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Trump shows yet again he’s not really interested in reining in government spending

Trump shows yet again he’s not really interested in reining in government spending

Rachael Bade writes: For all his bluster about “government efficiency” these days, President Donald Trump has never been comfortable as a scissor-happy, cost-cutting deficit warrior. He barreled into a Republican Party a decade ago that was dominated at the time by the debt-minded politics of Paul Ryan and the tea party movement and single-handedly shut down talk of slashing Social Security and Medicare. This week, his aversion to austerity showed its face again — and it portends strife ahead for…

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Musk applies his Twitter destruction playbook on the U.S. government and it’s even more dangerous

Musk applies his Twitter destruction playbook on the U.S. government and it’s even more dangerous

Mike Masnick writes: Remember how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by ripping apart its infrastructure without understanding it? Now imagine that same playbook applied to the federal government. It’s happening, and the stakes are exponentially higher. When reviewing Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book “Character Limit” last fall, I highlighted two devastating patterns in Musk’s management: his authoritarian impulse to (sometimes literally) demolish systems without understanding them, and his tendency to replace existing, nuanced solutions with far worse alternatives (even when…

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24 hours after Washington air crash, Trump admin urges air traffic controllers across the U.S. to resign

24 hours after Washington air crash, Trump admin urges air traffic controllers across the U.S. to resign

The New York Times reports: The most challenging day in decades for air traffic controllers, safety inspectors and other Federal Aviation Administration employees started with profound questions about a deadly crash the night before — and ended with an email urging them to resign from their jobs. The email, sent from President Trump’s Office of Personnel and Management to employees across the sprawling federal government, arrived just before 8:30 p.m. Thursday — almost exactly 24 hours after an air crash…

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Resistance: Acting FBI director refused DOJ order to fire Jan. 6 agents

Resistance: Acting FBI director refused DOJ order to fire Jan. 6 agents

NBC News reports: Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll on Friday refused a Justice Department order that he assist in the firing of agents involved in Jan. 6 riot cases, pushing back so forcefully that some FBI officials feared he would be dismissed, multiple current and former FBI officials told NBC News. The Justice Department ultimately did not dismiss Driscoll. He sent out a memo to the workforce Friday night explaining that he had been ordered to remove eight senior FBI…

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Large language models may face a hard limit to their abilities

Large language models may face a hard limit to their abilities

Anil Ananthaswamy writes: On December 17, 1962, Life International published a logic puzzle consisting of 15 sentences describing five houses on a street. Each sentence was a clue, such as “The Englishman lives in the red house” or “Milk is drunk in the middle house.” Each house was a different color, with inhabitants of different nationalities, who owned different pets, and so on. The story’s headline asked: “Who Owns the Zebra?” Problems like this one have proved to be a…

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Elon Musk is grasping the levers of power by attempting to control the government’s payment systems

Elon Musk is grasping the levers of power by attempting to control the government’s payment systems

Greg Sargent writes: President Donald Trump has granted Elon Musk unprecedented power to carry out his war on the “deep state.” The justification for this is supposed to be that the government is corrupted to its core precisely because it is stocked with unelected bureaucrats who are unaccountable to the people. Musk, goes this story, will employ his fearsome tech wizardry to root them out, restoring not just efficiency to government but also the democratic accountability that “deep state” denizens…

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Musk operatives have infiltrated yet another government agency

Musk operatives have infiltrated yet another government agency

Wired reports: Elon Musk’s minions—from trusted sidekicks to random college students and former Musk company interns—have taken over the General Services Administration, a critical government agency that manages federal offices and technology. Already, the team is attempting to use White House security credentials to gain unusual access to GSA tech, deploying a suite of new AI software, and recreating the office in X’s image, according to leaked documents obtained by WIRED. Some of the same people who helped Musk take…

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Musk operatives lock government workers out of computer systems at Office of Personnel Management

Musk operatives lock government workers out of computer systems at Office of Personnel Management

Reuters reports: Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials. Since taking office 11 days ago, President Donald Trump has embarked on a massive government makeover, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists. Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO and…

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Economists agree: Trump’s ‘tariffs will be very bad for America and for the world’

Economists agree: Trump’s ‘tariffs will be very bad for America and for the world’

The Guardian reports: As Donald Trump threatens to slap steep tariffs on many countries, he is boasting that his taxes on imports will be a boon to the US economy, but most economists strongly disagree – many say Trump’s tariffs will increase inflation, slow economic growth, hurt US workers and result in American consumers footing the bill for his tariffs. “Virtually all economists think that the impact of the tariffs will be very bad for America and for the world,”…

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Local officials just prevented Trump from flooding part of California

Local officials just prevented Trump from flooding part of California

Politico reports: President Donald Trump declared victory on Friday in his long-running water war with California, boasting he sent billions of gallons south — but local officials say they narrowly prevented him from possibly flooding farms. ”Today, 1.6 billion gallons and, in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion gallons. Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago — There would have been no fire!” he said in a…

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What Amazonian lives tell us about heart health and longevity

What Amazonian lives tell us about heart health and longevity

Ben Daitz writes: The Horus Group, named after the Egyptian god of healing, is an international team of cardiologists, archaeologists and radiologists who have studied more than 200 mummies in Egypt, Peru, the Aleutian Islands and Italy with computer tomography (CT) scans and genetic analyses. They wanted to see if atherosclerosis, one of the leading causes of death in the world, is a disease of modernity, our high stress, cholesterol-laden lifestyle, or if it had been there all along. Are…

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Tulsi Gabbard’s cult connections are difficult to hide

Tulsi Gabbard’s cult connections are difficult to hide

The Wall Street Journal reports: To defend and burnish Tulsi Gabbard’s image as her political star was rising, her congressional campaign hired a public-affairs firm in 2017 that tried to suppress coverage of an alleged pyramid scheme connected to her Hindu sect, according to interviews, emails and Federal Election Commission records. Gabbard, a former House member who is now President Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, was raised in the Science of Identity Foundation, a sect tied to a…

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The FAA is facing a major crisis without a leader because Elon Musk pushed him out

The FAA is facing a major crisis without a leader because Elon Musk pushed him out

The Verge reports: The Federal Aviation Administration is facing its first major aviation disaster in 16 years without a leader because Elon Musk helped push him out. Michael Whitaker stepped down as FAA administrator on January 20th, the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, after clashing with Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX is regulated by the agency. Musk publicly called on Whitaker to resign after the FAA fined SpaceX for failing to get approval for launch changes. And now the power…

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