The Trump administration is illegally stopping lifesaving foreign aid right now

Really limiting the checks and balances concept and moving closer and closer to “the only check is an election”

back on my bullshit (reminding people the government shuts down at midnight as wednesday begins, not on tuesday, which is a full day of government funding)

We're only 9 days out from a potential government shutdown, and OMB *still* doesn't have its agency contingency plans up (this is the central hub for how every agency plans to operate under a shutdown).

For no reason, I'm lifting up my column on how a government shutdown works. Every shutdown looks different because of different funding streams, contingency funds, different bodies administering them, etc. I did my best to explain here to be thorough without being too dense.

Sad doesn’t begin to do it justice. My country is breaking. I’m in anguish.

The defining feature of Trump administration is using the power of the state to help allies and hurt enemies.

Shot/chaser

Trump just enacted the largest cuts to food assistance in history. Now he's cancelling the government survey that measures hunger in America.

Trump is cancelling an annual government survey that measures hunger in America, rather than allow it to show hunger increasing under his tenure. This follows the playbook of many non-democracies that cancel or manipulate reports that would otherwise show less-than-perfect news.

Trump's attacks on free speech won't deter us from speaking truth to power on @heartlandsignal.bsky.social/ WCPT. Join me Saturday with guests: + @ellenlweintraub.bsky.social + @bbkogan.bsky.social + @casten.house.gov + @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social 🎧 1-4 CT 🤳Stream bit.ly/3DAcG8s

Vaccines are truly one of the most incredible things in all of human history. We founds ways to literally defeat communicable deadly diseases at almost no cost and at no harm to ourselves. And someone who had literal brain worms is working to undermine that and get people killed.

Incredible new paper from @centeronbudget.bsky.social looking into some specific Trump impoundments - where he illegally refuses to carry out our spending laws.

Not remotely surprising, but the person who tried to end American democracy when he lost the election quite obviously does many things that are diametrically opposed to freedom and democracy.

Extraordinarily corrupt. I watched FCC chair Brendan Carr's full interview on Hannity. Carr basically said straight out that coverage of Trump he deems overly hostile can be decreed contrary to the "public interest," and thus grounds for yanking licenses: newrepublic.com/article/2006...

Headlines on the Bloomberg Terminal from Air Force One: *TRUMP: TV LICENSES SHOULD BE TAKEN AWAY IF BAD PUBLICITY FOR ME *TRUMP: IF TV SHOWS 'HIT TRUMP' SHOULD BE DISCUSSED ON LICENSES *TRUMP ON TV SHOWS CRITICIZING HIM: THEY'RE NOT ALLOWED TO

Truly hate to see this all happen to my country. I don’t have the words to say anything someone else hasn’t already said, so I’ll just say I’m legitimately sad.

When I worked at Senate Budget, every single year, I would go through the copious errors in Rand Paul's budget. Tyler was my replacement when I left (follow him). What's so amazing about the Paul budget is both that he has some of the same errors each year & that there are new ones every year too.

The bicameral Democratic alternative CR has a lot of really outstanding language that both goes after impoundments & partisan rescissions packages. Great stuff here from @delauro.house.gov and @murray.senate.gov, showing a caucus that is actually serious about confronting Trump budget lawlessness.

Republicans literally took food away from poor children in the same bill that allowed this by supercharging funding for hiring and retaining ICE agents

i know everyone wants to talk about health care, but how can you make a govt funding deal when trump is already illegally not following the current deal? he's illegally not doing cancer research, k-12 funding, etc. unless a deal prevents that, what funding have you actually secured in some deal?

The Trump Administration broke the law when FEMA illegally withheld funding for the Emergency Food and Shelter Program the and Shelter and Services Program.

What’s so surprising about this imo is that the change in attitude is strong across all groups - young, old, liberal, conservative, college grads, non-college grads. Just a monumental shift in attitudes.

Wow, it’s not just that people think a college education is significantly less important than just 12 years ago - but that change in attitudes is broad, across all groups

Inflation comes in hot. Really recommend the president stop illegally and unconstitutionally unilaterally raising taxes on imported goods.

"Harvard can't use race as a factor in admissions, but ICE can use race as a factor in detentions" is a retrenchment essentially to a pre-Civil War understanding of the Constitution. It's vanishingly few steps removed from "Latinos have no rights which the white man is bound to respect."

100 years from now when transportation is fully autonomous, people aren’t gonna believe we used to drive ourselves around “So people just had to get really good at driving so no one died in crashes?” “Oh, people died all the time. There were actually more car deaths than murders every year.”

Absolutely insane and incredibly worrying sign

This a million times

One reason why demands regarding rescissions are helpful is that they are a logical counter to the "clean CR" line that tends to win the day in shutdown fights. Eg we Dems can only agree to a clean CR provided that the agreed spending is guaranteed to happen and not be rescinded or impounded.

Do Republicans really want to be in control of all parts of the government when premiums skyrocket because of them?

Next month, deficits will look about $130 billion lower than they otherwise would due to a one-time reestimate of the outstanding balance of our student loan portfolio, stemming from the changes in OBBBA that make student loan repayments more burdensome. (1/3) www.cbo.gov/system/files...

The preliminary benchmark revision of -911K amounts to -0.6% to March 2025 payroll employment. Combined with 2-month revisions, recent total revisions are big but hardly unprecedented, & smoothed over the business cycle the payroll survey has gotten more accurate over time.

the real strength of the conservative media bubble is that it’ll get like 60 seconds of coverage once, only on the actual news section that most people skip anyway and never on the big personalities, and then will never be mentioned again

i can’t believe they’re really going with “does that really look like his signature?” when it’s one of the most recognizable signatures and looks exactly like all his other signatures clearly betting on the strength of their media bubble. guess we’ll see if they’re right

An important thing to remember always is that this administration tells up-is-down lies all the time about everything, and we just never have to pretend to believe them

President Trump is attempting to get away with the biggest, most illegal budgetary ploy in U.S. history. CAP's @bbkogan.bsky.social explains in @MSNBC.com:

It's not the most important part of the issue but Kavanaugh saying "well they should just sue if they're the victims of excessive force from ICE" when he himself has previously voted to bar lawsuits against federal officers for violations of the 4th Amendment in immigration cases takes chutzpah.

🚨The Supreme Court today gives Trump a license to engage in racial profiling, with Justice Kavanaugh writing in concurrence to expressly endorse ICE and Border Patrol targeting any Latinos they observe in Los Angeles speaking Spanish and then demanding their papers.

Here Trump is complaining that hitting your wife is being classified as a crime — and he says calling domestic violence a crime is an attack against him personally, done only in order to say that crime didn’t fall 100% because of him

Have now listened to this approximately 481659164 times and it’s so fucking good

Mike is one of the best labor reporters in the country

Can’t imagine why a law that kicked 10 million people off their health insurance in the largest Medicaid cuts in history while giving such enormous tax cuts to the rich that the deficit still increased by $3.4 trillion would be so unpopular they feel the need to try to rebrand it

My new op-ed! “The pocket rescission is just a beacon meant to draw our attention. Trump wants us to focus on the foreign aid impoundments — a shiny object he’s illegally deleting via a pocket rescission — so that we forget about the quiet impoundments of cancer research and preschool funding.”

🚨NEW: Reversing *generations* of practice, the Board of Immigration Appeals gives ICE exactly what it demanded, ruling that any undocumented immigrant who entered illegally is categorically ineligible for release from detention on bond — expanding mandatory detention by millions of people.

OMB just released its midsession review and they gave themselves a $5.6 trillion macrodynamic boost they are claiming that the economy is gonna grow so much from all their policies that deficits over the next ten years will be $5.6 trillion lower than they’d otherwise have been. incredible stuff.

In this @emineirmakyucel.bsky.social piece I explain why government funding negotiations have to also address ongoing illegal impoundments and legal rescissions packages talkingpointsmemo.com/news/dems-ar...

From Jason on the bad site

Erika is the person Trump fired on Jobs Day last month when there were downward revisions