The State Department is building beyond genAI towards "AI agents that will take actions for humans," its tech head said yesterday. Still, it's had trouble getting pickup for its existing genAI bot, which only about half of its workforce uses. www.nextgov.com/artificial-i...

go Deacs!

Sen. Warren, Rep. Stansbury and six other lawmakers want to know if White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks has overstayed his 130 day limit as a special government employee. Sacks remains "deeply invested in the crypto and AI companies," they say. www.nextgov.com/people/2025/...

The data at the center of a recent whistleblower complaint hasn't been "accessed, leaked, hacked, or shared in any unauthorized fashion," the SSA Commissioner says in response to Republican oversight. The whistleblower resigned last month, saying his position was "untenable."

NEW: Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, the co-chair of the congressional Department of Government Efficiency Caucus, says that DOGE is pushing forward. www.nextgov.com/modernizatio...

The Agriculture Department has installed a new DOGE associate as the head of its technology, sidelining its longtime CIO to a new role www.nextgov.com/people/2025/...

NEW: Stephen Ehikian - the DOGE-affiliated former head of the General Services Administration - says he left GSA in a better position than it was in when he started. Feds who left GSA are in "higher productive use in the private sector." GSA can now "build back," he said. 👇

EXCLUSIVE: @bloomberg.com has obtained more than 100 previously undisclosed emails between UK Ambassador Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein from 2005 through 2010 that reveal Mandelson's steadfast support for Epstein after Epstein was charged with sex crimes 🎁 www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

A third of jobs related to race, diversity, and equality that were created in U.S. newsrooms since 2020 are gone as of this summer. 
 @hanaatameez.bsky.social with a months-long investigation and new data on American journalism's turn away from DEI initiatives. www.niemanlab.org/2025/09/from...

Mike Crapo - Senate Finance chairman and Republican - wants information from SSA about the recent whistleblower allegations that DOGE uploaded the confidential information of hundreds of millions of Americans into an insecure cloud server. 👀 t.co/dtwAUoiCIt

NEW: Stephen Ehikian - the DOGE-affiliated former head of the General Services Administration - says he left GSA in a better position than it was in when he started. Feds who left GSA are in "higher productive use in the private sector." GSA can now "build back," he said. 👇

NEW: Ignoring urgently needed reforms in favor of fruitlessly trying to find evidence of fraud, DOGE descended on the Social Security Administration “thinking it should work like a McDonald’s,” the agency’s former acting chief reveals to ProPublica.

The Social Security Administration's newly announced communications lead comes from a 13 year stint at the National Rifle Association. He's one of many on the agency's new leadership roster with no govt experience: www.nextgov.com/people/2025/...

The Office of Personnel Management’s top tech official, Greg Hogan, has left the job he’s held at the agency since day two of the Trump administration. OPM'S handling of data has been at the center of several lawsuits. Hogan's signature on a key document is relevant in one.

A DOGE ally at what was a DOGE stronghold - the General Services Administration, which he led for the first six months of the Trump administration - is on his way out the door. www.nextgov.com/people/2025/...

Labor is considering making a national database of unemployment claims data www.nextgov.com/digital-gove...

Labor is considering making a national database of unemployment claims data www.nextgov.com/digital-gove...

White House declares $4.9B in foreign aid unilaterally canceled in end-run around Congress' funding power.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services plans to begin a pilot program in six states that would use a tactic employed by private insurers that has been heavily criticized for delaying and denying medical care.

NEW: The White House appears to have instructed leaders at the General Services Administration (GSA) to add xAI’s Grok chatbot to a list of approved vendors “ASAP,” according to an email sent by agency leadership earlier this week, which WIRED obtained.

AP live feed of the CDC walkout in Atlanta. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ7Q...

NEW: Trump appointee Thomas Shedd is on a "leave of absence" from Tesla while working for the govt. He was until recently overseeing all tech and data at the Labor Dept and still works at the General Services Administration. "It's a mess," one ethics expert told me. 👇

Trump Shrank Staffing of National Parks. See How Many Are Struggling. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/u...

Why publish one story about A.I. gone wrong when you can publish two? Here's my other story today on how the NYPD used facial recognition tech to arrest the wrong man for public lewdness. The perp was 5'6''. Cops charged Trevis Williams, who is 6'2''. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/n...

My latest: The Trump administration is not waiting for the next fiscal year -- or Congress -- to cut climate science at NOAA. A new document details the money it won't spend *this* year on climate research.

Trump Again Escalates Power Grabs in Bid to Fire Fed Member President Trump claimed he has cause to remove a member of the independent board who has not obeyed his demands to vote for lower interest rates. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/u...

NEW: Trump appointee Thomas Shedd is on a "leave of absence" from Tesla while working for the govt. He was until recently overseeing all tech and data at the Labor Dept and still works at the General Services Administration. "It's a mess," one ethics expert told me. 👇

Don't look away. She Pushed to Overturn Trump’s Loss in the 2020 Election. Now She’ll Help Oversee U.S. Election Security. @dougbockclark.bsky.social

The entire Social Security database, dumped on a random cloud server: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/u...

Not trying to rag on the reporter, who is a "breaking news" guy, but this is where it matters that your reporters with substantive knowledge of a topic are not there to provide context. We basically get a mention of the problems of Healthcare.gov and no discussion of anything that happened after.

Say it louder for the people in the back!! Beat reporting matters, and beat reporting on government agencies and implementation matters. That's why I love my job

I don't know who made this spoof of the America by Design website, but it does reflect some of the indignation over Trump's design EO that I've seen from fired feds who worked on design issues. americabydesign.fail

Airbnb co-founder and Department of Government Efficiency associate Joe Gebbia announced that he had been selected as the government’s first chief design officer on Saturday, charged with implementing Trump’s “America by Design” initiative www.nextgov.com/people/2025/...

NEWS: The IRS is abandoning its layoff plans and is now actually working to plug mission-critical staffing gaps. www.govexec.com/workforce/20...

What I noticed with Trump's new push to improve the government's design: 1. It includes a hiring spree, after the WH laid off many designers from the govt's tech hubs 2. The push has some similarities to DOGE, including that it can take on volunteers shorturl.at/WyB9E

The federal housing agency will no longer provide any material in languages other than English www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/u...

NEW: Is the administration looking to use AI to make up for the loss of thousands of federal employees? 100%, says the Trump appointee charged with overseeing the govt's tech, who formerly worked at Palantir. More from that interview here: www.nextgov.com/artificial-i...

This should get WIDE circulation: MIT stating that it “has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper.” gizmodo.com/mit-backs-aw...

NEW: SSA said last month that it had taken away required ID checks on its phone line, but internal policies say otherwise. www.nextgov.com/digital-gove...

At a very crowded briefing with the President, who is sending the National Guard into D.C., where violent crime is at a low

"Anderson changed her hairstyle to avoid recognition, stayed indoors, rerouted packages from her Atlanta home and reminded her children to lock the doors and check the security cameras." www.reuters.com/investigatio...

NEW: Since the start of the second Trump administration, information on hundreds of government websites focused on environmental regulation has been changed or even removed. www.nextgov.com/digital-gove...

FROM @reuters.com: President Trump’s rhetoric has galvanized a new wave of far-right activists, fueling growth in white supremacist ranks. "He’s the best thing that’s happened to us," said the leader of the Aryan Freedom Network. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Phone calls to local Social Security offices are currently being rerouted to other field offices — often to staff who don't have jurisdiction over the caller's case, employees say.

7 months into the administration, DOGE is taking over the online presence of what used to be the U.S. Digital Service... "US Digital Service" is gone from the header of the website (usds.gov) and the LinkedIn is now the U.S. DOGE Service (linkedin.com/company/unit...)

NEW: NIST, a govt standards agency, has been working on new digital identity guidelines for years. It finally released them Friday. One big change from previous draft versions: the removal of any mention of "equity." www.nextgov.com/digital-gove...

NEW: Longtime Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd is no longer the head of the Labor Department's technology office. For now at least, it appears that Shedd is still in his General Services Administration job, where he's sought to accelerate AI adoption and slash staffing. www.nextgov.com/people/2025/...

The White House has named financial executive Edward Forst as nominee for the head of the General Services Administration, following recent leadership shakeups at the agency some say is DOGE fallout. www.nextgov.com/people/2025/...

@blumenthal.senate.gov ranking member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, is asking over 20 government watchdogs to tally DOGE’s costs in letters sent to inspectors general on Thursday.

Powell stressed today that the Fed's decisions will be based on how the economic data performs in coming months. One problem: That data may be becoming less reliable. My story on the BLS's latest cuts to CPI data collection: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/b... #EconSky