David Kurtz/TPM:
Trump Is Predictably Sloppy And It’s Hurting Him In Court
Overnight, the Justice Department had to file two separate corrections in pending court cases to clean up misstatements of fact they made to federal judges in open court. It’s an excruciating thing for any lawyer to have to do, but especially for the Justice Department which has prided itself on being a reliable narrator and has earned, for better or worse, the benefit of the doubt in federal court.
The impact and significance of the admitted errors isn’t entirely clear yet, but they undermine the Justice Department’s credibility and make it clear to the judges involved that these are not careful, considered, prudent government actions that deserve to be treated as regular or normal.
In the Treasury-DOGE case, the Justice Department now says it was mistaken when it told the court that since-resigned DOGE associate Marko Elez was a special government employee. He was in fact a Treasury Department employee.
In the USAID case, the Justice Department admitted it was wildly wrong when it told the court that 500 employees were placed on leave. The actual number was 2,140. It also mistakenly told the court that only future USAID contracts had been frozen when in fact existing contracts had been frozen as well.
Mark Totten/Detroit News:
States must hold federal government accountable
The past few weeks have marked a staggering assault on the rule of law in America. Nowhere is this menace clearer than at the U.S. Department of Justice. The rolling purge of DOJ employees deemed disloyal to President Donald Trump should send chills up the spine of every American. As these attempts to steamroll the law come fast and furious, the states — including Michigan — will play an important role preserving our constitutional order.
In our federal government, the Department of Justice is the guardian of the principle that ours is "a government of laws, not of men." The agency’s very mission is “to uphold the rule of law, to keep our country safe and to protect civil rights.”
Caleb Ecarma and Judd Legum/Musk Watch:
Musk associates granted access to confidential info about X's competitors
Politico reported on Saturday that Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought had assumed the role of acting director of the CFPB and instructed bureau staff to give DOGE access to all “non-classified” systems. The information that the CFPB collects on digital payment apps is not classified, the CFPB official said. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to communicate with the media.
The CFPB uses a process called “supervision” to comb through the internal information and processes of financial institutions, the official explained, producing records the bureau describes as confidential supervisory information, or CSI. “If I were a potential competitor to Elon’s planned payments app, I would be concerned about DOGE looking at my CSI,” the official said. “Some of the information he now has access to: Violations of law that aren’t public, information about the systems and processes they use, the investigative tactics that the bureau used to uncover information about violations of law, how many customers they have.”
“Musk now has tremendous access to confidential information about his competitors,” the official warned.
Fancy that. Rule of law. Foreign concept to Republicans, apparently.
Steven Levitsky and Lucan A Way/Foreign Affairs:
The Path to American Authoritarianism
What Comes After Democratic Breakdown
Democracy survived Trump’s first term because he had no experience, plan, or team. He did not control the Republican Party when he took office in 2017, and most Republican leaders were still committed to democratic rules of the game. Trump governed with establishment Republicans and technocrats, and they largely constrained him. None of those things are true anymore. This time, Trump has made it clear that he intends to govern with loyalists. He now dominates the Republican Party, which, purged of its anti-Trump forces, now acquiesces to his authoritarian behavior.
Noah Smith/Noahpinion:
What I think DOGE is really up to
And what I think we should actually be worried about.
Over the last two weeks, DOGE has moved so fast, and often so secretively, that nobody can quite seem to figure out what it’s doing. The whole thing is shrouded in a fog of chaos, with accusations and counter-accusations of illegality flying thick and fast. It’s very hard to follow all of these, much less evaluate their accuracy. Instead of evaluating all of these — something my lack of legal expertise makes me poorly qualified to do — I thought I’d focus on two key questions:
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What is the actual purpose of DOGE?
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What are the main dangers of DOGE?
In my opinion, answering these two questions is crucial if we want to understand how to approach the DOGE issue.
So far, I think most of the coverage of DOGE has been purely reactive — raising questions about the legality of specific DOGE moves, digging up dirt on the people who work for DOGE, or decrying breaches of data privacy. While there’s nothing wrong with that kind of coverage, I think if that’s all there is, it represents too slow-footed and passive of a reaction to Musk’s furious blitz of activity. In order to really grapple with what’s going on at the federal government, we need to think not only about what DOGE is doing right now, but what it’s going to do in the future.
David Dayen/The American Prospect:
Government by Malicious Autopilot
The hostile takeover of federal IT systems is intended to use technology to reach preordained conclusions.
In other words, part of this alleged reinvention of government we’re seeing involves the same thing conservatives have been doing for a half-century: dig up dirt on microscopic funny-sounding programs while ignoring the real drivers of wasteful federal spending, like the trillions of dollars that get funneled up from ordinary taxpayers to elites like Elon Musk.
But there’s another reason DOGE is after the IT systems. They want to integrate artificial intelligence into every facet of government operations, both to automate aspects of government work and to flow data through AI to catch discrepancies. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla employee now serving as a top official at the General Services Administration (GSA), called it an “AI-first strategy” in an all-staff meeting. GSA is developing a custom chatbot to analyze government procurement and contract data, and DOGE teams at the Department of Education have also pushed that department’s data through AI software.
So you have a bunch of techno-futurists who think that the future of government efficiency is either cherry-picking stuff that sounds bad, or running everything through a supposed HAL 9000 super-computer to weed out the waste. Neither will accomplish their aims, and will probably lead to tons of negative consequences in the process.
x
Latest in Dem AGs case challenging DOGE access to Treasury records: A judge updated a TRO to make clear Sec. Scott Bessent (and others) can access sensitive payments data, even as Elon Musk’s government efficiency team remains locked out for now
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
— Zoe Tillman (@zoetillman.bsky.social) 2025-02-11T20:15:54.019Z
Kelsey Piper/X via Threadreader:
What we found was that, yeah, there's a pretty strong case for PEPFAR. Even using conservative assumptions and ignoring many of its positive impacts, our best guess is that the program indeed saved 19million lives by 2018.
Jonathan Martin/POLITICO:
‘Americans Can and Will Die from This’: USAID Worker Details Dangers, Chaos
The sudden scapegoating of the once-bipartisan agency has left front-line workers in foreign countries stunned and abandoned, without even a contact in Washington.
But I have been more interested in what the attack on USAID has meant for the country’s interests overseas. While the agency delivers humanitarian aid, it had been popular with many Republicans because it also projected American strength and influence in countries whose loyalties in this moment are up for grabs.
Few grasp that better than a veteran USAID employee whom I’ve known for more than two decades and is currently serving abroad. I’m withholding the employee’s name and certain revealing details to protect their identity.
It’s common in journalism to append a background quote with something along the lines of, “who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals.” And this person certainly recognizes the danger of retaliation from the government and even harassment from those who’d chose to target a dedicated aid worker. But this official isn’t overly alarmed by internet trolls. It’s the non-American partners, working with USAID, whose lives could be at risk if the official’s work is exposed.
Cliff Schecter interviews Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch:
