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.

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

“It just could have been,” Trump said.

The big news today is that it appears the “freeze” order of yesterday has been entirely rescinded. Wow, did that mess blow up in Trump’s greasy orange face, or what?

I take it that around the country local television news reporters were covering the ways the freeze would impact local viewers. This must have upset a lot of folks. And I understand Democrats actually woke up and got aggressive in condemning it. And Stephen Miller is having a snit that the blowback stopped the freeze. Poor baby.

But wait … not so fast … later today the Trump administration said they were only rescinding the memo announcing the freeze order, not the freeze itself. Huh? NPR reports,

Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokeswoman, told reporters that the move simply meant a recession of the memo.

She said efforts to “end the egregious waste of federal funding” will continue. She said the OMB memo has been rescinded “to end any confusion on federal policy created by the court ruling and the dishonest media coverage.” The administration expects that rescinding the memo will end the court case against it.

After widespread confusion from the initially very broad memo calling for a halt in federal assistance, pending review, the White House tried Tuesday to further clarify which programs would not be affected, later specifying that it would not impact Medicaid and SNAP programs, for example.

This latest statement from the White House is likely to add to the confusion rather than clarify it.

So nobody knows what’s going on. On to the next outrage, the fake “buyout.”

The more I read about Trump’s so-called “buyout” of federal employees, the more confused I got. At first I understood it to be the standard sort of thing some companies do when they are downsizing, to offer employees a better severance package than they would otherwise get if they go ahead and resign. But that’s not exactly right. It’s more like a “deferred resignation.” If federal employees offer to resign now, they will still be considered employees until September 30, at which time their pay and benefits end. But while they are still considered employees they don’t have to come into the office. It’s not clear whether they’ll actually be working from home or not. What happens if they take another job before September 30? Do they get to “double dip”? From what I’ve read, probably not.

I found this on Bluesky:

I have read the email from OPM. It is not what has been reported. IT IS NOT A BUY OUT.

It is an exemption from the partially unenforceable return to the office EO until end of the Fiscal Year. You may have to work every single workday until the end of the FY. No guarantees. All discretionary.

[image or embed]

— Eugene Freedman (@eugenefreedman.bsky.social) January 28, 2025 at 7:13 PM

See also What federal workers should know about Trump administration’s ‘deferred resignation’ offer.

Part of the problem is that it appears the executive branch needs congressional approval to do this, although right now Trump would probably get it if he asked. But another thing to know about this downsizing of the workforce is that it appears to be an Elon Musk operation. See Elon Musk Lackeys Have Taken Over the Office of Personnel Management at Wired.

One of the best things I’ve read today about the downsizing is by David Dayen at The American Prospect, who first explains that the email with the fake buyout offer went to employees with the header “Fork in the Road.”

This was an Elon Musk operation, through and through. In fact, the “Fork in the Road” email had the same title as one that Elon Musk sent to Twitter when he took over there, informing workers to be “extremely hardcore” or take the resignation offer. The Twitter emails even included the same ask of workers to reply with their decision.

lso like Elon’s Twitter experience, OPM enticed workers to take the offer by explaining how miserable it would be to stay in a government job. The Trump administration is requiring a return to the office, and stripping thousands of employees in policymaking roles of civil service protections. Because of expected divestitures of physical office space, many workers would have to relocate into new offices or maybe even new cities. Because of promised reductions in force, many workers who choose to stay could be furloughed anyway: “At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency,” the email reads. Moreover, there are statements about higher performance standards and an emphasis on being “loyal” and “trustworthy.”

If that’s what toiling in the bureaucracy is like, maybe you’d think about taking the big severance package, even if it sounds too good to be true. Which it is.

Musk’s associates have apparently taken over OPM, according to a rundown from Wired and a Reddit post by someone claiming to be an anonymous OPM staffer. Chief of staff Amanda Scales worked for Musk’s AI firm; a former Tesla and Boring Company engineer is a senior adviser. Memos written by OPM had metadata revealing the authors as Project 2025 authors and conservative think-tank veterans. The previous chief information officer was reassigned just a week into starting at the agency, apparently because he wouldn’t set up this distribution list to all federal employees. (According to the Redditor, that’s been set up on a separate server that looks like it’s coming from OPM.)

Trump, of course, wants to replace career civil service employees with his own lackeys. Elon may just be trying to help. But Elon has a history of mass firings of employees. He seems to view his employees not as resources but as cost, and one of his first go-to strategies for handling too much cost is an indiscriminate mass firing of employees. You probably remember all the layoffs at Twitter, which didn’t appear to do Twitter any good. Last year he laid off 10 percent of the global workforce of Tesla. A report by Reuters found that Musk damaged parts of his company and mightily pissed of contracted vendors as a result. Later he went on a hiring spree to replace people he had laid off. Genius. But given Musk’s history, someone capable of finding a good job elsewhere might think twice about working for Musk.

It’s also the case that Trump doesn’t like work-from-home arrangements and had ordered all employees to return to the office. However, in many cases work-from-home was written into Union contracts. David Dayen writes that some federal agencies have already rejected Trump’s back-to-the-office order for that reason.

It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of federal civil service employees already have resumes in circulation, in hopes of finding a new job rather than continue to work for Captain Chaos. But I’d still be really cautious about going along with anything Musk/Trump proposes.

In other news:

Trump plans to cancel visas and deport all non-citizen students and others who took part in pro-Palestinian protests last summer. Reuters reports,

A fact sheet on the order promises “immediate action” by the Justice Department to prosecute “terroristic threats, arson, vandalism and violence against American Jews” and marshal all federal resources to combat what it called “the explosion of antisemitism on our campuses and streets” since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump said in the fact sheet.

“I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Trump is Netanyahu’s boy.

In more other news: Today RFK the Lesser reported to the Senate for confirmation hearings. I haven’t been watching, but the reviews have not been kind. Among other things, Lesser believes Americans don’t like Medicaid because “the premiums are too high.” Um, there are no premiums, Lesser.

Update: The hits keep coming — Trump plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a migrant camp.

In light of Trump’s unprecedented freeze on nearly all federal spending other than the salaries of federal employees, Social Security, Medicare, and the U.S. military, I’ve been studying up on the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. All those years ago, President Richard Nixon had a practice of impounding, or refusing to spend, money appropriated by Congress for programs he didn’t like. In at least one case, he had vetoed the bill appropriating the money, but Congress overrode his veto.

Other presidents before Nixon held back on spending appropriated money, but it appears that in at least some cases the objective desired by Congress didn’t require all the money appropriated. Or, in some cases circumstances changed, making the appropriation unnecessary. For example, during Thomas Jefferson’s administration Congress appropriated money for some gunboats to put down some kind of lawlessness on the Mississippi River. But Jefferson decided “The favorable and peaceable turn of affairs on the Mississippi rendered an immediate execution of that law unnecessary.” The 1974 law was sustained and strengthened by the Supreme Court in Train v. City of New York, 420 U.S. 35 (1975).

It’s my understanding that the 1974 act provides a means for a President to inform Congress if he really believes that not all appropriated money needs to be spent to secure what Congress wants. but Congress then has to agree the POTUS doesn’t have to spend it. A lot of presidents ever since have complained that the required procedures for not spending money are cumbersome, and a bit more flexibility would be nice. But Congress has the power of the purse, and presidents are not supposed to unilaterally substitute their own judgment for what Congress has decided to spend money on.

Here is the memo that was sent out last night announcing the freeze. I like this part especially.

Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending “wokeness” and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again. The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.

Among the apparently frozen programs are two that affect my day-to-day life, Medicaid and housing assistance grants. Earlier today all the Medicaid portals in all 50 states went down. The White House is claiming this has nothing to do with the freeze, and the portals will all be back online shortly. But if Medicaid payments are frozen, how are reimbursements supposed to go out? Is my Eliquis going to go back to costing $175 a month? What if I need a medical procedure I can’t afford? You understand my concern, I’m sure. And I’m thinking also of the majority of nursing home patients, whose bills are paid by Medicaid. What happens to them?

And the owner of the apartment building I live in gets a housing assistance grant that, I understand, makes up the difference between the reduced rents we seniors are paying here and what the apartments would rent for on the current rental market. I don’t know how the grant money is paid, but I assume there’s a limit to how long he can go without getting it.

Josh Marshall writes,

So I write the following with the caveat that everything in the unfolding Trump administration is cloaked in secrecy and uncertain from one moment to the next. But overnight President Trump kicked off a what can only be called both a wide-ranging constitutional crisis and also very likely a fiscal crisis. He has unilaterally halted – as of 5 pm this evening, according to an executive memorandum first reported by independent journalist Marisa Kabas – all “grant, loan and federal assistance programs” for at least 90 days. This appears to include everything the federal government does beyond the salaries of federal employees, direct checks to Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries and the US military. Mainstream media journalists are calling this “temporary” or a “pause”. But that’s like saying you’re “temporarily” shutting down Congress or “pausing” elections. “Temporary” isn’t a meaningful term in this case. It’s hard to think through everything affected. Already the halt to USAID budgets has cut off funding for the prison guards holding 9,500 ISIS prisoners in northeastern Syria, according to Syria expert Charles Lister. Cancer research, major parts of every state’s budget, the grants that keep the local daycare center running. This hits basically everything.

I’m seeing posts on Bluesky saying that the Small Business Administration loans for disaster relief in places like Los Angeles and North Carolina have been frozen, too.

This happened so suddenly it may take a few days for people to realize it happened. But what was announced yesterday was just a phase of the freeze. It had begun earlier.

On Inauguration Day, Trump ordered a 90-day pause in almost all foreign aid to give the administration a chance to ensure that it fits with its priorities. “The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values,” the executive order read.

Then on Friday, the State Department issued a “stop-work” order that surprised global health experts by stopping funds for not only future aid projects but also existing programs.

Over the weekend, USAID staff were told in an email by Ken Jackson, assistant to the administrator for management and resources, that the “pause on all foreign assistance means a complete halt” and that USAID staff should help ensure that aid work aligns with Trump’s America First policy and that staff who to ignore these orders could be disciplined. NPR obtained a copy of the email.

Some USAID staff have already been laid off for allegedly trying to get around this executive order.

Trump had also already “paused” “the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.” All of this is supposed to be about everything being paused until the Administration can review the spending and decide if it should continue. But one, that’s not really the Administration’s job in the case of congressional appropriations. And two, a review of federal spending is not a bad thing, but the freeze wasn’t necessary to do that.

Russell Berman writes in The Atlantic that the Trump Administration plans to argue that the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 is unconstitutional. They can certainly argue that, but they might want to have waited for a court’s opinion before going ahead with impoundment.

Berman interviews a bunch of people who say that what the Administration is doing is certainly illegal, and they believe the courts, including the SCOTUS, will rule against Trump on this issue. However, it would have been better if Congressional Republicans rose up to stop him, and so far that doesn’t seem to be happening. And until there’s a court decision all kinds of people are going to be in all kinds of limbo, waiting to know what’s going to happen with programs they depend on.

The Washington Post (sorry I’m out of gift articles for the month) is reporting now that the White House says the new freeze was only intended for foreign aid and DEI programs. That’s not what the memo says, but whatever. WaPo continued,

It appears the Colombian Crisis is over. I take it there was much bellowing and snorting and pawing of hooves on both sides for several hours. Now the news is that Colombia is accepting the migrant flights, and Trump backed down from the sanctions. News reports since the crisis began have been inconsistent. As I understand it, Colombia never said it would not take back its people; the issue was about how Trump was sending them. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia at one point offered to send his own presidential jet to bring the migrants back. That didn’t work for Trump. I hope eventually we get the whole story, which I don’t think we’ve heard yet.

U.S. Tech stocks plummeted like a rock because of something happening in China related to AI. The tech bros must be having a sad. I’ve yet to understand what the big deal is about AI; I think it’s being overhyped.

Philip Bump is one of my favorite writers still working for the Washington Post. Today he writes The gutting of American institutions has led to Trump gutting America itself. Here’s just a bit —

Trump has never really understood the presidency. He came to the office in 2017 from the Trump Organization, far more a monarchy than a democracy. In his previous perch, he said what was going to happen and it happened. He chafed at the balance of powers in D.C. that allowed both Congress and the Supreme Court to weigh in on what he did. He also didn’t understand or didn’t accept that the nature of his role was temporary — that he was chosen as four-year steward of something bigger than himself. Trump treated the office and its trappings as his own, which culminated in his attempt to block Joe Biden from (rightfully) ascending to a presidency that Trump considered his own.

This has been my impression all along. Trump doesn’t know how to function except as a dictator. He decides what’s important; he hands out orders; he expects people to follow his orders. His much-hyped deal-making skills only ever consisted of lying and bullying. And we see that in yesterday’s Colombia Crisis. Under any other president none of that would have happened. A normal administration would have worked with the government of Colombia in returning the migrants, not just send them in handcuffs on military planes, apparently with no advance warning, and then have a snit when Colombia didn’t accept the flights.

See also In Exacting Retribution, Trump Aims at the Future as Well as the Past by, um, a bunch of people at the New York times. Everything Trump is doing is about exacting retribution and eliminating the guardrails that get in the way of his absolute power.

For example, Trump has been dismantling the public health section of the federal government. This is probably mostly personal — in his mind, they made him look bad during Covid. It’s probably also the case that his ignorant ass doesn’t grasp what the public health section does, and he thinks cutting it would save money. If you want to be scared to death, read up on the Marburg virus and all the ways the U.S. is not prepared to stop it, thanks to Trump.

More stuff to read:

Garrett Epps, Washington Monthly, Trump’s Flaming Turd of an Argument for Ending Birthright Citizenship.

Interesting — Dems are considering flipping the script and holding the debt ceiling hostage to limit Trump’s agenda.

More about the Friday night massacre of inspectors general by Michael Tomasky at The New Republic.

Miz Lindsey has boldly declared that pardoning the violent J6 defendants was a mistake. However, he’s siding with Trump on birthright citizenship. “I think it’s a cheap way to award citizenship,” he said. “You should not be a citizen simple because you were born here.”

So how did you get to be a citizen, Miz Lindsey? Is he proposing that nobody gets to be a citizen until they’ve passed some kind of qualification test?

Of course, what he’s complaining about are the parents, not the children. Through most of U.S. history all kinds of odd people showed up here without being sorted into “legal” or “illegal” piles. But until the 14th Amendment citizenship was assumed to belong only to white people.

Do read What ending birthright citizenship could look like in the U.S. in the Washington Post. We’d need a whole new bureaucracy to check out birth records. And it would create a huge pool of undocumented, and probably stateless residents. It’s a “solution” to a non-problem that would cause many bigger problems.

Update: Trump is picking fights with Colombia because Colombia refused to allow two U.S. military planes presumably full of Colombian nationals being deported from the U.S. to land there. (The Biden administration was using chartered commercial jets to fly people being deported back to their countries of origin, which I understand is actually a lot cheaper.) Colombian President Gustavo Petro appears to have been primarily objecting to a U.S. military plane flying into his country without advance notice. Why Trump is insisting on military planes and not chartered flights isn’t clear to me. Maybe he thinks military planes are more cool. Anyway, Mexico refused to allow a U.S. military plane to land yesterday, but apparently that issue was smoothed over. The issue may have been that Trump didn’t get permission in advance to land the plane.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced he had blocked two US military flights carrying migrants heading toward the country and called on the United States to establish better protocols in its treatment of migrants. Petro also left the door open to receiving repatriated migrants traveling on civilian planes.

Following Petro’s announcement, Trump criticized him on social media while announcing a slate of new sanctions and policies targeting Colombia, including a 25% tariff on all imports from the country, a “travel ban” for Colombian citizens, and a revocation of visas for Colombian officials in the US along with “all allies and supporters.”

Anyway, instead of just working out some arrangement that was more comfortable for Colombia, Trump is throwing fits and punishing Colombia for not doing things his way.

According to Google’s AI overview, which I don’t entirely trust, “The primary imports from Colombia to the United States include crude petroleum, coal, coffee, cut flowers, gold, refined petroleum, vehicles, machinery, electrical equipment, pharmaceuticals, and agricultural goods like corn, with the US being the largest importer of Colombian goods overall.” It mentions corn, but the big one is COFFEE. More than 25 percent of the COFFEE we drink here comes from Colombia.

The new Big Lie among the MAGAts is that there is no such thing as “Palestinians.” The story being circulated on the Right (apparently originating here) is that the “Palestinians” are a made-up people invented by Soviet propagandists during the Cold War. They’re really just Arab Muslims who settled in the area that is now Gaza and Israel over the past couple of centuries, the story goes.

This claim began to circulate yesterday after Trump proposed moving all the Palestinians out of Gaza and resettling them in Egypt or Jordan. What Egypt and Jordan think of this plan, I do not know. I doubt they will comply, so this proposal is unlikely to go anywhere. I’m also waiting to see what Juan Cole has to say about it. Netanyahu and the hard right in Israel are ecstatic, of course.

Trump also lifted the hold placed by President Biden on  on sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. I wonder what all those Muslim Americans in Michigan who voted for Trump are thinking now. Hmmm.

FYI, the name “Palestine” appears to have been coined by the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century BCE to designate a district of Syria between Phoenicia and Egypt. In the 2nd century CE the Roman Empire renamed its province of Judea as :Syria Palestinia. The Romans were suppressing the Jews at the time, of course. So the name has been around for a while. The Palestinian people are said to be the descendants of the ancient Canaanites, although in the Middle East everybody’s DNA is pretty much all mixed up now, so everybody is a descendent of just about everything that was ever there.

Of course, anyone paying attention to Trump over the past few years could see something like this coming for miles and miles. I’m sorry that Joe Biden’s Gaza policies turned out to be a mess, but as I’ve argued  earlier we cannot know what Kamala Harris’s policies would have been. Vice Presidents are more or less gagged about splitting with the POTUS on foreign policy, especially while delicate negotiations are going on. She at least was on record as supporting a two-state solution, which Trump does not. Trump wants whatever Netanyahu wants, and he was clear about that during the 2024 campaign to anyone paying attention.

I see that there were some pro-Palestinian protests of Trump yesterday in Chicago; whether this was before or after he announced his plan about clearing out Gaza, I do not know. But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for all those tools who were out protesting “genocide Joe” to be just as fervently opposed to Trump’s Gaza policies, no matter how cruel. “genocide Donald” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. No fun.

Last night’s Senate vote to confirm the colossally unqualified Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense reminded me a bit of the disastrous 2002 Iraq War resolution vote. A bunch of Democrats who should have known better voted for the resolution. Apparently they thought a no vote would hurt them politically. But at least a few of them — John Kerry and Hillary Clinton in particular — probably regretted that vote later, and not just because the Iraq War was plainly wrong. IMO Kerry and Clinton would have had a better chance in their presidential bids were it not for that vote. I believe that vote cooled Democratic enthusiasm for Kerry in 2004 and was part of what cost Clinton the nomination in 2008. Not that I mind that Clinton lost the nomination in 2008.

Hegseth could seriously screw up the military, and not just because he might be making critical decisions with the help of his good friend Jim Beam. Discouraging women and LGBTQ folks from serving will reduce the ranks quite a bit, I suspect. (See Women, gays, transgender and queer Americans serve in the military because men won’t.) Hegseth also thinks the U.S. military is just way too woke about war crimes, and if we don’t let our boys (note masculine pronoun) massacre civilians now and then we’re holding them back from being warriors, or something. I hate to think about the quality of the recruits over the next four years. We could end up with a military full of Trumpy incels. We’d be doomed.

So all those spineless Republicans who confirmed Hegseth in spite of his obvious inadequacies for the job are counting on him not screwing up so much that their low-information voters notice. Otherwise, that confirmation vote could come back to bite them. We’ll see.

Of course, it’s also the case that Hegseth’s nomination chances probably improved because of Trump’s mass pardon of the J6 thugs. It appears now that Trump can unleash mobs of brownshirts on the Capitol whenever he likes and neither he (thanks to the Supreme Court) nor they will be held accountable.

The atrocities continue. From WaPo:

The White House late Friday fired the independent inspectors general of at least 12 major federal agencies in a 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 by emails from the White House personnel director that they had been terminated immediately, according to people familiar with the actions, who like others in this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private messages.

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 affected agencies were the departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Energy, Commerce and Agriculture, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration. Some of these people had been appointed during Trump’s first term. Oddly, the purge overlooked the inspector general of the Justice Department, an Obama appointee. Maybe Trump hasn’t figured out a way to monetize Justice for his personal benefit yet.

As far as the law is concerned — what law? The Supreme Court said Trump doesn’t have to obey laws.

On the deportation front, in spite of the White House making a big show of ICE raids, so far he hasn’t actually deported that many people.

A federal judge has blocked Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship. Federal District Court judge, John C. Coughenour called Trump’s order “blatantly unconstitutional.”

“Frankly,” he continued, challenging Trump administration lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.”

Twenty-two states have challenged the order in court, which suggests that if Congress did try to amend the Constitution in the normal way, it would fall short of the 38 states needed for ratification. I assume Trump will appeal up to the Supreme Court eventually, and then we’ll see how many of the so-called “originalists” are prepared to flush the Constitution down the toilet on Trump’s say-so.

One of the most disturbing thing I’ve seen today is at Washington Monthly,  Three Disturbing Signs of Fourth Estate Failure by Bill Scher. And may I add that fourth estate failure in regard to Trump is hardly new. But, basically, a lot of news outlets are tip-toeing around the current radicalism rather than calling it out plainly, and Scher provides some examples. I’ve seen others. I read today that CNN is laying off many employees and re-working its schedule and news approach, and somehow I doubt any of this will give CNN’s coverage of Trump a spine. CNN’s political coverage has been mostly useless for a long time, as far as I’m concerned.  Possibly now it will be even more useless.

We still have the MSNBC evening lineup, and Trump is vowing to shut the network down. And I bet he will try.

Meanwhile, Trump has begun dismantling the National Institute of Health.

President Donald Trump’s return to the White House is already having a big impact at the $47.4 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), with the new administration imposing a wide range of restrictions, including the abrupt cancellation of meetings including grant review panels. Officials have also ordered a communications pause, a freeze on hiring, and an indefinite ban on travel.

The moves have generated extensive confusion and uncertainty at the nation’s largest research agency, which has become a target for Trump’s political allies. “The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating,” one senior NIH employee says. …

… Separately, HHS announced a communications ban through 1 February in a memo issued yesterday. (The Washington Post and Associated Press first reported the memo’s existence.) It orders a stop on the publishing of regulations, guidance documents, grant announcements, social media posts, press releases, and other “communications,” and the canceling of speaking engagements. Any exceptions must be applied for and approved through the president’s appointees.

So they’re muzzled, just in time for a bird flu pandemic to slam into us. Also there’s a “hiatus” on medical research funding. This hasn’t been widely reported, but Talking Points Memo is getting it from medical researchers.

And all of this is just the tip of a big iceberg. But we can always lighten it up by laughing at Marjorie Taylor Greene. Today she’s slamming the UK for refusing to comply with the name change of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. She is pushing to get Congress to pass a law making the change, because she thinks this will force other countries to comply.

The blowback begins. A number of news stories today say that Trump’s blanket pardon for nearly all J6 convicts caught a lot of Republicans off guard. I don’t know why; it certainly didn’t surprise me. I would have been more surprised if he’d only pardoned a few of them. But apparently a lot of Republicans had been confident the rioters who had assaulted the police would remain in jail. And now they’re flapping around trying to decide what would hurt them more politically — supporting the release of violent criminals who assaulted cops or disagreeing with Trump. Miz Lindsey says he’ll have something to say by the weekend. Police unions that had endorsed Trump criticized the move. Even the Wall Street Journal is miffed about it, I hear. After all this time, they still are trying to see Trump as a better man than he obviously is.

And if any of those freed rioters does any harm whatsoever to anyone else, the Dems had better hang that around Trump’s neck with lead weights.

But I mostly want to talk about birthright citizenship today. I was seeing all kinds of disinfo on social media claiming that “birthright citizenship” is only available to people who can give full allegiance to the U.S. I found out this allegiance talk is coming from the Nazi Heritage Foundation. And I’m having a hard time understanding now a newborn baby has any allegiances at all, other than to Momma. But I’ll come back to this.

Regarding illegal aliens, note that when the 14th Amendment was passed by Congress and ratified — in 1866 and 1868 — there was no such thing as an “illegal alien.” There couldn’t be, because there were no federal immigration laws. Anyone who got off a boat onto these shores from anywhere had a right to be here, as far as federal law was concerned. Newcomers needed no permission, no papers, no clearances of any sort. I believe the first law restricting immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Here’s an article on The Birth of ‘Illegal’ Immigration that’s worth checking out.

The larger point is that the politicians who drafted the 14th couldn’t possibly have been concerned about whether babies were being born to “illegal aliens,” because there was no such thing in 1866.

The Heritage Foundation is claiming that the 14th didn’t cover people who were citizens of other countries who came here and had children. But technically, nearly everyone who showed up here from somewhere else was still a citizen of another country, unless they’d be banished or something. And there was no naturalization process. You just showed up and started living here. If you follow the Heritage logic, no one could be a citizen until they were second generation.

The 14th Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Heritage hangs a lot of their argument on the word “jurisdiction.” They are blowing smoke about different kinds of jurisdiction and which ones require allegiance to a “sovereign.” I didn’t know we had a sovereign.

Heritage does mention the Supreme Court case that settled what “jurisdiction” means in the 14th, which is United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898). According to Heritage, the Wong Kim Ark case involved a man born in the U.S. whose parents were “lawful permanent residents.” Unfortunately for Heritage one can find the text of the Wong Kim Ark decision online. It begins,

A child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China,…

So, yeah, they were not here illegally, because there were no immigration laws when they arrived. But they were considered subjects of the Emperor of China, which kind of kills the “allegiance” theory, seems to me.

Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873 to immigrant parents. His parents returned to China when he was a teenager, but Wong Kim Ark remained in California. In 1895 he visited his family in China, but when he came back to the U.S. he was denied entry because he was obviously of Chinese ethnicity, and the Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect.  Per the National Archives,

His appeal eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court resulting in the 1898 precedent-setting ruling affirming birthright citizenship and protecting U.S.- born descendants of immigrants from being denied this citizenship, regardless of the ethnicity, nationality, or status of their parents.

Notarized paper that affirmed Wong Kim Ark was born in the U.S.

The Wong Kim Ark decision goes on and on about jurisdiction, and it’s clear in context the justices interpreted “jurisdiction” to mean “within the jurisdiction of U.S. law.” For this reason, babies born to diplomats assigned to a foreign embassy within the U.S. don’t get to be U.S. citizens, because the parents are not subject to U.S. law. And originally the decision excluded Native Americans born on reservations, because reservations have a special status apart from U.S. law. An act of Congress corrected that several decades ago, so that Native Americans born on reservations are citizens now..

Otherwise, if you are in the United States, legally or otherwise, you are subject to U.S. law, and if you have a baby here the baby can claim citizenship. This is not really all that complicated. The Nazi Heritage Foundation can blow all the smoke it likes about sovereign allegiances and all the different varieties of “jurisdiction.” Any court that tries to overturn Wong Kim Ark is wrong, and corrupted. End of argument.

In other news: In the spirit of “let’s see what the Creature has been up to while I was writing this,”  — You’ll like this one —

President Trump on Wednesday revoked a 60-year-old executive order banning discrimination in hiring practices in the federal government, his latest action aimed at gutting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

His order, which the White House called “the most important federal civil rights measure in decades,” revokes Executive Order 11246 signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. It prohibited discriminatory practices in hiring and employment in government contracting and asserted the government’s commitment to affirmative action.

In other words Only White Men Need Apply.

Trump is also having one of his signature prolonged temper tantrums over remarks made in a prayer service in the National Cathedral by the Right Rev Mariann Budde, Bishop of the District of Columbia and part of Maryland. This was part of a prayer service that was an official inauguration activity, and Trump with Melania and J.D. Vance and his wife were in attendance. Here is the part of the sermon that seems to have set him off —

If you want to watch the entire sermon, here it is. Anyway, Trump has demanded an apology from the Bishop. Further,

Trump hit back in the early hours of Wednesday on his social media platform Truth Social, calling Budde a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” who is “not very good at her job” and demanding an apology.
“She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart,” he said.

“Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one,” he added.

The Bishop shouldn’t worry. In spite of the National Cathedral’s charter, it’s run by the Episcopal Church, not the government. So Trump can’t fire her for being a DEI hire and replace her with a man.

I’m still mostly ignoring news. I watched Maddow last night, and that was it. I couldn’t help but catch some headlines today, though. The Great Orange Moron has in fact directed the Department of the Interior to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in all official communications. Although maybe not all of it.

As such, within 30 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of the Interior shall, consistent with 43 U.S.C. 364 through 364f, take all appropriate actions to rename as the “Gulf of America” the U.S. Continental Shelf area bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba in the area formerly named as the Gulf of Mexico.  The Secretary shall subsequently update the GNIS to reflect the renaming of the Gulf and remove all references to the Gulf of Mexico from the GNIS, consistent with applicable law.  

I trust the rest of the world will continue to call the entire body of water the Gulf of Mexico. But I’m thinking of U.S. map and textbook publishers right now. I can see the staff putting together some el-hi social study series wondering if they have to scrap all the Western Hemisphere maps already. I’m betting they won’t, unless specific state editions (like Texas and Florida) require it. The California textbook board might object and want to keep Gulf of Mexico in California editions, though. This’ll be fun.

I also saw headlines saying that Trump was halting programs to lower prescription drug prices, especially for people on Medicare and Medicaid. Since I’m on Medicare and finally got on Medicaid too, this concerned me. I see that what happened is that Trump recalled a Biden directive to develop ways to lower prescription drug prices that hadn’t been fully put into effect yet, so for now there shouldn’t be any changes to current prices. What concerns me is that Trump and the wackadoo Congress will eliminate the government negotiation of drug prices under the Inflation Reduction Act.

And as expected he is trying to end birthright citizenship by executive order. Several states and organizations have already filed lawsuits to stop that from going into effect.

Trump says he wants a 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico to go into effect on February 1, but I’m not sure he’s issued that directive yet. I’m sure Canada and Mexico are prepared to retaliate.

Did I mention that a one-dozen carton of store-brand eggs at the local ShopRite grocery was $6.49 today? If you wanted name brand, or anything “free range,” think $8 to $9 a dozen. And the bird flu is spreading, I understand.

And the January 6 pardons are an atrocity, of course. May they all get bird flu.