Podcasts about omb

Wednesday, October 8th, 2025Today, Jim Comey will be arraigned in the Eastern District of Virginia; members of Congress will hold a press conference with Epstein survivors about the discharge petition to release the Epstein Files; furloughed workers are being told they may not receive backpay; the Supreme Court shoots down a Republican challenge to Washington State's Climate Commitment Act; Pritzker and Newsom threaten to withdraw from the National Governor's Association; CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis replaces the agency's general counsel with himself; Pam Bondi refuses to answer key questions in a Senate Judiciary hearing; Texas AG Ken Paxton continues his genocidal rhetoric against trans people; ICE bought vehicles with fake cell sites to spy on protestors; Roy Cooper shattered fundraising records in the first quarter for his Senate run; blue states should come together to declare an emergency; Jimmy Kimmel is more popular than Donald Trump; and Allison and Dana deliver your Good News.Thank You, SmallsFor a limited time, get 60% off your first order, plus free shipping, when you head to Smalls.com/DAILYBEANS.Guest: Alder Dina Nina Martinez-Rutherford Alder Dina Nina Martinez- Rutherford District 15 (WI) Running for WI State Assembly District 76votedinanina.comDinaNina.com@dinaninaxo - Bluesky, DinaNinaXO (facebook)DinaNinaXO (IG)Alder Dina Nina Martinez- Rutherford (she/her) - cityofmadison.comDinaNinaforMadison (IG)Dina Nina For Madison (facebook) StoriesFurloughed workers not guaranteed back pay after shutdown, OMB claims | The Washington PostICE bought vehicles equipped with fake cell towers to spy on phones | TechCrunchC.I.A. Deputy Director Has Replaced Agency's Top Legal Official With Himself | The New York TimesBlue states should come together to declare an emergency. Here's how | Opinion | The GuardianRoy Cooper raises $14.5 million last quarter, shattering records | POLITICOJimmy Kimmel more popular than Trump after show suspension, poll finds | The GuardianGood TroubleKeep calling Mike Johnson's office to have Adelita Grajava sworn in. She is the 218th signature. And right now the people of Arizona 7th are being re-taxed without representation because he won't swear her in. His number is 202-225-2000 or 202-225-2777  -  Especially if you're in Arizona's 7th district.**Vote Yes 836 - Oklahoma**OCTOBER 18 - NoKings.org**Yes On Prop 50 | Special Election Phone Banks - mobilize.us**How to Organize a Bearing Witness Standout**Fire Kilmeade - foxfeedback@foxnews.com, Requests - Fox News**Indiana teacher snitch portal - Eyes on Education**Find Your Representative | house.gov, Contacting U.S. SenatorsFrom The Good NewsAdopt Magnolia - Potential adopters email StrotmanHousehold@gmail.comAurora Animal ShelterReduce stress and boost happiness with 4 daily gratitude practices | CNNWordPress Accessibility Day 2025Adopt-A-Pet(Mark your calendar for November 14th, 2025 - Chicago, Illinois - Dana)Our Donation LinksNational Security Counselors - DonateMSW Media, Blue Wave California Victory Fund | ActBlueWhistleblowerAid.org/beansFederal workers - email AG at fedoath@pm.me and let me know what you're going to do, or just vent. I'm always here to listen. Find Upcoming Actions 50501 Movement, No Kings.org, Indivisible.orgDr. Allison Gill - Substack, BlueSky , TikTok, IG, TwitterDana Goldberg - BlueSky, Twitter, IG, facebook, danagoldberg.comMore from MSW Media - Shows - MSW Media, Cleanup On Aisle 45 pod, The Breakdown | SubstackReminder - you can see the pod pics if you become a Patron. The good news pics are at the bottom of the show notes of each Patreon episode! That's just one of the perks of subscribing! patreon.com/muellershewrote Our Donation LinksNational Security Counselors - DonateMSW Media, Blue Wave California Victory Fund | ActBlueWhistleblowerAid.org/beansFederal workers - feel free to email AG at fedoath@pm.me and let me know what you're going to do, or just vent. I'm always here to listen. Find Upcoming Actions 50501 Movement, No Kings.org, Indivisible.orgDr. Allison Gill - Substack, BlueSky , TikTok, IG, TwitterDana Goldberg - BlueSky, Twitter, IG, facebook, danagoldberg.comCheck out more from MSW Media - Shows - MSW Media, Cleanup On Aisle 45 pod, The Breakdown | SubstackShare your Good News or Good TroubleMSW Good News and Good TroubleHave some good news; a confession; or a correction to share?Good News & Confessions - The Daily Beanshttps://www.dailybeanspod.com/confessional/ Listener Survey:http://survey.podtrac.com/start-survey.aspx?pubid=BffJOlI7qQcF&ver=shortFollow the Podcast on Apple:The Daily Beans on Apple PodcastsWant to support the show and get it ad-free and early?The Daily Beans | SupercastThe Daily Beans & Mueller, She Wrote | PatreonThe Daily Beans | Apple Podcasts Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Viewpoint This Sunday with Malcolm Out Loud – Pres. Trump, along with the OMB, says this is an opportune time to drastically reduce government agencies. Senator Ron Johnson talks about the dysfunction and seriousness of the moment. How Many of Our Cities are Encircled By A Ring of Foreign Surveillance Telecom Networks? Chris Hoar, a telecom expert, along with Lt. Dave Smith talks about the threat...

Viewpoint This Sunday with Malcolm Out Loud – Pres. Trump, along with the OMB, says this is an opportune time to drastically reduce government agencies. Senator Ron Johnson talks about the dysfunction and seriousness of the moment. How Many of Our Cities are Encircled By A Ring of Foreign Surveillance Telecom Networks? Chris Hoar, a telecom expert, along with Lt. Dave Smith talks about the threat...

What's a Government Shutdown and Why Are We In One?A government shutdown happens when Congress fails to pass annual spending bills or a stopgap continuing resolution (CR) to keep agencies funded. No funding = no authority to operate = federal workers furloughed, services paused, and chaos for agencies and contractors.The House has passed a CR that would fund the government through November 21, but the Senate has rejected it three times. That CR keeps spending at current levels and buys Congress more time to negotiate a full budget. Think of it as saying, “We'll work out the details later, but in the meantime, keep the lights on.”So why the rejection? The sticking points are:* Democrats want the bill to include an extension of Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies, which are about to expire.* They also want to block the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from continuing to cut previously appropriated funds—something they see as a power grab.* Senator Rand Paul is the only Republican joining Democrats in opposing the House CR, but most Senate Democrats have voted it down.What Has to Happen to End the Shutdown?There are four main steps to reopening the government:* Negotiate a compromise CR. Either Republicans agree to ACA and OMB language, or Democrats back off.* Secure bicameral agreement. If the Senate changes the bill, it has to go back to the House.* Presidential approval. Trump has hinted he won't sign anything that includes ACA subsidies or limits on the OMB.* Implementation. Once signed, agencies resume normal operations and furloughed workers return.Two likely paths out of the shutdown:* Republicans stand firm → Democrats allow a CR vote without ACA or OMB demands, hoping to negotiate later.* A compromise CR is passed → includes ACA subsidies and OMB limits → enough Senate Democrats back it → risk of Trump veto remains.Why Is This So Complicated?The shutdown highlights a procedural gap between the House and Senate:* In the House, Republicans have a majority and can pass CRs with zero Democratic votes.* In the Senate, most bills need 60 votes to end debate (invoke cloture) and move to a final vote. Republicans don't have the numbers.Republicans could try to change Senate rules—eliminate the filibuster for budget bills and go with a simple majority—but that would be a massive institutional shift with long-term consequences.Until a resolution is reached, the government remains partially closed and the policy fight over ACA funding and executive power continues.What Happens If Republicans Do Make the Change?If Senate Republicans decide to invoke the so-called “nuclear option”—changing the chamber's rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for spending bills—the legislative and political landscape could shift immediately and dramatically.Immediate consequences:Republicans could pass the House-approved continuing resolution with no Democratic support, reopening the government on their terms. That means no extension of ACA subsidies, no restrictions on the Office of Management and Budget, and no need to negotiate across the aisle.Medium-term effects:The rule change would permanently alter how Congress handles appropriations. Any party with a Senate majority and House control could pass funding bills unilaterally, sidestepping the need for bipartisan coalitions. This could speed up the process—but also deepen partisan divides in budget negotiations.Long-term implications:Effectively, it would mean the end of the filibuster for all spending legislation. Shutdowns might become less frequent, since fewer votes are needed to keep the government open—but funding priorities could swing wildly every time control of Congress changes hands. One Congress could expand programs and hike spending; the next could cut deeply, all with a simple majority.In short, while the nuclear option would solve the immediate standoff, it would reshape the Senate's role in fiscal policymaking—and shift power further toward the majority party.Why Can't Republicans Just Pass a Budget Bill?If you've been hearing people say, “Just pass it as a budget bill—no filibuster needed,” here's why that's not happening.The Senate does have a special process called budget reconciliation, which allows certain bills to pass with just 51 votes—no filibuster, no 60-vote threshold. But there are some important catches:* It can only be used once per fiscal year.Technically, reconciliation instructions can cover three areas—spending, revenue, and the debt limit—but Congress usually combines them into a single package. That bill has already been used this year (for the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”), so the reconciliation tool is off the table until the next fiscal year.* The content of the bill is strictly limited.Under the Byrd Rule, reconciliation bills must directly relate to taxing or spending. Any provision that doesn't have a direct budgetary effect, or that increases the deficit beyond a 10-year window, gets stripped out—or the whole bill risks being disqualified.That's why the current CR probably couldn't go through reconciliation even if that option remained available this fiscal year. It likely includes provisions that violate the Byrd Rule—and certainly would if the OMB limitation Democrats want was included. Those elements either aren't strictly budgetary or would impact the long-term deficit.So even though Republicans hold a Senate majority, they can't simply slap a “budget” label on this bill and pass it with 51 votes. That procedural door is closed for now.If they want to bypass the filibuster, their only real option would be to change Senate rules—a dramatic move that would eliminate the 60-vote requirement for spending bills altogether. Otherwise, they'll need to cut a deal that clears the 60-vote threshold—or accept a prolonged shutdown.That is the current state of the shutdown – we'll see you back here on Monday for our usual daily news shows. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

We're a few days into a government shutdown, but James, Steve, and Charles are managing to get by. So it's business as usual as the trio pick apart the oddities of the week: Democrats attempt to dodge responsibility for their own filibuster; OMB's Russ Vought gets to work on his master plan; the Secretary of War stands accused of fat-shaming his generals; a man named Jihad does the unthinkable in Manchester; the Chicago Teachers' Union mourns the passing of a '70s cop-killer; and Hollywood resists the rise of digitally diverse actors.Sound from this week's opening: Pete Hegseth speaks in Quantico, listing practices that the military is "done with" going forward.

We're a few days into a government shutdown, but James, Steve, and Charles are managing to get by. So it's business as usual as the trio pick apart the oddities of the week: Democrats attempt to dodge responsibility for their own filibuster; OMB's Russ Vought gets to work on his master plan; the Secretary of […]

As public displays of Donald Trump's erratic behavior seem to be increasing in frequency and intensity, and the stakes for the fate of the country seem increasingly dire, more public figures are speaking out about whether Trump is not well enough to serve. Rep. Madeleine Dean, who was caught on camera confronting House Speaker Mike Johnson about Trump's condition, talks with Jen Psaki about her concerns.With Donald Trump using the federal government shutdown to allow his OMB director Russel Vought to run amok slashing jobs and federal programs, Shalanda Young, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, is speaking out about the willingness of congressional Republicans to give up their constitutional power to Donald Trump's abuses.Jen Psaki reports on how Donald Trump's trade war, combined with his weird favoritism for his international buddies like Argentine President Javier Milei, has resulted in brutal economic conditions for American farmers. Not only is Trump devastating their businesses, but Trump's policies are hurting their living expenses and particularly their health care costs. Senator Amy Klobuchar joins to discuss. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Subscribe to Bad Faith on Patreon to instantly unlock our full premium episode library: http://patreon.com/badfaithpodcast Executive editor of The American Prospect David Dayen returns to Bad Faith to explain the government shutdown and how Democrats are doing their darnedest to be the worst resistance party in the world. How is it that Trump seems to have infinite power when Biden, during his trifecta, had none? Did Trump really just do what we were told is impossible: overrule the parliamentarian? Why are Democrats making this a fight about healthcare rather than the fact that the GOP has already effectively shut down the government through their DOGE activities? And why should we be very very scared of OMB director Russell Vought? Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube for video of this episode. Find Bad Faith on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod). Produced by Armand Aviram. Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

Today's Headlines: The government is officially shut down, and OMB apparently spent its last working hours ordering at least 16 federal agencies to send out a pre-written email blaming Democrats for it—an illegal little parting gift to federal workers. With the shutdown, you can forget about getting jobs or inflation data for now (except from payroll firm ADP, which says companies shed 32,000 jobs in September—so, yeah, not great). Meanwhile, the Supreme Court told Trump he can't just boot Fed Governor Lisa Cook on the spot, kicking that fight to January. At the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth is rolling out strict NDAs and even random polygraphs for thousands of staffers, including top brass, in his ongoing war against leakers. And in actual science news, researchers in Nature Communications announced they've managed to create functional human eggs from skin cells in a lab—early proof-of-concept that could eventually transform fertility treatments, though no babies are being made from them anytime soon. Resources/Articles mentioned in this episode: The Handbasket: Trump mandates all federal agencies send email blaming Dems for potential gov't shutdown  Yahoo: While the government is closed, jobs and inflation data go unreported NBC News: U.S. companies shed 32,000 jobs in September in latest sign of labor market weakness NYT: Supreme Court Allows Lisa Cook to Remain at Fed, for Now WaPo: Pentagon plans widespread random polygraphs, NDAs to stanch leaks Wired: Scientists Made Human Eggs From Skin Cells and Used Them to Form Embryos Morning Announcements is produced by Sami Sage and edited by Grace Hernandez-Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Inez Stepman of the Independent Women's Forum fills in for Jim on the Thursday 3 Martini Lunch. Join Inez and Greg as they explain why the government shutdown gives President Trump the opportunity for DOGE 2.0, how the assassination of Charlie Kirk gives college administrators more ability to stifle conservative speech on campus, Hamas asking for absurd changes to the Gaza plan, and Islamist terrorism in England.First, they welcome President Trump's plans to cut parts of government through powers he holds during this government shutdown. Inez explains what Trump and OMB Director Russell Vought can do in this situation and how it is long overdue.They also focus briefly on the Dems' demand for extending Obamacare subsidies. Inez details how the high cost of health care is just one of countless ways the right has been proven right about the disaster of Obamacare.Next, they revisit Inez's concerns from last month that the Charlie Kirk assassination would give colleges and universities a more plausible reason to reject conservative speakers on campus. The security needs are just too expensive. New York University Law School is proving her right. NYU Law refused to allow the campus chapter of the Federalist Society to host Ilya Shapiro on October 7. NYU officials say the likelihood of intense protests is just too great. Inez reveals why this is just the tip of the iceberg.Finally, they shake their heads as Hamas reportedly like the Trump plan for Gaza, except for the part about Hamas leaving Gaza and being demilitarized. Inez says it will likely be up to the Arab supporters of the deal to force Hamas to comply. Inez and Greg also react to the Islamist terrorist attack in England, where two people were stabbed to death outside a synagogue on Yom Kippur. Inez reveals just how bleak the outlook is for the UK unless major policy changes happen very soon.Please visit our great sponsors:Get 20% off your first purchase of classic menswear. Visit https://MizzenAndMain.com with promo code 3ML20—shop online or visit a Mizzen and Main store in select states. Build your fall sanctuary of comfort with Boll and Branch. Save 20% plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at https://BollAndBranch.com/THREEMARTINI —offer ends soon, exclusions apply.

Two powerhouse unions — the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) — are suing the Trump administration. They argue threats to permanently fire 750,000 federal workers during the shutdown are unlawful and amount to political extortion. A memo from OMB director Russell Vought, also tied to Project 2025, told agencies to “use this opportunity” to cut staff. If the plan moves forward, entire agencies could be gutted overnight, leaving families without paychecks and communities without protections. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed with the latest news from a leading Black-owned & controlled media company: https://aurn.com/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of the Chuck ToddCast, Chuck unpacks the latest government shutdown and the political brinkmanship that created it. He explores how shutdowns—once unthinkable—have become a partisan weapon, wasting money while allowing leaders like Donald Trump to punish opponents and play to their base. With Democrats at risk of shouldering equal or greater blame, Chuck asks whether the public is even paying attention, and what role figures like Russ Vought could play in reshaping government permanently. Beyond the shutdown, the conversation turns to the bigger picture: why voters never saw Trump as an aberration, why 2020 wasn't a full repudiation of 2016, and what Democrats must do to win back Trump voters in 2028. From Harris's struggle to differentiate herself from Biden to Clinton's careful dance with Reagan's legacy, Chuck argues that Democrats may need to admit Trump identified real problems—even as his solutions and behavior, especially with military leaders, remain deeply troubling.Then, Chuck is joined by NewsNation host Leland Vittert, who opens up about his personal journey growing up on the autism spectrum, the struggles his family faced, and the lessons that shaped his outlook on life and journalism. From being misunderstood in school and learning to navigate social cues, to the pivotal role his mother played in holding the family together, Vittert reflects on why he chose to go public with his story and how his experiences inform his new book—a parenting guide told from the child's perspective. He also explores how autism has served as both a challenge and, at times, a superpower in his career and personal life.The conversation widens to America's media landscape, where Vittert argues for a “radical center” approach and a journalism that calls balls and strikes on both sides rather than chasing flashy headlines. He stresses the importance of reviving local news, curating coverage around what matters most, and confronting the biases not only in how stories are told, but in which stories get told at all. This candid discussion is part memoir, part media critique, and a call for greater honesty—both in parenting and in public life.Finally, Chuck presents his ToddCast Top 5 senate races most likely to flip parties, answers listeners' questions in the “Ask Chuck” segment, and recaps a frustrating night at the Cowboys/Packers game. Got injured in an accident? You could be one click away from a claim worth millions. Just visit https://www.forthepeople.com/TODDCAST to start your claim now with Morgan & Morgan without leaving your couch. Remember, it's free unless you win!Timeline:(Timestamps may vary based on advertisements)00:00 Introduction - Government begins shutting down01:15 Congress created shutdown conditions for political leverage02:00 Could shutdown trigger the end of the senate filibuster rule?02:45 Democrats have always messaged that shutdowns are bad04:30 Democrats could shoulder equal or more blame for shutdown06:30 Shutdowns are a massive waste of money07:30 Trump seems excited for shutdown to punish opponents09:15 Terrible trend of politicians only governing for their base 11:15 Independents are pretty sour on Trump's presidency13:00 Russ Vought at OMB could use shutdown to reorient gov't permanently14:30 Big danger for Democrats is whether the public is paying attention15:30 Chuck Schumer is “Mitch McConnell” level unpopular18:45 If Dems want to win in 28 they'll have to win over some Trump voters20:15 Democrats thought Trump was an aberration, voters didn't21:15 2020 wasn't a repudiation of why Trump was elected in 201624:00 Voters don't want status quo, which is why they elected Trump twice26:15 Harris needed to prove she was different from Biden and didn't27:45 For Clinton to win, he couldn't repudiate everything Reagan did30:00 Trump's behavior in front of military leaders was outrageous31:30 The military leaders handled the situation exactly as they should32:30 Hegseth lectured leaders of far higher rank than he earned in military33:45 Democrats will have to admit that Trump correctly identified problems34:45 Voters picked “political division” as the 2nd biggest problem after economy39:45 Leland Vittert joins the Chuck ToddCast 41:30 The public doesn't grasp autism and child development issues 42:45 Autism wasn't well understood in the 80s 43:30 Parents struggle to raise neurodivergent children 44:45 Adapting to the world you live in, not expecting world to adapt to you 46:30 Leland's father didn't want him to be defined by his disability 47:15 PE teacher put Leland in with the girls "to protect him" 48:00 The struggle with learning to pick up social queues 53:00 Everyone in DC always wanted to be student body president 53:45 Why go public with your story of being on the spectrum? 56:15 There's a "parental reckoning" happening in America 57:15 There are lots of broken young men susceptible to radicalization 58:45 Nobody has definitive answers about causes of autism 1:01:00 Scientists need to be humble enough to say "I don't know" 1:02:15 80% of parents with disabled children get divorced 1:04:15 Leland's mother held the family together, hero of the story 1:06:15 Telling this story publicly is like going to therapy on live TV 1:07:45 How did you share the story of your autism with your wife? 1:10:45 You don't "get over" autism 1:12:15 Where has autism showcased itself as a superpower in your life? 1:14:15 Book is a parenting book written from the child's perspective 1:16:00 There's no one answer to America's media problem 1:17:30 What works and doesn't work in the news media?? 1:18:45 There is a "radical center" that's sick of extremes on both sides 1:19:30 Journalists should call balls and strikes and call out both sides 1:21:30 Cable news tends to obsess over stories that are flashy over substantive 1:22:45 Journalists should curate stories that are most important 1:24:30 Bias isn't just how you cover the news, it's what you cover 1:26:15 Local news was a character reference for the national network journalists 1:28:00 How to revive local news/journalism? 1:30:45 Leland really put himself out there with this book1:31:15 Chuck's thoughts on interview with Leland Vittert 1:31:45 ToddCast Top 5 Senate races most likely to flip parties 1:32:15 #1 North Carolina 1:34:00 #2 Georgia 1:36:00 #3 Michigan 1:37:45 #4 Maine 1:39:45 #5 New Hampshire 1:45:15 Honorable mentions 1:45:45 Ask Chuck 1:46:00 Why is the lie that shutdown is over money for illegal immigrants pervasive? 1:49:00 Democrats feeling disheartened after talking to Trump supporters? 1:53:00 Would the country be better off if Trump was reelected in 2020? 1:57:15 Will Des Moines superintendent arrest derail Iowa senate campaign? 1:59:00 Chuck's experience at Cowboys/Packers game in Dallas 2:04:15 It was a great weekend of college football Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On this episode of the Chuck ToddCast, Chuck unpacks the latest government shutdown and the political brinkmanship that created it. He explores how shutdowns—once unthinkable—have become a partisan weapon, wasting money while allowing leaders like Donald Trump to punish opponents and play to their base. With Democrats at risk of shouldering equal or greater blame, Chuck asks whether the public is even paying attention, and what role figures like Russ Vought could play in reshaping government permanently. Beyond the shutdown, the conversation turns to the bigger picture: why voters never saw Trump as an aberration, why 2020 wasn't a full repudiation of 2016, and what Democrats must do to win back Trump voters in 2028. From Harris's struggle to differentiate herself from Biden to Clinton's careful dance with Reagan's legacy, Chuck argues that Democrats may need to admit Trump identified real problems—even as his solutions and behavior, especially with military leaders, remain deeply troubling.Finally, Chuck presents his ToddCast Top 5 senate races most likely to flip parties, answers listeners' questions in the “Ask Chuck” segment, and recaps a frustrating night at the Cowboys/Packers game. Got injured in an accident? You could be one click away from a claim worth millions. Just visit https://www.forthepeople.com/TODDCAST to start your claim now with Morgan & Morgan without leaving your couch. Remember, it's free unless you win!Timeline:(Timestamps may vary based on advertisements)00:00 Introduction - Government begins shutting down01:15 Congress created shutdown conditions for political leverage02:00 Could shutdown trigger the end of the senate filibuster rule?02:45 Democrats have always messaged that shutdowns are bad04:30 Democrats could shoulder equal or more blame for shutdown06:30 Shutdowns are a massive waste of money07:30 Trump seems excited for shutdown to punish opponents09:15 Terrible trend of politicians only governing for their base 11:15 Independents are pretty sour on Trump's presidency13:00 Russ Vought at OMB could use shutdown to reorient gov't permanently14:30 Big danger for Democrats is whether the public is paying attention15:30 Chuck Schumer is “Mitch McConnell” level unpopular18:45 If Dems want to win in 28 they'll have to win over some Trump voters20:15 Democrats thought Trump was an aberration, voters didn't21:15 2020 wasn't a repudiation of why Trump was elected in 201624:00 Voters don't want status quo, which is why they elected Trump twice26:15 Harris needed to prove she was different from Biden and didn't27:45 For Clinton to win, he couldn't repudiate everything Reagan did30:00 Trump's behavior in front of military leaders was outrageous31:30 The military leaders handled the situation exactly as they should32:30 Hegseth lectured leaders of far higher rank than he earned in military33:45 Democrats will have to admit that Trump correctly identified problems34:45 Voters picked “political division” as the 2nd biggest problem after economy37:30 ToddCast Top 5 Senate races most likely to flip parties 38:00 #1 North Carolina 39:45 #2 Georgia 41:45 #3 Michigan 43:30 #4 Maine 45:30 #5 New Hampshire 51:00 Honorable mentions 51:30 Ask Chuck 51:45 Why is the lie that shutdown is over money for illegal immigrants pervasive? 54:45 Democrats feeling disheartened after talking to Trump supporters? 58:45 Would the country be better off if Trump was reelected in 2020? 1:03:00 Will Des Moines superintendent arrest derail Iowa senate campaign? 1:04:45 Chuck's experience at Cowboys/Packers game in Dallas 1:10:00 It was a great weekend of college football Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The White House Office of Management and Budget is instructing agencies to consider reducing staff for programs that have a lapse in funding in the event of a government shutdown, as tensions rise ahead of the Sept. 30 end to the fiscal year. “With respect to those Federal programs whose funding would lapse and which are otherwise unfunded, such programs are no longer statutorily required to be carried out,” the undated message said. The guidance goes on to say that consistent with applicable law, including a federal reduction in force statute, agencies are directed to use this opportunity to consider RIF notices for employees working in projects, programs or activities that have a funding lapse on Oct.1, don't have another source of funding, and are not consistent with President Donald Trump's priorities. The project, program or activity must meet all three criteria, the message said. The message places blame for a possible shutdown squarely on congressional Democrats, calling their demands “insane.” The OMB message explains that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, legislation passed earlier this year that is at the heart of Trump's second-term agenda, provided “ample resources to ensure that many core Trump Administration priorities will continue uninterrupted.” Federal cyber authorities sounded a rare alarm last week, issuing an emergency directive about an ongoing and widespread attack spree involving actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities affecting Cisco firewalls. Cisco said it began investigating attacks on multiple government agencies linked to the state-sponsored campaign in May. The vendor, which attributes the attacks to the same threat group behind an early 2024 campaign targeting Cisco devices it dubbed “ArcaneDoor,” said the new zero-days were exploited to “implant malware, execute commands, and potentially exfiltrate data from the compromised devices.” Cisco disclosed three vulnerabilities affecting its Adaptive Security Appliances — CVE-2025-20333, CVE-2025-20363 and CVE-2025-20362 — but said “evidence collected strongly indicates CVE-2025-20333 and CVE-2025-20362 were used by the attacker in the current attack campaign.” The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said those two zero-days pose an “unacceptable risk” to federal agencies and require immediate action. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The White House says the public will have to look at each individual agency to find out their plans for what would happen in a government shutdown. The Office of Management and Budget's webpage which normally publishes shutdown contingency plans remained empty for months. But now, OMB says that agencies' plans will only be available one by one, on each agency's own website. Those contingency plans cover how many federal employees would continue working — with or without pay — during a possible shutdown. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The looming government shutdown — now just days away — has escalated dramatically. Russ Vought, Trump's former OMB director and the key architect behind the original administration firings, circulated a memo this week warning agencies to prepare for a “reduction in force” if funding lapses. The message was clear: if there's a shutdown, he plans to fire as many people as possible and make those firings stick. In his words, the Democrats would be handing him a gift. It's what he's always wanted to do, and he's daring them to let it happen.Democrats, for their part, view this as a scare tactic, a way to push them into passing a clean continuing resolution. They've been offered essentially the best deal possible under GOP control: Biden-era spending levels and no controversial riders. Still, they're rejecting it. Even lawmakers from districts and states with large numbers of federal employees — Chris Van Hollen, Glenn Ivey, Patty Murray, Mark Warner — are standing firm. For them, this is about resisting what they see as Trump-aligned plans to gut the federal workforce.Politics Politics Politics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Some Republicans are framing the mass firing threat as leverage, not a goal. Bernie Moreno said he supports the memo as a negotiating tactic but wants to avoid a shutdown. Susan Collins and Mike Lawler both expressed discomfort with using federal workers as bargaining chips but pointed out that the solution is simple: just vote for the clean CR. Speaker Mike Johnson, meanwhile, is pressing hard, accusing Democrats of preferring illegal immigrants to federal employees by insisting on funding Obamacare and Medicare subsidies that Republicans argue benefit non-citizens.So where does that leave us? A shutdown happens when Congress fails to pass, and the President fails to sign, either the full appropriations bill or a continuing resolution before the start of the fiscal year. When that happens, agencies are prohibited from spending money, except on activities deemed essential to life, property, or national security. Non-essential employees are furloughed, contractors go unpaid, and essential workers like the military and TSA keep working without pay. We're set to enter this world on October 1st.Everything from passport processing to regulatory enforcement gets paused. Federal contractors, especially in areas around DC, take a huge financial hit. Social security checks, Medicare, and mail delivery continue. And while federal workers usually get back pay, contractors often don't. A shutdown only ends when Congress passes and the President signs a funding bill. That's why I say this isn't an “if,” but a “when.” The government will shut down; the only question is how long Democrats are willing to hold out before taking the same deal they're rejecting now. I don't think it'll be long. This isn't their kind of fight, and they're about to find out why.Chapters00:00 - Intro03:12 - 107 Days06:30 - Gov Shutdown15:30 - Update15:49 - Hegseth Meeting18:04 - Kimmel Ratings19:44 - TikTok20:43 - Interview with Tom Merritt55:49 - Wrap-up This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.politicspoliticspolitics.com/subscribe

With a government shutdown just days away, the OMB says it will conduct mass layoffs. Plus, the Defense Department doesn't seem too worried about the prospect of a shutdown. Want more in-depth daily coverage from Congress? Subscribe to our free Punchbowl News AM newsletter at punchbowl.news. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jon Herold tackles the looming government shutdown, breaking down how Democrats' spending demands and Trump's clean CR strategy set the stage for potential mass firings across federal agencies. He digs into OMB memos from Russ Vought outlining “reductions in force” and explains why this round feels different from past shutdown rugs. The episode also explores the Pentagon's rare order summoning hundreds of generals to Quantico, sparking speculation about what could necessitate such an in-person gathering. From the Dallas ICE facility shooting and FBI updates, to DOJ's investigation into Soros's Open Society Foundations, to Jimmy Kimmel's ratings spike after his suspension, Jon connects the dots on narratives, psyops, and accountability. Add in Trump's latest Truth Social posts on election fraud, Comey's possible indictment, and foreign aid reallocation, and this episode delivers a sharp, detailed rundown of the battles shaping America's future.

Robert and Adam are sailing solo on this special episode of the GovNavigators Show, featuring an in-depth discussion of recent developments from OPM, OMB, GAO, and more. With the end of the fiscal year fast approaching, the GovNavigators are here to make sense of the storm. Hold on tight!Show Notes: OPM: New Guidelines for Performance ReviewsOMB: Updates to A-11GAO: New VideoEvents on the GovNavigator's RadarSeptember 24-25, 2025: AGA's Internal Controls & Fraud Conference  October 9, 2025: FedInsider / Carahsoft Innovation Summit 

Walt Lukken sat down with Mark Calabria at the White House Office of Management and Budget offices in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Mark serves as Associate Director at OMB, along with being detailed to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and serving as Chief Statistician of the United States in an interim role. They discussed the role OMB plays in setting federal regulations, the Trump administration's efforts to provide regulatory relief, regulating crypto and, given his long career in housing, Mark shared sage advice for those looking to purchase their first home.

Connect to John Gilroy on LinkedIn   https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-gilroy/ Want to listen to other episodes? www.Federaltechpodcast.com It is difficult to pinpoint an exact number, but some statistics show an executive is five times more likely to be attacked than a regular employee. It makes sense. If you receive a suspicious email from a fellow employee, do not respond. However, if you receive an email from the CEO, you are more likely to react more aggressively. In today's interview, Richard Fleeman and Ricky Freeman from Fortreum Labs discussed the increased risk executives face, citing a 74% human error rate in breaches. How do malicious actors get personal information on an executive? Sometimes, leaders are too active on social media and, for example, post when they are on vacation. If an employee gets fooled, he may transfer assets online. Okay, we know ransomware is on the rise drastically, and companies are vulnerable – what can an executive do to prevent this activity? Richard Fleeman observes that once the money is transferred, it is exceedingly difficult to find a resolution. He suggests that prevention is the best approach. Start with social media and see if you are revealing your email or confidential information. Some call this oversharing. Multi Factor Authentication is a terrific way to limit access to your accounts. People often use the same password. Humans tend to repeat passwords. "Password spraying" can be used to break into accounts. Fortreum offers a service to help executives avoid these common pitfalls. They can start with publicly available data and then move onto the dark web. Ricky Freeman notes that attacks like the OMB breach often result in data for sale on the dark web. He has developed tools that enable the scraping of the dark web to determine if an executive can compromise sensitive information. Hard to expunge – easier to opt out Dark web. Even if your compromised information is extant on the dark web, you may not be able to do anything about it. Fortreum's services include manual testing, attack surface analysis, and dark web scraping to identify vulnerabilities and provide recommendations. You can get an idea of your vulnerability by taking advantage of guides to see if you are exposed. 

Even as OMB rethinks how it frames enterprise risk management, the risks themselves aren't going anywhere and agencies can't afford to treat ERM as a compliance exercise. Here to discuss how federal leaders can keep enterprise risk considerations front and center is the current President of the Association for Federal Enterprise Risk Management Dr. Karen Hardy.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On today's Summer Recess edition of the Steak for Breakfast Podcast, we are covering:    Texas adds 5 new Republican Seats to the U.S. House of Representatives, Tulsi Gabbard trims the fat at the DNI, Kash Patel takes a sledgehammer to the Fed and POTUS thanks the National Guard and Law Enforcement for cleaning up the Capital    The FBI raids former ambassador John Bolton's home and private office, and President Trump gives an update on the War in Ukraine from the Oval Office    Guests: In Order of Appearance    All profile handles are for X (formerly Twitter)    Congressman Rudy Yakym (@RepRudyYaykm) U.S. Representative, IN-5   Website: https://yakym.house.gov/   Jessica Anderson: (@JessAnderson2) Former Trump 45 Office of OMB; President, Sentinel Action Fund    Website: https://sentinelactionfund.com/   Subscribe to the show and rate it, don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And find everything Steak for Breakfast at https://linktr.ee/steakforbreakfastpodcast Be sure to listen, like, follow and SHARE our Steak for Breakfast content!   Steak for Breakfast:    SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steak-for-breakfast-podcast/id1498791684   SUBSCRIBE on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3MXIB2s8IWLoT4tnBMAH9n?si=izN0KShBSAytW5JBBsKEwQ   SUBSCRIBE on YouTube:    Full shows: https://youtube.com/@steakforbreakfastpod   Steak Tidbits: https://youtube.com/@steaktidbits   EMAIL the show: steakforbreakfastpodcast@protonmail.com    Steak for Substack: https://steakforbreakfastpodcast.substack.com   linktree: https://linktr.ee/steakforbreakfastpodcast   MyPillow: Promo Code: STEAK at checkout  Website: https://mystore.com/steak Website: https://www.mypillow.com/steak  Via the Phone: http://mypatriotcigars.com/usa/steak   Saddles in Service - “Because no hero should ride alone” https://saddlesinservice.org   Man Rubs Enter Promo Code: STEAK15 and save 15% https://manrubs.com   BattleBorn Coffee Roasters enter promo code: STEAK and save 20% off your first order  https://www.battleborn.coffee   New Hope Wellness use this link or enter promo code: STEAK during intake for free consultation and $100 off your first order https://www.newhopewellness.com/steak Call: 1-800-527-2150

J.T. Young, author of Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America's Socialist Left, brings his decades of experience in Congress, the Treasury Department, and the OMB to expose why Democrats are now stuck with failing cities as the backdrop for their 2028 convention. Young explains how progressive policies have hollowed out America's urban centers—and why Democrats can't run from the mess they created.

Today I'm talking to economic historian Judge Glock, Director of Research at the Manhattan Institute. Judge works on a lot of topics: if you enjoy this episode, I'd encourage you to read some of his work on housing markets and the Environmental Protection Agency. But I cornered him today to talk about civil service reform.Since the 1990s, over 20 red and blue states have made radical changes to how they hire and fire government employees — changes that would be completely outside the Overton window at the federal level. A paper by Judge and Renu Mukherjee lists four reforms made by states like Texas, Florida, and Georgia: * At-will employment for state workers* The elimination of collective bargaining agreements* Giving managers much more discretion to hire* Giving managers much more discretion in how they pay employeesJudge finds decent evidence that the reforms have improved the effectiveness of state governments, and little evidence of the politicization that federal reformers fear. Meanwhile, in Washington, managers can't see applicants' resumes, keyword searches determine who gets hired, and firing a bad performer can take years. But almost none of these ideas are on the table in Washington.Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood for his judicious transcript edits and fact-checking, and to Katerina Barton for audio edits.Judge, you have a paper out about lessons for civil service reform from the states. Since the ‘90s, red and blue states have made big changes to how they hire and fire people. Walk through those changes for me.I was born and grew up in Washington DC, heard a lot about civil service throughout my childhood, and began to research it as an adult. But I knew almost nothing about the state civil service systems. When I began working in the states — mainly across the Sunbelt, including in Texas, Kansas, Arizona — I was surprised to learn that their civil service systems were reformed to an absolutely radical extent relative to anything proposed at the federal level, let alone implemented.Starting in the 1990s, several states went to complete at-will employment. That means there were no official civil service protections for any state employees. Some managers were authorized to hire people off the street, just like you could in the private sector. A manager meets someone in a coffee shop, they say, "I'm looking for exactly your role. Why don't you come on board?" At the federal level, with its stultified hiring process, it seemed absurd to even suggest something like that.You had states that got rid of any collective bargaining agreements with their public employee unions. You also had states that did a lot more broadbanding [creating wider pay bands] for employee pay: a lot more discretion for managers to reward or penalize their employees depending on their performance.These major reforms in these states were, from the perspective of DC, incredibly radical. Literally nobody at the federal level proposes anything approximating what has been in place for decades in the states. That should be more commonly known, and should infiltrate the debate on civil service reform in DC.Even though the evidence is not absolutely airtight, on the whole these reforms have been positive. A lot of the evidence is surveys asking managers and operators in these states how they think it works. They've generally been positive. We know these states operate pretty well: Places like Texas, Florida, and Arizona rank well on state capacity metrics in terms of cost of government, time for permitting, and other issues.Finally, to me the most surprising thing is the dog that didn't bark. The argument in the federal government against civil service reform is, “If you do this, we will open up the gates of hell and return to the 19th-century patronage system, where spoilsmen come and go depending on elected officials, and the government is overrun with political appointees who don't care about the civil service.” That has simply not happened. We have very few reports of any concrete examples of politicization at the state level. In surveys, state employees and managers can almost never remember any example of political preferences influencing hiring or firing.One of the surveys you cited asked, “Can you think of a time someone said that they thought that the political preferences were a factor in civil service hiring?” and it was something like 5%.It was in that 5-10% range. I don't think you'd find a dissimilar number of people who would say that even in an official civil service system. Politics is not completely excluded even from a formal civil service system.A few weeks ago, you and I talked to our mutual friend, Don Moynihan, who's a scholar of public administration. He's more skeptical about the evidence that civil service reform would be positive at the federal level.One of your points is, “We don't have strong negative evidence from the states. Productivity didn't crater in states that moved to an at-will employment system.” We do have strong evidence that collective bargaining in the public sector is bad for productivity.What I think you and Don would agree on is that we could use more evidence on the hiring and firing side than the surveys that we have. Is that a fair assessment?Yes, I think that's correct. As you mentioned, the evidence on collective bargaining is pretty close to universal: it raises costs, reduces the efficiency of government, and has few to no positive upsides.On hiring and firing, I mentioned a few studies. There's a 2013 study that looks at HR managers in six states and finds very little evidence of politicization, and managers generally prefer the new system. There was a dissertation that surveyed several employees and managers in civil service reform and non-reform states. Across the board, the at-will employment states said they had better hiring retention, productivity, and so forth. And there's a 2002 study that looked specifically at Texas, Florida, and Georgia after their reforms, and found almost universal approbation inside the civil service itself for these reforms.These are not randomized control trials. But I think that generally positive evidence should point us directionally where we should go on civil service reform. If we loosen restrictions on discipline and firing, decentralize hiring and so forth — we probably get some productivity benefits from it. We can also know, with some amount of confidence, that the sky is not going to fall, which I think is a very important baseline assumption. The civil service system will continue on and probably be fairly close to what it is today, in terms of its political influence, if you have decentralized hiring and at-will employment.As you point out, a lot of these reforms that have happened in 20-odd states since the ‘90s would be totally outside the Overton window at the federal level. Why is it so easy for Georgia to make a bipartisan move in the ‘90s to at-will employment, when you couldn't raise the topic at the federal level?It's a good question. I think in the 1990s, a lot of people thought a combination of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act — which was the Carter-era act that somewhat attempted to do what these states hoped to do in the 1990s — and the Clinton-era Reinventing Government Initiative, would accomplish the same ends. That didn't happen.That was an era when civil service reform was much more bipartisan. In Georgia, it was a Democratic governor, Zell Miller, who pushed it. In a lot of these other states, they got buy-in from both sides. The recent era of state reform took place after the 2010 Republican wave in the states. Since that wave, the reform impetus for civil service has been much more Republican. That has meant it's been a lot harder to get buy-in from both sides at the federal level, which will be necessary to overcome a filibuster.I think people know it has to be very bipartisan. We're just past the point, at least at the moment, where it can be bipartisan at the federal level. But there are areas where there's a fair amount of overlap between the two sides on what needs to happen, at least in the upper reaches of the civil service.It was interesting to me just how bipartisan civil service reform has been at various times. You talked about the Civil Service Reform Act, which passed Congress in 1978. President Carter tells Congress that the civil service system:“Has become a bureaucratic maze which neglects merit, tolerates poor performance, permits abuse of legitimate employee rights, and mires every personnel action in red tape, delay, and confusion.”That's a Democratic president saying that. It's striking to me that the civil service was not the polarized topic that it is today.Absolutely. Carter was a big civil service reformer in Georgia before those even larger 1990s reforms. He campaigned on civil service reform and thought it was essential to the success of his presidency. But I think you are seeing little sprouts of potential bipartisanship today, like the Chance to Compete Act at the end of 2024, and some of the reforms Obama did to the hiring process. There's options for bipartisanship at the federal level, even if it can't approach what the states have done.I want to walk through the federal hiring process. Let's say you're looking to hire in some federal agency — you pick the agency — and I graduated college recently, and I want to go into the civil service. Tell me about trying to hire somebody like me. What's your first step?It's interesting you bring up the college graduate, because that is one recent reform: President Trump put out an executive order trying to counsel agencies to remove the college degree requirement for job postings. This happened in a lot of states first, like Maryland, and that's also been bipartisan. This requirement for a college degree — which was used as a very unfortunate proxy for ability at a lot of these jobs — is now being removed. It's not across the whole federal government. There's still job postings that require higher education degrees, but that's something that's changed.To your question, let's say the Department of Transportation. That's one of the more bipartisan ones, when you look at surveys of federal civil servants. Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, they tend to be a little more Republican. Health and Human Services and some other agencies tend to be pretty Democrat. Transportation is somewhere in the middle.As a manager, you try to craft a job description and posting to go up on the USA Jobs website, which is where all federal job postings go. When they created it back in 1996, that was supposedly a massive reform to federal hiring: this website where people could submit their resumes. Then, people submit their resumes and answer questions about their qualifications for the job.One of the slightly different aspects from the private sector is that those applications usually go to an HR specialist first. The specialist reviews everything and starts to rank people into different categories, based on a lot of weird things. It's supposed to be “knowledge, skills, and abilities” — your KSAs, or competencies. To some extent, this is a big step up from historical practice. You had, frankly, an absurd civil service exam, where people had to fill out questions about, say, General Grant or about US Code Title 42, or whatever it was, and then submit it. Someone rated the civil service exam, and then the top three test-takers were eligible for the job.We have this newer, better system, where we rank on knowledge, skills, and abilities, and HR puts put people into different categories. One of the awkward ways they do this is by merely scanning the resumes and applications for keywords. If it's a computer job, make sure you say the word “computer” somewhere in your resume. Make sure you say “manager” if it's a managerial job.Just to be clear, this is entirely literal. There's a keyword search, and folks who don't pass that search are dinged.Yes. I've always wondered, how common is this? It's sometimes hard to know what happens in the black box in these federal HR departments. I saw an HR official recently say, "If I'm not allowed to do keyword searches, I'm going to take 15 years to overlook all the applications, so I've got to do keyword searches." If they don't have the keywords, into the circular file it goes, as they used to say: into the garbage can.Then they start ranking people on their abilities into, often, three different categories. That is also very literal. If you put in the little word bubble, "I am an exceptional manager," you get pushed on into the next level of the competition. If you say, "I'm pretty good, but I'm not the best," into the circular file you go.I've gotten jaded about this, but it really is shocking. We ask candidates for a self-assessment, and if they just rank themselves 10/10 on everything, no matter how ludicrous, that improves their odds of being hired.That's going to immensely improve your odds. Similar to the keyword search, there's been pushback on this in recent years, and I'm definitely not going to say it's universal anymore. It's rarer than it used to be. But it's still a very common process.The historical civil service system used to operate on a rule of three. In places like New York, it still operates like that. The top three candidates on the evaluation system get presented to the manager, and the manager has to approve one of them for the position.Thanks partially to reforms by the Obama administration in 2010, they have this category rating system where the best qualified or the very qualified get put into a big bucket together [instead of only including the top three]. Those are the people that the person doing the hiring gets to see, evaluate, and decide who he wants to hire.There are some restrictions on that. If a veteran outranks everybody else, you've got to pick the veteran [typically known as Veterans' Preference]. That was an issue in some of the state civil service reforms, too. The states said, “We're just going to encourage a veterans' preference. We don't need a formalized system to say they get X number of points and have to be in Y category. We're just going to say, ‘Try to hire veterans.'” That's possible without the formal system, despite what some opponents of reform may claim.One of the particular problems here is just the nature of the people doing the hiring. Sometimes you just need good managers to encourage HR departments to look at a broader set of qualifications. But one of the bigger problems is that they keep the HR evaluation system divorced from the manager who is doing the hiring. David Shulkin, who was the head of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), wrote a great book, It Shouldn't Be This Hard to Serve Your Country. He was a healthcare exec, and the VA is mainly a healthcare agency. He would tell people, "You should work for me," they would send their applications into the HR void, and he'd never see them again. They would get blocked at some point in this HR evaluation process, and he'd be sent people with no healthcare experience, because for whatever reason they did well in the ranking.One of the very base-level reforms should be, “How can we more clearly integrate the hiring manager with the evaluation process?” To some extent, the bipartisan Chance to Compete Act tries to do this. They said, “You should have subject matter experts who are part of crafting the description of the job, are part of evaluating, and so forth.” But there's still a long road to go.Does that firewall — where the person who wants to hire doesn't get to look at the process until the end — exist originally because of concerns about cronyism?One of the interesting things about the civil service is its raison d'être — its reason for being — was supposedly a single, clear purpose: to prevent politicized hiring and patronage. That goes back to the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883. But it's always been a little strange that you have all of these very complex rules about every step of the process — from hiring to firing to promotion, and everything in between — to prevent political influence. We could just focus on preventing political influence, and not regulate every step of the process on the off-chance that without a clear regulation, political influence could creep in. This division [between hiring manager and applicants] is part of that general concern. There are areas where I've heard HR specialists say, "We declare that a manager is a subject matter expert, and we bring them into the process early on, we can do that." But still the division is pretty stark, and it's based on this excessive concern about patronage.One point you flag is that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which is the body that thinks about personnel in the federal government, has a 300-page regulatory document for agencies on how you have to hire. There's a remarkable amount of process.Yes, but even that is a big change from the Federal Personnel Manual, which was the 10,000-page document that we shredded in the 1990s. In the ‘90s, OPM gave the agencies what's called “delegated examining authorities.” This says, “You, agency, have power to decide who to hire, we're not going to do the central supervision anymore. But, but, but: here's the 300-page document that dictates exactly how you have to carry out that hiring.”So we have some decentralization, allowing managers more authority to control their own departments. But this two-level oversight — a local HR department that's ultimately being overseen by the OPM — also leads to a lot of slip ‘twixt cup and lip, in terms of how something gets implemented. If you're in the agency and you're concerned about the OPM overseeing your process, you're likely to be much more careful than you would like to be. “Yes, it's delegated to me, but ultimately, I know I have to answer to OPM about this process. I'm just going to color within the lines.”I often cite Texas, which has no central HR office. Each agency decides how it wants to hire. In a lot of these reform states, if there is a central personnel office, it's an information clearinghouse or reservoir of models. “You can use us, the central HR office, as a resource if you want us to help you post the job, evaluate it, or help manage your processes, but you don't have to.” That's the goal we should be striving for in a lot of the federal reforms. Just make OPM a resource for the managers in the individual departments to do their thing or go independent.Let's say I somehow get through the hiring process. You offer me a job at the Department of Transportation. What are you paying me?This is one of the more stultified aspects of the federal civil service system. OPM has another multi-hundred-page handbook called the Handbook of Occupational Groups and Families. Inside that, you've got 49 different “groups and families,” like “Clerical occupations.” Inside those 49 groups are a series of jobs, sometimes dozens, like “Computer Operator.” Inside those, they have independent documents — often themselves dozens of pages long — detailing classes of positions. Then you as a manager have to evaluate these nine factors, which can each give points to each position, which decides how you get slotted into this weird Government Schedule (GS) system [the federal payscale].Again, this is actually an improvement. Before, you used to have the Civil Service Commission, which went around staring very closely at someone over their typewriter and saying, "No, I think you should be a GS-12, not a GS-11, because someone over in the Department of Defense who does your same job is a GS-12." Now this is delegated to agencies, but again, the agencies have to listen to the OPM on how to classify and set their jobs into this 15-stage GS-classification system, each stage of which has 10 steps which determine your pay, and those steps are determined mainly by your seniority. It's a formalized step-by-step system, overwhelmingly based on just how long you've sat at your desk.Let's be optimistic about my performance as a civil servant. Say that over my first three years, I'm just hitting it out of the park. Can you give me a raise? What can you do to keep me in my role?Not too much. For most people, the within-step increases — those 10 steps inside each GS-level — is just set by seniority. Now there are all these quality step increases you can get, but they're very rare and they have to be documented. So you could hypothetically pay someone more, but it's going to be tough. In general, the managers just prefer to stick to seniority, because not sticking to it garners a lot of complaints. Like so much else, the goal is, "We don't want someone rewarding an official because they happen to share their political preferences." The result of that concern is basically nobody can get rewarded at all, which is very unfortunate.We do have examples in state and federal government of what's known as broadbanding, where you have very broad pay scales, and the manager can decide where to slot someone. Say you're a computer operator, which can mean someone who knows what an Excel spreadsheet is, or someone who's programming the most advanced AI systems. As a manager in South Carolina or Florida, you have a lot of discretion to say, "I can set you 50% above the market rate of what this job technically would go for, if I think you're doing a great job."That's very rare at the federal level. They've done broadbanding at the Government Accountability Office, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The China Lake Experiment out in California gave managers a lot more discretion to reward scientists. But that's definitely the exception. In general, it's a step-wise, seniority-based system.What if you want to bring me into the Senior Executive Service (SES)? Theoretically, that sits at the top of the General Service scale. Can't you bump me up in there and pay me what you owe me?I could hypothetically bring you in as a senior executive servant. The SES was created in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. The idea was, “We're going to have this elite cadre of about 8,000 individuals at the top of the federal government, whose employment will be higher-risk and higher-reward. They might be fired, and we're going to give them higher pay to compensate for that.”Almost immediately, that did not work out. Congress was outraged at the higher pay given to the top officials and capped it. Ever since, how much the SES can get paid has been tightly controlled. As in most of the rest of the federal government, where they establish these performance pay incentives or bonuses — which do exist — they spread them like peanut butter over the whole service. To forestall complaints, everyone gets a little bit every two or three years.That's basically what happened to the SES. Their annual pay is capped at the vice president's salary, which is a cap for a lot of people in the federal government. For most of your GS and other executive scales, the cap is Congress's salary. [NB: This is no longer exactly true, since Congress froze its own salaries in 2009. The cap for GS (currently about $195k) is now above congressional salaries ($174k).]One of the big problems with pay in the federal government is pay compression. Across civil service systems, the highest-skilled people tend to be paid much less than the private sector, and the lowest-skilled people tend to get paid much more. The political science reason for that is pretty simple: the median voter in America still decides what seems reasonable. To the median voter, the average salary of a janitor looks low, and the average salary of a scientist looks way too high. Hence this tendency to pay compression. Your average federal employee is probably overpaid relative to the private sector, because the lowest-skilled employees are paid up to 40% higher than the private sector equivalent. The highest-paid employees, the post-graduate skilled professionals, are paid less. That makes it hard to recruit the top performers, but it also swells the wage budget in a way that makes it difficult to talk about reform.There's a lot of interest in this administration in making it easier to recruit talent and get rid of under-performers. There have been aggressive pushes to limit collective bargaining in the public sector. That should theoretically make it easier to recruit, but it also increases the precariousness of civil service roles. We've seen huge firings in the civil service over the last six months.Classically, the explicit trade-off of working in the federal government was, “Your pay is going to be capped, but you have this job for life. It's impossible to get rid of you.” You trade some lifetime earnings for stability. In a world where the stability is gone, but pay is still capped, isn't the net effect to drive talent away from the civil service?I think it's a concern now. On one level it should be ameliorated, because those who are most concerned with stability of employment do tend to be lower performers. If you have people who are leaving the federal service because all they want is stability, and they're not getting that anymore, that may not be a net loss. As someone who came out of academia and knows the wonder of effective lifetime annuities, there can be very high performers who like that stability who therefore take a lower salary. Without the ability to bump that pay up more, it's going to be an issue.I do know that, internally, the Trump administration has made some signs they're open to reforms in the top tiers of the SES and other parts of the federal government. They would be willing to have people get paid more at that level to compensate for the increased risks since the Trump administration came in. But when you look at the reductions in force (RIFs) that have happened under Trump, they are overwhelmingly among probationary employees, the lower-level employees.With some exceptions. If you've been promoted recently, you can get reclassified as probationary, so some high-performers got lumped in.Absolutely. The issue has been exacerbated precisely because the RIF regulations that are in place have made the firings particularly damaging. If you had a more streamlined RIF system — which they do have in many states, where seniority is not the main determinant of who gets laid off — these RIFs could be removing the lower-performing civil servants and keeping the higher-performing ones, and giving them some amount of confidence in their tenure.Unfortunately, the combination of large-scale removals with the existing RIF regs, which are very stringent, has demoralized some of the upper levels of the federal government. I share that concern. But I might add, it is interesting, if you look at the federal government's own figures on the total civil service workforce, they have gone down significantly since Trump came in office, but I think less than 100,000 still, in the most recent numbers that I've seen. I'm not sure how much to trust those, versus some of these other numbers where people have said 150,000, 200,000.Whether the Trump administration or a future administration can remove large numbers of people from the civil service should be somewhat divorced from the general conversation on civil service reform. The main debate about whether or not Trump can do this centers around how much power the appropriators in Congress have to determine the total amount of spending in particular agencies on their workforce. It does not depend necessarily on, "If we're going to remove people — whether for general layoffs, or reductions in force, or because of particular performance issues — how can we go about doing that?" My last-ditch hope to maintain a bipartisan possibility of civil service reform is to bracket, “How much power does the president have to remove or limit the workforce in general?” from “How can he go about hiring and firing, et cetera?”I think making it easier for the president to identify and remove poor performers is a tool that any future administration would like to have.We had this conversation sparked again with the firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner. But that was a position Congress set up to be appointed by the President, confirmed by the Senate, and removable by the President. It's a separate issue from civil service at large. Everyone said, “We want the president to be able to hire and fire the commissioner.” Maybe firing the commissioner was a bad decision, but that's the situation today.Attentive listeners to Statecraft know I'm pretty critical, like you are, of the regulations that say you have to go in order of seniority. In mass layoffs, you're required to fire a lot of the young, talented people.But let's talk about individual firings. I've been a terrible civil servant, a nightmarish employee from day one. You want to discipline, remove, suspend, or fire me. What are your options?Anybody who has worked in the civil service knows it's hard to fire bad performers. Whatever their political valence, whatever they feel about the civil service system, they have horror stories about a person who just couldn't be removed.In the early 2010s, a spate of stories came out about air traffic controllers sleeping on the job. Then-transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, made a big public announcement: "I'm going to fire these three guys." After these big announcements, it turned out he was only able to remove one of them. One retired, and another had their firing reduced to a suspension.You had another horrific story where a man was joking on the phone with friends when a plane crashed into a helicopter and killed nine people over the Hudson River. National outcry. They said, "We're going to fire this guy." In the end, after going through the process, he only got a suspension. Everyone agrees it's too hard.The basic story is, you have two ways to fire someone. Chapter 75, the old way, is often considered the realm of misconduct: You've stolen something from the office, punched your colleague in the face during a dispute about the coffee, something illegal or just straight-out wrong. We get you under Chapter 75.The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act added Chapter 43, which is supposed to be the performance-based system to remove someone. As with so much of that Civil Service Reform Act, the people who passed it thought this might be the beginning of an entirely different system.In the end, lots of federal managers say there's not a huge difference between the two. Some use 75, some use 43. If you use 43, you have to document very clearly what the person did wrong. You have to put them on a performance improvement plan. If they failed a performance improvement plan after a certain amount of time, they can respond to any claims about what they did wrong. Then, they can take that process up to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and claim that they were incorrectly fired, or that the processes weren't carried out appropriately. Then, if they want to, they can say, “Nah, I don't like the order I got,” and take it up to federal courts and complain there. Right now, the MSPB doesn't have a full quorum, which is complicating some of the recent removal disputes.You have this incredibly difficult process, unlike the private sector, where your boss looks at you and says, "I don't like how you're giving me the stink-eye today. Out you go." One could say that's good or bad, but, on the whole, I think the model should be closer to the private sector. We should trust managers to do their job without excessive oversight and process. That's clearly about as far from the realm of possibility as the current system, under which the estimate is 6-12 months to fire a very bad performer. The number of people who win at the Merit Systems Protection Board is still 20-30%.This goes into another issue, which is unionization. If you're part of a collective bargaining agreement — most of the regular federal civil service is — first, you have to go with this independent, union-based arbitration and grievance procedure. You're about 50/50 to win on those if your boss tries to remove you.So if I'm in the union, we go through that arbitration grievance system. If you win and I'm fired, I can take it to the Merit Systems Protection Board. If you win again, I can still take it to the federal courts.You can file different sorts of claims at each part. On Chapter 43, the MSPB is supposed to be about the process, not the evidence, and you just have to show it was followed. On 75, the manager has to show by preponderance of the evidence that the employee is harming the agency. Then there are different standards for what you take to the courts, and different standards according to each collective bargaining agreement for the grievance procedure when someone is disciplined. It's a very complicated, abstruse, and procedure-heavy process that makes it very difficult to remove people, which is why the involuntary separation rate at the federal government and most state governments is many multiples lower than the private sector.So, you would love to get me off your team because I'm abysmal. But you have no stomach for going through this whole process and I'm going to fight it. I'm ornery and contrarian and will drag this fight out. In practice, what do managers in the federal government do with their poor performers?I always heard about this growing up. There's the windowless office in the basement without a phone, or now an internet connection. You place someone down there, hope they get the message, and sooner or later they leave. But for plenty of people in America, that's the dream job. You just get to sit and nobody bothers you for eight hours. You punch in at 9 and punch out at 5, and that's your day. "Great. I'll collect that salary for another 10 years." But generally you just try to make life unpleasant for that person.Public sector collective bargaining in the US is new. I tend to think of it as just how the civil service works. But until about 50 years ago, there was no collective bargaining in the public sector.At the state level, it started with Wisconsin at the end of the 1950s. There were famous local government reforms beginning with the Little Wagner Act [signed in 1958] in New York City. Senator Robert Wagner had created the National Labor Relations Board. His son Robert F. Wagner Jr., mayor of New York, created the first US collective bargaining system at the local level in the ‘60s. In ‘62, John F. Kennedy issued an executive order which said, "We're going to deal officially with public sector unions,” but it was all informal and non-statutory.It wasn't until Title VII of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act that unions had a formal, statutory role in our federal service system. This is shockingly new. To some extent, that was the great loss to many civil service reformers in ‘78. They wanted to get through a lot of these other big reforms about hiring and firing, but they gave up on the unions to try to get those. Some people think that exception swallowed the rest of the rules. The union power that was garnered in ‘78 overcame the other reforms people hoped to accomplish. Soon, you had the majority of the federal workforce subject to collective bargaining.But that's changing now too. Part of that Civil Service Reform Act said, “If your position is in a national security-related position, the president can determine it's not subject to collective bargaining.” Trump and the OPM have basically said, “Most positions in the federal government are national security-related, and therefore we're going to declare them off-limits to collective bargaining.” Some people say that sounds absurd. But 60% of the civilian civil service workforce is the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Homeland Security. I am not someone who tries to go too easy on this crowd. I think there's a heck of a lot that needs to be reformed. But it's also worth remembering that the majority of the civil service workforce are in these three agencies that Republicans tend to like a lot.Now, whether people like Veterans Affairs is more of an open question. We have some particular laws there about opening up processes after the scandals in the 2010s about waiting lists and hospitals. You had veterans hospitals saying, "We're meeting these standards for getting veterans in the door for these waiting lists." But they were straight-up lying about those standards. Many people who were on these lists waiting for months to see a doctor died in the interim, some from causes that could have been treated had they seen a VA doctor. That led to Congress doing big reforms in the VA in 2014 and 2017, precisely because everyone realized this is a problem.So, Trump has put out these executive orders stopping collective bargaining in all of these agencies that touch national security. Some of those, like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), seem like a tough sell. I guess that, if you want to dig a mine and the Chinese are trying to dig their own mine and we want the mine to go quickly without the EPA pettifogging it, maybe. But the core ones are pretty solid. So far the courts have upheld the executive order to go in place. So collective bargaining there could be reformed.But in the rest of the government, there are these very extreme, long collective bargaining agreements between agencies and their unions. I've hit on the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) as one that's had pretty extensive bargaining with its union. When we created the TSA to supervise airport security, a lot of people said, "We need a crème de la crème to supervise airports after 9/11. We want to keep this out of union hands, because we know unions are going to make it difficult to move people around." The Obama administration said, "Nope, we're going to negotiate with the union." Now you have these huge negotiations with the unions about parking spots, hours of employment, uniforms, and everything under the sun. That makes it hard for managers in the TSA to decide when people should go where or what they should do.One thing we've talked about on Statecraft in past episodes — for instance, with John Kamensky, who was a pivotal figure in the Clinton-Gore reforms — was this relationship between government employees and “Beltway Bandits”: the contractors who do jobs you might think of as civil service jobs. One critique of that ‘90s Clinton-Gore push, “Reinventing Government,” was that although they shrank the size of the civil service on paper, the number of contractors employed by the federal government ballooned to fill that void. They did not meaningfully reduce the total number of people being paid by the federal government. Talk to me about the relationship between the civil service reform that you'd like to see and this army of folks who are not formally employees.Every government service is a combination of public employees and inputs, and private employees and inputs. There's never a single thing the government does — federal, state, or local — that doesn't involve inputs from the private sector. That could be as simple as the uniforms for the janitors. Even if you have a publicly employed janitor, who buys the mop? You're not manufacturing the mops.I understand the critique that the excessive focus on full-time employees in the 1990s led to contracting out some positions that could be done directly by the government. But I think that misses how much of the government can and should be contracted out. The basic Office of Management and Budget (OMB) statute [OMB Circular No. A-76] defining what is an essential government duty should still be the dividing line. What does the government have to do, because that is the public overseeing a process? Versus, what can the private sector just do itself?I always cite Stephen Goldsmith, the old mayor of Indianapolis. He proposed what he called the Yellow Pages test. If you open the Yellow Pages [phone directory] and three businesses do that business, the government should not be in that business. There's three garbage haulers out there. Instead of having a formal government garbage-hauling department, just contract out the garbage.With the internet, you should have a lot more opportunities to contract stuff out. I think that is generally good, and we should not have the federal government going about a lot of the day-to-day procedural things that don't require public input. What a lot of people didn't recognize is how much pressure that's going to put on government contracting officers at the federal level. Last time I checked there were 40,000 contracting officers. They have a lot of power. In the most recent year for which we have data, there were $750 billion in federal contracts. This is a substantial part of our economy. If you total state and local, we're talking almost 10% of our whole economy goes through government contracts. This is mind-boggling. In the public policy world, we should all be spending about 10% of our time thinking about contracting.One of the things I think everyone recognized is that contractors should have more authority. Some of the reform that happened with people like [Steven] Kelman — who was the Office of Federal Procurement Policy head in the ‘90s under Clinton — was, "We need to give these people more authority to just take a credit card and go buy a sheaf of paper if that's what they need. And we need more authority to get contract bids out appropriately.”The same message that animates civil service reform should animate these contracting discussions. The goal should be setting clear goals that you want — for either a civil servant or a contractor — and then giving that person the discretion to meet them. If you make the civil service more stultified, or make pay compression more extreme, you're going to have to contract more stuff out.People talk about the General Schedule [pay scale], but we haven't talked about the Federal Wage Schedule system at all, which is the blue-collar system that encompasses about 200,000 federal employees. Pay compression means those guys get paid really well. That means some managers rightfully think, "I'd like to have full-time supervision over some role, but I would rather contract it out, because I can get it a heck of a lot cheaper."There's a continuous relationship: If we make the civil service more stultified, we're going to push contracting out into more areas where maybe it wouldn't be appropriate. But a lot of things are always going to be appropriate to contract out. That means we need to give contracting officers and the people overseeing contracts a lot of discretion to carry out their missions, and not a lot of oversight from the Government Accountability Office or the courts about their bids, just like we shouldn't give OPM excess input into the civil service hiring process.This is a theme I keep harping on, on Statecraft. It's counterintuitive from a reformer's perspective, but it's true: if you want these processes to function better, you're going to have to stop nitpicking. You're going to have to ease up on the throttle and let people make their own decisions, even when sometimes you're not going to agree with them.This is a tension that's obviously happening in this administration. You've seen some clear interest in decentralization, and you've seen some centralization. In both the contract and the civil service sphere, the goal for the central agencies should be giving as many options as possible to the local managers, making sure they don't go extremely off the rails, but then giving those local managers and contracting officials the ability to make their own choices. The General Services Administration (GSA) under this administration is doing a lot of government-wide acquisition contracts. “We establish a contract for the whole government in the GSA. Usually you, the local manager, are not required to use that contract if you want computer services or whatever, but it's an option for you.”OPM should take a similar role. "Here's the system we have set up. You can take that and use it as you want. It's here for you, but it doesn't have to be used, because you might have some very particular hiring decisions to make.” Just like there shouldn't be one contracting decision that decides how we buy both a sheaf of computer paper and an aircraft carrier, there shouldn't be one hiring and firing process for a janitor and a nuclear physicist. That can't be a centralized process, because the very nature of human life is that there's an infinitude of possibilities that you need to allow for, and that means some amount of decentralization.I had an argument online recently about New York City's “buy local” requirement for certain procurement contracts. When they want to build these big public toilets in New York City, they have to source all the toilet parts from within the state, even if they're $200,000 cheaper in Portland, Oregon.I think it's crazy to ask procurement and contracting to solve all your policy problems. Procurement can't be about keeping a healthy local toilet parts industry. You just need to procure the toilet.This is another area where you see similar overlap in some of the civil service and contracting issues. A lot of cities have residency requirements for many of their positions. If you work for the city, you have to live inside the city. In New York, that means you've got a lot of police officers living on Staten Island, or right on the line of the north side of the Bronx, where they're inches away from Westchester. That drives up costs, and limits your population of potential employees.One of the most amazing things to me about the Biden Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was that it encouraged contracting officers to use residency requirements: “You should try to localize your hiring and contracting into certain areas.” On a national level, that cancels out. If both Wyoming and Wisconsin use residency requirements, the net effect is not more people hired from one of those states! So often, people expect the civil service and contracting to solve all of our ills and to point the way forward for the rest of the economy on discrimination, hiring, pay, et cetera. That just leads to, by definition, government being a lot more expensive than the private sector.Over the next three and a half years, what would you like to see the administration do on civil service reform that they haven't already taken up?I think some of the broad-scale layoffs, which seem to be slowing down, were counterproductive. I do think that their ability to achieve their ends was limited by the nature of the reduction-in-force regulations, which made them more counterproductive than they had to be. That's the situation they inherited. But that didn't mean you had to lay off a lot of people without considering the particular jobs they were doing now.And hiring quite a few of them back.Yeah. There are also debates obviously, within the administration, between DOGE and Russ Vought [director of the OMB] and some others on this. Some things, like the Schedule Policy/Career — which is the revival of Schedule F in the first Trump administration — are largely a step in the right direction. Counter to some of the critics, it says, “You can remove someone if they're in a policymaking position, just like if they were completely at-will. But you still have to hire from the typical civil service system.” So, for those concerned about politicization, that doesn't undermine that, because they can't just pick someone from the party system to put in there. I think that's good.They recently had a suitability requirement rule that I think moved in the right direction. That says, “If someone's not suitable for the workforce, there are other ways to remove them besides the typical procedures.” The ideal system is going to require some congressional input: it's to have a decentralization of hiring authority to individual managers. Which means the OPM — now under Scott Kupor, who has finally been confirmed — saying, "The OPM is here to assist you, federal managers. Make sure you stay within the broad lanes of what the administration's trying to accomplish. But once we give you your general goals, we're going to trust you to do that, including hiring.”I've mentioned it a few times, but part of the Chance to Compete Act — which was mentioned in one of Trump's Day One executive orders, people forget about this — was saying, “Implement the Chance to Compete Act to the maximum extent of the law.” Bring more subject-matter expertise into the hiring process, allow more discretion for managers and input into the hiring process. I think carrying that bipartisan reform out is going to be a big step, but it's going to take a lot more work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

In a sweeping announcement about a forthcoming executive order, President Donald Trump argued Monday that states are ultimately subservient to the White House when it comes to setting election policy. Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform that states are “merely an agent for the federal government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the federal government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.” Trump also claimed the executive order would end mail-in voting, falsely claiming that other countries stopped the practice due to fraud, as well as “very expensive and SERIOUSLY CONTROVERSIAL voting machines.” It's not clear which voting machines Trump was referencing. The president's allies and friendly media outlets like Fox News and NewsMax were successfully sued by Smartmatic and Dominion for billions of dollars after the 2020 election for falsely claiming that their voting machines were rigged to elect Democratic President Joe Biden. Either way, Trump has lost dozens of lawsuits attempting to prove fraud, and reportedly nearly signed an executive order at the end of his last term ordering the Department of Defense to seize voting machines, purportedly to examine them for fraud. A previous executive order from Trump this year, purporting to compel the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission to alter voter registration request forms to include a proof of citizenship section and deny forms to states or voters who don't provide the information, was struck down by a judge as unconstitutional in April. The judge in the ruling remarked that “no statutory delegation of authority to the Executive Branch permits the President to short-circuit Congress's deliberative process” on regulating elections via executive order. A federal watchdog is urging the Office of Management and Budget to prioritize the governmentwide adoption of a federal IT spending framework, or end the efforts, after finding the multi-year initiative has stalled. In a report made public Monday, the Government Accountability Office recommended that the OMB director direct the federal chief information officer to either terminate the agency's push for governmentwide adoption of the Technology Business Management framework or deem it an administration priority. Should it be made a priority, the GAO also suggested OMB quickly implement the watchdog's previous recommendations and take “immediate action” to integrate the framework across government fully. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

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When “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength” we are living in an era of alternate facts. Mary and Andrew apply this Orwellian concept to what's happening this week, after President Trump cited section 740 of the Home Rule Act to federalize the DC police force and send in the national guard to the nation's capital. They detail how the president was able to do this and why Congress will be the ultimate arbiter of this move. Then, they highlight some litigation befitting this theme, with Judge Breyer's trial starting this week on the use of the national guard in Los Angeles, and some decisions including not to unseal grand jury testimony in the Ghislaine Maxwell case, plus an Appeals court blocking contempt proceedings in JGG. Last up, Andrew and Mary take a look at Judge Henderson's opinion in the OMB case and why it deserves more attention than it's received. Further reading: Here is President Trump's letter to Congress citing section 740, courtesy of the New York Times.And some exciting news: tickets are on sale now for MSNBC Live – our second live community event featuring more than a dozen MSNBC hosts. The day-long event will be held on October 11th at Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan. To buy tickets visit msnbc.com/live25.Want to listen to this show without ads? Sign up for MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts.

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The Office of Management and Budget is planning to supercharge the Do Not Pay database. The White House says it will cut through some of the systemic issues that have kept this database from helping other agencies further reduce the amount of improper payments across the government. For more on OMB's plans, Federal News Network's Executive Editor Jason Miller joins me now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

CHIHUAS RODRIGUEZ PIERDE SU TITULO!JESSICA NERI PLATA HARA PELEAS EN ESTADOS UNIDOS CON MVPRAUL MACIAS EL MAS QUERIDO DE MEXICOXANDER ZAYAS A ESCRIBIR SU HISTORIA

This week, the GovNavigators sit down with Brian Friel, Co-Founder of BD-Squared, for a discussion on how federal procurement looks in the age of consolidation. An expert in procurement data, Friel offers great insight into how past efficiency efforts have led us to this administration's push to rid the federal government of duplicative and unnecessary contracts. Show Notes:Leadership shakeup at GSA M-25-31 (OMB memo on procurement consolidation)America's AI Action PlanThree AI-related EOs releasedEvents on the GovNavigators' RadarJuly 28-29th: AGA's Professional Development Training July 30th: Rare HSGAC markup scheduledAugust 5th: Data Foundation's Evaluating for Efficiency: Lessons from GAO and IGs August 19th: Celonis' Public Sector Process Intelligence Day August 20th: Data Foundation's AI Virtual Forum: Data & Policy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

OLEKSANDR USYK NO DEJÓ DUDAS DE QUIÉN ES EL MEJOR EN LA DIVISIÓN DE LOS PESOS PESADOS AL NOQUEAR AL INGLÉS DANIEL DUBOIS EN CINCO ASALTOS!NO PUDO, MANNY PACQUIAO FRACASÓ EN SU INTENTO DE SER CAMPEON DEL MUNDO Y EMAPTO CON MARIO BARRIOS…JESSE "BAM" RODRÍGUEZ, SUMÓ UN SEGUNDO CINTURÓN A SU COLECCIÓN DE 115 LIBRAS AL DERROTAR A PHUMELELA CAFÚ POR NOCAUT TÉCNICOY AHORA BUSCARA EL CETRO EN PDOER DEL PUMA MARTINEZ.SEBASTIÁN FUNDORA NOQUEÓ EN OCHO ASALTOS A TIM TSZYUISAAC “PITBUL” CRUZ GANÓ EL TÍTULO INTERINO SUPERLIGERO DEL CMB¡JOSH TAYLOR ANUNCIA SU RETIRO DEL BOXEO A, LOS 34 AÑOS!LLEGA LA UBO (UNIFIED BOXING ORGANIZATION) EL NUEVO ORGANISMO DE BOXEO AVALADO POR TKO Y TURKI ALALSHIKH.XANDER ZAYAS EMOCIONADO POR ENFRENTAR A UN MEXICANO.¡EL CHINO GARCI BUSCARA DAR LA SORPRESA ESTE SÁBADO EN NUEVA YORK!

What happens when a $2 trillion cryptocurrency market suddenly requires monthly audits? Blake and David break down the Genius Act, the new federal stablecoin legislation that just created a massive opportunity for auditors—but also potentially recreated the chaotic "wildcat banking" era of the 1800s. You'll learn why every stablecoin issuer now needs monthly attestation reports and annual audits, creating hundreds of new recurring revenue streams for accounting firms willing to take on the risk. Plus, they explore whether there are enough auditors to actually make this system work, and what happens if quantum computing breaks cryptocurrency security. The episode also covers PCAOB leadership changes under the new administration, live-tests AI agents trying to enter invoices (spoiler: it's messier than the hype suggests), and updates on the 23 states now offering alternative CPA pathways.SponsorsMissive - http://accountingpodcast.promo/missiveRelay - http://accountingpodcast.promo/relayCloud Accountant Staffing - http://accountingpodcast.promo/casChapters(01:17) - AI in Accounting: Browser Integration (02:35) - Major News: The Genius Act and Its Implications (03:38) - Sponsor Shoutouts and Livestream Interaction (05:06) - Audit News: Erica Williams and PCAOB Changes (08:27) - Federal Audit Failures and OMB's Strategic Reset (09:48) - AICPA's New Fraud Detection Standards (12:52) - Sponsor Highlight: Missive (15:38) - Fraud Case Study: Christine Hunsicker's $300M Scam (20:08) - Deep Dive: The Genius Act and Stablecoins (41:21) - The Risk of Stablecoins and Financial Contagion (42:07) - Quantum Computing Threat to Bitcoin (42:38) - The Challenge of Upgrading Cryptocurrency Systems (43:22) - Summary and Predictions for Accounting Firms (43:38) - Fraud in the Traditional Banking System (44:08) - Relay: The Small Business Banking Solution (45:43) - Pig Butchering: A Growing Fraud Problem (48:05) - The Case for a Federal Stablecoin (50:26) - Alternative Pathways for CPA Licensure (52:02) - Decline in CPA Licenses and Modernizing Education (54:59) - Cloud Accountant Staffing: Solving the Labor Shortage (56:01) - Agentic AI: The Future of Automation (59:13) - Challenges and Potential of AI in Accounting (01:02:31) - The Role of AI in Data Entry and Research (01:17:53) - Conclusion and Final Thoughts  Show NotesTrump signs landmark GENIUS Act, hailing "exciting new frontier" for crypto - CBS News https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-signs-genius-act-crypto-bill/Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Signs GENIUS Act into Law – The White House https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/07/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-signs-genius-act-into-law/Stablecoin regulation bill heads to Trump's desk https://www.axios.com/2025/07/17/house-passes-genius-act-stablecoins-trumpA 'Crypto Week' win: Congress passes 1st major crypto legislation in the U.S. https://www.npr.org/2025/07/17/nx-s1-5451413/crypto-week-stablecoin-genius-act-trumpGENIUS Act Passes in US Congress: A Breakdown of the Landmark Stablecoin Law – Publications https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2025/07/genius-act-passes-in-us-congress-a-breakdown-of-the-landmark-stablecoin-lawErica Williams Resigns as PCAOB Chair - CPA Practice Advisor https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/2025/07/15/erica-williams-resigns-as-pcaob-chair/164956/PCAOB chair Erica Williams steps down | Accounting Today https://www.accountingtoday.com/news/pcaob-chair-erica-williams-steps-downSEC.gov | Statement Regarding Tenure of Erica Williams at the PCAOB https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/atkins-statement-erica-williams-pcaob-071505Southern District of New York | CaaStle Founder Charged In $300 Million Fraud Scheme | United States Department of Justice https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/caastle-founder-charged-300-million-fraud-schemeThe surprising details of fashion entrepreneur Christine Hunsicker's fraud indictment- Fast Company https://www.fastcompany.com/91371881/the-surprising-details-of-fashion-entrepreneur-christine-hunsickers-fraud-indictmentFashion startup founder Christine Hunsicker accused of cheating investors out of over $300 million - CBS News https://www.cbsnews.com/news/christine-hunsicker-charged-fraud-300-million-fashion-startup-founder/States move beyond the 150-hour rule for CPA licensure | Accounting Today https://www.accountingtoday.com/list/states-move-beyond-the-150-hour-rule-for-cpa-licensureTracking CPA licensure paths: Removing the 150-hour-rule hurdle | CFO Dive https://www.cfodive.com/news/broadening-cpa-licensure-paths-marching-beyond-150-hour-rule-accounting-talent-shortage/745282/The rise and fall of the 150-hour rule https://www.cfobrew.com/stories/2025/04/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-150-hour-ruleAICPA, NASBA approve alternatives to the 150-hour rule https://www.cfobrew.com/stories/2025/05/15/aicpa-nasba-approve-alternatives-to-the-150-hour-ruleNeed CPE?Get CPE for listening to podcasts with Earmark: https://earmarkcpe.comSubscribe to the Earmark Podcast: https://podcast.earmarkcpe.comGet in TouchThanks for listening and the great reviews! We appreciate you! Follow and tweet @BlakeTOliver and @DavidLeary. Find us on Facebook and

The Office of Management and Budget has until Wednesday to turn the lights back on for one of its key public spending transparency websites. In March, OMB shut down its Congressionally-mandated database that tracks the apportionment of funds to individual agencies, saying it didn't believe it should have to provide “predecisional” information. On Monday, a federal judge found that decision violated the law, and gave the Trump administration until 10 a.m. on Wednesday to restore the Public Apportionments Database.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today on the show  the First Circuit is reversing DOGE's “DEI” cuts at NIH. Trump is suing the Wall Street Journal for defamatory reporting that he was friends with that pedophile he used to party with all the time. And trial courts are calling SCOTUS's shadow docket bluff. Plus, Alina Habba is headed for the exit.   Links:   SCOTUS Shadow Docket Order Dept. of Education v. California https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a910_f2bh.pdf   American Public Health Association v. National Institutes of Health  https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/70621936/american-public-health-association-v-national-institutes-of-health/   CREW v. OMB https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69858087/citizens-for-responsibility-and-ethics-in-washington-v-office-of/   Show Links: https://www.lawandchaospod.com/ BlueSky: @LawAndChaosPod Threads: @LawAndChaosPod Twitter: @LawAndChaosPod  

More than two decades have passed since Congress last approved a recission request from a President. With last weeks' approval of $9 billion in funding clawbacks, the Director of OMB now says there will be more. Director Vought also said budgets should be "less bipartisan." What does this mean for agencies still trying to spend their 2025 funds? Here with insight on the implications of recissions is Bloomberg Government's deputy news director, Loren Duggan.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

OMB and DOGE have been clear about their intention to use federal data more smartly to evaluate programs and drive decisions. That's something data watchers have advocated for years. But how they do that matters for transparency and trust. Here with a front-row seat to the issues is President and CEO of the Data Foundation, Nick Hart.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

TAYLOR-SERRANO 3 ROMPE RECORDSSHAKUR RETIENE SU TITULO!PACQUIO BUSCA UN NUEVO TÍTULO!¡MARIO BARRIOS QUIERE DETENER A LA LEYENDA!GERVONTA DAVIS VUELVE A PRISIÓN¡JAIME MUNGUIA PRESENTA PRUEBAS!

Carl Quintanilla, Jim Cramer and David Faber explored stocks pulling back from record highs after President Trump threatened to impose 35% tariffs on Canadian goods beginning August 1. The anchors also reacted to comments by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon: He warns of "complacency" in the markets. Also in focus: Wrapping up a big week for tech including Nvidia's $4 trillion milestone, OMB director slams  Fed Chair Powell, the stocks riding the dealmaking rally, Levi Strauss jumps on earnings, countdown to Jim's CNBC Investing Club Annual Meeting. Squawk on the Street Disclaimer

One proposal in the recently passed "big, beautiful bill" that didn't make it to the finish line was an amendment from Utah Sen. Mike Lee, which would have jump-started a sell-off of federally owned lands. On this episode of Plain Talk, John Bradley, executive director of the North Dakota Wildlife Federation, talked about that victory, and also discussed the place in politics conservation issues often find themselves.  "Conservation sometimes becomes the dog that everybody can get behind kicking," he said. Bradley expressed a desire for public lands to become a "third rail" issue that politicians are "terrified to go after," but also acknowledged that there are instances where some sales make sense. He says there is, in existing law, a process for selling or swapping out federal lands, and while he admits that it can be bureaucratic, he also says that it's important that all interested parties are involved in that process. Bradley also discussed his group's recent criticism of North Dakota's congressional delegation's support for using the Congressional Review Act to rewrite federal land use rules that the delegation says are too arduous for the energy industry and other interests. He called the approach "scorched earth," arguing it "wipes that entire process" and assumes D.C. politicians "know better" than local experts. Also on this episode, we discussed the hard feelings between Attorney General Drew Wrigley's office and the North Dakota Ethics Commission, as well as news that millions in federal dollars for after school programs in North Dakota have been frozen. There are "crickets from the congressional delegation in terms of unfreezing this money," my co-host Chad Oban said of the situation. "Crickets from the governor's office to unfreeze this money. Crickets from the superintendent of public instruction." "I understand that [Superintendent Kirsten Baesler] is trying to get a job in Washington, but if our superintendent of public instruction is not screaming and yelling to unfreeze these dollars, I'm not sure she can be doing her job," he added. "Our congressional delegation should be pounding on the door of OMB and the Department of Education getting this money to our kids in North Dakota, but everybody's afraid of Trump," he continued. If you want to participate in Plain Talk, just give us a call or text at 701-587-3141. It's super easy — leave your message, tell us your name and where you're from, and we might feature it on an upcoming episode.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday lifted a district court order that prevented multiple federal agencies from carrying out reductions-in-force, clearing the way for those actions to resume. In an unsigned opinion, a majority of the justices granted the government's request for a stay of the lower court ruling, concluding that it will likely be successful on its argument that President Donald Trump's executive order directing agencies to make plans for RIFs and corresponding guidance from the White House were lawful. The justices, however, also emphasized that their ruling doesn't express a view on the legality of RIF or reorganization plans under that order and memo. The district court's preliminary injunction hinged on that court's view that Trump's order and the Office of Management and Budget's memo were unlawful and not on any of the plans specifically. Under the injunction from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, a wide array of federal agencies were required to halt their RIF plans — which included the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of State, Department of Commerce, and many more. It also prompted OMB to pause reviewing or discussing those plans with agencies, per FedScoop reporting. While other legal challenges are moving forward on agency RIFs, the Supreme Court's ruling, at least for now, means they can begin those actions again. Anthropic is making the enterprise version of its chatbot Claude available to the entire staff of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, the artificial intelligence company announced Wednesday. The expansion comes as generative AI companies look to deepen their relationship with the federal government's national lab system — and amid growing interest in agencies' use of the technology. Anthropic said the expansion comes after a pilot, as well as an event in March that allowed thousands of scientists based at the California lab to learn about the technology. The company said the program, which involves its Claude for Enterprise product, constitutes one of the most significant lab deployments of AI at the Energy Department. As many as ten thousand national lab employees will now be able to use generative AI for their work. Lawrence Livermore will eventually have access to a forthcoming FedRAMP High service, once it's approved and accredited, meaning lab scientists will be able to use Claude on unclassified data that requires that level of accreditation. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

This week on the GovNavigators Show, former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel joins us to unpack the Trump administration's rapid-fire push to modernize the IRS—and what gets lost when speed outruns strategy. Drawing on decades of federal service, including senior roles at OMB and DOJ, Danny reflects on his team's detailed IRS transformation plan, contrasts it with today's approach, and raises big questions about transparency, workforce cuts, and cybersecurity risks. Plus, a bonus deep dive into the future of financial reporting under M-25-30, the limits of paperwork-based oversight, and why civics literacy might be the government's most underrated reform tool.Show Notes OMB: M-25-30IRS: IRS FY25 Budget Justification JHS: Johns Hopkins School of Government and PolicyGAO: GAO Report on IRS IT Modernization

Karoline Leavitt said President Trump expects the big, beautiful bill on his desk by the 4th of July. We are here to give you expert insight into how deliberations will go in the Senate and the House. Mick Mulvaney is the former White House Chief of Staff and former Director of OMB in President Trump's first administration. Mick takes us inside the Senate to discuss what modifications the Senate will make and who will vote no based on the current bill. Senate Majority Leader John Thune is putting forth his best effort to get the bill through the Senate. Once passed, it will head to the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson will most likely put the bill up for a vote. If the House votes immediately and it passes it will be on the president's desk by July 4th. Dr. Alberto Martinez is a Professor of History at the University of Texas. While Dr. Martinez has not always been a fan of President Trump, he is a fan of the truth. As Dr. Martinez was preparing his history lessons, he would frequently watch the news. What he noticed was that nearly every story about President Trump was an exaggeration, misrepresentation or just all out fiction. In Dr. Martinez's book The Media Vs The Apprentice, takes us all the way back to the 90's to fact check and debunk the media lies about President Trump. What he shares with us today is shocking! Featuring: Mick Mulvaney Former White House Chief of Staff Former Director, Office of Management and Budget Former Congressman, South Carolina, District 5 https://x.com/MickMulvaney Dr. Alberto Martinez Department of History Professor | University of Texas at Austin https://x.com/AlMartinezUT Get your copy of Dr. Martinez's book The Media VS The Apprentice here: https://a.co/d/amBp7CG What's my wish for the 4th of July? Click here: https://www.seanspicer.com/p/my-fourth-of-july-wish Today's show is brought to you by these great sponsors: TAX Network USA Talk with a strategist at Tax Network USA... it's FREE. Stop the threatening letters. Stop looking over your shoulder and put your IRS troubles behind you, once and for all. Whether you owe $10,000 or $10 million, Tax Network USA can help you! Reach out to them today at 1-800-245-6000 or visit https://tnusa.com/SEANSPICER Riverbend Ranch Riverbend Ranch has been around for 35 years, selecting cattle that have higher marbling and tenderness than any other beef. You cannot get this beef in your grocery store. Riverbend Ranch ages their beef for 21 days and you'll find it more tender and flavorful than even the finest restaurants. So, if you're ready to have the best steak of your life, head to https://www.riverbendranch.com. Use promo code: SEAN to get $20 of your first order. ------------------------------------------------------------- 1️⃣ Subscribe and ring the bell for new videos: https://youtube.com/seanmspicer?sub_confirmation=1 2️⃣ Become a part of The Sean Spicer Show community: https://www.seanspicer.com/ 3️⃣ Listen to the full audio show on all platforms: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sean-spicer-show/id1701280578 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/32od2cKHBAjhMBd9XntcUd iHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-sean-spicer-show-120471641/ 4️⃣ Stay in touch with Sean on social media: Facebook: https://facebook.com/seanmspicer Twitter: https://twitter.com/seanspicer Instagram: https://instagram.com/seanmspicer/ 5️⃣ Follow The Sean Spicer Show on social media: Facebook: https://facebook.com/seanspicershow Twitter: https://twitter.com/seanspicershow Instagram: https://instagram.com/seanspicershow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John and I welcomed Casey Dreier from The Planetary Society to the program to go over the proposed NASA space and science budget cuts and project eliminations. Casey suspected the direction for the cuts originated out of OMB without much space guidance or thought. He identified several of the projects and programs identified for either a budget cut such as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to the New Horizons and Venus missions being totally eliminated. Casey also talked about the bleak future for SLS and the Gateway for their demise post Artemis 3. Casey talked about their being a shift to commercial Moon missions but with little detail and clarity. Cislunar development, cargo and resupply to the ISS, the future for the private space stations, Mars and EDL for Mars plus demos all were part of our discussion. In Part 2, John talked about the robotic missions including existing missions plus the future missions, all of course depending on robots. Casey worked in commentary about cuts and changes for both JPL and Goddard, two very important and key Nasa centers. Before concluding the program, our guest was asked about the impact of the layoffs for NASA scientists and engineers. Casey suggested they would have an uncertain future ahead of them as their might not be abundant job opportunities for these important skills. Read the full summary at The Space Show website, www.thespaceshow.com and also at doctorspace.substack.com.

060525 Scott Adams Show, Trump Russia, Iran, and Gaza Peace Talks, BBB, CBO, OMB, and the GDP kerfuffle

Jeffrey Goldberg has been a thorn in President Donald Trump's side since the real-estate developer–turned reality-show host first ran for office in 2016. Back then — ten months before he took over as editor-in-chief of The Atlantic — Goldberg wrote a piece headlined “A Brief Exercise Meant to Illuminate the Prejudices of Donald Trump.” The magazine has continued its unsparing criticism of Trump ever since, and Goldberg's recent Signalgate story was just the latest in a series of blockbuster scoops that have nominally embarrassed the president.  On Friday, Goldberg sat down with Kara for an on-stage interview at the WBUR Festival in Boston. They discussed Trump's corruption, the unserious people staffing his administration (as well as with the very serious Russell Vought, a Project 2025 architect who heads the OMB), the Democratic Party's travails, and the state of the news media.  Questions? Comments? Email us at on@voxmedia.com or find us on Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Trump Signs a $142 Billion Weapons Deal In Saudi Arabia, Not the Peace Deal With Putin He Expected To Sign, But He Still Hopes to Sign a Deal With Iran | As Trump Throws His Lot in With Rich Arabs, How Much is Netanyahu Out in the Cold? | The Good "Christians" Speaker Johnson and the OMB's Vought Are Working Tirelessly to Hurt the Poor and Reward the Rich backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia bsky.app/profile/ianmastersmedia.bsky.social facebook.com/ianmastersmedia

We begin today with the latest insane court rulings and how conservative media is a day late and a dollar short in dealing with it. Also, there are some disturbing trends at HHS, including the continuation of Biden's policies on dangerous abortion drugs. Next, we're joined by Paul Winfree, president of the Economic Policy Innovation Center and budget director at the OMB under Trump's first administration, for a discussion on Medicaid. He explains how Republicans must attack the perverse incentives under Medicaid expansion that allow states and the health care cartel to use the program as an ATM to line their pockets at the expense of the most vulnerable. He shows what is driving the uncontrollable cost of the program and how Republicans are shortsighted for refusing to pick a fight on structural reforms to the program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Donald Trump and Elon Musk continue their all-out assault on the federal government, shuttering USAID, rooting out and firing workers linked in any way to diversity initiatives, and breaking and ignoring laws as they go. Jon and Dan hash out all the latest, including Trump's plan to have the US "own" and redevelop Gaza, Democratic pushback, and whether federal judges will step in to stop—or at least slow—the madness. Then, Tommy talks with Sen. Brian Schatz about Democrats' all-night floor fight against Trump's OMB pick, what they think is working, and how they're gearing up for the big battles ahead. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.