Washington threw a lot at the wall yesterday. A 55-year-old civil rights institution got indicted. The Navy lost its civilian boss in the middle of a blockade. The federal government set a new record for dysfunction.
And somewhere in there, the administration started negotiating to buy an airline. Any one of those would be a headline week in normal times.
DOJ Indicts the SPLC on Federal Fraud Charges
The Justice Department handed down an 11-count federal indictment Tuesday against the Southern Poverty Law Center, charging the Montgomery, Alabama-based nonprofit with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The core allegation: the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donor money between 2014 and 2023 to paid informants embedded inside white supremacist groups — including the KKK, Aryan Nations, and the neo-Nazi National Alliance — without disclosing the program to donors or the banks holding its accounts. According to the indictment, the SPLC created fictitious entities like “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse” to conceal the payments. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press conference the SPLC was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose.”
The SPLC’s interim CEO Bryan Fair pushed back hard, arguing the informant program was a legitimate counterintelligence operation that protected staff and provided actionable intelligence to law enforcement, including the FBI. Fair called the prosecution politically motivated and promised the organization would fight the charges. The SPLC has been a flashpoint for conservatives for years, accused of smearing right-of-center organizations by labeling them hate groups. FBI Director Kash Patel cut all ties with the organization last October, calling it a “partisan smear machine.” The indictment doesn’t allege the money went directly to fund the groups’ activities, but the government’s theory is that donors were defrauded because they didn’t know their contributions were being used to pay active participants in the very organizations the SPLC claimed to be fighting.
The prosecution is being run out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama in Montgomery, where the SPLC was founded in 1971 and is still headquartered. The indictment alleges one informant, paid more than $1 million between 2014 and 2023 while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance, attended the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally at the SPLC’s direction and helped coordinate transportation for other attendees. That detail, if proven, will be at the center of this case.
Pete Hegseth Fires the Secretary of the Navy
The Pentagon announced Wednesday that Secretary of the Navy John Phelan was “departing the administration, effective immediately” — the kind of terse language that has become this administration’s calling card for ousters. Six sources told CNN that Hegseth gave Phelan a simple choice: resign or be fired, and that the decision came after friction over shipbuilding reform and Phelan’s tendency to go directly to Trump rather than through the chain of command.
Axios reported that a Pentagon source put it bluntly: “Phelan didn’t understand he wasn’t the boss.” Phelan, a financier who helped raise millions for Trump’s campaign before being confirmed as Navy secretary last year, reportedly didn’t believe the order had come from Trump himself and went to the White House to confirm it in person. Trump met with him briefly and confirmed he was out.
Phelan’s firing came while the U.S. Navy is actively running a blockade of Iranian ports in the middle of a ceasefire, 20 days after Hegseth’s removal of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George. Undersecretary Hung Cao, a retired Navy captain and former Virginia Senate candidate, will serve as acting secretary. Hegseth has now removed more than a dozen senior military officials since taking the Pentagon. The pace of leadership turnover at the Defense Department, against the backdrop of active naval operations in the Strait of Hormuz, is a question Congress is likely to start asking more loudly.
The DHS Shutdown Just Set a Record — and May Get Worse
Wednesday marked day 67 of the partial government shutdown affecting the Department of Homeland Security — the longest government funding lapse in American history, clearing the previous record by a significant margin. The shutdown covers the Coast Guard, TSA, FEMA, USCIS, the Secret Service, ICE, CBP, and CISA. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Tuesday the department will run out of funds to pay employees as early as the first pay period in May.
The department has been using emergency funds from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to keep workers on the payroll, but Mullin confirmed those funds are nearly exhausted: “There is no more emergency fund. The president can’t do another executive order for us to use money because there’s no more money there.”
The Senate moved Tuesday to try to break the stalemate, voting 52-46 to begin a budget reconciliation process that would fund DHS with up to $70 billion for immigration enforcement — ICE, CBP, and related agencies — bypassing the Democrats who have blocked bipartisan funding bills over demands to reform or defund those agencies. The standoff has its roots in the deaths of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis, which hardened Democratic opposition to funding the agencies without significant reforms. Republicans argue the enforcement operations are working and cutting off funding would undermine border security. The House has so far refused to bring the Senate’s bipartisan version up for a vote.
Trump’s Team Is Negotiating to Buy a Piece of Spirit Airlines
The Trump administration neared a deal Wednesday to offer Spirit Airlines a $500 million rescue package that could give the federal government up to 90 percent equity in the carrier. The deal is not yet finalized, and a White House official said details could still change. Spirit has filed for bankruptcy twice in less than two years — November 2024 and August 2025 — and was on track to emerge from Chapter 11 by early summer. Then the Iran war started, jet fuel prices roughly doubled, and the math stopped working.
JPMorgan estimated that if fuel stays around $4.60 a gallon, Spirit faces an additional $360 million in costs on top of a cash balance of just $337 million. Trump told CNBC Tuesday he’d “love somebody to buy Spirit,” citing 14,000 jobs. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was more cautious, warning a bailout might be throwing “good money after bad.”
The federal government bailed out the airline industry after 9/11 and during COVID, but those were industry-wide programs. A single-carrier deal of this scale, for a company that was in financial crisis well before the war pushed fuel prices up, is a different precedent. JPMorgan analysts flagged the obvious concern: if Spirit gets a lifeline, JetBlue and Frontier will be next in line asking for one. The White House attributed Spirit’s predicament squarely to the Biden DOJ blocking the carrier’s merger with JetBlue on antitrust grounds in 2024. That argument has some merit, though it doesn’t fully explain two bankruptcy filings in less than a year.
The FAA Is Asking Congress for $10 Billion More to Finish the Job
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford took the stage Tuesday at the Department of Transportation’s Modern Skies Summit to show off what $12.5 billion has bought so far — and to ask Congress for another $10 billion to finish the overhaul.
Bedford described the current U.S. air traffic control network as running on “glorified calculators,” with radar systems dating to the 1970s and, in some towers, paper strips still being used to track aircraft. Half of the system’s copper wiring has now been replaced with fiber optic cable. About 270 radio sites have been converted. Seventeen control towers have switched to digital flight strips. Duffy said the work is on schedule to be complete by the end of 2028.
Congress has appropriated billions for aviation modernization over the past two decades with limited results, and Duffy acknowledged the track record before making the case that this time is different. He pointed to the 2025 Reagan National collision and the repeated Newark Liberty outages as evidence of what happens when the infrastructure gets ignored. The next phase of the overhaul targets software: predictive analytics that would reduce in-air conflicts and ground delays, with Bedford arguing that cross-country flight times could actually get shorter. The FAA also still needs thousands of additional air traffic controllers to staff a modernized system, and the GAO noted in January that hiring and certification haven’t kept pace with growth. Whether Congress is ready to write another big check is the open question.
Louisiana: 24 Days to the First Closed Senate Primary in 16 Years
With early voting starting May 2, Louisiana voters have less than two weeks to get their registrations sorted out for the May 16 party primaries — the first closed partisan primaries for congressional seats in the state since 2010. The new system, one of Gov. Jeff Landry’s signature legislative accomplishments, applies to U.S. Senate, U.S. House, the Louisiana Supreme Court, the Public Service Commission, and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Under the old jungle primary, all candidates and voters appeared on one ballot.
Now, registered Democrats vote in the Democratic primary, registered Republicans in the Republican primary. Unaffiliated voters can choose which party’s ballot to pull, but they’re locked in through any June 27 runoff. Registered third-party voters see only local races and constitutional amendments.
On the Republican side, incumbent Bill Cassidy — one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial — faces Trump- and Landry-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow and State Treasurer John Fleming. Cassidy has been politically isolated since his 2021 impeachment vote, and Trump’s team has made clear he’s the only Republican senator they’re actively targeting for defeat this cycle. As of April 1, Democrats hold a narrow registration edge: 1.07 million to 1.05 million Republicans, with another 838,000 unaffiliated voters. The online deadline to switch party registration is Saturday, April 25, worth flagging for anyone who needs to get that sorted before pulling a primary ballot.
Bottom Line
The DHS shutdown keeps getting treated as background noise when it’s actually the sharpest sign of Washington’s dysfunction right now. Sixty-seven days in, it’s already the longest in American history, the Coast Guard and TSA are weeks from missing paychecks, and the only exit involves a reconciliation fight with no clear end date. That’s the floor. On top of it: the Navy just lost its civilian leadership in the middle of a shooting war, the country’s most prominent civil rights organization is under federal indictment, and the Trump administration is negotiating a government takeover of an airline. It’s a lot to process before coffee.