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 that as the agency has not been abolished, workers involved must avail themselves of existing federal employment laws to challenge their firings, not federal district courts. Cuts to the agency funds will now proceed as well. As this was the enormous left-wing slush fund, this should but a big dent in their activities.

The Department of Education is on the block and Project Veritas has interviewed an official there who provides evidence that it will require a deep cleansing. DOGE has already cut $900 million the department has been spending on the Institute of Education Sciences. It halted $4.4 billion that remained in a $200 billion COVID relief package (millions of which had already been frivolously spent with no oversight). States which want these funds must first shell out for the expenditures, and DOGE will not release any reimbursements without receipts and department approval. 

The Department of Education has terminated 18 grants for $226M to Comprehensive Centers, which provided consulting services with a large focus on DEI. One Center application stated: “Embedding DEI reviews across all deliverables and materials ensures it is not a one-off task specific activity.” A 2019 study (which itself cost $8M) was “not able to measure the causal impact of the centers’ work”.

Judge Randolph D. Moss of the D.C. federal court declined to bar DOGE from accessing student loan accounts at the Department of Education. 

With so many rice bowls being smashed, you’d be on target to believe there would be many efforts to halt the efforts in courts in those jurisdictions sympathetic to the idea of an expansive federal government, and there have been. Two this week are worthy of particular scrutiny, both involve allegations of judicial misconduct.

In one, a case dealing with the administration’s ban on transgender troops, the Department of Justice’s chief of staff filed an ethics complaint against Judge Anna Reyes: 

"Judge Reyes' misconduct during these proceedings raises serious concerns about her compliance with the Code of Conduct for United States Judges. Her behavior violates Canon 2A's requirement that judges should "act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary" and Canon 3A(3)'s directive that judges should "be patient, dignified, respectful, and courteous." The Comment to Canon 3A(3) specifically notes that "The duty to be respectful includes the responsibility to avoid comment or behavior that could reasonably be interpreted as harassment, prejudice, or bias." Judge Reyes' treatment of DOJ counsel falls short of this standard." "I respectfully request that appropriate action be taken to address these violations and to ensure that future proceedings in this court are conducted with the dignity and impartiality the public has a right to expect. At minimum, this matter warrants further investigation to determine whether these incidents represent a pattern of misconduct that requires more significant remedial measures."

The complaint cites outrageous behavior on the Judge’s part. If true, I can’t imagine some sort of sanctions not being imposed upon her. 

In the second case, Judge John McConnell is being charged with having failed to disclose he had a conflict of interest in a case where he called a halt on the freezing of federal funds. 

A judge who blocked President Trump’s federal spending freeze is Chairman Emeritus of a nonprofit that will continue to receive millions in government funding as a result of his ruling, in an apparent conflict of interest seen as a second cause for the judge’s impeachment.

On Wednesday, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) announced articles of impeachment against federal Judge John McConnell on the grounds that he overreached his authority and engaged in partisan activism by blocking Trump’s executive order freezing federal funding while Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) searches for wasteful spending.

“Impeach this pseudo-jurist!!,” Musk responded to Rep. Clyde’s post.

Then, on Sunday, America First Legal Foundation (AFL) reported that Judge McConnell appears to have had a conflict of interest, which he did not disclose, when he ruled on the lawsuit petitioning him to block the spending freeze.

AFL revealed its findings in a thread of posts on Musk’s X.com social media platform:

• “Judge McConnell has appeared as a Director on Crossroads’ IRS Form 990 every year since he took the federal bench in 2013.”
• “Judge McConnell appears to be currently serving on the Board of Directors for the non-profit NGO Crossroads Rhode Island.”
• McConnell was previously the Chair of the Board and is currently listed as Chairman Emeritus.
• “In the 18 years Judge McConnell has been on the board of Crossroads Rhode Island, it has received over $128 million in government funding.”
• The nonprofit received $18.6 million in government funding in 2023 -- more than half its total revenue for the year.
• “Crossroads Rhode Island has already received just under $2.9 million in FY2025 to provide various programs and services to Rhode Island”
• Rhode Island is one of the plaintiffs Judge McConnell sided with when he ruled against the federal funding freeze.

 Thus, AFL writes, Judge McConnell was legally required to disclose his close ties to Crossroads and was ethically obligated to recuse himself in order to avoid even the appearance of impropriety -- but, he did neither.

As a result of these revelations, AFL is calling on Judge McConnell to immediately vacate his temporary restraining order against the funding freeze and recuse himself from the case.

“If accurate, these are grounds for impeachment of the judge,” Musk replied to AFL’s posts on Monday.

As interesting as this sampling of actions and litigation is, the more significant things, in my opinion, are policy changes, and two caught my eye this week: Policies on domestic energy production and foreign investment in the United States.

For national security reasons as well as economic ones, energy independence is a significant goal, and once again we are working toward that, as opposed to the Obama-Biden policies of stifling domestic energy production of the only non-fantastical sort of energy that matters.

President Trump’s team is dismantling Biden’s anti-energy agenda with surgical precision. Secretary Burgum’s reversal of offshore drilling bans and SecDuffy’s rollback of auto mandates expose how D.C. bureaucrats strangled American energy independence. 

Restarting LNG exports and slashing red tape prove Trump’s commitment to crushing inflation and unleashing domestic production. These moves aren’t just policy shifts -- they’re a declaration of war on the regulatory state that’s been bleeding taxpayers dry. 

America-first energy dominance isn’t a slogan -- it’s the only way to stop globalist elites from selling out our future. 

Among the many Executive Orders the President has signed, his order on foreign investment in the U.S. seems highly significant and, to my knowledge, not widely covered.

He will undertake efforts to encourage and make easier foreign investments, even passive investments here, but he would sharply restrict “PRC-affiliated persons from investing in United States technology, critical infrastructure, healthcare, agriculture, energy, raw materials, or other strategic sectors.  My Administration will protect United States farmland and real estate near sensitive facilities.  It will also seek, including in consultation with the Congress, to strengthen CFIUS [Committee on Foreign  Investment in the United States] authority over “greenfield” investments, to restrict foreign adversary access to United States talent and operations in sensitive technologies (especially artificial intelligence), and to expand the remit of “emerging and foundational” technologies addressable by CFIUS.”

He would in addition restrict U.S. investment in China:

The United States will also use all necessary legal instruments to further deter United States persons from investing in the PRC’s military-industrial sector.  These may include the imposition of sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) through the blocking of assets or through other actions, including actions pursuant to Executive Order 13959 of November 12, 2020 (Addressing the Threat From Securities Investments That Finance Communist Chinese Military Companies), as amended by Executive Order 13974 of January 13, 2021 (Amending Executive Order 13959 -- Addressing the Threat From Securities Investments That Finance Communist Chinese Military Companies) and Executive Order 14032 of June 3, 2021 (Addressing the Threat From Securities Investments That Finance Certain Companies of the People’s Republic of China), and actions pursuant to Executive Order 14105 of August 9, 2023 (Addressing United States Investments in Certain National Security Technologies and Products in Countries of Concern).  Executive Order 14105 is under review by my Administration, pursuant to the Presidential Memorandum of January 20, 2025 (America First Trade Policy), to examine whether it includes sufficient controls to address national security threats.

All in all, this first month of the new administration is showing a high degree of competence, fashioning its policies and conduct with dispatch and thoughtful care, making it difficult for those wanting to hang on to the old, demonstrably corrupt, wasteful, and even dangerous policies to persist.