Members of the Democratic National Committee will elect new leadership today, as the party out of power in Washington looks to recalibrate its direction after President Trump’s return to office.

Current chairman Jaime Harrison is not running for a second term, so the 448 voting members of the DNC will select his replacement during the party’s winter meeting held in the Washington, D.C. suburbs Saturday afternoon.

The next DNC chair will inherit a national party apparatus that has touted record fundraising, as well as record investments in data and organizing resources that has led to more coordinated infrastructure with state and local Democrats.

But the next chair will also take over at a time when Democrats have no clear leader, no clear answer for how the party lost in November and no clear strategy for how to handle the avalanche of executive actions unleashed by Trump in his first two weeks back in the White House.

Who is running for chair?

Eight people have qualified to be on the ballot for DNC chair, including longshot presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ former campaign manager Faiz Shakir and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

But the general consensus among voting members is that the next leader will either be Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin or Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Ben Wikler.

Both men have backgrounds in the type of party infrastructure building that is the less flashy side of the job, and both tout fundraising prowess that will be necessary to implement a year round, nationwide organizing strategy that they propose.

Without control of the White House or Congress, the new DNC chair will be one of many faces of the Democratic Party that is still figuring out how to move on from rejection at the ballot box.

What about other offices?

DNC members will also elect a treasurer, secretary and national finance chair, a vice chair for civic engagement and voter participation and three vice chair candidates.

The party’s rules also state that “DNC Officers are as equally divided as practicable according to gender,” which means candidates for the three vice chair positions may be restricted based on who wins the other positions.

At the in person forum in Detroit in January, the more substantive discussions included vice-chair candidates and there was more criticism of Biden for running for reelection before dropping out of the race with less than three months until the election.

Joe Paolino, a former mayor of Providence, R.I. mayor, said Biden did a “great job” in his first term, but had he not run again, “then there could have been a primary and we could have gone through that vetting process.”

Gun control activist David Hogg said the party had a problem with anyone who called for Biden to step aside before he ultimately made the decision.

“We are not a cult, we should not be a cult,” he said. “Increasingly we are becoming a party of subtraction, not addition.”

Who gets to vote for DNC leadership?

There are currently 448 voting members of the DNC, and while there is no official public list of names, more than half of the voting population comes from the chair, vice chair and national committee members from each of the states and U.S. territories, as well as Democrats Abroad.

The heads of affiliated groups like the Young Democrats of America are also members. The remainder are at-large members that include longtime party figures, union leaders and others with ties to former President Joe Biden.

In his inauguration address, President Trump vowed to rebalance the scales of justice.

That’s happening more swiftly than anyone predicted: a fast and furious purge underway even before Trump’s nominees to serve as attorney general and FBI director have been confirmed.

The president famously faced off against the Justice Department in a pair of criminal cases over the past couple of years — until those prosecutions were dropped after he won the election. Now Trump appears to be trying to remake the institution.

“This is dreadful mistreatment by the Trump administration of career public servants,” said David Uhlmann, a former agency veteran.

More than a dozen agency veterans and outside observers spoke to NPR about the changes at the DOJ over the last 10 days, including reassignments of senior staff and moves to fire officials who investigated Trump. Largely, they said such steps go far beyond the regular moves by a president to reshape an agency to his priorities.

Instead, they say, such actions hit at the Justice Department’s impartiality and independence in enforcing the law.

Uhlmann worked at the Justice Department for more than 17 years, under both Republican and Democratic presidents. (He later took on a senior enforcement role in former President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency.) He’s watching, with dismay, as acting officials in charge at the DOJ have reassigned veteran supervisors who worked on environmental protection and put a freeze on new cases and settlements.

“President Trump is making clear that he does not intend to hold polluters accountable for exposing communities across America to harmful pollution,” Uhlmann said.

The changes don’t end there.

New Justice Department leaders transferred lawyers with decades of experience handling civil rights, extraditions, counterterrorism and cybercrime into a new office that covers immigration enforcement. That’s a key priority of the new president.

Many prosecutors think that’s designed to get them to quit.

One of them already has. Corey Amundson ran the public integrity unit at the Justice Department. He got that nonpartisan job during the first Trump administration, after years prosecuting corrupt public officials.

But his government service ended after he refused to be moved to that immigration enforcement office this week.

Then came word that more than a dozen DOJ lawyers who worked on the criminal prosecutions of Trump had been fired. The acting attorney general, James McHenry III, cited their work on the Jan. 6 and classified documents cases against Trump and said they could not be trusted to carry out the president’s “agenda.”

McHenry did not provide any cause for their firing and added they could appeal their dismissals to a federal board, which would take time and money.

These changes don’t come as a surprise after the frequent criticism Trump levied at the DOJ after leaving office in 2020. On the campaign trail, he called it “the Department of Injustice” and promised to go after his political enemies inside the agency and beyond.

Since returning to the White House, Trump also signed an executive order that criticizes federal law enforcement for a “systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents” and urges departments to take corrective actions.

Politicized firing, hiring?

Sally Yates spent a quarter-century at the Justice Department, ending with a stint as acting attorney general at the end of the Obama years. Trump fired her in early 2017 after she refused to carry out his first travel ban for people from majority Muslim countries.

Yates, now in private practice, said she’s even more concerned about the institution now.

“Firing civil servants who sought to hold him accountable is really a twofer for President Trump,” Yates said. “He gets to retaliate and exact vengeance against prosecutors for just doing their jobs while also intimidating everyone across government and beyond.”

Yates said that’s no way to run a department entrusted with the impartial administration of justice. The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment about changes at the agency for this story.

Politicized hiring scandals have hit the Justice Department before. Congress and an inspector general investigated the firings of U.S. Attorneys — political appointees — for potentially improper reasons in the George W. Bush administration.

Back then, watchdogs ultimately found a young political aide installed inside the DOJ sought to cultivate a “farm system” for Republicans, by hiring scores of prosecutors and immigration judges who espoused conservative priorities and practiced Christian lifestyle choices.

But this moment feels different and more serious to many Justice Department veterans. None could remember a time when a team of prosecutors had been fired for their work on a particular case: essentially, fired for doing their job.

FBI agents ordered to resign

Separately, at least five senior FBI officials were notified on Thursday that they should retire or resign by Monday or be fired, according to two FBI sources familiar with the situation. The notifications did not provide a reason for the move. The FBI declined to comment.

FBI employees have been notified that officials are creating a list of Bureau personnel who worked on Jan. 6 Capitol riot cases, to include their job title, role in the investigation, and their supervisor. The results are due next week, after which DOJ “will conduct a review to determine if additional personnel actions are necessary.”

Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, said “Trump’s outrageous attack on the DOJ and FBI is a clear and present danger to public safety, and a wrecking ball swinging at the rule of law.”

And the FBI Agents Association warned of dire consequences.

“Dismissing potentially hundreds of Agents would severely weaken the Bureau’s ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats and will ultimately risk setting up the Bureau and its new leadership for failure,” the association said in a statement.

Meantime, Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, launched an internal review over that office’s handling of hundreds of cases against Jan. 6 rioters. He also announced the dismissal of more than two dozen prosecutors who worked on those cases but who are in their probationary period, giving them fewer job protections.

Martin previously played a role in the stop the steal election fraud movement and sat on the board of a group that supported Jan. 6 defendants.

Mary McCord worked at the Justice Department nearly 25 years. She worries this is the start of something bigger.

“What does that start, are we now going to be in a cycle of every change in administration, there’s retribution against those who took positions, whether it’s prosecutorial positions or policy positions that you disagreed with?” asked McCord, who is now at Georgetown Law Center.

Alberto Gonzales led the Justice Department under President George W. Bush.

Every president is elected on a set of law enforcement priorities, Gonzales said. And those deserve a lot of discretion and support.

“The difference here may be in the speed and the language of the changes that may be a bit jarring,” said Gonzales, who’s now the dean of the Belmont University College of Law.

Some of that rhetoric “will likely be toned down or disappear” in the event of a national security or high-profile criminal incident, he said.

But Gonzales said it may be hard for new political appointees to get the very large DOJ moving in the direction they want.

NPR Justice Correspondent Ryan Lucas contributed to this report.

For as much that has happened in these first two weeks of the Trump presidency — and it’s been a lot — one particular thing has been conspicuously absent: a focus on lowering prices.

Trump’s promises to bring down the cost of living were a big reason he was elected, but since taking office he has now twice said that’s not his top priority.

“They all said inflation was the No. 1 issue,” Trump said about the presidential campaign as he spoke to supporters at the Capitol following his inauguration address. “I said, ‘I disagree. I think people coming into our country from prisons and from mental institutions is a bigger issue for the people that I know.’ And I made it my No. 1. I talked about inflation, too, but you know how many times can you say that an apple has doubled in cost?”

(It’s been fact checked many times that migrants were not coming into the country from prisons and mental institutions, but Trump continues to say it.)

Again on Monday, Trump reiterated that immigration is the bigger issue.

“I always felt the border was first,” he said in a speech to congressional Republicans gathered at Trump National Doral Miami Golf Resort.

“I talked about that much more so than I did inflation,” Trump said. “I mean, inflation was terrible. I think it was the worst in the history of our country, but you can only talk about it so long. The price of apples doubled. The price of bacon has quadrupled. Everything is a disaster. And you say it, and then what do you do?”

Recent inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022. That was the highest since 1981, but it wasn’t the highest ever. The most recent inflation data shows it is down to 2.9%.

A top problem Trump said he would fix

Undoubtedly, though, higher than pre-pandemic prices and high interest rates intended to curb inflation put Americans in a bad mood — and is a big reason, if not the reason, Trump won in 2024.

He said so himself.

“I won on the border, and I won on groceries,” Trump said on NBC’s Meet the Press in his first interview after the election. “When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time, and I won an election based on that. We’re going to bring those prices way down.”

He made similar pledges about the economy during the campaign and ran an ad saying he would “fix it” (as well as immigration). He told a voter at a town hall in Pennsylvania in October: “We’re going to get your prices down.”

As president, Trump is seeking to extend his broad tax cuts, expand oil exploration and deregulate industry — things he believes will spur more growth and help bring down prices in what experts already consider a strong economy.

“My administration is acting with unprecedented speed to fix the disasters we’ve inherited from a totally inept group of people and to solve every single crisis facing our country,” Trump told the World Economic Forum gathered in Davos, Switzerland last week. “This begins with confronting the economic chaos caused by the failed policies of the last administration.”

Trump has signed executive orders declaring an energy “crisis” and ordering the executive branch to find ways to cut prices. That included making efforts to deregulate efficiency standards on home appliances — everything from stoves to shower heads to light bulbs.

He also directed agencies to stop funding anything related to curbing climate change; he froze foreign aid; and he says he wants to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse through an effort headed up by Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, who is the richest person in the world.

Experts are dubious that those initiatives, however, will have an effect on grocery prices.

​​What’s more, Trump has said he will impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico and 10% more tariffs on China, starting this Saturday. Those efforts, experts also warn, could drive the prices of many things people buy — and gas prices — higher.

A different focus 

Trump’s top focus as president, though, has so far been on other issues — mass deportations, remaking the federal government and implementing a right-wing ideology that blames societal ills and government failures on diversity, equity and inclusion policies, or DEI.

That includes even the fatal plane crash near Reagan National Washington airport this week — even though he admitted the facts are not yet known about what actually happened.

“We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas,” Trump said at a White House press conference on Thursday, “and I think we’ll probably state those opinions now.”

And he did — in what was a politicized, clear departure from the staid responses of past presidents after similar disasters. When disaster struck during their terms in office, they made clear their intention was to sympathize with the families, pledge the support that’s needed from the federal government and to try and keep the country calm.

Reporters later asked Trump if he had plans to visit the crash site — something typical for elected leaders. He responded:

“I have a plan to visit, not the site. Because you tell me, what’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”

For many voters, prices were the issue

Many of Trump’s early actions are probably not what the many people who crossed party affiliation to vote for him had in mind when they chose to put him back in office.

During the campaign, NPR heard from undecided voters — some who did not want to provide their full names, citing security concerns — about how grocery prices, the lack of affordable housing and high interest rates had them on the fence and potentially tipping toward Trump.

For example, Brady, a voter from Wisconsin, who voted for Obama twice, told NPR in September that he’d prefer not to “go through another four years of a Trump presidency,” but “things have gotten more expensive. I have probably a middle-class income for my family, and it doesn’t feel like it’s getting any easier — even as my wife and I have advanced in our careers.”

Another then-undecided voter, John from Miami, said he considered himself a “liberal union Democrat” also voted for Obama twice and volunteered on Bill Clinton’s campaigns. But he said he was considering Trump, because he wants a candidate to “stop the inflation.”

“I think Joe Biden did the best he could,” he said. “If he could have just grabbed the horns on inflation — things are through the roof. It’s gone freakin’ nuts.”

That was the kind of thing heard repeatedly during the presidential campaign.

Outside of Trump’s core base of supporters, prices were it for many voters. What they’ve witnessed instead over the first two weeks of the administration has been something quite different: a focus on culture war issues, attempts to dismantle the federal workforce, firing Justice Department staff who worked on criminal investigations of Trump — and asking senior FBI officials to resign or be fired.

The country is about to find out if his approach affects his political standing, or if voters think he is going too far.