We’re getting clearer indications now that the effort to bamboozle, frighten and entice federal workers into resigning their positions in exchange for non-existent “buy outs” was very much a product of the Elon Musk/DOGE cabal now wilding through and embedding itself within the federal government. We don’t need a lot of confirmation: they left a slew of meme Easter eggs scattered through the process more or less announcing it. What’s notable is that the White House is now going out of its way to tell reporters that it definitely wasn’t them. They were, in that well-worn phrase, out of the loop, etc.

I suspect this is true, as far as it goes. But that understates — straight up ignores, really — the degree to which Donald Trump and his top advisors have, entirely by design and intentionally, spun up a series of independent fiefdoms, with Musk’s being the largest, to move fast and break things and push every boundary in the interest of a number of overlapping but distinct ideological agendas. In other words, they probably did “bypass key Trump officials.” But that’s pretty much the idea when you wind up guys like Elon Musk and Russell Vought with “let’s be legends” gusto and give them the keys.

As you’ve no doubt seen the White House attempt to institute an illegal, unilateral government shutdown in the form of freezing all federal government grants, loans and financial assistance collapsed this afternoon when the Office of Management and Budget rescinded the “memo” on which the attempt was based. It’s a major defeat — technically, a faceplant — for the White House just over a week into the presidency. Trying to recover from the embarrassment, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted on Twitter that the freeze is ongoing on the basis of the earlier executive orders targeting “wokeness” which indefinitely froze funding of things like cancer research and foreign aid. Those comments were apparently part of what got a judge this afternoon to grant a restraining order since the White House has left unclear what it is and is not currently freezing.