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OPM has effectively locked federal agencies out of a government HR software program called USA Staffing. The agency has been taken over by allies of billionaire Elon Musk, who's guiding the Department of Government Efficiency effort from within the White House.

The real world effects can be seen in VA clinics and hospitals across the country, like the Albany VA Medical Center in New York, where nurse Gwen Freiermuht began wondering last month why they couldn't seem to hire desperately needed bedside nurses and nursing assistants.

The new approval process is creating lengthy wait times for agencies to onboard new hires, causing fears that those employees will go unpaid, their work will go undone, and that their personal information might be compromised.

It's causing chaos at agencies with urgent hiring needs, particularly at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where failure to bring in staff could quickly lead to medical emergencies and mental health care crises for veterans.

Some agencies have resorted to using manual processes or paper records to process new hires in order to avoid extended delays, according to multiple people at the VA who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity.

For the taxpayer, the purpose of such an initiative is obscure. The crypto industry is a hyper-speculative casino. It is not essential to the American financial system, nor are cryptocurrencies essential to the American public. Workers cannot put bitcoin in their gas tanks; parents cannot feed XRP to their kids; businesses do not need cardano to build roads, light cities, produce vaccines, or provide loans to homeowners and entrepreneurs.

Yet for the White House, the purpose is obvious. Trump’s commerce secretary, his AI and crypto czar, and several of his most influential policy advisers are crypto investors, and the president launched his own meme coin. Establishing a reserve would boost prices, enriching these public officials and the crypto magnates donating tens of millions of dollars to Republican campaigns. It would not be a public investment, but a private giveaway—one of a mounting number in the Trump era.

Democrats of all persuasions, even some centrists who have long been firmly anti-shutdown, feel that voting for a “clean” spending bill would be tacitly blessing Musk’s controversial work. Denying Republicans the votes they’ll need to keep the agencies open, they believe, would be the lesser evil.

“Nobody wants a shutdown, but they don’t feel like aiding and abetting what’s happening, with Musk and Trump taking a wrecking ball to health care in particular,” said one senior House Democratic aide, who like others I spoke to was granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal party conversations. “Why would we be complicit in that?”

A senior Democratic lawmaker was blunter: “At some point you’ve got to have a goddamn backbone. I am not giving them a blank check until September.”