Week Four: No Rest for the Grifters

In the 1960s when my husband and I first worked in Washington , D.C. , according to the Office of Personnel Management , there were about 1,808,000 federal employees.

At the start of President Trump ’s second term there were 2.3 million , of which about 775,000 were military and Department of Defense employees.

This astonishing bloat in the federal bureaucracy is even more inexplicable when you consider that in this same period so many of the jobs being performed by these people have been made strikingly more efficient.

A number of temporary restraining orders were issued, which as a general matter are not appealable, but once that is followed by preliminary injunctive relief they are, so some will be heading up the judicial ladder soon.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency ( DOGE ) has succeeded in a major court battle.

The government has responded asking her to wait until Monday and hold a hearing before entering any order.

The notion of a district court’s having the power to issue nationwide injunctions seems to grant them extraordinary powers not envisioned in the Constitution .

Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas have already questioned their legality.