DOGE has made landfall at the National Endowment for the Humanities. They are demanding roughly $175 million out of an annual grant budget of just over $200 million and fire about 80% of state. In internal conversations the new bosses apparently speak of “select opportunities” soon to be offered to favored organizations. That sounds to me like we might be looking at new grants to Breitbart and such but perhaps I’m just being alarmist. The DOGE commissar assigned to NEH is Justin Fox.
Two thoughts on today’s tariffs. I could get into the substance of the decision. But I think that goes without saying.
Point one is that we should remember that Presidents have no inherent power over tariffs whatsoever. This isn’t like war powers or pardons where these are questions the Constitution assigns to the will of one person. They are entirely delegated by Congress and could be taken back at any moment. They are also explicitly reserved for emergencies. They aren’t meant to be used as to create entirely novel trade regimes. But Congress lets the President decide what constitutes an emergency. The logic of that delegation is based on the flexibility and convenience the delegation creates and the assumption that the president wouldn’t be nuts. The Republican Congress could bring this absurd gambit to a halt tonight. So it’s all on them, every one of them individually.
Chicago is … where Josh and Kate are headed for the next live show! Chicago was the leading vote-getter in our poll asking you where we should head next, with 23.5% of the vote.
The live show will be Wednesday, May 14th. Tickets will go on sale this Friday, April 4th at 10 a.m. Eastern. If you are a Prime member, you’ll receive an email with discounted tickets.
We hope you’ll came hang out with us for a few hours. In addition to the the live edition of the Josh Marshall Podcast featuring Kate Riga, there will be a Q&A session and a cocktail hour after the show where you can chat with our podcasters and other TPMers as well.
So is Elon really out, as the White House is claiming to beltway news outlets? Don’t bet on it.
First of all, he’s almost certainly not leaving DOGE.
Second of all, it would hardly matter if he did. He’ll keep running DOGE even if he nominally steps aside. Remember that at least in terms of what his minions are telling federal judges he doesn’t even run it now. The entire entity is run by his deputies and powered by the fear of his money and his power. He couldn’t stop running it without dismantling it. And of course neither is going to happen.
I want to circle back to the series of posts I did in the last few days about people with disabilities on SSI whose Social Security portals were showing that they were no longer Social Security recipients. As I noted, the people whose payments seemed like they might be a little late all ended up receiving their payments overnight Monday into Tuesday. That still left the fact that people’s portals showed they were not in fact recipients on top of their payment histories disappearing. Well, around mid-afternoon eastern yesterday those messages disappeared from the portals. In other words, everything went back to how it had always been. There was no language saying recipients were not recipients and people’s payment history reappeared.
In the first weeks of the administration, I wrote a number of pieces on the shuttering of PRAMS (the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System), a decades-old data collection and analysis program at CDC tracking infant and maternal health from pregnancy through childbirth and postpartum. It’s a critical source of data across time, affluence, demographic groups, etc. It was shuttered, as I eventually learned, because of the President’s “DEI” executive order. Various of the questions didn’t pass muster under the White House’s standards of what counted as DEI. It wasn’t clear if the shuttering was in effect permanent or whether the program might come back after undergoing some kind of DEI cleanse. Then a couple weeks ago I learned that it was in the process of being resurrected. Some questions were stripped out, but not as many as feared. It also seemed like some data from the disruption period might not be recoverable. There was a lot of work in terms of new IRB reviews and things like that. But it seemed on the way to coming back. Today all CDC employees who worked at PRAMS were terminated (RIF’d). So while there hasn’t been any official announcement that the program is permanently shuttered, all the people who ran it are out as of today.
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Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, obtained private emails that show the acting commissioner of Social Security purposely canceled contracts the Social Security Administration holds with the state of Maine as some sort of political payback against Democratic Gov. Janet Mills.
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