We had some things come up Thursday that prevented me from digging into this closer to “in real time”. I won’t say that I’m not still distracted, but I’m going to do my best to focus on this long enough to complete it.

So he’s changing the employment rules, specifically for new federal employees that must submit to a probationary period of employment. Now, instead of the probationary employee being converted to a full time employee once they have worked for the required 90 days… they are required to be approved for the full time employment, and if they are not, or if there is a delay, they are terminated after that 90 day probationary period. This appears to also include employees of the United States Postal Service.

Most of the references are to persons who are appointed to the competitive service, I’m kinda hazy on what exactly that is. So I guess my question would be, is the appointment to the position of President of the United States of America considered a “competitive service” position? I know the answer is probably no… but if the answer is yes, it would make sense that he would wait until after his 100th day in office to publish this one. Can you imagine… 90 days as a “probationary” president, then “You’ve been found to be under performing, and your continued employment is not in the public interest. YOU’RE FIRED!”

Unfortunately, even if this EO had been signed before DT’s 90 days had concluded, the presidency is not considered a competitive service position… Still, its an amusing scenario to entertain.

Notably, this is the second EO specifically in regard to federal employees. The first being signed on January 20, 2025 "Reforming the federal hiring process and restoring merit to government service"

This EO highlights our dependency on “foreign adversaries” for critical minerals and identifies sea bed minerals as an alternative option to this dependency. Its worth noting that this dependency is framed as an “unprecedented economic and national security challenge”.

On April 17 a proclamation was published criticizing the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument which prevents commercial fishing (among other things) in a 400,000 square mile area in the Pacific ocean in an effort to protect and preserve the lands and marine environment. It was cited that the PRIMNM was essentially redundant due to numerous other acts protecting marine life, water cleanliness, etc. Unfortunately, this proclamation seems to have also opened much of this up to the potential for sea bed mining of the “critical minerals” that we are allegedly dependent on “foreign adversaries” for.

This is the first presidential memoranda that I’ve encountered in the short time that I’ve been reviewing the published presidential actions.

I’ve heard it said that every accusation made by this administration has an underlying admission of their own guilt, and with the articles claiming DT is at worst a Russian asset or at best a Putin fanboy, this sentiment seems just as true with this memorandum.

Further ActBlue was singled out as being associated with at least 22 significant fraud campaigns, nearly have of which are alleged to have a “foreign nexus”. One of the things that was highlighted was “237 donations from foreign IP addresses using prepaid cards” and labeled this activity as a pressing concern.

His sudden concern over prohibited contributions by foreign nationals is in stark contrast with his past actions in regards to his campaign tactics, illustrated in this article from The Hill

Questions of foreign financial contributions aside, I’ve personally made some small donations to Democratic candidates through ActBlue, so out of curiosity I did a quick search and while the ActBlue website and the Wikipedia page were the first 2 results, the third was an article published on April 24, 2025 on a platform called Daily Kos by someone else who has more exposure to ActBlue than I do. I urge you to check it out if this has piqued your curiosity or concern like it did for me.

Why has every EO started to sound like a phishing email? One of the first red flags they talk about when identifying a phishing email is that the sender is conveying a sense of urgency… everything lately has been framed as a crisis, unprecedented, a national emergency, etc. If that isn’t wording aimed at creating an urgent feeling, I’m not sure what is.

And sure, sometimes urgency is warranted to draw attention to a situation before it becomes an emergency, but framing DEI as somehow being discrimination, ransacking federal agencies in the name of “efficiency” and the elimination of “fraud, waste, and abuse”, the issuing of tariffs without regard to the impact the domestic economy, threats of annexing neighboring countries, and so much more, feels like this administration is cutting its nose off to spite its face and creating the “emergencies” its claiming to be trying to mitigate.