(Ed. Note: I go into a lot of detail below. The bottom line is Democrats have about 48 hours to convince D senators to clip Elon’s wings. It’s still totally doable. But it has to happen in the next 48 hours.)

We’re now down to the wire with the so-called “continuing resolution” fight. And just to take this out of Congress-speak, this is a temporary spending bill that will keep the government running, such as it is, until Republicans can pass their full budget in the early fall — that’s the one that will slash health care coverage and other safety net spending to give the Elon crowd a massive tax cut. After almost two months of a criminal wilding spree on the republic, interspersed with lots of “cry more!”s and “sucks to be you”s, Republicans now come to Democrats and say: hey, now we need your help to keep going. The bill is essentially a license for Elon to keep the party going right through the fall.

The bill is being billed as a “clean CR” — in other words, just a continuation of the Biden budget. That’s not true. It’s the Biden-era stuff plus new money for a bunch of Trump priorities. What it doesn’t do is lock in the Musk-illegal cuts. What that also means is that it appropriates a bunch of money for stuff Elon has already shut down. So where’s that money go exactly?

One of Elon Musk’s Starship rockets exploded over the Gulf of Mexico early yesterday evening, creating a spectacular fireworks-like display and disrupting commercial air traffic from Florida up through the eastern seaboard. Flight radar maps showed numerous commercial airliners in the eastern Caribbean scrambling to leave the debris zone. Starship is SpaceX’s new mega-rocket intended for missions to the moon and possibly Mars. I want to flag a couple details.

Musk had a running feud with former FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker and is generally believed to have helped force Whitaker into retirement when Donald Trump was sworn in in January, though the precise details are murky. Musk had claimed repeatedly that he was over-regulated by the FAA, especially after the agency fined SpaceX $633,000 for launching rockets with unapproved changes. He repeatedly called for Whitaker’s resignation and accused the FAA of “harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety while giving a free pass to Boeing even after NASA concluded that their spacecraft was not safe enough to bring back the astronauts.” The FAA also had to fine Starlink for skirting safety regulations.

This article from the Post is just one jaw-dropper after another. Musk met yesterday with Republican senators and then the House GOP caucus. Notionally it’s about communication. The folks on the Hill are getting a bit unhappy there’s a “lack of communication” about DOGE plans to shut down departments and unilaterally rewrite the federal budget. The Republicans want more details about what Musk’s doing, which — setting aside the infinite absurdities of this moment — would seem reasonable enough. They’re Congress after all. They’re literally in charge of this stuff. Read this graf …

Musk told a group of Republican senators in a closed-door lunch that he wanted to set up a direct line for them when they have questions, allowing them to get a near-instant response to their concerns, senators said. Some senators were given Musk’s phone number during Wednesday’s meeting, and the entrepreneur said he would “create a system where members of Congress can call some central group” to get problematic cuts reversed quickly, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) said.

There’s a budget, appropriated money that defines what the government does and provides the money to do it. But Musk, absent any visibility even for much of the executive branch, is simply changing everything. But wait … he’s going to set up a system where Republican members of Congress can call and ask to “get problematic cuts reversed quick.”

What the fuck?

Democrats need to be on the ground in states like Iowa, supporting local Democrats who can start building the case now against Sen. Joni Ernst (R) and other pro-Trump politicians, whoever ends up winning the right to challenge her as the Democratic nominee. I’m not saying Ernst will lose. It will be a very difficult race. Iowa has rapidly gone from a textbook swing state to a reliably red one in presidential elections. But people forget how rapidly things can change in a political climate in which visible, core political decisions by elected officials have tangible and deep impacts on ordinary people’s lives. People forget what happened between 2004 and 2006. They forget what happened between 2008 and 2010, though I think the first is the more relevant analog. There’s 2018 too. But I think we’ll find 2018 isn’t that true an analog.

For almost a year I’ve been thinking through an idea that now seems especially timely and relevant in the last six weeks. I think of it as a form of civic sede vacantism. The reference is, ironically, to a strain of hyper-traditionalist Catholic thought which held (still holds) that none of Vatican II canons or the successive Popes counted because they were heretical and heretics. A bit more complicated than that. But details of that really aren’t relevant for us. I just found the defining metaphor or concept helpful. The key is their idea that the papal throne was empty. That’s the meaning of the Latin phrase, sede vacante. My interest and concern with this grew out of my belief that civic democrats in the US have far too great an essentialism about the law and constitutional jurisprudence, especially under the corrupted federal judiciary as it now exists. It breeds a kind of fatalism and passivity which casts a pall over thought and political action.

I know I’ve thrown around a lot of big and perhaps obscure ideas. So let me get down to concrete specifics. In Trump v. United States last year the Supreme Court claimed that Presidents have wide immunity from criminal law after they leave the presidency. For many people this was an ‘everything changed’ moment. It did in effect end Trump’s prosecution. But now that’s the law, as so many people I know put it. Only it’s not. This isn’t a decision I disagree with. It’s simply wrong. I’m not going to rehearse all the arguments. To me, among all the other areas of flawed and disingenuous reasoning, we have the simple fact that the authors of the constitution knew precisely how to confer immunity on public officials. They did it with Congress. But again, I’m not trying to rehearse the specific arguments. Others have already made them on the particulars better than I can. I’m saying that we must disengage from the idea that this is what the law is. It’s not. These are fraudulent decisions.

The Atlanta Fed has again lowered its projection for first quarter 2025 GDP. It had been predicting growth of 2.3%. At the end of last week that was revised to 1.5% contraction and this morning they were again down-revised 2.8% contraction, or in other words 2.8% negative growth. To be clear these aren’t final or official stats. We’re only two-thirds of the way through the quarter. They are a prediction based on current indicators. But if it’s not clear that would mean a steep move into recession. And the numbers which presage that outcome are largely tied to general economic uncertainty and various collective economic decisions based on the expectations of a dramatic ramp up in U.S. tariffs and tariff retaliation.

There’s such a sea of chaotic information we’re all drifting through in these days that it is terribly difficult to find out precisely what is going on, to find the patterns that can bring the larger story into focus. I want to point to one of those patterns I noticed or which was brought to my attention last night. I think I’m the first to highlight this, though I may be wrong about that. Not trying to claim an exclusive; I want to point to the significance of the detail.

Let’s start with my story from last night about the abrupt and reckless cancelation of upwards of a thousand VA contracts totaling roughly $2 billion and covering a huge variety of work VA does, everything from funeral care to doctor recruitment. As I reported last night, VA contract officers were sent an Excel spreadsheet of almost a thousand contracts in the early morning of February 21st, told that all of these contracts should be canceled and that if anyone wanted to make a case to spare individual contracts they had until the end of business that day (February 21st) to make their case. My sources noted that the contract code on all of these contracts was NAICS – 541611, which is “Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services.” It’s very clear the DOGE people pulled up everything under that label and slated it to be cut. My sources’ impressions are that the DOGErs making these decisions read that label as basically, McKinsey/MBA consulting type bullshit, easy stuff to cut. At VA, most of it wasn’t that at all. But they didn’t seem to make any attempt to look under the hood at what those contracts were.

We mentioned on Monday that the Office of Special Counsel had found that six federal civil servants from six separate agencies had been unlawfully terminated from their positions. Now the Merit Systems Protection Board has granted the request to halt those terminations. Needless to say, this all sounds very technical and bureaucratic, and it’s not at all clear just what it means. I’m kind of there too. I think the best way to put it is that there are agencies within the federal government charged with deciding what kinds of dismissals are and are not okay. The OSC is a sort of finder of fact. It decided these terminations were unlawful. Then it brings it to this board and ask them to reinstate these people. That’s what just happened.

Winston Churchill once said, “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” One might also say there’s nothing so fun as being right about a big story totally by accident. Or rather, in this case, I actually knew about what I’m about to describe to you but forgot. Early February was at least a hundred years ago and I’ve been working on a million different stories since then — and, so, I’d totally forgotten about these details. But seriously, people, let’s not make it about me.

Here’s the story.

As you know, Elon Musk went on Twitter on Saturday and said federal workers had to list their accomplishments for him or else. The email was sent out over something called The Government-Wide Email System (GWES), a DOGE creation from the first days after the takeover of the Office of Personnel Management. (This will be a key point.) The email itself didn’t include Elon’s threat of termination (or, technically, a constructive resignation). But the message was heard loud and clear. Then pretty much the entire federal government spent 72 hours trying to figure out whether compliance was or wasn’t required. On Sunday morning, I flagged this Privacy Impact Statement (PIA) which OPM prepared for the GWES system back on February 5th. That document was flagged to me by a government tech. And as I noted, it states very clearly that compliance with any requests you receive via GWES is totally voluntary. You can respond to these emails or not. You can share information or not. It’s totally up to you. It’s very clear.

But I didn’t really have any clear idea of why this document existed or why it made such strong representations about the voluntariness of anything tied to GWES. (As is often the case, Marcy Wheeler had already put it a lot of this together even though I hadn’t.)

Well, here’s the story.

There was a very important development today, still only little-noted in the national press. Government Executive magazine has a good piece on it. The news turns on a decision by the Office of Special Counsel, the head of which, Hampton Dellinger, Trump had only recently tried to fire before being blocked from doing so by a federal judge. The decision specifically deals with six federal employees, each from a different agency, who were recently fired as probationary employees as part of the DOGE purge. Technically, the decision only applies to those six employees. But in a way that is analogous, though not identical, to the way a court ruling works, the findings would likely apply to many other recent DOGE-terminated employees across the federal government.