U.S. Government & governance January 2025-

Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Trump and Musk’s dismantling of government is shaking the foundations of US democracy
(AP) — When Elon Musk debuted the Department of Government Efficiency recently at the Capitol, House Speaker Mike Johnson enthusiastically predicted the coming Trump administration would bring “a lot of change around here.”
Three weeks in, the change the Trump administration has brought is a disruption of the federal government on an unprecedented scale, dismantling longstanding programs, sparking widespread public outcry and challenging the very role of Congress to create the nation’s laws and pay its bills. 5 February 2025
Trump could be the most powerful US president since FDR [and] will demand a different approach, say Steven R Okun and Thurgood Marshall Jr.
(CNA Singapore) American presidential power has evolved over time from the delicate balance among the three branches established by the founding fathers to a more powerful executive branch that nevertheless still operates within a system of checks and balances.
Those guardrails against a president usurping power beyond the Constitution continue to exist in the hands of the legislature and the judiciary. However, the power of the modern American president has been enhanced to meet challenges including war. Prime examples include expansions of authority granted or exercised by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and by Franklin D Roosevelt during World War II. …
Trump has access to all the power amassed by his predecessors, and he built on that the first time around by testing those limits. This term, he will blow through existing norms to amass even great power.
Last July, the Supreme Court eliminated a key check on Trump’s power. There, the Court ruled that presidents have “absolute” immunity for acts committed as president within their “core constitutional powers”, at least “presumptive immunity” for “acts within the outer perimeter” of their official responsibility, and no immunity for unofficial acts.
As such, Trump enters the presidency this time knowing he has free reign in his decision-making from basically any criminal liability when he leaves office – arguably including ordering actions with the intent to stay in power after his Constitutionally-limited second term. -17 January 2025
DOGE’s Plans to Replace Humans With AI Are Already Under Way
The civil service is being turned over to machines.
A new phase of the president and the Department of Government Efficiency’s attempts to downsize and remake the civil service is under way. The idea is simple: use generative AI to automate work that was previously done by people. -10 March 2025

15 March
Kash Patel pushes command changes at the F.B.I.
(NYT) Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, is pushing ahead with a plan to decentralize the agency’s command structure and divide the bureau into three regions, according to an internal email obtained by The New York Times. …
The swift decision to alter the hierarchy of the F.B.I. comes just weeks after Mr. Patel was confirmed, raising questions among former and current agents about the thoroughness of the plan. In particular, they said, they worried that the changes could result in less coordination between field offices and create intelligence gaps. Still, even former senior executives skeptical of Mr. Patel’s leadership and relative lack of experience believe the new model, while imperfect, could be an improvement and certainly reduce the deputy director’s immense responsibilities.

Heather Cox Richardson March 13, 2025
Tonight, U.S. District Judge James Bredar ordered the administration to reinstate thousands of probationary workers in the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the General Service Administration, and the Small Business Administration.
Bredar said it was “likely” that “the Government has engaged in an illegal scheme spanning broad swaths of the federal workforce.” … “On the record before the Court,” Bredar said, “There were no individualized assessments of employees. They were all just fired. Collectively.”
Judge orders Trump officials to offer jobs back to fired probationary workers
Judge William Alsup directed the Trump administration to extend the offer to probationary workers fired last month across the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury and Veterans Affairs.
(WaPo) Judge William Alsup said at a hearing in U.S. District Court in San Francisco that OPM — which serves as the federal government’s human resources agency — had no legal authority to direct the mass firings in phone calls and written communications last month.

TRUMP’S ILLEGAL & UNCONSTITUTIONAL SCHEME TO WITHHOLD FUNDING HEADED TO COMMUNITIES ACROSS AMERICA
Peter Frise linked to a lengthy piece by Arlene Dickinson, Founder and General Partner of District Ventures Capital
The key thought: …what should Americans be paying very close attention to? Impoundment. Because if he controls the money, he controls everything.
Turns out, impoundment is just a fancy word for blocking government spending that’s already been approved. And Trump is trying to expand his ability to do just that, giving himself the power to withhold money from anything he simply doesn’t like.
Here’s why this should terrify Americans: Congress controls spending. That’s how democracy works. Taxpayers elect their representatives, and those representatives decide where tax dollars go. But if a president can override that process and decide where to spend (or not spend) money, then the taxpayer has lost all control. Congress and the government become meaningless. And the only person with real power is the one deciding where the money goes. This isn’t just about budget fights. Every president has spending priorities, but that doesn’t mean they get to block spending that Congress has already approved. That’s not governing—that’s ruling.

10 March
DOGE’s Plans to Replace Humans With AI Are Already Under Way
The civil service is being turned over to machines.
By Matteo Wong
(The Atlantic) A new phase of the president and the Department of Government Efficiency’s attempts to downsize and remake the civil service is under way. The idea is simple: use generative AI to automate work that was previously done by people.

USDA cancels $1B in local food purchasing for schools, food banks
USDA ended the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program. States have been notified that they will not receive 2025 funding for schools to buy food from nearby farms.

7 March
Inside the Explosive Meeting Where Trump Officials Clashed With Elon Musk
Simmering anger at the billionaire’s unchecked power spilled out in a remarkable Cabinet Room meeting. The president quickly moved to rein in Mr. Musk.
The meeting was a potential turning point after the frenetic first weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term. It yielded the first significant indication that Mr. Trump was willing to put some limits on Mr. Musk, whose efforts have become the subject of several lawsuits and prompted concerns from Republican lawmakers, some of whom have complained directly to the president.
Just moments before the blowup with Mr. Rubio, Mr. Musk and the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, went back and forth about the state of the Federal Aviation Administration’s equipment for tracking airplanes and what kind of fix was needed. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, jumped in to support Mr. Musk.
Mr. Duffy said the young staff of Mr. Musk’s team was trying to lay off air traffic controllers. What am I supposed to do? Mr. Duffy said. I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?

5 March
Bernie Sanders seethes US has become ‘oligarchic society’ following Trump speech
‘The Trump administration is a government of the billionaire class by the billionaire class,’ Sanders claimed
(Fox news) “The Trump administration is not hiding it,” Sanders said in a streamed response to Trump’s address Tuesday. “The Trump administration is a government of the billionaire class by the billionaire class, and for the billionaire class. Notwithstanding some of their rhetoric, this is a government that could care less about ordinary Americans and the working families of our country. My friends, we are no longer moving toward oligarchy. We are living in an oligarchic society.”
Sanders Calls Out Trump’s “Outrageous Lie” on Social Security in Scathing Speech
Trump is repeating lies about the crucial anti-poverty program to lay the groundwork for cuts, the senator said.
Bernie Sanders Delivers Blistering Response To Trump’s Address To Congress (YouTube)

1 March
Trump’s moves test the limits of presidential power and the resilience of US democracy
(AP) During his first six weeks in office, President Donald Trump has embarked on a dizzying teardown of the federal government and attacks on long-standing institutions in an attempt to increase his own authority.
… Those who monitor democracy across the globe had warned that a second Trump term could endanger America’s 240-year experiment with democracy. His opening weeks in office have done nothing to dispel those concerns.
“Trump is using the classic elected authoritarian playbook,” said Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College, who joined more than 800 other political scientists in signing a letter warning that Trump is undermining the rule of law and the basic constitutional principle of checks and balances. “It’s almost embarrassing how crude it is.”
… The president declared, “we are the federal law” … Trump’s supporters say he actually is trying to preserve American democracy by giving voters what they want — a strong president. How strong Trump can become is in question. Courts have paused several of his executive orders, including ones seeking to eliminate agencies created by Congress and ending birthright citizenship for the children of parents who are in the U.S. illegally. …

19 February
Musk’s DOGE Cuts Risk Triggering a Government Shutdown
(Bloomberg) Musk’s actions could soon pose a problem for Trump and the Republican Party. On March 14, the continuing resolution that funds the government will run out and its work will shut down—unless the Republican Congress and Trump reach an agreement.
As is often the case, Republicans are divided between a group of conservative hard-liners, who insist on slashing spending to balance the federal budget, and a larger group, which includes many lawmakers who serve swing districts, who don’t want to risk the political damage steep cuts to programs like Medicaid would cause to their constituents (and to their own electoral prospects). The GOP’s razor-thin three-seat House majority makes this a particular knotty dilemma for House Speaker Mike Johnson.

15 February
An Unchecked Trump Rapidly Remakes U.S. Government and Foreign Policy
By Luke Broadwater
The president’s swift moves underscore the confidence of an administration with a much firmer grip on the levers of government than during his first term.
At every step in his second term, Mr. Trump is demonstrating how unbound he is from prior restraints, dramatically remaking both domestic and foreign policy at a scale that has little parallel. His swift moves in his first month back in office underscore the confidence of an administration with a much firmer grip on the levers of government than during Mr. Trump’s last stint in the White House.

13 February
US states say Trump illegally appointed Elon Musk to head DOGE
Democratic states allege Musk was illegally appointed in new lawsuit
Other lawsuits argue Musk’s DOGE lacks legal power for Treasury access
Unions seek to block DOGE from accessing sensitive agencies records
(Reuters) – A group of state attorneys general on Thursday sued to halt Elon Musk’s efforts to slash federal spending as head of President Donald Trump’s new government efficiency agency, escalating the legal fight over the billionaire’s influence in the White House.
The lawsuit in Washington, D.C., federal court filed by the attorneys general of New Mexico and 13 other states alleges Trump has given Musk “unchecked legal authority” without authorization from the U.S. Congress.
Trump, Musk and America are headed for a very rude awakening
By Philip Bump
Elon Musk is trying to gut government programs, claiming it’s what the people want. But is it really?
(WaPo) Polling — that is, actual scientific polling — already shows deep skepticism about Musk’s efforts. YouGov, for example, determined that 4 in 10 Americans think Musk should have no influence in the administration. For every two Republicans who think Musk should have a lot of influence over the administration, one thinks he shouldn’t have any influence at all.

Heather Cox Richardson February 12, 2025
Yesterday afternoon, in a bizarre performance, President Donald Trump hosted reporters in the Oval Office, the formal working space of the President of the United States. As Trump sat quietly behind the Resolute Desk,…billionaire Elon Musk held center stage.
The event was Trump signing another executive order, this one essentially putting Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) in charge of the U.S. government. The executive order, titled “Implementing The President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative” provides for an operative from DOGE to be assigned to every agency, where that operative will be in charge of all hiring and firing. It also puts downsizing in DOGE’s hands and establishes that only one new employee can be hired to replace four who leave.
… As both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported today, the big winner from all the cuts to the government has been Musk himself, who has eliminated the agencies that were scrutinizing his businesses.

11 February
Elon Musk’s government takeover is powered by AI
(GZEROmedia)… Musk isn’t just seizing control of the executive branch; he’s using artificial intelligence as his weapon of choice.
At the Education Department, DOGE representatives have reportedly fed sensitive data, including personally identifiable student loan information, into AI software through Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. A group of students from the University of California sued DOGE in federal court on Friday for allegedly violating federal privacy rules and exceeding their statutory authority. Additionally, congressional Democrats have demanded answers about allegations of a private server used at the Office of Personnel Management; federal workers have sued to stop this, while OPM officials deny it violates the law. And a federal judge on Saturday temporarily halted DOGE access to taxpayer information at the Treasury Department because, the judge wrote, it risks disclosure of “sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking.”

9-10 February
Defying court orders? Trump, Musk, Vance appear to lay the groundwork.
Vice President JD Vance has been floating such a possibility for years.
(WaPo) The inevitable clash has begun between President Donald Trump and the courts that would dare to stand in the way of his administration’s many legally dubious actions.
As of Monday morning, at least 10 judges have issued rulings halting what the administration is doing and seeking to do. That’s 10 rulings in the 21 days since Trump was inaugurated — a staggering clip that reflects just how much Trump is disregarding federal statutes and legal precedent.
And as that clash builds, it’s becoming increasingly valid to consider the seemingly unthinkable: Trump and his administration simply defying those court orders and launching the country into a full-blown constitutional crisis.
Trump’s Actions Have Created a Constitutional Crisis, Scholars Say
(NYT) Law professors have long debated what the term means. But now many have concluded that the nation faces a reckoning as President Trump tests the boundaries of executive power.
Vance and Musk question the authority of the courts as Trump’s agenda faces legal pushback

Heather Cox Richardson: February 8, 2025
Organizations, employees and politicians react to cuts affecting their missions, activities,lives
In chaotic Washington blitz, Elon Musk’s ultimate goal becomes clear
Shrink government, control data and — according to one official closely watching the billionaire’s DOGE — replace “the human workforce with machines.”
3-8 February
Judge Halts Access to Treasury Payment Systems by Elon Musk’s Team
Saturday’s order came in response to a lawsuit filed on Friday by Letitia James of New York along with 18 other Democratic state attorneys general, charging that when Mr. Trump had given Mr. Musk the run of government computer systems, he had breached protections enshrined in the Constitution and “failed to faithfully execute the laws enacted by Congress.”
A federal judge early Saturday temporarily restricted access by Elon Musk’s government efficiency program to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems, saying there was a risk of “irreparable harm.”
The Trump administration’s new policy of allowing political appointees and “special government employees” access to these systems, which contain highly sensitive information such as bank details, heightens the risk of leaks and of the systems becoming more vulnerable than before to hacking, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said in an emergency order.
The defendants — President Trump, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the Treasury Department — must appear on Feb. 14 before Judge Jeannette A. Vargas, who is handling the case on a permanent basis, Judge Engelmayer said.
The situation could pose a fundamental test of America’s rule of law. If the administration fails to comply with the emergency order, it is unclear how it might be enforced. The Constitution says that a president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” but courts have rarely been tested by a chief executive who has ignored their orders.
Federal officials have sometimes responded to adverse decisions with dawdling or grudging compliance. Outright disobedience is exceedingly rare. There has been no clear example of “open presidential defiance of court orders in the years since 1865,” according to a Harvard Law Review article published in 2018.
Federal Workers Are Starting to Fight Musk’s Lawless Power Grab. Is It Too Late?
(Slate) The lawsuits seeking to slow down Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of the federal government are finally starting to make some progress, even if the pace hasn’t been able to keep up with the damage wrought by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Critically, two federal employees filed for a temporary restraining order against Musk on Tuesday. Late last month, the workers filed a lawsuit in the D.C. District Court against the Office of Personnel Management, asking the court to shut down the email server that was installed to send out Elon Musk’s “Fork in the Road” email containing a dubious “deferred resignation” offer to 2.3 million civil servants.
Who can police a president unwilling to abide by the law?
Philip Bump
A president who wants to brazenly challenge both Congress and the courts will be hard to constrain
(WaPo) Who will police the president? Barring an outbreak of self-respect at the Capitol, the answers are unsatisfying. There are the courts, though that path tends to be slow and depends on respect for the courts’ authority. There’s also the public — the same public that Trump still insists wanted him to be president in November 2020. And that’s about it.
In Trump’s quest to close the Education Department, Congress and his own agenda may get in the way
(AP) — President Donald Trump is preparing to gut the U.S. Education Department to the full extent of his power, directing his administration to slash spending while pressuring employees to quit. Yet his promise to close the department is colliding with another reality: Most of its spending — and its very existence — is ordered by Congress.
An executive order in preparation by the White House appears to recognize the limits of the president’s power. The planned order would direct his education chief to start winding down the agency but urge Congress to pass a measure abolishing it, according to sources familiar with the plan.
Of course it’s a coup –Miss the obvious, lose your republic
Timothy Snyder
In the third decade of the twenty first century, power is more digital than physical.
A couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives. Using technical jargon and vague references to orders from on high, they gain access to the basic computer systems of the federal government. Having done so, they proceed to grant their Supreme Leader access to information and the power to start and stop all government payments.
That coup is, in fact, happening. And if we do not recognize it for what it is, it could succeed.
The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights.
Jamelle Bouie: There Is No Going Back
Even if anyone had elected Elon Musk to anything, the past week would still be one of the most serious examples of executive branch malfeasance in American history.
Musk has seized hold of critical levers of power and authority within the federal government, apparently enabling him to destroy federal agencies at will, barring congressional action or judicial pushback.
Musk’s team, which includes a small gaggle of young aides, reportedly ages 19 to 24 — have taken control of the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration. They also have access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, which provides a direct line to sensitive information about tens of millions of Americans, including Social Security numbers and bank accounts. By his own account, Musk could use his access to the payments system — which disburses congressional appropriations to the many payees of the government — to effect a kind of personal line-item veto. If he does not believe that a program or grant is effective — if he thinks that it constitutes “waste, fraud and abuse” — then he will cancel its funding and leave it to starve on the vine.
Musk is a ‘special government employee,’ the White House confirms
(AP) — Elon Musk is working for President Donald Trump as a “special government employee,” according to a White House official, solidifying his controversial role in the administration but sidestepping some disclosure rules that are typical of federal workers.
The official, speaking Monday on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said that Musk has a government email address and office space in the White House complex.

2 February
The Logic of Destruction And how to resist it
By Timothy Snyder
What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together.
The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate.

1 February
Trump and allies make more moves to wrest control of USAID
In the latest action, two top security officials at the independent agency were removed after they refused access to restricted spaces to Elon Musk’s representatives.
Musk aides gain access to sensitive Treasury Department payment system
The access — granted by Scott Bessent, Trump’s newly confirmed treasury secretary — comes after the ousting of the agency’s top career official.

31 January
FBI Agents Are Stunned by the Scale of the Expected Trump Purge
By Shane Harris
Seasoned members of the nation’s top law-enforcement agency are bracing for a mass expulsion as the president roots out anyone he sees as disloyal to him.

27-29 January
Stop Feeling Stunned and Wounded, Liberals. It’s Time to Fight Back.
Charles M. Blow
The first week of President Trump’s return to power was a flurry of provocations, of attacks on the rule of law and raw exertions of power.
There Is a Strategy Behind the Chaos
The drama over federal-grant spending this week isn’t mere disorganization; it’s part of a broader effort to remake the government from the inside.
By David A. Graham
(The Atlantic) Today, OMB folded—at least for now. The White House says that it has withdrawn the grant freeze in the memo, but not the executive orders mentioned in it, some of which assert a freeze on spending. Part of the goal appears to be to short-circuit court proceedings that might produce an unfavorable ruling.
…this was no fluke and no ad hoc move. It’s part of a carefully thought-out program of grabbing power for the executive branch, and this week’s drama is better understood as a battle over priorities within the Republican Party than as unmanaged chaos.
White House budget office rescinds federal funding freeze
(The Hill) The Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget released a memo Wednesday rescinding a controversial order that froze a wide swath of federal financial assistance, which had paralyzed many federal programs and caused a huge uproar on Capitol Hill.
The decision came amid strong behind-the-scenes pushback from Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, according to a GOP senator who was apprised of the decision to reverse the policy order.
Trump White House reverses course, rescinds freeze on federal grants
The budget office came under immense pressure over the impacts of a sudden pause in key government spending.
Senate Dems take down ICC sanctions bill amid fury over Trump funding freeze
Senate Democrats revolted on Tuesday following the Trump administration’s sweeping freeze on federal aid by tanking a vote to sanction the International Criminal Court and promising there might be similar moves to come if the White House does not change its tune in short order.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were blindsided by the administration’s freeze on aid that included disbursements of grants and loans.
Here’s what we know — and don’t know — about the Trump funding freeze
The Trump administration’s freeze on federal grants and loans set off confusion nationwide. Some states had trouble accessing funds that were not put on hold.
(WaPo) Capping a frenetic day, a federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump from imposing the sweeping pause on trillions of dollars in federal spending. The order prevented the new restrictions from taking effect until at least Feb. 3, buying time for a coalition of public health advocates, nonprofits and businesses — represented by the left-leaning group Democracy Forward — to proceed with its case challenging the freeze.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, and Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the appropriations committee, gave scathing condemnations of the move to pause funds. They were joined by Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, the top Democrat on the Energy Committee, and Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee. Each spoke of the financial strain the freeze puts on constituents in their states, particularly middle class families and organizations that provide aid to the needy.
US judge temporarily blocks Trump from freezing federal grants
Order causes confusion among US agencies
Foreign aid is also frozen, lifesaving medicines withheld
Freeze is part of a broader campaign to reshape government
Nonprofits dismayed, Democrats challenge ‘unlawful’ move
(Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping directive to pause federal grants, loans and other financial aid, giving a win to advocacy groups that said it would disrupt programs that serve tens of millions of Americans.
U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan ordered the Trump administration not to block funding for ongoing programs until Feb. 3 at a hearing in Washington court.

Robert Reich: Clearly illegal
This isn’t about cutting the size of government. It’s about further concentrating power in Trump’s hands.
The scale of Trump’s order is wildly broad — it cites federal spending totaling $3 trillion — and argues that federal spending must be aligned with “Presidential priorities” while reviews are undertaken.
Officials then have until February 10 to report to the Office of Management and Budget. By then, the OMB will likely be run Russ Vought, Trump’s nominee — and, not incidentally, the chief author of Project 2025 — who has made no secret of his determination to slash government spending (while also delivering a huge tax cut to the wealthy). …
Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress holds the power of the purse, and Congress approved these payments.
While Trump has the power to pause spending, subject to review, this isn’t really about pausing. It’s about stopping. That’s called “impounding.”
In 1974, Congress enacted the Impoundment Control Act in response to Nixon’s abuses of power. It bars a president from not spending money Congress has appropriated.
Trump believes the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional — but the Supreme Court determines what acts of Congress are not constitutional. And in the 1975 case of Train v. City of New York, the court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the act.

White House tries to clarify Trump federal spending freeze as confusion spreads
Hours after the Trump administration issued its directive, officials braced for seismic interruptions to key federal programs and services.
Does Trump Have the Power to Block Spending That Congress Has Authorized?
President Trump said during the campaign that he wanted to revive presidents’ authority to withhold or delay the spending of funds that Congress has appropriated.
(NYT) The White House’s temporary pause on trillions in federal spending could set up a court fight over executive authority and Congress’s control of the purse.
What has Trump done?
In his first week in office, Mr. Trump barred spending on certain initiatives whose mission he disagreed with, including programs involving “diversity, equity and inclusion” and funding to nongovernmental organizations he believes undermine the national interest. He also ordered a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid spending to review it for any conflicts with his priorities, making exceptions for military assistance to Israel and Egypt.
White House pauses all federal grants, sparking confusion
Trillions of dollars could be on hold, according to an Office of Management and Budget memo.
The White House budget office is ordering a pause to all grants and loans disbursed by the federal government, according to an internal memo sent to agencies Monday, creating significant confusion across Washington.
Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, instructs federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligations or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.” The memo also calls for each agency to perform a “comprehensive analysis” to ensure its grant and loan programs are consistent with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, which aimed to ban federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and limit clean energy spending, among other measures.

28 January
Federal workers are enticed to resign as Trump seeks to remake the U.S. government.
The Trump administration on Tuesday offered roughly two million federal workers the option to resign but be paid through the end of September, in an effort to drastically reduce the size of the federal work force and push out people who do not support President Trump’s political agenda.
In an email, the Office of Personnel Management, an agency that oversees the federal civilian work force, gave employees the option to leave their positions by typing the word “resign” into the subject line of an email and hitting send. Workers have until Feb. 6 to accept the offer.

26 January
Ezra Klein is focused on Donald Trump’ relationship with the ‘attention titans’
Trump Has Something He Would Like to Bring to Your Attention
Attention, not money, is now the fuel of American politics.
(NYT) I am not willing to watch Trump give America’s most powerful merchants of attention some of the best seats at his inauguration and pretend he wants nothing from them or that there is nothing they would want from him enough to cut a deal.
And the problem will persist beyond Trump. The right spent years believing the social media platforms were biased against them, and the left is about to spend years believing the same. As absurdly concentrated as wealth is in America, attention is even more so. As powerful as money is in politics, attention is even more so. We have largely failed to regulate the role of money in politics. For attention, the problem is worse — and we have not even begun to attempt solutions.

24-25 January
Trump’s Moves to Upend Federal Bureaucracy Touch Off Fear and Confusion
Agencies are gripped with uncertainty about how to implement the blizzard of new policies as workers frantically try to assess the impact on their lives.
(NYT) … Starting on Inauguration Day, the orders and memos came down one after the other, many crafted in the pugnacious tone of a campaign speech: the shuttering of “Radical and Wasteful” diversity programs in federal agencies; the stripping of civil service protections from a share of the federal work force; the end to remote work, which, one administration memo claimed, had left federal office buildings “mostly empty” and rendered downtown Washington “a national embarrassment.”
All new hiring was frozen, job offers were rescinded, scientific meetings were canceled and federal health officials were temporarily barred from communicating with the public, a directive that some understood as so broad that it even extended to making outside purchase orders for lab supplies.

Ruth Marcus: Trump’s Friday night massacre is blatantly illegal
The firing of at least 14 inspectors general foreshadows a Donald Trump unbound and heedless of the rule of law.
Trump ousts at least 15 independent inspectors general in late-night purge
The dismissals appeared to violate federal law, which requires Congress to receive 30 days’ notice of any intent to fire a Senate-confirmed inspector general.
(WaPo) The White House removed the independent inspectors general of nearly every Cabinet-level agency in an unprecedented purge that could clear the way for President Donald Trump to install loyalists in the crucial role of identifying fraud, waste and abuse in the government.
The inspectors general were notified late Friday by emails from White House personnel director Sergio Gor that they had been terminated immediately… The watchdogs at Homeland Security and Justice were the only Cabinet-level inspector generals spared.
The dismissals appeared to violate federal law, which requires Congress to receive 30 days’ notice of any intent to fire a Senate-confirmed inspector general. The legal uncertainty could create awkward encounters on Monday, when several watchdogs who were told they were fired planned to show up in their offices to work anyway.

23 January
Trump and the Perils of Ungoverning
Institutions Under Assault Will Not Deliver for Americans
Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum
(Foreign Affairs) Trump has convinced many of his followers that a “deep state” thwarted his first term and robbed him of the 2020 election. Now, the putative deep state will be expunged, along with the expertise and procedures that make effective administration possible. Trump will judge both appointees and civil servants by one criterion: loyalty, defined not by commitment to a programmatic agenda but by unquestioning obedience to the president. …
Staffing the federal government with sycophants is not about ensuring loyalty to an agenda. It is about ensuring submission to the president. And it serves to amplify what we call “ungoverning”: the degradation of state capacity and the substitution of unchecked personal will for the difficult, necessary business of shaping, implementing, and assessing policy for the nation. The administration will sideline experts and circumvent regular processes of information gathering and consultation. In so doing, it will degrade state capacity; the premium Trump places on personal loyalty will result in confounding his ability to govern.

22 January
The New Rules of the Trump Era -audio and/or text
What got them there was their control of attention. These are attentional billionaires. These are attentional oligarchs.
(The Ezra Klein Show) … These are all executive orders, so we’ll see what stands. But they are doing, in many ways, less than meets the eye because so much of this will not actually stand. And many of these executive orders are just messaging anyway. Bring down prices — as an executive order, that doesn’t get you anywhere. There is this sense of energy of: OK, somebody is back in control and doing something. …
Democrats still think the fundamental substance of political power is money. And Republicans under Trump believe it is attention. And I think they are closer to right. So the alliances and deals they are trying to cut have more to do with attention.

Trump’s executive orders are not exactly crowd-pleasers
Polling suggests skepticism about the president’s plans, including about actions he’s already taken.
(WaPo) President Trump has been unusually insistent that his victory in November reflects robust public support. … The extent of his “mandate,” though, is tempered both by the narrowness of his popular-vote victory and by the extent to which he benefited from international anti-incumbent trends.
In the hours after his return to the White House, though, Trump began putting his campaign promises into effect — including ones that are unpopular even among many Republicans.
The most obvious example was his decision to immediately extend pardons and commutations to those involved in planning or participating in the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Recent polls show that less than half of the country approves of this. Among Republicans, support is higher — but in polling conducted for CBS News and NPR-PBS NewsHour, 3 in 10 Republicans opposed the idea.

21 January
Trump’s executive orders already face pushback, legal challenges
The orders include some actions that scholars and legal experts say may be beyond the reach of the president’s pen and could be tied up in courts or legislatures for years.
Two hours after being sworn in, President Donald Trump sat down in the President’s Room at the U.S. Capitol to sign the first of nearly 100 promised executive orders — a historic and hand-cramping effort that he promised would begin “the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense.”
But his pen strokes also kicked off a round of objections from opponents, scholars and other groups that said he had exceeded the limits of his presidential power. They included some critics who filed lawsuits before his signatures were dry, all but guaranteeing that his approval would not be the last word on Monday’s executive actions.
A Disturbing Theme in Trump’s Executive Orders
By Fred Kaplan
(Slate) Among the most striking of President Donald Trump’s first-day executive orders, the ones that may augur an era of lawless thuggery, are his pardons or commutations for all of the Jan. 6 rioters and—less noted but hardly less ominous—the reversal of President Joe Biden’s sanctions against some of the most savage settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Beyond the betrayal of justice that both steps represent on their own, they also send an ominous message: that acts of political violence are OK, even laudable, as long as they’re committed in furtherance of Trump’s power and preferences.
There is little doubt that at least some of the “J6 hostages” (as Trump has called them), or like-minded observers emboldened by the pardons, will threaten or carry out additional attacks on people or institutions decried by Trump as enemies, assured—correctly or not—that the president will once again come to their rescue.
Three Opinion Writers on Trump Day 1: He Is Exploiting ‘Civic Ignorance’
The president’s executive orders show us where things are headed.
(NYT) On his first day back in office, President Trump issued dozens of executive orders and pardoned nearly all of the Jan. 6 rioters. He also set a new tone and pace for Washington: He’s going to do whatever he wants, and fast.
Michelle Goldberg: All kinds of people who have assaulted police officers — committed really egregious acts of political violence — are about to be freed in what I think is a statement about the scale of impunity that Trump’s allies are going to enjoy in this new world.
Healy: Michelle, you just identified what I thought was the most audacious hypocrisy of Monday and the lead-up to it, which was this Republican spin about violent offenders and nonviolent offenders on Jan. 6 — this notion that there would be thoughtful and nuanced approaches to who got pardons and who got commutations. …
Healy: David, what kind of precedent do you think these pardons and commutations set for our democracy?
French: It’s a dreadful precedent, and I have to extend it beyond Donald Trump. Right on the very eve of Trump’s presidency, Joe Biden pardoned a bunch of his family members. So this is sort of amplifying and moving beyond the Hunter Biden pardon.
And so you already had yet another example — of many in American history — where pardon power has been abused.

The Tech Oligarchy Arrives
Donald Trump’s inauguration signaled a new alliance —for now— with some of the world’s wealthiest men.
(The Atlantic) What wealthy donors could get in return for their support of Trump remains an open question. Zuckerberg’s, Bezos’s, and Musk’s federal business interests include rocket-ship and cloud-computing contracts, a federal investigation of Tesla’s auto-driving technology, a pending Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against Meta, and a separate antitrust case against Amazon. Just last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk for allegedly failing to disclose his early stake in Twitter, the social-media giant he later took over and renamed X. (A lawyer for Musk has said he did “nothing wrong.”) When Trump promised in his inaugural address to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” the cameras panned to Musk, whose SpaceX is racing Bezos’s Blue Origin;
Existing federal ethics rules were not designed to address the possibility of the world’s wealthiest people padding the pockets of the first family through television rights or legal settlements. The Trump family’s recently announced cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, creates yet another way for the wealthy to invest directly in an asset to benefit the commander in chief. “There is no enforcement mechanism against the president under these laws,” Trevor Potter, a former general counsel for the late Arizona Senator John McCain’s campaign, told us.
What Everyone Gets Wrong About Tulsi Gabbard
Other than raw ambition, only one through line is perceptible in a switchbacking political career.
Long before Donald Trump rewarded Tulsi Gabbard’s loyalty with a nomination to be the next director of national intelligence, before her friendliness with Tucker Carlson, and before her association with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, she was loyal to another charismatic leader. … That leader is Chris Butler, the founder of an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement in Hinduism, called the Science of Identity Foundation.
Regardless of whom her opportunism ultimately serves, political opportunity has come again for Gabbard. After she hitched her wagon to Trump, he chose her to be his spymaster in chief—a position for which she does not seem remotely qualified.