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    US supreme court clears way for Trump officials to resume mass government firings

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    The US supreme court has cleared the way for Donald Trump’s administration to resume plans for mass firings of federal workers that critics warn could threaten critical government services.Extending a winning streak for the US president, the justices on Tuesday lifted a lower court order that had frozen sweeping federal layoffs known as “reductions in force” while litigation in the case proceeds.The decision could result in hundreds of thousands of job losses at the departments of agriculture, commerce, health and human services, state, treasury, veterans affairs and other agencies.Democrats condemned the ruling. Antjuan Seawright, a party strategist, said: “I’m disappointed but I’m not shocked or surprised. This rightwing activist court has proven ruling after ruling, time after time, that they are going to sing the songs and dance to the tune of Trumpism. A lot of this is just implementation of what we saw previewed in Project 2025.”Project 2025, a plan drawn up by the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank, set out a blueprint for downsizing government. Trump has claimed that voters gave him a mandate for the effort and he tapped billionaire ally Elon Musk to lead the charge through the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, though Musk has since departed.In February, Trump announced “a critical transformation of the federal bureaucracy” in an executive order directing agencies to prepare for a government overhaul aimed at significantly reducing the workforce and gutting offices.In its brief unsigned order on Tuesday, the supreme court said Trump’s administration was “likely to succeed on its argument that the executive order” and a memorandum implementing his order were lawful. The court said it was not assessing the legality of any specific plans for layoffs at federal agencies.Liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole member of the nine-person court to publicly dissent from the decision, which overturns San Francisco-based district judge Susan Illston’s 22 May ruling.Jackson wrote that Illston’s “temporary, practical, harm-reducing preservation of the status quo was no match for this court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this president’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture”.She also described her colleagues as making the “wrong decision at the wrong moment, especially given what little this Court knows about what is actually happening on the ground”.Illston had argued in her ruling that Trump had exceeded his authority in ordering the downsizing, siding with a group of unions, non-profits and local governments that challenged the administration. “As history demonstrates, the president may broadly restructure federal agencies only when authorized by Congress,” she wrote.The judge blocked the agencies from carrying out mass layoffs and limited their ability to cut or overhaul federal programmes. Illston also ordered the reinstatement of workers who had lost their jobs, though she delayed implementing this portion of her ruling while the appeals process plays out.Illston’s ruling was the broadest of its kind against the government overhaul pursued by Trump and Doge. Tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired, have left their jobs via deferred resignation programmes or have been placed on leave.The administration had previously challenged Illston’s order at the San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals but lost in a 2-1 ruling on 30 May. That prompted the justice department to make an emergency request to the supreme court, contending that controlling the personnel of federal agencies “lies at the heartland” of the president’s executive branch authority.The plaintiffs had urged the supreme court to deny the justice department’s request. Allowing the Trump administration to move forward with its “breakneck reorganization”, they wrote, would mean that “programs, offices and functions across the federal government will be abolished, agencies will be radically downsized from what Congress authorized, critical government services will be lost and hundreds of thousands of federal employees will lose their jobs”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe supreme court’s rejection of that argument on Tuesday was welcomed by Trump allies. Pam Bondi, the attorney general, posted on the X social media platform: “Today, the Supreme Court stopped lawless lower courts from restricting President Trump’s authority over federal personnel – another Supreme Court victory thanks to @thejusticedept attorneys. Now, federal agencies can become more efficient than ever before.The state department wrote on X: “Today’s near unanimous decision from the Supreme Court further confirms that the law was on our side throughout this entire process. We will continue to move forward with our historic reorganization plan at the State Department, as announced earlier this year. This is yet another testament to President Trump’s dedication to following through on an America First agenda.”In recent months the supreme court has sided with Trump in some major cases that were acted upon on an emergency basis since he returned to office in January.It cleared the way for Trump’s administration to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their own without offering them a chance to show the harms they could face. In two cases, it let the administration end temporary legal status previously granted on humanitarian grounds to hundreds of thousands of migrants.It also allowed Trump to implement his ban on transgender people in the US military, blocked a judge’s order for the administration to rehire thousands of fired employees and twice sided with Doge. In addition, the court curbed the power of federal judges to impose nationwide rulings impeding presidential policies.On Tuesday the Democracy Forward coalition condemned the supreme court for intervening in what it called Trump’s unlawful reorganisation of the federal government. It said in a statement: “Today’s decision has dealt a serious blow to our democracy and puts services that the American people rely on in grave jeopardy.“This decision does not change the simple and clear fact that reorganizing government functions and laying off federal workers en masse haphazardly without any congressional approval is not allowed by our Constitution.” More

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      Supreme court lifts order blocking Trump’s federal layoffs, paving way for mass job cuts – US politics live

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      The supreme court has cleared the way for Donald Trump’s administration to resume carrying out mass job cuts and the restructuring of agencies, key elements of his campaign to downsize and reshape the federal government.The justices lifted San Francisco-based US district judge Susan Illston’s 22 May order that had blocked large-scale federal layoffs called “reductions in force” affecting potentially hundreds of thousands of jobs, while litigation in the case proceeds.Workforce reductions were planned at the US departments of agriculture, commerce, health and human services, state, treasury, veterans affairs and more than a dozen other agencies.Illston wrote in her ruling that Trump had exceeded his authority in ordering the downsizing, siding with a group of unions, non-profits and local governments that challenged the administration.“As history demonstrates, the president may broadly restructure federal agencies only when authorized by Congress,” Illston wrote.The judge blocked the agencies from carrying out mass layoffs and limited their ability to cut or overhaul federal programs. She also ordered the reinstatement of workers who had lost their jobs, though she delayed implementing this portion of her ruling while the appeals process plays out.Illston’s ruling was the broadest of its kind against the government overhaul being pursued by Trump and Doge.The San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals in a 2-1 ruling on 30 May denied the administration’s request to halt the judge’s ruling.It said the administration had not shown that it would suffer an irreparable injury if the judge’s order remained in place and that the plaintiffs were likely to prevail in their lawsuit.The ruling prompted the justice department’s 2 June emergency request to the supreme court to halt Illston’s order.Controlling the personnel of federal agencies “lies at the heartland” of the president’s executive branch authority, the justice department said in its filing to the supreme court.“The constitution does not erect a presumption against presidential control of agency staffing, and the president does not need special permission from Congress to exercise core Article II powers,” the filing said, referring to the constitution’s section delineating presidential authority.The plaintiffs urged the supreme court to deny the request. Allowing the Trump administration to move forward with its “breakneck reorganization”, they wrote, would mean that “programs, offices and functions across the federal government will be abolished, agencies will be radically downsized from what Congress authorized, critical government services will be lost and hundreds of thousands of federal employees will lose their jobs”.The Supreme Court’s ruling today will allow the Trump administration to proceed with its plans to layoff vast swaths of federal workers. The impacted agencies will include: the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, State, Treasury and Veterans Affairs.Pam Bondi, the attorney general, applauded the supreme court’s ruling today allowing the Trump administration’s mass federal layoffs to proceed.Writing on social media, Bondi said: “Today, the Supreme Court stopped lawless lower courts from restricting President Trump’s authority over federal personnel.”“Now, federal agencies can become more efficient than ever before,” she added.The supreme court’s ruling to allow Donald Trump’s mass federal layoffs to continue “dealt a serious blow to our democracy and puts services that the American people rely on in grave jeopardy”, the unions, non-profits and local governments that filed the lawsuit said in a statement today.The plaintiffs added that the court’s ruling “does not change the simple and clear fact that reorganizing government functions and laying off federal workers en masse haphazardly without any congressional approval is not allowed by our constitution”.It appears that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived at the White House for his closed-door meeting with Donald Trump.A White House pool reporter says that Netanyahu’s motorcade has arrived, though press did not see Netanyahu enter the White House as he used a different entrance.Travelers will soon be able to keep their shoes on while traversing US airport security, the Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem announced today, in a reversal of a nearly two decades old policy.In a press conference at Reagan airport today, Noem announced the new Transportation Security Administration policy, which she said she hoped would make travel to the United States easier ahead of the Olympics, World Cup and 250th anniversary of the country.“The Golden Age of America is here,” she said. “We’re so excited that we can make the experience for those individuals traveling throughout our airports in the United States more hospitable.”The TSA policy requiring travelers to remove their footwear dates back to 2006.Donald Trump’s scheduled meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is starting later than the announced 4.30pm ET start time. We’ll bring you the top lines once it begins.Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole member of the Supreme Court to dissent in the court’s recent ruling clearing the way for Donald Trump’s administration to resume mass job cuts and the restructuring of federal agencies.In her dissent, Jackson criticized the court’s “enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture” and called the decision “hubristic and senseless”.She warned that the administration’s actions “promises mass employee terminations, widespread cancellation of federal programs and services, and the dismantling of much of the Federal Government as Congress has created it”.Marco Rubio is headed to Malaysia this week, the Washington Post reports. The trip will mark the secretary of state’s first visit to Asia, which comes as the White House has just announced steep tariffs on goods imported from many other Asian nations.Yesterday, Donald Trump announced 25% tariffs on goods from Malaysia, and equal or higher tariffs on goods from Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Myanmar.Relatedly, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, told CNBC today that US officials will meet with their Chinese counterparts to discuss trade between the two countries next month.The supreme court has cleared the way for Donald Trump’s administration to resume carrying out mass job cuts and the restructuring of agencies, key elements of his campaign to downsize and reshape the federal government.The justices lifted San Francisco-based US district judge Susan Illston’s 22 May order that had blocked large-scale federal layoffs called “reductions in force” affecting potentially hundreds of thousands of jobs, while litigation in the case proceeds.Workforce reductions were planned at the US departments of agriculture, commerce, health and human services, state, treasury, veterans affairs and more than a dozen other agencies.Illston wrote in her ruling that Trump had exceeded his authority in ordering the downsizing, siding with a group of unions, non-profits and local governments that challenged the administration.“As history demonstrates, the president may broadly restructure federal agencies only when authorized by Congress,” Illston wrote.The judge blocked the agencies from carrying out mass layoffs and limited their ability to cut or overhaul federal programs. She also ordered the reinstatement of workers who had lost their jobs, though she delayed implementing this portion of her ruling while the appeals process plays out.Illston’s ruling was the broadest of its kind against the government overhaul being pursued by Trump and Doge.The San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals in a 2-1 ruling on 30 May denied the administration’s request to halt the judge’s ruling.It said the administration had not shown that it would suffer an irreparable injury if the judge’s order remained in place and that the plaintiffs were likely to prevail in their lawsuit.The ruling prompted the justice department’s 2 June emergency request to the supreme court to halt Illston’s order.Controlling the personnel of federal agencies “lies at the heartland” of the president’s executive branch authority, the justice department said in its filing to the supreme court.“The constitution does not erect a presumption against presidential control of agency staffing, and the president does not need special permission from Congress to exercise core Article II powers,” the filing said, referring to the constitution’s section delineating presidential authority.The plaintiffs urged the supreme court to deny the request. Allowing the Trump administration to move forward with its “breakneck reorganization”, they wrote, would mean that “programs, offices and functions across the federal government will be abolished, agencies will be radically downsized from what Congress authorized, critical government services will be lost and hundreds of thousands of federal employees will lose their jobs”.Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet again on Tuesday evening to discuss Gaza, a day after they met for hours while officials conducted indirect negotiations on a US-brokered ceasefire.Trump and Netanyahu dined together on Monday at the White House during the Israeli leader’s third US visit since the president began his second term on 20 January.Netanyahu spent much of Tuesday at the Capitol, telling reporters after a meeting with House speaker Mike Johnson that while he did not think Israel’s campaign in the Palestinian territory was done, negotiators are “certainly working” on a ceasefire.“We have still to finish the job in Gaza, release all our hostages, eliminate and destroy Hamas’ military and government capabilities,” Netanyahu said.Netanyahu’s plan to return to the White House at 4.30pm ET pushed back his meeting with Senate leaders to Wednesday.Shortly after Netanyahu spoke, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff said he hoped to reach a temporary ceasefire agreement this week.“We are hopeful that by the end of this week, we’ll have an agreement that will bring us into a 60-day ceasefire. Ten live hostages will be released. Nine deceased will be released,” Witkoff told reporters at a meeting of Trump’s cabinet earlier.In his remarks to reporters at Congress, Netanyahu praised Trump, saying there has never been closer coordination between the US and Israel in his country’s history.A new study of defense department spending previewed exclusively to the Guardian shows that most of the Pentagon’s discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 has gone to outside military contractors, providing a $2.4tn boon in public funds to private firms in what was described as a “continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing”.The report from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Costs of War program at Brown University said that the Trump administration’s new Pentagon budget will push annual US military spending past the $1tn mark.That will deliver a projected windfall of more than half a trillion dollars that will be shared among top arms firms such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon as well as a growing military tech sector with close allies in the administration such as JD Vance, the report said.The report is compiled of statistics of Pentagon spending and contracts from 2020 to 2024, during which time the top five Pentagon contractors (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman) received $771bn in contract awards. Overall, private firms received approximately 54% of the department’s discretionary spending of $4.4tn over that period.Taking into account supplemental funding for the Pentagon passed by Congress under Trump’s flagship sweeping tax and spending bill, the report said, the US military budget will have nearly doubled this century, increasing 99% since 2000.“The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in September 2021 did not result in a peace dividend,” the authors of the report wrote. “Instead, President Biden requested, and Congress authorized, even higher annual budgets for the Pentagon, and President Trump is continuing that same trajectory of escalating military budgets.”That contradicts early indications from Trump in February that he could cut military spending in half, adding that he would tell China and Russia that “there’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1tn on the military … and I’m going to say we can spend this on other things”. Instead, the spending bill pushed by Trump through Congress included a $157bn spending boost for the Pentagon.The government of El Salvador has acknowledged to United Nations investigators that the Trump administration maintains control of the Venezuelan men who were deported from the US to a notorious Salvadoran prison, contradicting past public statements by officials from both countries.The revelation was contained in court filings on Monday by lawyers for more than 100 migrants who are seeking to challenge their deportations to El Salvador’s mega-prison known as Cecot.“In this context, the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities,” Salvadorian officials wrote in response to queries from the unit of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.The UN group has been looking into the fate of the men who were sent to El Salvador from the US in mid-March, even after a federal judge had ordered the planes that were carrying them to be turned around.The Trump administration has argued that it is powerless to return the men, as they are beyond the reach of US courts and no longer have access to due process rights or other US constitutional guarantees.But lawyers for the migrants said the UN report shows otherwise. American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Lee Gelernt said in an email:
      El Salvador has confirmed what we and everyone else understood: it is the United States that controls what happens to the Venezuelans languishing at Cecot. Remarkably the US government didn’t provide this information to us or the court.
      Skye Perryman, CEO and president of Democracy Forward, said the documents show “that the administration has not been honest with the court or the American people”. The ACLU and Democracy Forward are both representing the migrants.A justice department spokesperson declined to comment. White House and homeland security department officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Associated Press.The US education secretary, Linda McMahon, yesterday threatened the state of California with legal action after the state refused to ban transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports as demanded by the Trump administration.“@CAgovernor, you’ll be hearing from @AGPamBondi,” McMahon wrote on X, using the handles for California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the US attorney general, Pam Bondi.McMahon’s statement was the latest salvo in the culture wars over transgender youth and ratchets up the personal rivalry between Trump and Newsom. Trump has made reversing advances in transgender rights a priority since returning to office on 20 January, while California law has allowed student athletes to participate in sports in alignment with their gender identity since 2013.The justice department declined to comment and the education department did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for clarification on the meaning of McMahon’s comment.California’s state education department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Newsom’s office and the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), the governing body for high school sports, declined to comment.The US education department issued a statement in June declaring California in violation of the Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IV, the education law banning sex-based discrimination, and demanding the state alter its policy. The state rejected the federal government’s directive, and in June filed a pre-enforcement lawsuit against the US justice department in anticipation of legal action.With controversy brewing ahead of the state high school track and field championship in June, the CIF allowed girls displaced from the finals by a transgender athlete to also be granted space to compete. The CIF also allowed girls to appear on the winners’ podium if they would have won a medal without a transgender athlete competing.As a result, the CIF crowned two champions in the girls’ high jump and triple jump after transgender girl AB Hernandez won both events.During his cabinet meeting, Donald Trump also suggested his administration was looking into taking over governance of Washington DC.Trump said his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was in close touch with the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, a Democrat.It is not the first time the president floated a federal takeover of the city, home to the White House, Congress and the supreme court.Trump told reporters in February: “I think we should take over Washington DC – make it safe. I think that we should govern District of Columbia.”Under home rule, Congress already vets all laws in the city and federal lawmakers can overturn some of them. However, it would take an act of Congress to make federal rule a reality.Both houses would have to vote to repeal the 1973 Home Rule Act. It would be a controversial move and unlikely to make it through.Donald Trump said he would announce a 50% tariff on imported copper on Tuesday. The Trump administration announced a so-called Section 232 investigation into US imports of the red metal in February.Trump had ordered the investigation into possible tariffs on copper imports to rebuild US production of a metal critical to electric vehicles, military hardware, semiconductors and a wide range of consumer goods.Trump signed an order directing the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, to start a new national security investigation under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the same law that Trump used in his first term to impose 25% global tariffs on steel and aluminum.A White House official said any potential tariff rate would be determined by the investigation, adding that Trump preferred tariffs over quotas.The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, said first responders in Texas are “still looking for a lot of little girls” who remain missing after a devastating flood in Texas.Noem described the scene in Texas as Trump met with his cabinet at the White House on Tuesday.Noem visited Camp Mystic in Kerrville on Saturday after the catastrophic flood on Friday.You can read our Texas live coverage here:A temporary ceasefire agreement in Gaza could be finalized by the end of the week, Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, said at the cabinet meeting.Witkoff added that proximity talks had reduced outstanding issues from “four issues … to one”.“We are hopeful that by the end of this week, we will have an agreement that will bring us into a 60-day ceasefire,” Witkoff said. “Ten live hostages will be released. Nine deceased will be released.”Trump added that he would meet with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, later to discuss Gaza “almost exclusively”, describing the situation as “a tragedy” while claiming that the prime minister has been “very unfairly treated” because of his corruption trial.“He’s been very unfairly treated. I think what they’ve done to him in Israel is very unfair. Having to do with this trial, he’s a wartime prime minister, had an unbelievable outcome, and I think he’s been treated very unfairly,” Trump said of Netanyahu. More

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      US immigration officials release Iranian woman nabbed from her home’s yard

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      Federal immigration officials have released an Iranian woman whom they allowed to stay in the US without legal status for the last 47 years, until agents in tactical gear and unmarked vehicles suddenly nabbed her in front of her New Orleans home on 22 June – the day after American forces bombed Iran.A letter-writing campaign extolling decades of community service by Mandonna “Donna” Kashanian, 64, and care for her neighbors in the quiet Lakeview section of the city helped get her case in front of Steve Scalise, the Republican US House majority leader, and then top Trump administration officials, Kashanian’s neighbor and longtime friend Connie Uddo said.“We got a little over 200 letters in just a week,” Uddo said. “People were calling constantly.”She recounted how Scalise, their community’s congressperson, “was inundated with phone calls and emails and said he had to take a look”. Scalise and his staff met with Kashanian’s family, researched her case, spoke with Trump administration officials and got it to federal immigration officials.Kashanian’s American husband of 35 years, Russ Milne, and their 32-year-old daughter, Kaitlynn, are now able to pick her up from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center in Basile, Louisiana – three hours west of New Orleans – and bring her home.Kashanian came to the US legally on a student visa in 1978, when she was just 17. She tried to stay beyond her visa by seeking asylum after the anti-American Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution seized control of her home country in 1979. But court records show she was denied asylum in 1984 and lost her last appeal in 1993.She also tried to get permanent legal residency – colloquially known as a green card – in her 20s by marrying a US citizen, but she admitted it was a sham and got divorced. A federal court ruled in 2001 that the fraudulent marriage disqualified her from ever getting legal status by getting married, no matter how legitimate. The court acknowledged her marriage to Milne was “bona fide” but ruled that she couldn’t overcome the sham one from her 20s.Still, Stephanie Hilferty, a Louisiana state House member and Republican from the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, said Kashanian’s case deserved a second look. And she worked with Kashanian’s family to gather letters about Kashanian’s character and dedication to America, hoping to get them in front of Donald Trump.Scalise also spoke with Russ and Kaitlynn Milne about Kashanian’s case. Scalise then spoke with the Trump administration, ensuring that Ice officials reviewed her file and read the hundreds of letters Hilferty had collected.Kashanian’s court records show immigration officials ordered her deportation several times since 1983. But each time, they made her departure voluntary because of what the court called her “good moral character”. And for the last two decades, a judge allowed her to stay as long as she continued to follow the law and checked in regularly.She has no criminal record and her family says she’s never missed an immigration check-in appointment. But she was never able to attain legal immigration status despite obeying the rules the government and courts imposed on her so she could stay.Scalise’s office is planning to work with Kashanian’s attorney to help her pursue asylum or permanent residency under current immigration laws, which have changed since she first pursued those avenues four decades ago.The timing of Kashanian’s detention came just after the US’s 21 June airstrikes in Iran. Those bombings coincided with the ramping-up of deportations of Iranians by the Trump administration.Kashanian’s Ice detention also came amid a nationwide crackdown by the agency, which has seen tens of thousands of immigrants detained, often by masked agents, plunging many communities into fear and outraging civil liberties advocates. More

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      Netanyahu vows to combat what he calls ‘vilification against Israel’ online

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      Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that he’s vowed to combat an orchestrated social media campaign of “vilification and demonization” that he says is responsible for a drop in support for Israel among US voters, especially Democrats.“I think there’s been a concerted effort to spread vilification and demonization against Israel on social media,” the Israeli prime minister told journalists on Capitol Hill after being asked to respond to opinion polls showing a move away from the historic trend of strong backing for Israel.“It’s directed, it’s funded. It is malignant. We intend to fight it, because nothing defeats lies like the truth, and we shall spread the truth for everyone to see once people are exposed to the facts, we win hands down. That’s what we intend to do in the coming months and years.”Netanyahu’s comments came during a visit to Congress, where he met the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson.They also followed the recent victory of Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary race for the mayor of New York, which commentators believe was partly fueled by the candidate’s vocal support for Palestinian rights and criticism of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.A range of surveys have shows a marked decline in support for Israel among Democratic-leaning voters amid rising disquiet about the impact of the war in the now devastated coastal territory. The ongoing war has killed about 60,000 people – most of them Palestinians – and has seen much of the population threatened with starvation.A Gallup poll in March showed less than half of the US public sympathized with Israel’s position, the lowest figure recorded since the organization started taking surveys on the issue. Among Democrat voters, 38% sympathize with the Palestinians over the Israelis, a reversal of a 2013 Gallup survey, which saw Democrats sympathizing with Israelis by a margin of 36%.Other polls have shown similar trends, raising concerns for the future of the traditional strong bipartisan US support for Israel.The Israeli leader said his government had accepted a proposal from Qatari mediators for a fresh ceasefire with Hamas, saying it matched what had been proposed by Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWitkoff, speaking at a cabinet meeting earlier on Tuesday, had spelled out the terms of a proposed deal to broker a 60-day ceasefire he hoped would be in place by the end of the week, saying it would involve the release of Israeli hostages.“Ten live hostages will be released, nine deceased will be released,” Witkoff said. “We’re meeting at the president’s direction with all the hostage families to let them know, and we think that this will lead to a lasting peace.”Netanyahu said: “We accepted a proposal that came from the mediators. It’s a good proposal. It matches Steve Witkoff’s original idea and we think that we’ve gotten closer to it, and I hope we can cross the line.”He also said he expected to meet the US president again during his current visit, his third to Washington since Trump was inaugurated in January. The two met at the White House on Monday evening, when Netanyahu presented Trump with a letter nominating him for a Nobel peace prize.Netanyahu said the the military coordination with Washington during Israel’s recent 12-day war with Iran, which resulted in repeated strikes on Tehran’s nuclear facilities, was unprecedented.“In the entire 77 years of Israeli history, there has never been the degree of coordination of cooperation and trust between America and Israel as we have today,” he said. “And I credit President Trump with this extraordinary achievement.” More

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      Pentagon provided $2.4tn to private arms firms to ‘fund war and weapons’, report finds

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      A new study of defense department spending previewed exclusively to the Guardian shows that most of the Pentagon’s discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 has gone to outside military contractors, providing a $2.4tn boon in public funds to private firms in what was described as a “continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing”.The report from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Costs of War project at Brown University said that the Trump administration’s new Pentagon budget will push annual US military spending past the $1tn mark.That will deliver a projected windfall of more than half a trillion dollars that will be shared among top arms firms such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon as well as a growing military tech sector with close allies in the administration such as JD Vance, the report said.The report is compiled of statistics of Pentagon spending and contracts from 2020 to 2024, during which time the top five Pentagon contractors (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman) received $771bn in contract awards. Overall, private firms received approximately 54% of the department’s discretionary spending of $4.4tn over that period.Taking into account supplemental funding for the Pentagon passed by Congress under Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”, the report said, the US military budget will have nearly doubled this century, increasing 99% since 2000.The rapid growth in military spending that began under the Bush administration’s post-9/11 and the “global war on terror” has now been continued on spending to counter China as the US’s main rival in the 21st century, as well record foreign arms transfers to Israel and Ukraine.“The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in September 2021 did not result in a peace dividend,” the authors of the report wrote. “Instead, President Biden requested, and Congress authorized, even higher annual budgets for the Pentagon, and President Trump is continuing that same trajectory of escalating military budgets.”That contradicts early indications from Trump in February that he could cut military spending in half, adding that he would tell China and Russia that “there’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1tn on the military … and I’m going to say we can spend this on other things”. Instead, the spending bill pushed by Trump through Congress included a $157bn spending boost for the Pentagon.The growth in spending will increasingly benefit firms in the “military tech” sector who represent tech companies like SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril, the report said, that are “deeply embedded in the Trump administration, which should give it an upper hand in the budget battles to come”.“High Pentagon budgets are often justified because the funds are ‘for the troops’,” said William D Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an author of the report. “But as this paper shows, the majority of the department’s budget goes to corporations, money that has as much to do with special interest lobbying as it does with any rational defense planning. Much of this funding has been wasted on dysfunctional or overpriced weapons systems and extravagant compensation packages.”“These figures represent a continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing,” said Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War project.Calculated for inflation, the military spending dwarfs an approximate $356bn that Congress had appropriated for US diplomacy, development and humanitarian aid.The Trump administration has continued to slash money spent on aid. Last month, the Guardian revealed that a White House review of grants to the state department recommended a near total cut on democracy promotion programs.The Guardian has contacted the Pentagon for comment. More

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      Trump is bullying Canada over ‘digital taxes’ and Canada caved | Joseph Stiglitz

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      Donald Trump’s announcement calling off trade talks with Canada over its digital tax – and that he would impose retaliatory tariffs – demonstrates, once again, not only the president’s ignorance of economics and willful disregard of international norms and the rule of law, but also his willingness to use brute power to get whatever he and the oligarchs who support him want.He was wrong in labeling the tax as outrageous and “a direct and blatant attack on our country”. It is actually an efficient tax, well designed to ensure that the technology companies – the profits of which benefit the tech oligarchs who have come to dominate US policy – pay their fair share of taxes.It is accordingly disappointing that Canada appears to have caved, even more so as the prime minister had stood up strongly against Trump’s demand for Canada to become the 51st state. Regrettably, others are giving in – New Zealand and India have reportedly retreated.Trump’s bullying tactics have been in evidence since he took office. In January he threatened to double taxes on Australian citizens and companies in the US if they went ahead with their planned digital levy.Why digital taxes?Because digital companies operate all over the globe, and generate revenue in countries where they do not have a physical presence, they avoid taxation by shifting revenue and profit around the world. Some of the most egregious examples include Google moving $17bn to Bermuda, Apple owing France 10 years of back taxes, and the Italian government’s recent investigation of Meta over whether the firm owes €938m in VAT payments. Apple was so successful in avoiding taxes in Europe that it is estimated that it paid in some years a tax of just 0.005% on its European profits. Of course, when the most profitable companies in the world don’t pay their fair share of taxes, it just shifts the burden on to others.As more and more activity occurs online, and often from services provided from abroad, countries are losing revenue from sales, employment and profits taxes. Just because an activity is provided digitally doesn’t mean it should not be taxed; indeed, economists argue that digital taxes are among the easiest to administer, precisely because there is a digital record. The idea of the digital service tax is to help countries recoup revenue by taxing any kind of digital service provided from anywhere in the world: online sales, digital advertising, data usage, e-commerce or streaming services. They might include consumption taxes on internet purchases. Indeed, more than 18 countries have such taxes and some 20 others have proposed them.When it looked like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) would get a global agreement to raise corporate taxes, the agreement included a prohibition on digital taxes. Indeed, one of the reasons that the US was even willing to engage in these discussions on global taxation was to circumscribe others’ ability to impose such taxes. While that agreement was under discussion, the US government, influenced by its tech giants, strongly opposed these digital taxes and then US treasury secretary Janet Yellen spent a good deal of time calling up her counterparts and telling them not to impose them.But on 20 January, Trump issued an executive order saying that the agreement that had been negotiated over years and years “had no force or effect” in the US. As a result, more countries are now trying to decide whether to keep or adopt digital services taxes. Imposing them will incur the wrath of the US government and tech giants, but countries are well within their rights to do so. Indeed, there was a moratorium on levying digital taxes while there were some prospects of the OECD agreement going into effect; but with Trump, that prospect has all but disappeared, and that moratorium has come to end.Any country concerned with designing efficient, fair and easy-to-administer digital services duties should consider such taxes – indeed, they have the support not only of economists but of global civil society, including the Independent Commission on Reform of International Corporate Taxation (which I co-chair).skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLong-established principles of international taxation hold that so long as a tax does not discriminate across countries – or corporations that are headquartered in different countries – which taxes a country imposes is a matter of national sovereignty. A country may be foolish, levying taxes that are not good for its economy, but so be it: that is a matter for the country to decide. In this case, the tax is actually good for the economy. What Trump has been doing has violated international norms in several ways: using the threat of tariffs or taxes against corporations headquartered in a country whose policy he dislikes, and walking away from what were supposed to be binding trade agreements, without even a pretense of using the mechanisms for dispute resolution embodied in those agreements.The question now: will countries cave in to these threats or can they stick together and collect the billions they are rightly owed? Make no mistake: what is at stake is more than money that will be collected. It is a matter of the rule of law, which Trump has trampled on so fiercely, both within the US and globally. The rule of law is essential not just for economic performance, but for social justice and democracy. And Canada’s capitulation to Trump’s unilateral move makes a mockery of the whole process by which international agreements are negotiated. Some were skeptical that the so-called “inclusive framework” was but a facade: others may have been at the table, but their voices were not heard. What has now happened verifies this: whatever the US wants, it gets.Canada should have stood up for its principles and national sovereignty, even in the face of such transparent bullying. The alternative now emerging is the law of the jungle, brute power and Canada becoming, de facto, the 51st US state.

      Joseph E Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate in economics, university professor at Columbia University and chief economist of the Roosevelt Institute

      Anya Schiffrin, senior lecturer at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and her student Philip L Crane contributed to this piece More

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      ‘They have promised retribution and retaliation’: the Washington lawyer Trump is targeting

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      Mark Zaid knew he would be targeted if Donald Trump won re-election.The lawyer, who specializes in national security cases, has long been on the US president’s bad side. He represented a whistleblower with knowledge of Trump’s plot to extort Ukraine during Trump’s first impeachment. He frequently talks to the media to critique Trump. His clients include a host of people who are suing the government.He has received a barrage of threats for being publicly anti-Trump. After Trump railed against him at a rally, a man emailed Zaid a death threat and was prosecuted for it, sentenced to a year in prison. Zaid’s social media pages still include calls for him to be tried for treason.It’s safe to say, he’s drawn the ire of Trumpworld.Still, seeing his name in a presidential memo in March alongside high-profile elected and appointed Republicans and Democratic officials, including a former president, surprised him. They seemed like way bigger fish.The memo revoked the security clearances of Joe Biden and his entire family, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney and a handful of others. The memo doesn’t detail why these clearances were revoked, simply saying that it was “no longer in the national interest” for these people to have any access to classified information.“I have no idea why I’m on that list,” Zaid told the Guardian. “The action against me, I get … It’s perfectly consistent with what I expected from him and his administration, but to have me included on that list and the order of our names, why? Why am I fourth, ahead of the president and vice-president?”Trump frequently promised retribution on the 2024 campaign trail. Once he was elected, he and his allies moved quickly to enact a revenge agenda, going after law firms, people who have criticized him, prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases, students who participated in protests, universities, and others who worked to undermine his agenda. The list is long and growing.Zaid had publicly said he was advising a “small number” of his clients to consider leaving the country around the time of Trump’s inauguration, in case they could be arrested, like those who have served as whistleblowers. “I’m taking him and his inner circle at their word. They have promised retribution and retaliation,” he told Politico last November.Now that he’s personally been targeted, he is fighting back. He sued the Trump administration over the revocation, arguing the order was unconstitutionally vague, that his and his clients’ rights to due process were violated and that it impedes first amendment rights to free speech and association and the right to petition the government for grievances.A judge heard oral arguments in the case on 27 June.The White House said the courts don’t have a role in deciding this issue. “The decision to grant any individual access to this nation’s secrets is a sensitive judgment call entrusted to the President,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement to the Guardian. “Weighing these factors and implementing such decisions are core executive powers, and reviewing the President’s clearance decisions falls well outside the judiciary’s authority.”Zaid said he filed the lawsuit to ensure due process and the rule of law are followed and to emphasize that the president is not a king. He wants his security clearance back, but he said he knows he’ll get it back at some point, whether through the courts or in a subsequent presidential administration.“I didn’t do anything. I’m caught up in this political, vindictive battle, so my hope is the lawsuit certainly will reinstate my clearance, but will also hold this administration accountable to the rule of law,” he said.Zaid makes his living in part on having access to sensitive materials. His clients – which include “current and former federal employees, military service members, and government contractors” – seek him out because of his expertise and sensitivity in cases where they need to share classified information with a trusted attorney. His clients and potential clients have lost their ability to use his services.His ongoing cases have been affected, too: after the memo was released, he received a letter from the Central Intelligence Agency’s general counsel that said not only could he not access any classified information going forward, but he also couldn’t “make use of classified information” in his current cases that involve the agency. That would prevent him from working on his Anomalous Health Incidents, or Havana Syndrome, cases.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn one case referenced in his lawsuit, he was denied access to an already-filed classified complaint for one of his clients.One of the lawyers representing Zaid, Norm Eisen, also had his security clearance revoked in the same memo. Zaid’s lawsuit is “a landmark case that will establish that, whatever the permissible grounds may be of taking away security clearances, it’s illegal to do them as an act of revenge, which is what happened here”, Eisen said.Eisen said his own inclusion on the list and the broader retaliation agenda have solidified his resolve – more of a “defrosting effect” than the chilling effect others have described after Trump’s attacks.“One thing that autocratic bullies everywhere start off with is attacking and threatening their enemies,” Eisen said. “So if you’re an American who loves your freedom, and we all do, you should understand these threats as part of a larger pattern. There’s no place for that in the United States. This kind of behavior is un-American.”In his lawsuit, Zaid has drawn attention to the political and personal nature of the Trump administration’s comments about him. Trump, during the 2019 impeachment, called Zaid a “sleazeball” and said he should be sued and maybe tried for treason, alluding to the a 2017 tweet in which Zaid said the “#coup has started” after officials tried to prevent some of Trump’s actions.The director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who tweeted before the memo that Trump had directed her to revoke the clearance, told rightwing commentator Megyn Kelly that revoking clearances including Zaid’s was “fun”. Gabbard also issued a press release that described those who lost their clearances as people who “abused public trust for political purposes”.Zaid said he’s concerned about the chilling effect on the legal field after Trump’s repeated attacks on lawyers and firms.“I know a number of lawyers who I’ve tried to get involved with certain things where they just don’t want to run afoul of this administration because they know how vindictive they are,” he said. More

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      Did National Weather Service cuts lead to the Texas flood disaster? We don’t know | Rebecca Solnit

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      Why exactly so many people drowned in the terrible Independence Day floods that swept through Texas’s Hill Country will probably have multiple explanations that take a while to obtain. But it’s 2025, and people want answers immediately, and lots of people seized on stories blaming the National Weather Service (NWS).There were two opposing reasons to blame this vital government service. For local and state authorities, blaming a branch of the federal government was a way of avoiding culpability themselves. And for a whole lot of people who deplore the Trump/Doge cuts to federal services, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, the idea that the NWS failed served to underscore how destructive those cuts are.Many of them found confirmation in a New York Times story that ran with the sub-headline: “Some experts say staff shortages might have complicated forecasters’ ability to coordinate responses with local emergency management officials.” Might have is not did. Complicated is not failed. It’s a speculative piece easily mistaken for a report, and its opening sentence is: “Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose.”A casual reader could come away thinking that staffing shortages had had consequences. But if you give the airily innuendo-packed sentence more attention, you might want to ask who exactly the anonymous experts were and whether there’s an answer to their questions. Did it actually make it harder, and did they actually manage to do this thing even though it was harder, or not? Did they coordinate with local emergency managers?The piece continues: “The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said,” and “suggested” sounds like we’re getting an interpretation of what these anonymous sources think might have happened or been likely to happen, rather than what actually did. Suggestions are not facts. Likelihoods are not actualities. Eventually we get to a named source: “A spokeswoman for the National Weather Service, Erica Grow Cei, did not answer questions from The New York Times about the Texas vacancies, including how long those positions had been open and whether those vacancies had contributed to the damage caused by the flooding.”In other words, there’s no answer to the suggestions and questions and intimations. Nevertheless, a lot of readers gathered the impression that this was not speculation aired by unnamed experts but confirmation that the NWS had failed. One prominent public figure with three quarters of a million BlueSky followers shared the New York Times piece with this note: “The United States government is no longer able to protect us from real hazards, such as flash floods, because it’s shifting funds to fake hazards, such as a non-existent immigrant crime wave.”If you read down a couple of dozen paragraphs in this New York Times piece, you get to the former NWS director of Congressional Affairs saying “that the local Weather Service offices appeared to have sent out the correct warnings. He said the challenge was getting people to receive those warnings, and then take action.” Nevertheless, the idea the NWS failed became so widespread that Wired magazine published a report specifically to counter it: “Some local and state officials have said that insufficient forecasts from the National Weather Service caught the region off guard. That claim has been amplified by pundits across social media, who say that cuts to the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, its parent organization, inevitably led to the failure in Texas.”They link to the pundit with almost a million followers, who had posted on Twitter: “Now TX officials are blaming a faulty forecast by NWS for the deadly impact of a storm.” Those officials are, but why would we believe them? Wired continues: “But meteorologists who spoke to Wired say that the NWS accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm.” With that, we’re onto another piece of the picture: the difference between accurately predicting a risk and knowing exactly how severe it will be.Climate change, which some reports mentioned and others did not, is both a contributing factor for specific weather disasters and a reason why the future will not necessarily look like the past. For both fires and floods, the old rules about how fast they’ll move and how big they’ll get have expired. Hotter air holds more moisture, and that can and does lead to more torrential downpours and worse flooding. On the other hand, as local newspaper the Kerrville Daily Times reported, Kerr county has a history of extremely heavy rainfall leading to rapid river rise and devastating floods.The Washington Post had a better assessment of what went right and what went wrong: “But even as weather forecasts began to hint at the potential for heavy rain on Thursday, the response exposed a disconnect: few, including local authorities, prepared for anything but their normal Fourth of July. When the precipitation intensified in the early morning hours Friday, many people failed to receive or respond to flood warnings at riverside campsites and cabins that were known to be in the floodplain.” The county, in this report, did not send its first cell-phone alert until Sunday, while “most cellphone alerts were coming from the National Weather Service’s Austin/San Antonio station. But some alerts about life-threatening flooding didn’t come until the predawn hours, and to areas where cellular reception may have been spotty.”It seems like the National Weather Service did its duty despite the cuts, but more are coming. Fossil Free Memo reports: “Just days before the flood, Texas Senator Ted Cruz helped pass the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, a sweeping fossil fuel giveaway that also slashed $200 million from Noaa’s weather forecasting and public alert programs. The money was meant to improve early warnings for exactly the kind of fast-moving, deadly flooding that just hit his own state. The cuts weren’t in the House version. Cruz added them in the Senate, behind closed doors, as chair of the committee that oversees Noaa.” The impact of cuts to vital services is going to degrade everyday life and add to the dangers we face, and as far as politicians like Ted Cruz are concerned, that’s the plan. It will be important to connect cause and effect, when there is a connection.The desire to have an explanation, and the desire for that explanation to be tidy and aligned with one’s politics, easily becomes a willingness to accept what fits. But knowing we don’t know, knowing the answers are not yet in, or there are multiple causes, being careful even with the sources that tell us what we want to hear: all this equipment to survive the information onslaughts of this moment. We all need to be careful about how we get information and reach conclusions – both the practical information about climate catastrophes and weather disasters and the journalism that reports on it. Both the weather and the news require vigilance.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Deadly floods could be new normal as Trump guts federal agencies, experts warn

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      The deadly Texas floods could signal a new norm in the US, as Donald Trump and his allies dismantle crucial federal agencies that help states prepare and respond to extreme weather and other hazards, experts warn.More than 100 are dead and dozens more remain missing after flash floods in the parched area known as Texas Hill Country swept away entire holiday camps and homes on Friday night – in what appears to have been another unremarkable storm that stalled before dumping huge quantities of rain over a short period of time, a phenomena that has becoming increasingly common as the planet warms.It remains unclear why the early warning system failed to result in the timely evacuation of Camp Mystic, where 700 girls were camped on a known flood plain on the Guadalupe River, but there is mounting concern that the chaos and cuts instigated by Trump and his billionaire donor Elon Musk at the National Weather Service (NWS) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) may have contributed to the death toll.“This is the exact kind of storm that meteorologists, climate scientists, emergency management experts have been talking about and warning about for decades at this point, and there’s absolutely no reason that this won’t happen in other parts of the country. This is what happens when you let climate change run unabated and break apart the emergency management system – without investing in that system at the local and state level,” said Samantha Montano, professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy.“It takes a lot of money, expertise and time to eliminate risk and make sure that agencies are prepared to respond when a flood situation like in Texas happens. And if you eliminate those preparedness efforts, if you fire the people who do that work, then the response will not be effective.”Fema was created in 1979 by Jimmy Carter – precisely because states were struggling to cope with major disasters – and works closely with state and local government agencies to provide resources, coordination, technical expertise, leadership and communication with the public when they cannot cope alone.Upon returning to the White House, Trump immediately began threatening to disband Fema, belittling the agency amid its ongoing efforts to help communities devastated by the Los Angeles wildfires and Hurricane Helene, the category 4 storm that left at least 230 people dead in southern Appalachia.The threats were followed by a pledge to dismantle Fema at the end of the 2025 hurricane season, without offering any clear plan about what would come next. The cuts are part of the administration’s unsubstantiated claims that the states and private enterprises are capable and best positioned to provide most federal services including weather forecasting, scientific research and emergency management.Reports suggest that more than a third of Fema’s permanent full-time workforce has been fired or accepted buyouts, including some of its most experienced and knowledgeable leaders who coordinate disaster responses – which can involve multiple federal agencies for months or years.Emergency management and the weather service work hand in hand. At the NWS, more than 600 people have already been laid off or taken early retirement, leading to offices across storm and flood-prone areas of the US to be short of meteorologists and round-the-clock staffing cover. The agency has also had to scale back routine weather monitoring.Two senior meteorologists at the San Antonio NWS office, which is responsible for forecasting in the Hill Country region, were among the casualties of Musk’s buyouts and layoffs. This included the warning coordination meteorologist, who is usually responsible for liaising with local emergency managers to help translate NWS forecasts into likely impacts that inform local actions such as warnings and evacuation orders.But Trump said it was unlikely the staff cuts to the NWS will be reversed, even in the wake of the Texas floods. “I would think not,” the president said on Sunday about a possible reversal. “This was a thing that happened in seconds. Nobody expected it. Nobody saw it. Very talented people are there, they didn’t see it.”Accuweather, the popular commercial weather forecasting services, relies on the NWS for much of its foundational meteorological data and forecasts. Fema often steps in to cover emergency accommodation and reconstruction costs for Americans without adequate insurance and/or the means to rebuild.Reports suggest NWS weather balloons, which assess storm risk by measuring wind speed, humidity, temperature and other conditions that satellites may not detect, have been canceled in recent weeks from Nebraska to Florida due to staff shortages. At the busiest time for storm predictions, deadly heatwaves and wildfires, weather service staffing is down by more than 10% and, for the first time in almost half a century, some forecasting offices no longer have 24/7 cover.In May, the NWS office in eastern Kentucky scrambled to cover the overnight forecast as severe storms moved through the region, triggering multiple tornadoes that eventually killed 28 people.Despite such threats, the Republican budget bill signed by Trump last week cuts $150m in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) to help improve future weather forecasts and also shrinks the amount of money to the National Science Foundation, the premier federal agency supporting basic science and engineering research, by 56% next year.The 2026 budget makes significant cuts to Noaa including terminating the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which in essence could be the end of the efforts to improve warnings for events like the Texas floods, warned Alan Gerard, former head of the Warning Research and Development Division of the Noaa National Severe Storms Laboratory, speaking on DemocracyNow! on Monday.NSF funded research has played a pivotal role in developing early warning systems for all sorts of hazards, but more work is urgently needed to improve local accuracy and community acceptability amid the growing threats due to global heating. There is no other funding source capable of filling this gap.“The Hill Country is a desert area with big rivers which have had historic major floods and that are prone to flash flooding – but like most of rural America do not have gauge systems. Without gauges, the warnings don’t come early enough, and with flash floods every 15 minutes can save lives. This is something we can do better,” said Ryan Thigpen, a flood scientist trying to improve early warning systems in Appalachia .Texas senator Ted Cruz has called for “a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way” in the wake of the disaster, even though he inserted language into the “big beautiful” bill to slash Noaa’s weather forecasting upgrades. Local officials, too, have sought to distract attention away from Trump’s cuts – and their support for his plans – but the lack of leadership at Fema is impossible to ignore especially as Trump plans to visit the area with the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, on Friday.David Richardson, the acting administrator of Fema, has not traveled to Texas. Richardson, a former US marine with no emergency management experience prior to his appointment in May, is most notable for his warning to agency staff to not oppose Trump’s plan for Fema or “I will run right over you.”“A lot of key people at Fema who worked there for years, decades in many cases, and hold the expertise that is needed to be able to actually move the resources of the agency, are gone. Fema is so depleted, it’s unclear if they are even capable of launching a huge response right now,” said Montano, author of Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis.“It’s not the same level as during [hurricane] Helene but there’s already a lot of inaccurate information out there, and Fema is no longer a trusted voice – we haven’t heard from the administrator, only secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem, which is very unusual. We’re almost at the point where we can say no one’s home at Fema… there is no trusted voice,” Montano added. The turmoil at the federal agencies tasked with predicting and responding to disaster comes as the threat from extreme weather grows due to the human-caused climate crisis. The Texas floods occurred in a warmer, more moisture-laden atmosphere than in the past, with one analysis finding that climate change has made conditions 7% wetter and 1.5C hotter than they would’ve been otherwise.“We have added a lot of carbon to the atmosphere, and that extra carbon traps energy in the climate system,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “Because of this extra energy, every weather event we see now carries some influence from climate change. The only question is how big that influence is.”Meanwhile on Monday the White House described the deadly Texas floods as “an act of God”. More