I am dying.
A brief update from my sickbed.

I mean, all of us are, as soon as we're born. But I've been sick for three days now, which has not happened in at least ten years. (I get sick for two days, tops.) It's not clear what I have, but it comes with a headache that has made concentrating on anything but episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine impossible. So, my apologies for the lack of newsletters again this week. This one will be short, but I wanted to make sure you all know that I love you and am, alas, not long for this world. "He was too beautiful for us." Make sure your remembrances of me say that.
What is happening with the federal government? The other day, the Trump administration issued executive orders that essentially shut off most of the money flowing out of the federal government. That's trillions of dollars, and a huge chunk of the national economy; someone described it as a government shutdown on steroids. It's not something you can do without serious repercussions across the board. It was also unconstitutional—Congress is in charge of federal spending and had already allocated those monies. It's so unconstitutional that the Republican-controlled Supreme Court might even tell Trump he can't do it. A federal judge has already blocked the spending freeze, and Trump and his press secretary have given statements explaining that they weren't really shutting down all federal spending, just the bad and wasteful kind. Okay.
Over three million federal employees got an email asking if they wanted to keep their jobs and could support Trump's agenda, or if they wanted to take buyouts. This was also probably illegal. The subject line of the email was "Fork in the Road"—which, not coincidentally, was the subject line of a similar email that Twitter employees received after Elon Musk bought the company in 2022. 🙃
Oh, also, two of the people newly placed in charge of the Office of Personnel Management—the federal government's HR agency, more or less, which is issuing all these orders—are a 21-year-old and a recent high school graduate who aren't being named because of their ages. Scuttlebutt is that they are Musk's nephews.
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This brought a big smile to my face, and I hope it does to yours too:
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