Politics

The Lever reported Tuesday that USAID’s inspector general was in the process of investigating its own public-private partnership between Musk’s Starlink and the Ukrainian government at the time that the billionaire’s DOGE crippled the agency. Publicly available information about that probe is still online. An announcement from last May reads: “The USAID Office of Inspector General, Inspections and Evaluations Division, is initiating an inspection of USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the Government of Ukraine. Our objectives are to determine how (1) the Government of Ukraine used the USAID-provided Starlink terminals, and (2) USAID monitored the Government of Ukraine’s use of USAID-provided Starlink terminals.”

The leader of the largest union for federal employees has warned a congressional committee that Donald Trump’s campaign to dramatically downsize the government amounts to “the biggest assault” on its workforce in American history.

“In just the past week, we have seen the administration issue a legally dubious policy to drain departments and agencies of experienced and dedicated professionals, clearly with the objective of crippling the ability of federal agencies to do their jobs and setting them up to fail in the eyes of the American taxpayer. What is happening today is not a drive to streamline government but to destroy it,” Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement submitted today to the House oversight committee, which is holding a hearing focusing on Trump’s government reform campaign.

Kelley pointed to Trump’s order to reclassify tens of thousands of nonpartisan government employees in a way that will make them easier to fire, calling it “the biggest assault on the federal workforce in American history.”

“Make no mistake about it: if the assault that the Trump Administration initiated last month continues unchallenged, every member of Congress will soon hear from angry or confused constituents about why their VA claims have not been processed or why their Soc

The U.S. Postal Service said it will resume accepting all inbound mail and packages from China and Hong Kong on Wednesday, a day after temporarily suspending such service.

"The USPS and Customs and Border Protection are working closely together to implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery," it said in a statement.

Staffers with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (DOGE) reportedly entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC, today, inciting concerns of downsizing at the agency.

“They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former NOAA official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot of which is confidential information.”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio could not have been more complimentary about the deal he struck with the president of El Salvador on Monday.

Bukele had offered to take in people deported from the US, regardless of their nationality, and house them in El Salvador's mega-jail.

"We can send them and he will put them in his jails," Rubio said.

The mega-jail, also known as Cecot (short for Terrorism Confinement Centre), has become emblematic of Bukele's iron-fist approach to crime and punishment.

The maximum-security prison, one of the largest in Latin America, opened in January 2023 and can house 40,000 inmates, according to government figures.

Trump says US will ‘take over’ Gaza Strip and doesn’t rule out using American troops

Federal workers have filed an emergency lawsuit demanding that courts mandate that Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency shuts down the server it has set up at the US Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) headquarters.

Wired reports that an attorney representing two unidentified government workers is alleging that "the server’s continued operation not only violates federal law but is potentially exposing vast quantities of government staffers’ personal information to hostile foreign adversaries through unencrypted email."

The complaint alleges that the DOGE server was installed "without OPM—the government’s human resources department—conducting a mandatory privacy impact assessment required under federal law," writes Wired.

Now Veltri, the FBI’s special agent in charge, has been forced out in an escalating purge by senior officials in the Department of Justice who took over the agency after Trump was sworn in as president for a second term last month.

Veltri, like about a dozen high-ranking FBI officials in Washington, D.C., and in field offices around the country, was given an ultimatum: retire, resign or be fired by Monday. Veltri, 50, chose to resign on Friday, according to several sources familiar with his departure.

Veltri ran one of the FBI’s biggest field offices in the country, with more than 400 special agents in the Southern District of Florida. During his nearly two-year tenure, his office gained attention for not only investigating the documents case, but the attempted assassination of Trump during his re-election campaign in September and developer Sergio Pino’s alleged hiring of hit teams to kill his wife. Pino ended up killing himself when FBI agents went to his Cocoplum home in Coral Gables to arrest him in July.

Peter T. Akemann, the co-founder of the Treyarch video game studio, has pleaded guilty to recklessly flying a drone during the California wildfire. According to his own admission, the video game exec launched a DJI drone during the fires last month and it crashed into a firefighting plane. He’ll pay $65,169 to repair the plane and do 150 hours of community service related to wildfire relief.

Akemann is a 56-year-old gaming veteran with a long history in the industry. Treyarch, the studio he co-founded, is responsible for the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise and the Black Ops run of Call of Duty games.

On January 9, as wildfires raged across California, Akemann drove to the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California. He went to the top floor of a parking lot there and launched a DJI Mini 3 Pro towards the Pacific Palisades with the goal of surveilling the fire.

Citing an urgency to protect students’ civil rights in a second Trump administration, Illinois lawmakers filed a new bill Monday that would explicitly prevent school police from ticketing and fining students for misbehavior.

The legislation for the first time also would require districts to track police activity at schools and disclose it to the state — data collection made more pressing as federal authorities have signaled they will deemphasize their role in civil rights enforcement.

A 2022 ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation, “The Price Kids Pay,” found that even though Illinois law bans school officials from fining students directly, districts skirt the law by calling on police to issue citations for violating local ordinances. It also found that Black students were twice as likely to be ticketed at school than their white peers.

• On the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for HHS secretary
• On AMA’s silence in the face of Trump’s violation of their standards
• On Trump’s removal of sanctuary status for hospitals
• On AMA’s silence around the government’s lack of action on bird flu
• On physician burnout

During an internal meeting Friday morning, Trump administration officials directed OPM senior career staff to begin making plans to cut the agency’s workforce and programs by 70%. Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting confirmed the details of the meeting to Federal News Network.

Sources who provided information to Federal News Network on the condition of anonymity said the political leadership at the agency also directed OPM leaders to stop work on anything that is not statutorily required.

Trump administration officials told agency office leaders and associate directors at OPM to prepare briefs over the weekend detailing all of their work and programs that are statutorily required. By Monday, all OPM offices are expected to give political leaders organizational staffing charts with plans for an initial 30% reduction for both federal employees and contractors.

On Monday morning, employees for USAID got an email telling them to stay out of their headquarters. The email was signed by Gavin Kliger, one of the young engineers working with Musk who helped him gain control of the Office of Personnel Management last week.

In a late-night X Space over the weekend, Musk said that he and his DOGE cronies had gotten into USAID and found it wanting. “As we dug into USAID it became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it, but we have actually just a ball of worms,” Musk said. “If you have an apple with a worm in it, you can take the worm out. If you have a whole ball of worms, it’s hopeless. USAID is a ball of worms. There is no apple. And when there is no apple you just need to get rid of the whole thing. That’s why it’s got to go. It’s beyond repair.”

In a post on X, she said: "The tariffs are on pause for one month from now." Sheinbaum said her government had agreed to send 10,000 national guard troops to the border to prevent drug trafficking, specifically fentanyl. And the U.S. will work to stop weapons trafficking to Mexico, she added.