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      US Forest Service and National Park Service to fire thousands of workers

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      The US Forest Service is firing about 3,400 recent hires while the National Park Service is terminating about 1,000 workers under Donald Trump’s push to cut federal spending and bureaucracy, according to a report on Friday.The terminations target employees who are in their probationary employment periods, which includes anyone hired less than a year ago, according to Reuters, and will affect sites such as the Appalachian trail, Yellowstone, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr and the Sequoia national forest.The cuts represent about 10% of the Forest Service workforce and about 5% of National Park Service employees, but excludes firefighters, law enforcement and certain meteorologists, as well as 5,000 seasonal workers, from the cutbacks.“Allowing parks to hire seasonal staff is essential, but staffing cuts of this magnitude will have devastating consequences for parks and communities,” the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) president, Theresa Pierno, said in a statement.The association warned in a statement this month that staffing levels were not keeping pace with increasing demands on the national park system, which saw 325m visits in 2023 alone – an increase of 13m from 2022.Kristen Brengel, the NPCA’s senior vice-president of government affairs, warned that visitors from around the world expecting a once-in-a-lifetime experience could now be faced with “overflowing trash, uncleaned bathrooms and fewer rangers to provide guidance”.Like other government agencies, the National Park Service was taken by surprise by a late January order from the White House office of management and budget pausing federal grants. The administration rescinded the order two days later and is re-evaluating it.Across the federal government, about 280,000 employees out of the 2.3 million-member civilian federal workforce were hired in the last two years, with most still on probation and easier to fire, according to government data.In addition to the visits to national parks, about 159 million people visit national forests annually. The Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, said it could not comment on personnel matters.The agriculture department said in a statement that protecting people and communities, as well as infrastructure, businesses and resources, remains “a top priority”.“Our wildland firefighter and other public safety positions are of the utmost priority,” it added.However, the federal funding freeze is affecting programs meant to mitigate wildfire risk in western states as well as freezing the hiring of seasonal firefighters.The reduction in resources for wildfire prevention comes a month after devastating blazes in Los Angeles that are expected to be the costliest in US history.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Oregon-based Lomakatsi Restoration Project non-profit said its contracts with federal agencies, including the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, to reduce hazardous fuels in Oregon, California and Idaho have been frozen.“The funding freeze has impacted more than 30 separate grants and agreements that Lomakatsi has with federal agencies, including pending awards as well as active agreements that are already putting work on the ground,” the project’s executive director, Marko Bey, said in a letter to the senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon.A spokesperson for the interior department, the parent agency of the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, said it was reviewing funding decisions.Senate Democrats have called on the administration to unlock fire-mitigation funding, and separately have asked interior and agriculture department leadership to exempt seasonal firefighters from a broad federal hiring freeze.Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy group for federal firefighters, said its members have been unable to hire the hundreds of firefighters that are typically brought on at this time of year to gear up for the summer fire season.“The agencies already have had a recruitment and retention problem,” Riva Duncan, vice-president of the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, said in an interview. “This just exacerbates that problem.” More

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      Democrats in Congress see potential shutdown as leverage to counter Trump

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      With the US federal government expected to shut down in one month unless Congress approves a funding bill, Democratic lawmakers are wrestling with just how far they are willing to go to push back against Donald Trump’s radical rightwing agenda that has thrown American politics into turmoil.Specifically, Democrats appear divided on the question of whether they would be willing to endure a shutdown to demonstrate their outrage over the president’s attempted overhaul of the federal government.The stakes are high; unless Congress passes a bill to extend funding beyond 14 March, hundreds of thousands of federal employees may be forced to go without pay at a time when they already feel under attack by Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”. And given Trump’s eagerness to flex his presidential authority, the fallout could be particularly severe, depending on how the office of management and budget (OMB) handled a shutdown.To be sure, Republicans are taking the lead on reaching a funding deal, as they control the White House and both chambers of Congress, but party leaders will absolutely need Democrats’ assistance to pass a bill. While Republicans hold a 53-to-47 advantage in the Senate, any funding bill will need the support of at least 60 senators to overcome the filibuster.In the House, Republicans hold a razor-thin majority of 218 to 215, and hard-right lawmakers’ demands for steeper spending cuts will likely force the speaker, Republican Mike Johnson, to also rely on Democratic support to pass a funding bill.“There’s no reasonable funding bill that could make its way through the Senate that wouldn’t cause uproar in the Republican party on the House side,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive group Indivisible. “That is the fault of the Republicans in the House, not anybody else. But because of that, it is something that is giving Democrats in the House leverage.”In recent weeks, a bipartisan group of congressional appropriators from both chambers have met to hash out the details of a potential funding agreement, but Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, suggested on Thursday that Johnson had instructed his conference members to “walk away” from the talks.“At this moment, there is no discussion because the speaker of the House has apparently ordered House Republican appropriators to walk away from the negotiating table,” Jeffries told reporters. “They are marching America toward a reckless Republican shutdown.”Johnson shot back that Democrats appeared “not interested in keeping the government funded”, adding: “So we will get the job done. We’re not going to shut the government down. We’ll figure out a path through this.”The dynamics of the funding fight have empowered some Democrats to suggest that the negotiations could become a powerful piece of political leverage as they scramble to disrupt Trump’s efforts to freeze federal funding, unilaterally shutter the foreign-aid agency USAid and carry out mass firings across the government.“I cannot support efforts that will continue this lawlessness that we’re seeing when it comes to this administration’s actions,” Andy Kim, a Democratic senator of New Jersey, said on NBC’s Meet the Press last weekend. “And for us to be able to support government funding in that way, only for them to turn it around, to dismantle the government – that is not something that should be allowed.”Progressive organizers have called on Democratic lawmakers to hold the line in the negotiations to ensure Congress passes a clean funding bill that Trump will be required to faithfully implement.On Monday, prominent congressional Democrats rallied with progressive groups outside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington, and 15 of them pledged to withhold their support from a funding deal until Trump’s “constitutional crisis” comes to an end.“We’re not just looking for statements. We’re not looking for protest votes. We’re also asking them to identify where they have power, where they have leverage and use that power,” Levin said. “And because of the nature of this funding fight, this is a clear opportunity.”Other Democrats have appeared much more cautious when it comes to the possibility of a shutdown, even as they insist that Republicans should shoulder the blame for any funding lapse.The senator Cory Booker, a Democrat of New Jersey, argued that Democrats must now embrace their role as “a party of protecting residents, protecting veterans, protecting first responders, protecting American safety from [Trump’s] illegal actions”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The Republican party has shown year after year that they’re the party of shutdowns. They’re the party of government chaos,” Booker said on CNN’s State of the Union last weekend. “So we’re not looking to shut down the government. We’re looking actually to protect people.”The political fallout of past shutdowns may give Democrats pause as well.The last shutdown occurred during Trump’s first term and began in December 2018, eventually stretching on for 35 days and becoming the longest shutdown in US history. It started after Trump demanded that Congress approve billions of dollars in funding to construct a wall along the US-Mexico border, and it ended with Trump signing a bipartisan bill that included no money for the wall. At the time, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed 50% of Americans blamed Trump for the shutdown, while 37% said congressional Democrats were responsible.“Historically, I think it has been the case that shutdowns are costly, and they’re disruptive. When they conclude, you look back and wonder, what did we get for all of that? The answer is usually nothing,” said Gordon Gray, executive director of Pinpoint Policy Institute and a former Republican staffer for the Senate budget committee. “For people who have to interact with the government during a shutdown [and] for the workforce, there’s real downsides. Politically, there just seems to be more downside than upside.”This shutdown, if it occurs, could be unlike any other.Trump has shown an extraordinary willingness to test the bounds of executive power, and while past presidents have taken steps to alleviate the pain caused by shutdowns, he may choose not to do so. Considering his apparent fixation on eliminating government “waste”, some fear Trump and the new OMB director, Russell Vought, might use the shutdown as an opportunity to sideline federal agencies and departments that the president deems unimportant.“There’s a tremendous degree of discretion that OMB can exert in its interpretation of this,” Gray said. “Clearly this administration is willing to contemplate its discretion more expansively than we’ve seen. It would not surprise me if we saw novel developments under Trump.”Levin agreed that it is entirely possible Trump and some of his congressional allies may want to “shut down the government so that they can more easily steamroll” federal agencies. He expects some House Republicans to propose funding provisions that will be absolute non-starters with Democrats, such as eliminating the health insurance program Medicaid, to potentially derail negotiations.“I absolutely think it’s possible that the Republicans’ plan is to drive us into shutdown. I think that it is giving them the benefit of the doubt to say that they are interested in making any kind of deal,” Levin said. “Democrats have some amount of leverage here, but if we head into shutdown, there should be no illusion of who benefits and whose grand plan this is.” More

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      Why is Trump behaving like a bully over tariffs? Because he can | Gene Marks

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      Why is Donald Trump so obsessed with tariffs? If you ask me, it’s because America is so freaking huge. California’s economy is bigger than the entire UK’s. Texas’s is larger than all of Canada’s. Florida’s is larger than all of Mexico’s. In its entirety the US economy is about eight times larger than both the Canadian and Mexican economies … combined!Trump is a bully sitting on top of the world’s biggest bully – the American economy. Bullies tend to use their fists to overcome others. Sometimes they can be outwitted. But we all know that strength and size means everything.As a bully, Trump uses tariffs as a weapon and he can get away with it. This is what bullies do. He can threaten smaller countries such as Canada and Mexico because he’s bigger and stronger. He can increase tariffs, cut off funding and limit aid to foreign countries because he knows that, without the US, those organizations and governments would be unable to sustain themselves.And sure, using tariffs as a tool will have collateral damage at home. I recently spoke to an association of building materials distributors and they aren’t exactly thrilled with the potential that their costs of Canadian lumber could rise by 25%. Neither are e-commerce businesses that buy products from China, food service companies that sell Mexican produce or energy companies that rely on oil supplies from up north.But then again there are others that love tariffs. Have a conversation – as I’ve done – with business owners that make steel and have been undercut by Chinese imports or those in the kitchen cabinet manufacturing industry who have faced the same unfair trading practices that has cost them customers and caused them to contract their investing and hiring. Or talk to auto manufacturers whose cars are being tariffed almost five times higher when trying to sell their vehicles in Europe versus the other way around. Or the American companies that have been historically unable to sell their milk, cheese, butter and chicken in Canada because they face existing tariffs exceeding 200%.It’s true that tariffs will benefit some businesses and hurt others. And it’s true that the rising costs of some products will ultimately trickle down to the consumer. But many businesses I know are determined not to let that happen.For example, I have clients in many industries who have been quietly building inventory over the past few months to cushion their supply. I know others who have been aggressively finding alternative suppliers both in the US and in countries that are less exposed to higher tariffs. Others are simply finding ways to cut costs by doing things like reducing their property footprint or investing in technology and AI to offset the increase in the prices of materials. These strategies are easier said than done. But I’ve seen them being implemented by smart, forward-thinking leaders.Regardless, let’s agree that for both businesses and consumers Trump’s tariff adventures are not great, particularly in the short term. They’re disruptive. They’re causing significant uncertainty. They affect margins. They could potentially hit shoppers right in the pocketbook at a time when prices are already high and incomes are barely keeping up.But Trump doesn’t care. He enjoys being a bully and he knows that – given the size of our economy and our influence around the world – he can be. Will his bullying result in a more level playing field for American companies? Will it drive more investment and jobs at home? Will it result in limiting illegal immigration or the importing of fentanyl? Is he doing this for the right reason, which is to make America stronger?Is his bullying justified? Is any bullying justified?Maybe, maybe not. Most of the times bullying isn’t justified, so history is not in his corner. Unfortunately, the rest of us running businesses and going to the grocery store have no way of knowing. We may bask in his success. Or we may suffer if he fails. But one thing’s for sure: he told us he was going to do this and this is what the country asked for when he was elected. More

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      ‘A scary time to be a scientist’: how medical research cuts will hurt the maternal mortality crisis

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      On Tuesday, a few days after the Trump administration announced its plan to slash billions of dollars in funding for biomedical and behavioral research, an investigator at a maternal health research center in Pennsylvania told Dr Meghan Lane-Fall that the cuts may lead her to leave academia altogether.Lane-Fall urged her not to make any sudden moves. “It’s not like nothing has happened. No one’s threatened her job,” said Lane-Fall, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “But if she looks six months down the line, it looks uncertain.”She did advise her colleague to update her resume.Among the many fields of research threatened by the funding cuts is the growing effort to curb the US maternal mortality rate, which is far worse than in other rich nations. Not only could the cuts delay vital breakthroughs but women’s health experts warn they could also push promising young scientists out of the field.“Above and beyond the stalling of progress, we’re going to see this hollowing out of the workforce that’s been working on this research,” Lane-Fall said. “That will reverberate for years, if not decades.”Late last week, the Trump administration declared that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would only reimburse 15% of researchers’ “indirect costs”, which can pay for expenses such as staff and laboratory maintenance. Normally, such costs hover at around 50% for elite universities. If indirect costs are capped at such a low percentage, scientists and the institutions where they work say they will not be able to carry out research.A court ordered that the Trump administration suspend the policy earlier this week, but this change – which was reportedly the work of the Elon Musk-run “department of government efficiency” (Doge) – casts into doubt the future of the NIH, the planet’s premier public funder of biomedical research. In 2023, the NIH spent more than $35bn on grants. If implemented, the new policy would endanger at least $4bn worth of funding, but its impact could go much further, imperiling the ability of research institutions – especially smaller ones – to do their work at all. The US maternal mortality rate almost doubled between 2018 and 2022, with rates of deaths among Black and Indigenous expecting or new mothers increasing at a disproportionally fast clip. States that Donald Trump won may be hit especially hard by NIH cuts: they are home to some of the country’s worst maternal mortality rates.To address this crisis, the NIH in 2023 launched a seven-year, $168m initiative to set up more than a dozen research centers to investigate and improve maternal health outcomes, as well as help train new maternal health researchers. The future of these centers – one of which is co-led by Lane-Fall – are now in question.“We’re working with agencies across 20 Michigan counties – that have more than 7 million people in them – to be able to improve services so that moms don’t get sick and die,” said Dr Jennifer E Johnson, a Michigan State University public health professor who helps run one of the research centers in Flint, Michigan. “To do that, we need offices. We need electricity. We need lights, heat, IT, infrastructure, people to create and sell the contracts. All of the support for that would be cut dramatically.”Normally, Johnson said, NIH reimburses about 57% of the indirect costs for Michigan State University’s grants, including hers. It’s not feasible, she said, for the university to cover those costs on its own or for her center to lower its indirect costs so substantially.“If we can’t turn on the lights and we can’t pay the rent and we can’t get people hired – I don’t know what we would do,” Johnson said. “The research is the car. All the infrastructure costs are the road. You can go a little while, but if there’s no maintenance on that, it’s a problem.”Several of the institutions that host the maternal health centers – which tend to focus on improving maternal mortality among people of color and rural communities – are set to lose millions over the NIH cuts. Stanford University officials have said the school, whose center aims to reduce the risk of dangerous postpartum hemorrhages, would take a $160m loss. The University of Utah, which studies how drug addiction impacts pregnancy, would lose $45m.The Guardian reached out to dozens of researchers who have NIH grants to study the health of women, children and parents. Many declined to speak, often citing the ongoing uncertainty of the situation. “I’m honestly not sure what to say as like most of my colleagues I was taken off guard and it’s really unclear how this will play out now that courts are involved,” one scientist, from Missouri, wrote in an email.While Republicans have generally been supportive of Musk’s slash-and-burn approach to the government in the last few weeks, some members of Congress have expressed alarm about the NIH cuts. “It’s pretty drastic. So I’m thinking we need to look at this,” Shelley Moore Capito, the West Virginia senator, told the Washington Post. Alabama senator Katie Britt said she planned to work with Robert F Kennedy Jr, the new leader of the Department of Health and Human Services, to address the impact. “A smart, targeted approach is needed in order to not hinder life-saving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions like those in Alabama,” she told AL.com.One of the agencies behind the maternal health centers is the NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health – whose website has been hollowed out by the Trump administration’s recent, widespread purges of government websites. Links to pages on the Office of Research on Women’s Health website about “funding opportunities and notices”, “research programs and initiatives” and “supporting women in biomedical careers” have all vanished.“It is a scary time to be a scientist in the United States,” said Johnson, who is also concerned about recent reports of efforts at the National Science Foundation – an NIH sibling agency that focuses on scientific and engineering research – to scrutinize projects that include words like “women”, “disability” and “underrepresented”. Johnson continued: “All of a sudden, we’re working in a world where we’re not sure we’re going to be allowed to say what the data clearly shows.”On Monday, the day the new policy was supposed to take effect, the Association of American Medical Colleges sued to halt it.“Even at larger, well-resourced institutions, this unlawful action will impose enormous harms, including on these institutions’ ability to contribute to medical and scientific breakthroughs,” the association, which represents several of the US medical schools that host maternal health centers, said in its lawsuit. The association continued: “Smaller institutions will fare even worse – faced with more unrecoverable costs on every dollar of grants funds received, many will not be able to sustain any research at all and could close entirely.”A federal judge then ordered Trump to suspend the cuts, writing in a court order that implementing the cuts would cause “immediate and irreparable injury”. A hearing in the case is set for 21 February.However, it is unclear whether Trump will obey. Although the administration is legally required to heed court orders, a federal judge ruled in another case this week that Trump had defied an order to halt a separate freeze in federal funding. Disregarding court orders may tee up a showdown between the executive and judicial branches of the government – and a constitutional crisis.Regardless of when, how or if NIH grants function in the future, Lane-Fall believes the chaos unleashed by the Trump administration has already led science to suffer. Lane-Fall had to pause plans to hold a conference and told some postdoctoral students that they cannot yet move forward with research projects. She’s now worried that maternal health centers – who have built partnerships with local groups that champion doulas, breastfeeding among Black women and more – will not be able to compensate those groups.“One really important trend in maternal and child health research is that we are working now more with communities than we ever have before, because we understand that there’s a lot of lived experience and expertise in communities. Part of what makes that partnership possible is that we’re able to compensate them for their time,” Lane-Fall said. “When we go to those communities and we say: ‘We promised you money, but it might not be there’ – that is devastating.”Dr Nancy E Lane is haunted by the idea that the confusion will lead women’s health scientists to leave academia. A University of California, Davis, doctor who specializes in osteoporosis and osteoarthritis, Lane was part of a 2024 report calling for more NIH funding for women’s health. Between 2013 and 2023, just 8.8% of NIH grant dollars focused on investigating it.“My career has tremendously benefited from the resources from the National Institutes of Health. It’s what made me who I am,” Lane said. “How much will the current generation put up with this before they’ll just throw their hands up?” More

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      The courts are a crucial bastion against Trump. What if he ignores their orders?

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      Years before he became the US vice-president and openly advocated defiance of the courts over the Trump administration’s blitz through the federal bureaucracy and constitution, JD Vance revealed his contempt for legal constraints.In 2021, Vance predicted that Donald Trump would again be elected president and advised him to “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people”.“Then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,’” he told the Jack Murphy Live podcast.Whether the seventh American president actually said that remains disputed, but the sentiment is alive and well as the Trump administration defies federal court orders to at least pause its subversion of the constitution and destructive rampage through the federal bureaucracy led by Elon Musk.In the absence of action by Congress to defend its powers, it has been government workers, state attorneys general and unions who have counterattacked, with a flurry of lawsuits – challenging presidential orders to limit the constitutional right of anyone born in the US to be a citizen, a federal funding freeze, and the dismissal of corruption watchdogs, among other measures. Nearly 50 legal challenges have been filed in the last three weeks, an unprecedented pushback in the courts against a new administration.The lawsuits have resulted in a string of court rulings. They have put a hold on some of Trump’s executive orders freezing some spending. They have also restricted Musk, head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”, from sending his staff to rifle through the financial records of federal agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and the education department as a means to restrict their work or even close them down.But it quickly became apparent that the administration was defying some of the court orders, while its supporters attacked what they called “rogue judges” for ruling against Trump – and Vance portrayed the courts as just another bureaucratic obstacle to the president implementing the people’s will.That has prompted warnings from legal scholars, including Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley law school, of a constitutional crisis in the making.“It’s very frightening to think that they will disobey court orders. If they don’t, it will be a constitutional crisis unlike anything this country has seen, because if the president can violate constitutional laws and disobey court orders then the name for that is a dictatorship,” he said.“This isn’t the realm of normal. What we’ve seen in the first three weeks is unprecedented in American history.”The judge John McConnell has accused the Trump administration of deliberately disobeying an order obliging the government to reinstate billions of dollars in grants. Another judge, Loren AliKhan, accused the administration of defying its legal obligations after she ordered the office for budget and management (OMB) to halt a spending freeze.Vance pushed back against the rulings on X.“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” he wrote.“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”Musk called for one of the judges involved to be impeached.Trump won a victory on Thursday when a judge ruled in favour of Musk’s offer to almost all of the 2 million-strong federal workforce of eight months of pay for not working if they resign now. The email’s subject line, “Fork in the Road”, was the same as one he used in a message to employees when he bought Twitter in 2022 and got rid of about 80% of its staff. Shortly after the deadline set by the email for voluntary redundancy, which was accepted by about 65,000 federal workers, unions said involuntary dismissals had begun.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, praised the rare court victory.“This goes to show that lawfare will not ultimately prevail over the will of 77 million Americans who supported President Trump and his priorities,” she said.But mostly the courts have so far ruled against the Trump administration as it pursues a power grab.The American Bar Association, which represents hundreds of thousands of lawyers in the US, has condemned what it called the Trump administration’s “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself”.“We have seen attempts at wholesale dismantling of departments and entities created by Congress without seeking the required congressional approval to change the law,” it said.The ABA also condemned “efforts to dismiss employees with little regard for the law and protections they merit” and social media posts intended “to inflame”.“This is chaotic. It may appeal to a few. But it is wrong. And most Americans recognize it is wrong. It is also contrary to the rule of law,” it said.It’s likely that at least some of the flood of lawsuits will end up before the supreme court. The administration may in fact want to see some cases reach the highest court, which has a solid conservative majority after Trump appointed three of its nine justices during his first term, as it seeks to consolidate even more power in the presidency over issues such as who has final control over spending allocated by Congress.But the process of moving through district and appeals courts before making it to the supreme court is unlikely to be swift, by which time Musk may already have achieved much of what he aims to do in wrecking the work of USAid, the education department and other federal agencies.Then there is the unpredictability of a supreme court that has already overturned precedent in striking down the right to abortion.Chemerinsky believes the Trump administration is all but certain to lose cases on birthright citizenship, the freeze on spending and the dismissals of commissioners that oversee labour rights, consumer protection and equal employment opportunities, because they are in breach of federal law. He said the court was also likely to order the administration to back down from attempts to eliminate individual agencies created by Congress.But what if the administration follows Vance’s call to openly defy the courts? Chemerinsky said that would set up “a constitutional confrontation unlike any we’ve seen”.“The courts have limited ability to enforce their orders. They could hold individuals other than the president in contempt of court. They could figure out who’s responsible for carrying out the court order and hold that person in contempt with fines or jail for civil contempt. But the idea of the courts holding a cabinet secretary, an attorney general, a secretary of defence in contempt is just unheard of in the United States,” he said.“It’s so hard to imagine where we’ll be in four years. When you think about what’s going on in just three weeks, it’s certain Donald Trump is claiming expansive executive power beyond what any president has ever asserted. How much will the courts allow that? There’s no way to know.” More

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      Elon Musk’s ‘efficiency’ agency team at the Pentagon to meet defense staff

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      Members of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” arrived at the Pentagon Friday, in what appeared to be their first meeting with defense department staff, a US official told Reuters. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.Donald Trump has said the Pentagon would be an early target of Musk’s government budget and personnel slashing team and that he expects the tech billionaire to find hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud and abuse in the department.Last week, Trump confirmed that he had asked Musk to review spending in the sprawling defense department. “I’ve instructed him to go check out education, to check out the Pentagon, which is the military. And you know, sadly, you’ll find some things that are pretty bad.”Defense department spending has long been the subject of debate across the political spectrum, with its budget approaching $1tn per year. In December, then president Joe Biden signed a bill authorizing $895bn in defense spending for the fiscal year. But Democrats have questioned whether Musk – an unelected official with lucrative contracts at the department through his company SpaceX – is the best poised to negotiate reforms.In recent months, Trump has formed a close relationship with Musk as the world’s richest man spent $250m on the president’s re-election campaign. When he took office, Trump appointed Musk to lead the newly formed, so-called “department of government efficiency”.Since then, the agency has called for mass layoffs across many government agencies, including the US Agency for International Development, the Department of Education, the Small Business Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the General Services Administration. More layoffs are expected to follow at the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services.On Tuesday, Musk took questions from reporters alongside the president in an Oval Office ceremony regarding the closure of government offices. Next week, the pair are expected to appear together on Fox News in their first televised joint appearance.Musk’s team’s meeting at the Pentagon came the same day it published classified information on its website, according to the Huffington Post. The leak included statistics from the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates spy satellites – including hundreds built by Musk’s SpaceX company. The office’s budgets and head counts are classified.Also Friday, a federal judge extended a temporary order blocking Doge from accessing treasury records that contain sensitive personal data such as social security and bank account numbers for millions of Americans. The case alleges the Trump administration allowed Musk’s team access to the treasury department’s central payment system in violation of federal law.A government watchdog is expected to launch an inquiry into security over the US treasury’s payments system.Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, another close Trump ally, has downplayed concerns about Musk’s agenda for the agency. Hegseth said he had already been in touch with Musk but on Tuesday added: “We’re not going to do things that are to the detriment of American operational or tactical capabilities.” Hegseth has said he wants to increase overall US defense spending. More

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      Under-pressure prosecutors ask to drop Eric Adams charges after seven resign

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      Under immense pressure from Donald Trump’s justice department leadership, prosecutors in Washington have asked a federal judge to dismiss the criminal corruption case against Eric Adams, the New York mayor, rather than see the entire public integrity office be fired.The prosecutors, Edward Sullivan and Antoinette Bacon, filed the request on Friday night to withdraw the charges against Adams that included bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions.The move capped a week of turmoil at the department where seven prosecutors – including the acting US attorney in southern district of New York, the head of the criminal division and the head of the public integrity section – resigned in protest rather than dismiss the case for political reasons.And it followed an extraordinary showdown after the acting deputy attorney general Bove, facing opposition from prosecutors in New York and pushing to bring the justice department to heel, forced the public integrity section to find someone to put their name on the dismissal or be fired themselves.The roughly hour-long meeting, where the public integrity section weighed whether to resign en masse after agreeing that the dismissal of the Adams case was improper, culminated with Sullivan, a veteran career prosecutor, agreeing to take the fall for his colleagues, according to two people familiar with the matter.The decision gave the justice department what it needed to seek the end of the Adams case. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, said in an appearance on Fox News afterwards that the mayor’s case “is being dismissed today”, although that power rests with the presiding US district judge, Dale Ho, in New York.Ho has limited ability to deny the request but could still order an evidentiary hearing into why the department was ordering the end of the corruption case against Adams, which threatens to unearth deeper revelations into the fraught background behind a decision castigated by the lead prosecutor as a quid pro quo deal.The department’s rationale to dismiss the case was necessarily political: Bove had argued that it was impeding Adams from fully cooperating with Trump’s immigration crackdown – and was notably not making the decision based on the strength of the evidence or legal theory underpinning the case.The saga started on Monday. After Bove ordered the charges against Adams to be withdrawn, Danielle Sassoon, the acting US attorney for the southern district of New York, sent a remarkable letter to the attorney general that said Bove’s directive was “inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor”.Sassoon also made a startling accusation in her letter, writing that the mayor’s lawyers had “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed”.A lawyer for Adams, Alex Spiro, denied the accusation, saying: “The idea that there was a quid pro quo is a total lie. We offered nothing and the department asked nothing of us. We were asked if the case had any bearing on national security and immigration enforcement and we truthfully answered it did.”On Friday, Adams himself said in a statement: “I never offered – nor did anyone offer on my behalf – any trade of my authority as your mayor for an end to my case. Never.”Sassoon, a conservative career prosecutor, also revealed in her letter that her team had intended in recent weeks to add a further obstruction of justice charge against Adams. For good measure, she castigated Bove for scolding a member of her team for taking notes at the meeting and ordering that the notes be confiscated.Apparently realizing that Sassoon would not agree to drop the case, two people familiar with the matter said, Bove attempted to end-run the situation by having the public integrity section at justice department headquarters in Washington take over the case and request its dismissal.The move prompted a wave of resignations from career prosecutors. On Thursday, Bove wrote back to Sassoon criticizing her for insubordination and placing her two lieutenants, Hagan Scotten and Derek Wikstrom, on administrative leave.Meanwhile, in Washington, Kevin Driscoll, the acting head of the criminal division which oversees public integrity, tendered his resignation with John Keller, the acting head of the integrity section itself, rather than go along with the dismissal.After Keller’s departure,Marco Palmieri became the third of four deputy chiefs of the public integrity section to resign, leaving the team without a clear leadership aside from three senior litigation counsels who served under the deputy chiefs.By Friday, Scotten resigned while on administrative leave. In a scathing rebuke of Bove, he wrote: “If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.” More

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      Trump and Vance are courting Europe’s far right to spread their political gospel

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      The Trump administration is making a big bet on Europe’s hard right.Speaking at a conference of Europe’s leaders in Munich on Friday, the US vice-president JD Vance stunned the room by delivering what amounted to a campaign speech against Germany’s sitting government just one week before an election in which the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim AfD is set to take second place.As Vance accused foreign leaders of suppressing free speech, failing to halt illegal migration and running in fear from voters’ true beliefs, a whisper of “Jesus Christ” and the squirming in chairs could be heard in an overflow room.Hours later he met with Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD, breaking a taboo in German politics called the “firewall against the far-right”, meant to kept the anti-immigrant party with ties to extremists out of the mainstream and of any ruling coalition.“It’s an incredibly controversial thing for him to do,” said Kristine Berzina, the managing director of the German Marshall Fund’s Geostrategy North, who was at the Munich Security Conference.The backing of Vance – or Elon Musk, who recently gave a video address at an AfD party summit – is unlikely to tilt the result of Germany’s elections, said Berzina. And it’s unlikely to browbeat the ruling Christian Democratic Union, which should win next week’s vote, into allowing AfD to enter any coalition.But the US right under Trump does have its eyes set on a broader transformation in Europe: the rise of populist parties that share an anti-immigration and isolationist worldview and will join the US in its assault on globalism and liberal values. They see those leaders in Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, as well as the UK’s Reform party and Marine Le Pen in France.“It is personal and it is political in terms of far-right political alignment,” she said. “It also opens the door to what other unprecedented things are we going to see in terms of the US hand in European politics.”Could the US president even threaten serious policy shifts like tariffs based on an unsatisfactory German coalition? “That would be normally unthinkable,” she said in response to that question. “But in 2025, very little is unthinkable.”Trump has claimed a broad mandate despite winning the popular vote by a smaller margin than any US leader since the early 2000s. And he seeks to remake politics at home and redefine the US relationship with its allies abroad, many of whom attacked him personally in the wake of the January 6 insurrection and his second presidential campaign.Vance also wanted to antagonise Europe’s leaders on Friday. He refused to meet with Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor who should be among the US’ key partners in negotiations with Russia over the future of the war in Ukraine. “We don’t need to see him, he won’t be chancellor long,” one former US official told Politico of the Vance team’s approach.That speaks to a trend in the Trump administration’s thinking: that voters abroad will handle what his negotiations and alliances cannot. As Vance stunned the European elite on Friday, he told them that “if you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you”.“You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years,” he said.This is something that Vladimir Putin, who waited years for the return of a Trump administration, knows well regarding his war in Ukraine: sometimes you have to bide your time until conditions are right.And it’s something that Trump intimated about Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy as he riffed on his plan to end the war through negotiations that would cede Ukrainian territory and give up Kyiv’s designs on Nato membership.“He’s going to have to do what he has to do,” Trump said of Zelenskyy agreeing to a deal. “But, you know, his poll numbers aren’t particularly great.” More