I’ve been gratified at just how much response and interest I’ve got to my proposal for a DOJ-in-Exile project. I’ve heard from so many people either wanting to volunteer their time or work for such a project or help get it off the ground that I haven’t even been able to respond to everyone yet. But I’m very encouraged by the interest. As I said yesterday, this isn’t something I am envisioning running. I don’t have the expertise and I’m already doing something. I’m trying to bring together interested people and potentially funders and thus hopefully play some role in bringing it into existence.

To help bring the idea into more focus, I thought I’d try to flesh out the concept.

I just learned that the Department of Justice has shelved its plan to essentially shutter the Department’s Tax Division. The plan had been to disperse the Division’s lawyers to U.S. Attorney’s Offices around the country and maintain a very small residual oversight office at Main Justice. This would satisfy, at least in the view of DOJ’s current political leadership, statutory requirements. But it would trigger big departures of lawyers unwilling to relocate around the country and dilute and dissipate institutional knowledge and organizational focus.

In my late 2024 post-election brainstorming, another idea of mine was to create a structure for pressing Republican Reps who threatened to cancel the green energy investments in their districts under the Inflation Reduction Act. It was a matter of some consternation for Democrats at the time, but those investments were overwhelmingly in Republican districts — like something like 75% of them. There were a few explanations of that at the time, one of which was that it was focused on those areas that were in whatever way “passed over” in the city-centric prosperity of the early 21st century. But we’re seeing another one of the benefits now and it’s precisely that dynamic I was keen mobilize: it makes these investments much harder to claw back by a future Republican administration.

NYT reports a second Hegseth Signal chat in which the secretary of defense shared Houthi attack plans. This one included his wife and brother.

Since January 20th, and actually back into November, I’ve had a series of projects I’ve desperately wanted to see done. My first was a simple but clean and easily shareable site to track core economic statistics from the end of the Biden administration through Trump’s presidency. Simple, objective, core economic data — here’s where Biden left off, here’s where Trump is. At the time I envisioned a different start to the administration. I figured it would be like 2017 where Trump took the quite good economy he inherited, mostly left it alone, maybe juiced it with tax cuts and rebranded it as his own. I was pretty confident this was a good bet since most of the Biden numbers were about as good as they could be. For employment, inflation, growth they would be pretty hard to top. So there wasn’t much chance Trump would end up looking much better than Biden. You simply can’t get unemployment much lower than 3%. I saw it as a way of deflating what I figured would be the standard Trumpian rebrand, where he talked constantly of the catastrophic Biden economy and his own era of prosperity with data that was actually marginally worse.