“The timing of this loan makes the investment all the more questionable. As CNBC reports, “When asked why Constellation was receiving the loan now,” an Energy Department official said, “Constellation could have completed the project without help from the Energy Department. But the loan will help make electricity cheaper for consumers on the grid operated by PJM Interconnection, which serves more than 65 million people across 13 states.”
Wanting to reduce electricity rates may be a worthwhile goal—energy costs are outpacing inflation and are rising faster in some states with a higher concentration of data centers—but pouring public money into restarting nuclear power plants is not the best way to achieve this.”
“Before being shut down, the Council of Inspectors General was a shared resource for the dozens of inspectors general’s offices located in various government agencies across the executive branch. It provided training for investigatory staff and ran a tip line to collect reports of waste, fraud, and abuse.
By shutting down the council, the White House may have also shuttered the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), which was created as part of the CARES Act and operated as a subcommittee of the council. (However, its website was still active on Wednesday morning.)
The PRAC was tasked with overseeing pandemic relief spending—which was absolutely rife with fraud—and was recently reauthorized by Congress until 2034 as part of the 2025 tax bill.
The White House’s decision to close the two federal watchdog agencies has drawn criticism from at least two Republican senators. “We urgently request an explanation for these actions and ask that you to promptly reverse course so that CIGIE and PRAC can continue their important oversight work uninterrupted,” wrote Sens. Susan Collins (R–Maine) and Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) in a letter to OMB Director Russell Vought this week.
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Like with the earlier attempt at firing dozens of inspectors general from their posts, this latest effort at undermining the viability of the government’s watchdogs suggests the Trump administration is less interested in draining the swamp than in pushing aside people who might sound the alarm about corruption.”
“It’s not inherently wrong for the federal government to refrain from funding an extremely wealthy private institution of higher education, especially one with an endowment of $14.8 billion. But the Trump administration isn’t trying to save money for taxpayers—it’s using the money as leverage to make the university police student expression.”
“The Office of Personnel Management has formally submitted draft regulations that would make it easier for agencies to fire career government officials who push back against presidential orders.
The move laid out in documents obtained by POLITICO on Tuesday is the latest step toward rekindling a plan initiated at the tail end of President Donald Trump’s first term to eliminate civil service protection for federal employees who play a role in policy development or advocacy.”
“Republicans on the Hill are also largely giving Musk and Trump the benefit of the doubt, dismissing criticism from Democrats that they are infringing on their congressional powers. Instead, they are leaning on comments from one of their former colleagues — Secretary of State Marco Rubio — instead of directly grappling with Musk’s actions.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), asked if Trump has the ability to close USAID unilaterally, said the administration’s goal is to ferret out waste.
“I think it’s a lot more about finding out how the dollars are being spent, where they are going and whether or not they’re consistent with this administration’s and our country’s priorities,” he said.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Judiciary Committee, said that it is a “constitutional question” when asked if Trump can end USAID without congressional approval.
“It’s how you define the executive powers of the president of the United States,” he said, “and I can’t define that for you.”
Career government officials, Democratic lawmakers and nongovernmental organizations have scrambled to shine a light on Musk’s efforts, many of which they’ve argued he doesn’t have the legal authority to carry out absent approval from Congress. Even some conservatives have raised concerns over Musk’s actions. So far, though, they have been vastly outpaced by Musk, who has taken to his social media platform X to build public support for shock-and-awe efforts.
Though Musk posted on X throughout the weekend that it was time for USAID to “die” and bragged that he was “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” it wasn’t until Monday afternoon that Democratic lawmakers held a press conference in hopes of saving the agency.
Likewise, days after Musk’s allies gained access to the Treasury Department’s payments system, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced that he and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) would work on legislation stopping the “unlawful peddling.” Schumer said, “It’s like letting a tiger into a petting zoo and hoping for the best.””
“The opaque office’s early moves have violated the Privacy Act and cybersecurity laws, according to legal experts, and triggered a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s assault on government bureaucracy.
Legal and security experts are particularly exercised by Musk’s move to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development and take control of the Treasury Department’s central payments database.
“The scale here is unprecedented in terms of the risk to sensitive personal and financial information,” said Alan Butler of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “It’s an absolute nightmare.”
The Musk-led effort to gain entry into Treasury’s huge payment database drew a lawsuit Monday from two major federal employee unions and left some lawyers who specialize in regulation of such data nearly apoplectic.
Mary Ellen Callahan, former Chief Privacy Officer at the Department of Homeland Security, called DOGE’s access “a data breach of exponential proportions.” “If we lose control of that data, we’ve lost control forever,” she said.”
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“Other lawyers said DOGE’s access could also violate cybersecurity-related laws, like the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2002.
Reports that career employees at the Office of Personnel Management were locked out of key databases by DOGE personnel also triggered deep concern Monday among legal and security experts. A key OPM database was breached by hackers in 2013, prompting widespread outrage from lawmakers and federal workers. The U.S. government blamed the hack on China and said the data could be used to target or enlist federal employees in espionage.
“They’re not following the law, they’re not following any semblance of best practice, they’re just hacking and slashing government IT systems in a way that threatens national security and puts everyone at risk,” Butler said.
Claims by Musk that he is shutting down USAID were met with widespread skepticism as well. USAID was created through an executive order issued by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. But it was formally established as a federal government agency by Congress in 1998, creating doubts about Trump’s authority to simply abolish it or, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio has suggested, fold it into the State Department.
“I think it’s the most clearly unconstitutional act that he’s doing,” said Alex Joel, an adjunct professor of law at American University. “He can’t just destroy the whole agency.””
The debt is a huge problem and we need bi-partisan solutions to fix it.
Solutions that the incoming administration have proposed like cutting 70% of the federal workforce: demonize the bureaucracy, will make government function poorly, and are bad ideas.
“”Federal law is clear: patients have the right to stabilizing hospital emergency room care no matter where they live,” said Department of Health and Human Services (DHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra. “Women should not have to be near death to get care.”
In July, HHS issued new guidance stating that EMTALA’s provision for stabilizing treatment includes a right to an abortion in some circumstances. “If a state law prohibits abortion and does not include an exception for the health or life of the pregnant person—or draws the exception more narrowly than EMTALA’s emergency medical condition definition—that state law is preempted,” the agency said.
No existing abortion ban lacks an exception for a mother’s life, but some do omit exceptions for women’s health. And determining whether something counts as a life-threatening emergency—as opposed to a mere health-threatening emergency—isn’t so clear-cut. Many pregnancy complications could become life-threatening while not being necessarily or immediately so. The HHS guidance attempts to provide clarity, stating that regardless of what a state law says, physicians must provide an abortion if one is necessary to address an emergency medical condition (including, but not limited to, ectopic pregnancy or severely high blood pressure).
Texas sued over the HHS directive. Joined by the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) and the Christian Medical and Dental Association (CMDA), the state sought to have the HHS “abortion mandate” declared “unlawful, unconstitutional and unenforceable” and for the court to issue a preliminary injunction on its enforcement.”
“These “get off my lawn” conservatives claim to be upholding the principle of local control by arguing that local government officials rather than bureaucrats in far-off Sacramento get to make development decisions. It sounds good in theory given the Jeffersonian concept that the government closest to the people governs best.
The better quotation (actually used by Henry David Thoreau but often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson) is “that government is best which governs the least.” The goal—for those of us who value freedom—isn’t to allow the right government functionary to control us, but to have less government control overall.
Local officials are easier to kick out of office than officials in Sacramento or Washington, D.C., but the locals can be extremely abusive. They know where we live, after all. I’ve reported extensively on California’s defunct redevelopment agencies, and local tyrants would routinely abuse eminent domain under the guise of local control.
“Under S.B. 9, cities are required to approve these lot splits ‘ministerially,’ without any reviews, hearings, conditions, fees or environmental impact reports,” complains my Southern California News Group colleague, Susan Shelley.
Oh, please.
Conservatives have for decades complained about the subjective nature of bureaucratic and public reviews, the evils of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and excessive fees. Now there’s a law that fixes that, albeit in a limited manner, and they are grabbing their pitchforks.
S.B. 9 and S.B. 10 do not put Sacramento bureaucrats in charge of the locals. Instead, they deregulate certain development decisions, by requiring officials to approve a project “by right” provided it meets all the normal regulations. It eliminates subjectivity and defangs CEQA. Yet this greatly upsets them.”
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“If conservatives seriously believe local control is the trump card, then they should lobby for the repeal of Proposition 13, which is a state-imposed restriction on local governments’ authority to raise property taxes. I find Prop. 13 to be one of the best laws ever passed in this state. They should also oppose Republican efforts at the federal level to limit the ability of blue states to regulate the heck out of us.”
“A recent study of the program’s effects from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) finds that the majority of the funds spent by the program went to business owners and shareholders rather than to workers themselves. Ultimately, “only 23 to 34 percent of the program’s funds went directly to workers who would have otherwise lost their jobs.” The jobs it did keep in place were preserved at very high cost—somewhere between $170,000 and $257,000 a year, far more than the typical earnings of affected workers, which are closer to $58,000 per year.
While the PPP was able to save some jobs, albeit, at a very high cost, the overall result of the program was precisely the opposite of what was intended. The purpose of the program was to preserve the jobs of wage workers, not to funnel money to business owners. As David Autor, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and the lead researcher behind the paper, told The New York Times recently, “it turns out [the money] didn’t primarily go to workers who would have lost jobs. It went to business owners and their shareholders and their creditors.” The program, he added, was “highly regressive.””