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If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Matteo Wong on Signal at @matteowong.52.
A new phase of the president and the Department of Government Efficiency’s attempts to downsize and remake the civil service is under way. The idea is simple: use generative AI to automate work that was previously done by people.

One response to the egregious, often cruel actions of the Trump administration is outrage. That’s understandable, but mostly counterproductive, and, worse, a reaction that Donald Trump’s supporters enjoy. Ice is more advisable than fire in this situation, and the situation is better assessed with a cold head than a hot one.
Broadly speaking, there are three streams of influence on the administration. Trump’s vindictive, amoral, autocratic, and ignorant personality is the most obvious one.

Donald Trump’s approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has always been to root for Russia while pretending he isn’t. Trump just hates killing and death. More than that, he hates sending American money overseas. The claim that he actually agrees with Moscow is a hoax, remember. Trump is all about putting America first. Or so he’s said, and so his mostly non-Russophilic supporters claim to believe.
But now he has flung the mask to the ground.

The anxiety of influence, a phrase that the literary critic Harold Bloom coined in 1973 to describe the struggle to write innovative poetry, lives on today in the form of reheated nachos. In internet slang, to reheat someone else’s nachos is to take old, soggy ideas and serve them up as if they’re fresh. An interviewer recently asked Lady Gaga to reply to the accusation that she was doing just that with “Abracadabra,” her new single that conjures many of her older songs.