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      USC enacts hiring freeze and makes cuts over Trump threats to funding

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      The University of Southern California announced an immediate hiring freeze for all staff positions, “with very few critical exceptions” in a letter to faculty and staff on Tuesday.The letter, from USC’s president, Carol Folt, and provost, Andrew Guzman, said the hiring freeze was one of nine steps to cut the school’s operating budget amid deep uncertainty about federal funding – given sweeping cuts to scientific research, the reorganization of student loans, and an education department investigation accusing the university of failing to protect Jewish students during protests over Israel’s destruction of Gaza following the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023.“Like other major research institutions, USC relies on significant amounts of federal funding to carry out our mission,” the university administrators wrote. “In fiscal year 2024, for example, we received approximately $1.35 billion in federal funding, including roughly $650 million in student financial aid and $569 million for federally funded research. The health system also receives Medicare, Medicaid, and Medi-Cal payments – a significant portion of its revenues – and the futures of those funds are similarly uncertain.”The other measures include: permanent budget reductions for administrative units and schools, a review of procurement contracts, a review of capital projects “to determine which may be deferred or paused”, a curtailment of faculty hiring, new restriction on discretionary spending and expenses for travel and conferences, an effort to streamline operations, a halt on merit-based pay increases, and an end to extended winter recess introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic.Two weeks ago, USC was one of 60 schools notified by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights of “potential enforcement actions if they do not fulfill their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus”.The newly announced budget cuts follow a university statement in November of last year that informed staff that “rising costs require … budgetary adjustments”. In 2024, that statement said: “USC’s audited financial statement shows a deficit of $158 million.”“Over the past six years, our deficit has ranged from $586 million during legal cost repayments and COVID, to a modest positive level of $36 million in 2023,” USC administrators wrote in November.“Similar deficits are being reported at many peer institutions due to rising costs that outpace revenues across all of higher education,” they added. More

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      Pentagon warned staffers against using Signal before White House chat leak

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      The Pentagon recently warned its employees against using Signal, the encrypted messaging app, due to a technical vulnerability, an NPR report reveals.The report comes one day after the Atlantic published a story detailing how top national security officials, including the US vice-president and US defense secretary, had accidentally added a journalist to a Signal group chat, which revealed plans for military strikes in Yemen.The Atlantic’s revelations sparked widespread outrage at the security lapse and sent ripples of shock at the breach through diplomatic circles across the world. However, Trump administration officials have tried to play down the sensitivity of the information exposed to the journalist.But according to a Pentagon “OPSEC special bulletin” seen by NPR reporters and sent on 18 March, Russian hacking groups may exploit the vulnerability in Signal to spy on encrypted organizations, potentially targeting “persons of interest”.Signal uses end-to-end encryption for its messaging and calls. It is also an “open source” application, meaning the app’s code is open to independent review for any vulnerabilities. The app is typically used as a secure method to communicate.The Pentagon-wide memo said “third party messaging apps” like Signal are permitted to be used to share unclassified information, but they are not allowed to be used to send “non-public” unclassified information.In a statement to NPR, a spokesperson for Signal said they were “not aware of any vulnerabilities or supposed ones that we haven’t addressed publicly”.The Atlantic’s story, in which the editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, describes the Signal back-and-forth between senior Trump administration officials, led to widespread ridicule online, pointing to top officials’ lack of candor when discussing military strikes, and the original mistake in adding the journalist to the sensitive chat. The chat included top-level officials within the Trump administration, including the vice-president, JD Vance, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, and others.Goldberg did not release the entirety of the messages in the article. During an appearance on a liberal podcast on Tuesday, Goldberg said he refused to release the full thread, despite the Trump administration saying no classified information was shared. Trump dismissed the security leak as a “glitch”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDemocratic politicians have strongly criticized the intelligence officials for their behavior. On Tuesday, during a Senate intelligence committee hearing, Democratic senators pressed the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, CIA head Ratcliffe and the FBI director, Kash Patel, on the Signal chat leak.Goldberg received information regarding a forthcoming series of airstrikes on Houthi-controlled areas on 15 March, hours before the strikes took place. The Iran-backed Houthis said at least 31 people were killed as a result of the strikes.The US has been striking Houthi areas since November 2023, when, in retaliation for the US-backed Israeli attacks on Gaza, the Houthis began to target commercial and military vessels in the Red Sea. More

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      We call on Columbia to stand up to authoritarianism | Open letter

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      To the Columbia University administration,As journalists who were trained by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and who are steeped in America’s long traditions of free speech and academic freedom, we write to you to express our horror at the events of the past week.The Trump administration has sent immigration enforcers into university-owned student housing and university public spaces at Columbia, has arrested and sought to deport Mahmoud Khalil – not for having committed any documented crimes, but for the thoughts that he has expressed; and has forced another student, Ranjani Srivasan, to flee to Canada after her visa was revoked, also apparently for thought crimes.It has sought to financially cripple the university by withholding $400m in federal funds. And it has demanded the university shut down or restructure departments it deems to be politically problematic, and that it alter its criteria for who to admit to incoming student cohorts.We come from diverse political backgrounds and worldviews; some of us were deeply alienated by last year’s campus protests around the war in Gaza, others of us were sympathetic to the students. Regardless of our political views, however, we firmly believe that the federal government should have no role in policing Columbia’s academic structures, in shaping course requirements and personnel choices made by the university, in dictating admissions strategies, and in terrorizing students for expressing political views that the first amendment clearly protects.Yet, astoundingly, all of these changes are now being accepted by Columbia University in the vain hope of deterring a predatory government from cutting off federal funds and decimating the university’s science research facilities. The university higher-ups have sold out students and faculty alike in their efforts to access federal dollars.We recognize that the fault here lies primarily with the Trump administration, which is stampeding away from democratic norms and, by the day, reinventing the US as an autocracy in the image of Orbán’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia. We recognize, too, that universities such as Columbia are caught between a rock and hard place, damned if they cooperate with the Maga agenda and damned if they don’t.In such a dismal situation, courageously standing up for moral principles and academic codes would have been the honorable – and ultimately more effective – path to take. As Churchill famously said after England and France’s capitulation to Nazi demands at the Munich conference in which Czechoslovakia was dismembered: “You had a choice between dishonor and war; you chose dishonor and you shall have war.”Trump’s administration preys on weakness, and it is employing an extraordinarily effective divide and conquer strategy. We are seeing this in its assault on individual law firms, such as Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which this week cried uncle and arranged a meeting with Trump, in which it agreed to do $40m of pro bono work for clients and issues of his choice in exchange for not having their security clearances revoked.That will, of course, only empower Trump and the justice department to ask more of the capitulating attorneys and also to go after additional law firms, seeking the same result – indeed, on Friday night, Trump released a memo directing the Department of Justice to do just that. We are seeing it with major media outlets – take, for example, ABC’s extraordinary decision to donate millions of dollars to the Trump presidential library to make an inconvenient Trump lawsuit disappear; or CBS’s decision to give the Trump team access to the transcripts of its pre-election interview with Kamala Harris. Again, that will only empower Trump to demand further concessions from those companies in how they report on his Administration as well as to seek to kneecap the independence of other media outlets.And, of course, we are seeing it in the escalating war against academia. Columbia’s capitulation won’t end the nightmare that American research universities are facing, rather it will make it worse. For if an institution of the stature, and with the vast endowment resources, of an Ivy League school such as Columbia can be publicly humiliated and made to grovel for Federal crumbs, then every other academic institution in the country is rendered weaker and more open to political attack.Given this reality, we urge Columbia’s administrators to rethink their strategy in dealing with Trump’s authoritarian administration. We urge university administrators around the country to respond collectively rather than allowing themselves to be picked off one by one. And we urge Columbia alumni, of all political persuasions, to join with us in recognizing the enormous stakes in play here, and in demanding that this wonderful academic institution stand up for the values and the beliefs that have held steady since its founding more than 270 years ago. We urge alumni to call their political representatives to protest the assault on academic freedom, to contact Columbia University’s leadership to express their displeasure, and, if necessary, to withhold their donations to Columbia until such time as the university stiffens its spine in its dealings with the Trump administration.This is, we believe, one of the greatest crises facing academia in US history, and also one of the greatest assaults on free speech. How universities such as Columbia respond will determine whether universities remain independent or whether, ultimately, they end up simply serving as extensions of an increasingly authoritarian state.Sasha Abramsky
      Jason Ziedenberg
      Marissa Ventura
      Marion Davis
      Martha Irvine
      Anna Allen
      Gil Griffin
      Megan Williams
      Tony Fong, Science editor
      Victoria Pesce Elliott
      Holly Bass
      Stuart Davis
      Chuck Tanowitz
      Jennifer Cohen Oko
      Carolyn Juris
      Victoria Colliver
      John Nichols
      Chris Lombardi
      Alice Sparberg Alexiou
      Elizabeth Kadetsky
      Dina Hampton
      Aaron Naparstek
      Kevin Heldman
      Jerome Weeks
      Betsy Rosen
      Lizzy Stark
      Jay Ross
      Professor Sam Freedman
      Timothy Cahill More

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      The Guardian view on the Signal war plans leak: a US security breach speaks volumes | Editorial

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      It is jaw-dropping that senior Trump administration figures would accidentally leak war plans to a journalist. But the fundamental issue is that 18 high-ranking individuals were happy discussing extremely sensitive material on a private messaging app, highlighting the administration’s extraordinary amateurishness, recklessness and unaccountability.The visceral hostility to Europe spelt out again by the vice-president, JD Vance, was glaring. So was the indifference to the potential civilian cost of the strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, designed to curb attacks on Red Sea shipping. The Houthi-run health ministry said that 53 people including five children and two women were killed. The response by the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, to the attacks was to post emojis: a fist, an American flag and fire. The lack of contrition for this security breach is also telling. Individually and together, these are far more than a “glitch”, in Donald Trump’s words. They are features of his administration.Mr Waltz appears to have organised the Signal chat and inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic. The magazine says that the secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, posted details of the timing and sequencing of attacks, specific targets and weapons systems used, though the administration denies that classified information was shared. Other members included Mr Vance; the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard; the CIA director, John Ratcliffe; Steve Witkoff, special envoy to the Middle East; and “MAR”, the initials of the secretary of state, Marco Rubio.These conversations would normally take place under conditions of high security. While Signal is encrypted, devices could be compromised. Foreign intelligence agencies will be delighted. Legal experts say using Signal may have breached the Espionage Act.The hypocrisy is glaring. Mr Trump’s first presidential campaign – and several members of this Signal group – lambasted Hillary Clinton for using a private email server to receive official messages that included some classified information of a far less sensitive nature, and for the autodeletion of messages. These Signal messages too were set to disappear, though federal records laws mandate the preservation of such data.In many regards, this leak hammers home what US allies already knew, including this administration’s contempt for Europe, which the chat suggests will be expected to pay for the US attacks. The vice-president characterised an operation carried out to safeguard maritime trade and contain Iran as “bailing Europe out again”. Mr Hegseth responded that he “fully share[d] your loathing of European free-loading”. Concerns about information security are familiar territory too. In his first term, the president reportedly shared highly classified information from an ally with Russia’s foreign minister, and after leaving office he faced dozens of charges over the alleged mishandling of classified material, before a judge he had appointed threw out the case against him.The UK and others cannot simply walk away when they are so heavily dependent on and intermeshed with US intelligence capabilities. Their task now is to manage risk and prepare for worse to come. It may be that this breach is not chiefly distinguished by its severity, but by the fact that we have learned about it.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Jon Stewart on GOP’s obsession with free speech: ‘It’s such blatant hypocrisy’

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      Late-night hosts talked conservatives’ hypocrisy over free speech and the Trump administration accidentally texting an Atlantic editor its war plans.Jon StewartJon Stewart was back in old-school Daily Show mode on Monday evening, pointing out the hypocrisy of Republicans in power. But first, he mocked the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, whose group text on Signal regarding the administration’s plans to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen accidentally included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg.“Back in my day if you were a journalist who wanted leaked war documents, you had to work the sources, meet them in a dark garage, earn the trust, pound the pavement,” Stewart said. “Now? Just wait for the national security adviser to be distracted by The White Lotus while he’s setting up his Bomb Yemen group chat.”Stewart went on: “There are certain hypocrisies and absurdities that we find in our cultural moment that make for great fodder for humorous dialogue: a facial expression, a nod and a wink. Then there are pronouncements by our elected officials, other actions by our government that are so baldly bullshit, even though you know it will have no effect, and that these powerful creatures have been genetically modified to resist shame or self-reflection of any kind, you just can’t help yourself but to go old-school Daily Show gotcha.”He specifically referred to conservatives’ obsession with “free speech” and the liberal “thought police”, while arguing in the same breath for CNN to be banned from the airwaves, among other proposed cancellations and censorship.“Generally, you’ve gotta search the archives for contradictions on one’s stated principles, dig through policy papers to uncover private actions that are undermined by someone’s public stance, but this is so blatant,” said Stewart. “I can’t wrap around it. It’s not even the hypocrisy, it’s that they so fetishize free speech, this thing that they do not in any way actually practice.”Stewart cited Trump banning the AP from the White House for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico to “the Gulf of America”, and the detainment of Columbia student protester Mahmoud Khalil.“These guys don’t give a fuck about free speech,” he said. “They care about their speech. It’s such blatant hypocrisy.”Stephen Colbert“Our nation is a beautiful pastry spread of freedom and opportunity,” said Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. “And yesterday, I got a closeup look at one of the donuts that Trump has been licking” at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Colbert and a number of comedians attended in support of Conan O’Brien, who received the Mark Twain prize for American humor.“It was a great night full of life and love and laughs,” he said, but the mood in DC was “still grim”. Last week, Trump held his first official meeting with “all of his hand-picked flunkies” that appointed him to the board of the Kennedy Center, “so he knows that they’re all 100% loyal to him”.During the meeting, which was recorded and leaked to the press, Trump said he wanted to make the Kennedy Center programming “slightly more conservative” and feature more “non-woke musicals”. “Non-woke musicals, also known as any musical you take your dad to,” Colbert joked.Besides rambling on about his love for the musical Cats, Trump also put his name forward as a potential host for the annual Kennedy Center Honors. “Man alive, you could’ve given me a thousand guesses, and that would’ve been all of them,” said Colbert, himself a three-time former host of the ceremony. “I tell you what, sir, I’m willing to trade – you host the Kennedy Center Honors, I’ll be president.”Jimmy KimmelAnd in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel also mocked the administration putting sensitive military information in a group chat with Goldberg. “In other words, our national security is being guarded by a bunch of doofs you wouldn’t trust to throw your cousin a surprise party,” he said. “No one on the chain thought to ask: ‘Who is JG? What are these initials?’ They could’ve been leaking secrets to Jeff Goldblum, for all they knew.”“If Joe Biden’s top military team accidentally texted these plans to a journalist, Laura Ingraham’s erection would be so rock strong, it would break through the wall like the Kool-Aid man,” he added.“This is a crazy mistake by any definition, but you have to remember: Pete Hegseth, our secretary of defense, three months ago was a weekend host on Fox & Friends.” So his former cohost “looked at the bright side” of the story on-air.As Fox’s Will Cain put it: “What you will see is dialogue between vice-president JD Vance, secretary of defense Pete Hegseth and many more, in a very collaborative, open, honest, team-based attempt to come to the right decision after years of secrecy and incompetence. If you read the content of these messages, I think you’ll come away proud that these are the leaders making these decisions in America.”“If you read the content of these messages – the point is we’re not supposed to read the content of these messages!” Kimmel exclaimed. “That is a real beauty of a spin.” More

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      It’s war and peace with Donald and Pete – and the worst group chat the world has ever seen | Marina Hyde

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      Once again, we find ourselves having an anguished debate about mobile phones and online safety, in this case asking: should we ban the devices for US national security advisers under the age of 60? Do you know what your national security adviser is doing on his device? Is he using it to stay in touch with other guys in the big-man-osphere to talk about bombing Hooters? Or did he maybe add the editor-in-chief of a leading general interest magazine to a Signal group in the crucial period running up to a highly sensitive US military operation in Yemen, seemingly committing so many alleged crimes that he should have a full-body orange jumpsuit tattooed on him for ever?By now, you will have caught up with the tale of one of the most idiotic breaches of security imaginable – seemingly executed, regrettably, by the actual US national security adviser. Mike Waltz seems to have been aided and abetted in his full-spectrum fatuity by other ultra-senior figures, including the vice-president, JD Vance, and the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, who shared detailed operational and strategic information in a chat to which Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg had been accidentally invited. Is Hegseth OK? Has he returned to being – how to put this delicately? – someone you probably don’t want to give important tasks to “after lunch”?On another tangent, meanwhile, was there some extremely senior military or government official with either the first name Jeffrey, or the second name Goldberg, whom Waltz actually meant to add? And did that intended Jeffrey or Goldberg wake up the next day, see the Yemen news, and feel a deeply wounded sense of Fomo? “Wait, you guys bombed Yemen without me? I hate you ALL. I demand you put me in the group chat NOW, just so I can immediately flounce off and leave the group chat.”The breach exposes so many things that it is difficult to know where to start. It certainly highlights the almost immeasurably rich lexicon of emojis. You realise that a certain type of guy deploys the same three emojis for taking out a Houthi target as they would if Bryson DeChambeau nailed a slightly tricky putt on the 14th at the West Palm Beach Pro-Am. Punching fist, USA flag, flames emoji. Let’s GO, Bryson!That said, the emojis are obviously the best of it. Less easy to scroll past is the bit where Vance, or his proxy, says: “I just hate bailing out Europe again.” Then Hegseth replies: “I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It’s PATHETIC.” Mm. Three weeks ago, we had Vance offering a blanket disparagement of European forces as “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”. Now we have this Signal chat – yet another sweet memorial to all the European service personnel who gave their lives in the US Republican party’s endlessly stupid 9/11 wars. We never asked to be reimbursed for that military assistance – very BAD! very Wrong! – and are now repeatedly hearing that it meant nothing to Marine-adjacent shutterbug Vance, who remains the most unbearably loud and rude American at the luxury hotel breakfast. They really should make a darkly satirical TV show about these absurd, degenerate, unpleasant people. Call it The White Potus.Needless to say, the first instinct of the Trump administration has been to insult the journalist, when in less responsible hands than Goldberg’s this could have been catastrophically endangering information for involved US service personnel and intelligence operatives. At time of writing, Hegseth’s sole comment on the bed he and the guys just shat was to attack the man to whom they personally served this scoop, calling Goldberg “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist”. Is he though? Come on, Pete! Given the same information in real time, your boy Joe Rogan would have livestreamed it and you know it. At least Donald Trump would have been up to speed with it that way. “I don’t know anything about it,” was the president’s sleepy verdict yesterday, a day he spent wetting his pants about some oil painting of him hanging somewhere in the Colorado state legislature.As for consequences, do please remember that we are dealing with the biggest hypocrites on the planet. Consider their own thunderous statements on infosec. Here is the chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, just last week: “If you have a private that loses a sensitive item, that loses night vision goggles, that loses a weapon, you can bet that that private is going to be held accountable. The same and equal standards must apply to senior military leaders.” Also last week, here is Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard: “Any unauthorised release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such.” Was Tulsi on the Signal chat? Course she was! If you still want more, here’s Hegseth mining the seemingly endless potential of Hillary Clinton’s careless use of a private server for classified information back when he was a Fox News host: “If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now.” “When I’m president of the United States, neither she nor any of these other people are going to be above the law,” was the previous verdict of one Marco Rubio, last seen on the Houthi chat appearing in the role of secretary of state of the United States.We’ll have to wait and see if these clowns will hold themselves to their own very high standards. In the meantime, please enjoy European diplomats declaring that as far as the relationship between the continent and the US goes, this is “the writing on the wall”. If only it HAD been written on a wall – that would actually have been more secure and secretive. Come to that, it would genuinely have been more secure and secretive to hire a skywriting plane. Great job, guys! Punching fist, USA flag, flames emoji, etc.

      Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More