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And We Still Haven’t Hit Bottom

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RFK the Lesser was confirmed as health secretary. I’d wring my hands about it, but even if somehow he had been rejected I can’t imagine Trump putting anyone competent into that position. I hate to think of the devastation if there’s another pandemic in the next four years.  I believe Kash Patel is up next, and he’s made it out of committee.

This morning I read House GOP Makes Official Its Plan For Devastating Cuts To Medicaid at TPM. I knew this was coming, but it’s personally upsetting as I was just able to get on Medicaid last year. It’s been great so far. I’m getting the same medical care I would have gotten with normal insurance, but all my co-pays and deductibles are gone. I’m even fully covered if I have to be hospitalized for something. If that goes away I may have to make hard decisions about what health care I can actually get without running up a debt I can never pay. So far I haven’t heard anything specific about ending housing subsidies, but they’ll get to it eventually.

It’s hard to keep up with the nonsense. Now I’m reading Trump is proposing what he calls “reciprocal tariffs,” which seems to mean that other countries aren’t supposed to impose higher tariffs on our stuff than we impose on their stuff. Exactly how he expects to enforce that, I have no idea. I see that back in the early FDR Administration there was a law called the Reciprocal Tariff Act that was intended to facilitate negotiating lower tariffs to undo the damage of Smoot-Hawley, but that was way different.

This comes about in part because Trump is obsessed with trade deficits and believes they are a bad thing that happen when other countries are “unfair” to us. Even the Cato Institute says that’s not how it works. But even if trade deficits were really bad, as I understand it tariffs are not the best tool one might use to correct the situation. He really is a moron.

You’ve probably heard that Trump and Putin are negotiating with each other about ending the Ukraine-Russia war with no input from Ukraine’s President Zelensky. Comparisons to the 1938 Munich Agreement between Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler abound. And Trump continues to be confused about who started the war.

Trump was asked if he viewed “Ukraine as an equal member of this peace process?” Trump responded: “It’s an interesting question. I think they have to make peace. That was not a good war to go into.”

So, yeah, everything’s going to hell. Quickly.

Stuff to Read:

David Graham, The Atlantic, The Trump Supporters Who Didn’t Take Him at His Word

Philip Bump, The Washington Post, Trump, Musk and America are headed for a very rude awakening

Paul Krugman, Elon Musk Is Faking It

Quick Note

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Since Trump was re-inaugurated, every week when I do grocery shopping I take a photo of the basic store-brand large eggs, showing the price, and post it on Facebook. They’ve gone from $6.49 a dozen on January 21 to $7.99 today. So much winning! Today’s announcement that inflation was up by 3 percent drew a standard response from Trump — “BIDEN INFLATION UP!” He’s also calling for lowering interest rates, which the Fed is very unlikely to do anytime soon given the inflation numbers. Sooner or later try I predict Trump will try to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and replace him with someone who will drop interest rates at Trump’s bidding. There must be somebody reporting on Fox News who would do.

So Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed as director of national intelligence. Mitch McConnell was the only Republican who didn’t vote for her. I think the nation is going to be incredibly lucky if we get through the next four years without another major terrorist attack, or worse. We’ve got incompetent nutjobs in charge of security and intelligence. We’ve got a so-called POTUS with a gift for pissing off most of the planet.

More tomorrow. Please as ever feel free to vent in the comments.

Trump’s Constitutional Crisis

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First, let’s everybody stop saying we’re “approaching” a constitutional crisis, or “risking” one, or whatever. It’s here. We’re smack in the middle of it.

Everyone’s looking to the courts to stop Trump, but Trump and his people have made it clear they’re ignoring the courts. It is the administration’s official policy that courts have no authority over presidents.

Lawyers for the Trump administration argued late Sunday that a court order blocking Elon Musk’s aides from entering the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems impinged on the president’s absolute powers over the executive branch, which they said the courts could not usurp.

This part is rich:

They argued that the order violated the Constitution by ignoring the separation of powers and severing the executive branch’s right to appoint its own employees. The restriction, they wrote, “draws an impermissible and anti-constitutional distinction” between civil servants and political appointees working in the Treasury Department.

“Separation of powers” only works one way with Trump; his way.

The filing followed warning shots over the weekend. Vice President JD Vance declared that the courts and judges were not allowed “to control the executive’s legitimate power,” although American courts have long engaged in the practice of judicial review.

On Saturday, Mr. Trump called the ruling by Judge Engelmayer a “disgrace” and said that “no judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of a decision.”

Writing for The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait (yeah, I know, he’s wrong a lot) writes that Trump’s determination to simply govern by executive orders and whatever Musk feels like doing is especially remarkable considering Republicans control Congress, and Republicans in Congress have been entirely compliant to Trump’s demands (with the exception of the Matt Gaetz appointment). Trump could easily accomplish what he wants through the usual constitutional processes. He just doesn’t want to bother.

Just as Trump and Musk are refusing to submit their plans to a Congress that their party controls, they are at least toying with the notion of ignoring orders by a court they have shaped. The Supreme Court, which has final word on all constitutional disputes, has a two-to-one majority of Republican appointees. When Vance floated the idea of defying the courts in 2021, he was anticipating his party taking actions so indisputably illegal that not even friendly justices would swallow them. They are prepared to smash a system they control, simply because it won’t move at the frantic pace they demand. …

… Just this weekend, The WashingtonPost reported that the administration is asking candidates for national-security and law-enforcement positions to answer questions such as “Who were the ‘real patriots’ on Jan. 6? Who won the 2020 election?” and declining to offer jobs to those who fail to supply MAGA answers. Trump has sanctified the insurrection, has criminalized the prosecution of even its most violent activities, and is screening out anybody willing to question his belief that he is entitled to absolute power.

If you had predicted things like this before the election, most Republicans would have accused you of Trump derangement syndrome. Yet Republicans have barely uttered a peep of protest in the face of these actions.

Given his party’s near-total acquiescence in every previous step toward authoritarianism, perhaps Trump would not have to be crazy to take the next one. The entire administration is intoxicated with power. The crisis lies not in the structure of government so much as in the character of the party that runs it, which refuses to accept the idea that its defeat is ever legitimate or that its power has any limits.

Yet even Chait (who is wrong a lot) begins the essay by saying the U.S. is “sleepwalking into” a constitutional crisis, not that we’re already in one. I think some of these people are afraid to admit the system is breaking down as easily as it is breaking down. If Trump decides to just ignore the courts, who’s going to stop him and by what enforcement mechanism that Trump doesn’t control?

This happened today:

A federal judge on Monday said the White House has defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, marking the first time a judge has expressly declared that the Trump White House was disobeying a judicial mandate.

The ruling by Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island federal court ordered Trump administration officials to comply with what he called “the plain text” of an edict he issued last month.

Judge McConnell’s ruling marked a step toward what could quickly evolve into a high-stakes showdown between the executive and judicial branches, a day after a social media post by Vice President JD Vance claimed that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” elevating the chance that the White House could provoke a constitutional crisis.

Already, more than 40 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration, challenging Mr. Trump’s brazen moves that have included revoking birthright citizenship and giving Elon Musk’s teams access to sensitive Treasury Department payment systems. Judges have already ruled that many of these executive actions may violate existing statutes.

Maybe if Judge McConnell goes to D.C. and wags his finger sternly at Elon Musk, Elon will back down. Or not. See also The Courts Blocked Trump’s Federal Funding Freeze. Agencies Are Withholding Money Anyway. at ProPublica.

At the New York Times, Adam Liptak writes that Trump’s Actions Have Created a Constitutional Crisis, Scholars Say. So somebody’s saying it. One of the scholars interviewed said that while previous presidents have done unconstitutional things, this is the first time we’ve had a president who thinks the Constitution is meaningless.

So, yeah, it’s a crisis.

More Fresh Hells

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The news is so horrible. Out country is being broken up into pieces and flushed down a drain. And there seems to be nothing anyone can do to stop it. The most recent I’ve seen — NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediately

The Trump administration is cutting billions of dollars in biomedical research funding, alarming academic leaders who said it would imperil their universities and medical centers and drawing swift rebukes from Democrats who predicted dire consequences for scientific research.

The move, announced Friday night by the National Institutes of Health, drastically cuts its funding for “indirect” costs related to research. These are the administrative requirements, facilities and other operations that many scientists say are essential but that some Republicans have claimed are superfluous.

“The United States should have the best medical research in the world,” NIH said in its announcement. “It is accordingly vital to ensure that as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead.”

As I understand it, this is about the long-standing practice of grant money being split between researchers and the academic / medical centers and research universities in which they work. The “administrative overhead” is going to maintain the facilities in which the research is being done, among other things. I take it that from now on scientists will be expected to just do research in their own kitchens. Josh Marshall has been all over this; see White House Declares War on Academic Medical Centers, The Huge NIH Funding Cuts, and More on Trump’s Effort to End Basic Medical Research in the United States.

Dana Milbank, arguably the last decent editorial columnist left at WaPo — there may be another, but I can’t think of who it would be — has written as good a summation of where we stand as I’ve seen. See Democrats, don’t save Trump from himself.

See also Inside Musk’s Aggressive Incursion Into the Federal Government by a bunch of people at the New York Times.

This morning a federal judge did put a temporary block on Musk’s access to the Treasury payment system, but at this point I don’t know if a judge’s order even means anything. Who’s going to enforce it?

Wired has been doing some good reporting on what the Muskrats are up to. See A US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis Designates DOGE Staff as ‘Insider Threat’ and DOGE Builds ‘Firewall’ Between Musk’s Team and [U.S. Digital Services] USDS Workers, for example.

I’m just seeing this — In a harbinger of illiberalism, Trump fired the Archivist of the United States without telling her or Congress why.

That’s enough to digest for now. Please feel free to vent about whatever is most upsetting you in the comments.

Pam Bondi and the Criminalization of DEI

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I saw on television there was a decent turnout at the state capitol protests yesterday. I felt bad for not trying to get to one, but I’ve been really slammed with arthritis pain in my knees recently.  I saw an orthopedic guy yesterday who gave me a steroid shot in one knee (the other is beyond help, apparently) and am in much less pain today. But it’s safe to say my marching in the streets days are over, unless I can get my hands on a wheelchair and someone to push it. Younger people will have to do the marching now.

There’s so much going on it’s hard to keep up. But one of the first headlines to jump out at me today was at Slate, Pam Bondi Instructs Trump DOJ to Criminally Investigate Companies That Do DEI. This is by Jeremy Stahl and Mark Joseph Stern.

One astonishing memo, seen by Slate, puts the DOJ at the center of President Donald Trump’s widespread efforts to destroy any traces of initiatives that would create inclusive and diverse workspaces, otherwise known as DEIA. The new memo claims that it will target private-sector diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility initiatives for potential “criminal investigation.”

In other words, the government is going to interfere with the hiring practices of private companies. And the righties will say that’s what Affirmative Action did, but frankly Affirmative Action was about protecting individual citizens from discrimination. And the righties will say that now White men are being discriminated against, and I will say, yeah, and I’m King Charles.

I am sure I’ve preached this sermon before, about how I grew up in a “sundown town” and was around White racists a big chunk of my life, Something I realized while I was still a young person was that the White guys who were the most openly bigoted were relentlessly … ordinary. They weren’t especially smart, or accomplished, or exceptional in any way except for being loudmouth bigots. And most of them were living standard middle-class lives, with ok jobs and a decent home and the usual accoutrements of average Americana. But they believed they were owed all the goodies the American Dream had to offer, and if their lives weren’t fulfilling their expectations it must be the fault of those other people.

It’s also the case that a lot of them clung to their identity as a White male as the one thing that made them special. They couldn’t face being relentlessly ordinary. See also something I wrote in 2017, The Myths That Guide Us.

This is an entirely subjective opinion not backed up by scholarly studies, but I know my people. I sincerely believe a whole lot of these guys go down the white supremacy rabbit hole because they’ve come to live inside a myth that says their whiteness entitles them to greatness. In their own minds they are the heirs to a noble tradition of warrior-men who eventually will return in glory and re-assert their natural superiority over all those other people. And yeah, it’s nonsense, but it’s a fantasy that helps them avoid confronting how utterly banal they and their lives actually are.

Many of the people in the Trump Administration fit the categories of “banal” and “ordinary,” but they got pushed up ladders because they were loudmouth advocates of the White supremacist fantasy that won’t die.

Part of the fantasy is that DEI programs require quotas, meaning that somehow more-qualified White guys lose jobs to less-qualified minorities or women in order to fill a quota. But quotas are illegal, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. DEI means that companies should not be hiring and promoting less-qualified White guys over better-qualified minorities and women. This is a concept alien to a bigot, of course.

When I graduated college in 1973 Affirmative Action was just going into effect, and it was only because of that that at least some of my highly accomplished sister graduates were considered for professional jobs and not automatically dumped into secretarial pools. The best jobs, of course, automatically went to the White guys, including some very average ones.

In most of my early career in book publishing  — which is a female intensive industry — in the 1970s and 1980s, I still saw very average — and sometimes downright stupid — White guys promoted over the heads of women with more experience and skills. (And as I recall there were few racial minorities in publishing in those days. That didn’t start to change until the 1990s.) The rule seemed to be that a White guy was considered competent, even with copious evidence to the contrary, as long as he didn’t burn down the building. Women and minorities were assumed to be less competent until they had put in a few years proving themselves with exceptional service to the company. And then maybe they’d be allowed up the ladder just a step.

I’ve worked for a couple of male managers who were so colossally stupid they were clearly costing the company tons of money. One guy rendered the entire department of a relatively small company nearly dysfunctional before the owner noticed there was a problem — book schedules were blown, books were published with sections missing, books were printed with pages of gibberish that nobody noticed — and even then he brought in a (male) consultant to evaluate the situation. The consultant, bless him, recommended firing the stupid manager. This was in the 1970s; this was the “meritocracy” Trump wants to take us back to.

A long time ago I read an argument that the problem was not so much that there were huge barriers to women and minorities, but that White men often got too many passes to move up without deserving it. That may have become less true over time, but it never entirely went away.

See also a post from back in 2009, The Default Norm, about Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing to be a Supreme Court justice. The hearings painfully exposed that many of the Senators harbored the perspective that White maleness is the default human norm, and anyone else must be assumed to be less normal and treated differently.

And, of course, over the years I’ve had some excellent male managers and some clunky female managers, but on the whole by the time we got into the 1990s there seemed to be less discrimination — in publishing, anyway, I can’t speak for other industries — and more putting people into jobs they could actually do, regardless of sex or skin color. It did American business a lot of good, I suspect. I also suspect that companies that develop and sell consumer products, recreation, entertainment, that kind of thing, and who want customers of all races and genders, find that having a diverse workforce is very useful in that regard. White guys alone tend to be oblivious to what might interest and appeal to other people. Many large companies have come to appreciate that diversity is good for their bottom lines.

Government is lagging behind. I found a 2021 study that said White men are 30 percent of the U.S. population but hold 62 percent of all elected offices.

What exactly is Bondi going to investigate? Did a company send recruiters to Howard University, for example? Is that going to be criminal now? Are more women and minorities than White Men (who are only 30 percent of the U.S. population, after all) being hired by some company? Is that criminal now?

And does Bondi appreciate that Sandra Day O’Connor, after graduating near the top of her law school class in 1952, was offered no jobs with a legal firm except as a legal secretary? She eventually got a first professional job as a county deputy attorney after offering to work without compensation. And were it not for feminists in the 1960s and 1970s making noises about women’s equality, I doubt it would have occurred to Ronald Reagan to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court. Or maybe he was trying to prove something after having opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.

And for years the Right whined that any government interference with private business was socialism. I guess they’ve changed their minds.

Stuff to Read

Highly recommended — Josh Marshall, The Three-Headed Chimera of Trumpian Destruction

David Frum, The Atlantic, How Trump Lost His Trade War 

Timothy W. Ryback, The Atlantic, The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler

Paul Krugman, RFK Jr. and the MAGA Death Trip

Dana Milbank, Washington Post, From the river to the sea, Palestine will be … abolished?

MSN/WaPo, Gutting USAID threatens billions of dollars for U.S. farms, businesses

This isn’t even getting into the last in what Elon Musk has been up to. It’s too much.

The Dumbest POTUS in History

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The Wall Street Journal editorial board weighs in on Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico:

I can’t get past the subscription paywall to read the whole thing, but I trust the headline is a reasonable summation.

WSJ as part of the Rupert Muroch media empire did a lot to make Donald Trump the most powerful man in the world. Are they surprised at what he’s doing? Did they not notice he’s a moron?

Case in point: Some time Thursday Trump ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to open the dams to two California reservoirs. Why? He got it in his head that the water would somehow flow down to Los Angeles and help with the firefighting. And he did this on very short notice without consulting with state authorities.

Except the water won’t magically flow south to Los Angeles, and there’s no readily available way to encourage it to do so. Trump just dumped water that will probably be needed for agriculture this summer, for no good reason. Billions of gallons. The New York Times:

Trump administration officials began releasing significant amounts of water from two dams in California’s Central Valley on Friday in a move that seemed intended to make a political point as President Trump continued to falsely blame the Los Angeles wildfires on water policies in the Democratic-run state.

The releases, as ordered, have sent water toward low-lying land in the Central Valley, and none of it will reach Southern California, water experts said. Nonetheless, President Trump said on Friday that the same action would have prevented the Los Angeles wildfires on the other side of mountain ranges over which that water has no way of traveling.

“Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California,” President Trump posted on Friday on social media in an apparent reference to the dam releases. “Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago — There would have been no fire!”

Experts expressed dismay on Friday that releasing so much water now served little use for farmers, who typically have higher irrigation needs in the spring and summer months when agricultural fields are abundant. …

... Alarmed, local water managers rushed Thursday to prepare for an abrupt onslaught of water they had not asked for, according to county officials. In an email to the Kings County Board of Supervisors, Jim Henderson, the county’s public works director, said that the water authorities had reached out with “serious concerns” before a flurry of calls to local Republican members of Congress dramatically slowed the flows.

And Elon Musk isn’t much brighter.

“They” didn’t keep the water from the people of California. Trump just took it away from the people of California. If there’s a drought in California this summer it’s going to hit California agriculture really, really hard. A publication dedicated to San Joaquin Valley water issues totally blasted the water release.

“Every drop belongs to someone,” said Kaweah River Watermaster Victor Hernandez. “The reservoir may belong to the federal government, but the water is ours. If someone’s playing political games with this water, it’s wrong.”

It was no game on Thursday when area water managers were given about an hour’s notice that the Army Corps planned to release water up to “channel capacity,” the top amount rivers can handle, immediately. 

The Army Corps later agreed to more measured releases, alleviating a mad scramble to alert first responders and have crews on standby in case river banks were breached and levees overtopped, as happened during the 2023 floods.

See also:

Politico, Trump says he opened California’s water. Local officials say he nearly flooded them.

Daily Kos, For the Sake of a Photo Op, Trump Tries to Ruin CA Farmers that Probably Voted for Him

Digby, Hullabaloo, Make It Stop

There are a several big reservoirs in the Ozarks and Appalachia, mostly built during the New Deal to provide hydroelectric power. If you’ve lived near one, you appreciate that the people who schedule the release of water need to know what they are doing.

So, yes, this is really stupid. And speaking of Elon Musk and the California fires, see Federal firefighters fought L.A.’s blazes. Then came resignation offers.by Daniel Wu at WaPo. It begins,

Justin Brown had done a grueling stint at the perimeter of the Hughes Fire, battling last week to keep the blaze from spilling into towns in northern Los Angeles County. He was still sore Tuesday when an email from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management arrived in his inbox, warning of upcoming cuts to the civil service and presenting an offer to resign from his job

“It was a slap in the face,” Brown said.

The article goes on to say that the letter was a huge blow to morale for the firefighters.

Speaking more of Musk, he now indeed has full access to the government payment system.

And back to the tariffs, Trump did indeed sign executive orders imposing 25% tariffs on all goods from Mexico and Canada, a 10% tariff on Canadian oil exports, and a 10% tariff on goods from China. Nobody who knows anything about economics thinks this makes any sense. See Paul Krugman, The End of North America and Why Has Trump Gone Soft on China and Hard on Canada?

Elon Musk Is Taking Over the Government

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I’d already mentioned in the last post that Musk and his private sector minions are taking over the payment system through which the federal government distributes money. Later today I read that Musk’s people — can we call them Muskies? — have taken over the General Services Administration, which manages federal offices and technology. This is from Wired:

And then I read this from Reuters:

Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.

Since taking office 11 days ago, President Donald Trump has embarked on a massive government makeover, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.

 

There’s mounting evidence that even more than we know is being directed by Elon Musk and his private-sector employees, who are now fanned out across the government. He appears to have taken control of the federal payment system which allows his operatives to stop checks to any private individual in the country and/or examine all their personal financial information. According to The New York Times, Musk has tasked engineers with figuring out how to cut off the flow of funds from the Treasury to programs and priorities he believes conflict with the brief he received from Donald Trump. He has also taken control of some portion of the federal agency computer systems, allowing his operatives to lock federal workers out of key computer systems. We need a lot more reporting on just how he is exerting this power, specifically under what authority and who the people are he’s installed at these government agencies. Some have simply been appointed to new roles the old-fashioned way. But the best information we have about how “DOGE” is working suggests many are employees from his private companies operating with no legal authority at all.

There’s a pretty developed law that you can’t do stuff in the federal government if you’re not an employee of the federal government, or a contractor who is placed under the rules of the federal government. If you do do those things you become a de facto government employee and the law says you come under all sorts of record-keeping and disclosure requirements. Those requirements turn out to be quite important and consequential.

This is getting very frightening.

Oh, and Trump’s tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and maybe China, are supposed to go into effect tomorrow unless something happens in the night to stop them.

Update: Trump administration forces out multiple senior FBI officials and January 6 prosecutors.

A letter sent to the fired prosecutors said their removal was based on their role in the Jan. 6 prosecutions. It cited an executive order Trump recently signed that called the Jan. 6 prosecutions “a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years.”

In a separate memo to the FBI workforce sent out Friday night, the bureau’s acting director, Brian J. Driscoll, Jr., informed employees that acting Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, had asked for a list of all FBI employees who worked on January 6 cases for “a review process to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”

“We understand that this request encompasses thousands of employees across the country who have supported these investigative efforts,” Driscoll wrote. “I am one of those employees.”

It was not immediately clear why the FBI and DOJ officials had been ousted. The FBI and DOJ declined to comment.

A majority of FBI personnel may be targeted before this is over. A reporter asked Trump about it today, and he said he didn’t know this was happening.

The Musk/Trump Administration Is Deadly

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The most alarming thing I’ve seen so far today is that Elon Musk and the DOGE boys appear to have gotten control of a sensitive payment system at Treasury through which the U.S. government pays out funds. From WaPo: (This is the last day of January, and I’m out of this month’s gift links for the Washington Post and New York Times, sorry.)

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate. (Musk was seen on Thursday visiting GSA, according to two other people familiar with his whereabouts, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters. That visit was first reported by the New York Times.) His Department of Government Efficiency, originally conceived as a nongovernmental panel, has since replaced the U.S. Digital Service.

The executive order Trump signed creating DOGE also instructed all agencies to ensure it has “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” which would appear to include the Treasury payment systems.

It is unclear precisely why Musk’s team sought access to those systems. But both Musk and the Trump administration more broadly have sought to control spending in ways that far exceed efforts by their predecessors and have alarmed legal experts.

Musk somehow forced out the very senior guy at Treasury who oversaw this payment system. And it’s hard to know how much of this is Trump and how much of it is Musk. It wouldn’t surprise me if Musk is grabbing up more power and access than Trump realizes. If Musk controls the payment system, he can stop payments at his discretion, and create new payments nobody knows about. Congress? Congress?

A preliminary report on the DC crash says that the air traffic control tower was short staffed. From The New Republic:

An internal report from the Federal Aviation Administration found that in reality, the tower’s staffing at Ronald Reagan National Airport (DCA) was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” according to The New York Times. There was only one air traffic controller to handle both helicopters and planes in the airport’s vicinity, a job usually assigned to two people. …

…. Staffing levels at the airport’s control tower have been below adequate levels for years, like many of the U.S.’s other airports. DCA’s tower only had 19 fully certified controllers as of September 2023, according to congressional reports. This is well below the FAA and air traffic controller union’s preferred number of 30, and is due to employee turnover and budget cuts, according to the Times.

As a result, many air controllers at the airport work up to 10 hours a day and six days a week. Those levels probably have not been helped by Donald Trump’s federal hiring freeze, his gutting of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and the FAA chief’s resignation at Elon Musk’s behest. As much as Trump and the right might try to blame DEI or something else ludicrous, perhaps they should look in the mirror.

There is also reporting that the helicopter may have deviated from its approved path.

But guess what? FAA employees, including air traffic controllers, got another “buyout” offer email YESTERDAY. New York Times:

In a mass email sent to federal employees just before 8:30 p.m. — almost exactly 24 hours after an air crash in Washington that killed 67 people — the Office of Personnel Management encouraged F.A.A. workers, including air traffic controllers, to look for new jobs outside of government, where they might have an opportunity to be more productive.

“We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so,” stated the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”

The message, in the form of “F.A.Q.s” — or Frequently Asked Questions — suggested that if the employees agreed to depart, they could take a second job or travel to their “dream destination” while still on the public payroll for months before leaving permanently. But employees have been informed over the years that it is illegal for them to take a second job while working for the federal government, raising questions about whether the government can deliver on that offer.

It also came after President Trump, in public comments, blamed efforts to diversify the air traffic controller work force as a contributor to the crash, saying hiring standards had been too lax. He provided no evidence for his assertions about air traffic controllers, a field plagued for years by staffing shortages.

Again, the emails urging federal employees to resign are coming from Elon Musk’s people. Musk is turning into a bigger danger than Trump.

I also want to call you attention to Dana Milbank’s column today. So I’ll just quote a big chunk of it.

No one yet knows what caused the crash, but Trump didn’t hesitate to blame what he said were Joe Biden’s and Barack Obama’s “mediocre” and “lower” standards for air traffic controllers. He blamed Biden’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, for offering nothing but “a good line of bulls—” as he oversaw the Federal Aviation Administration. And Trump blamed the FAA itself for deciding that “the work force was too White” — and pursuing diversity in hiring rather than “people that are competent.”

A reporter asked whether he was really blaming the crash on DEI.

“It just could have been,” Trump said.

Wasn’t he premature to be casting blame before there’s an investigation?

“No, I don’t think so at all,” Trump replied.

How can he conclude that diversity was to blame?

“Because I have common sense.”

In fact, as NBC News’s Peter Alexander informed Trump, the same diversity policy the president now blames for the tragedy was on the FAA’s website throughout Trump’s first term.

If we’re recklessly assigning blame, we might just as easily point out that, before Trump took office, there hadn’t been a major commercial plane crash in the United States in the previous 16 years; that, in the week before the crash, Trump sacked the head of the Transportation Security Administration, disbanded the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, failed to name an acting head of the FAA, and imposed a hiring freeze that apparently includes air traffic controllers; and that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) last year celebrated his “landmark victory” in expanding the number of flights out of National — over the protest of aviation safety experts and senators from Maryland and Virginia, who warned that Cruz and friends “decided to ignore the flashing red warning light of the recent near-collision of two aircraft at [National] and jam even more flights onto the busiest runway in America.”

I had not known about the Ted Cruz connection. This needs to be amplified.

Other stuff to be concerned about:

David Kurtz, TPM, The Worst Nightmare For DOJ Is Already Coming True

Eric Boodman, STAT, National Science Foundation suspends salary payments, leaving researchers unable to pay their bills. NSF grant payments have been frozen, even though the “freeze” is supposed to be suspended.

How Utterly Useless Is the Trump Administration?

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The plane that crashed into the Potomac carried figure skaters and their families, according to U.S. Figure Skating. So sad. And then Trump gets his ugly orange face in front of a microphone and blames DEI, Barack Obama, Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and possibly the cast of Hamilton for the disaster. Well, okay, he didn’t blame Hamilton. But I bet he would have if someone had brought it up.

There has been no investigation yet into what caused an army helicopter and a commercial jet to collide. But Trump is already making sure everyone knows it wasn’t his fault. It was those other people he doesn’t like. And then the useless twerp of a Veep added, “When you don’t have the best standards in who you’re hiring, it means on the one hand, you’re not getting the best people in government. But on the other hand, it puts stresses on the people who are already there.”

That’s rich, coming from an administration being run by flying monkeys. Today’s exercise in blame happened while the confirmation hearings for Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel, two people outrageously unqualified for the sensitive positions to which they’ve been nominated.

Now the Federal Aviation Administration is operating without a head, because the last FAA administrator, Mike Whitaker, quit on January 20 after Elon Musk told him to resign, according to the Daily Beast. Musk accused Whitaker of standing in the way of his vision of putting human life on Mars, says the Daily Beast.

It’s true that the FAA has struggled with a shortage of air traffic controllers for some time. Note that air traffic controllers were included in the recent buyout offer to federal employees. More on that in a bit.

See also Trump Gutted Key Aviation Safety Committee Before D.C. Plane Crash by Hafiz Rashid at The New Republic.

Last week, just days after his inauguration, Donald Trump eliminated the membership of a key committee that handles aviation security. And on Wednesday night,  a passenger plane collided with a military helicopter in the Washington, D.C., area. 

On Tuesday, January 22, the Aviation Security Advisory Committee’s members received a memo from the Trump administration saying that the Department of Homeland Security was getting rid of the membership of all advisory committees in a “commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security.” At the same time, Trump also fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard.

Congress mandated the aviation committee in 1988, after the PanAm Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. After Trump’s move, the committee technically continues to exist but has no members to examine safety issues in airlines and airports. Its membership consisted of key groups in the aviation industry, from major unions to representatives from major airlines, as well as a group associated with victims of the PanAm bombing. 

Throughout its existence, the committee’s recommendations were adopted into air travel procedure. It was out of commission for more than a week until Wednesday’s disaster. No survivors were reported in the crash between American Eagle Flight 5342 heading to D.C. from Wichita, Kansas, and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter. 

I don’t know that these dismissals have had any impact on airline safety, yet. But of course I don’t know that they didn’t, either.

And what about the U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter? Maybe it was somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be, and maybe that was Pete Hegseth’s fault. We don’t know.

Pete Buttigieg isn’t taking any of this lying down.

Well said, Pete Buttigieg

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— Andrew Weinstein (@andrewjweinstein.com) January 30, 2025 at 12:43 PM

Trump won’t do anything but flap his little hands around and claim to be making air travel great again. Did I mention the cost of a dozen basic store brand large eggs at the local grocery was $6.99 this week? See also Trump Administration’s Halt of CDC’s Weekly Scientific Report Stalls Bird Flu Studies. We are entering an egg crisis that ordinary people are noticing. Trump doesn’t see how his dumb decisions are blowing back on him.

Trump is no leader of any kind, and what seems to be happening is that a few people are setting up their own fiefdoms within the administration and operating pretty much independently of Trump. Both the spending freeze and the fake employee buyout appear to have been put into motion without White House approval. Josh Marshall has a great bit up, White House Says We Were Out of the Loop—ON EVERYTHING.

The news, linked above, that the resignation emails were Team Elon’s idea and didn’t have the okay of the White House comes from a Washington Post article. But we get pretty much the same story in an Ashley Parker article published overnight in The Atlantic, only this time about the across-the-board federal spending freeze and the “memo” that kicked it off Monday. That one was Vought’s team — if not Vought himself, who has yet to be confirmed — at OMB. White House officials told Parker that the memo “was released without going through the usual White House approval processes.”

So the White House is saying they were out of the loop, caught as off guard as everyone else, by the two big conflagrations that have roiled the federal government over the course of this week and led to what is now universally conceded to be a fairly epic face plant little more than a week into the administration. It’s not exonerating. It’s by design. But I suspect that in this narrow sense it’s true. Because that’s how these folks operate. Trump remains entirely a transactional creature. Ideology, in any articulate sense, is entirely alien to him. He wants to be loved, which in his mind means total power and total subservience. Amidst the raging bureaucratic storm and planes tumbling out of the sky after two decades-plus of near-perfect safety in U.S. airspace, we learned yesterday afternoon that Trump told Mark Zuckerberg last November that the price of being “brought into the [Trump] tent” was arranging a $25 million bribe in the form of settling a meritless lawsuit from 2020 which had no hope of success. …

… So the “resignations” gambit from the Office of Personal Management is from Team Musk, which appears to be running OPM, trying to “disrupt” the federal workforce with “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley values. The OMB memo is the work of Christian nationalist Russell Vought, who envisions an electoral presidential dictatorship which uses its power to enforce a top down re-traditionalizing of American society and culture.

Are we having fun yet?