2:00PM Water Cooler 1/29/2025 | naked capitalism

Bird Song of the Day

Brown Thrasher, Newnans Lake SF–East Trail (Pithlachocco Trail), Alachua, Florida, United States. Virtuosic!

In Case You Might Miss…

1. Anti-Trump lawfare begins… but with far, far more solid cases.
2. OMB memo RESCINDED. That was fast!
3. A defense of slowness.

Politics

“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles

Trump Assassination Attempts (Plural)

They disappeared The Claims Adjuster too:

It’s been six months since the Butler assassination attempt and we still know nothing about the man who shot Donald Trump, much less why he was allowed to do it. That should make you nervous. Sean Davis explains.

(0:00) The Three Big Questions of the Trump Assassination Attempt… pic.twitter.com/Y6ZHachAut

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) January 17, 2025

Trump Administration

Lambert here:

From my armchair at 60,0000 feet, here is how I see Trump’s executive orders and yesterday and today’s barrage of communiqués from the OMB. A first approximation, things can change!

First, the Democrat Party is like a rotten plank, and the Republicans were going to punch through it sooner or later. I feel sooner is better than later, because I have some optimism about a better outcome later if “we” take the punch now, what with the various approaching and inter-related crises that will be worse and worse later.

Because–

Second, the key point is not what the Republicans do (“You can trust the Republicans… To be Republicans”) but how Democrats react. After all, Trump is not that popular; his victory in 2024 was solid, but not spectacular; and “pausing” programs upon which the working class depends might not be the best way for Trump to pivot his party to make that same working class his base. This implies an enormous power vacuum in the Democrat Party leadership, and politics abhors a vacuum. Somebody will step up, almost by definition not from the tired, flaccid, corrupt, and dull-witted party leadership, but “out of nowhere.” My thought was a city councillor from, say, Minnesota (plain-spoken and media savvy are musts); Yves wondered where our Huey Long is. Perhaps the Skunk Party!

Third, the Medicaid shutdown fiasco (details to come below) shows some weaknesses in the Trump operation. Stoller is correct to say that Republicans want to govern, and Democrats shrink from it, but all the Republicans had to do to prevent the Medicaid shutdown when they wrote the OMB “pause” memo was to explicitly exempt Medicaid by name, as they did with Medicare and Social Security, in footnote 2. Everyone knows to read the footnotes, right? Well, apparently nobody in Stephen Miller’s OMB did. I don’t know how the screw-up happened — some reactionary dweeb thought Medicaid was part of Medicare? They hate poor people? Their AI had a hallucination? — but the same sort of thing happened with the Bush Administration, which discovered that you just can’t swap in Liberty University lawyers for Harvard lawyers (Christianists though they may be). Or when they tried to reconstruct Iraq with twenty-something Young Republicans. In other words, just because Republicans want to govern doesn’t mean they do it well.

P.S. I don’t want to imply that I’m wedded to the Democrat Party; after all, the Republican Party was in the White House after only two election cycles. I don’t take any of the existing alternative parties seriously; but that doesn’t mean a new second party couldn’t be created. My thought — blue sky though it is — is that Democrats 2.0 would be a dues paying party, an idea that worked so successfully for Labour in the UK that the spooks, the press, the Israeli Embassy, and the electeds all had to work hard to cripple it. So maybe Corbyn was onto something. Somebody more clever than I am would have to pencil it out, but dues might take the party out of the hands of the squillionaires. Enough dues, and you start offering member benefits, too. Why not? Blue skying wildly, the other major dues-paying institution in politics is… unions. Why not a Labor Party? Sounds crazy, but when you imagine the leverage that the Longshoreman, the railway workers, the truckers, and the airline stewardesses could exert if directed toward a single program at a single time… Well, “The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.”

P.P.S. On the rescission of OMB memo M-25-13 (belowP: I don’t think the impulses behind the memo have changed. There seem to have been three drivers: (1) animus against “big gummint” generally; (2) animus against NGOs; (3) animus against DEI, but also other various “irritable mental gestures.” Taking these out of order: Big Gummint issues are also being handled at the personnel level (see the OPM material). Mental Gestures are not especially relevant — does anybody really believe that “Marxist equity” and “Green New Deal Social Engineering” are sufficiently conceptualized to be “identified” let alone “reviewed”? DEI is the exception since it has an institutional apparatus to support it, but frankly, if the Republicans manage to kill it off, they’ll be doing Democrats a favor. As for NGOs, I think they are the real target of the memo, which might rationally have been pared down to address them alone (and perhaps will be). Do recall, for example, that on the key Republican issue of immigration, the allocation of immigrants to towns and cities across the United States was handled, not by government, but by an invisible albeit well-funded network of NGOs, a policy that ought to be brought into the light of day and examined. So while the memo was poorly drafted, its rescission is a minor tactical victory.

OMB memo M-25-13 -> Medicaid freeze-up -> reaction -> rescission. This link gives the best timeline and detail–

“As some Medicaid sites freeze up, White House acts to clarify pause on grants and programs” [Stat]. • Summarizing the discourse as it flowed across my feed: M-25-13 explicitly exempted Medicare and Social Security from the freeze (or “pause”) in footnote 2. Medicaid was not exempted. And from footnote 1, “assistance received directly by individuals” was exempted, but that doesn’t exempt Medicaid, which reimburses providers. Given the tenor of the memo (“career and political appointees in the Executive Branch have a duty to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities”) it was rational for government officials to follow the letter of the memo as best they could and freeze the sites. Administration advocates framed this as “malicious compliance,” but putting attributed motives aside, I don’t think compliance was irrational. The text is the text, after all. Accidentally or not, “it’s pretty obvious they just threw a big breaker switch on the federal government” (though it would be nice to have reporting on the details of how the breaker switch was thrown). At this point, the memo was rescinded. I wonder if any heads will roll? For example, Stephen Miller’s:

“[E]xplicitly excluded all aid and benefit programs” is wrong; Miller appears not to have read his own memo (see discussion of footnotes 1 and 2 above.)

“White House response adds to confusion on federal funding freeze” [PBS]. “The Office of Management and Budget has rescinded its call for a pause on federal assistance, according to the agency’s memo shared by Democracy Forward, which led a legal challenge over the effort. But the White House said that only the original memo calling for the freeze had been rescinded. The new memo says the heads of executive departments and agencies should contact their general counsels ‘if you have questions about implementing the President’s Executive Orders.’ But Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokeswoman, told reporters that the move simply meant a recession of the memo. She said efforts to ‘end the egregious waste of federal funding’ will continue. She said the OMB memo has been rescinded ‘to end any confusion on federal policy created by the court ruling and the dishonest media coverage.’ The administration expects that rescinding the memo will end the court case against it. After widespread confusion from the initially very broad memo calling for a halt in federal assistance, pending review, the White House tried Tuesday to further clarify which programs would not be affected, later specifying that it would not impact Medicaid and SNAP programs, for example. This latest statement from the White House is likely to add to the confusion rather than clarify it.” As for the power of the purse: “The order provided an early litmus test for just how willing Congressional Republicans would be to cede their power of the purse in deference to the leader of their party – even temporarily…. House Speaker Mike Johnson called it ‘an application of common sense,’ and said it would ‘be harmless in the end.’” • Is it possible to be a constitutionalist and a consequentialist at the same time? Johnson seems to think so, but I’m not so sure….

Lawfare, but with far more solid cases:

“Lawsuit claims systems behind OPM governmentwide email blast are illegal, insecure” [FedScoop]. “A lawsuit filed in federal court Monday alleges that the Office of Personnel Management set up an on-premise server to conduct last week’s mass email blast to federal employees and store information it received in response without doing a privacy impact assessment on the system as required by law. Filed by two anonymous federal employees in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the class-action lawsuit calls for OPM to stop the use of the system until the agency can show that it’s lawfully conducted a privacy assessment. The two employees accuse OPM officials of deploying the new server — which is said to be ‘retaining information about every employee of the U.S. Executive Branch’ or potentially doing so through systems linked to it — in a ‘rapid’ manner without building proper security measures into it or assessing the privacy impacts as required by the E-Government Act of 2002. On Friday, OPM sent a mass email to employees across the federal government — though not every federal employee received it, including one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit — to test ‘a new distribution and response list,’ asking recipients to reply ‘yes.’ Over the weekend, federal employees received another test ‘to confirm that an email can be sent and replied to by all government employees.’ Some agency and department heads gave guidance to their employees that the emails from OPM could be trusted. The complaint goes on to say: ‘OPM has not conducted a PIA for this unknown email server or any system which collects or maintains Personally Identifiable Information (‘PII’) obtained from its use,’ nor has a chief information officer or equivalent agency official signed off on an assessment. Finally, such an assessment would need to be made publicly available for review. ‘OPM’s failure to take these steps constitutes agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed in violation of 5 U.S.C. § 706(1),’ the lawsuit states. ‘Plaintiffs are being materially harmed by this inaction because they are being denied information about how these systems — which will be rich in PII about every employee of the U.S. Executive Branch — are being designed and used.’ As a measure of relief, the plaintiffs call for an injunction of the systems involved in the matter until OPM conducts the required privacy assessment.” • Alternatively, Trump could have set up the servers in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago…..

“Trump Hit With New Lawsuit for Funneling Sensitive Info to Elon Musk” [The New Republic]. “Donald Trump’s administration has been hit with a lawsuit over allegedly collecting federal employee information and directing it to an employee of Elon Musk. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Monday, alleges that employee data is going to Amanda Scales, who, according to LinkedIn, works for xAI, a private corporation of which Musk is the CEO. This would violate federal laws on transparency and put the sensitive information of federal employees into the hands of a private corporation.” • Here is the filing.

“Elon Musk Lackeys Have Taken Over the Office of Personnel Management” [Wired]. “Sources within the federal government tell WIRED that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry. Among them is a person who, according to an online résumé, was set to start college last fall. Scott Kupor, a managing partner at the powerful investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, stands as Trump’s nominee to run the OPM. …. Amanda Scales is, as has been reported, the new chief of staff at the OPM. She formerly worked in talent for xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, according to her LinkedIn. Before that, she was part of the talent and operations team at Human Capital, a venture firm with investments in the defense tech startup Anduril and the political betting platform Kalshi; before that, she worked for years at Uber. Her placement in this key role, experts believe, seems part of a broader pattern of the traditionally apolitical OPM being converted to use as a political tool.” And: “According to the same sources, other people at the top of the new OPM food chain include two people with apparent software engineering backgrounds, whom WIRED is not naming because of their ages. One, a senior adviser to the director, is a 21-year-old whose online résumé touts his work for Palantir, the government contractor and analytics firm cofounded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who is its chair. (The former CEO of PayPal and a longtime Musk associate, Thiel is a Trump supporter who helped bankroll the 2022 Senate campaign of his protégé, Vice President JD Vance.) The other, who reports directly to Scales, graduated from high school in 2024, according to a mirrored copy of an online résumé and his high school’s student magazine; he lists jobs as a camp counselor and a bicycle mechanic among his professional experiences, as well as a summer role at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company.” • Analytically, I don’t think “Musk’s lackeys” is correct framing. This is a Flex-Net centered on Silicon Valley. As for the 21-year-old…. One of Thiel’s blood bags?

“Federal judge temporarily blocks Trump administration freeze on federal grants and loans” [Associated Press]. “A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked a push from President Donald Trump to pause federal funding while his administration conducts an across-the-board ideological review to uproot progressive initiatives…. U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan blocked the funding freeze only minutes before it was scheduled to take effect. The administrative stay, prompted by a lawsuit brought by nonprofit groups that receive federal money, lasts until Monday afternoon. Another court hearing is scheduled that morning to consider the issue.” • Here is the docket. Here is the filing. NOTE This filing concerns the OMB memo now rescinded. BWA-HA-HA-HA! I picked the best posssible day to get a late start!

OMB memo M-25-13 rescinded:

At least somebody in the White House has the strength of mind to cut their losses, even at the cost of allowing the Democrats a minor tactical victory!

“Trump’s Attempt to Usurp Congress’s Spending Power” [Reason]. The rescission of OMB memo M-25-13 aside: “As in his first term, Trump is again planning to deny federal funds to sanctuary jurisdictions unless they accept his dictates on immigration policy. Earlier, he suspended nearly all foreign aid programs, except those for Israel and Egypt. Trump also recently threatened to withhold disaster relief funds from California, unless they adopt his preferred changes to state election law. More generally, he and his underlings have far-reaching plans to ‘impound’ federal spending they disapprove of. In combination, this is a massive assault on Congress’ power over federal spending. The Spending Clause of the Constitution is clear in giving Congress, not the president, the power to allocate federal spending. When it comes to conditions imposed on grants to state and local governments, the Supreme Court has long made clear that they too must be imposed by Congress, and meet a number of other requirements, as well. Such conditions must, among other things, 1) be enacted and clearly indicated by Congress (the executive cannot make up its own grant conditions), 2) be related to the purposes of the grant in question (e.g. – grants for health care or education cannot be conditioned on immigration enforcement), and 3) not be ‘coercive.’ Thus, for example, even Congress could not condition disaster aid on changes in state election law, because the two issues are not related. Some might argue that many of the Administration’s actions on spending are no big deal because they are only “temporary.” But if the White House can ‘temporarily’ withhold congressionally allocated funds for a month, why not for two months, or for two years? There is no logical stopping point here.” • Massive triers, these guys. And a lot of parallel lines of attack. I’m a little amazed that the House — which I would think values having the power of the purse — is rolling over for this. What do these guys have on Mike Johnson, anyhow?

Nomination

RFK (1):

I absolutely agree with RFK Jr’s critique of America’s food supply. It urgently needs an overhaul

But he’s nominated for HHS

NOT the U.S. Department of Agriculture

And his thoughts on health issues like HIV and vaccines are categorically undefendable and extremely dangerous

— Craig Spencer MD MPH (@Craig_A_Spencer) January 29, 2025

RFK (2):

RFK Jr says we need to more ‘value based care’ and more privatized insurance, claims Medicaid isn’t ‘working for anyone.’ It’s basically Cato style libertarianism. pic.twitter.com/Bt5zTpdOyq

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) January 29, 2025

RFK (3):

2024 Post Mortem

I’m stealin’ back to my same old used to be:

Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff just decided he’d like to represent giant private equity firms for the corporate law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher that once employed Robert Bork. Hooray! pic.twitter.com/GfQflAgG6r

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) January 27, 2025

Democrats en déshabillé

“‘A 5 Alarm F-ing Fire’: Trump’s Federal Funding Freeze Is Jolting Some Dems Into Fight Mode” [HuffPo]. “Democrats on Capitol Hill are fuming about President Donald Trump’s Monday night announcement that he is freezing all federal grants and loans, a stunning action that appears as unconstitutional as it is harmful to millions of Americans…. Nearly two dozen Democrats on Tuesday opposed confirmation of Trump’s transportation secretary nominee, Sean Duffy, who is relatively noncontroversial. Some explicitly said their reason was because of the president’s freeze on federal money.” • I suppose it’s a step up from a sternly worded letter.

Please kill me now:

This is great. This crew has a pretty impressive track record of winning tough races with the kind of creative, working-class messaging that Dems need now https://t.co/722plAOx0r

— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) January 27, 2025

We’re gonna pry that “fight” meme from their cold, dead hands….

Not such a bad idea:

I agree with Tim Snyder: it is time for Democrats to form a Shadow Cabinet just like they do in the United Kingdom

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) January 29, 2025

The base is not happy (but is also completely addled by RussiaGate, Trump Derangement Syndrome, and too much brunch, so what do you do):

Syndemics

“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison

Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).

Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!

Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (wastewater); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).

Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).

Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).

Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, KF, KidDoc, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, thump, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).

Stay safe out there!

Lambert here: Everything’s gone dark except for trusty New York State hospitalization (daily), Walgreen’s positivity (weekly), and the Cleveland Clinic? Readers, do you have any suggestions about alternatives at state level? Thank you! How I wish we had Biobot back….

TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts