Are you a US federal employee? In the absence of the FEVS this year, the Partnership for Public Service is administering a survey to the fed workforce to assess today’s federal employee experience. Learn more and take the survey: ourpublicservice.org/psvs

so, no actual audit or report of what doge cut exactly?

Really important work by folks like @billresh.bsky.social and @davidlewisvu.bsky.social. The FEVS is an invaluable tool for assessing the health of the civil service. It's even better off in the hands of private researchers. ourpublicservice.org/public-servi...

This is my shocked face:

A systematic attack on the rule of law. Watergate-level high crimes and misdemeanors happening every day.

Just posted on @3streamsblog.bsky.social from @jandrewsinclair.bsky.social on the Mamdani win in New York cc @cmwitko.bsky.social @billresh.bsky.social @dcinbox.bsky.social @sam-workman.bsky.social medium.com/3streams/zoh...

41.7 million people are losing their SNAP support... illegally. But here's one of the shiny toilets from where our president will be online trolling these families.

I miss US federal data releases :(

The richest man on earth owns X. The second richest man on earth is about to acquire TikTok and his family could soon own both Paramount and Warner Bros. The third richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fourth richest man owns The Washington Post. See the problem here?

Currently hooked on "Mussolini: Son of the Century" on MUBI. It strips away the myth and exposes a hollow showman driven almost entirely by self-preservation and power. It may also be the most singularly relevant entertainment at any point in the last 20 years.

This. The president can't extort corporations to pay essentially taxes to him personally so that he can use that money at his personal discretion to do government work.

Seeing folks say this is socialism when almost certainly the model in Trump's head is the Gulf states

In Opinion “The United States is cutting off the kind of foreign aid that keeps children alive for 12 cents a day, but it’s willing to invest far larger sums in a dubious effort to prop up a distant economy — while effectively subsidizing tycoons who made bad investments,” Nicholas Kristof writes.

All the things folks pretended were happening in 2022-23 under Joe Biden are actually happening now under Donald Trump

"Any strategy that takes on Trump must find a way to incorporate and exploit this truth: Trump and his key followers are criminal parasites on American society." open.substack.com/pub/johnganz...

the president has destroyed the east wing of the white house without so much as a word of input from anyone else to build a royal ballroom paid for with bribes

When you lose the Washington Times... www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/oc...

take a moment to really think about how hard Democratic leaders have had to work to somehow be losing to Trump on the issue of corruption

It's pretty laughable to listen to the most Stalin-esque administration in the history of our Republic label government programs and other public servants "communist."

"...it’s hard for the administration to make accusations that workers are redundant, non-essential, or not carrying out its priorities when it doesn’t appear to have a transparent 'accounting of exactly who is in what position and what they’re doing.'”

i do not like living under a government run by the worst facebook posts you've ever seen

I was on Atlanta's 11Alive this morning to talk about the shutdown and our research on the topic @gsupmap.bsky.social: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgRU...

By the time the MSPB resolves pending cases, many employees will have found other jobs. Most people cannot afford to remain out of work while their claims go through the system. And most won't want to leave those new jobs to return to an employer who has spent the last year making their life hell.

Many federal employees accept lower pay relative to the private sector in exchange for stability, an opportunity to serve the public, and a degree of autonomy. As those incentives are reduced, there are fewer reasons to remain or join the civil service.

Ultimately, I think this is the right question. The government is losing credibility as an employer. The private sector cannot absorb all federal jobs but those with the greatest expertise and experience will have less difficulty finding jobs--especially in fields like health care.

Immigrant Nobel Prize winners exiting the United States

Our new open-access article in @pareview.bsky.social offers a stark warning about the latest shutdown through analysis of the last one (2019). Turning this one into an instrument of political control will further hollow out institutional memory, weaken professionalism, and erode long-term capacity.

Was I asleep when the people of Chicago, Portland, DC, LA, etc voted for Trump or Stephen Miller to militarize their neighborhoods? While I was asleep, did I dream of the principle of federalism as a fundamental check against concentrated national power as a central tenet of American conservatism?

I'm less than optimistic on this.

"The Free Press is attractive to someone like Ellison for its choice of enemies... lustily punching down and left at the critics and adversaries of the ownership class. As a billionaire [seeking] to consolidate and expand power and influence, you could not find a more eager servant than Weiss."

Fascism occurs twice: first as the tragedy of a Second World War started by men who fought the First and knowingly chose slaughter, then as the farce of an ignorant draft dodger trying to provoke a war against his own people.

And that is true even by the Trump administration's own legal arguments.

This is an old formula used by authoritarian regimes. Stoke chaos and blame scapegoats to justify the use of force.

For a regime that hates "bureaucrats" and the modern administrative state, they sure have endowed one bureaucrat (who simultaneously occupies 2(!) positions created for said state) an unprecedented amount of arbitrary power to ignore two other constitutional branches.

In the American system of government, a legislature of the people’s elected representatives decide how to allocate the people’s money, then an unelected appointee in the executive branch called “OMB Director” decides if he feels like distributing the people’s money that way or if he’d rather not.

Russ Vought is a protege of Phil Gramm, which is a useful reminder that this aggressively destructive Republican administration did not fall out of a coconut tree. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Abughazaleh: I think Kristi Noem should be tried at The Hague. And if the response from ICE to people exercising their first amendment right is to drive vehicles through them, they should not be an agency in the US.

"by the president’s own words, the U.S. military is engaged in armed conflict with undefined enemies he has unilaterally labeled 'unlawful combatants'... Yet he has refused to inform Congress or the public.” Let's just govern on an old man's vibes. What could possibly go wrong?

Raskin: "It's not lost on anyone that shutting the government down allows them not swear in our new colleague, Ms Grijalva from Arizona, who would be the 218th signature to discharge the Epstein files and to put a vote on that on the House floor."

Today, I was interviewed by the BBC on the shutdown and its political and substantive implications. You can find the interview here: youtu.be/igY-iRuAzxI?...

I was interviewed yesterday by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for their "Radio National Breakfast" about the shutdown. The permanent structural, legislative, and electoral implications of this are vast, particularly if Ds don't cave and force Rs to consider eliminating the filibuster.

I hope it's clear to everyone now that Trump really is going for it - he's trying to become a dictator. I don't know if he'll succeed, but he's working to install himself as an autocrat unaccountable to voters. And he's weaponizing the military against Americans who oppose him as part of that effort

My guess is this was coordinated across the entire executive branch, like a Hands Across the Hatch Act Violation event or something

Pete Hegseth must have the world’s absolutely smallest penis of all time

The flew the entire military leadership in so they could see for themselves that the Secretary of Defense is a mouthbreathing dipshit and the Commander in Chief is a senile, weak old man who might keel over at any moment.

I’m opening a movie theater in which I show recently released films that I ripped from the internet but the studios are welcome to opt out if they wish.