Politics

President Trump has announced that Boeing will build the U.S. Air Force's next generation of fighter jets.

Late Friday night, the White House released the latest tranche of Trump executive actions and directives aimed at further kneecapping some of the nation’s most famous lawyers and law firms the president believes are obstructing his agenda or have tangled with him in the past.

US President Donald Trump has taken away security clearances for former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others in his latest move against his Democratic opponents.

The Republican president, who has also revoked the security clearance for former President Joe Biden, defeated Ms Clinton in the 2016 presidential election and Ms Harris in last year's election.

of Donald Trump’s executive order targeting several top law firms over ties to the president’s perceived enemies and decisions he opposes, Trump on Thursday announced that he had reached an agreement to drop his attack against one of the firms, Paul, Weiss. The deal, according to a Truth Social post, will renege Trump’s threat to suspend the security clearances of the firm’s attorneys in exchange for Paul, Weiss to dedicate $40 million in pro-bono services throughout his term.

The deal was widely seen as a remarkable act of capitulation by one of the most powerful law firms in the country. And now, an associate at Skadden Arps, another top firm, is speaking out.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered immigration officials not to deport a Georgetown scholar who was detained by the Trump Administration and accused of spreading Hamas propaganda in the latest battle over speech on U.S. college campuses.

U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles in Alexandria, Virginia, ordered that Indian national Badar Khan Suri "shall not be removed from the United States unless and until the Court issues a contrary order."

The Trump administration is escalating its crackdown on foreign students whom it accuses of supporting terrorism, detaining Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow and Indian citizen Badar Khan Suri Monday night.

The directive, issued by the US General Services Administration on 15 February, removed a ban on “segregated facilities”, such as waiting rooms and restaurants, for federal contractors.

Republicans in Congress are refusing to hold town halls in their districts out of fear of criticism, and now Democrats are swooping in.

When ABC shut down FiveThirtyEight early this month, the site’s publicly available polling databases — like a presidential approval rating tracker — shut down, too. Many news outlets, including The New York Times and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, had relied on the data for election coverage, and people worried about its disappearance.

While Ben & Jerry’s has decades of activism as part of its corporate tradition, Unilever appears to have tried to stamp that out starting in 2025. The parent company refused to allow B&J to issue corporate statements criticizing the Trump administration on matters of politics. This resulted in a lawsuit against Unilever, with B&J claiming that Unilever is contractually obligated to allow for B&J’s independent ability to make those statements as part of the acquisition. This ramped up even further more recently with the news that Unilever terminated B&J CEO David Stever as a result of his activism.

The latest victim of the Trump administration’s obsession with the appearance of efficiency is the guy who made the trains run on time. Stephen Gardner, the Chief Executive Officer of Amtrak who held the post since 2022, abruptly announced that he would be stepping down from his role Wednesday in the wake of Donald Trump and Elon Musk placing the train company in the crosshairs for potential privatization.

Bedoya and his fellow Democratic Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter were both fired by Trump on Tuesday evening in what they call an illegal removal from an independent agency. Trump’s move appears to violate the law and a longstanding Supreme Court precedent preventing the president from firing commissioners without cause. In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, Slaughter warned that their firings are a warning for other government entities that are supposed to be independent. “If I can be fired, I don’t know why Jerome Powell can’t be fired,” she said, referring to the chair of the Federal Reserve.

Tens of thousands of federal employees who were fired during their probationary periods have their jobs back — on paper, anyway.

In court-mandated filings Monday night, the Trump administration gave agency-by-agency details on the employees it has reinstated since late last week, when two separate federal judges found that the en-masse terminations of probationary federal workers were illegal.

Taken together, the filings, which cover most federal civilian agencies, show that 24,583 probationary employees were terminated as part of the administration’s sweeping layoffs. Of those, 24,570 have at least been notified that their jobs have been reinstated, though most agencies have placed the workers on administrative leave at least temporarily.

The Federal Reserve will host a two-day meeting starting today to discuss the state of the economy. A major topic will be the economic impacts of the Trump administration's tariffs and the potential for a recession due to the ongoing trade war.

At the end of the meeting on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will announce an interest rate decision. Most financial experts do not expect the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates this month.

Business groups are raising privacy concerns after state regulators requested detailed data on Floridians’ prescription drugs, including patients’ names and dates of birth and their doctors.

The Office of Insurance Regulation is demanding the unusual trove of data from pharmacy benefit managers — health care industry middlemen that Gov. Ron DeSantis and others have blamed for skyrocketing drug prices and monopolistic behavior.

The companies were asked this year to turn over claim reimbursement data for every prescription drug they filled in Florida in 2024, possibly hundreds of millions of transactions.

The state did not answer when asked how many companies have complied. It said it wanted the data to better understand the companies’ practices.

"We worked our entire life," one panicked retiree declared at Huizenga's most recent town hall, held via teleconference. "But we can’t get any help because we can’t get through to anybody." The former teacher was featured in an Associated Press report from the weekend detailing how angry and frightened Social Security recipients are storming town halls, begging their congressional representatives to stop Musk's misnamed DOGE from taking away their benefits. Donald Trump won this part of the state with over 60% of the vote, but now voters are begging their Republican representative to save them from the consequences of their electoral choices.

Musk has long obsessed over the idea that low birthrates and a subsequent aging population are "the biggest danger civilization faces by far." While he tends to emphasize the "more babies" part of the equation to fix this alleged problem, it's not much of a leap to see that "fewer old people" would also get the job done.

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.

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.