American Battleground: Tearing down the house with the richest man in the world
CNN
When the man in black charges onstage swinging a chainsaw while he whoops and hollers, the moment could be mistaken for a scene from “The Hunger Games.” The screaming crowd makes it seem even more so.
When the man in black charges onstage swinging a chainsaw while he whoops and hollers, the moment could be mistaken for a scene from “The Hunger Games.” The screaming crowd makes it seem even more so. “This is the chain saw for bureaucracy!” Elon Musk shouts, grinning behind dark sunglasses and beneath a MAGA black baseball cap. The spectacle by the richest man in the world at the Conservative Political Action Conference is a sensation, and not just because Musk spent more than $290 million of his own money to help push Donald Trump and other Republicans to their landmark wins last fall. Trump has given Musk the job of doing what so many conservatives have craved for so long: hacking the federal government to pieces. The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was initially conceived as an effort under the command of both Musk and his fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Trump said the group’s mission was “making changes to the Federal Bureaucracy with an eye on efficiency and, at the same time, making life better for all Americans.” It’s an oddly bureaucratic description for the coming carnage. As the DOGE team goes to work, headlines emerge of Musk and a group of young, technology whizzes (including a 19-year-old who goes by the moniker “Big Balls”) roaming the halls of government, demanding access to files, prying into computer records, and rapidly pushing tens of thousands of federal workers to consider resigning or risk being fired. At Yosemite National Park, employee Andria Townsend is terminated along with hundreds of other National Park employees in what they are calling the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.” She sees calamity lurking in the coming collision of understaffed facilities, decreased maintenance and the massive vacation crowds. “Moving forward, I think it’s just going to make life even harder and less efficient for the people working in the federal government right now, which seems to be the opposite of what the administration is trying to do.”
The two men killed as they floated holding onto their capsized boat in a secondary strike against a suspected drug vessel in early September did not appear to have radio or other communications devices, the top military official overseeing the strike told lawmakers on Thursday, according to two sources with direct knowledge of his congressional briefings.
As Chad Curry busily ferries his teenage children through the streets of their Chicago neighborhood of West Ridge, he eyes passing vehicles with a skepticism he didn’t have just a few months ago.
Speaker Mike Johnson is a political survivor, weathering crisis after crisis since his unlikely ascent two years ago.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan are well matched, rhetorically forceful opposites. And they have been clashing for more than a decade over an increasingly relevant question of presidential power: How easy should it be for the president to fire the heads of independent agencies?
The Army gynecologist described in a recent lawsuit as a “predator in uniform” is now being held in the Bell County Jail in Texas, “after apparently violating conditions of liberty imposed by his commander,” according to an Army spokesperson.
Brian Walshe on Thursday came face-to-face for the first time with the man who had been having an affair with his wife before her death, as he took the stand to testify in Walshe’s murder trial.
The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed Texas to use a congressional map that will boost President Donald Trump’s effort to keep Republicans in control of Congress, blocking a lower court decision that found the new boundaries were likely unconstitutional because they were drawn based on race.
The US military carried out a strike Thursday on a suspected drug boat in the Eastern Pacific, killing four people on board, according to a social media post from US Southern Command.
A grand jury voted against indicting New York Attorney General Letitia James after being asked to look at the mortgage fraud case against her a second time, according to multiple people familiar with the development Thursday.
National Guard troops deployed to Washington, DC, can remain there for now, after a federal appeals court on Thursday temporarily froze a judge’s ruling that would have soon required them to leave the city’s streets.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s bad week just got worse. That’s after the long-awaited release Thursday of an inspector general’s report on his sharing of highly sensitive military attack plans on the unclassified app Signal earlier this year.
President Donald Trump has hired a new architect for the White House ballroom amid disputes between the president and his architect originally contracted to complete the project, several sources have told CNN.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth risked compromising sensitive military information that could have endangered US troops through his use of Signal to discuss attack plans, a Pentagon watchdog said in an unclassified report released Thursday. It also details how Hegseth declined to cooperate with the probe.