More from Trump’s first 100 days: all the news affecting the tech industry
Donald Trump livestreamed a Tesla showcase in the White House driveway on Tuesday, apparently reading the notes of a Tesla sales pitch as he performed choosing one of its EVs to purchase from five delivered for the event.
Standing alongside Elon Musk, Trump attempted to boost the automaker, after prices of its shares dropped 15 percent over the last five days, and said he’d label violence against its locations as domestic terrorism.
Plankey isn’t new to the Trump administration, as he previously served as the principal deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Energy from 2019 to 2020. He also worked as the director for cyber policy with the National Security Council before that.
[cyberscoop.com]
The agency is axing the Office of the Chief Scientist and the the Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy.
NASA contributes significantly to research on climate, weather, air quality, and the environment. Joe Biden appointed chief scientist Katherine Calvin, who was recently stopped from joining a meeting of the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Science reports.
“It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focuses gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment,” says an internal NIH email obtained by Science and The Washington Post.
Donald Trump tapped anti-vax crusader Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spread disinformation falsely linking vaccines to autism, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services that houses NIH.
[science.org]
The Department of Commerce laid off 40 people from the office overseeing CHIPS grants after senior department official Michael Grimes held “brief interviews” with employees, reports The New York Times.
...Mr. Grimes asked employees to justify their intellect by providing test results from the SAT or an IQ test, said four people familiar with the evaluations. Some were asked to do math problems, like calculate the value of four to the fourth power or long division.
Last week, Trump called for ending the program.
I’ve been at the courthouse this morning as Adam Martinez, chief operating officer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is grilled about whether the agency is unlawfully trimming staff and ordering people to stop work. Martinez admitted staff members have been confused about what they’re allowed to work on, but he insists it’s improving. So far, Judge Amy Berman Jackson seems skeptical — we’ll be headed back after lunch for more.
Wired reports that following a 150-person pilot, General Services Administration employees are using the chatbot, which Elon Musk’s DOGE hopes to expand to the entire agency, for “general purposes.”
An internal memo seen by Wired instructs workers not to “type or paste federal nonpublic information,” and includes suggestions for “effective” prompts. One employee told the outlet GSAi is “about as good as an intern,” producing “generic and guessable answers.”
While Musk and Rubio beefed about who should really be in charge of the state department, an unelected billionaire or the secretary of state, “the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match.” The result of the meeting was the first attempt to put any brakes on Musk’s power. Good luck with that!
The New York Times reports Trump signed an EO Thursday evening to “establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile” consisting of crypto assets owned by the Treasury forfeited in criminal or civil cases.
In a video, the president prepared to sign as a voice offscreen called it “like a digital Fort Knox for digital gold,” however CoinDesk notes that not everyone in crypto feels like they got what they paid for yet, with one exec calling it “the most underwhelming and disappointing outcome we could have expected for this week.”
The 25 percent tariffs Donald Trump announced for Canada and Mexico just a couple of days ago have been quickly pared back. First there was a 30-day exemption for automakers and now, as Bloomberg and the New York Times report, goods from either country covered by the USMCA trade agreement are also exempt, at least until April 2nd.
The suspension effectively abandons many of the tariffs that Mr. Trump had placed on Canadian and Mexican products — levies he said were necessary to stem the flow of drugs and migrants into the United States.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump said DOGE is “headed by Elon Musk,” despite DOJ lawyers arguing he isn’t its administrator or even an employee. Now Politico reports he told the top members of his administration that Musk “was empowered to make recommendations to the departments but not to issue unilateral decisions on staffing and policy.”
Of course, as CNN reports, Trump also told reporters later:
“We’re going to be watching them, and Elon and the group are going to be watching them, and if they can cut, it’s better,” Trump said. “And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”
As part of the DOGE-directed reshaping of the federal government, General Services Administration listed more than 400 federal properties “designated for disposal” earlier this week, before replacing them with a “coming soon” message.
That could be because 14 of them were in a warehouse complex also housing “the worst-kept secret in Springfield,” a U-shaped building that Bloomberg Law says “doesn’t appear in federal property records but has long been associated with the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Wired has more details.
The new State Department program, called “Catch and Revoke,” will use AI to review the social media accounts of tens of thousands of students who are in the US on visas, Axios reports. State Department sources tell Axios that officials plan on combing through internal databases to see if any international students were arrested in pro-Palestine demonstrations since October 2023 — and that the department is working with the Department of Homeland Security to ensure a “whole of government and whole of authority approach.”
Rubio, the new Secretary of State, has been calling for the revocation of student visas for pro-Palestine protesters since October 2023.
Workers are now barred from browsing general news, online shopping, and sports websites on government devices, unless they get an exception for a legitimate business need, according to an email to SSA employees obtained by Rolling Stone.
Apparently this will help “better protect the sensitive information entrusted to us in our many systems,” which might include some of the same systems the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has reportedly tried to access.
[rollingstone.com]
Our corrupt administration has no reason to make Big Tech obey an anti-deepfakes law.
During the State of the Union address Tuesday night and in a post on the White House website published Wednesday, Donald Trump and his administration tried to claim that the government was spending millions on “transgender animal experiments.”
However, as this Rolling Stone article points out, the National Institutes of Health grants cited as examples of “examples of waste, fraud, and abuse” aren’t for that at all, with the White House misleadingly referring to studies of transgenic (not transgender) mice, and others about the effects of hormones that again, did not create transgender animals.
The program, DOSAir, monitored air quality at embassies around the world, helping to prevent hundreds of premature deaths. Now, the program is ending “due to budget constraints,” Wired reports.
It’s not surprising that the government’s crypto reserve involves Bitcoin and Ethereum, but the other three coins seem kind of random — Cardano (have you heard of it???), XRP, and Solana.
Popular Information dug deeper and identified a few politically-connected entities involved. There’s Ripple, the company that created XRP, which donated tens of millions to Republican super PACs and candidates like Trump in the 2024 election. Then there’s Solana, which backs memecoins like $TRUMP and $MELANIA. And to nobody’s surprise, David Sacks is also all up in the mix.
[popular.info]
The bipartisan bill would require social media sites to have procedures to promptly remove nonconsensual intimate images once notified. The bill recently passed the Senate unanimously and First Lady Melania Trump is trying to push it over the finish line in the House. High school student Elliston Berry, who experienced AI images with her face shared by a classmate without her consent, sat next to FLOTUS at the congressional address as one of her guests.