Trump’s first 100 days: all the news affecting the tech industry

On April 22nd, Fight Fight Fight LLC, a company with ties to President Donald Trump, announced that the 220 top investors in its meme coin $TRUMP would be invited to meet with Trump himself. The event was billed as an “intimate private” dinner, but with obvious hints that attendees were buying an elected official’s time. Around the date of the announcement, federal government officials reportedly registered three websites apparently related to the dinner: thetrilliondollarinner.gov, dinnerforamerica.gov, and thetrillion.gov. At least one, it was reported, temporarily directed to a Department of Commerce login portal, suggesting that the coin was somehow linked to the government. The coin’s price jumped by more than 50 percent after the dinner was announced, netting Trump and his allies nearly $900,000 in trading fees in just two days.

Two democratic senators demanded an ethics probe into the May 22 dinner, but in February, Trump fired the head of the body that would typically investigate that type of alleged misconduct.

President Donald Trump proposed drastic budget cuts today that could stymie green energy projects, gut environmental protections, and further hobble health and climate research in the US.

Topline budget proposals released today for the 2026 fiscal year would ax $15 billion in federal funding for renewable energy and new technologies to capture carbon dioxide emissions. It would strip nearly $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health, while the Environmental Protection Agency would see its budget slashed in half.

With President Donald Trump’s new tariff plan, your online shopping packages coming directly from China are about to get much more expensive.

In February, the Trump administration moved to get rid of a little-known rule that allows US consumers to avoid tariffs on low-value packages. The de minimis exemption meant that packages valued under $800 could enter the US duty-free, and shoppers — as well as retailers — relied on the exemption regularly, even if they didn’t realize it. Nearly 1.4 billion packages claiming the exemption entered the US in 2024, the majority of which came from China. The removal of this exemption has been paused since early February, meaning Temu and Shein packages have been able to flow into the country without duties. But no longer.

Within weeks of President Trump stepping into office, key health and environmental resources that doctors and farmers rely on started disappearing from federal websites. Trump was also quick to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID), cutting off funding — as well as the flow of data that people around the world use to prevent famine and issue warnings ahead of natural disasters.

“As we all watched the websites being pulled down, as we all watched data disappearing, we were all concerned — because that’s truth. There’s truth in data,” says a former contractor who was granted anonymity to speak freely without fear of repercussions. “Now it’s more easy just to say something and force it as the truth. But there’s no way to back it up.”

For several weeks, President Donald Trump and his administration have been grasping for evidence that a man his administration deported and imprisoned in error is a dangerous gang member, and the effort has now reached what may be an untoppable peak: the President repeatedly insisting in an in-person interview that an obvious text label that says MS13 in the Calibri typeface is an actual tattoo.

On Tuesday, Trump sat for an interview with ABC News correspondent Terry Moran. Moran asked Trump about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent to El Salvador’s CECOT prison without due process and in violation of a protective order, and who remains in El Salvador despite a Supreme Court ruling demanding he facilitate the man’s return. Trump said (contradicting his administration’s previous public statements) that he “could” pick up the phone and order Abrego Garcia’s return, but that he refused because Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang. His evidence: “on his knuckles, he had MS-13.”

I once wondered whether law enforcement might stop Elon Musk’s power grab. About a month ago, I got my answer: no.

On March 17th, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency broke into the nonprofit, congressionally funded US Institute for Peace, according to court documents filed by the USIP’s board of directors. By allegedly threatening to “cancel every federal contract” of a private security firm that had worked with USIP until a day earlier, they convinced it to let them into the building — where, told by institute staff they were trespassing, the fired security firm headed for the USIP gun safe. That’s when the USIP called the cops. The DC police arrived to escort DOGE into the building. USIP head of security Colin O’Brien, along with two of USIP’s lawyers, was detained.

The Metals Company, which has been trying for years to exploit battery materials strewn across the ocean floor, announced today that it has applied for a permit from the Trump administration to start commercially mining in international waters.

Together, the company and President Trump are circumventing a multilateral process to develop rules for deep sea mining that has so far prevented any commercial exploitation from happening.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a new plan to address “forever chemicals” once widely used in non-stick and water-proof products that have since been linked to cancer, reproductive health issues, and liver damage. The vague details the EPA has shared so far, however, have health and environmental advocates wondering whether the EPA’s plan helps or delays action to keep the chemicals out of drinking water.

The agency says it’ll launch new efforts to study the chemicals and will develop new guidelines to limit pollution from manufacturers. But the announcement on Monday comes as the EPA under Donald Trump attempts to roll back dozens of other environmental protections. And, notably, the agency hasn’t decided whether it plans to enforce existing limits on the amount of forever chemicals in drinking water. Nor will the agency say whether it plans to defend a Biden-era rule to classify the two most common forms of PFAS as hazardous chemicals prioritized for cleanup under the federal Superfund law.

Here’s some dumb stuff that just happened:

Okay — a couple things. First, there was no “act” by Amazon, just a single-sourced story that everyone wanted to believe. So Leavitt (and, if you believe her, Trump) reacted with nuclear fury to the mere idea that a major American retailer might add price transparency to its website, because that transparency would make it ever more obvious that their tariff plans are basically nonsense. That fury resulted in immediate acquiescence.

The death knell for American TikTok should have been on March 13th, 2024, when Congress voted on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis to force its parent company to sell the app or face an outright ban. Rarely do you ever see Republicans and Democrats in agreement over anything, but both sides saw the app as a national security threat and worried that the Chinese government would use it to sow misinformation and secretly harvest its users’ personal data. After the bill was signed into law by President Joe Biden and negotiations with ByteDance dragged on, a ban seemed inevitable, even if his adversary Donald Trump won.

After all, MAGA had always been consistent about hating two things that happen to proliferate on TikTok: the Chinese Communist Party, whom they believed were secretly bankrolling the Bidens; and people who openly support Palestine. And in 2020, Trump signed an executive order attempting to ban TikTok, partially after seeing how TikTok was boosting support for his then-rival Joe Biden.

2024 was shaping up to be the year Congress regulated how kids engage with social media, particularly through one bill, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). A debate about its risks to free expression still raged, but the voices of the bill’s advocates seemed to ring loudest in senators’ ears. The momentum was there. The Senate vote was virtually unanimous. Then, unexpectedly, House Republican leadership — worried KOSA would make Silicon Valley giants remove more conservative content — let it fade away.

Now, after a hundred chaotic days of the Trump administration, the once-rational bet of new child safety legislation is looking shakier. Parent and youth advocates continue to hammer the urgency of passing bills like KOSA, as well as new regulations to address the proliferation of AI-created nude images of minors. But civil liberties groups — which already feared these bills put marginalized kids at risk — now warn they could give Trump new weapons to wield against speech they disagree with. Meanwhile, some lawmakers wonder if the administration’s dramatically weakened regulators can enforce the rules at all.

The Take It Down Act is heading to President Donald Trump’s desk after the House voted 409-2 to pass the bill, which will require social media companies to take down content flagged as nonconsensual (including AI-generated) sexual images. Trump has pledged to sign it.

The bill is among the only pieces of online safety legislation to successfully pass both chambers in years of furor over deepfakes, child safety, and other issues — but it’s one that critics fear will be used as a weapon against content the administration or its allies dislike. It criminalizes the publication of nonconsensual intimate images (NCII), whether real or computer-generated, and requires social media platforms to have a system to remove those images within 48 hours of being flagged. In his address to Congress this year, Trump quipped that once he signed it, “I’m going to use that bill for myself too, if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.”

For millions of people, any one of the many unprecedented actions in the first 100 days of the second Trump presidency was enough to show that the US is barreling toward — or has already arrived at — billionaire-helmed fascism. Sure, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has indiscriminately fired thousands of federal employees and gutted the parts of the federal government that protect everyday people. And elsewhere, government funds are being spent on arresting immigrants with no criminal record and sending them to languish in prisons abroad; college students are being disappeared for their opinions on Palestine. But what really seems to have triggered Americans all across the political spectrum is Trump’s plan to levy steep tariffs on just about every country on Earth, and the resulting economic instability. When the stock market lost around $10 trillion in value over the course of a few days earlier in April following the announcement, even Trump’s loudest boosters started to worry.

Trump’s tariffs are not trade policy as much as they are a fishing expedition: What can he extract from trade partners and from US companies that can be spun as a win for him? Early tariff truces with Canada and Mexico suggest the deals don’t even have to be very good: much of what Canada agreed to do to target fentanyl had already been announced weeks or months prior. Trump’s tariffs are a cudgel looking for a target.

Elon Musk’s expansive portfolio of companies could avoid more than $2.37 billion in potential legal liability due to his unprecedented influence over the US government, a new Senate report finds.

The figure comes from a report assembled by Democratic staff for the Senate Homeland Security permanent subcommittee on investigations (PSI) probing the impact of Musk’s closeness with President Donald Trump and creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on his financial interests. The staff endeavored to quantify “the financial impact of President Trump’s delegation of power on potential liabilities and scrutiny facing Mr. Musk and his companies.” To do so, it calculated the legal exposure The Boring Company, Neuralink, SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI could face as a result of federal investigations, litigation, or regulatory actions pending as of Trump’s inauguration. The staff called the number “a credible, conservative estimate.”

Donald Trump wants to mine the depths of the ocean for critical minerals ubiquitous in rechargeable batteries, signing an executive order on Thursday to try to expedite mining within US and international waters.

It’s a brash move that critics say could create unknown havoc on sea life and coastal economies, and that bucks international agreements. Talks to develop rules for deep-sea mining are still ongoing through the International Seabed Authority (ISA), a process that missed an initial 2023 deadline and has continued to stymie efforts to start commercially mining the deep sea.

President Donald Trump recently announced that he would host a private dinner for the top 220 biggest holders of $TRUMP, the meme coin he launched days prior to taking office – and several U.S. Senators would like to know exactly why he’s doing this.

The dinner was publicly advertised on the $TRUMP coin homepage this past Wednesday, and included a special VIP package for the top 25 holders: a private reception with Trump, and a VIP tour of the White House the next day. According to the site, the winners will be determined by how much of the coin a contestant owns, as well as how long they hold it between April 23rd and May 12. “The more $TRUMP you hold — and the longer you hold it — the higher Your Ranking will be,” it said.

After stranding former US Agency for International Development (USAID) workers with devices holding sensitive information, the Trump administration says it will no longer physically collect their government-issued phones, laptops, and tablets.

An email sent by USAID to workers on Thursday and obtained by The Verge says the devices will be wiped remotely, and then “marked as disposed.” Each direct hire or contractor will then be responsible for discarding the equipment. It’s unclear from the email whether the decision affects people stationed abroad or only those within the continental US.

Federal agents arrested a Milwaukee judge Friday on obstruction charges for allegedly interfering with an immigration arrest. Judge Hannah Dugan of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court was arrested in the county courthouse and remains in federal custody, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports. Kash Patel, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), posted about Dugan’s arrest on X. He has since deleted the post.

Dugan’s arrest comes one day after federal agents arrested a former New Mexico county judge and his wife in their home. Former Doña Ana County Magistrate Judge Joel Cano and his wife, Nancy Cano, were charged with evidence tampering and harboring an alleged member of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. (The administration has used spurious evidence, including innocuous tattoos, to accuse Venezuelan migrants of being Tren de Aragua members in order to exile them to a notorious prison in El Salvador.)