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12:15 PM ET, January 29, 2025

memeorandum

 Top Items: 
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.
RELATED:
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” …
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 …
Popular Information:
New Trump memo claims authority to ignore Congress  —  On Monday, the Trump administration issued an extraordinary memo ordering federal agencies to indefinitely freeze the “disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.”  The freeze was scheduled to take effect at 5 PM on Tuesday …
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: Palo Alto Online
Axios:
Scoop: Trump offering buyouts to all federal workers, source says … We're five years past COVID and just 6 percent of federal employees work full-time in office.  That is unacceptable," a senior administration official tells Axios.
Associated Press:
Trump offering federal workers buyouts with about 8 months' pay in effort to shrink government
Punchbowl News:   1/29/25 ☀️ AM:  —  Dems were in the dumps - until Trump helped them out
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:
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 …
Shane Goldmacher / New York Times:
Powerless, Democrats Debate Just How Deep in the Wilderness They Are
Discussion: HotAir
MPR News:
Doron Clark wins Senate special election, DFLers take back the Minnesota Senate
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:
Andrew Prokop / Vox:
Trump and Musk's plan for a massive purge of the federal workforce, explained
Discussion: RedState and Hollywood Life
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.”
Discussion: Jerusalem Post, PinkNews and Twitchy
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 …
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:
Zack Beauchamp / Vox:
Trump is already acting like a king
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 …
RELATED:
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 …
Politico:
DOJ moves to drop prosecution of former Trump co-defendants in classified documents case  —  The request offered no explanation for the Justice Department's decision to abandon the case against the two Trump allies.  —  The Justice Department on Wednesday moved to drop its effort …
Discussion: CNN, CNBC, CBS News, Reuters and Associated Press
RELATED:
Zoe Tillman / Bloomberg:
DOJ Drops Push to Prosecute Trump Associates in Records Case
Discussion: Axios, The Hill and Raw Story
New York Times:
Trump's Order on Transgender Troops Will Likely Ban Their Service, Again  —  In an executive order issued Monday night, the president said transgender service members “cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary” for the military.  —  Hours after President Trump signed …
RELATED:
The White House:
Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation
Nicholas Florko / The Atlantic:
This Is About More Than RFK Jr.  —  A day for pseudoscience in Congress  —  Shortly after birth, newborns in the United States receive a few quick procedures: an Apgar test to check their vitals, a heel stick to probe for genetic disorders and various other conditions, and in most cases, a hepatitis B vaccine.
RELATED:
Sheryl Gay Stolberg / New York Times:
RFK Jr., Trump's Pick for Health Secretary, Faces First Senate Confirmation Hearing
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.
Lisa Rein / Washington Post:
How Trump is stretching laws to make the federal government more political  —  The White House is exploiting, and sometimes outright ignoring, the arcane laws, rules and regulations that have long protected the civil service of 2.3 million from a political takeover.
RELATED:
Evan McMorris-Santoro / NOTUS:   Trump's White House Is Flooding the Zone With Legal Tests
Fox News:
Pentagon pulling Gen. Milley's security detail and clearance ‘immediately,’ may face demotion in retirement  —  EXCLUSIVE: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will announce he is “immediately pulling” retired Gen. Mark Milley's personal security detail and security clearance, multiple senior administration officials tell Fox News.
RELATED:
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
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 and Associated Press
Politico:
‘It was leaked to us:’ Army in chaos over Trump orders  —  Confusion around the new administration's spending freezes and executive orders has caused disarray inside the Pentagon.  —  The Army rushed to satisfy President Donald Trump's executive orders this week, sparking so much confusion …
David R. Lurie / Public Notice:
Trump's chaos governance failed once.  He's trying it again.  —  He's breaking eggs while ignoring their price. … ✈️ ⛈️ 🚁  —  Pundits spent the past week expressing wonderment at how Donald Trump has lumbered back into the White House with a massive show of dominance and power.
Discussion: WisPolitics
 
 
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 More Items: 
Jennifer Rubin / The Contrarian:
The Human Cost of Frozen Funds
Discussion: The Hill, STAT and NBC News
Steven Nelson / New York Post:
Trump ordering review to identify, punish and deport antisemites — including students on visas
Discussion: Reuters and Exposing the role …
Kitty Kurth / The Sword And the Sandwich:
Who Goes MAGA?  —  In 1934, a courageous, flawed, complicated journalist named Dorothy Thompson …
Sen. Rick Scott / Washington Examiner:
Tulsi Gabbard is the right person to lead the intelligence community
Discussion: American Prospect
Neetu Arnold / City Journal:
Federal Funding Shouldn't Be Going to Woke University Programs
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
 Earlier Items: 
Punchbowl News:
The best commute to Washington belongs to Jim Justice
Joan Westenberg / The Index:
Trump's PEPFAR Shutdown is White Supremacy in Action
Discussion: New York Times, NPR and them.
Rachel Ulatowski / The Mary Sue:
'Biden's Book Ban Hoax': Department of Education claims book bans are a ‘hoax’ and dismisses all complaints
Discussion: PEN America
Julia Ainsley / NBC News:
Trump administration may pull money from TSA, Coast Guard to help ICE afford costly deportations