The new Trump administration’s “slash first, ask questions later” approach to overhauling the federal bureaucracy has, unsurprisingly, spawned a mountain of litigation raising a dizzying array of statutory and constitutional challenges to various executive actions.

Among the most effective to date at halting the steamroller, at least temporarily, have been those brought by a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general. Two of these have focused particularly on the activities of the soi-disant Department of Government Efficiency. The first lawsuit has, thus far successfully, sought to block DOGE staff from accessing the Treasury Department’s critical payments system, alleging violations of the Administrative Procedures Act, the Privacy Act of 1974, and the Federal Information Security Management Act, among others.

The second suit strikes at the formation of DOGE itself, arguing that the unprecedented power delegated to Elon Musk effectively makes him a senior government officer, and that the administration’s failure to seek Senate confirmation runs afoul of the constitutional mandate to obtain the “advice and consent” of that body for such appointments.

In order to get the inside skinny on the litigation—and what future challenges might be coming down the pike—we spoke with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who brought the suits along with 18 other state attorneys general. Ellison previously served a dozen years in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he founded the Congressional Antitrust Caucus and the Congressional Consumer Justice Caucus, as well as co-chairing the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

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As Elon Musk and his teen tech team take a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy, those of us who followed the South African centibillionaire’s fraught takeover of the platform formerly known as Twitter may be feeling an eerie sense of déjà vu.

The hasty mass layoffs, often seemingly conducted with little understanding of who is being fired and what function they served. The dubious projections of a drastically improved fiscal outlook. The general ambiance of fear and confusion, exacerbated by intimidating all-hands e-mails. Haven’t we seen this movie before?

No, it’s not a glitch in the Matrix; Musk is running his Twitter-takeover playbook on the federal government with astonishing fidelity. To help us break down the parallels, we could think of no better guides than New York Times tech reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, authors of Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, the most detailed and thorough account out there of the microblogging platform’s transformation into “X.”

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Fighting through all the trash memes, trolling, and terrible DOGE database security we somehow made it to Episode 3! This week we interview cybersecurity expert Tarah Wheeler, CEO of Red Queen Dynamics.

Tarah serves as the Senior Fellow for Global Cyber Policy at Council on Foreign Relations and is a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Board of Directors. You can find her on Bluesky @tarah.org.

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We're back! After reacting to Elon Musk's latest Bart Simpson level trolling on X, we talk briefly on how we're going to ramp up production in order to meet the deluge of news and noise coming out of DOGE.

Our guest this week is Professor Henry Farrell, from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Prof. Farrell was the 2019 recipient of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology and his latest book (along with Prof. Abraham Newman at Georgetown) is Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

In order to meet the weight of the current historical moment, we shifted our editorial calendar around a bit in bringing Prof. Farrell on because we think there is a deep and poorly understood connection between the norms the United States enforces on infrastructure around the world and how it treats its own deep systems.

We thought Profs. Farrell and Newman's recent post on Lawfare, "Elon Musk Weaponizes the Government" provides one of the first framework and abstraction to understand what's going on. Take a listen and let us know what you think on our socials!

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--LINKS REFERENCED--

The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies
Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better by Jennifer Pahlka

In our first full episode, we interview Mikey Dickerson, the first Administrator of the United States Digital Service (USDS) – which the Trump Administration has now renamed to the US DOGE Service. We discuss his personal origin with USDS, how things get done behind the scenes in the Executive Office of the President (EOP), and the potential impacts of the DOGE Executive Order.

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Noah Kunin and Julian Sanchez introduce the idea behind WatchCats!

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