Lindsey

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

Just sharing this tweet from Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein about Elon Musk’s “deferred resignation” offer for federal government workers. (Don’t take it! It’s still a trap.)

Also, if you remember the letter-writer who worked at Twitter when Elon Musk took over, that same person has sent in this note:

I just wanted to thank you for posting about what federal workers who are currently under attack can do.

The former Twitter employees I know have all spent the past couple of weeks reliving the Twitter takeover from 2 years ago but on a much more widespread and terrible scale. I want to say this is all beyond belief but … we saw this happen and how it played out, and now I’m just left feeling so angry that we couldn’t have stopped this somehow. I don’t know what I could have done differently or better, but I feel the burden of watching this happen the first time around and not being able to stop it.

Seeing the news about how Elon locked government workers out of their systems, how they’re moving beds into OPM’s headquarters … It feels like the Twilight Zone.

I would not at all be surprised if he held a public auction in the next couple weeks to sell off real estate, office equipment … all the way down to artwork on the walls and plants on employee desks.

I’m still thinking about how I can help push back on and resist what we’re seeing happen all around us, and I wanted to say that if you ever do another post on this issue, please let the federal workers know that a whole bunch of former Twitter employees know what they’re going through, and we support them, and we’re so so sorry they’re experiencing this.

It's been a confusing 24 hours at the US Postal Service (USPS) after the Trump administration imposed new tariffs on China that eliminated a loophole allowing low-value Chinese packages into the US duty-free.

On Tuesday, the USPS abruptly stopped accepting all inbound packages from Hong Kong and China. This briefly halted personal shipments from China, as well as online deliveries from China-based companies. That included blocking orders from online marketplaces increasingly popular with Americans like Alibaba, Temu, and Shein, as well as China-based retailers selling cheap goods on Amazon.

But by Wednesday morning, the USPS reversed the temporary policy, posting an international service notice clarifying that the USPS and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) "are working closely together to implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery."

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When thousands of pages started disappearing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website late last week, public health researchers quickly moved to archive deleted public health data.

Soon, researchers discovered that the Internet Archive (IA) offers one of the most effective ways to both preserve online data and track changes on government websites. For decades, IA crawlers have collected snapshots of the public Internet, making it easier to compare current versions of websites to historic versions. And IA also allows users to upload digital materials to further expand the web archive. Both aspects of the archive immediately proved useful to researchers assessing how much data the public risked losing during a rapid purge following a pair of President Trump's executive orders.

Part of a small group of researchers who managed to download the entire CDC website within days, virologist Angela Rasmussen helped create a public resource that combines CDC website information with deleted CDC datasets. Those datasets, many of which were previously in the public domain for years, were uploaded to IA by an anonymous user, "SheWhoExists," on January 31. Moving forward, Rasmussen told Ars that IA will likely remain a go-to tool for researchers attempting to closely monitor for any unexpected changes in access to public data.

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Just months after we learned Chinese hackers had compromised US telecom systems through government-mandated backdoors, an inexperienced developer from Musk’s DOGE unit is pushing untested code directly into the Treasury’s payment infrastructure — a system that handles over $6 trillion in federal payments annually.

It seems reasonable to call it one of the most dangerous cyberattacks on the US government.

The Treasury Department wants us to believe everything is fine. When Senators Warren and Wyden — the ranking members of the Banking and Finance Committees — demanded answers about Musk’s team’s access to the payment system, Treasury responded with reassurances: just “read only” access, they claimed, with no ability to interfere with payments.

Importantly, the ongoing review of Treasury’s systems is not resulting in the suspension or rejection of any payment instructions submitted to Treasury by other federal agencies across the government. In particular, the review at the Fiscal Service has not caused payments for obligations such as Social Security and Medicare to be delayed or re-routed. To be clear, the agency responsible for making the payment always drives the payment process. Currently, Treasury staff members working with Tom Krause, a Treasury employee, will have read-only access to the coded data of the Fiscal Service’s payment systems in order to continue this operational efficiency assessment. This is similar to the kind of access that Treasury provides to individuals reviewing Treasury systems, such as auditors, and that follows practices associated with protecting the integrity of the systems and business processes.

But while Treasury was making these claims, both Wired and TPM revealed a far more alarming reality: a 25-year-old DOGE team member named Marko Elez (who had refused to give any of his brand new colleagues his last name) had been granted something far beyond “read only” access — he had full administrator privileges to the system. That’s the keys to the kingdom (or, rather, the kingdom’s payments):

Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: The Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a top-secret mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.

Despite reporting that suggests DOGE has access to these Treasury systems on a “read-only” level, sources say Elez, who has visited a Kansas City office housing BFS systems, has many administrator-level privileges. Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log into servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.

And Elez’s qualifications for this extraordinary level of access to our nation’s financial infrastructure? According to Wired’s reporting, a mere three and a half years of experience since graduating Rutgers, split between SpaceX and ExTwitter’s Search AI team. Neither position involved anything remotely close to handling critical financial infrastructure or government payment systems.

But it gets worse. Josh Marshall’s reporting at TPM reveals something that I can already hear developers howling about, even through the internet: Elez isn’t just looking at the code — he’s pushing untested changes directly into production on a system that handles trillions in federal payments:

I’m told that Elez and possibly other DOGE operatives received full admin-level access on Friday, January 31st. The claim of “read only” access was either false from the start or later fell through. The DOGE team, which appears to be mainly or only Elez for the purposes of this project, has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system. They have not locked out the existing programmer/engineering staff but have rather leaned on them for assistance, which the staff appear to have painedly provided hoping to prevent as much damage as possible — “damage” in the sense not of preventing the intended changes but avoiding crashes or a system-wide breakdown caused by rapidly pushing new code into production with a limited knowledge of the system and its dependencies across the federal government.

Remember Treasury’s reassurance that no payments would be blocked? That appears to have been, at best, aspirational. At worst, deliberately misleading. Marshall’s sources indicate that the code changes have a very specific purpose: creating mechanisms to block payments while hiding the evidence.

Phrases like “freaking out” are, not surprisingly, used to describe the reaction of the engineers who were responsible for maintaining the code base until a week ago. The changes that have been made all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked. I want to emphasize that the described changes are not being tested in a dev environment (i.e., a not-live environment) but have already been pushed into production. This is code that appears to be mainly the work of Elez, who was first introduced to the system probably roughly a week ago and certainly not before the second Trump inauguration. The most recent information I have is that no payments have as yet been blocked and that the incumbent engineering team was able to convince Elez to push the code live to impact only a subset of the universe of payments the system controls. I have also heard no specific information about this access being used to drill down into the private financial or proprietary information of payment recipients, though it appears that the incumbent staff has only limited visibility into what Elez is doing with the access. They have, however, looked extensively into the categories and identity of payees to see how certain payments can be blocked.

Let’s be clear about what we’re seeing: deliberately obscured payment-blocking capabilities being added to absolutely critical government infrastructure by an inexperienced developer with minimal oversight. In cybersecurity terms, that’s not just a backdoor — it’s flashing warning lights of an approaching catastrophe.

And the timing couldn’t be worse.

As you might know, we’re about to face yet another debt ceiling crisis in the near future, which might be even more chaotic given the current state of the federal government. But one of the key aspects of the whole debt ceiling thing is that, at some point, long-term civil servants at the Treasury Department are supposed to inform Congress when the government runs out of money.

Greg Sargent, over at The New Republic, has a terrifying piece on how the people who know how to do that were the people Musk just pushed out, like David Lebyk.

What also alarms these officials is that this is unfolding even as a debt ceiling crisis looms. When the government is on the verge of defaulting on its obligations, these officials tell me, it’s Lebryk and his team who carefully monitor the situation to determine, to the greatest extent possible, on what date it will no longer be able to meet its obligations. This team monitors the water levels, these officials say, noting that this is how Treasury knows what to say in those letters that periodically warn Congress that a breach is approaching.

As it happens, this is precisely why we want career, nonpolitical civil servants to be in charge of the spigots. To put it delicately, this is some really complicated shit, and we want the process to be administered in a totally nonpoliticized way. Letting someone like Musk anywhere near it risks corrupting it quite deeply.

“The payment systems are controlled by a small number of career officials precisely to protect them and the full faith and credit of the United States from political interference,” said Jesse Lee, who was a senior adviser to the National Economic Council under President Joe Biden. Or as Linden put it: “This is exactly the kind of thing you do not want political appointees getting involved in.”

And just to add an extra layer of technical recklessness to this situation, Marshall’s reporting includes this stomach-churning detail:

Adding further anxiety about the stability of the system there is, I’m told, a long-scheduled migration scheduled to take place this weekend which could interact in unpredictable ways with the code changes already described.

Cool. Cool.

Pushing untested code changes right before a major system migration is the kind of thing that gets you fired from a low-level development job. Here we’re talking about the federal government’s payment infrastructure.

All of this becomes even more alarming when you consider the broader context: sophisticated foreign adversaries have been systematically probing and compromising US government systems for years.

As we’ve been covering over the last few months, we only recently learned that the Chinese state-sponsored hacking group known as Salt Typhoon gained almost unrestricted access to the backdoors we built into the telecom system for law enforcement wiretapping. They had that access for “months or longer” and were able to do real damage. We still don’t even know if we’ve gotten them out of the system.

And what was one of Trump’s first moves upon taking office? Firing the team investigating that breach.

So here we are: an inexperienced developer, fresh from working on ExTwitter’s search tools, is implementing hidden payment-blocking capabilities in the federal government’s $6 trillion payment system, while the very experts who understand these systems are being pushed out, and the teams responsible for investigating security breaches are being disbanded.

What could go wrong?

Hopefully, for everyone’s sake, nothing goes wrong at all. It sounds like career staff are doing their best to actually protect the system from harm. But, this isn’t a rocket ship that you can have blow up a few times before you figure out the problems.

So… fingers crossed?

The Trump administration’s leadership at the General Services Administration is looking to cut the agency’s total budget in half, and looking to reduce staffing to reach that goal.

GSA leaders have notified staff they are expected to reduce total spending across all programs and personnel by 50%. Plans to meet that goal are due to GSA’s acting administrator no later than Friday.

GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service told staff in a town hall meeting on Jan. 31 that senior leadership is developing a plan to cut GSA’s spending by 50%. Potential areas for cuts include personnel, payroll and contracts.

GSA leadership didn’t offer a timeline for implementing the cuts, but employees were told that a nonvoluntary Reduction in Force (RIF) is expected “shortly” after Feb. 6. That’s the deadline for federal employees to accept the Office of Personnel Management’s “deferred resignation offer.”

FAS Commissioner Josh Gruenbaum told staff in an email this week that FAS will be “looking at operations in every portfolio to strengthen our business and comply with the directive from the President to reduce the federal workforce.”

“We can and must make tough decisions to create a leaner and more agile organization,” Gruenbaum wrote.

Among those decisions, Gruenbaum told employees that “we won’t need staff in certain parts of the country,” and will be “cutting redundant business functions and associated staffing.”

“In addition to optimizing our workforce, we’re also considering how we can use AI in our portfolios and ways to reduce prices for our client agencies,” Gruenbaum wrote.

Acting GSA Administrator Stephen Ehikian told employees in an email last week that the “OPM email is real and should be taken seriously,” and added that there are “NO excluded positions” at GSA.

“Per President Trump’s directives concerning the federal workforce, there will be a multi-step approach to reducing the size of the federal workforce and consolidating redundant operations,” Ehikian wrote in an email sent Jan. 30.

“If you do not accept, you should expect more changes to come. We will be implementing a performance culture that will evaluate everyone based on key performance metrics,” he wrote.  “There will be further consolidation of office and centralization of functions. This plan is actively being worked on, but will not be finalized before Feb. 6.”

GSA’s return to office mandate, he added, will go into effect on March 3, with the requirement of working five days per week at a federal facility.

Elon Musk, the head of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency, wrote on X Monday that GSA’s 18F — a team of designers, software engineers and product designers that helps other federal agencies build, buy and share technology products — has been “deleted.”

A source familiar with the situation at GSA said 18F engineers “have deleted large swaths of internal code” at the direction of Thomas Shedd, the director of GSA’s Technology Transformation Services.

Federal News Network has reached out to GSA for comment about 18F’s status and spending cuts proposed by GSA’s leadership.

‘GSA is going to be a substantially smaller organization’

Michael Peters, commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service, told staff in an email obtained by Federal News Network that non-Defense Department federal building space — both owned and leased — “should be reduced by at least 50%.”

“This reduction will come from more efficient space utilization, as well as an overall downsizing of the federal workforce,” Peters wrote.

The lower operating and maintenance costs, he added “will enable us to deliver higher-quality work environments over a smaller, more appropriately-sized footprint.”

Peters wrote that his initial assessment of GSA’s real-estate holdings shows a “gross excess of space in the portfolio,” as well as “substantial levels of deferred maintenance.”

Peters said GSA will also transition away from an “agency-centric model of space utilization” to a “whole of government” approach “that assesses requirements and availability across agencies.”

He added that he expects this new approach will allow PBS to “further consolidate and reduce space, as well as downsize the associated support staff and other PBS resources.”

Peters previewed his plans last week at a meeting of the Public Buildings Reform Board. During that meeting, he said a “disproportionate amount” of eliminated building space would come from the Washington, D.C. metro area — and will include GSA moving out of its own 1800 F St. NW headquarters.

Peters said the PBS is also restructuring away from an “outdated and inefficient model” of 11 regional offices across the country.

“In the immediate future, we will effectuate a restructuring along functional reporting lines rather than the current matrix of regions and functions,” he wrote. This more streamlined organization will allow the majority of our remaining personnel the flexibility to provide service across the entire geographic footprint in response to surges in demand and provide improved resource utilization and efficiency.”

Peters said these plans are still not “fully formed,” but notified PBS staff ahead of OPM’s deferred resignation offer deadline.

“GSA is going to be a substantially smaller organization in the future. I am excited to work with a highly motivated team to affect transformational change. If you want to join me on this mission to transform how PBS functions and to set an example for other federal agencies, be prepared for the hard work and difficult decisions that will be required to right size PBS,” he wrote.

‘If there is a place in government that is run like a company, it is GSA’

The proposed cuts at GSA raise questions about its ability to keep meeting its mission without impacting customer agencies.

A former GSA official told Federal News Network that the agency and its many missions — the federal government’s landlord, tech hub and contracting nerve center — have always been a “force-multiplier for really good cross-governmental efficiencies.”

“It is a prerogative of the president to set the budgets, to make sure that the government is functioning in a reflection of the way they want. I’m not trying to take that away from the administration. But to come in and just do mass layoffs and without really understanding the potential consequences — there’s mission-critical infrastructure run out of GSA,” the official said.

While Trump administration officials have touted agency cuts as a way to cut federal spending, much of GSA’s funding doesn’t come from congressional appropriations.

“It’s mostly not an appropriated agency. Even the IT shop at GSA runs off a working capital fund, which is responsive to the buyers of tech within the agency,” the former GSA official said. “If there is a place in government that is run like a company, it is GSA. So to dismiss it, and say it’s ‘deleted,’ you’re either missing the point or there’s something else at play here.”

The post GSA seeks 50% spending cuts, nonvoluntary RIF after OPM’s resignation offer first appeared on Federal News Network.

The New York Times used a programmatic approach to estimate the number of pages taken down so far since Friday. Ethan Singer reporting:

On Friday, The Times downloaded the list of the most visited government domains in the U.S. and began compiling the complete list of pages available on each one using each site’s sitemap, a file that outlines the structure of a website and is typically used by search engines to keep track of what’s on the internet. (Some sites, including state.gov and weather.gov, were not included in our analysis because we were unable to identify a complete list of web pages on their sites, or for other technical reasons.) In all, we were able to identify more than seven million pages across more than 150 sites.

We then repeated this process several times Friday night and on Saturday, and compared our new list of websites with those we originally found.

About 3,000 pages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 3,000 from the Census Bureau, and 1,000 from the Office of Justice Programs make up the bulk of takedown.

Tags: government, New York Times, takedown

A longtime Treasury Department official is leaving his job after a dispute with Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has reportedly been seeking access to federal payment systems.

"The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems," The Washington Post reported today, citing three people familiar with the matter.

The departing official is Fiscal Assistant Secretary David Lebryk, who has served in nonpolitical Treasury Department roles during his career of more than 30 years. President Donald Trump named Lebryk the acting secretary of the Treasury, an additional role he held for a week before political appointee Scott Bessent was confirmed by the Senate. But Lebryk "announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post," the newspaper reported.

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Trump administration officials are taking major steps to cut down the size of the workforce and federal programs at the Office of Personnel Management.

During an internal meeting Friday morning, Trump administration officials directed OPM senior career staff to begin making plans to cut the agency’s workforce and programs by 70%. Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting confirmed the details of the meeting to Federal News Network.

Sources who provided information to Federal News Network on the condition of anonymity said the political leadership at the agency also directed OPM leaders to stop work on anything that is not statutorily required.

Trump administration officials told agency office leaders and associate directors at OPM to prepare briefs over the weekend detailing all of their work and programs that are statutorily required. By Monday, all OPM offices are expected to give political leaders organizational staffing charts with plans for an initial 30% reduction for both federal employees and contractors.

“People around OPM look like they have seen ghost. People are shocked,” a source told Federal News Network by email.

According to FedScope data, as of March 2024, OPM had 2,902 agency employees — 2,148 of which are career employees in the competitive service. Close to 1,300 employees are bargaining unit members with the American Federation of Government Employees.

Based on the conversations in Friday morning’s meeting, it’s unclear at this time what components or programs at OPM will be cut as part of the 70% reduction. But it’s likely the cuts will impact Retirement Services, the Federal Employees Health Benefits program, and other major federal programs that OPM runs.

OPM declined to comment on the details of the agency meeting.

The plans at OPM align with the Trump administration’s broader efforts to overhaul and majorly reduce the size of the federal workforce governmentwide.

Many federal employees remain uncertain about how to respond to the offer of a “deferred resignation” by the end of next week.

If employees don’t take the deferred resignation, the next phase will likely be issuing reductions in force (RIFs) and creating performance evaluation plans to try to further cut down the size of the federal workforce, according to a source familiar with OPM’s plans. OPM is also looking at the possibility of offering voluntary early retirements to eligible employees.

“This is all driven by the president’s promise to reduce the size of government. But this is cutting with a hatchet not a scalpel,” a source told Federal News Network. “They are trying to get the government down to a minimum set of services. We all know that this will affect the people who need the services.”

The post Trump administration directs 70% cut to internal OPM staffing, programs first appeared on Federal News Network.

As Republican lawmakers craft a wide-ranging budget reconciliation bill to lock in and potentially expand President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and fund expanded immigration enforcement, federal workers are once again in the crosshairs.

A 50-page document, compiled by GOP members of the House Budget Committee and first reported by Politico, outlines a list of provisions that could be included in the package, which would not be subject to the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold, includes a litany of proposals increasing federal workers’ contribution to their retirement and health care benefits, in exchange for worse payouts.

First is a proposal to standardize the amount Federal Employees Retirement System enrollees pay toward their defined-benefit annuity at 4.4%. Currently, FERS participants contribute 0.8% of their basic pay to their retirement if they were hired in 2012 or prior, 3.1% if they were hired in 2013, and 4.4% if they were hired in 2014 or later.

The document also suggests eliminating the FERS supplement for employees who retire before reaching Social Security eligibility at age 62, a provision that would disproportionately impact federal law enforcement officers, who are mostly required to retire when they turn 57 years old. And it revives a proposal from Trump’s first term to base federal retirees’ annuity payments on the average of the highest five years of an employee’s salary, compared to the current “High-3” calculation.

Another proposal would require newly hired federal workers to choose between better retirement benefits and the civil service protections that most federal employees currently enjoy.

“This option would require future federal employees to elect between two classification systems: the current system with merit-based civil service protections or a new at-will classification,” the document states. “If an employee elects to be classified as an at-will classification, they will maintain a lower FERS annuity contribution rate (4.4% or lower). However, for employees that elect to be classified under the current merit-based civil service system, their annuity employee contribution would be increased to a higher rate.”

On health care benefits, the House GOP proposes replacing the current system, by which the federal government pays for a percentage of health care premiums through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and the new Postal Service Health Benefits program, with a “voucher model.”

“Under this option, the FEHB and PSHB programs would be reformed by replacing the current premium-sharing structure with a voucher, which would not be subject to income and payroll taxes,” the document states.

And the document calls for enactment of a bill introduced last year to require the Office of Personnel Management to audit FEHBP for improper enrollments. But OPM has said that under the current “decentralized” nature of the program, the agency does not have the capabilities to conduct such an audit.

Prior to the presidential transition, then-President Biden’s OPM sent Congress a legislative proposal, drawn on lessons learned in launching the PSHB program this year, to revamp how it administers FEHBP so that it can conduct better oversight.

The panel also floated reviving a Trump-era policy to charge unions for use of agency property, including office space, computers and other equipment, or to evict them from federal facilities. New in this iteration is a proposal also to charge unions for official time granted to union officials.

Official time is the practice by which agencies pay union employees’ their normal salary for time spent working on representational matters, including collective bargaining negotiations as well as representing employees in litigation, grievance or disciplinary proceedings. Though often presented—incorrectly—by conservatives as a giveaway for unions to conduct internal business on government time, the practice represents a compromise at the center of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act—the government agrees to pay union officials for time spent on representational duties, and unions agree to represent non-members within their bargaining units.

Also included in the list is a proposal to begin charging a fee for federal workers seeking to appeal an adverse personnel action to the Merit Systems Protection Board. And, in one instance of increased spending on federal workers, the document establishes a $2 billion Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment Fund to pay for governmentwide employee buyouts, coupled with an increase to the buyout cap from $25,000 to $40,000 for all civilian employees and lowers the eligibility threshold from 20 to 15 years. The buyout cap already is $40,000 at the Defense Department.

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Amid the Trump administration's abrupt, wide-scale freeze on federal funding, states are reporting that they've lost access to Medicaid, a program jointly funded by the federal government and states to provide comprehensive health coverage and care to tens of millions of low-income adults and children in the US.

The funding freeze was announced in a memo dated January 27 from Matthew Vaeth, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, and was first reported Monday evening by independent journalist Marisa Kabas. The freeze is intended to prevent "use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies," Vaeth wrote. The memo ordered federal agencies to complete a comprehensive analysis of all federal financial assistance programs to ensure they align with the president's policies and requirements.

"In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders..." Vaeth wrote.

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Last year, a study highlighted that your doctor's office might be taking your blood pressure wrong. The current best practice is to take seated blood pressure readings with a detailed protocol: Patients must not eat, drink, or exercise for 30 minutes prior; they must have an empty bladder and sit calmly for five minutes prior to the first reading; they must sit with their feet uncrossed and flat on the floor; their back should be supported; and—a big one that's often overlooked—they must keep the arm to be measured resting on a flat surface at the height of their heart, not higher or lower.

While the setup is often different from what happens in a bustling medical office, a new study blows away quibbles over protocol and suggests that even when done perfectly, the method is second-rate. We shouldn't be sitting at all when we take our blood pressure—we should be lying down.

According to the study, published in JAMA Cardiology and led by researchers at Harvard, blood pressure readings measured while lying down were significantly better at indicating risks of cardiovascular disease, stroke, heart failure, and death than were seated blood pressure readings alone.

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Parents, students, teachers, and administrators throughout North America are smarting from what could be the biggest data breach of 2025: an intrusion into the network of a cloud-based service storing detailed data of millions of pupils and school personnel.

The hack, which came to light earlier this month, hit PowerSchool, a Folsom, California, firm that provides cloud-based software to some 16,000 K–12 schools worldwide. The schools serve 60 million students and employ an unknown number of teachers. Besides providing software for administration, grades, and other functions, PowerSchool stores personal data for students and teachers, with much of that data including Social Security numbers, medical information, and home addresses.

On January 7, PowerSchool revealed that it had experienced a network intrusion two weeks earlier that resulted in the “unauthorized exportation of personal information” customers stored in PowerSchool’s Student Information System (SIS) through PowerSource, a customer support portal. Information stolen included individuals’ names, contact information, dates of birth, medical alert information, Social Security Numbers, and unspecified “other related information.”

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Electric vehicle chargers are increasingly a target of vandals, often in search of copper. "Even at our headquarter site here in Campbell, in Silicon Valley, we've had our site vandalized twice," said Rick Wilmer, CEO of ChargePoint. His customers are starting to get fed up with the problem, too, and so Wilmer has had the company hard at work on a solution: an uncuttable cable, which should be ready to deploy by early summer.

"I literally got so frustrated ... I was at home in my own workshop, building prototypes and taking all my nastiest tools to them, to try and cut them, to see what we could come up with," Wilmer told me. It's a simple idea, involving hardened steel and "some other polymer materials that are just really hard to cut through," Wilmer said.

As well as making cables for its own chargers, ChargePoint plans to license its invention to others in the industry. "So we've collaborated with a few [cable vendors] to build these cables... and we can refer anyone that's interested to those vendors and give [them] permission to build cables with this technology for someone other than us," Wilmer said.

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Blockbuster weight-loss and diabetes drugs Wegovy and Ozempic top the list of 15 drugs selected for the second round of federal price negotiations, which are scheduled to begin this year, with resulting bargained prices going into effect in 2027.

The first round of negotiations, involving 10 high-cost drugs, wrapped up in August, with resulting prices being 38 percent to 79 percent lower than list prices. Those negotiated prices will go into effect in 2026 and are expected to save people with Medicare prescription drug coverage $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs.

“Last year we proved that negotiating for lower drug prices works," Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said in a statement. "Now we plan to build on that record by negotiating for lower prices for 15 additional important drugs for seniors."

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The battery system on an electric car can either charge—from regenerative braking or an external power supply—or discharge—powering the EV's motor(s) or supplying that power via so-called vehicle-to-load. As a rule, it can't do both at once, but General Motors has some thoughts about that. The patent analysis site CarMoses spotted a recent GM patent application for a system that is capable of charging and discharging simultaneously.

The patent describes a "charging system" with a pair of charging ports. One is for drawing power from an external source, just like every other EV. The second charge port is connected to a bi-directional charger, and the battery management system is able to charge the battery pack from the first port while also supplying power from the second port.

That second port could be used to charge another battery, including the battery of another EV, and the patent includes an illustration of three EVs daisy-chained to each other.

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Great job, US government. You went so overboard with your “TikTok is an evil Chinese app” and deciding to ban it that you’re pushing kids to go even deeper into the Chinese app ecosystem.

The US government’s ham-handed attempt to ban TikTok on national security grounds is not only a troubling attack on free speech and the open internet, but it’s already backfiring by sending users flocking to Chinese apps that pose even greater privacy concerns, as young people mock their misguided paternalism.

As I type this, the top two apps on the iPhone iOS app store are:

That first one is Rednote, a Chinese app that is sort of more like Instagram/Pinterest, but which was not particularly popular in the US. At least until this week. Lemon8 is also owned by TikTok/ByteDance and has been around for a bit, though has never been that popular. It was ByteDance’s attempt to create a Pinterest-like app.

Many people are pointing out that Xingin, the maker of Rednote, is even more closely tied to the Chinese government than TikTok ever was.

Meanwhile, the biggest (and perhaps final?) big trend on TikTok is kids saying “goodbye to my Chinese spy” as they expect the TikTok app to potentially go dark this weekend. If you go on TikTok and look up the #chinesespy hashtag, there’s a never-ending stream of people effectively mocking the US government / mourning the potential loss of an app they like.

It’s basically all just people mocking the out-of-touch, censorial US government as it sets up its very own “Great Firewall.”

There was a time when the US looked on the Great Firewall of China as evidence of how closed off and censorial China was, as opposed to the US’s approach of openness and freedom. But with this move, the US has not only made a mockery of its own support of free speech and an open internet, but given a huge gift to China, by suggesting their approach of banning foreign apps to “protect its citizens” is the right approach.

The Supreme Court will weigh in some time in the next few days, and there’s a decent chance it will mock the First Amendment and freedom, and fall for the moral panic about China.

But the kids who are using TikTok are all pretty clearly aware of just how stupid this all is and are commenting on it the best way they can, spitefully mocking out-of-touch politicians, judges, and the media.

Still, the end result of this nonsense will be an end of an era of American belief in free speech and an open internet. In trying to “protect” Americans from China, our gripped-by-moral-panic political class has made us just like China. The government has decided that the only way to combat China’s techno-authoritarian censorship model is to emulate it.

On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to decide whether to block lawsuits that Honolulu filed to seek billions in damages from oil and gas companies over allegedly deceptive marketing campaigns that hid the effects of climate change.

Now those lawsuits can proceed, surely frustrating the fossil fuel industry, which felt that SCOTUS should have weighed in on this key "recurring question of extraordinary importance to the energy industry" raised in lawsuits seeking similarly high damages in several states, CBS News reported.

Defendants Sunoco and Shell, along with 15 other energy companies, had asked the court to intervene and stop the Hawaii lawsuits from proceeding. They had hoped to move the cases out of Hawaii state courts by arguing that interstate pollution is governed by federal law and the Clean Air Act.

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A British judge ruled against a man who wants to excavate a landfill where he says a hard drive with access to thousands of bitcoins was mistakenly dumped over 11 years ago.

Since 2013, James Howells has been hoping to recover a laptop hard drive that he says contains the private key for cryptocurrency which he says he mined in 2009. We wrote about it at the time, noting that the value of a bitcoin had just passed $1,000, making 7,500 bitcoins worth $7.5 million.

The alleged number of bitcoins has changed a bit, with Howells now saying he lost 8,000 bitcoins. The bitcoin price exceeded $100,000 last month and was worth over $95,636 as of this writing, or $765 million for 8,000 bitcoins.

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Local animal lovers have been saddened and alarmed by the sudden deaths of two dogs on a downtown DC sidewalk earlier this week.

The dogs died Monday afternoon in two separate incidents on 19th Street, a few blocks from the Dupont Metro. Both were walking with their owners when they were electrocuted, according to DC police.

Pepco tells Washingtonian in a statement that it’s investigating the incident “to understand what took place and what may have caused this issue.” The investigation, which the company says “will include industry peers and third-party experts,” is expected to take about two months.

In the meantime, Pepco says its crews have inspected the stretch of sidewalk where the alleged electrocutions happened—they’ve confirmed that “there is no stray voltage in the area and the area is safe.”

While Pepco hasn’t determined an official cause of Monday’s incidents, this isn’t the first time the company has investigated apparent electrocutions of dogs in DC: Back in the winter of 2021, some pet owners reported their dogs received nonfatal electric shocks in and around a Navy Yard apartment building. Pepco determined that those zaps were likely caused by powerful static.

New York City has seen similar incidents in recent years—in February 2022, a dog was fatally electrocuted in Brooklyn while walking over a metal plate on the street.

The recent snowstorm that swept across the District may have been a catalyst for Monday’s tragedies. According to a 2018 WNYC article, such incidents can happen when road salt is applied to city streets after winter weather: Since salt makes water a stronger conduit for electricity, saltwater-soaked concrete near a damaged underground cable can charge the sidewalk.

As Pepco conducts its investigation, there are still some steps that pet owners can take to protect their dogs during walks—especially in the wintertime.

Kate Meghji, the chief operating officer of the Humane Rescue Alliance, suggests getting your pup some seasonal footwear—the same way you’d wear winter boots to protect your own feet. “Rubber-soled boots or booties are a barrier that could be between your dog’s paws and the ground,” she says. Plus, booties can keep your dog’s paws from making direct contact with road salt: “The salt that people put out—some of it is pet-friendly and some of it is not, and so if it gets in your pet’s paws and they lick it, that could cause some distress.”

In general, Meghji recommends that dog walkers avoid “manhole covers and wired grates” as they move around the neighborhood.

With a coating of snow expected in the DC area Saturday, Meghji reminds pet parents to limit their animals’ outdoor time altogether: “I strongly recommend everybody snuggle with their dogs on a sofa this weekend.”

The post How to Keep Your Dog Safe From Stray Voltage on DC Streets first appeared on Washingtonian.

The list of electric vehicles that qualify for the IRS clean vehicle tax credit has changed with the arrival of the new year. No longer linked to battery capacity, the credit of up to $7,500 is now tied to the sourcing of battery components—each year, an increasing amount must be extracted or refined in the US (or a free trade partner) to be eligible. The total number of eligible EVs has actually increased in 2025, from 24 last year to 27 this year, but a number of automakers' products have also dropped off the list in the process.

The $7,500 tax credit is split into two components. $3,750 is available if the battery components are made or assembled in the US. The other half now requires that 60 percent of the critical minerals in the battery—things like lithium, nickel, and so on—be extracted or refined in the US (or by a free trade partner). Last year, this threshold was 50 percent; next year, it will increase to 70 percent.

Additionally, national security concerns mean that no EV is eligible if any of its battery components are manufactured by a "foreign entity of concern," which means any company with direct links to the governments of China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia. While the latter three have no domestic EV production they're trying to sell in the US, that obviously does not apply to China, which heavily subsidizes its domestic car makers to allow them to export their vehicles at rock-bottom prices to undermine local industry in other regions.

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The US Secret Service and other agencies plan to deploy “numerous security and surveillance drones” around DC over the next few weeks, the Associated Press reports. That’s remarkable because FAA regulations typically prohibit unmanned aerial vehicle flights in the entire region. But it’s also an acceleration of the security state apparatus that has metastasized around Washington over the last two decades.

The drones are part of federal, state, and local agencies’ responses to the three “National Special Security Events” taking place this month: Monday’s certification of the results of the presidential election, Jimmy Carter’s state funeral, and the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20. The US Secret Service typically leads coordination of National Special Security Events.

In a statement to Washingtonian, Secret Service spokesperson Nate Herring confirms the agency “will use unmanned aerial vehicles as part of our security plans for this month’s National Special Security Events and the public may see these assets operating both before and during these events.” Herring continues:

The Secret Service and our local, state and federal partners employ a multitude of seen and unseen security measures operating in tandem to ensure comprehensive and seamless security plans. To maintain operational security, we are unable to provide additional details.

The recent history of law enforcement and aerial surveillance is not an entirely happy one from a civil liberties perspective. Sometimes, they cross the Fourth Amendment line of surveilling private property, as when a New York Police Department helicopter that monitored a bicycle protest in 2005 picked up footage of what the New York Times delicately called “A man and woman who shared an intimate moment on a secluded, dark rooftop.”

And other times, as when federal officials used UAVs to monitor the protests that followed George Floyd’s murder, they invite further scrutiny into what courts may consider warrantless surveillance. A federal appeals court in 2021, for example, ruled that the Baltimore Police Department’s six-month-long aerial surveillance program of Baltimore residents was unconstitutional.

It’s not clear whether “seen and unseen security measures” will mean eyes in the skies during happenings around the upcoming National Special Security Events, such as the January 18 People’s March or the January 19 Trump rally at Capital One Arena. And to be sure, the drones are only part of a web of plans to prevent anything like what happened on January 6, 2021. But their buzz will arrive on the heels of a national drone panic and in a city where many folks are a bit nervous about what the next four years will bring.

The post Look Up, DC: Drones Could Be Watching You first appeared on Washingtonian.

Washington’s first snowfall of the year has arrived, and local sledding destinations provide the perfect opportunity to revel in the winter wonderful.

The lawn of the Capitol Building has long been a popular snow-day destination—but, thanks to an unfortunate scheduling conflict between Mother Nature and American government procedures, DC’s favorite Hill is off-limits while Congress certifies the presidential election results today (it’s the four-year anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, after all). Preparations for Jimmy Carter’s state funeral and President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration are also expected to close off much of Capitol Hill in the coming weeks, so don’t count on any sledding escapades in this area even if today’s snow sticks.

In the meantime, here are some other locally beloved spots to check out.

DC

Fort Reno Park

Boasting the highest elevation in DC, this Tenleytown park is a sledding haven—and with several smaller hills scattered throughout its parameters, it’ll be a hit with kids of all ages.

Rock Creek Park

Thrill-seekers can head to the woodsy area at P Street Beach to enjoy one of the District’s steeper hills.

Meridian Hill Park

Not only does this Northwest DC park offer sledding terrain, but it’s a go-to battleground for the District’s Snowball Fight Association.

Book Hill Park

This spot, tucked away behind the Georgetown Neighborhood Library, is good for sledding. However, we recommend this spot for older kids and adults—the hills lead into the street, so make sure you’ll be able to stop yourself.

Battery Kemble Park

An abundance of pine trees sets the scene for winter fun at this Palisades park. It’s a popular spot for local families, offering a range of elevation for big kids and little ones alike.

Eastern High School

The Capitol Building’s lawn may be out of bounds this week, but the hills at this nearby high school are another popular sledding locale.

Maryland

Takoma Park Middle School

The Lee Jordan athletic field offers sledders a large, double-tiered hill—plus, an adjacent staircase will help you on the way up to your next run.

Rockville Civic Center Park

Local sledders flock to this big hill, nestled behind the Glenview Mansion, for snow day fun.

Pine Crest Elementary School

Take in the views of this Silver Spring school’s tennis courts as you slide down its sledding hill. Parents will be sold on the spacious parking lot.

Virginia

George Washington Masonic National Memorial

The sledding hills at this Alexandria memorial offer scenic views of King Street, and have long been a popular snow-day retreat for area families.

Lake Fairfax Park

Locals still get use out of this Reston park’s facilities in the winter—even though the space is known for its 18-acre lake. The hill behind the picnic area’s restrooms makes for a great sledding slope.

Jefferson Manor Park

For the optimal ride at this Alexandria park, sledders should start at the shelter located on the Telegraph Road side.

Wolf Trap

By day, Vienna’s Wolf Trap National Park is more than a concert venue—sledders will enjoy the hilly terrain and relatively small crowds.

The post Best Sledding Spots in the DC Area first appeared on Washingtonian.

Some version of the Hula-Hoop has been around for millennia, but the popular plastic version was introduced by Wham-O in the 1950s and quickly became a fad. Now, researchers have taken a closer look at the underlying physics of the toy, revealing that certain body types are better at keeping the spinning hoops elevated than others, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We were surprised that an activity as popular, fun, and healthy as hula hooping wasn’t understood even at a basic physics level,” said co-author Leif Ristroph of New York University. “As we made progress on the research, we realized that the math and physics involved are very subtle, and the knowledge gained could be useful in inspiring engineering innovations, harvesting energy from vibrations, and improving in robotic positioners and movers used in industrial processing and manufacturing.”

Ristroph's lab frequently addresses these kinds of colorful real-world puzzles. For instance, in 2018, Ristroph and colleagues fine-tuned the recipe for the perfect bubble based on experiments with soapy thin films. In 2021, the Ristroph lab looked into the formation processes underlying so-called "stone forests" common in certain regions of China and Madagascar.

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"It's time for THE charger," the European Commission posted to X on December 28, 2024. While the sentiment only applies to one continent (and not all of it) and only certain devices, the Common Charger Directive now in effect in the European Union suggests that far fewer gadgets will foist barrels, USB-micro, or proprietary plugs onto their owners.

The Common Charger Directive demands that a "USB-C receptacle" be equipped on "radio equipment" that is "equipped with a removable or embedded rechargeable battery" and "can be recharged via wired charging." If it has a battery and can be powered by up to 240 watts through a USB-C connection, it's generally subject to the EU's USB-C requirements. The directive applies to devices "placed on the market"—sent to a distributor or buyer—after December 28, even if they were initially designed and sold before that date.

Laptops get until April 2026 to comply, but most other things—phones, tablets, handheld gaming devices, computer accessories, and wireless headphones—will have to be powered by USB-C to be sold inside the EU from now on. Drones, for the time being, are largely unaddressed by the directive, but the EU will likely get around to them.

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Drivers will no longer be able to make right turns at red lights in DC beginning on Wednesday—well, okay, at some intersections. The DC Council’s Safer Streets Amendment Act of 2022 called for an end to right turn on red everywhere in town, a ban that was eventually scheduled to take place on January 1. However, the measure will apply at only about half of the District’s intersections, the Washington Post reported last month.

Why?

A number of reasons. The act has never been popular with the administration of DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, who didn’t sign it. The DC Department of Transportation declined to pay for “gateway” signs that would inform drivers entering the District of its ban, because the council didn’t explicitly fund the project. Drivers from most other jurisdictions in the US, where right turn on red is overwhelmingly legal, would be unlikely to know about the law, DDOT director Sharon Kershbaum told the Post.

Who else doesn’t like it?

Republicans in Congress. As Michael Schaffer wrote in Politico this past summer, right turns on red have become a front in the GOP’s culture wars. Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee have floated the idea of prohibiting DC—which has no voting representation in Congress—from banning right turns on red. While such proposals rarely make it into law, you can probably expect more noise about right turn on red when Republicans take full control of the federal government next month.

What will it mean for drivers?

All intersections where motorists can’t turn right on red will bear signs, says Darnisha Green, a DDOT spokesperson. No sign means right turns on red are allowed. Drivers who violate the ban at intersections where the turns are prohibited could be subject to a $100 fine. There’s no map available from DDOT of the intersections where right turn on red is banned, Green says: “DDOT continues to install these signs and drivers should come to a complete stop each time they approach an intersection when there is a red light.”

The post DC’s Kinda-Sorta Ban of Right Turns on Red Begins January 1 first appeared on Washingtonian.

Apparently Hertz's purging of electric vehicles from its fleet isn't going fast enough for the car rental giant. A Reddit user posted an offer they received from Hertz to buy the 2023 Tesla Model 3 they had been renting for $17,913.

Hertz originally went strong into EVs, announcing a plan to buy 100,000 Model 3s for its fleet by the end of 2021, but 16 months later had acquired only half that amount. The company found that repair costs—especially for Teslas, which averaged 20 percent more than other EVs—were cutting into its profit margins. Customer demand was also not what Hertz had hoped for; last January, it announced plans to sell off 20,000 EVs.

Asking its customers if they want to purchase their rentals isn't a new strategy for Hertz. "By connecting our rental customers who opt into our emails to our sales channels, we're not only building awareness of the fact that we sell cars but also offering a unique opportunity to someone who may be in the market for the same car they have on rent," Hertz communications director Jamie Line told The Verge.

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