As DOGE continues it’s federal government wilding spree, purportedly searching for examples of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, we seem to have had another case of keyword search gone awry. One of the leases DOGE decided to cancel is the lease for Skeen-Whitlock Building in Carlsbad, New Mexico, a 90,000 square foot facility which manages the nation’s only storage area for DOD-created nuclear waste and the only operating deep geologic nuclear waste storage facility in the world.

Alas, due to scheduling conflicts, The Josh Marshall Podcast will be out tomorrow, Thursday, March 6, instead of our usual Wednesday drop.

In the meantime, the team is hitting the road, and we want to hear from you! Want us to visit your neck of the woods? Vote now.

It’s not the people who directly compile the economic statistics at the Commerce Department precisely. It’s an expert panel which advises those people on how to do it correctly. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick fired them at the end of last month.

In case you didn’t hear the GSA today announced it’s going to sell off many if not all of the central buildings making up the headquarters of the American republic. Those buildings include FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, the buildings which are the headquarters of the DOJ, HHS, DOL and more – more than 400 buildings across the country. Here’s the listing and here’s a Politico piece which gives an overview.

Late Update: A rather bizarre coda to this story. Or, perhaps not a coda, just an update. Several hours after GSA posted this and after the first round of press they removed all the DC buildings from the list. Given how unexplained and arbitrary the decision-making seems to be it seems entirely possible they’ll be back on the list soon. But at least for now we’re not selling the Department of Justice, at least in the sense of the literal building.

Even Later Update: And now the entire list is gone.

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.