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The cuts, which are said to affect between 560 and 1,830 workers at the agency, were planned for at least a week, contingent upon the confirmation of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees the agency. NOAA reported a permanent workforce of 11,758 in fiscal 2023, meaning the cuts could affect more than 10 percent of employees. One source who asked to speak on background told The Hill the firings began Thursday and will continue Friday.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Tuesday that the Trump administration would start handpicking which media outlets were allowed to participate in the presidential pool, the small, rotating group of journalists who relay the president’s day-to-day activities to the public.

“It should be done through layoffs rather than individual, performance-based firings," she said. "The government has processes to do, and we would have 60 days to look for a new job and, most importantly, acknowledgment that these terminations weren't our fault. Private companies have to do that, too.

Federal workers across the U.S. government received an email on Saturday afternoon asking them to account for what they did in the past week — and Elon Musk says they will be fired if they don't respond.

They warn that dismantling the behind-the-scenes scientific research programs that backstop American life could lead to long-lasting, perhaps irreparable damage to everything from the quality of health care to the public’s access to next-generation consumer technologies. The US took nearly a century to craft its rich scientific ecosystem; if the unraveling that has taken place over the past month continues, Americans will feel the effects for decades to come.

“I’m in close contact with the CDC. They have about what, 13,000 employees, 13,000 employees at the CDC. In the last couple years, those probationary people, which is about 10% of their employee base, about 1,300 people, which you’re referring to. A lot of the work they do is duplicitous with AI,” McCormick said. The mention of AI led to “no’s” and murmurs from the crowd, leading the Republican representative to say, “I happen to be a doctor. I know a few things.”

A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem. It not only profits from fascist voices, it actively promotes their work and recruits them. And it's funded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy billionaires like Marc Andreesen — the same type of people who are, right now, raiding the US government to basically cut funding for social services and scientific research, and to steal money for themselves.

It’s one thing to be reminded that “elections have consequences,” but quite another to insist that the best response to the abuse of authority is to be restrained, demure, neutral.

The last portion of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker's 2025 State of the State and budget address included Pritzker invoking Nazis when criticizing President Donald Trump.

The operational emphasis on Signal from multiple threat actors in recent months serves as an important warning for the growing threat to secure messaging applications that is certain to intensify in the near-term.

The President of the United States is aligning himself with the dictator of Russia, Vladimir Putin, to undermine the independence of Ukraine and its democracy.

"Although several positions supporting [bird flu efforts] were notified of their terminations over the weekend, we are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters," a USDA spokesperson said in a statement. "USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service frontline positions are considered public safety positions, and we are continuing to hire the workforce necessary to ensure the safety and adequate supply of food to fulfill our statutory mission."

Four out of 10 Americans have shifted their spending over the last few months to align with their moral views, according to the Harris poll.

“A lot of these diversity programs and multicultural centers on campuses were founded as retention tools to help students who had been shut out of higher education in some of these institutions for centuries,” Harris said. “To penalize institutions for taking those steps to help students, that is actually very much an echo of the segregation era.”

“These reckless firings will slow down critical cleanup work and make workers less safe – trying to run Hanford with a skeleton crew is a recipe for disaster that could have irreversible impacts,” Murray said.

One disabled veteran who worked at Veterans Affairs overseeing patient care said he learned of his firing by email Thursday. He was one month shy of graduating from his probationary period, he said. The email cited “performance” as the reason. “This is ironic,” he said, “because my most recent — and granted, only — performance evaluation was the highest you could possibly achieve at my agency.”

“We have come up with a new slogan for LLS: ‘the disease detectors.’ If you’re not testing, you don’t know what disease is there,” a current fellow, who was among those who received termination notices, told NBC News

The firings hit the FAA when it faces a shortfall in controllers. Federal officials have been raising concerns about an overtaxed and understaffed air traffic control system for years, especially after a series of close calls between planes at U.S. airports. Among the reasons they have cited for staffing shortages are uncompetitive pay, long shifts, intensive training and mandatory retirements.

Here are some of the basic ingredients of a truly pro-business atmosphere: The rule of law; a functional and predictable court system; enforceable contracts; intelligible regulations; trustworthy and accurate government data; widely available well educated and healthy workers; and strong public services that create a customer base that is, itself, healthy and wealthy and flourishing enough to spend money freely.

If the uncertainty is getting to you, I have the plainest and most time-tested advice which is: Unless or until clarity about the most crucial levers becomes available, do what you can reach. Make the calls. Care for the people you can find. Hold on by hanging onto each other.

…screens and all the technologies that accompany them are tools to make the world seem more predictable and less uncertain: infinite scroll; autoplay; the always-on “live” news cycle; the steady drumbeat of notifications; the apps that summon servants to our doors, hiding all the labor and improvisation and accidents (often involving blood and bone) that go into moving atoms from one place to another. These tools train us in convenience, which is training in predictability, in the facade of certainty. And when that facade inevitably breaks, we often find ourselves at sea.

One day, I saw what felt like Gorton on a ferry traversing the waters Bay Area. A few weeks later, I spotted it on a sign in a national park. Then on an intercom. On a street lighting access cover. In an elevator. At my dentist’s office. In an alley.

The individuals, who work in an agency that overseas the nation's nuclear stockpile, had been fired on Thursday and lost access to their federal government email accounts.

Although Trump and Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims. Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.

I tell ya, I’m tryin’, dear friends. I’m struggling here not to engage in hyperbole. But I don’t know what else to call these people besides political commissars. And again, they report to Elon Musk. He’s already very clearly operating here as an independent actor whose actions the President blesses after he’s found out what’s happened. This is a parallel overlaying of authority over the entire structure of the U.S. government.

“It’s a shit show,“ says Dr. Jeff Jensen, vice chair of research in obstetrics and gynecology at the OHSU School of Medicine. “But it’s that way by intention. They are doing it to destabilize everyone who didn’t vote for them. People will lose jobs.”

A stunning 54% of Americans now believe we’re in a Constitutional crisis, according to recent YouGov polling. They’re right.

It has been three weeks since Inauguration Day. Most Americans recognize that newly elected leaders bring change. That is expected. But most Americans also expect that changes will take place in accordance with the rule of law and in an orderly manner that respects the lives of affected individuals and the work they have been asked to perform.

Nichols noted that despite Trump’s claim of massive “corruption and fraud” in the agency, government lawyers had no support for that argument in court. Aside from that assertion, the judge said, the administration was unable to explain “what harm would befall the government if it could not immediately place on administrative leave the more than 2000 employees in question.”

"This is terrible, these families are the most at risk, the most vulnerable across our state, and they depend on us for many services," said Morrison-Frichtl. "For some of our children, we meet two-thirds of their nutritional needs each day. Families depend on us to get to their job, to have their child in a safe, educational, caring place."

Based on what has been reported, DOGE representatives have obtained or requested access to certain systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with eyes toward others, including the Federal Aviation Administration. “This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”

An intelligence team within the department recommended stripping DOGE staffers of their access to data immediately.

After years of screaming “save the children” while baselessly accusing others of exploiting kids, the Trump administration is now trying to destroy the actual infrastructure that saves children. This one crosses from standard MAGA hypocrisy into genuinely evil territory.

They weren’t warning readers to amuse them. They were warning readers that someday they would need to be prepared to act fast.

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment isn’t just about individual rights—it’s a fundamental guarantee that the government will treat all persons and entities equally under the law. When someone with Musk’s level of government access and influence starts making threats against competitors, we have to ask: Are we still operating in a system where all companies have equal protection and opportunity under the law?

“Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” Musk said during an X spaces conversation last week. “Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”

I can’t tell you what the market is going to say, because I don’t know how quickly it’s able to assimilate reality. What I can tell you is this: If we’re at scenarios #1 or #2, it means that the world does not understand political reality in America yet.

In his letter, Wyden said he was concerned that Musk’s extensive business operations in China “endangers U.S. cybersecurity” and creates conflicts of interest that “make his access to these systems a national security risk.”

We need to reject these culture wars and recognize that billionaire oligarchs will undermine the humanity in all of us, left or right, if it makes them a few extra bucks. We need unity in this time of crisis.