appears to be as tight with Trump as almost anyone in the administration. A Commerce Department guidance email says that employees should reply with the requested information but send it to their supervisor. They are not required to send it as a reply to OPM/DOGE. Not sure what that’s about.

“My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.” – Ulysses S. Grant, first sentence, Memoirs.

Sen. Marshall went far into western Kansas looking for a rural town where there might be some support for DOGE and Russia. He still got smoked.

Here’s our full townhall list with three new entries from Kansas, Texas and Tennessee.

This deserves more discussion. My brain is a little fried from a long week. But I wanted to let you know that 18F, an in-house government tech consultancy focused on making key public-facing government websites and services more effective and user friendly was finally disbanded last night. It’s housed within TTS (Technology Transformativon Services) which is part of GSA. Just as an example, they’re the team who built the new free IRS tax preparation portal and many other similar things across government.

18F actually didn’t cost the government any money because it was funded by projects with individual government agencies. So they do a job for IRS and IRS “pays” them, which just means they take part of their budget and it goes to 18F for doing the work. The email from TTS Director Thomas Shed (an Elon guy installed in the position) said that the unit was being disbanded under the directive to cut all “non-essential consulting functions” within government. He additionally added that the abolition was “with explicit direction from the top levels of leadership within both the administration and the GSA,” which I take to mean, ‘Trump and Elon wanted all you guys fired.’