A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The Retribution
A senior USAID official was placed on leave Sunday after he wrote a memo blowing the whistle on the Trump administration’s failure to provide lifesaving humanitarian assistance, contradicting claims by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that it was exempt from the freeze on foreign aid.
Shortly after receiving notice that he’d been placed on leave, Nicholas Enrich, USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health, released a series of memos he’d written. The memos were obtained by the NYT, but it seems to have posted just one of them.
The impacts on global health outlined by Enrich are devastating, wide-ranging, and suggest hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths will result from Trump’s lawless destruction of USAID.
On a more mundane level, the subtext of Enrich’s revelations is that Rubio and the administration have been less than fully candid with federal courts handling cases challenging the USAID freeze, the sacking of most of its staff, and the termination of most of its contracts.
Whether those misrepresentations are sufficiently material to result in any legal or political blowback will be tested in courts in the coming days.
Trump Administration Wrecks USAID Life-Saving Programs
[O]n Wednesday, Rubio and Marocco completely ended nearly 10,000 aid programs in one fell swoop — including those they had granted waivers just days earlier — saying the programs did not align with Trump’s agenda. The move consigns untold numbers of the world’s poorest children, refugees and other vulnerable people to death, according to several senior federal officials. Local authorities have already begun estimating a death toll in the hundreds of thousands.
Judge: Trump’s Firing Of U.S. Special Counsel Was Illegal
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled over the weekend that President Trump’s firing of U.S. Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger violated a statute that limits the president from removing that official except in cases of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
The firing was part of Trump’s broader attack on independent agencies while advancing the claim that Congress cannot limit the president’s power to remove executive branch officials.
The Trump administration immediately appealed Jackson’s ruling to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court is expected to decide to case ultimately.
The Purges
- The Trump administration plans to cut Social Security staffing by some 7,000 workers, or 12% of its workforce, and close six regional offices.
- Former NIH director Francis Collins has retired from federal government work without giving a reason.
- CNN: US intel shows Russia and China are attempting to recruit disgruntled federal employees, sources say
DOGE Watch
- NYT: “A federal judge said on Friday that it seemed “factually inaccurate” for the Trump administration to keep insisting that Elon Musk has no formal position in an operation that has led to mass firings of federal workers and the hobbling of the nation’s foreign aid agency.”
- WaPo: “Officials from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have expressed interest in using personal tax records to check federal benefits payments for fraud, which would mobilize the IRS to drive the Trump administration’s campaign to cut government spending, according to three people familiar with the situation and records obtained by The Washington Post.”
- NYT: “Federal workers started to receive emails late Friday evening asking them to provide a list of accomplishments from the week, a reprise of a request by Elon Musk that spread fear and confusion through the government just days ago.”
The GOP Brings Back Its Patented Funny Math
Unable to reconcile its over-the-top political rhetoric with the policy realities, the Republican Party over the years has taken to jiggering the math so their preferred policies don’t look as bad as they are. Here we go again:
- AP: “The Trump administration may exclude government spending from GDP, obscuring the impact of DOGE cuts.”
- WSJ: “Republicans are readying an untested and aggressive move—a blatant gimmick, critics say—that would declare that Congress can extend expiring tax cuts and record no costs.”
Oh?
ProPublica: Speaker Mike Johnson Is Living In A DC House That Is The Center Of A Pastor’s Secretive Influence Campaign
Thread Of The Day
What we’re witnessing in America is what happens when disordered discourse captures a political party, then the state itself. The Republican Party was the first to fall – abandoning truth for conspiracy, ideology for grievance, and policy for performative outrage.
— Eliot Higgins (@eliothiggins.bsky.social) February 28, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Ominous I
NYT: “The Department of Homeland Security has pushed the Internal Revenue Service to turn over the addresses of roughly 700,000 undocumented immigrants it is seeking to deport, according to three people familiar with the matter, in a request that could violate taxpayer privacy laws.”
Ominous II
NYT: “In recent months, Voice of America’s parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, has opened human-resources investigations into Voice of America journalists for reporting on criticism of Mr. Trump or for making comments that were perceived as critical of him, according to several employees.”
The Jan. 6 Erasure Continues
Acting DC U.S. Attorney Ed Martin has demoted several senior prosecutors in his office, including some involved in the prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers. But the retaliation against prosecutors extended to other cases perceived as anti-Trump.
Epilogue: Mar-a-Lago Documents Case
The FBI returned to President Trump on Friday the materials its seized during its August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents. The returned materials were loaded on Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews and flown back to Mar-a-Lago.
Trump’s Oval Office Ambush Of Zelensky
As Europe scrambled to come to Ukraine’s aid in the aftermath of the Trump-Vance Oval Office ambush, domestic news coverage in America continued to operate from the flawed premise that the United States wasn’t already in the process of pulling the rug out from under Ukraine and feeding its ally to the Russian wolf. Even Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) recognized the reality of what’s been happening in the first six weeks of the Trump administration. But much of American political media remains in denial.
Quote Of The Day
“This is going to be great television. I will say that.”–President Donald Trump, concluding the ritualistic Oval Office humiliation of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky
Laugh And Cry
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