Good morning. Your weekend plans seem safe as lawmakers are already looking toward hearings next week on budget bills before they vote on them in a yet-called special session.

The story all of Washington, most with political interest and pretty much anyone on the internet is talking about: President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are out to tear down the other. After a close political relationship that bloomed last year and into the early days of Trump’s return to the White House, the breakup has gotten ugly. Each is going for the jugular and the financial and personal repercussions are immense. Read up on it here.

Leading national Republicans are making clear that they have disdain for Gov. Tim Walz — and he seems to be welcoming the fight.  In one of his now routine Oval Office avails Thursday, President Trump was weaving through an answer about his new rift with Elon Musk. In the course of the answer, he ripped on Musk’s willingness to work with Democrats in the past (Trump used to donate to Democrats before he was a politician) and then launched into critiques of Democrats, including “the governor from Minnesota. He’s a sick puppy — that guy, that poor guy. I feel sorry for him. They made a bad choice with him.” Trump was referring to the Walz run for vice president. Walz has been on the road a lot lately speaking to Democratic crowds. U.S. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, a former congressional colleague of Walz,  was asked Wednesday about the Walz national travel that some see as a precursor to a 2028 run. “This guy has not been representing Minnesotans,” Emmer said. “He’s now in some kind of a pity tour, where he’s traveling around the country.” Meanwhile, Walz is having fun with the new Trump-Musk rivalry. He sent out a fundraising appeal Thursday with the subject line “Welcome Elon to the fight, I guess?” It goes on to say: “You know things are bad when even Elon Musk is trying to distance himself from Donald Trump’s extreme agenda.” It also asks Democrats to “turn up the pressure on Trump and every Republican in Congress enabling this chaos.”

Gov. Tim Walz says his office did not get a heads-up about a federal raid of a south Minneapolis restaurant earlier this week. Agents from the FBI, ATF and Immigration and Customs Enforcement drove down Lake Street in south Minneapolis on Tuesday in armored vehicles and tactical gear. Walz said the presence created chaos as many residents thought an immigration raid was happening. At a States Newsroom conference in Minneapolis, Walz told The Minnesota Reformer’s editor J. Patrick Coolican that federal authorities should have worked more closely with the community. "I don't see how anybody can think it's a good situation to see a heavy militarized presence in a residential neighborhood of an issue that, quite honestly, you probably could ask for some help from folks," Walz said. Walz said it would have been beneficial to know what federal agents were doing ahead of time and that feds have still not contacted him about it. 

Nursing homes, disability waivers see cuts in the human service budget bill, while counties will see fewer costs passed on to them than expected. Peter Cox reports that the 303-page bill caps funding increases for nursing home reimbursement rates, as well as disability waivers, at 4 percent. Counties, which had been slated earlier in the session to pick up a lot of costs for services, do not see as many cost shifts in this bill. Both the nursing home and the disability care industries worry about the funding increase caps, and how they could affect the long term viability of their industries. Advocates for the disabled worry the cap will lead to fewer services for people who need them. While legislators who worked on the bill say they were not happy to have to make cuts, they say it was the result of compromises that they could support.

There was elation and dejection yesterday as the Office of Cannabis Management conducted the licensing lotteries that will determine who could get an early foot in the door in the marijuana market. The selections will lead to further vetting of cannabis operations, from cultivators to sellers. The lotteries were needed to winnow down the long list of applicants. Nicole Ki reports that it’ll still be some time before the retail market gets the go-ahead . “There’s a lot of cannabis that needs to be grown, a lot of cannabis products that need to be manufactured, and today’s lottery will set the course for a number of those new operators to start to build in that capacity,” Eric Taubel, interim OCM director, said on Thursday. 

Want to know how many state employees have been granted full telework waivers under the new return-to-office policy? That's hard to say. There is apparently no central tally being kept by the Walz administration. The policy — one of the biggest shifts in employee policy in years — was developed by the Department of Minnesota Management and Budget. But the executive branch’s enterprise-wide human resources hub isn’t pulling in data from agencies on implementation. An MMB spokesman said the requests for that information would have to be made to each of more than two dozen state agencies (not counting smaller executive branch offices and boards). The MMB-crafted policy requires all state workers to spend at least 50 percent of their time in office or job site settings if they live within 50 miles of those locations or don’t otherwise have a built-in exception. They can request exemptions through their agencies, whose HR departments and managers have the right to approve or deny those requests. It says “agencies must monitor teleworkers’ performance, and teleworkers must continue to meet customer business needs and performance expectations.”