This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.

I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

We suddenly have a lot of bad news for Elon Musk on our hands.

A striking new federal court ruling just ordered the Trump administration to reinstate thousands of federal workers in their jobs, a big blow to Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Meanwhile, two new polls show approval of Musk absolutely

cratering, and critically, the polls show large majorities have turned against Musk's core

mission of gutting the government. So what if the public mobilization against Musk and Tesla is really working?

Today we're talking about this question with Paul Waldman, who has a good new piece on his

substack, the cross section, arguing that the public campaign against Tesla is actually good

for our country. Great to have you back on, Paul.

Thanks.

So a federal district judge in California just ruled that the Trump administration must reinstate

thousands of workers across six federal agencies finding that their terminations were done improperly.

This impacts Treasury, Veterans Affairs, agriculture, defense, energy, and interior

departments. The key thing about the ruling is that the judge found that the firings were in bad

faith. The cover story was that this was poor performance by all these workers. The judge slammed

this as a sham. This is exactly what the municipal unions bringing

the lawsuit argued. It's a sham. Paul, this really goes to the impudence, the audacity of these

firings. Your thoughts on it? Yeah, and it does harken back to what happened in Trump's first term,

where one of the things that was characteristic of a lot of the court cases

where Trump's moves got struck down was that over and over judges up to and including the

Supreme Court told the Trump administration that they were being sloppy and dishonest in their

court filings and the way they went about things. This is what happened in the case when they

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