President Donald Trump is weighing slashing "thousands" of federal jobs ahead of a meeting with his budget director, Russell Vought, as the White House looks to ratchet up pressure on Democrats to end a government shutdown that has entered its second day. "It's likely going to be in the thousands," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Thursday, saying that the "entire team at the White House" was working to identify possible cuts.
The Energy Department said in a statement Thursday that 223 projects were terminated after a review determined they did not adequately advance the nation's energy needs or were not economically viable. Officials did not provide details about which projects are being cut, but said funding came from the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and other DOE bureaus.
On Thursday, Vance took to X to respond to a clip of Reid discussing racism in the United States. The original video was taken in March, but was reposted by a conservative social media account this week. In the talk, Reid discusses that her parents got a rude awakening after immigrating to the United States. My mother got the rude awakening, like, oh, it's racist here, that's weird, she said, adding that her mother realized this was not a land of opportunity for Black people.
Speaking inside the Second Avenue Subway Community Information Center on 125th Street, Espaillat stressed that the community has waited over 100 years for the project and vowed to keep pressing for federal support. We've got to continue the fight for the funding to be there, he said. And again, I think the main and most important thing is that the project that we've been waiting for for over 100 years continues to move forward.
In the days since Donald Trump directed his "Secretary of War" to marshal troops against "domestic terrorists" in Portland, encouraging the use of "full force" in a city he likened to a "war zone," I have been hanging around the demonstration that the president wants to crush. What I've found is an atmosphere that is more like a carnival than combat.
In particular, they seek "transition minerals," which are vital to the shift away from fossil fuels. These include lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel (often called critical minerals, essential for rechargeable batteries), as well as rare-earth minerals such as yttrium, scandium, and lanthanides (integral components of green infrastructure). Freedom from dirty energy, it would appear, requires doubling down on the decidedly nonrenewable practice of mineral extraction.
But this was just wild, you know? Von said. And people are sending messages and hateful stuff, and, you know, You think all these illegals should and all this type of shit. I could talk to you ad nauseam about that, but this wasn't the time for it. It just was something they used and put out there and everybody saw, right?
Good morning. A swell day awaits-weatherwise, to be clear; everything else is terrible-with sun and a high around 71. Crisp again overnight, with a low around 52. You can find me on Bluesky, I'm @abeaujon.87 on Signal, and there's a link to my email address below. This roundup is available as a morning email newsletter. Sign up here. I can't stop listening to: Des Demonas, " The Duke Ellington Bridge."
As a and lifelong political junkie, and for the last six years as a journalist, I've seen my party stumble before. I've watched us weather humiliating losses, recover, and reinvent ourselves. But rarely have I felt as demoralized as I do now. These past eight months under Trump's second (failed) attempt to be president, with his reckless presidency, a far-right and compliant , and a rubber-stamping Supreme Court all against us, have been among the darkest periods in modern Democratic history.
Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed vengeance on a Democratic Party he regularly called "the radical left" (or, on occasion, "communists") and accused of a treasonous conspiracy to turn over the country to criminal immigrants and America-hating globalist elites. Even as he has relentlessly pressed to expand his own powers to unprecedented levels, the 47th president has begun acting on his threats by deploying the machinery of justice against people, institutions, and ideas he dislikes.
The group has filed several complaints with the Office of Special Counsel over posts that have appeared on several federal agency websites blaming Democrats for the shutdown -which Public Citizen alleges violate the Hatch Act, which governs how federal employees can weigh in on political activities.
You can read the news stories. You can watch it on TV. You can read the articles, but until you're there, until you look somebody in the eye, and they tell you what happened, and you see that pain, you see where they live, you see burnt down or bombed out houses, it's hard to actually understand,
