pelespirit

This is all coming as the Trump administration resumes border wall construction in Texas. Over the weekend, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced they awarded a $70 million contract for seven miles of construction in Hidalgo County. More on that contract in my latest story here.

But perhaps the biggest difference is that egg farms in Canada are much smaller, so when one farm does suffer a flu outbreak, the effects are less far-reaching. The typical egg farm in Canada has about 25,000 laying hens, whereas many farms in the U.S. have well over a million. In effect, American farmers have put a lot more of their eggs in a relatively small number of baskets.

"If individual farms represent a larger proportion of production, then when an individual farm is affected, you're taking more of that supply, right?" von Massow says.

“If Elon Musk were forced to sell shares of our common stock that he has pledged to secure certain personal loan obligations, such sales could cause our stock price to decline,” Tesla wrote.

“We are not a party to these loans,” the company added.

It already seemed like Musk was going to have trouble paying back his loans for X. Last year, the social media company reported that its value had plummeted by more than half, to around $19 billion. When the banks formulated a plan to restructure the loan, X didn’t follow through, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

Tesla stock was doing slightly better on Wednesday, as a result of an uptick in the wider market caused by a report that inflation had eased slightly in February.

Dudek’s comments, delivered to a group of senior staff and Social Security advocates attending both in person and virtually, offer an extraordinary window into the thinking of a top agency official in the volatile early days of the second Trump administration. The Washington Post first reported Dudek’s acknowledgement that DOGE is calling the shots at Social Security and quoted several of his statements. But the full recording reveals that he went much further, citing not only the actions being taken at the agency by the people he repeatedly called “the DOGE kids,” but also extensive input he has received from the White House itself. When a participant in the meeting asked him why he wouldn’t more forcefully call out President Donald Trump’s continued false claims about widespread Social Security fraud as “BS,” Dudek answered, “So we published, for the record, what was actually the numbers there on our website. This is dealing with — have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?”

It should be obvious at this point that Musk is not making the government more efficient, nor is he saving taxpayers money. A recent report showed that federal spending hit a new record last month. Indeed, government spending in February was $36 billion higher than last February, when Biden was in office. That’s because most of the agencies that Musk is terrorizing represent minuscule fractions of federal spending (meaning that, for the money, they are actually quite efficient). A majority of federal spending is on entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, which Americans—including Trump’s base—overwhelmingly support keeping.

However, ProPublica has found that she does not appear to be running the budget-slashing group, according to interviews with six current and former government officials. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.

“I get the sense that Amy is in the role of scapegoat,” said one source who had been in meetings with Gleason.

The exact chain of command at DOGE is not clear to most federal employees who brush up against the team. But sources told ProPublica that longtime Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, a former executive of Musk’s Boring Company and SpaceX, appears to be administering day-to-day operations. And at times, Musk himself issues commands from inside the Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, said a person familiar with the matter.

The order will affect:

• the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service
• the United States Agency for Global Media
• the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution
• the Institute of Museum and Library Services
• the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness
• the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund
• the Minority Business Development Agency.

It instructs the head of each agency to submit a report to the Office of Management and Budget “explaining which components or functions of the governmental entity, if any, are statutorily required and to what extent.” In practice, as has happened with other federal agencies in recent weeks, it’s expected to leave these agencies a shell of themselves and fundamentally nonexistent; in the case of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, it destroys the only federal agency solely focused on addressing the homelessness crisis.

This Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (Reca) provided one-time payouts to people who may have developed cancer or other diseases while living in areas where activities such as atomic weapons testing took place. It paid out $2.6bn (£2bn) to more than 41,000 claimants before coming to an end in 2024.

Benefits were paid to such neighbours, frequently called "downwinders", in Arizona, Utah and Nevada, but not New Mexico, where the world's first test of a nuclear weapon took place in 1945. Research published in 2020 by the National Cancer Institute suggested that hundreds of cancers in the area would not have occurred without radiation exposure.

St Louis, meanwhile, was where uranium was refined and used to help create the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. After World War Two ended, the chemical was dumped near the creek and left uncovered, allowing waste to seep into the area.

Decades later, federal investigators acknowledged an increased cancer risk for some people who played in the creek as children, but added in their report: "The predicted increases in the number of cancer cases from exposures are small, and no method exists to link a particular cancer with this exposure."

As a result of BOP’s announcement, some employees have already left their positions. At a federal medical center in Lexington, Kentucky, for example, several doctors and physician assistants have put in their resignation letters. Others plan to resign in the coming days.

Even more employees are expected to leave once the incentive cuts kick in, according to Brandy Moore White, president of AFGE’s Council of Prisons Locals. Moore White said she has received hundreds of calls and messages from correctional officers who intend to leave once the pay incentives are cut.

“Officers are telling me, ‘This is the only thing that’s keeping me at the prison. If this goes away, or is reduced, I’m walking,’” Moore White said in an interview. “With all of the talk of reductions in force for the government, and we’re already short-staffed, and now this on top of it — it’s just a lot. People are scrambling, and it’s very frustrating.”

DOGE announced that the United States Postal Service will cut 10,000 jobs. The move was agreed to by outgoing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. In a letter he sent to Congress, DeJoy said USPS would work with DOGE to "identify and achieve further efficiencies."

"The scale of our daily work is unprecedented and extraordinary; our infrastructure has greatly deteriorated due to years of underinvestment, and our operating practices were for a postal environment of long ago that were never adjusted as the times and our business changed," DeJoy said. "We are encumbered by many unreasonable rules and regulations that handcuff our service expectations and, in many instances, that were a barrier to meaningful change."

America’s favorite low poly electric truck is facing a new set of problems that don’t have anything to do with people spray painting swastikas or crude comments about Elon Musk on them. Deliveries of the Tesla Cybertruck are on hold while the company addresses issues with reports that the trim is becoming detached and flying off, Electrek reports.

Tesla service representatives are telling customers awaiting deliveries that there is a “containment hold” on their trucks, according to several posts in the Cybertruck Owners Forum, as noted by Electrek. The customers are not being told it has anything to do with the vehicle’s trim, though. A containment hold is a proactive measure taken by automakers to address a quality issue or defect with a vehicle before it reaches customers.