Good morning. It is February 10th. The temperature in New York is crossing the freezing point on the way to a brief one day thaw. And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The story of the Trump administration's government funding shutdown continues to branch out across every possible area. The Washington Post this morning has “Farmers on the hook for millions after Trump freezes USDA funds, the sub-headline is “The White House had repeatedly said the funding freeze would not affect benefits that go directly to individuals. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump ordered the Agriculture Department,” the Post writes, “to freeze funds for several programs designated by President Joe Biden's signature clean energy and health care law, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The freeze paused some funding for the department's Environmental Quality Incentives Program which helps farmers address natural resource concerns, and the Rural Energy for America program, which provides financial assistance for farmers to improve their infrastructure. Farmers who signed contracts with the Agriculture Department under those programs paid upfront to build fencing, plant new crops, and install renewable energy systems with guarantees that the federal government would issue grants and loan guarantees to cover at least part of their costs. Now, with that money frozen, they're on the hook.”

There are two consistent themes about what the Trump administration is doing on display here. One is that neither the text of the executive order's freezing funding nor the judges orders that are supposed to unfreeze funding have any actual identifiable formal relationship to the funding cutoffs. No one is trying to make any of this conform to any sort of procedure or law or even plan. The government has just quit paying out money and all the attempts to make sense of it in terms of the text of executive orders and countervailing judicial orders has really kept the focus off the other overarching theme of it all, which is the part where, as the story says, the farmers signed contracts. Apart from the question of separation of powers and to what extent the executive branch can countermand the spending plans passed into law by the legislative branch, there's the fundamental question of contract law, because it's how Elon Musk and Donald Trump do business, the government has decided to just start defaulting on legal obligations it has already entered to pay money for things. They're not suspending Joe Biden's program of offering farmers incentives to make these various improvements. They're taking farmers who've already spent money under an explicit deal that the government would reimburse them for it, and they're stiffing them on the reimbursement.

You don't have to get into the principles of constitutional government at this point. It's just now official policy that the United States cheats people in basic financial dealings. The markets meanwhile seem to be ignoring Donald Trump's freestyling on the way to the Super Bowl about how Elon Musk may have found a problem with treasuries. In his words, it wasn't immediately clear Bloomberg writes, “whether he was talking about US government debt or payments processed through the Treasury Department. ‘That could be an interesting problem because it could be that a lot of those things don't count,’ he said, ‘therefore, maybe we have less debt than we thought of.’” Is he planning to advance from stiffing the farmers to some larger default on the nation's credit obligations? For now, it's being treated as unreal. Like when he talked about opening the faucet in California and it took a few days to realize that he was dumping the reservoirs. Trump also posted yesterday that he's going to order the mint to stop making pennies. which would be an actual practical cost saving reform, but yet another one that seems to require an act of Congress. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news story, two columns wide, “Front Line to Resist Trump Coalesces in Federal Court / Attorneys General Lead Multipronged Push That Will Test Checks and Balances.” 

“More than 40 lawsuits filed in recent days by state attorneys general, unions and nonprofits,” the Times writes, “seek to erect a bulwark in the federal courts against President Trump's blitzkrieg of executive actions, which have upended much of the federal government and challenged the Constitution's system of checks and balances.” Next paragraph. “Unlike the opening of Mr.
Trump’s first term in 2017, little significant resistance to his second term has arisen in the streets, the halls of Congress or within his own Republican Party. For now at least, lawyers say, the judicial branch may be it.” Right. 

The story right next to it is, “Stunned Federal Workers Speak Out on Purge.” Next to that is, “Angry Callers Tie Up Phones at the Capitol.” And inside the paper, facing the jump page, “In New York, Rallying to Support Trans Youth. Bells, Drums and Chants rang out Saturday afternoon in Union Square in Manhattan, as thousands of New Yorkers gathered to protest an executive order from the Trump administration targeting transgender children and teens.” Nobody's out in the streets, except all the people who are out in the streets. Meanwhile, as far as that battle in the courts goes, you have to go pretty far past the jump to get to the paragraph that says, “as of Sunday afternoon, there's already at least one indication that court orders issued by federal judges were not immediately changing the administration's behavior. An emergency motion filed Friday by 22 state attorneys general before Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island District Court claimed an ever-changing kaleidoscope of federal financial assistance had been suspended, deleted, in transit, under review, and more, despite a court order from Judge McConnell on January 31st to end the funding freeze.” The Times once again has not put a lot of work into integrating the various stories it shoves into the print edition with one another. 

On the Jump page, as a standalone story, “Vance Denies Judges Power Over Precedent.” That story begins “Vice President J.D. Vance declared on Sunday that judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power, delivering a warning shot to the federal judiciary in the face of court rulings that have, for now, stymied aspects of President Trump's agenda.” A hand span away in the other story, “Sunday on X, Vice President J.D. Vance made a provocative post that seemed to suggest that when it comes to the legality of the White House's orders, judges do not have the final say. ‘Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power,’ he wrote.”

It's definitely newsworthy that the vice president put out that message, but it probably could have been edited into one story. 

Back on page one, “Trump Memecoin Is a Bonanza For a Few, but a Loser for Most.” It opens by describing how somebody put a million bucks into Donald Trump's trash coin, less than two minutes after it launched, and then got out two days later with a profit of as much as $109 million.

But the Times writes, “the fast profits for early traders whose names are unknown, but some of whom appear to be based in China, came at the expense of a far larger number of slower investors who have cumulatively suffered more than $2 billion in losses after the price of the token crashed. As of the middle of last week,” the Times writes “more than 810,000 wallets had lost money on the bet. According to an examination that the crypto forensics firm Chainalysis performed for the New York Times, the total losses are almost certainly much larger. The data does not include transactions that took place on a series of popular crypto marketplaces. It started offering the coin only after its price had already surged. Whether people made or lost money,” the Times writes, “it was stellar business for the Trumps. Nearly $100 million in trading fees have flowed to the family and its partners. Although most of that has not yet been cashed out, the chain analysis data shows.” 

That is the news. Congratulations to the world champion Philadelphia Eagles and to Kendrick Lamar for both manhandling their opponents at the Super Bowl yesterday. Congratulations to the backup dancer who whipped out the Palestine and Sudan flag banner and good luck against whatever legal charges the authorities try to trump up on that one. 

The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Socca-Ho.

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