I wrote a series of posts over the weekend about how to make sense, politically, strategically and even emotionally of the unfolding crisis of governance in DC. Here’s a piece about messaging and morale and another on Trump and Musk’s “shock and awe” strategies. After reading those posts, a number of TPM Readers have asked, okay, what are we supposed to do? Or what are our electeds supposed to do? I want to dig into this more later, but in this post I want to give as best a quick answer to that as I can.

We start with a piece in this morning’s Punchbowl which is simultaneously encouraging and gobsmackingly disheartening. The headline reads: Democrats ask: Why would we help Trump and the Republicans?. Most of you are probably thinking, you’re just getting to this question, guys? Well, they are. As they should, though it’s far more tentative than it should be. I suspect that’s about to change.

Let’s repeat the core fact. Republicans are in charge. As I explained here, the levers Democrats have over any of this are very limited. This is fundamentally a battle over public opinion, one in which the opposition needs to be making the case about the disastrousness of Trump’s policies. But there are levers. And they need to use them. Because even those tiny levers are key to that larger battle. Talk in itself is meaningless. Begging especially is meaningless. In fact, on its own it can be demoralizing — same old, same old, just performatively illustrating either the inability or unwillingness to act.

Right now in Washington, DC, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dominating literally everything. That will start changing quickly, at least in a limited way, in the courts. But the overriding need is for Democrats to get a seat at the table. And they can do that in several ways. The biggest way is that Republicans will need help to pass a budget and raise the debt ceiling. The rubber starts meeting the road on that front next month. Real soon. You can talk as much as you want. But the White House and congressional Republicans absolutely need that help. And Democrats need to be crystal clear that the answer is absolutely no help — without meeting their conditions. That’s where you get the seat at the table.

Overnight, Wired reported that, contrary to published reports that DOGE operatives at the Treasury Department are limited to “read only” access to department payment systems, this is not true. A 25-year-old DOGE operative named Marko Elez in fact has admin privileges on these critical systems, which directly control and pay out roughly 95% of payments made by the U.S. government, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and virtually all contract payments. I can independently confirm these details based on conversations going back to the weekend. I can further report that Elez not only has full access to these systems, he has already made extensive changes to the code base for these critical payment system.

As Elon Musk and Donald Trump, in a secondary role, steamroll through the federal government, there’s a taxonomy to the players that is important to understand. It’s semi-hidden at the moment. But you can see it showing up if you look up close and it will likely become more visible over time.

There are three big factions operating in Trump’s government with currently overlapping but very distinct aims and strategies. First, you have MAGA, which wants to punish and displace the people who made life hard for Trump in his first term and replace them with loyalists. That’s mostly about power and personal fealty to Trump. Ideology is mostly secondary to the core aim. Second, you have Christian nationalists who want to seize the power of the state to execute a top down re-traditionalization of American society and culture. Russell Vought is key to this group. The basic theory goes back into the aughts, when a faction of conservatives decided (essentially a counsel of despair) that they had lost control of American culture and that state power was required to get it back. Third are people like Elon Musk who want to radically hollow out the government, outsource its functions and replace many of those functions with novel technologies — AI, cryptocurrency, etc. This is a mix of Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” business culture combined with “dark enlightenment” Yarvinian degenerate thought.

I’ve made this point a few times in passing in other posts. But as events develop I wanted to explain it succinctly and with emphasis. Democrats are out of power and have very few actual levers to impact what’s happening. Yelling is important. Driving opposition in what is ultimately a battle for public opinion is important. Contesting everything through the courts is important. But there is only one hard lever of power currently available: that’s the help the White House needs from Democrats on a budget and the debt ceiling. This morning explainer from Punchbowl makes clear why that help is essential. It’s not just helpful. It’s essential. The GOP majorities are simply too small, especially in the House. The GOP is simply too fractious.

Here’s an interesting little detail behind the headlines. The medical news website StatNews has a whole package of pieces out today about the new NIH policy restricting so-called “indirects” (see this post) to 15%. One of their pieces is about 22 states going to court today to block that new directive. Unsurprisingly, the 22 states are all either blue states or ones that currently have Democratic governors or AGs. Again, no surprise. But as I discussed over the weekend, those grants are very important, for example, not just to the University of Alabama but the State of Alabama generally. The state’s junior senator Katie Britt talked to local media over the weekend saying, albeit in the politest terms to President Trump, that it’s super important to keep these funds flowing and that she looks “forward to working with incoming HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to accomplish this vital mission.”

Yesterday the Bulwark posted a very interesting article which showed that while basically every Republican is bowing down to the High Lord Elon in Washington, they’re singing at least a slightly different tune in letters to constituents in their states and districts. The Bulwark rightly notes that this suggests a nascent discomfort with the headlines Musk’s operation is creating, enough that even some pretty stalwart Republicans are reacting to it. The Bulwark received letters which readers had sent in from twelve different members of Congress and published four of them — from Sen. John R. Curtis of Utah, Rep. Daniel Webster of Florida, Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska, and Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska. The members are certainly not turning on Musk. But it’s not the standard DC “sucks to be you” discourse we’re seeing in Washington. The letters say they’re monitoring the situation closely to make sure there are no conflicts of interest. They’re particularly sensitive to reports of people’s private information being compromised. A number of them say clearly that Musk is only making recommendations and that Congress will have the final say about spending.

I wanted to direct your attention to the news today that House Republicans have introduced a budget outline. This is a big, big deal. It may seem like ordinary budget politics is moving on a separate path from the ongoing constitutional crisis. But they are deeply intertwined. Framing everything is the fact that House Republicans have only the tiniest of margins in the House — 1 to 3 votes, depending on a few different factors. It’s seemed highly doubtful that they can get everything they want to do or need to do in a single bill — Trump tax cuts, the massive spending cuts to pay for those tax cuts and also what the Freedom Caucus demands, a debt-ceiling hike, border spending, more. This is why the House and the Senate have been going back and forth on one massive bill or two bills.

The acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, has submitted her resignation to Attorney General Pam Bondi, an implicit refusal to seek the dismissal of charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, as Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered her to do on Monday. I’ve noted several times over recent days that despite that order, which most people — including me, before this was flagged to me — thought ended the matter, the dismissal hadn’t actually been carried out. A motion to dismiss should have shown up in the trial docket. But it wasn’t. And, as I noted, that suggested they couldn’t find someone in the New York office (SDNY) to carry it out.

Now we have our answer.

In recent days I have been inundated by reports out of HHS and particularly NIH (National Institutes of Health) and NCI (National Cancer Institute). I hope you will keep inundating me. You can find out how to contact me through encrypted channels in the footer of this post. Since it’s time consuming to dig in and confirm each individual thread of the story, which I’m in the process of doing, I want now to give you the broad picture. And the broad picture is bad. It’s nothing less than a very concerted attempt to shut down medical research across the United States.

A few days ago I did this post on the taxonomy of DOGE, who’s actually involved in it, the people who are formally part of it and the ones who are part of Musk’s operation but have not gotten official appointments in the executive branch. In that post I asked why it is that Musk seems to continue to rely on this subset of DOGE personnel — the dozen or so under-25 techies — as the landing parties who go in and actually force their way into these departments. It happens again and again. In that post I noted that Gavin Kliger is the guy at IRS. And in a conversation with a fellow journalist I was just told that another of the original crew is the lead now in the break-in at SSA.