Joseph Rillotta, a senior #IRS lawyer, wrote that “no one” at the IRS had taken into account the performance of the probationary workers set to be fired. Rillotta urged that the language be struck from the draft termination letter.

If the falsehood wasn’t removed, Rillotta said he would file a report w/the #InspectorGeneral for the IRS.

…according to previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica, a top lawyer at the #IRS warned #Trump admin officials that the performance-related language in his agency’s termination letter was “a false statement” that amounted to “#fraud” if the agency kept the language in the letter.

The emails reveal that in the hours before the IRS sent out its Feb. 20 termination letter [to nearly 7k employees], a fierce dispute played out at the agency’s highest levels.

More

The United States Institute of #Peace #USIP is suing over #DOGE’s “lawless assault” on the #independent #nonprofit organization established by #Congress.

#law #Trump #Musk #ArmedBreakIn #TrumpPurge #AbuseOfPower
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278529/gov.uscourts.dcd.278529.1.0.pdf

The program was created by #Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to finance #CleanEnergy & #climate-friendly projects.

Zeldin [falsely] accused the grant recipients of mismanagement, fraud & self-dealing & froze the #grants.

#SCOTUS ruled in 1935 to uphold a #law that allows #FTC commissioners to be fired ONLY for good #cause, such as neglecting their duties. The ruling shields a number of #independent, bipartisan multi-member agencies from direct control by the #WhiteHouse.

@Nonilex

Sorry to post this yet again, but it was frustratingly predictable:

"It seems likely that the new administration will devastate many government agencies that not only house experts in their respective fields but a treasure trove of institutional knowledge. Once these are destroyed, it will take years to restore them, if they ever can be.”

"Second Foundation” would be a good name for a coalition of blue states, though…

The #USgovernment is one of the world’s biggest #publishers, & its #research on everything from carbon emissions to infant mortality is conducted on a scale that few private institutions can match. Kellam said that she’d participated in a small data-preservation effort during #Trump’s first term, but had never seen anything like the frenzy that ignited in late Jan, when the #CDC began removing #information…. (It’s since been restored by means of a #TRO.)

Like the Encyclopedists of #IsaacAsimov’s “Foundation”—who race to compile a collapsing empire’s accumulated knowledge—they’re assembling #information arks to ride out the chaos.

“This is how we know about our country,” Lynda Kellam, a social scientist & data librarian, told me. “People who support the ‘drain the swamp’ mentality don’t seem to understand how much the government does.” Kellam… described the vulnerable data as “irreplaceable.”

It comes from a loose coalition of #archivists & #librarians, who are standing athwart #history & yelling “Save!” They belong to organizations such as the #InternetArchive, which co-created a project called the End of Term Web Archive to back up the federal web in 2008; the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, or #edgi; & #libraries at major #universities such as #MIT & the University of #Michigan.

A recently leaked list of pages marked for deletion on military websites includes…the #EnolaGay, …the B-29 bomber that nuked Hiroshima.

Oblivion menaces every scrap of #information that doesn’t spark joy in the Oval Office. “It’s gone,” #Trump said of “wokeness,” during his address to Congress, in almost motherly tones. “And we feel so much better for it, don’t we? Don’t we feel better?” But on this front, at least, Trump is facing well-organized resistance.

Racing to comply w/ #Trump’s executive orders banning “DEI” & “gender ideology extremism,” agencies have cut materials on everything from supporting transgender youth in school to teaching children about sickle-cell disease, which disproportionately affects people of African descent. But they have also axed records having little to do w/the Admin’s ideological priorities, seemingly assisted by AI tools that flag forbidden words w/o regard to context.

On Feb 7th, #Trump sacked the
head of #NARA, the agency that maintains the ofcl texts of the nation’s laws, & whose motto is “the written word endures.”

>110k govt pages have gone dark in a #purge that one scientist likened to a “#DigitalBookBurning,” & which has proved as frightening in its imprecision as in its malice.

Earlier this week, however, #DOGE associates targeted what several experts & government officials described as perhaps the most sensitive of all — a system within a broader govt database created to help enforce #ChildSupport payments, which pulls a vast trove of #information, including income data linked to nearly ALL US WORKERS [not just those working for the Federal Govt].