The Office of Personnel Management announced a final rule creating Schedule F (now renamed Schedule Policy/Career). This allows Trump to remove job protections and fire tens of thousands of federal employees who hold policymaking roles, another step in politicizing public services under his personalist regime.

Here are some quick takes, which I will revise and expand as time goes on.

Even with extreme politicization, Schedule F still matters

When I started writing about the risks of a second Trump administration at the end of his first term in office I focused on Schedule F. Now, that focus seems a little naive. The degree of politicization we have actually witnessed is on a scale that I, who could be fairly counted as one of the biggest Cassandras on this topic, did not anticipate.

About 350,000 employees have been pushed out of government, disproportionately in agencies that are seen as more liberal. Federal hirings, annual performance evaluations, and even employee awards must now consider how loyal employees are to President Trump, and are closely monitored by political appointees.

As I’ve detailed previously, employees with stronger protections than those afforded by Schedule F have been fired because they are related to the wrong person, because the investigated abuses of power, because they were tagged by the MAGA online right as being disloyal, because they refused to break the law by firing others without cause, because they are trans, because they provided accurate information to a judge, because they made public statements about the effects of the President’s policies on their agencies, or, for no reason at all.

Even as politicized reprisals against career civil servants are a fact of life of life, internal protections against such reprisals, like the Merit Systems Protection Board, have been defanged to the point of toothlessness, meaning that an employee must now go to the courts if they are treated unfairly, even as the Supreme Court has offered little reason for optimism

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The President already effectively has an at-will work force.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has a new book coming out. It’s titled How Watching Fox News Made Me the Worst Version of Myself.

Just kidding, I don’t actually care what it’s called. (Fine. I can Google it for you. It’s called So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and the Country.) It’s my job to read such things and… I won’t read his book. They can’t make me. Life is entirely too short.

I bring it up because the book is scheduled to be released October 6, 2026. That’s a curious date. The Supreme Court starts its 2026–27 term on October 5, the first Monday of October. Alito’s book is set to drop the next day.

It sure feels like Alito doesn’t plan on having a real job the Tuesday his book launches and instead thinks he’ll be free to run around the country promoting it. By way of context, here are publication dates for the the last four sitting Supreme Court justices who released books:

Amy Coney Barrett, September 9, 2025
Neil Gorsuch, May 5, 2025
Ketanji Brown Jackson, September 4, 2024
Sonia Sotomayor, January 25, 2022 (a children’s book)
Sonia Sotomayor, September 3, 2019

It makes sense for the justices to release their books in September. You have all the attention on the upcoming term, but the justices are free to fly around the country, giving talks and doing interviews to promote their books. May also makes sense, because the court is no longer hearing cases then, just writing and editing opinions.

The justices are busy in October. Arguably too busy to sell a book.

The release last Friday by the Department of Justice of roughly 3 million documents relating to the investigation of the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has created a bizarre blame game among billionaires. Epstein was able to commit unspeakable crimes on a mass scale for decades with only a slap-on-the-wrist punishment because he was rich and well-connected. The new files help flesh out our sense of his social world, which was top-heavy with plutocrats such as the current commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick (who had earlier lied about the extent of his relationship with Epstein), Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates (whose marriage to his former wife Melinda was destroyed in large part by his relationship with Epstein), PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk (who, like Lutnick, had been deceptive about how often he interacted with Epstein).

These men all had relationships with Epstein after his 2008 conviction and jailing for sex trafficking minors; some also had deep business or philanthropic ties to Epstein. Now that these sordid ties are finally coming back to haunt them, oligarchs are franctically throwing Epstein-related stones at each other from within their respective glass houses. When Hoffman posted on X (the social-media site owned by Musk), “We should focus on prosecuting those who committed crimes and finally getting justice for the victims.” Musk sarcastically responded, “While you’re at it, maybe you can help OJ ‘find the real killer’.” Hoffman shot back with a screenshot of a 2012 e-mail where Musk asked Epstein about visiting his private island, a missive that included this query: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”

The tawdry exchange between Hoffman and Musk has all the emotional maturity of kindergarten kids accusing each other of having the cooties. In truth, none of those in Epstein’s social circle should escape culpability, since, even if they committed no crimes themselves, they were, at the very least, tolerant of Epstein’s vileness.

The Epstein files are a window into the world of the financial and political elite. What emerges from this window is an ugly site. Epstein’s coterie transcended normal political divides. Gates and Hoffman are centrist liberals who tend to support Democrats, while Thiel, Lutnick, and Musk are all ardent right-wingers. But their seeming partisan differences were as nothing compared to their common membership of the ruling class. After all, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were both close Epstein associates.

Virginia Democrats have unveiled their plan to pick up four more seats in Congress, giving the public their first look at a map meant to counter President Donald Trump’s gerrymandering gains in GOP-controlled states.

Democrats are currently defending* their redistricting effort in court. But if the Virginia Supreme Court allows the plan to move forward, voters will get the final say on whether to use the new map in the 2026 midterm elections.

If the proposed map released Thursday ultimately goes into effect, Virginia’s congressional delegation – currently made up of six Democrats and five Republicans – could look a lot more blue.

State Senate leader Louise Lucas (D), a forceful public voice for the aggressive “10-1” plan Democrats are putting forward, has spent months pushing back on fellow party members who advocated for more moderate gains.

“How about you all stay focused on the fascist in the White House and let us handle redistricting in Virginia,” Lucas said in a social post aimed at Virginia’s U.S. senators, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner.

A far-right social media influencer whose political career has been fueled more by provocation than by votes complained this week that Texas Republicans have barred her from party events. She also claimed, without evidence, that she was stripped of her ability to vote, allegations that arrive amid a familiar mix of incendiary rhetoric and unverifiable claims.

Valentina Gomez, who has described herself to her more than 400,000 followers online as a Colombian immigrant and a MAGA conservative, made the assertions in a video posted Wednesday to Instagram. In it, she says the Republican Party of Texas is “so corrupt” that it banned her from party functions after she “expos[ed] the horrible health condition of 84-year-old Congressman John Carter,” the longtime incumbent in Texas’ 31st Congressional District. She also claims she is “under investigation by multiple federal agencies” and alleges that officials “used their power to remove me from the voting rolls,” adding that “they made it illegal for me to cast my vote.”

TALLAHASSEE – Lawyers for residents in Broward and Miami-Dade counties have filed a petition challenging Gov. Ron DeSantis’ call for a special session where lawmakers would redraw congressional boundaries mid-decade instead of every 10 years.

After months of trying to convince the Legislature to take up redistricting on its own, DeSantis on Jan. 7 called a special five-day session in April for the “purpose of considering legislation relating to the drawing of congressional districts for the State of Florida.”

The same day, Secretary of State Cord Byrd, a DeSantis appointee, sent a letter to all 67 county supervisors of elections instructing them to implement candidate qualifying rules that only apply in a year in which the Legislature redraws congressional districts.

Those actions are unconstitutional, and violate Florida’s “strict separation of powers doctrine,” according to the petition, filed Thursday in the Florida Supreme Court by the Elias Law Group, a national firm based in Washington, D.C. specializing in voting rights litigation and progressive causes.

The actions of DeSantis and Byrd “commandeer the Legislature’s authority to decide whether and when to re-draw Florida’s congressional boundaries,” the petition says. “Their actions have already disrupted Florida’s impending elections by casting significant uncertainty on the future of Florida’s congressional map and the relevant candidate filing deadlines.”