A district court judge torpedoed the Trump administration’s argument for firing federal workers during the government shutdown, throwing up new legal barriers that may prove difficult for the president’s attorneys to overcome.
Buttressed by courts and support from some Republican lawmakers, federally funded newsrooms that President Trump has tried to eliminate have yet to be rendered obsolete.
Charles Borges, then chief data officer for the vast Social Security Administration, was alarmed last summer when he learned that members of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service had copied a mainframe database containing the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans, including names, birthdays, addresses and more.
Federal Emergency Management Agency personnel who signed an open letter criticizing President Donald Trump’s cuts to disaster funding have been interrogated in recent weeks in an effort to determine the names of colleagues who endorsed the letter anonymously or distributed it.
The Monday appointment of Frank Bisignano, known for his Wall Street acumen and as an ally to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, as the new IRS CEO is raising concerns about how the agencies will handle taxpayer data between the two of them and other agencies as the Trump administration pushes hard on its priorities.
Police are investigating a fire that burned down the home of South Carolina Circuit Court judge Diane Goodstein, who had reportedly received death threats for weeks related to her work.
Legal challenges, including a separate federal lawsuit brought by nonprofits, could take months, at best. In the meantime, oversight advocates worry their absence could exacerbate conditions in detention.
A federal judge agreed Monday to temporarily suspend the Trump administration’s plan to eliminate hundreds of jobs at the agency that oversees Voice of America, the government-funded broadcaster founded to counter Nazi propaganda during World War II.
A report issued Thursday accuses the Department of Government Efficiency of putting millions of Americans’ personal information in an unsecured cloud server.
“This report concludes that DOGE is jeopardizing Americans’ most sensitive data, while its employees operate under a layer of secrecy that shields them from meaningful oversight and accountability,” the report’s authors wrote.
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