“The gears of government slowed to a halt this week after President Trump axed major federal initiatives across Washington, causing even routine functions to hit the skids,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The Transportation Department temporarily shut down a computer system for road projects. Health agencies stopped virtually all external communications in a directive that risked silencing timely updates on infectious diseases. A hiring freeze left agencies wondering how parts of the government could adapt to new demands. Confusion loomed over how agencies should disburse funds allocated by the previous administration.”

Susan Glasser: “Eight years after the first Trump Inauguration, we know the drill. He loves to drown us in outrage. The overwhelming volume is the point—too many simultaneous scandals and the system is so overloaded that it breaks down. It can’t focus. It can’t fight back. The distractions are just too damn distracting. Who has time to point out that Trump also promised to end the war in Ukraine and bring down inflation on his first day back in the Oval Office? And yet drones are still firing on Kyiv and eggs are still crazy expensive.”

“In the days leading up to the Inauguration, Trump’s allies promised ‘shock and awe’—fast, decisive, transformational action to seize control of the government and rewrite its rules before stunned opponents, ‘the enemies within,’ as Trump calls them, have a chance to react.”

“But, speaking as one who was in Iraq in those early days after the 2003 U.S. invasion, I’d caution against planning an assault on Washington that is based too closely on Donald Rumsfeld’s playbook. The insurgents may have hardly begun to regroup. But regroup they will.”

New York Times: “Mr. Trump did not specify the names of the people who received the pardons, but the order that he held up for cameras to capture included the names of 10 anti-abortion activists who were prosecuted under the Biden administration for their roles in blockading an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C., in October 2020.”

“White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt revealed in amended campaign filings on Thursday that her unsuccessful 2022 congressional campaign owes more than $300,000 in unpaid debts, with Leavitt failing to disclose for years that her campaign took in hundreds of thousands of dollars in inappropriate donations and never paid the money back,” NOTUS reports.

Some of President Trump’s key aides and allies are furious with Elon Musk for publicly trashing his $500 billion artificial intelligence mega-deal, Politico reports.

The top lawyer at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is announcing his departure just days after President Trump’s return to the White House, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Kash Patel, President Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, has repeatedly undercut the work of the very agency he is set to lead by making false statements related to its criminal and counterintelligence inquiries into the president,” the New York Times reports.

“His demonstrably spurious claims, shared in podcasts and in his book, Government Gangsters, served to delegitimize the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, stoke baseless suspicions that the F.B.I. helped instigate the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and muddy the waters of the inquiry into Mr. Trump’s refusal to return classified documents after leaving office.”

“Mr. Patel’s pattern of peddling misinformation is at sharp odds with Mr. Trump’s proposal to put him in charge of the nation’s premier agency charged with figuring out what is true.”