I write fluidly across different venues. Here, on social media, in emails with readers … and I sometimes lose track of where I’ve said what. So I wanted to agree with something TPM Reader XX1 says in this email I flagged. I’m skeptical the White House will follow through on their threats to carry out a new wholesale round of firings, as Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought is threatening. I’m not saying they won’t. They totally might. So this isn’t something I’m relying on or telling you to rely on. I’m just skeptical for two reasons. The first is that this White House doesn’t need a shut down to fire people. Despite the law-breaking it entails, they’ve made clear that, with the Supreme Court’s assistance, they can fire as many people as they want. If they thought it helped them to fire more people, they’d be doing that already; the shutdown provides zero new legal power to fire anyone.
“Want” is the key word here.
JoinI can’t go into too much detail without revealing my sources. But I wanted to share that I’ve heard from sources in multiple departments and agencies that the groundwork you’d expect to see in advance of wholesale firings — as promised by Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought — simply are not happening: lists for who gets fired and who doesn’t, the reduction in force paperwork, etc. Those things aren’t happening. At least not in the places where the people I’ve spoken to work. At least not yet.
Of course we’re one day in. MAGA isn’t known for good order and process. So it might change. But it is an early signal, by no means definitive, that Vought’s threat of a DOGE 2.0/large-scale firings is one they’re hesitant to carry out … In this Times newsletter, Jess Bidgood relays Karoline Leavitt’s threat that the layoffs are “imminent” and Vought is cueing them up. Trump holds all the power, she continues. “The question is merely how far [Trump] wants to go.” But again, under the hood, in the boiler rooms of personnel policy rather than official statements, it looks different.
On Monday I saw a bunch of people on Bluesky mentioning and praising this essay by Andrea Pitzer. It’s quite good. I recommend reading it. It’s about the recent podcast discussion between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates. And that conversation turns a lot on the much-derided column Klein wrote about Charlie Kirk and how “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.”
Regular readers know that I have a number of enduring disagreements with Klein. They’re actually more and less than disagreements. They’re more like dispositional disagreements. Pitzer says up front that a lot of people are dumping on Klein now and she’s not trying to do that or at least not add to that. (And I second that for what I write below.) What she sets out to do is explain why she thinks Klein is “lost” in the present moment (a point Klein actually agrees with) and, secondarily, why Coates, whether you agree with him specifically, is not. Again, it’s worth reading Pitzer in her own lucid words rather than just my synopsis. But I would summarize it thus: Pitzer says that Klein has something called “bright-kid syndrome”, by which she means the idea that a smart and hyper-educated young(ish) person like Klein can and should come up with a prescription or fix to the ills he sees in front of him. It’s not quite like the “one weird trick” of memeland. But it’s kind of like that, inasmuch as it rests on the assumption that the intractable and overwhelming can actually be solved if you think about it hard enough, if you have enough cleverness and ingenuity.
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