Background Briefing: February 6, 2025
Government Workers Should Not Fall For the Musk/Trump Buyout Trick
We begin with today’s deadline, since extended, for federal civil service employees to accept the Musk/Trump buyout offer and discuss the likelihood, given the appalling nature of Trump’s choices to the top positions in his administration, that the loyalists he plans to replace governments workers with will be bottom feeders like the lowlifes who stormed the capitol on January 6. Joining us is David Super, a professor of Law at Georgetown University whose research focuses on Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, Legislation, Local Government Law, and Public Welfare Law. He also teaches Civil Procedure, Contracts, Evidence, Property, and Torts. In addition to Georgetown, he has also taught law at Columbia, Harvard, Howard, Maryland, Penn, Washington & Lee, and Yale and prior to entering the legal academy, he served for several years as the general counsel for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. We discuss his article at The Hill, “Don’t fall for it — the federal employee ‘buy-out’ plan is a trick.”
The Moral Authoritarian and Billionaire Worshipping Author of Project 2025 About to Head the OMB
Then, with Democratic senators pulling an all-nighter in the Senate to protest Trump’s head of the OMB, the Christian Nationalist and Democrat-hater Russell Vought, we speak with Lisa Graves, the Executive Director of the new corporate watchdog group True North Research and Court Accountability. She has served as a senior advisor in all three branches of the federal government–as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, as Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as a Deputy Chief of the article 3 judges division for the U.S. Courts.
Collusion Between the Far Right and American Policing is About to Get Worse Under Trump, Bondi and Kash Patel
Then finally we examine the the terrifying collusion between the extreme right and American policing that threatens the very foundations of our democracy which will get much worse as Trump, Bondi and Kash Patel empower white supremacist and militia groups. Joining us is Mike German who worked undercover infiltrating white supremacist and militia groups and is now a fellow with the Liberty and National Security program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. He has worked at the ACLU and served sixteen years as an FBI special agent. He is the author of Thinking Like a Terrorist as well as Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Our Democracy. His new book just out, co-authored with Beth Zasloff, is Policing White Supremacy: The Enemy Within.