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1:05 PM ET, January 29, 2025

memeorandum

 Top Items: 
Vittoria Elliott / Wired:
Elon Musk Lackeys Have Taken Over the Office of Personnel Management  —  Sources tell WIRED that the OPM's top layers of management now include individuals linked to xAI, Neuralink, the Boring Company, and Palantir.  One expert found the takeover reminiscent of Stalin.
RELATED:
Don Moynihan / Can We Still Govern?:
Compelling Mass Civil Servant Resignations Will Create Chaos  —  Elon Musk's role at Twitter represents a Rorschach test for how people think he will fare in restructuring government.  For fans, he was able to cut the majority of the employees, and the site continued to run more or less as before.
Andrew Prokop / Vox:
Trump and Musk's plan for a massive purge of the federal workforce, explained  —  Donald Trump and Elon Musk's sweeping effort to purge and reshape the federal government is underway.  —  Federal employees have arrived at a “fork in the road,” the new administration proclaimed in a Tuesday night announcement.
Discussion: RedState and OutsideTheBeltway
NBC News:
Trump administration will offer all 2 million federal workers a buyout to resign  —  An email is set to go out to federal workers beginning Tuesday.  —  President Donald Trump's administration is set to offer every single federal worker the chance to take a “deferred resignation” …
Associated Press:
Trump offering federal workers buyouts with about 8 months' pay in effort to shrink government
Axios:
Scoop: Trump offering buyouts to all federal workers, source says
Amanda Marcotte / Salon:
“Trump is trying to collapse our economy”: War on “woke” revealed as a war on all Americans  —  Christian nationalists behind the spending shutdown aim to punish everyone, not just imaginary Marxists  —  Initially, the most striking detail in the White House Office of Management and Budget memo …
RELATED:
Timothy Noah / New Republic:
The Reason Why Donald Trump Shut Down His Government  —  Washington's newest pastime is counting the number of impeachable offenses Trump commits in his first 100 days.  It's a parlor game rather than a government proceeding because you don't impeach a president less than three months into his term …
Zack Beauchamp / Vox:
Trump is already acting like a king  —  Late on Monday night, the Trump administration sent out a stunning memo suspending all federal grants.  Chaos followed, with everything from veteran's charities facing financial ruin to reports of Medicaid portals shutting down across the country.
Matthew Yglesias / Slow Boring:
Throw Biden under the bus  —  Sleepy Joe landed us in this mess with bad, selfish decisions  —  When Joe Biden stepped aside in favor of Kamala Harris, the overwhelming majority of Democrats praised him for the decision and painted an overall flattering portrait of Biden's presidency and his career.
Discussion: New Jersey Online
RELATED:
Shane Goldmacher / New York Times:
Powerless, Democrats Debate Just How Deep in the Wilderness They Are
Discussion: HotAir
Brad Reed / Raw Story:
‘Written by children’: Critics slam New York Times' glowing coverage of Trump official  —  White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt received glowing coverage from the New York Times for her press briefing debut despite delivering a performance that other observers have described as an “embarrassment.”
RELATED:
Shawn McCreesh / New York Times:
White House Press Secretary Makes Steely and Unflinching Debut  —  Karoline Leavitt used her first briefing in the role to warn veteran reporters that they were increasingly irrelevant.  —  So much for respecting your elders.  —  Karoline Leavitt, the new White House press secretary …
Hailey Fuchs / Politico:
RFK Jr. is in the hot seat  —  Donald Trump's attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, who represented the president during his first impeachment trial, was voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday morning in a party-line, 12-10 vote.  The former Florida attorney general is expected to be confirmed on the Senate floor.
RELATED:
New York Times:
Live Updates: R.F.K. Jr. Faces Bipartisan Grilling Over Vaccines and Medicaid
Filip Timotija / The Hill:
Former RFK Jr. running mate threatens to primary senators who vote against nomination
New York Times:
Which Federal Programs Are Under Scrutiny?  The Budget Office Named 2,600 of Them.  —  A Trump administration memo sent to U.S. federal agencies Monday night ordered temporary freezes in funding for programs across the government.  It caused widespread confusion among agency officials …
Discussion: Defense One and Palo Alto Online
RELATED:
Popular Information:
New Trump memo claims authority to ignore Congress
Punchbowl News:   1/29/25 ☀️ AM:  —  Dems were in the dumps - until Trump helped them out
Jason Koebler / 404 Media:
OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us  —  The narrative that OpenAI, Microsoft, and freshly minted White House “AI czar” David Sacks are now pushing to explain why DeepSeek was able to create a large language model that outpaces OpenAI's while spending orders …
RELATED:
Financial Times:
OpenAI says it has evidence China's DeepSeek used its model to train competitor  —  White House AI tsar David Sacks raises possibility of alleged intellectual property theft  —  OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company's proprietary models …
Brianne Pfannenstiel / Des Moines Register:
Iowa Democrats flip Senate seat in special election to cut into Republican majority  —  Iowa Democrats have flipped a state Senate seat vacated earlier this year by Chris Cournoyer, who resigned to become the state's new lieutenant governor.  —  Democrat Mike Zimmer has defeated Republican Kate Whittington …
RELATED:
MPR News:
Doron Clark wins Senate special election, DFLers take back the Minnesota Senate
Erica Orden / Politico:
Trump hires new lawyers to appeal his hush money conviction  —  The lawyers will replace Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, who represented Trump during the trial last spring.  —  NEW YORK — President Donald Trump has hired the elite white-shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to appeal his criminal conviction in the Manhattan hush money case.
Discussion: Fox News
RELATED:
Zach Schonfeld / The Hill:
Trump appeals hush money criminal conviction
Discussion: Alternet.org and WHDH-TV
RELATED:
The Guardian:
Trump revokes temporary protected status for 600,000 Venezuelans  —  New DHS secretary Kristi Noem ends extension that allows people to stay if they cannot return safely to home country  —  The Trump administration has revoked an extension of deportation protections that the previous Biden …
Discussion: USA Today and Reuters
RELATED:
Hamed Aleaziz / New York Times:
Trump Officials Revoke Biden's Extension of Protections for Venezuelans
David Corn / Mother Jones:
SCOOP: RFK Jr. Secretly Recorded Second Wife During Divorce and Acknowledged Being “Polygamous”  —  One recording might have violated state law.  It was part of a messy saga that ended with her suicide.  —  In the early 2010s, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went through a contentious divorce with his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy.
CNN:
Trump DOJ appointee in DC lashes out after flurry of ‘personally insulting’ leaks in his first week  —  The acting top federal prosecutor in Washington under President Donald Trump is furious about recent leaks to the press and also specifically directed staff to scrutinize a former official's work …
Discussion: Mediaite
Washington Post:
Rubio backtracks on near-total foreign aid freeze, issues humanitarian waiver  —  The secretary of state, in a memo, approved the continuance of potentially billions of dollars in “life-saving humanitarian assistance.”  Many aid groups are still unsure what that means or whether they are allowed to continue work.
Siobhan Hughes / Wall Street Journal:
Ted Cruz Leads Republican Charge to Defund Consumer-Protection Agency  —  CFPB was created by Democrats in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis  —  WASHINGTON—Republicans, riding high from their election sweep of the House, Senate and White House, are again pushing to hobble …
Daniel Carvalho / Bloomberg:
Bolsonaro Sees ‘Big Trump’ as His Ticket Out of Brazilian Limbo  — The former Brazilian president speaks in a Bloomberg interview  — Bolsonaro wants Trump, Orban, Milei to intervene on his behalf  —  Donald Trump's presence is everywhere in former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's orbit.
Zach Montague / New York Times:
Trump Signs Order Restricting Gender-Affirming Treatments for Minors  —  The directive built on a string of recent actions to roll back federal protections and services for transgender people.  —  President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday taking steps to end gender-affirming medical treatments …
Ashleigh Fields / The Hill:
Florida Republican introduces bill to add Trump to Mount Rushmore  —  Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) introduced a bill Tuesday seeking to add President Trump's face to the Mount Rushmore monument.  —  “His remarkable accomplishments for our country and the success he will continue …
Filip Timotija / The Hill:
House Democrat: Colleagues need to focus on ‘reestablishing our own credibility’  —  Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) sent a message to his colleagues in the Democratic Party, urging them to focus on “reestablishing our own credibility” and to revert from solely “bashing” what President Trump's administration does in response.
 
 
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 More Items: 
Sara Weissman / Inside Higher Ed:
Governor Leaves Indiana's Predominantly Black University Out of Budget
Dana Goldstein / New York Times:
American Children's Reading Skills Reach New Lows
William Kristol / The Bulwark:
Congressional Republicans Prefer Being a Doormat
Jennifer Rubin / The Contrarian:
The Human Cost of Frozen Funds
Discussion: The Hill, STAT and NBC News
Lisa Rein / Washington Post:
How Trump is stretching laws to make the federal government more political
Sen. Rick Scott / Washington Examiner:
Tulsi Gabbard is the right person to lead the intelligence community
Discussion: American Prospect
 Earlier Items: 
Jonathan Cohn / HuffPost:
Trump Administration Scales Back Order To Stop Foreign Assistance
Anna Kutz / The Hill:
Lara Trump: Caroline Kennedy's comments on RFK Jr. ‘disgusting’
Ashley Parker / The Atlantic:
You're So Vain, You Probably Think Kash Patel Hates You
Punchbowl News:
The best commute to Washington belongs to Jim Justice
David R. Lurie / Public Notice:
Trump's chaos governance failed once. He's trying it again.
Discussion: WisPolitics
Fox News:
Pentagon pulling Gen. Milley's security detail and clearance ‘immediately,’ may face demotion in retirement