There are probationary employees who are new in government service and those who are labeled as probationary because of a job switch but who have continuous government service prior to their current job. If you are in that latter category, and if you are fired as a probationary employee in these category terminations taking place now, there is a good chance your termination was illegal. And it is illegal in a way that courts will vindicate. Obviously there are details and nuances about how this works. But if this applies to you you should at least speak with an attorney who knows this area of law. There’s a good chance you have a case and can receive compensation and/or reinstatement.

Needless to say I am not a lawyer and I am certainly not your lawyer. But I say the above after conferring with someone who has relevant expertise and experience in this area of law.

This afternoon termination notices are going out to more than 300 employees at the National Cancer Institute. Locked out of access by the end of the day, four weeks paid leave, and that’s that.

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.

Events in the Trump DOJ-Eric Adams story have moved very quickly this afternoon. Thank you so much to the source who flagged to me the quite public but unremarked on information that allowed me to be one of the few public voices noting SDNY appeared to be defying the Trump DOJ’s demand to drop the charges against Mayor Adams. I will return later to the stunning revelation contained in Danielle Sassoon’s letter to AG Pam Bondi in which she reveals that she witnessed Emil Bove negotiating an explicit quid-pro-quo in which Adams agreed to provide political and policy assistance to Donald Trump in exchange for dropping the criminal charges against him. In that same meeting Bove reprimanded a member of Sassoon’s team who was memorializing the meeting in written notes and had those notes confiscated. That’s consciousness of guilt if I ever saw it. But for now I want to discuss the tenure of Adams as mayor of New York and whether Gov. Kathy Hochul should remove him from office, something the state constitution gives her the power to do.

More clown show breaking this afternoon out of TTS, the in-show tech consultancy housed within GSA. I told you last night that the new leadership had started firing people yesterday starting with a few dozen probationers — people in their first year on the job who are easier to fire under Civil Service law. But apparently the new bosses are still learning how to do things, most specifically, how to fire people. Yesterday the fired staffers found out about their terminations when they were summoned to hastily arranged meetings in which they were verbally told they were fired. But then people started to notice that the formal letters of termination they were told to expect weren’t showing up in their inboxes. And they couldn’t easily ask their supervisors what was up since their supervisors hadn’t been looped in on the fact that members of their teams had been fired in the first place.

So what happened?

It seems that the new bosses got down to firing people before they learned how you fire people. Finally Thomas Shedd, the Musk associate who was appointed as the new head of TTS, sent a message this afternoon to the whole team that it turns out … well, they’re not quite fired yet. “We don’t yet have the go-ahead from HR,” a presumably somewhat sad-sack Shedd Slacked colleagues a bit after 2 this afternoon.