☕️ BAPTISM OF FIRE ☙ Tuesday, January 28, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Nothing like it has ever happened before in American history. In fact, nobody even thought it was possible. Useless media has lost the plot — Trump's war against the deep state is fully underway.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! And here we go again. The second Week of Trump is proving even more historic and disruptive than the first. I realize that’s hard for you to imagine. Get ready, the news is coming at us through a fire hose (one that works, not in LA). We can now see that last week, Trump was only playing with the deep state. He was pruning the swamp using a machete. But yesterday he put the machete down and flipped on a hellscape of AI-powered, swamp-draining drones. Trust me, you won’t believe this is real.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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If last week was a tectonic wake-up call, this week the Trump Administration unleashed a 7.8 magnitude earthquake against the deep state. The world is literally changing before our eyes. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal made history, perhaps unknowingly, with its story blandly headlined, “White House Orders Pause of Federal Financial-Assistance Programs.” The sub-headline said only that “Agencies scramble to understand the unexpected memo.” Then, Politico ran a related and oddly similar headline, more blunt but also more confused: “‘It will kill people’: Chaos, confusion after Trump halts US foreign aid.”

Chaos. Confusion. Epoch-making. What Trump has done was, until yesterday, unimaginable. When the Wall Street Journal called “the memo” “unexpected,” it was a masterpiece of understatement, kind of like describing the Hindenberg as an unscheduled travel delay.

It came in two parts (so far). Yesterday, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) unleashed a two-page memo upon the entire federal government. It was nothing less than a multi-trillion-dollar, whole-of-government spending freeze, excepting only a small handful of essential items like Medicare, emergency relief, payrolls, and Social Security. Like that, Trump shut down the government.

You can be sure that nothing like this has ever happened before. It has completely flipped the script. Instead of Trump trying vainly to wrestle control over a vast bureaucracy, now the bureaucrats must come to Trump for permission to do anything.

Overnight, Trump has managed to turn the vast, out-of-control federal bureaucracy into a command-and-control system.

“Many in the aid space,” Politico reported, “said they couldn’t remember any such sudden halt to funding in the past.” One darkly predicted destruction, saying, “This order is cruel and deadly; It will kill people.”

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) predicted it would create total chaos, insisting, “It will mean missed payrolls and rent payments and everything in between: chaos for everything from universities to non-profit charities, state disaster assistance, local law enforcement, aid to the elderly, and food for those in need.”

Neither the WSJ nor Politico quoted anybody supporting the freeze, or any Republican at all, for that matter. They didn’t even quote any other prominent Democrat voices apart from Schumer’s. There’s no narrative yet, no talking points. The completely one-dimensional report means the media is in shock, terrified, cowed. It doesn’t know which way to turn or what to think.

Can he really do this?

Expect a tsunami of litigation starting … right now.

🔥 Here’s a link to a copy of the memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Read the whole thing. It’s only two pages, and it might be one of the single most significant government actions in our lifetimes. I would bet a year’s wages a Supreme Court decision lies at the end of this memo. But let’s dig in. Here are the memo’s two ‘money’ paragraphs:

Starting at 5pm today, all government financial assistance (excluding the aforementioned categories) must be temporarily frozen until further notice, after Trump Administration officials can “review” all government expenses to “determine the best uses of the funding.”

Until yesterday, nobody would have believed such a pause for review was even possible. It’s too big. Trump isn’t asking the bureaucracy to follow orders; he’s forcing them to come to him for permission to function at all. It is totally unprecedented, and it raises all kinds of questions about separation of powers between the President and Congress, but it also resonates on a common-sense level.

If the President is the nation’s chief executive, shouldn’t everything be centralized in his office? And if it got out of control, shouldn’t some President get it back under control?

🔥 The second, companion order, described in the Politico article, was a “Stop Work” order issued on Friday by Secretary of State Marco Rubio (and “clarified” yesterday). Rubio’s order shut down all foreign aid and operations, full stop, and also curtailed staff communication about the order, effective immediately. (Aid to Egypt and Israel were excepted, but it included Ukraine and Taiwan.)

Under the stop-work order, all state aid programs must be entered into a centralized database where they can be reviewed. Not one dollar can go out until that happens. Now, you might have already thought everything was in a centralized database, but no. And that is part of the problem.

Like the OMB Memo, Rubio’s stop-work order is a full-scale shutdown of U.S. foreign aid operations, going far beyond a normal policy review. By restricting all bureaucratic discretion, and freezing all existing contracts, it is one of the most aggressive funding halts in modern U.S. diplomatic history.

Between the OMB memo and the State Department stop-work order, the Trump Administration is forcing a total reset on federal spending, and collecting all spending into a centralized database where an agency like DOGE can have any hope of overseeing it.

It also means the Administration is forcing a total reset on federal policy, since spending is policy.

You could not possibly imagine a more disruptive strategy. It’s a live wire. You can mess around with DEI all you want and probably get away with it, but start messing with people’s money, and get ready for the fur to fly. The stoppage affects everything— red states, blue states, foreign countries, local governments, and perhaps most importantly, all the so-called NGOs.

It’s an absolute masterstroke of disruption. The OMB memo and State Department stop-work order aren’t just administrative policy shifts—they are a full-scale financial coup over the federal government. This is not just about budget cuts, or ideological targeting—this is about power.

Until now, government spending has operated on autopilot. Government money printer go brrrrrrr. Money flowed freely through an opaque, closed-top strainer, without transparency or direct executive oversight, and bureaucracies, NGOs, and foreign governments knew they would always get paid regardless of who was in the White House.

Trump just ended that assumption. This moment will forever be remembered as a turning point in American governance.

🔥 One of the biggest sources of funding for NGO’s —especially foreign NGO’s— is the State Department’s USAID, which many have long suspected was a CIA front for destabilization operations. According to the Kiev Post, USAID has distributed over $30 billion dollars to Ukrainian NGOs and contractors, a vast uncharted ocean of misspent money.

USAID is the deep state’s ATM.

Yesterday, the AP ran a story related to the financial freeze orders, headlined “US places dozens of senior aid officials on leave, citing possible resistance to Trump orders.”

According to the AP, 56 senior USAID personnel and “hundreds of contractors” were placed on immediate administrative leave yesterday, pending review, which is the closest thing to getting fired career bureaucrats get.

The dramatic USAID purge seems related to malicious compliance inside the agency. Someone leaked an internal USAID memo sent late yesterday, which quoted new acting administrator Jason Gray, who said he had identified “several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the President’s Executive Orders and the mandate from the American people.”

Boom.

We can quibble over precise definitions, but nobody can argue that USAID isn’t a core component of the deep state, however you want to define that term. It’s ironic that Chuck Schumer has become the deep state’s poster boy, since Trump is attacking the deep state “six ways from Sunday.” He’s cut off their money —the deep state’s lifeblood— and now he’s ruthlessly making examples of employees who defy legal instructions. And not just a few employees, either.

This is the long-awaited deep state showdown—but on a scale nobody imagined. It’s like what we hoped would happen during Trump’s first term, except that it has been working out during its 4-year hiatus and now it has roid rage.

If Trump succeeds in these agency purges, and gathers the money strings back under White House control, in one transparent database, then the deep state as we knew it is finished.

🔥 It’s becoming an even more real episode of Trump’s hit reality TV show, The Apprentice. The Washington Post ran an article yesterday headlined, “DOJ fires officials who worked on Jack Smith’s Trump investigations.” Which is exactly what Trump promised he would do. Of course, just because Trump said he’d do it about a million times, that didn’t stop the outrage machine.

You’re fired. Acting interim attorney general James McHenry informed a large group of DOJ lawyers they were fired, effective immediately, and explained that the Department “does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda.” No doubt. McHenry’s memo added, “This action is consistent with the mission of ending the weaponization of government.”

All the fired lawyers worked on the team prosecuting President Trump. The fog of war is thick. WaPo said, “It was unclear how many people on the special counsel team were terminated Monday.”

It’s not complicated. You try to sue your boss to get him fired, but the lawsuit gets thrown out and your boss gets a promotion. What do you think happens next?

Unlike career bureaucrats, DOJ officials serve at the pleasure of the president.

It wasn’t just the fired lawyers. Many more DOJ officials involved in or related to the investigations have been transferred to, shall we say, less desirable posts. In other words, they are effectively demoted without actually being demoted. Some are even being forced to work directly on the Trump agenda, having already been “transferred to a newly created division focused on sanctuary cities and immigration enforcement.”

In case you were wondering how they were reacting to these transfers, they don’t like it. High-profile, 23-year DOJ veteran Corey Amundson, who until yesterday was head of the Department’s public-integrity section, immediately resigned after being reassigned to the immigration group.

It’s not just the DOJ either. “The shake-up,” WaPo reported, “has hit nearly every major department.”

As with everything else we described today, the DOJ shakeup was historic. Stephen A. Saltzburg, a former Justice Department official who now teaches at George Washington University’s law school, said “We have never had a situation like this before.”

The media and Democrats are completely blindsided—they expected some firings, not an inconceivably radical, whole-of-government-wide restructuring.

🔥 But wait, there’s more. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the DOJ itself is now under investigation. Ed Martin, the new interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., is leading a review of all January 6th prosecutions. In an email Monday, Martin asked prosecutors to turn over “all files, documents, notes, emails and other information” related to the J6 cases.

“The loosely defined inquiry,” WSJ noted, “jarred prosecutors in the office as well as others who recently left.” In other words, not knowing exactly what they’re being investigated for is making them feel anxious. The irony! The turnabout! The hunters have become the hunted!

Ominously, Ed Martin has long criticized the J6 prosecutions. He served on the board of the Patriot Freedom Project, a group supporting J6 defendants, and he also helped organize the “Stop the Steal” movement in 2020. Martin has called the DOJ’s creative interpretation of the obstruction charge —later shot down by the Supreme Court— as a “great failure.” Most inauspiciously, Martin wrote, “we need to get to the bottom of it.”

Now, Ed Martin is in charge of investigating the DOJ.

🔥 The federal workforce is in a state of shock, and so unsurprisingly the Reddit channel r/FedNews (“subreddit”) is getting pretty wild. Here’s one examplethat escaped to Twitter yesterday. It will give you a sense of the hot winds blowing through the halls of power in Washington:

It is difficult to imagine the scale of planning that must have preceded yesterday’s assault on the permanent bureaucracy. It reminds us of the “Baptism of Fire” scene in the Godfather, where Michael strikes back against all the rival gangs, not just the one who assassinated his father.

The Trump Administration isn’t just changing policy—it’s taking a wrecking ball to the entire power structure of the permanent bureaucracy. That’s why r/FedNews and other government-adjacent spaces are melting down. This isn’t like the 2017-era bureaucratic resistance, where civil servants slow-walked Trump’s policy changes for four years until he left office.

This time, Trump isn’t bothering to ask for compliance—he’s making their compliance irrelevant. The civil service class thought they could outlast any administration. Yesterday, Trump shattered that illusion. Now, loyalty to the bureaucracy means nothing—loyalty to the President is what matters.

We’re about to see a fight like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Not a spirited fight over a batch of executive orders—it’s an existential battle over how the government operates on a fundamental level. If Trump wins, everything will be different.

Have a terrific Tuesday! C&C will be back tomorrow morning with the latest essential, momentous news, along with a side of snarky commentary to help understand it all.

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