It’s been an exhausting four weeks for anyone watching the administration’s effort to reshape, modernize, and clean up the federal government. It’s been an avalanche of Executive Orders, confirmation hearings, court battles, and staff reshufflings and removals. “The choice was between a slow canoe ride through more of the same, or a roller coaster. Americans chose the roller coaster.”

A lot of things have been made clear. The most significant is that as things were going, the roles of the president and Congress had been largely diminished in recent years. Unelected bureaucrats in the U.S. Treasury were in charge of disbursing the money allocated by the federal budget to bureaucrats elsewhere who shaped the laws and policies in a manner making it almost impossible to audit. Nothing could have been more fake. A return to constitutional governance was possible only if the system was altered, as it very rapidly is. 

The Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process). In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible. As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going. Thanks to @USTreasury for the great work.

There has been a substantial change in staffing among agencies and departments, among these:

At the Department of Defense, enlistments are up and woke is dismantled: Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired the Naval Chief, the Vice Chief of the Air Force and the Judge Advocate Generals for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. There is no possibility of a strong defense when the military is more concerned with pronouns than battle readiness, diverting military funds for expensive transitioning of recruits, and choosing officers on anything but demonstrated capabilities to lead. 5,400 civilian employees were also fired in the short time Hegseth has been in office.

Within days of confirmation, Kash Patel, the new director of the FBI ordered 1,500 agents relocated from Washington, D.C.: 1,000 to areas where there have been spikes in crime and 500 to Huntsville, Alabama.

The attempt to shutter the USAID and fire all but a small number of the thousands employed there which had been halted by a district court temporary restraining order is now back on track, the court having considered that no other relief was warranted.

Citing in particular imagined hardships to those stationed abroad, federal unions had challenged the cuts and questioned their constitutionality. In the latest round, Judge Carl Nichols held........

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