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12:35 PM ET, January 29, 2025

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 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.
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” …
Axios:
Scoop: Trump offering buyouts to all federal workers, source says
Andrew Prokop / Vox:
Trump and Musk's plan for a massive purge of the federal workforce, explained
Discussion: RedState and OutsideTheBeltway
Associated Press:
Trump offering federal workers buyouts with about 8 months' pay in effort to shrink government
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 …
MPR News:
Doron Clark wins Senate special election, DFLers take back the Minnesota Senate  —  Democrats will regain control of the Minnesota Senate following a convincing special election win Tuesday.  —  DFLer Doron Clark won in the deep-blue Minneapolis district with 90 percent of the vote, according to unofficial results.
Shane Goldmacher / New York Times:
Powerless, Democrats Debate Just How Deep in the Wilderness They Are
Discussion: HotAir
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
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 …
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 …
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
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:
Sheryl Gay Stolberg / New York Times:
RFK Jr., Trump's Pick for Health Secretary, Faces First Senate Confirmation Hearing
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 and Reuters
RELATED:
Zoe Tillman / Bloomberg:
DOJ Drops Push to Prosecute Trump Associates in Records Case
Discussion: Axios, The Hill, Scripps News and Raw Story
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:
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.
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 WHDH-TV
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
The White House:
Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation  —  By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:  —  Section 1.  Policy and Purpose.  Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming …
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
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.
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 …
 
 
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 More Items: 
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
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
 Earlier Items: 
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
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
Fox News:
Pentagon pulling Gen. Milley's security detail and clearance ‘immediately,’ may face demotion in retirement
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
Paramount and YouTube cut a new carriage deal that will keep Paramount channels available on the YouTube TV video service; terms of the deal were not disclosed

Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Spotify struck deals with Universal and Warner for its Music Pro premium plan launch, which offers users song remixing tools and early access to concert tickets

Jeff Gluck / New York Times:
A survey of NASCAR fans shows frustration, anger, and often acceptance of the fragmented system for watching races over broadcast, cable, and streaming channels

 
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