| Trump 2.0 DOGE inbound to the Pentagon: The military services are preparing lists of weapons programs they want to cut—but lawmakers do not—ahead of Elon Musk’s young team of developers tasked with cutting costs in the federal government, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Personnel from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are expected in the building as soon as today. “There are several systems that we know won’t survive on the modern battlefield,” Army spokesman Col. Dave Butler said. The Army’s list reportedly includes “outdated drones and vehicles that have been produced in surplus.” “The U.S. Navy is proposing cuts to its frigates and littoral combat ships,” according to the Journal. But the Air Force is staying tight-lipped so far. Read more, here. Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth is travelling in Europe with far-right activist Jack Posobiec, the Washington Post reported Thursday. “One [U.S. defense] official said the potential involvement of Posobiec, a Trump booster who is known for peddling conspiracy theories and trolling political adversaries online, has raised questions within the Pentagon about Hegseth’s judgment and what he aimed to communicate to U.S. allies if he were to allow a polarizing political figure to be by his side,” the Post’s Dan Lamothe reports. Posobiec is a U.S. podcaster who has been known for boosting Russian disinformation on his social media feeds. “One of them, a website called SouthFront that U.S. Treasury sanctioned in 2021 and said ‘receives taskings from the FSB,’ regularly published disinformation on the war in Ukraine,” researcher Hannah Gais of the Southern Poverty Law Center noted Thursday. “For a decade, SouthFront has promoted pro-Russian narratives about the war, provided support for Russia’s ‘denazification’ narrative to justify the incursion on Ukraine, as well as boosted Russian nationalist channels,” she added. One year ago: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely,” Posobiec said in a speech at last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. “We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.” Read more, here. A judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze U.S. foreign aid. “The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by two health organizations that receive U.S. funding for overseas programs,” Reuters reports; those organizations are the Global Health Council and the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. According to the judge’s 15-page ruling, the White House did not give “any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid, which set off a shock wave and upended reliance interests for thousands of agreements with businesses, nonprofits, and organizations around the country, was a rational precursor to reviewing programs.” The Associated Press reports “The funding cutoff has left contractors, farmers and suppliers in the U.S. and around the world without hundreds of millions of dollars in pay for work already done and forced wide scale layoffs among those enterprises.” A second judge on Thursday extended his block on the Trump administration’s “plans to pull all but a fraction of USAID staffers off the job worldwide,” AP writes. “The judge said he plans to issue a written ruling in the coming days on whether the pause will continue.” Developing: Three federal judges will decide later today if Musk’s young developers can access the Treasury Department payment systems “and potentially sensitive data at U.S. health, consumer protection, labor and education agencies,” Reuters reports. Case 1: “In Manhattan, U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas will consider a request by Democratic state attorneys general to extend a temporary block on DOGE that was put in place on Saturday, which prevented Musk’s team from accessing Treasury systems responsible for trillions of dollars of payments.” Case 2: “In Washington, U.S. District Judge John Bates will consider a request by unions to prevent the DOGE team from accessing sensitive records at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Labor Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.” Case 3: “At a third hearing on Friday, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss in Washington will consider a request by the University of California Student Association to extend a temporary block on DOGE from accessing systems at the Department of Education, which the students said would violate privacy and administrative procedure laws.” Read more, here. Related reading: “Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda,” which is a litigation tracker updated periodically by the New York Times;“DOGE boasts about billions in canceled federal contracts, but the data is murky,” NPR reported this week; Opsec alert: “Anyone Can Push Updates to the DOGE.gov Website,” 404 Media reported Friday; “Trump spending freeze halts some national-lab projects,” Defense One reported Thursday; ICYMI, “Christian aid groups receive millions in USAID funds. Now their humanitarian work is collapsing,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday; “Justice, FBI ousters remove longtime experts from daily threats meeting,” the Washington Post reported Wednesday; “Trump signs a plan for reciprocal tariffs on US trading partners, ushering in economic uncertainty,” AP reported Thursday; Check out a useful explainer on “Trump’s National Security Tariffs,” published Wednesday by the Council on Foreign Relations;And after an inaccurate post from Trump Thursday morning, “Defense Department contract ‘inaccurately represented’ on social media, says Thomson Reuters,” the wire service reported in clarification Thursday afternoon. |