Trump Names Sean Duffy Interim Administrator of NASA
'He will be a fantastic leader of the ever more important Space Agency, even if only for a short period of time,' Trump wrote on his website Truth Social. 'Congratulations, and thank you, Sean!'
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- Yahoo
‘I've Called Him So Many Things…': Jasmine Crockett's New Donald Trump Slam Goes Viral
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USA Today
26 minutes ago
- USA Today
Trump sharpens the axe for the Education Department. Swing away, Mr. President.
Despite the Department of Education's massive budget, students in the U.S. far too often lag behind peers in other industrialized countries. The largest employer in the United States isn't a Fortune 100 company like Alphabet, Amazon or Apple. It's the federal government − and that's a problem. Thankfully, President Donald Trump continues to slash bureaucratic bloat. On July 11, the administration sent layoff notices to more than 1,300 State Department workers, and three days later, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to move forward with plans to gut the Department of Education. That's bad news for government employees, but great for taxpayers, especially given the Education Department's expense − $268 billion in the last fiscal year − and its lack of effectiveness. Despite the department's massive budget, students in the U.S. far too often lag behind peers in other industrialized countries. In 2022, for example, American high school students scored behind teens from 25 other countries on an international math test. And we're losing ground. Math and reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress continue to decline. Part of the drop can be attributed to pandemic-related learning loss, but reading scores in the U.S. began to decline in 2019 − before Americans had even heard of COVID-19. But how will pulling the federal government out of K-12 education help? It's important to note that more than 90% of public school funding comes from state and local governments along with foundations and other private sources. Much of the federal education budget is used to feed the bureaucracy, which generates rules and regulations that local administrators and teachers must obey. If all of that bureaucratic oversight consistently produced better results, there might be a case for keeping it. But the data clearly shows it doesn't. Removing federal bureaucrats from our schools should give states and local school districts more flexibility to set education policy, and that should improve choices for parents like me. Returning more control to the states also should improve efficiency and enable schools to better meet students' needs. Opinion: Our schools are struggling because teachers unions don't put kids first Government efficiency is vital for the American people Trump isn't cutting jobs only at the Education Department, of course. The State Department layoffs follow reductions at other federal agencies this spring. The cuts are driven by necessity: our national debt is now more than $37 trillion and the annual budget deficit will top $1 trillion again this year. So, I was surprised to see news reports paint the laid off State Department workers as heroic. Cameras caught teary goodbyes and applause for well-liked employees. I don't recall the same concern when President Joe Biden halted construction of the Keystone Pipeline, which cost 1,500 workers their jobs and eliminated plans to create thousands more. Opinion: PBS, NPR push liberal propaganda. Trump is right to cut their funding. Companies often restructure. So should the federal government. While job loss is certainly scary, and I don't wish it on anyone, federal job cuts should be put in the context of the overall jobs market. Microsoft announced this month it would eliminate 9,000 jobs, not because the company is failing but because it's retooling as the market changes. Other companies, including Intel and Meta, have announced plans to restructure this year as the emergence of artificial intelligence and other technology changes how Americans work. The federal government should be as flexible as our top companies in adapting to a changing world. Yet, progressives have criticized the Trump administration's efforts to restructure the federal bureaucracy as cruel. The president's job, however, isn't to employ as many bureaucrats as possible. It's to deliver effective services as efficiently as possible to taxpayers. Dismantling ineffective and inefficient bureaucracies like the Education Department is a long overdue step toward achieving that goal. Nicole Russell is a columnist at USA TODAY and a mother of four who lives in Texas. Contact her at nrussell@ and follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @russell_nm. Sign up for her weekly newsletter, The Right Track, here.
Forbes
27 minutes ago
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U.K. May Drop Plans To Break Apple's Encryption To Please Trump
U.K. government seeks to keep Donald Trump happy over encryption The U.K. government is reportedly backtracking on plans to force Apple to create a backdoor into encrypted communications. In January, the U.K. issued a technical capability notice to Apple, demanding that it create a backdoor in encrypted communication systems that would allow law enforcement and security services to read customers' messages. Apple resisted the move and has launched a legal challenge, as well as removing the Advanced Data Protection encryption from some of its services in the U.K. market. Apple has subsequently been joined in its legal challenge by the Meta-owned WhatsApp. Now, according to a report in the Financial Times, the U.K. government is seeking ways to avoid a confrontation with the tech companies, through fear of upsetting Donald Trump's U.S. administration. 'This is something that the vice-president is very annoyed about and which needs to be resolved,' a 'senior official' in the UK's technology department told the newspaper. 'The Home Office is basically going to have to back down.' Attack On Free Speech? The vice-president has been repeatedly critical of what he views as attacks on free speech by European governments. The officials who spoke to the Financial Times said the U.K. government is keen not to be drawn into anything that the vice-president may regard as a free-speech issue. Donald Trump has also publicly stated his opposition to breaking encrypted communications, publicly urging the prime minister Kier Starmer not to introduce such measures. Aside from being a free speech issue, it's also one of communications security. Apple and other tech companies have long argued that it's not possible to create a backdoor for the security services alone, that once encryption has been compromised it becomes a potential attack vector for anyone. 'Apple has never created a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services,' the company claims in a statement on its website regarding government security requests. 'We have also never allowed any government direct access to Apple servers. And we never will.' The company does co-operate with governments and law-enforcement agencies around the world, when legally required to hand over details of customers' devices or accounts. Apple publishes a transparency report to show how many of these requests it deals with on a country-by-country basis. For example, between January and June 2024, the company dealt with 2,925 device requests in the U.K. and 2,550 requests for details of customers' accounts. In the U.S. those figures are 12,043 and 12,812 respectively for the same period. Apple's transparency data shows that the number of such requests has grown sharply in recent years in both countries. Tech Companies Threaten To Walk It's not only the U.S. administration that the U.K. government might be mindful of upsetting, but the tech companies themselves. Aside from Apple and WhatsApp leading a legal challenge, other communications firms have threatened to leave the U.K. altogether if they are forced to break encryption. Signal president Meredith Walker told the BBC in 2023 that her company 'would absolutely, 100% walk' if it were forced to weaken the privacy of its messaging system in the U.K. Signal is, of course, the encrypted messaging system that was the center of a U.S. government security scandal earlier this year when senior members of the administration were revealed to be discussing battle plans in a conversation in which a journalist was accidentally added to the group.
