“Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll on Friday refused a Justice Department order that he assist in the firing of agents involved in Jan. 6 riot cases, pushing back so forcefully that some FBI officials feared he would be dismissed,” NBC News reports.

“The Justice Department ultimately did not dismiss Driscoll. He sent out a memo to the workforce Friday night explaining that he had been ordered to remove eight senior FBI executives and turn over the names of every FBI employee involved in Capitol riot cases.”

“Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency full access to the federal payment system late on Friday, handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending,” the New York Times reports.

“The new authority follows a standoff this week with a top Treasury official who had resisted allowing Mr. Musk’s lieutenants into the department’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. The official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, was put on leave and then suddenly retired on Friday after the dispute.”

“The system could give the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress, a push that has faced legal roadblocks.”

CNN: How an arcane Treasury Department office became ground zero in the war over federal spending.

Rachael Bade: “For all his bluster about ‘government efficiency’ these days, Donald Trump has never been comfortable as a scissor-happy, cost-cutting deficit warrior…”

“This week, his aversion to austerity showed its face again — and it portends strife ahead for the GOP.”

“President Donald Trump has fired the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra, in the latest purge of a Biden administration holdover,” the AP reports.

Ed Kilgore: “One of the great anomalies of American politics is that Donald Trump, who has been elected to the presidency twice and came very close to victory a third time, has been pretty regularly unpopular since he first came down that New York escalator in 2015…”

“All this is relevant background for what we might expect now that Trump 2.0 is entering its first serious rough patch, with a significant public backlash against a poorly executed and almost immediately suspended federal funding freeze. Upcoming fights over congressional budget decisions (which could make the funding-freeze furor seem like a low-pressure dress rehearsal), the messy details of mass deportation, and Trump’s own tendency to overreach could all drive his popularity down to where it has been for most of his public career.”

“The question then remains: In his last term in office, does he really care?”

NPR: “It has long been said that politics ‘makes strange bedfellows,’ but some such alliances are surely stranger than others.”

“Take, for example, the emerging collaboration of working-class voters with the very, very wealthy in America who have increasingly allied themselves with President Trump.”