“A 19-year-old acolyte of Elon Musk known online as ‘Big Balls’ is listed as having taken on a new role at the State Department, raising concerns among some diplomats about his potential access to sensitive information and the growing reach of his tech billionaire boss into America’s diplomatic apparatus,” the Washington Post reports.

“President Donald Trump is expected to pardon former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich,” Axios reports.

“Blagojevich served eight years in prison on charges stemming from his effort to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat after Obama won the 2008 presidential election, until Trump commuted his 14-year sentence in 2020.”

The Trump administration is making an urgent push to end a court order barring top officials’ access to the federal government’s massive payment system operated by the Treasury Department, saying the “remarkable intrusion” is unconstitutional and should be “dissolved immediately,” Politico reports.

From the Justice Department: “Basic democratic accountability requires that every executive agency’s work be supervised by politically accountable leadership, who ultimately answer to the president.”

“A federal judge says the Trump administration has been violating his order to resume funding federal grants that the White House attempted to block with a blanket spending freeze last month,” Politico reports.

“U.S. District Judge John McConnell ordered the administration to ‘immediately restore frozen funding’ while his order remains in effect, including to the National Institutes of Health and to fulfill the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Improvement and Jobs Act.”

Said McConnell: “The broad categorical and sweeping freeze of federal funds is, as the Court found, likely unconstitutional and has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm to a vast portion of this country.”

President Trump said Monday he had ordered the “immediate dismissal” of four military Boards of Visitors, claiming the advisory bodies had been “infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues,” Axios reports.

“A federal ethics enforcer swept up in a spree of firings President Donald Trump carried out Friday night is suing to get his job back,” Politico reports.

“The lawsuit from Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger is the latest case that will test the president’s power to fire officials across the executive branch despite federal laws that seek to protect those officials from politically motivated firings.”

“Five former Treasury secretaries warned Monday that recent actions at the Treasury Department by Trump administration officials and Elon Musk’s DOGE team raise ‘substantial cause for concern’ that the United States’ financial commitments are being ‘unlawfully’ undermined,” CNBC reports.

Wrote the former secretaries in the New York Times: “We have during our service in the Treasury Department faced moments of crisis, when the specter of an American default loomed. Any hint of the selective suspension of congressionally authorized payments will be a breach of trust and ultimately, a form of default. And our credibility, once lost, will prove difficult to regain.”

Kevin Hassett, a top economic advisor to President Trump dismissed such concerns as “poppycock.”