James.galbraith

Google has become so integral to online navigation that its name became a verb, meaning "to find things on the Internet." Soon, Google might just tell you what's on the Internet instead of showing you. The company has announced an expansion of its AI search features, powered by Gemini 2.0. Everyone will soon see more AI Overviews at the top of the results page, but Google is also testing a more substantial change in the form of AI Mode. This version of Google won't show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode.

This marks the debut of Gemini 2.0 in Google search. Google announced the first Gemini 2.0 models in December 2024, beginning with the streamlined Gemini 2.0 Flash. The heavier versions of Gemini 2.0 are still in testing, but Google says it has tuned AI Overviews with this model to offer help with harder questions in the areas of math, coding, and multimodal queries.

With this update, you will begin seeing AI Overviews on more results pages, and minors with Google accounts will see AI results for the first time. In fact, even logged out users will see AI Overviews soon. This is a big change, but it's only the start of Google's plans for AI search.

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AMD is a company that knows a thing or two about capitalizing on a competitor's weaknesses. The company got through its early-2010s nadir partially because its Ryzen CPUs struck just as Intel's current manufacturing woes began to set in, first with somewhat-worse CPUs that were great value for the money and later with CPUs that were better than anything Intel could offer.

Nvidia's untrammeled dominance of the consumer graphics card market should also be an opportunity for AMD. Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards have given buyers very little to get excited about, with an unreachably expensive high-end 5090 refresh and modest-at-best gains from 5080 and 5070-series cards that are also pretty expensive by historical standards, when you can buy them at all. Tech YouTubers—both the people making the videos and the people leaving comments underneath them—have been almost uniformly unkind to the 50 series, hinting at consumer frustrations and pent-up demand for competitive products from other companies.

Enter AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards. These are aimed right at the middle of the current GPU market at the intersection of high sales volume and decent profit margins. They promise good 1440p and entry-level 4K gaming performance and improved power efficiency compared to previous-generation cards, with fixes for long-time shortcomings (ray-tracing performance, video encoding, and upscaling quality) that should, in theory, make them more tempting for people looking to ditch Nvidia.

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Half of the world's climate-heating carbon emissions come from the fossil fuels produced by just 36 companies, analysis has revealed. From a report: The researchers said the 2023 data strengthened the case for holding fossil fuel companies to account for their contribution to global heating. Previous versions of the annual report have been used in legal cases against companies and investors. The report found that the 36 major fossil fuel companies, including Saudi Aramco, Coal India, ExxonMobil, Shell and numerous Chinese companies, produced coal, oil and gas responsible for more than 20bn tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2023. If Saudi Aramco was a country, it would be the fourth biggest polluter in the world after China, the US and India, while ExxonMobil is responsible for about the same emissions as Germany, the world's ninth biggest polluter, according to the data. Global emissions must fall by 45% by 2030 if the world is to have a good chance of limiting temperature rise to 1.5C, the internationally agreed target. However, emissions are still rising, supercharging the extreme weather that is taking lives and livelihoods across the planet. The International Energy Agency has said new fossil fuel projects started after 2021 are incompatible with reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Most of the 169 companies in the Carbon Majors database increased their emissions in 2023, which was the hottest year on record at the time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court handed down a very brief order that effectively requires the government to pay foreign aid contractors as much as $2 billion for work they’ve already completed. The Court’s order is quite narrow and is unlikely to have many implications for future cases.

Shortly after President Donald Trump took office for a second time, his administration attempted to halt funding for the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Wednesday’s Supreme Court order is the latest chapter in ongoing litigation over whether cutting off this funding is legal. In that order, the Supreme Court leaves in place a lower court decision which forbade the administration from “suspending, pausing, or otherwise preventing the obligation or disbursement of appropriated foreign-assistance funds” that had been authorized as of January 19.

So this is a defeat for Trump, but it is an extremely small one. The Supreme Court’s order is only one paragraph long, and it mostly says that the Court will not second-guess the lower court because of an amateurish mistake by acting solicitor general Sarah Harris and the other Justice Department lawyers working on this case. 

The Supreme Court also decided this case, known as Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, in a 5-4 vote — with Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh joining a dissenting opinion by Justice Samuel Alito. That means that, despite Harris’s error, four justices nonetheless sided with Trump.

Trump’s legal team flubbed this case by appealing the wrong lower court order

On February 13, federal District Judge Amir Ali issued a temporary order suggesting that the Trump administration’s suspension of USAID funding was illegally arbitrary because the administration has not “offered any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid…was a rational precursor to reviewing programs” for inefficiency or noncompliance with Trump’s policy goals. 

Twelve days later, after the plaintiffs in this case complained that they still had not received payments they are owed by the government, Ali issued a second order seeking to enforce his first. That February 25 order required the State Department and USAID to “pay all invoices and letter of credit drawdown requests on all contracts for work completed prior to the entry of the Court’s [first order] on February 13.”

As Alito argues in dissent, there are plausible arguments that Judge Ali erred when he issued the February 13 order. It’s possible, for example, that the plaintiffs filed their case in the wrong court — Alito suggests this case should have been filed in the Court of Federal Claims, and not in Ali’s US District Court for the District of Columbia. 

But the Trump administration inexplicably did not appeal Ali’s February 13 order. Instead, they only challenged the February 25 order seeking to enforce that first order. That means Alito’s concern that some other lower court should have heard this case was not properly raised by the Trump administration.

As a majority of the justices explain in their Wednesday order, “on February 13, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia entered a temporary restraining order enjoining the Government from enforcing directives pausing disbursements of foreign development assistance funds. The present application does not challenge the Government’s obligation to follow that order.”

That said, the majority’s order does call upon Ali to “clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order, with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines,” so there appears to be some concern among the justices in the majority that Ali is requiring the government to fix too much, too quickly.

Wednesday’s order dodges the biggest issues presented by this case

In any event, all of the issues raised by both the majority and the dissent in the AIDS Vaccine order — whether the government appealed the correct order, whether the plaintiffs sued in the right court, and whether Ali should have proceeded more cautiously — are pretty far afield from the big constitutional questions presented by this case.

The Trump administration claims to have the power to “impound” federal funding, meaning that the president can cancel spending appropriated by an act of Congress. But the president does not have this authority under the Constitution. As future Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in a 1969 Justice Department memo, “it is in our view extremely difficult to formulate a constitutional theory to justify a refusal by the President to comply with a congressional directive to spend.”

Rehnquist’s view was echoed by Kavanuagh in a 2013 opinion he wrote as a lower court judge, which said that “even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend” funds appropriated by Congress.

So, if the Supreme Court ultimately rules that the Constitution still applies to Donald Trump — an uncertain prospect after the Court’s decision last July holding that he is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes — it will someday need to rule that Trump cannot impound federal spending.

For now, however, the Court appears content to leave that showdown for another day. The Supreme Court’s order in the AIDS Vaccine case touches on none of these big issues, and largely turns on a mistake by Justice Department lawyers that they can correct in future cases.

Republicans showed their intolerance for dissenting viewpoints once again, this time during President Donald Trump’s primetime speech broadcast across the world. 

Speaker Mike Johnson had Democratic Rep. Al Green of Texas removed from Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night after Green dared to object to Trump as he began to speak.

Green stood up as Trump began, asserting that Trump had “no mandate” for several of his recent actions—seconds after Trump claimed that his small electoral victory was a “mandate” for sweeping changes.

Johnson angrily banged his gavel and ordered Green to “take your seat.” He then called in the sergeant at arms to forcibly eject the Democratic congressman.

The move was unusual and serves as further evidence of Republicans using political power to silence dissenting views. When Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina infamously yelled “You lie!” during former President Barack Obama’s speech in the same room in 2009, Wilson was notably allowed to stay.

Related | Trump accidentally says Elon Musk should be fired

This wasn’t even the first moment of the night when Republicans refused to tolerate dissent of any kind.

Earlier in the evening, as Trump entered the room, Republican Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas ripped a sign reading “This is NOT normal” out of the hands of Democratic Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico.

Republicans only value one kind of speech: their own.

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A top White House aide on Tuesday said she didn't feel bad for the thousands of federal workers—many of them veterans—who have been fired by the Trump administration, claiming without evidence that those who were fired didn't show up to work.

In two separate interviews on Tuesday, Alina Habba, a counselor and lawyer to President Donald Trump, said that those who were fired didn't deserve their jobs.

"Yeah, you get fired. You get fired when you don't show up to work. You get fired when you are taking taxpayer dollars, and you're not working for the federal government, and you are double dipping. That is this administration," Habba said in an appearance on Fox News. Habba was referencing the federal workers fired by Trump and co-President Elon Musk as part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency's cost-cutting measures who will attend Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday night.

Then, in an appearance set up outside of the West Wing of the White House surrounded by microphones, Habba doubled down, discussing the thousands of veterans who have lost their jobs in the federal government as part of Trump's purge.

"We have taxpayer dollars, we have a fiscal responsibility to use taxpayer dollars to pay people who actually work, that doesn't mean we forget about our veterans by any means, we are going to care for them in the right way, but perhaps they're not fit to have a job at this moment or are not willing to come to work," Habba said. "And we can't—I wouldn’t take money from you and pay somebody and say, 'Sorry, they're not going to come to work.' It's just not acceptable."

Of course, many of the thousands of federal employees who were purged from the federal government did show up to work. 

There were park rangers, infectious disease experts, weather forecasters, nuclear weapons experts, and more who were let go in a mass purge in the name of cost savings—even though the firings endanger national security and the country’s health.

In fact, many of the fired federal workers who will be attending Trump's speech on Tuesday night were both veterans and in-person employees whose work product was praised in their performance reviews.

For example, Army veteran Luke Graziani—who was fired from his role as a public affairs specialist at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx—will attend Trump’s speech with Democratic Rep. Grace Meng. 

“After 20 years of military service, including four combat tours, being terminated from my job at the VA by a thoughtless and heartless email was devastating,” Graziani said in a news release. “These terminations affect real people and real families of dedicated public servants. I am grateful to Congresswoman Meng for giving me the opportunity to represent thousands of federal workers who've been discarded while providing vital services Americans depend on. I hope my presence in our nation's capital will inspire other federal employees to continue standing for what is right.”

Army veteran Adam Mulvey worked at the Lovell Federal Health Care Center in Chicago, as an emergency management specialist in charge of creating plans for major disasters such as active shooting situations, when he was fired by DOGE.

“To be terminated and to then be told that my firing was due to performance is insulting," Mulvey, who is attending the address with Democratic Rep. Brad Schneider, said in a news release. "I, like the majority of the terminated civil servants, had received outstanding evaluations. I greatly appreciate Rep. Schneider for helping to put names and faces to these illegal terminations. Those let go from federal service are your neighbors, friends and relatives. They deserve better treatment from their government. I deserve better as well."

Another fired worker, Army veteran James Diaz, will attend the address with Illinois Democratic Rep. Eric Sorensen. Diaz, a Trump supporter, said he was fired from his job at the IRS despite getting stellar performance reviews.

“Everything was going great, all the reviews I had gotten were 100 percent-plus,” Diaz told the Pontiac Daily Leader. “The next thing you know, I got fired, alluding to my poor performance when there wasn’t anything to come close to that."

Diaz added, "Treating anyone the way I was treated, especially someone who has a combat service ribbon who is working for the federal government, someone who gave up a job making $140,000 a year with overtime to end up with a $75,000-a-year job working for the federal government should never be treated the way I was treated. If anybody should have gotten the benefit of the doubt, it should have been our veterans.”

As the Trump administration trashes veterans who were fired by Trump and Musk, Democrats are working to protect them.

Democratic Rep. Derek Tran of California introduced the “Protect Veteran Jobs Act,” which if passed would reinstate the veterans who were fired by Trump and Musk’s mass purge.

“Any individual who is a veteran and who was involuntarily removed or otherwise dismissed without cause from a civil service position during the period beginning on January 20, 2025, and ending on the date of the enactment of this section shall be eligible for reinstatement to such position or any other civil service position for which the individual is qualified,” the bill says.

It’s hard to see how trashing veterans will be helpful for Trump and the GOP. Indeed, polling shows that DOGE’s mass firings are not popular.

A new Civiqs poll conducted for Daily Kos found that 46% of voters think DOGE’s firings of federal workers is a “very bad thing,” as opposed to the 36% of voters who believe it’s a “very good thing.” 

But as has been the case since Trump launched his first presidential campaign in 2015, the cruelty is the point.

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The government produces many of America’s most important economic indicators. And that data influences the media’s coverage of the economy, which likely colors voters’ views of the president.

These facts have long led partisans to fear presidential manipulation of economic data. Specifically, during Democratic presidencies, conservatives have often sought to dismiss positive economic trends by alleging data manipulation. Last August, Donald Trump accused the Biden administration of “manipulating jobs statistics” to make unemployment look artificially low before Election Day. 

Such allegations have always been baseless. Presidents might have an incentive to tamper with economic data reported by the executive branch. But they have always been constrained from doing so by respect for the independence of data-gathering agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis, fear of scandal, and a desire to provide the private sector with clear and accurate information about economic conditions.

But Trump appears uniquely unencumbered by such constraints. His administration is openly contemptuous of agency independence, arguing that the president should boast unitary authority over all of the executive branch’s activities. It also evinces no concern for giving off the appearance of corruption (before taking office, the president established a memecoin that enables any interest group to directly burnish his net wealth). Trump’s constantly shifting tariff threats indicate an indifference to providing business owners with clarity about the economy’s future trajectory, while his entire history as a public figure suggests an indifference to the truth. 

All this gives us some cause for fearing that Trump might tamper with government economic data, should it become politically inconvenient. And over the weekend, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested that he intends to do just that, by altering how the government calculates gross domestic product (GDP) — the total value of goods and services produced in the economy. 

“You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said during a Fox News interview Sunday. “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”

Lutnick’s remarks came days after Elon Musk argued that “A more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending” since “Otherwise, you can scale GDP artificially high by spending money on things that don’t make people’s lives better.”

In other words, Musk believes that the US government has been producing useless goods and services just to inflate GDP numbers.

This argument is substantively unsound. And it also appears politically motivated: Musk’s comments came in response to a new projection from the Atlanta Federal Reserve, which showed GDP on pace to decline during the first quarter of this year. Musk’s implication was that this projected decline is entirely attributable to his elimination of wasteful government activities that had been distorting growth statistics. 

Stripping government spending from official GDP data would not be the most corrosive form of data manipulation. Such tampering would at least be transparent; the administration would not be producing fabricated economic statistics, but merely seeking to redefine an existing measure. But the administration’s desire to alter the content of GDP — seemingly, due to political concerns — makes the threat of more covert and destructive data manipulation more plausible.

The problem with Elon Musk’s case against GDP

The Trump administration’s complaint with conventional GDP estimates has a certain logic to it: Governments often aspire to produce high GDP growth and public investment can mechanically increase such growth, even if the goods and services produced have little value to consumers or businesses.

This dynamic is a genuine problem in China, where the ruling Communist Party sets explicit goals for GDP growth, and often meets them by building economically useless infrastructure like “ghost cities” comprised of mansions and apartment towers that no one has ever occupied and bridges that are rarely used.

Nevertheless, there are several problems with Musk and Lutnick’s argument. 

First, while it’s true that the government sometimes makes bad investments, which raise GDP without providing much economic value, this is also true of the private sector. Production of the Juicero contributed to GDP, but was of virtually no use to consumers. And this happens on a much larger scale each time investors’ enthusiasm for a given asset — such as internet companies or homes — causes the private sector to produce a larger supply of that asset than consumers can support, which leads to an eventual crash (like the “dot com” one in 2000 or the housing one in 2008 ).

Ultimately, GDP is not meant to measure wise or socially valuable economic activity, in part because such a metric would be inherently subjective. Perhaps it is obvious to Elon Musk that the government’s investments in highway repairs or public education have produced less economic value than his own investment in the Hyperloop. But I think most people would not find this self-evident. 

It is useful to have an impartial tally of all goods and services produced in the US economy. This would be true even if GDP did not correlate with other indicators of prosperity, but it does.

Second, the US government already produces an estimate of what GDP would be without public production, a measure called real value in private industries. Businesses and consumers already have access to this information, there is no need to alter GDP calculations to provide it to them.

Third, it simply is not the case that the US government has been using public spending to artificially inflate GDP. As former White House economist Mike Konczal notes, a measure of GDP that excluded public spending would show stronger growth during Joe Biden’s presidency than the actual GDP data does.

Over a longer time horizon, meanwhile, changes in the real value produced by private industries have correlated almost perfectly with changes in GDP. Were the US government propping up growth with massive investment in useless infrastructure, we would see a large gap between these two figures. 

Why the Trump administration’s silly critique of GDP is ominous

The context of Musk and Lutnick’s remarks makes them especially troubling. 

On Friday, the Atlanta Fed’s projection for first-quarter GDP growth turned negative, after a Commerce Department report showed that personal spending fell by 0.2 percent in January. As of this writing, the Atlanta Fed is currently forecasting that GDP will decline at a 2.8 percent annualized rate during the first four months of this year.

Musk suggested that this apparent economic downturn was entirely attributable to his elimination of wasteful government programs. Lutnick’s proposal for removing publicly produced goods and services from GDP therefore appears politically motivated. 

As it happens, Musk is actually completely wrong about why America’s economic outlook is souring. If one stripped public sector production out of the Atlanta Fed’s forecast, then GDP would be on pace for a 3.8 percent contraction this quarter, according to Harvard University economist Jason Furman. What’s actually driving the Fed model’s pessimism is slowing consumption and private investment, the latter being partly a function of Trump’s tariff policies. 

Nevertheless, Musk thought he was proposing a change in the measurement of GDP that would make the Trump administration look better. And America’s Commerce Secretary suggested days later that he would pursue that very change. 

This is an ominous development. Right now, the Trump administration does not have especially strong incentives to manipulate economic data. The midterm elections are more than a year and a half away. And although GDP forecasts have declined, we are not actually in a recession as of yet. In fact, some forecasters still project healthy growth for this quarter. If this White House is willing to mess around with GDP now, it’s conceivable they would be interested in suppressing adverse inflation or employment readings more insidiously in the future. 

Pulling off such manipulation would not be easy. Any attempt to covertly alter how the government’s statistical agencies report data would almost certainly trigger mass resignations and leaks to the press. And further attempts to redefine economic data points in politically convenient ways can only achieve so much; the private sector produces a lot of economic data, and if the government’s numbers paint a dramatically different picture from other sources, business and the mainstream media will likely dismiss the former.

Nevertheless, further attacks on the integrity of government data would be costly, undermining the capacity of the government, businesses, and households to make informed economic decisions. 

Rather than scheming to change unflattering economic indicators, White House officials should try to better understand them. Proposing changes to how GDP is calculated — which would actually make your own economic management look worse — is not the best way to reassure a skeptical public that you know what you’re doing.

Early on Monday morning, a bank of Tesla Superchargers went up in flames in Littleton, Massachusetts. While the cause of the fire is unknown, Tesla's Superchargers are not known for bursting into flames, and a $5,000 reward is being offered by the authorities, who believe the fire was "intentionally set." Assuming that arson is to blame, this may well be one more attack against a brand that's becoming more and more toxic.

Elon Musk's involvement with US President Donald Trump has changed the nature of the spotlight on the Tesla CEO. Instead of cute cameos in Marvel movies and being name-checked by Star Trek, Musk now makes headlines for boosting far-right politics in Europe and suggesting cuts to Social Security. This has made him some new friends, but it has lost many more in the process. And the consequences for Tesla's core business—selling electric cars—have been disastrous.

2024 was already a not-good year for the automaker. A decade ago, it was basically the only game in town if you wanted an electric car that could go more than 200 miles between charges, and celebrities and tastemakers flocked to the brand in droves. Now, customers are spoiled for choice, and Tesla's model range—effectively just two cars—has to compete against all the established OEMs that are increasingly working out how to build great EVs, plus all those Chinese startups that appear to have cracked that market in terms of what customers want and how to make it cheap.

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"4090 performance at $549."

That’s what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said of the GeForce RTX 5070 when he announced the card at CES in January. Thanks to AI, this new midrange GPU would be able to match the frame rates of what had been the fastest consumer GPU that had previously existed for around one-third the price.

Let's dispel that notion up front. No, the GeForce RTX 5070 is not as fast as an RTX 4090, not without some very creative comparing of non-comparable numbers. Per usual for the 50-series, Nvidia is leaning on its AI-generated interpolated frames for the bulk of its claimed performance improvements. In terms of actual rendering speed, the 5070 isn’t even as fast as a 4080 or a 4070 Ti. It’s barely faster than last year’s 4070 Super, and it has disproportionately higher power usage.

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Vice President JD Vance is under fire from British military veterans for minimizing the ultimate sacrifice that over 600 service members in that nation made during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Vance’s comments came during a friendly interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity discussing the Trump administration’s hostility to Ukraine and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It also covered President Donald Trump’s rhetoric that has weighed in on the side of Russia during its war against Ukraine.

“The very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine,” Vance said. “That is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.”

Trump has paused U.S. aid to Ukraine even though they have been relying on American help during the Biden administration to stave off Russian encroachment. The administration’s hostility to Zelenskyy has been widely panned by both Democrats and European leaders, while only those in Trump’s corner have publicly backed his stance.

Vance’s comments come after it was disclosed that the United Kingdom and France have been making plans to send peacekeepers to Ukraine to secure any possible end to the conflict.

But contrary to Vance’s flippant remark, both nations not only participated in recent wars but they also lost lives in combat and were fighting alongside American soldiers in those conflicts. France and the U.K. participated in the Afghanistan War following the 9/11 attacks, and the U.K. was part of the invasion of Iraq that began in 2003.

A total of 88 French soldiers have died in Afghanistan since they first deployed there in 2001. The toll was even higher for the U.K., with 457 dead in Afghanistan and 179 losing their lives in Iraq.

Veterans lashed out at Trump’s chief sidekick.

“I was part of British forces fighting in highly kinetic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the latter in response to Article 5 following 9/11,” UK member of Parliament Ben Obese-Jecty wrote. “The disrespect shown by the new US Vice President to the sacrifices of our service personnel is unacceptable.”

Helen Maguire, another member of Parliament who also served in the military in Iraq said, “JD Vance is erasing from history the hundreds of British troops who gave their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. I saw firsthand how American and British soldiers fought bravely together shoulder to shoulder. Six of my own regiment, the Royal Military Police, didn't return home from Iraq. This is a sinister attempt to deny that reality.”

Maguire called on UK Ambassador to the United States Lord Mandelson to ask for a formal apology from Vance.

Johnny Mercer, a former member of Parliament and a military veteran who served in Afghanistan, said, “Vance needs to wind his neck in. Show a bit of respect and stop making yourself look so unpleasant.” He also referred to Vance as a “clown” and called on him to “check his privilege.”

“Vance has insulted the Veteran community, we are outraged 🤬,” veteran Shaun Pinner wrote.

Another veteran, Macer Gifford, wrote, “J D Vance insulted British troops that have made tremendous sacrifices in support of America. Don’t do us down to make your political points you sh*t eating clown.”

His fellow veteran Andy Aitcheson was even more blunt: “F*ck you @JDVance you sh*t eating, grifter c*nt.”

A spokesperson for Prime Minister Keir Starmer didn’t directly reply to Vance but noted, “The PM and I think the whole country is full of admiration for all British troops who have served for instance in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom have lost their lives in the process and fought obviously alongside allies including the United States.”

Even one of Trump’s most staunch allies, right-wing member of Parliament (and bigot) Nigel Farage took Vance to task.

“JD Vance is wrong. Wrong wrong wrong,” Farage said. “For 20 years in Afghanistan pro rata our size against America's we spent the same amount of money, we put the same number of men and women in. We suffered the same losses.”

After the blowback, Vance attempted to backtrack and claimed his comments were misinterpreted because he didn’t specifically mention U.K. and France in the statement. But those are the two countries floating the peacekeeping issue.

Then he doubled down, arguing that many countries offering to support peacekeeping efforts “have neither the battlefield experience nor the military equipment to do anything meaningful.”

The incident is another major stumble for Trump and his team on the world stage—but this time they’ve insulted America’s greatest ally and again put the “special relationship” in a bad place.

Donate now to support humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The United States has suspended its offensive cyber operations against Russia, according to reports, amid efforts by the Trump administration to grant Moscow concessions to end the war in Ukraine. The reported order to halt U.S.-launched hacking operations against Russia was authorized by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to The Record. The new guidance affects operations carried out by U.S. Cyber Command, a division of the Department of Defense focused on hacking and operations in cyberspace, but does not apply to espionage operations conducted by the National Security Agency. The reported order has since been confirmed by The New York Times and The Washington Post. The order was handed down before Friday's Oval Office meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, according to the reports. The New York Times said that the instruction came as part of a broader effort to draw Russian President Vladimir Putin into talks about the country's ongoing war in Ukraine. The Guardian also reports that the Trump administration has signaled it no longer views Russian hackers as a cybersecurity threat, and reportedly ordered U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA to no longer report on Russian threats. The newspaper cites a recent memo that set out new priorities for CISA, including threats faced by China and protecting local systems, but the memo did not mention Russia. CISA employees were reportedly informed verbally that they were to pause any work on Russian cyber threats.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, experts have debated how widely AI language models would impact the world. A few years later, the picture is getting clear. According to new Stanford University-led research examining over 300 million text samples across multiple sectors, AI language models now assist in writing up to a quarter of professional communications. It's having a large impact, especially in less-educated parts of the United States.

"Our study shows the emergence of a new reality in which firms, consumers and even international organizations substantially rely on generative AI for communications," wrote the researchers.

The researchers tracked large language model (LLM) adoption across industries from January 2022 to September 2024 using a dataset that included 687,241 consumer complaints submitted to the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), 537,413 corporate press releases, 304.3 million job postings, and 15,919 United Nations press releases.

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Just a few months after investing $30 million in a company owned by President Donald Trump and his two eldest sons, cryptocurrency bro Justin Sun was rewarded with a decision by the Securities and Exchange Commission to drop its fraud case against him.

Nineteen days after Trump won the 2024 election, Sun, head of the crypto company TRON DAO, announced that he had invested $30 million in World Liberty Financial.

“The U.S. is becoming the blockchain hub, and Bitcoin owes it to @realDonaldTrump! TRON is committed to making America great again and leading innovation,” he wrote.

World Liberty Financial is a venture of the Trump family launched last year, run by Trump and his sons Don Jr. and Eric. Trump promoted the company in a post in September, proclaiming, “Crypto is one of those things we have to do. Whether we like it or not, I have to do it.”

In 2023, under the Biden administration, the SEC announced that it was charging Sun for fraud and other violations of federal securities law. The SEC alleged that Sun had been involved in the “unregistered offer and sale of crypto asset securities,” and also accused him of fraudulent market manipulation.

A group of celebrities were also charged as part of the scheme, including actress Lindsay Lohan, singer Akon, and boxer and influencer Jake Paul—who endorsed Trump last October.

The SEC decision following the financial contribution that directly benefited Trump highlights the ease with which he can be bought off. As he did in his first term, Trump has not adhered to traditional ethics guardrails in the presidency and has left himself open via multiple avenues to be bribed.

Democrats have proposed legislation meant to curb abuses like Trump’s, putting into law what had once been bipartisan tradition. The Modern Emoluments and Malfeasance Enforcement Act, introduced by California Rep. Sam Liccardo, would prohibit federal officeholders and their families from selling and promoting cryptocurrency that would be to their financial benefit.

Trump’s decision to drop this crypto case follows in the footsteps of other actions he has taken demonstrating a weakness on crime issues. The administration has advocated for misogynist Andrew Tate, who has been accused of rape and sex trafficking, and Trump issued pardons for his supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Trump has portrayed himself for years as being in favor of “law and order,” but for just a few million he now appears willing to drop the pursuit of justice.

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At least the Oval Office meeting held by President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was held in front of the cameras. False friendliness in public by Trump and Vance, followed by behind-the-scenes treachery, would have been much more dangerous to the Ukrainian cause.

Instead, Trump and Vance have revealed to Americans and to America’s allies their alignment with Russia, and their animosity toward Ukraine in general and its president in particular. The truth is ugly, but it’s necessary to face it.

Today’s meeting gave the lie to any claim that this administration’s policy is driven by any strategic effort to advance the interests of the United States, however misguided. Trump and Vance displayed in the Oval Office a highly personal hatred. There was no effort here to make a case for American interests. Vance complained that Zelensky had traveled to Pennsylvania to thank U.S. ammunition workers, because, Vance charged, the appearance amounted to campaigning for the Democratic presidential ticket. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump angrily explained. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia.”

Both the president and vice president showed the U.S.-led alliance system something it needed urgently to know: The national-security system of the West is led by two men who cannot be trusted to defend America’s allies—and who deeply sympathize with the world’s most aggressive dictator.

Through the Cold War period, Americans were haunted by the fear that a person with clandestine loyalties to a hostile foreign power might somehow rise to high office. In the late 1940s, the Alger Hiss case convulsed the country. Hiss’s accusers charged—and it later proved true—that Hiss had betrayed U.S. secrets to Soviet spymasters in the 1930s, when Hiss served as a junior official in the Department of Agriculture. The secrets were not very important; they included designs for a new fire extinguisher for U.S. naval ships. But Hiss himself was a rising star. The possibility that a person with such secrets in his past might someday go on to head the Department of State or Central Intelligence Agency once tormented Americans.

But what if the loyalties were not clandestine, not secret? What if a leader just plain blurted out on national television that he despises our allies, rejects treaties, and regards a foreign adversary as a personal friend? What if he did it again and again? Human beings get used to anything. But this?

It’s not hard to imagine a president of Estonia or Moldova in that Oval Office chair, being berated by Trump and Vance. Or a president of Taiwan. Or, for that matter, the leaders of core U.S. partners such as Germany and Japan, which entrusted their nations’ security to the faith and patriotism of past American leaders, only to be confronted by the faithless men who hold the highest offices today.

We’re witnessing the self-sabotage of the United States. “America First” always meant America alone, a predatory America whose role in the world is no longer based on democratic belief. America voted at the United Nations earlier this week against Ukraine, siding with Russia and China against almost all of its fellow democracies. Is this who Americans want to be? For this is what America is being turned into.

The Trump administration’s elimination of PEPFAR, the American program to combat HIV infection in Africa, symbolizes the path ahead. President George W. Bush created the program because it would do immense good at low cost, and thereby demonstrate to the world the moral basis of American power. His successors continued it, and Congresses of both parties funded it, because they saw that the program advanced both U.S. values and U.S. interests. Trump and Vance don’t want the United States to be that kind of country anymore.

American allies urgently need a Plan B for collective security in a world where the U.S. administration prefers Vladimir Putin to Zelensky.

The American people need to reckon with the mess Trump and Vance are making of this country’s once-good name—and the services they are performing for dictators and aggressors. There may not be a deep cause here. Trump likes and admires bad people because he is himself a bad person. When Vance executed his personal pivot from Never Trump to Always Trump, he needed a way to prove that he had truly crossed over to the dark side beyond any possibility of reversion or redemption; perhaps his support for Russia allowed him to do that. But however shallow their motives, the consequences are profound.

In his first term, Trump sometimes seemed a rogue actor within his own administration. The president expressed strange and disquieting opinions, but his Cabinet secretaries were mostly normal and responsible people. The oddball appointees on the White House staff were contained by the many more-or-less normal appointees. This time, Trump is building a national-security system to follow his lead. He has intimidated or persuaded his caucus in the House to accept—and his caucus in the Senate not to oppose—his pro-authoritarian agenda.

The good and great America that once inspired global admiration—that good and great America still lives. But it no longer commands a consensus above party. The pro-Trump party exposed its face to the world in the Oval Office today. Nobody who saw that face will ever forget the grotesque sight.

President Donald Trump will soon launch another salvo against civil rights gains in America with an upcoming executive order declaring English the official language of the United States.

For the entirety of its 249-year history, America has never had an official language. While most Americans speak English, more than 350 languages are spoken here, reflecting the diversity of the population.

Trump has long railed against the diversity of America’s melting pot and the Wall Street Journal reports that his executive order will rescind an order signed by former President Bill Clinton in 2000 that instructed federal agencies to provide accommodation to millions of non-English speakers.

Clinton’s order was meant to bolster the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. Trump has issued a flurry of orders attacking policies related to the law, which was passed to combat racial segregation and discrimination stemming from the practice of slavery and other crimes against humanity and dignity.

The order would not immediately make English the official language. That would require a law passed by Congress. Then-Sen. JD Vance proposed legislation in the Senate in 2023, the “English Language Unity Act,” that would accomplish this task but it failed to pass; his replacement, Sen. Bernie Moreno, introduced a similar bill on Feb. 12.

Creating an official language would likely give a federal stamp of approval for linguistic racism, which is discrimination against people who do not speak the dominant language in a population. By making one language the only accepted way of speaking, non-English speakers would likely face discrimination in the workplace and in their daily lives.

Trump has been a fierce advocate of discrimination throughout his entire life as a political figure and has used his leadership of the Republican Party to attack Black people, Latinos, Asians, women, the disabled, LGBTQ+ people, and hundreds of others.

Of course, Trump and his team have used languages other than English when it helped them to accomplish their goals.

During a recent visit to Costa Rica, Secretary of State Marco Rubio conducted a press conference in Spanish (he is fluent in the language as the son of Cuban immigrants). Similarly, Trump’s campaign had no problem using Spanish in campaign ads attacking Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 election.

But using multiple languages to assist Americans? Trump is all-in on changing the law and American tradition, as long as civil rights are rolled back.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with Sen. Bernie Moreno’s bill.

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More layoffs have hit the federal government, this time at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States’s main weather forecaster and the world’s premier research agency for the seas and the skies. 

CBS News reports that 880 employees were cut across NOAA, about 7 percent of the workforce, including earth scientists, meteorologists, computer modelers, and space weather forecasters. It’s already causing some functions — like weather balloon launches that provide raw data for weather models — to shut down. 

I have confirmed that weather balloon launches for western Alaska have been halted due to the firings today.
For a little background, weather balloons are launched normally twice per day, more during a severe day, and we get most of our raw data from these launches. pic.twitter.com/XPq4qH0UDu

— Ahmad Bajjey (@AhmadBajjeyWx) February 27, 2025

What these employees had in common was that they were on probation. This is not a form of punishment but rather a quirk of the federal hiring system. By law, federal civil service employees start new roles on a one-year probationary period, if not longer. This mainly means new hires, but also covers people who have been at an agency for years who were promoted or transferred to different roles. About one in 10 government workers are on probation at any given time. 

“Like most jobs, it kind of just gives your employer an opportunity to evaluate your performance,” said Amelia Glymph, deputy chief of staff at the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union for federal workers. “They don’t have as many rights as full-time employees.”

During the probationary period, workers have the “burden to demonstrate why it is in the public interest ” for the government to hire them, according to the US Merit Systems Protection Board. 

“You should view your probationary period as kind of an extension of the hiring process,” said Robert Shriver, managing director for Democracy Forward’s Civil Service Strong initiative, which aims to provide information and resources to government workers. “I think any good federal manager can find out pretty quickly if somebody’s up for the job or not.” 

Then why is the federal probation period so long, stretching up to two years? 

Part of the reason is that many federal jobs like law enforcement require extensive training. Simply learning to navigate the government bureaucracy can take weeks. Certain job functions can only be performed at specific times of the year, like when Congress is in session. Other roles require workers to produce reports, analyses, or investigations that take months to assemble and weeks to evaluate. 

After nearly two weeks of overwhelming uncertainty, today it happened. I was fired from my dream of working at NOAA. I'm so sorry to everyone also affected.

My job was to strengthen NOAA's use of machine learning and AI for subseasonal-to-decadal weather and climate prediction

— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) February 27, 2025

Plus, once an employee graduates out of probation, they end up with strong job protections that make them harder to fire. This is to encourage civil service workers with specialized training and expertise to stay on the job. It also helps protect their roles from the whims of politicians.  

But probationary employees have some protections too. They can’t be dismissed without some kind of performance problem, and the Trump administration’s mass firings may be illegal, according to federal courts. However, the judicial process is moving slowly while thousands of federal employees have already cleared out their desks and have been locked out of their offices. 

“The courts are overwhelmed because there’s never been anything like this before, and I think that’s part of the [Trump administration’s] strategy,” Shriver said. 

And layoffs aren’t the only way agencies are seeing their numbers dwindle. Vacancies are going unfilled, while existing staffers are taking buyouts alongside the normal attrition from retirements. The chaos across the government is making it a less appealing place to work, deterring prospective workers from applying. 

For an agency like NOAA that performs urgent research unmatched by the private sector, it adds up to a long-term squeeze of their workforce that will impair the safety of Americans and the health of the economy.

AMD is releasing the first detailed specifications of its next-generation Radeon RX 9070 series GPUs and the RDNA4 graphics architecture today, almost two months after teasing them at CES.

The short version is that these are both upper-midrange graphics cards targeting resolutions of 1440p and 4K and meant to compete mainly with Nvidia's incoming and outgoing 4070- and 5070-series GeForce GPUs, including the RTX 4070, RTX 5070, RTX 4070 Ti and Ti Super, and the RTX 5070 Ti.

AMD says the RX 9070 will start at $549, the same price as Nvidia's RTX 5070. The slightly faster 9070 XT starts at $599, $150 less than the RTX 5070 Ti. The cards go on sale March 6, a day after Nvidia's RTX 5070.

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On Wednesday, during his first Cabinet meeting, President Donald Trump was caught on a hot mic directing Fox News’ Lawrence Jones how to cover the meeting as journalists filed out of the room.

TRUMP: Lawrence. Look at Lawrence. This guy’s making a fortune. He never had it so good. He never had it so good.

[Jones crosses in front of the camera, giving Trump a thumbs-up sign.]

TRUMP: Lawrence, say we did a great job, please. Okay? Say it was unbelievable.

The exchange was caught by the Associated Press’ feed. The AP has been a target of the White House’s early attempts at censorship, initially denying the news outlet access after it chose not to rename the Gulf of Mexico based on Trump’s whims.

Trump’s directive to Jones came on the same day that HuffPost was removed from the White House press pool, breaking the longstanding practice of press access without authoritarian interference.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told journalists that the White House will decide which outlets get access to the Oval Office and Air Force One from now on.

“This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” the White House Correspondents Association said in a statement. “It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”

The AP, Bloomberg News, and Reuters released a joint statement calling Leavitt’s announcement a threat to democracy. 

“We believe that any steps by the government to limit the number of wire services with access to the President threatens that principle. It also harms the spread of reliable information to people, communities, businesses and global financial markets that heavily depend on our reporting,” said the statement.

Trump may be right that Jones has “never had it so good.” During last year’s presidential campaign, Jones accompanied Trump on a “surprise” visit to a barbershop in the Bronx, in an attempt to make Trump seem less racist and elitist. Fox News was later found to have edited much of Trump’s incoherence and many of his lies out of the aired segment. 

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Finding help to file your taxes will be harder this year because President Donald Trump’s administration plans to close at least 113 IRS taxpayer assistance centers, which provide free help to tax filers, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

Experts are also warning that Trump's decision to fire thousands of IRS employees in the middle of tax season could cause a delay in taxpayers receiving their returns. 

But now, the government is canceling the leases on 113 of the roughly 360 taxpayer assistance centers in the U.S. That means the Trump administration is cutting about one-third of the centers, which will make it harder for Americans to receive the assistance they need.

The IRS did not return The Washington Post’s request for comment on whether the assistance centers will relocate or close altogether. But the fact that the IRS is shuttering the centers in the middle of tax season, when taxpayers must prepare their returns and file them by the April 15 deadline, could make it harder for taxpayers to obtain the help they need.

“Sometimes you need to sit down and talk to someone,” Nina Olson, the former national taxpayer advocate at the IRS who now serves as executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, told The Washington Post.

Closing the offices is part of Trump and co-President Elon Musk's effort to slash the federal budget—a slapdash effort that is causing chaos and threatening public health and other necessary services for veterans, Social Security recipients, 9/11 survivors, and now every taxpayer in America.

It’s also part of their effort to decimate the IRS, which Trump wants to abolish and replace with tariffs, a regressive move that would cause low-income Americans to pay a larger portion of their earnings than the richest. 

The chaos Trump and Musk are causing is leading to an uproar against GOP lawmakers at town halls across the country. That’s an early sign that the cuts could be a political problem for Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections.

Republicans are brushing off the backlash.

“The videos you saw of the town halls were for paid protesters in many of those places,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday on CNN, which is a lie. “These are Democrats who went to the events early and filled up the seats.”

As more and more Americans feel the pain of the cuts Trump and Musk are making, the anger from constituents will only grow. And Republicans ignore it at their own peril. 

Thank you to the Daily Kos community who continues to fight so hard with Daily Kos. Your reader support means everything. We will continue to have you covered and keep you informed, so please donate just $3 to help support the work we do.

Elon Musk’s cut-first, aim-later run through the federal government is predicated on the idea that the nation’s finances are in crisis and that it needs to drastically cut spending to recover. But at least one cut Musk’s team is planning will actually cost the government money, worsening the supposed fiscal crisis that the Trump administration is claiming is a national emergency.

That’s Musk’s plan to cut jobs at the US Internal Revenue Service.

At the behest of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team, the IRS reportedly plans to lay off up to 6,700 employees, and the cull began last Thursday. Those affected include over 5,000 workers handling auditing and collections, despite assurances from IRS managers that positions critical to tax filing season have not been impacted. Many of them are probationary employees who have been working for the federal government for less than a year and are not entitled to severance.

So how are these cuts going to cost money?

It turns out that money spent on IRS agents pays for itself many times over, because when there are more people doing tax enforcement, the government takes in more of the revenue it’s legally owed under the tax code. 

The Biden administration showed that investing in the US Internal Revenue Service can be a boon to tax revenues, hiring new agents — and focusing enforcement on the highest earners.

The layoffs might only be the beginning: Trump has also proposed the creation of an “External Revenue Service” funded by tariffs, reportedly with the intention of replacing the IRS. It sounds far-fetched, and Trump famously floats a lot of extreme ideas that never come to fruition. But any further significant reduction in the IRS workforce, however, could lead to a corresponding decline in tax collections — especially among the wealthiest Americans who have recently been targeted for tax enforcement.

The IRS got more resources and higher tax revenues followed

In mid-2022, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which included an $80 billion investment over ten years in tax enforcement activities at the IRS, including the hiring of more IRS agents. In the two years that followed, the agency’s workforce grew by more than 15,000 permanent employees. 

A big spike in tax revenues followed, with gross collections jumping from $4.7 trillion in fiscal year 2023 to about $5.1 trillion the next year, according to data from the IRS and the National Taxpayer Advocate.

Obviously, there are a lot of factors that contribute to tax revenue levels, including, most importantly, the state and size of the economy in a given year. But in the 2023-2024 leap,

much of the increase came from enforcement activities against people making over $400,000 per year, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. That suggests that stepped-up IRS enforcement played a prominent role.

The agency collected about $1.1 billion from just 1,600 of those wealthiest Americans with unpaid tax debts in fiscal year 2024, up from $38 million the year before. That money was only recovered because the IRS finally had the required staffing levels to investigate, helping to make some progress in closing an estimated $696 billion gap in unpaid US taxes.

Despite significant boosting funding for the IRS, the costs of tax collection have actually gone down in recent years. For every $100 collected, the IRS only spent 34 cents in fiscal year 2023, near historic lows.

None of that has proved enough for the Trump administration to save the jobs of the thousands of IRS workers now facing layoffs. Reducing the IRS workforce at a time when revenues and efficiency have been increasing may ultimately backfire, exacerbating the alleged financial crisis that Musk purports to want to solve.

At the first meeting of his presidential Cabinet, President Donald Trump put multi-billionaire Elon Musk ahead of everyone else, giving his campaign financier the first speaking slot. 

Asked by a reporter if anyone in the Cabinet had voiced dissatisfaction with Musk’s actions at the Department of Government Efficiency, which have raised security concerns and been the subject of multiple lawsuits, Trump leapt to the defense of his co-president.

“Anybody unhappy with Elon? If you are, we’ll throw them out of here,” Trump said, adding, “we have a lot of respect for Elon that he’s doing this.”

The Cabinet meeting is just the latest instance of Trump ceding the spotlight to Musk in a manner starkly at odds with how he has angrily pushed back on past insinuations that he’s not in charge. Trump’s submission to his billionaire backer also raises new questions about his state of mind.

In 2017, during his first term, Trump very publicly fired chief strategist Steve Bannon after Bannon got publicity for purportedly being the brains behind Trump’s presidency. CNN reported at the time that Trump was angry after Bannon told a media outlet that he had the power to fire officials at the State Department and had contradicted Trump on foreign policy.

The Trump eruption had apparently been stewing for months, after Bannon was featured on the cover of Time magazine with a story asking, “Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?”

Yet a Time cover from last week was even more provocative, featuring a photoshopped image of Musk behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Asked about the cover, Trump said he had no reaction to it.

Trump was also passive a few weeks ago as Musk held court with reporters in the Oval Office, with Trump looking on. Musk’s son even wiped his boogers on the desk as Trump sat for it all.

Republican officeholders have been dealing with the fallout from Musk’s destructive actions at DOGE, fielding angry complaints about privacy violations, indiscriminate firings, and confusing mandates. Trump has defended these actions and attempted to smooth over the chaos caused in multiple departments.

Asked directly by reporters if Musk speaks for him, Trump replied, “Yeah. Everybody speaks for me.”

Some have raised questions about possible mental decline by Trump, which could perhaps explain why he isn’t the forceful personality in this dynamic that he was eight years ago.

Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, addressing Trump’s friendliness with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, brought up concerns about Trump’s state of mind during a recent CNN interview.

“I think it’s an indication his mind is full of mush, and he says whatever comes into it. He believes Vladimir Putin is his friend, and you know, you don’t call your friends a dictator,” Bolton said.

Musk contributed millions to make Trump president and got his desired result in the 2024 election. A major issue in that election advanced by the right was the purported “cognitive decline” of President Joe Biden.

But now, just a month into Trump’s presidency, Musk appears to be the beneficiary of some sort of decline by Trump, and now the public is forced to suffer the consequences of an unelected co-president.

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A MAGA-supporting group of private military contractors pitched an idea to President Donald Trump to use a “small” civilian army to carry out his mass deportation promises, Politico reported Tuesday.

The contractors, led by Blackwater CEO and Trump acolyte Erik Prince and its former chief operating officer Bill Mathews, proposed a slew of dystopian-level ideas, including carrying out deportations through a network of “processing camps” on military bases and a private fleet of 100 planes. 

According to Politico, which obtained a copy of the 26-page report, the president’s advisers received the unsolicited proposal before his January inauguration. It carries a hefty price tag of $25 billion but promises that, if enacted, would assist in the deportation of 12 million people before the 2026 midterms.

To reach its goal, the authors of the plans, who called themselves 2USV, projected that the government would need to “eject nearly 500,000” undocumented immigrants per month.

“To keep pace with the Trump deportations, it would require a 600% increase in activity,” the proposal said, adding that the White House should “enlist outside assistance” to address this suggested rise in demand by deputizing 10,000 private citizens to assist immigration enforcement officers.

These “private citizens,” the plan said, would include former Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers, law enforcement agents, and military veterans, who would work under the supervision of Trump’s deranged “border czar” Tom Homan.

Aside from Prince and Mathews, other key members of the 2USV group include former immigration officials and some people associated with Blackwater, a private military contractor founded by Prince in 1997 that gained widespread notoriety for its role in providing security services during the Iraq War.

That said, the company has been implicated in many violent incidents, including the 2007 Nisour Square Massacre, where four Blackwater personnel were convicted of killing 17 Iraqi civilians, including two children, in Baghdad. The affected employees were later pardoned by Trump toward the end of his first term.

Though it wasn’t clear whether the president had read the plan, the Trump administration has since announced plans to use military sites across the nation to detain undocumented immigrants. (Politico noted that this could merely be a coincidence and that there’s no evidence that the president’s team got this idea from Prince’s group.)

Despite the announcement of some disturbing plans to curb the flow of immigration, Trump’s administration is still falling short of the president’s expectations for mass deportations. The president’s team began arresting and deporting people immediately after he was sworn into office on Jan. 20, but the pace has since slowed. One estimate from Axios, released earlier this month, said that Trump’s arrest rate is behind that of former President Joe Biden, a statistic which is reportedly driving the president “nuts.”

Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, told Politico that 2USV’s plan is one of many unsought proposals that the administration has received. 

Desai added, though, that the president and his team “remains aligned on and committed to a whole-of-government approach to securing our borders, mass deporting criminal illegal migrants, and enforcing our immigration laws.” 

Still, it’s not clear the 2USV plan is being looked at as a possible solution to this. When reached for comment, Mathews told Politico that the group had not been contacted by, nor had discussions with, anyone in the federal government since submitting their proposal.

“There has been zero show of interest or engagement from the government and we have no reason to believe there will be,” he said.

It’s possible Trump’s administration isn’t paying close attention to the group’s plan because they already have their own nightmarish ideas for detaining undocumented migrants, despite its plans to conduct raids in places of worship getting temporarily barred. And on Tuesday afternoon, a federal judge blocked Trump’s attempt to halt the nation’s refugee admissions system. 

Then again, Trump might be avoiding 2USV’s proposal because it’s legally dubious. Some of the recommendations that are likely to face legal hurdles include one to create a screening team of 2,000 attorneys and paralegals to refer people to mass deportation hearings and another to publish a public database of people summoned to appear before an immigration judge. But the push to empower private citizens to impose Trump’s promises regarding deportations might be the most egregious one of all. 

“I don’t see how you could do private sector, deputized law enforcement officers,” former ICE director John Sandweg told Politico. “That’s subject to an immediate injunction by a court.”

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The State Department is ordering officials worldwide to deny visas to transgender athletes who try to enter the U.S. for competitions.

This order, obtained by The Guardian, is particularly harsh as it could even place a lifetime ban on these athletes should their passport or visa information list their gender as something different than what they were assigned at birth. 

According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, this would be considered fraud. 

“In cases where applicants are suspected of misrepresenting their purpose of travel or sex, you should consider whether this misrepresentation is material such that it supports an ineligibility finding,” reads the directive.

This note to officials issuing visas comes after Trump’s Feb. 5 executive order banning transgender girls and women from competing in athletic sports for girls and women.

Specifically referring to the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, the president announced that he would direct Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to reject “any and all visa applications made by men attempting to fraudulently enter the United States while identifying themselves as women athletes."

It is unclear how many international transgender athletes are slated to attend the Olympics. 

Past trans Olympians include New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who competed in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. And Quinn, a trans nonbinary Canadian soccer player, competed in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro and 2020 Tokyo Olympics. (Quinn was not out during the 2016 games, however.)

The International Olympics Committee has allowed transgender people to participate in the games since 2004, and when similar pressure was mounting in 2021, the committee issued a statement showing their support for the LGBTQ+ community.

“The IOC will not discriminate against an athlete who has qualified through their [International Federation], on the basis of their gender identity and/or sex characteristics,” their website states.

But as Trump’s sports ban took hold, it also has taken its grip at a national level. 

Just this week, Pennsylvania followed suit on Trump’s executive order and banned transgender athletes from participating in school sports. Other states, such as Maine, have signaled that they may push back on Trump’s ban. 

This bigotry extends beyond sporting arenas. 

Trump signed a barrage of executive orders targeting the tiny percentage of Americans who are transgender. One order Trump signed targets trans youth, banning gender-affirming medical care for those under the age of 19. He also threatened schools over teaching “gender ideology.” 

The convicted felon also signed an executive order effectively banning transgender people from the military. 

However, in a statement to Daily Kos, the civil rights organization Lambda Legal said they’re ready to take the president to court on this front. 

“Thousands of transgender troops are combat-tested, having been deployed to war zones and executed missions with distinction, many of whom are senior personnel with decades of experience,” Sasha Buchert, the director of Lambda Legal’s nonbinary and transgender rights project, told Daily Kos. “It will hurt unit cohesion because it will discriminate against otherwise qualified service members, sending the message that identity rather than merit is what is important and that some discrimination is acceptable.”

The legal group had one message for Trump: See you in court.

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Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., who proudly declared he is one of “President Trump’s lawyers,” appears to be expanding his partisan services to other Republicans facing legal woes. 

The Department of Justice employee declined to issue a warrant to arrest Cory Mills after the GOP House member from Florida was suspected of physically assaulting 27-year-old Sarah Raviani, the co-founder of Iranians for Trump, at his Southwest Washington apartment, per The Washington Post.

“This week, law enforcement was asked to resolve a private matter at Congressman Mills’ residence,” read a statement from Mills’ spokesperson, which was sent to several media outlets, including NBC News. “Congressman Mills vehemently denies any wrongdoing whatsoever, and is confident any investigation will clear this matter quickly.”

On Wednesday, the D.C. Metropolitan Police responded to a 911 call from a woman who reported an assault. According to a copy of the police report obtained by NBC 4 Washington, the 44-year-old Mills “grabbed” Raviani, “shoved her, and pushed her out of the door.”

“Eventually, [Mills] made contact with police and admitted that the situation escalated from verbal to physical, but it was severe enough to create bruising,” the report continued.

Police noted that Raviani had “bruises on her arm, which appeared fresh.” She also claimed that Mills had been her “significant other for over a year,” which is interesting considering Mills has been married to his wife Rana Al Saadi since 2014 and they have two children together, according to The Daily Beast

When officers informed Mills he would be placed under arrest, Raviani then recanted the details of the assault. A second version of the police report obtained by NBC 4 Washington the following day only characterized the incident as a “family disturbance.” Raviani later told the Post that she was never assaulted and that “no physical altercation took place.”

Mills was not taken into custody at the time of the 911 call but officers seemed to believe the apparent confrontation warranted closer attention. Although police sent a warrant application for Mills this past Friday, Martin’s office refused to sign it, ending any criminal investigation. Prosecutors reportedly believed there was “insufficient probable cause to support an arrest,” per the Post.

A spokesperson for Martin declined to comment to the Post, claiming that discussing any case before criminal charges are filed is improper. 

It’s striking that a U.S. Attorney’s Office declined the case, especially since Martin, a Donald Trump appointee and MAGA supporter who pushed Trump’s lies about a stolen election, has been accused of trying to silence critics of the president and his “first buddy” Elon Musk, and even sent a threatening letter to a Congress member who has spoken out against them. On Monday, the man who legally defended several Jan. 6 rioters proclaimed in an incoherent and roundly criticized statement that federal prosecutors serve as Trump’s personal attorneys.

Perhaps Martin is trying to protect Mills in a desperate effort to maintain Republicans’ slim majority in the House. With a 218-215 edge, GOP members have almost no margin for error if they want to pass their cruel legislation that aims to give huge tax cuts to the rich while slashing health care and food stamps for struggling Americans. In line with this, House Speaker Mike Johnson admitted that Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York has not yet had her confirmation vote to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations because he can’t afford to lose another vote on his struggling budget bill.

According to NBC, D.C. police are investigating why officers didn’t initially arrest Mills and why the case was reclassified as a family disturbance instead of an assault. 

“Once MPD leadership became aware of this matter there was an immediate review of our initial response to ensure all procedures were followed. MPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau is currently investigating this matter,” the department said.

It would indeed be an interesting development if the supposed party of law and order was using its judicial power to avoid prosecuting one of their own. Mills, a Trump superfan, is a two-term congressman from Florida who has said he will make a Senate run in 2026 for the seat that was vacated by now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

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The Supreme Court has once again rejected a telecom industry challenge to New York's $15 broadband law.

The court first refused the hear the case in December, which meant that an appeals court ruling upholding the law was not disturbed. New York started enforcing the law in January, but broadband industry groups made another attempt to get the Supreme Court's attention.

AT&T stopped offering its 5G home Internet service in New York entirely instead of complying with the law, and the industry hoped AT&T's exit would convince the Supreme Court to change its decision. Lobby groups filed a supplemental brief on January 17 urging the court to reconsider its denial of their petition, saying that AT&T's exit proves that "some providers will cease offering broadband service in New York rather than sell at a loss."

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It’s hard to imagine a lawsuit that faces more challenging political headwinds than Mexico’s case against US gun companies in Smith & Wesson Brands v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos.

Briefly, the nation of Mexico sued seven US gun manufacturers plus a company that distributes firearms, claiming that these companies knowingly (and illegally) supplied guns to drug cartels in that country which set off an epidemic of violence. According to a federal appeals court that previously heard this case, “defendants produce more than sixty-eight percent of the U.S. guns trafficked into Mexico, which comes out to between 342,000 and 597,000 guns each year.”

Mexico makes a plausible case that these companies have profited handsomely off of these weapons, which allegedly cause thousands of deaths in Mexico every year. Yet there are three reasons to doubt that Mexico has any shot of prevailing in the US Supreme Court.

The first is a 2005 federal law, known as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (“PLCAA”), which gives gun makers and sellers an unusual amount of immunity from lawsuits of all kinds. This law seeks to prevent suits against gun manufacturers “for the harm solely caused by the criminal or unlawful misuse of firearm products or ammunition products by others when the product functioned as designed and intended.” Guns, of course, are designed and intended to be used as deadly weapons.

That said, PLCAA does contain some exceptions to this general rule, including an exception for gun manufacturers who aid and abet a violation of state or federal law. But that brings us to the second reason why Mexico faces an uphill climb: The Court’s most recent precedent governing when someone can be held liable for aiding and abetting is fairly vague, and it contains language that is favorable to both parties’ positions in this case. That means that the justices could potentially read this case to benefit whichever party they want to win.

And that brings us to the third reason why Mexico is unlikely to prevail: The politics of this case are simply awful. The Supreme Court has 6-3 Republican supermajority, and those Republicans have tripped over themselves to rule in favor of pro-gun causes — even writing an entirely new interpretation of the Second Amendment in order to make the law much more favorable to guns. 

While there are reasonable legal arguments supporting both sides of this case, Smith & Wesson asks a Republican Supreme Court to choose between ruling in favor of gun makers and ruling in favor of Mexicans. If you’re a gambler, it’s easy to decide which side of that bet you should take.

Of course, it’s still possible that a majority of the justices will side with Mexico here. Realistically, however, Mexico faces a tough fight in a Supreme Court that’s shown a great deal of solicitude for the gun industry — even in cases that don’t involve a federal statute that protects gun companies from liability.

What is the legal issue in Smith & Wesson?

Mexico sued a broad range of American gun companies, including Smith & Wesson, Glock, Colt, and Beretta. While their factual allegations are somewhat complicated, Mexico essentially argues that these companies knew that their guns were being distributed to dealers who were selling them to cartels, often indirectly through “straw” purchasers who would buy the guns and then sell or transfer them to cartel members.

According to Mexico’s brief, the defendants “routinely receive alerts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) showing that ‘guns they sell to specific distributors and dealers are being recovered at crime scenes in Mexico.’” Mexico alleges that the gun companies continue to do business with these distributors or dealers despite those warnings.

Ordinarily, PLCAA prohibits lawsuits arising out of “the criminal or unlawful misuse” of a gun by a “third party” — meaning that a gun manufacturer cannot be sued if someone uses their product to commit a crime. But the law contains an exception for suits where a gun maker “knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product, and the violation was a proximate cause of the harm for which relief is sought.”

So which statute have the gun makers allegedly violated? As the appeals court that heard this case explained, “Mexico reasons that by deliberately facilitating the unlawful trafficking of their guns into Mexico, defendants aid and abet violations of various federal statutes that prohibit selling guns without a license, exporting guns without a license, and selling to straw purchasers.”

So this case is complicated, and it involves a fair amount of labyrinthian statutory language. The most important thing to understand is that this case is likely to turn on what it means to “aid and abet” a violation of a federal licensing or anti-straw purchaser law. Mexico and the defendants both interpret this phrase quite differently.

The answer to that question is likely to hinge on Twitter v. Taamneh (2023), a recent, unanimous decision discussing what it means for one person to aid and abet an illegal action by another person.

So what does “aid and abet” mean?

Twitter involved a federal law that permits any American who is injured by an act of international terrorism to sue anyone who “aids and abets, by knowingly providing substantial assistance” to anyone who commits “such an act of international terrorism.” 

The plaintiffs were American relatives of people killed in ISIS terror attacks, who claimed that major social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube aided and abetted those attacks because they sometimes hosted recruitment videos posted by ISIS.

Much of the Twitter opinion is favorable to the gun manufacturers’ position. In ruling for the social media companies, all nine justices were worried about creating a world where any company could be sued for any remote consequence caused by their product. As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the Court, “if aiding-and-abetting liability were taken too far, then ordinary merchants could become liable for any misuse of their goods and services, no matter how attenuated their relationship with the wrongdoer.”

At the same time, the gun makers at the heart of the Smith & Wesson case have a much closer relationship with gun dealers than Twitter or Facebook had with a terrorist group. And the legal rule announced in the Twitter decision is quite vague.

Specifically, the Court announced that, in order to aid and abet an illegal act, a defendant must “have given knowing and substantial assistance to the” person who actually performed that act. Thomas added that a weaker demonstration that the defendant knew what was going on might be overcome by a greater showing of assistance, or vice versa.

Smith & Wesson arrives at the Court at an early stage of the litigation; no trial court has examined Mexico’s factual allegations. Because of that, the justices are required to treat all of Mexico’s allegations as true. So, it would likely be improper for the Court to dismiss this case right now. Notably, the appeals court which heard this case determined that Mexico’s suit could move forward under Twitter.

But Twitter also provides a justice who wants to rule in favor of the gun companies with plenty of reasons they can use to justify their preferred result.

The gun companies also make another, more dangerous argument

In addition to fighting over the proper way to read decisions like Twitter, Mexico and the gun companies also disagree over the proper meaning of a legal term known as “proximate cause.” Recall that the PLCAA allows suits against gun companies to move forward if those companies knowingly violated a law, and this violation “was a proximate cause of the harm for which relief is sought.”

Proximate cause is a foundational legal concept that law students typically spend a fair amount of time studying during their first-year Torts class. It refers to an act that doesn’t just cause someone to be harmed, but that the law deems legally sufficient to justify holding the actor liable for that harm. Basically, it helps courts decide who is responsible (and who is not) for some injury.

Think of it this way: Suppose that Jack hits someone with his car while driving home, breaking one of their ribs in the process. Any number of acts could be said to have “caused” this accident, including the car manufacturer’s decision to make that car and the car dealer’s decision to sell it to Jack. But we don’t normally think of these sorts of remote causes as a good basis for a lawsuit. Absent any evidence that the dealer or the manufacturer behaved wrongfully or negligently, the law will hold Jack solely responsible for his negligent driving.

While the concept of proximate cause can be slippery, the general rule, as laid out in a treatise cited in Mexico’s brief, is that a defendant can be held responsible for injuries that are the reasonably “foreseeable” result of their illegal actions. Indeed, the Twitter opinion seems to embrace this view, stating that “people who aid and abet a tort can be held liable for other torts that were ‘a foreseeable risk’ of the intended tort.” 

Thus, for example, while a car dealer ordinarily would not be liable for selling a car to someone who gets into an accident with that car, the rule might be different if Jack had shown up to the dealership and loudly bragged about how much he’s looking forward to using his new car to injure people. In this case, the dealer reasonably should have foreseen that selling a car to Jack would lead to another person being injured.

The gun companies, however, propose a radical reimagining of the concept of “proximate cause” in their brief. They claim that, when a chain of events leads to a bad outcome, the legal cause of that outcome is generally “limited to the ‘first step’ in a causal chain.” This is especially true, they argue, when that chain of events involves “separate actions carried out by separate parties” — that is, when multiple independent actions by multiple people led to the bad outcome.

Thus, under the gun companies’ proposed rule, if a gun manufacturer sells a gun to a distributor, who sells it to a dealer, who sells it to a straw purchaser, who sells it to a cartel member, who uses it to kill a Mexican police officer, it is likely that only the cartel member could be held liable for this death.

The problem with the gun companies’ proposed rule, however, is that limiting liability to just one actor in a causal chain would lead to absurd results. 

Suppose that Jack, after visiting a neighbor, intentionally leaves that neighbor’s front door wide open, and even puts up a sign reading, “Hey thieves! There’s lots of stuff behind this totally unlocked door that you can steal.” Under the gun companies’ theory, if a burglar takes Jack up on this invitation, only the burglar could be held liable for the theft, and not Jack, even though the burglary could have never taken place without Jack’s malicious action.

In any event, the concept of proximate cause can sometimes be difficult to apply to individual cases. And courts sometimes struggle to determine whether a particular defendant reasonably should have foreseen an illegal act by another individual. But the gun companies’ proposed rule is too simplistic, and it would allow many companies to escape liability even when they knew full well that someone would use their products to do something awful.

It is likely, given the Supreme Court’s Republican supermajority, that these justices will find some way to rule in favor of the gun companies in Smith & Wesson. Should that happen, however, we should hope they do so in a way that doesn’t lead to preposterous results in a whole mess of future cases.

President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill”—which would cut taxes for the rich while at the same time slash health care and food stamp benefits for the poorest Americans—is on the brink of collapse, with multiple House Republicans saying they will not support the budget bill that's set for a vote on Tuesday night.

The budget—which seeks to partly pay for an extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the top 1% of earners by cutting hundreds of billions from Medicaid, food stamps, and educational grants—faces opposition from GOP lawmakers on all sides of the political spectrum.

Hard-liners oppose the budget because they correctly point out that it would add to the federal deficit. Those hard-liners want even more cuts to federal spending to pay for Trump's regressive tax cuts.

“If the Republican budget passes, the deficit gets worse, not better,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who plans to vote against the bill, wrote in a post on X.

Meanwhile, less insane Republicans (because let's face it, there are no moderate GOP lawmakers) are balking at the massive cuts the budget would make to Medicaid and food stamps. 

The budget calls for the House Energy and Commerce Committee to make $880 billion in cuts, which are largely expected to come from Medicaid, the government health care plan that covers more than 72 million low-income Americans. The budget also calls for the House Agriculture Committee to cut $230 billion, which could come largely from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program, better known as food stamps.

A group of eight GOP lawmakers sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson on Feb. 19, urging him not to use Medicaid and food stamps as the pay for tax cuts.

“For many families across the country, Medicaid is their only access to healthcare,” Reps. Tony Gonzales, Nicole Malliotakis, Monica De La Cruz, David Valadao, Juan Ciscomani, Rob Bresnahan Jr., James Moylan, and Kimberlyn King-Hinds, wrote in the letter. “Slashing Medicaid would have serious consequences, particularly in rural and predominantly Hispanic communities where hospitals and nursing homes are already struggling to keep their doors open.”

Ultimately, Johnson can afford to lose just one vote and have the budget pass—assuming every lawmaker is in attendance.

And according to Politico, as many as seven GOP lawmakers are publicly voting no or leaning no on the bill.

“I don't know how you do it without cutting Medicaid seriously,” New Jersey turncoat Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew told Politico. “And so that's my concern, and that's why, at this point, I'm a lean no.”

Democrats, meanwhile, are united in their opposition.

At a House Rules Committee hearing on Monday night, where Republicans advanced the budget to a vote before the full House, Democrats introduced amendments that would prevent the budget from cutting taxes to the richest taxpayers.

But Republicans voted each of those amendments down—even though exempting the richest taxpayers from tax cuts would allow Republicans to cut less from Medicaid and food stamps.

“Every single Republican on the Rules Committee chose more tax giveaways for billionaires over protecting their own constituents on Medicaid,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, wrote in a post on X. “Don't listen to what they say. Watch how they vote.”

The bill is currently set for a vote at 6:30 PM ET on Tuesday. But if it looks like it won't pass, Republicans could pull the vote—which would be a massive self-own and a terrible sign for the future of Trump's legislative agenda.

Ultimately, it looks like Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is more like one big, beautiful disaster.  

Thank you to the Daily Kos community who continues to fight so hard with Daily Kos. Your reader support means everything. We will continue to have you covered and keep you informed, so please donate just $3 to help support the work we do.

Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said government workers should comply with an Elon Musk order that is being disputed by others.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency sent out an email to federal workers on Saturday demanding that they send him a summary of five things they’ve accomplished over the previous week of work or risk being fired.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union of federal employees, slammed the directive. Union President Everett Kelley sent a letter to the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees government workers, and asked for Musk’s letter to be rescinded.

“Since last night, it has become even more clear that the thoughtless and bullying email was meant to intimidate federal employees and cause mass confusion,” Kelley wrote in a statement released today.

Multiple agency heads—led by Trump appointees—told their staff not to respond to Musk’s demand, citing possible security violations. Even some congressional Republicans, including Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, have spoken out against the Musk directive.

But in a CNN appearance on Sunday, Connolly said workers should comply for now.

“I guess if you can, cover yourself and do the five things you did last week just to be able to say, ‘well I did it,’” he advised.

The pro-compliance message echoed continuing weakness from Democratic leaders in response to Trump and Musk’s disruptive and bigoted actions in the executive branch. The party has provided key congressional votes for some of Trump’s nominees and has not deployed the full arsenal of legislative tools that are available to slow down Trump’s actions.

Connolly secured his position on the pivotal Oversight Committee after leaders in the House Democratic caucus—most notably former Speaker Nancy Pelosi—backed Connolly’s bid over Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

While other Democratic leaders have been fumbling for a response to Trump, the administration has been in a public feud with Ocasio-Cortez. Tom Homan, Trump’s handpicked immigration czar, has even called on the Department of Justice to investigate the congresswoman after she advised migrant communities of their constitutional rights.

In contrast to Connolly’s pro-compliance message, Ocasio-Cortez recently wrote, “America is not for sale. We have an obligation to resist kings. We outnumber them. And they can be overwhelmed.”

Public polling has recently shown that voters are starting to sour on Musk and DOGE. For instance, only 34% of respondents to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll said they approved of Musk while 55% in a Quinnipiac University poll said he had too much power. Democratic leadership is still behind the public when it comes to resisting Trump and Musk and there is little evidence so far that they have any motivation to catch up.

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