Overnight, Wired reported that, contrary to published reports that DOGE operatives at the Treasury Department are limited to “read only” access to department payment systems, this is not true. A 25-year-old DOGE operative named Marko Elez in fact has admin privileges on these critical systems, which directly control and pay out roughly 95% of payments made by the U.S. government, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and virtually all contract payments. I can independently confirm these details based on conversations going back to the weekend. I can further report that Elez not only has full access to these systems, he has already made extensive changes to the code base for these critical payment system.
OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell released a memo this afternoon to agency heads which says that “provisions of collective bargaining agreements that conflict with management rights are unlawful and unenforceable.” The memo addresses telework issues. At least for now the memo remains online on this government server. The title of the memo is ‘Guidance on Collective Bargaining Obligations in Connection with Return to InPerson Work’.
I called Senator Warner’s office to get a sense for what they are doing to raise the salience of Elon Musk’s illegal takeover of the Treasury Payments system.
The very polite staffer said that Senator Warner will be issuing a statement soon. She politely explained that this is how members of Congress communicate their position.
Dude, these people are just lost. They don’t get it or don’t want to get it.
There are many ways to skin a cat. But statements that go out via press release are meaningless. That is no longer how news works. Full stop.
I wrote a series of posts over the weekend about how to make sense, politically, strategically and even emotionally of the unfolding crisis of governance in DC. Here’s a piece about messaging and morale and another on Trump and Musk’s “shock and awe” strategies. After reading those posts, a number of TPM Readers have asked, okay, what are we supposed to do? Or what are our electeds supposed to do? I want to dig into this more later, but in this post I want to give as best a quick answer to that as I can.
We start with a piece in this morning’s Punchbowl which is simultaneously encouraging and gobsmackingly disheartening. The headline reads: Democrats ask: Why would we help Trump and the Republicans?. Most of you are probably thinking, you’re just getting to this question, guys? Well, they are. As they should, though it’s far more tentative than it should be. I suspect that’s about to change.
Let’s repeat the core fact. Republicans are in charge. As I explained here, the levers Democrats have over any of this are very limited. This is fundamentally a battle over public opinion, one in which the opposition needs to be making the case about the disastrousness of Trump’s policies. But there are levers. And they need to use them. Because even those tiny levers are key to that larger battle. Talk in itself is meaningless. Begging especially is meaningless. In fact, on its own it can be demoralizing — same old, same old, just performatively illustrating either the inability or unwillingness to act.
Right now in Washington, DC, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dominating literally everything. That will start changing quickly, at least in a limited way, in the courts. But the overriding need is for Democrats to get a seat at the table. And they can do that in several ways. The biggest way is that Republicans will need help to pass a budget and raise the debt ceiling. The rubber starts meeting the road on that front next month. Real soon. You can talk as much as you want. But the White House and congressional Republicans absolutely need that help. And Democrats need to be crystal clear that the answer is absolutely no help — without meeting their conditions. That’s where you get the seat at the table.
“They say that, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge To which a scoundrel clings’ Steal a little and they throw you in jail Steal a lot and they make you king”
– Bob Dylan, Sweetheart Like You
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“He may be wading into areas that will be congressional authority, period,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) acknowledged to TPM, before insisting that some unknown force will stop Musk from exercising that authority.
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