One of the more outrageous Trump power grabs yet is occurring without much public attention, so I gave it a shout at New York:

With all the chaos that has pervaded the federal bureaucracy in Trump’s second term, some very basic MAGA “reforms” may have escaped attention. The best known is the reimposition of the so-called Schedule F, an initiative adopted late in the first Trump administration (and promptly revoked by Joe Biden) that reclassified around 50,000 civil service positions into political appointments. But as Don Moynihan explains, that initiative just makes it easier to fire “deep state” bureaucrats who haven’t bent the knee to the new regime. A broader hiring initiative has just been announced by the Office of Personnel Management, which is basically the federal government’s HR agency. Called the Merit Hiring Plan (reflecting the wording of the Trump executive order that mandated it), the initiative has many interlocking provisions aimed at simplifying and, well, politicizing federal hiring practices, partly to kill, bury, exhume, and kill again anything that looks like DEI policies, but also to build a spanking-new federal workforce composed of “patriotic,” hardworking proles.

What leaps right off the page and punches you in the mouth is the initiative’s new rules for federal job applications. All applicants for jobs graded at GS-5 or higher (or roughly 94 percent of federal jobs) will have to answer (in less than 200 words each) four essay questions. Two are pretty banal, involving testaments to applicants’ work ethic and examples of efficiencies they’ve achieved in prior jobs. A third raises some eyebrows:

“How has your commitment to the Constitution and the founding principles of the United States inspired you to pursue this role within the Federal government? Provide a concrete example from professional, academic, or personal experience.”

This is pretty rich coming from an administration whose leader has suggested he may not have to uphold the Constitution in his own job (notwithstanding that it was right there in his oath of office). In addition, the “founding principles of the United States” is a fairly subjective notion. But there’s a fourth essay question that takes the cake:

“How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired.”

Now keep in mind that Trump’s EOs include such matters as the demonization of law firms and individuals who have crossed Donald Trump in the past. Would it be kosher for someone applying for a GS-6 gig to write a few sentences about how she or he will help implement Executive Order 14246, “Addressing Risks for Jenner and Block”? Expanding the scope of essays into presidential “policy priorities” adds an element of rather extreme subjectivity into the process. Do Trump “policy priorities” include items like his frequently repeated insistence that federal judges (particularly those he appointed) owe him 100 percent loyalty, or that Canada should become the 51st state? Do they extend to the policy priorities of his Cabinet members, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA anti-vaccine and anti-fluoride initiatives?

While much is unclear about this question, what’s unmistakable is that all federal job applicants are essentially being instructed to demonstrate their personal commitment to Trump and his erratic if very loud worldview. This isn’t just a hortatory gesture either; the OPM memo announcing the Merit Hiring Plan sets up monitored benchmarks for agency compliance beginning this month. As Moynihan notes, this is wildly unprecedented:

“I cannot think of anything like this level of politicization being formally introduced into the hiring process. Under the George W. Bush administration, it was a scandal when appointees in the Justice Department were caught scanning candidate CVs for civil servant positions to try to discern their political leanings. Now they will just ask them to explain how they can serve President Trump’s agenda. Within the space of a generation, backdoor politicization practices went from being a source of shame to a formal policy.”

Without much question, a No Democrats Need Apply policy would be in place. But it would guarantee massive turnover in the federal workforce the minute a Democrat — or even a Republican who isn’t a Trump mini-me — is elected president:

“With this policy, any future President would know that some portion of their workforce was selected because they had expressed explicit support with their predecessor, and an agenda that the current President might disagree with. For all the Republican complaints about rooting out “the deep state” or “Democrat holdovers” the policy specifically encourages selection into permanent civil service based on political leanings that will invariably run contrary to future Presidents. They want to build their own deep state!”

To put it another way, this Merit Hiring Plan institutionalizes a spoils system beyond the wildest dreams of the corrupt political bosses of the distant past. It deserves a lot of attention right now, if only to warn the poor schmoes who might want to apply for some lower-level federal job that they’d better bone up on their Trump EOs and get ready to pucker up and pledge allegiance. And of course, they better bury any past Democratic associations while they are at it.

As a long-time fan of Iowa politics, I was delighted to see some good news for Democrats appear in that once-competitive state, and wrote about it at New York:

Up until now, Iowa has been the poster state for Donald Trump’s alleged electoral revolution. Prior to Trump’s first race, it went Democratic in six of the seven presidential elections (and went Republican only by an eyelash in the other). Then Trump carried the state by 9.5 percent in 2016, by 8.2 percent in 2020, and by 13.2 percent in 2024. The red tide in the land of corn wasn’t strictly at the presidential level, however. As recently as 2018, Democrats won three of Iowa’s four U.S. House seats. Since 2022, all four have been occupied by Republicans. In 2016, the GOP won its first Iowa state government trifecta since 1998, and has held it ever since. And after the 2014 elections, Republicans held both U.S. Senate seats for the first time since 1984, thanks to the defeat of Tom Harkin’s hand-picked Democratic successor, Bruce Braley, at the hands of a state legislator with a background in hog farming and distinguished National Guard service, Joni Ernst.

Now an embarrassing gaffe from Ernst may have helped open the door to a 2026 midterm comeback by Iowa’s downtrodden Democrats. At a town hall meeting, Ernst dismissed a highly predictable question about the possibility of deaths ensuing from her party’s proposed cuts in Medicaid and SNAP benefits by snarkily saying, “Well, we are all going to die.” Worse yet, when her remarks spurred outrage and a lot of attention, she doubled down in a contemptuous Instagram post:

This hasn’t been a great year for the junior senator from Iowa. Before she sneered at the idea of poor people dying, she provided a profile in cowardice when threats of a MAGA primary challenge changed her almost overnight from a key Armed Services Committee skeptic of Defense-secretary nominee Pete Hegseth into a cheerleader for his confirmation. And now her previously 100 percent–sure reelection race in 2026 is attracting some potentially serious competition, as the Cedar Rapids Gazette reports:

“State Rep. J.D. Scholten, D-Sioux City, announced Monday a run for the seat held by Republican Sen. Joni Ernst since 2015.

“Other state lawmakers, Sen. Zach Wahls from Coralville and Rep. Josh Turek of Council Bluffs, have been talked about as possible challengers for Ernst but so far Nathan Sage, an Iowa Army and Marine Corps veteran, and Scholten are the only ones to make it official. …

“’After her comments [on Medicaid and SNAP] over the weekend, I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but that’s when I just said: This is unacceptable and you’ve gotta jump in,’ Scholten said.”

Scholten came within three points of knocking off the raging nativist Steve King back in 2018 in a deeply conservative western Iowa district. Two years later, he lost decisively to Republican Randy Feenstra, who purged King in a primary, but still performed credibly, before winning a state legislative seat in 2022.

Ernst is far from the only Iowa Republican incumbent feeling some heat right now. Three-term U.S. House member Mariannette Miller-Meeks lost three congressional races before finally winning in 2020 by a grand total of six votes. In 2024, despite Trump’s long coattails, she won by the smallest margin of any Republican House member who didn’t actually lose (799 votes). She looks extremely vulnerable if there is even the slightest pro-Democratic midterm trend. And her two-term colleague Zach Nunn (who won narrowly in both 2022 and 2024) looks vulnerable too. One 2024 preview based on varying national scenarios has both Miller-Meeks and Nunn losing if there is a Democratic “ripple,” much less a “wave.”

There’s an open governorship in Iowa in 2026 as well, as Republican incumbent Kim Reynolds leaves office with the opprobrium of having been rated the least-popular governor in America by Morning Consult. State Auditor Rob Sand, the only statewide elected Democrat at present, is running for the governorship, as is the aforementioned congressman Randy Feenstra. It could be a close race. While the demographic fundamentals of Iowa (which has a large white working-class population with relatively few nonwhite voters) have helped drive the state into Trump’s arms, reaction to his policy agenda (especially the trade war and mass deportations, which threaten the vital agribusiness sector) could drive it away.

Iowa Democrats are unlikely to suffer from overconfidence, but if they are tempted to get smug, they can remember the moment of excitement in 2024 when legendary Iowa pollster Ann Selzer showed Kamala Harris actually leading Trump among likely voters just before Election Day. It didn’t work out that way. At this point, just a thoroughly competitive election year would be a good showing for the Democratic Party in Iowa.

Being old and all, I remember a lot of intra-Democratic arguments over the decades. An allegedly brand new one brought back memories, as I explained at New York:

If you are an aficionado of wonky policy debates, or perhaps if you are a civically active Californian, you may have heard there’s a debate going on in left-of-center circles over a so-called “Abundance Agenda.” That term was coined in 2022 by Derek Thompson, whose recent book with Ezra Klein, entitled Abundance, has helped raise interest (and some hackles) over its tenets. Put briefly, “abundance” advocates believe progressive politics needs to be refocused around producing public and private goods that broadly raise living standards, instead of insisting on narrow and legalistic group agendas that often frustrate the operations of government, particularly with respect to prosperity-enhancing public projects.

The leading edge of this debate has been the issue that is in danger of consuming California politics: the massive regulatory and legal obstacles to creating an adequate supply of affordable housing for sale or rent. But as my former colleague Jonathan Chait points out at The Atlantic, the recent experience of the Biden administration has really intensified concerns that progressives are sabotaging themselves by embracing interest-group-driven roadblocks to getting things done:

“Biden had anticipated, after quickly signing his infrastructure bill and then two more big laws pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into manufacturing and energy, that he would spend the rest of his presidency cutting ribbons at gleaming new bridges and plants. But only a fraction of the funds Biden had authorized were spent before he began his reelection campaign, and of those, hardly any yielded concrete results.

“More than two years after signing the infrastructure law, Biden was ‘expressing deep frustration that he can’t show off physical construction of many projects that his signature legislative accomplishments will fund,’ CNN reported. The nationwide network of electric-vehicle-charging stations amounted to just 58 new stations by the time Biden left office. The average completion date for road projects, according to the nonprofit news site NOTUS, was mid-2027. The effort to bring broadband access to rural America, a centerpiece of Biden’s plan to show that he would work to help the entire country and not just the parts that had voted for him, had connected zero customers.”

The fateful failure of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda contributed, of course, to the opportunity Donald Trump had to become president again and launch his own very different BBB. And as Chait observed, that realization led to a lot of reconsiderations of prior assumptions:

“Policy wonks, mostly liberal ones, began to ask why public tasks that used to be doable no longer were. How could a government that once constructed miracles of engineering—the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge—ahead of schedule and under budget now find itself incapable of executing routine functions? Why was Medicare available less than a year after the enabling legislation passed, when the Affordable Care Act’s individual-insurance exchange took nearly four years to come online (and had to survive a failed website)? And, more disturbing, why was everything slower, more expensive, and more dysfunctional in states and cities controlled by Democrats?”

The obvious conclusion is that if “the government has tied itself in knots … enormous amounts of prosperity could be unleashed by simply untying them.” But “untying them” would offend the progressive interest and identity groups who had built up an edifice of safeguards against potentially abusive government power, and whose entire approach to politics involved defending each other’s regulatory and legal turf. So any effort to ride roughshod over these safeguards, even in the most unimpeachably progressive causes like battling homelessness, has drawn a lot of fire from the left and “the groups” (as various interest and identity advocates are often called).

The rivalry between “common purpose” liberals seeking to do good things quickly through government, and progressives affiliated with various “groups,” is a lot older than the arguments over “abundance.” Reading Chait’s description of a progressivism that “seeks to maintain solidarity among its component groups, expecting each to endorse the positions taken by the others” reminded me instantly of one of the best political speeches I ever heard, at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who said his piece before delivering his endorsement to party presidential nominee Michael Dukakis:

“When I was a child growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, my grandmama could not afford a blanket, she didn’t complain and we did not freeze. Instead she took pieces of old cloth — patches, wool, silk, gabardine, crockersack — only patches, barely good enough to wipe off your shoes with. But they didn’t stay that way very long. With sturdy hands and a strong cord, she sewed them together into a quilt, a thing of beauty and power and culture. Now, Democrats, we must build such a quilt.

“Farmers, you seek fair prices and you are right — but you cannot stand alone. Your patch is not big enough. Workers, you fight for fair wages, you are right — but your patch of labor is not big enough. Women, you seek comparable worth and pay equity, you are right — but your patch is not big enough.”

And on through the litany of groups he went … students … Blacks and Hispanics … gays and lesbians, in every case their “patch” was not big enough alone. Jesse Jackson’s very clear vision was a Democratic Party that was a coalition of groups linking arms to protect their stuff, their solidarity more important than any particular thing that they might do together. And that’s the entrenched and emotionally compelling point of view the abundance advocates are trying to overcome. It’s a struggle that is also evident in separate discussions over the morality of policy positions that leave any vulnerable group less than fully empowered, such as restricting athletic opportunities for transgender women, a wildly popular but deeply offensive position from the point of view of progressive solidarity.

But here’s the thing: The current emergency created by Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory has given the abundance camp a powerful new argument. Had Joe Biden been able to implement his BBB and show results, might his performance on the economy have been viewed as superior to Trump’s? Possibly so. And if Democrats during his administration had made a visible effort to “reinvent government” to make it more efficient, would hostility to bureaucracy and alleged “runaway government spending” have been a potent issue for Trump? Possibly not.

What we do know is that Trump’s victory gave us an administration that is systematically working to destroy all the causes “the groups” hold dear. A total revocation of environmental regulations is underway in an ongoing frenzy to “drill baby drill.”  “Civil rights” are beingredefined as exclusively for the protection of straight white Christians and Jews, while transgender folk are literally being defined out of existence. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is blowing up government and delegitimizing the very idea of public service. Everyone’s “patch is not big enough” today, but out-of-power Democrats can’t do much about it. “The groups” might develop an overriding stake in making things work and restoring the credibility of both the public sector and the progressive movement that built it over the decades. It could mean political as well as economic abundance for all.

 

Sometimes the job of a political writer is to knock down ludicrous ideas. I took on one of the latest examples at New York:

Four months after his inauguration, Donald Trump’s second administration is facing several trials and troubles that could determine whether it’s a success or a failure. There’s the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (the official name, believe it or not), the House version of the budget-reconciliation bill meant to implement Trump’s legislative agenda, which struggled to passage last week and faces new problems in the Senate. There are the legal challenges to a vast number of Trump power grabs. And there’s the anxious waiting game to see if the president’s tariff program will goose consumer prices, shake markets, and possibly even trigger a recession.

With so many fraught matters up in the air, you have to figure that Republicans were thrilled at the chance to shift the focus to Joe Biden.

This opportunity emerged from two sources. The first was the intense promotion of a classic Washington insider tell-all book, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up and His Disastrous Decision to Run Again. The second was the sad announcement that the former president has been diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer. Unanswered questions about the discovery of Biden’s cancer, and whether it could have or should have been disclosed to the public earlier, led Republicans to ask (sometimes after pro forma expressions of sympathy) if there had been some sort of “cover-up.”

The question of Biden’s fitness to finish his first term as president and run for a second is obviously legitimate. Democrats are as interested in this issue as Republicans; they spent many months debating how big a problem Biden’s age might become, and then how to cope when his health issues became manifest during a crucial presidential debate. Precisely for that reason, the idea that Biden’s condition was some sort of closely held secret that required a vast conspiracy to hide is a bit absurd, as Mark Leibovich noted in The Atlantic:

“It’s pretty much impossible to ‘cover up’ for something that is hiding in plain sight. Democrats could trot out as many White House officials as they wanted to claim I was with the president just this morning, and he was sharp as a tack and running circles around staffers less than half his age. But whenever Biden was allowed to go out in public—a rarity, which itself was a red flag—the public’s preexisting consensus about his infirmity was only reinforced.”

It’s kind of like Trump’s unhinged social-media posts. I don’t know the exact process behind this habit or whether anyone in his circle tries to restrain him, but it cannot be covered up.

Yet excited journalists, presumably egged on by Republican politicians and maybe even some Democrats who want pots stirred, are already speculating that “the Biden cover-up” could loom over the 2028 presidential election. You know, the election that will happen over three years from now, which in Trump years is like three decades. Here’s how The Hill put it:

“Former President Biden’s cancer diagnosis has done little to quell concerns about his decision to run for reelection, and many in the party acknowledge the issue is likely to dog them as they look toward 2028. …

“While the news of Biden’s illness was met with an outpouring of condolences from both sides of the aisle, it also sparked new questions surrounding the Biden team’s handling of his health and underscored the degree to which scrutiny over the former president will persist through the next White House election.

“’I think Democrats, whoever they are, need to be ready for this question,’ Democratic strategist Maria Cardona said of attention on Biden’s 2024 decisions.”

An Associated Press item even predicted that the issue would “become a litmus test for the next leaders in his party.”

Assuming the beginning of Trump 2.0 is any indication of what is to come, assessments of the 47th president, not the 46th, are going to dominate the next midterm elections and then the next presidential cycle as never before, and that’s saying a lot. Keep in mind that in 2024, millions of persuadable voters had dismissed as irrelevant or as ancient news the fact that one of the two major-party candidates had spoken provocatively about a “stolen election” to a mob that then sacked the U.S. Capitol. In 2028, they are not going to be dwelling on what Democrats knew or didn’t know in 2024 about Biden’s mental acuity or possible cancer diagnosis.

Some 2028 Democratic presidential candidates will likely hail from far-away state capitals where they were not in a position to closely monitor the president’s ability to remember names or work into the late evening. And even Democratic members of Congress or Cabinet members had at most episodic interactions with the 46th president. Unless some member of Biden’s family or someone from the inner core of his White House staff runs for president, candidates will likely be able to brush off questions about his mental state, much as Pete Buttigieg did this week by saying Biden was no worse in private than in public, as far as he knew.

This doesn’t mean that Biden’s physical and mental condition and allegations of a “cover-up” won’t live on as urgent topics in MAGA-land. It’s like the various scandals real and imagined that hounded Bill and Hillary Clinton; assorted contrived conspiracy theories involving Barack Obama’s place of birth, upbringing, and teleprompter use; and the invidious narratives built up on social media and book-length “exposés” about other devil figures in the conservative imagination, from George Soros to Nancy Pelosi to Kamala Harris. The Biden “cover-up” will always serve as Republican porn, a bad-faith question to fire at Democrats when nothing else is available. But if swing voters in 2028 are still thinking about it, that means Democrats will have done a terrible job of giving them something else to think about.

 

Having followed the ups and downs and twists and turns of House passage of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, I offered some thoughts at New York of where things stand for Republicans and for Democrats:

Republicans are in a state of euphoric self-congratulation over House passage of what’s known as the Big Beautiful Bill.

Politico Playbook, the Beltway’s daily bread, referred to the GOP Speaker of the House as “Magic Johnson” for his last-minute deal-making and cat-herding in securing its passage by a single vote, which happened before a Memorial Day deadline that many had thought unrealistic. He’s sharing credit, of course, with The Boss, Donald Trump, who wheedled and threatened and thundered in the presence of BBB holdouts at several key moments. In the end, for all the interminable talk of “rebellious” GOP factions unwilling to support the gigantic bill as either too vicious or not vicious enough, the price of collective failure was just too high for nearly all of them.

But now, of course, we are about to be reminded that Congress is a bicameral institution, and despite Republican control of both chambers, there are enough issues in the Senate with the carefully balanced Jenga tower the House built to endanger the edifice anew. And when the Senate does produce its version of BBB (the informal but very real deadline is July 4), the two bills will have to be reconciled, and the final product passed by both Houses and sent to Trump for his signature. This needs to happen before the arrival of the so-called X Date — likely in August — when the Treasury finally breaches the statutory debt limit, which is increased in the BBB.

As a former Senate employee, I can assure you that members and staff of that body have enormous institutional self-regard, regardless of party, and will not accept take-it-or-leave-it demands from the petty little pissants of the House. Beyond that, it’s important to understand that what makes “reconciliation” bills like BBB possible is the ability to avoid a Senate filibuster, and there are arcane but very real rules, policed by the non-partisan Senate parliamentarian, about what can and cannot be included in a budget reconciliation bill. So some changes may become absolutely necessary.

More importantly, the very divisions that came close to derailing the bill in the House exist in the Senate as well, with some special twists.

One of the most powerful House factions was the SALT caucus, a sizable group of Republicans from high-tax blue states determined to lift or abolish the cap on SALT (state and local tax) deductions imposed by the 2017 tax cut bill. They were able to secure an increase in the cap from $10,000 to $40,000 (with an inflation adjustment over the next ten years), a juicy treat for upper-middle-income tax itemizers with big property-tax bills, costing an estimated $320 billion. There are no Republican senators from the big SALT states, but there are a lot who deeply resent what they regard as a subsidy for free-spending Democrats in the states most affected. Maybe they’ll care enough about GOP control of the House to throw a lifeline to vulnerable members like Mike Lawler of New York or Young Kim of California, who have made SALT a big personal campaign-trail issue. But there are limits to empathy in Washington.

Another red-hot issue in the House was the size and nature of Medicaid cuts, with the BBB winding up with big cuts mostly accomplished via new “work requirements” that will cost millions of low-income people their health insurance. Senators are divided on Medicaid as well, notes Politico:

“GOP Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine have all warned they have red lines they will not cross on Medicaid and that they believe the House bill goes beyond ‘waste, fraud and abuse.’ The alignment between Hawley, a staunch conservative, with moderates like Murkowski and Collins, underscores how skittishness over changes to the health safety-net program is resonating across the ideological spectrum.”

There are similar problems with the SNAP (food stamp) cuts that shift many billions of dollars of costs to the states. And the way BBB structure the SNAP cuts the cost-shift will be particularly egregious for states with high “error rates” for SNAP paperwork and benefit determinations. Three states with two Republican senators each, Alaska, South Carolina and Tennessee, could really get hammered. They won’t be happy about it.

But at the same time, the HFC hard-liners, who were the very last faction to cave in to Trump’s pressure on the BBB, have counterparts in the Senate with their own complaints about the roughly $3 trillion the BBB adds to the national debt, notes Politico:

“Sen. Ron Johnson … is pushing for a return to pre-pandemic spending levels — a roughly $6 trillion cut. The Wisconsin Republican said in an interview he knows he won’t get that level of savings in the megabill but wants to tackle a chunk under the budget reconciliation process and then set up a bicameral commission to go ‘line by line’ to find the rest.

“Johnson also believes he has the votes to block a bill that doesn’t take deficit reduction seriously, pointing to Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Rick Scott of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky as senators sharing his concerns.”

If Mike Johnson is “magic,” Ron Johnson is “poison.”

On top of everything else, the budget resolution the Senate passed to set up its version of BBB includes an accounting trick that basically means the two chambers are operating from very different baseline numbers. The Senate’s insistence on “current policy scoring” means $3.8 trillion worth of expiring tax cuts that will be resurrected are deemed as “revenue neutral,” a fancy term for “free.” Perhaps the Senate parliamentarian will blow up that scam, but if not, it will cause problems in the House.

These are just the most obvious BBB problems; others will emerge as senators use their leverage to shape the bill to reflect their own political needs and the grubbier desires of the wealthy interests Republicans tend to represent. And for all the talk of the House being the body in which Republicans have no margin for error or division (two voted no and one voted “present”), the same number of GOP senators, four, could blow up the BBB. It’s going to be a long, wild ride, and the only people in Washington who know exactly what to say about the BBB are Democrats. No matter what tweaks Republicans make, the final product is still going to “cut safety net programs to give the wealthy tax cuts” while borrowing money to do so. That’s just baked into the cake.