Indivisibles,

We’re in the thick of it now. While scrolling BlueSky this weekend, I saw a couple Indivisible groups wondering how they were going to cover all this week’s developments in their weekly newsletters. I feel your pain. But here’s some good news: The energy is building on our side. It’s giving me hope. Indivisible co-hosted a call last night with 50,000 people: We Choose to Fight. If you weren’t able to join, I’d recommend watching the recording. From Rep. Maxwell Frost, Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, Nancy Hagans of National Nurses United, Rahna Epting of MoveOn, and Maurice Mitchell of Working Families Party, it was a really good crew.

Leah and my role on the call was to cover where we stand and the tactics local groups around the country can use to influence the course of events. I’ll do my best to summarize:

Rapid-fire overview of the last week:

• Purging civil service. Since Trump got in, his henchmen have been executing rolling purges of top civil service leadership across agencies.
• Unconstitutional funding freeze. Last Monday night, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memo cutting off all federal grants indefinitely. I cannot overstate how radical a move this is. That’s the money for educating and feeding kids, for healthcare for tens of millions of people, for domestic violence shelters and veterans’ programs and senior citizens. It was shocking.
• Blowback. There was immediate, massive public blowback. We drove 15,000 calls to Congress in under 24 hours. Initially, there wasn’t much of a response from elected officials -- but as the calls mounted, Democrats got braver and Republicans got more scared.
• Trump retreat. Within 48 hours, Trump folded. He rescinded the OMB order, and multiple federal judges issued injunctions against his unconstitutional power grab. 
• Empire strikes back. On Friday night, reports broke that White House staff reporting to Elon Musk were demanding access to the Treasury payments system. Civil servants who refused were forced to resign. On Saturday, it was confirmed that Treasury Secretary Bessent (who received 16 Democrat votes last week) had given full access to the Treasury payment system. This is either the largest data breach in human history or a coup by an unelected foreign billionaire or both. 
• The vote on Vought. Simultaneously with all of this, the human embodiment of Project 2025 and a lead strategist behind the (currently failed) OMB funding freeze plot, Russell Vought, is moving forward toward a confirmation by the Senate to be the head of OMB this week.

That’s a lot, and it’s not everything, and there’s a lot we still don’t know. As of this writing, we don’t know if Musk is cutting off payments to programs without congressional approval or oversight. He could be stealing massive amounts of sensitive confidential information for himself. 

What we do know is that there should be zero support for any future nominees of this kleptocratic president and his power-grabbing billionaire henchmen. On Friday, more Democrats voted for another Trump nominee, and Senate Minority Leader Schumer cut a deal with the GOP to fast track more votes starting today. 

That was after the OMB freeze, but before the outrage following the Musk raid of the Treasury. Some Senate Democrats are fighting back, but we need the caucus unified. Now is the time to push for that unified opposition -- and that means organizing this week to push your own senators in person. 

We cannot fix everything by fighting back, but we won’t fix anything unless we try. I will end this the same way I ended our comments on the call last night. Remember: Trump has no mandate for this. What he is doing is not just cruel, corrupt, chaotic, and unconstitutional -- it’s also deeply unpopular. And as long as we live in a constitutional republic, doing deeply unpopular things for extended periods of time is hard to sustain in the presence of organized opposition. Our job right now is to organize that opposition -- and we need you to take action to do it.

And with that, here come your weekly to-dos. 

- Ezra Levin
Co-Executive Director, Indivisible

Your weekly to-dos

We’re in an all-out crisis right now, with Trump and Co-President Musk brazenly freezing funds, attempting to shutter agencies, and raiding the treasury in order to steal services away from the American people and redirect wealth and power into the hands of their billionaire friends. Here’s how you can fight back: 

1. Show up at your senators’ offices. This week, we’re asking Invisibles all over the country to plan visits to your closest US Senate offices to push your senators to take a stand against Trump’s lawless overreach. The ask will be slightly different if your senator is a Democrat or Republican. We’ve put together a full toolkit here explaining the strategy, messaging, and logistics. Dozens of visits have already been scheduled. See if there’s a visit happening near you. And if there's nothing close by, grab some friends, organize a visit, and register it here.
2. Call your Republican senators and demand they vote NO on Russell Vought’s confirmation.* Trump’s funding freeze wasn’t his idea. It wasn’t even Elon Musk’s idea. It was the brainchild of Russell Vought, who wrote an entire chapter of Project 2025 on how the OMB can bypass Congress (and ignore the Constitution) in order to implement MAGA’s extreme agenda. If confirmed to lead the OMB, Vought would control federal spending and abuse his power to choke off government programs and agencies that don’t align with MAGA ideology. The Senate will vote on his confirmation this week, so make sure they hear from you right away (calls are better than emails, but if you find your senators’ voicemail is full, you can also send them an email using this tool). 
3. Rally at the Department of the Treasury on Tuesday, February 4, at 5pm. This one is for folks who are in DC or who can get to DC -- on Tuesday afternoon, a broad coalition of groups will be peacefully protesting the handing over of massive amounts of sensitive data and the payment systems for our entire federal government to an unaccountable, unelected far-right billionaire. Musk has been given seemingly unchecked power to remove career civil servants, sabotage agencies like USAID (risking millions of lives), and treat the US government like one of his corporate acquisitions. Pissed off? Show up. 

P.S. -- With social media companies bending the knee to Trump, Project 2025 purging the government of dissenters, and corporate media companies caving in the face of speech-chilling lawsuits, it’s never been more important to invest in organizations you believe in that are willing to speak out and defy autocracy. Please consider chipping in with a monthly or one-time donation to help us keep up the fight.

* Throughout the day, the Senate phone system has been crashing. Hopefully the issue is resolved by the time you read this, but if our call tools fail to connect, go to your senators’ websites, visit their contact sections, and you’ll find numbers for their in-state offices. You’ll be able to reach them via those numbers.  

Nix the Noms:
Stopping Trump’s most unfit and dangerous nominees

As long as Trump and Musk continue with their unconstitutional pillaging of our government, we are calling for no votes on all of Trump’s nominees, and for Dems to use every dang trick in the book to delay, obstruct, and grind Senate activity to a halt. 

But some nominees do not deserve to be confirmed under any circumstances: At Indivisible, we’re focusing on the previously mentioned Russell Vought, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel. 

Here’s a quick update on where their nominations stand: 

RFK Jr. (Health and Human Services) had two very shaky hearings last week, revealing he didn’t really understand the job he’s applying for, acknowledging his peddling of bat💩 conspiracy theories, and laying out how he and Trump could ban abortion nationwide. A number of Republican senators appeared rattled by his answers. Here’s what’s next: 

• Tues, 2/4: The Senate Finance Committee will vote on whether to advance the nomination. Senate Majority Leader Thune has indicated Kennedy may not get a full Senate vote if he isn’t recommended by the committee. 

Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence) is probably in the most trouble of any of Trump’s nominees following her performance before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week, which apparently even freaked out officials in the White House. Here’s what’s next:

• Tues 2/4: The Senate Intelligence Committee will vote on whether to advance her nomination. If she isn’t recommended by the committee, it might not be the end of her nomination, but it’d be hard to see a path forward. 

Kash Patel (FBI) pursued a strategy of evasion and convenient lapses of memory during his hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, putting the proud author of a political enemies list on track for confirmation. It’s very scary stuff.

• Currently, the committee doesn’t have a vote on Patel scheduled.

Russell Vought (OMB): After Trump’s government-wide funding freeze, Democrats united against the Vought nomination, boycotting the Senate Budget Committee vote to advance him. Good stuff -- that’s the fight we want to see. But Republicans nevertheless advanced his nomination, and he’s on track for a full vote this week. What’s next: 

• Thurs 2/6 or Fri 2/7: Following debate, there will likely be a full Senate vote on Vought’s confirmation. We’re urging Dems to use every procedural delay possible to drag out this fight. 

That’s the update -- now, please urge your senators (especially your Republican senators) to vote NO on all these nominees. We’ve got call and email tools here. 

We’re keeping our weekly discussions going. Will you join us?

Early in December, we knew the news would be coming at us fast and we’d need a time and space to pause, discuss, and strategize together as a movement. So we started a weekly Zoom called “Bracing for Impact” to… well, brace ourselves for what was coming. 

Well, the news isn’t slowing down. And attendance at these discussions has only been climbing. We’ve got thousands of folks in the chat every week looking for community, looking to process what’s happening, and searching for ways we can fight back. 

So we’re keeping the calls going for the foreseeable future. But we’re no longer bracing for impact -- the Trump presidency has hit us like a ton of bricks, and now it’s time for us to show up to discuss the latest news and lay out our plan for responding. 

Join us Thursdays at 3pm ET/noon PT for our newly-rebranded weekly “What’s the Plan” discussion, and remember to submit questions ahead of time or share them in the chat.

Have a better idea for a name than “What’s the Plan?” We’d love to hear your ideas.

IndivisiWin of the Week 

This weekend, The Visibility Brigade in Paramus NJ was sounding the alarm about the Musk/Trump power grab. There’s no shortage of actions we can take in this moment to bring attention to the administration’s crimes and push back.

Follow us on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads to keep up on the latest information, and text “INDIVISIBLE” to 59798 to opt-in to our text messaging program, where we send rapid response actions a few times a month.