More from Trump’s first 100 days: all the news affecting the tech industry
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick plans to make an internet infrastructure investment program “technology-neutral,” according to The Wall Street Journal, meaning Elon Musk’s Starlink could more easily benefit. The program currently favors investment in fiber.
The Wall Street Journal reports that this afternoon, we’ll hear about how the chipmaker that Apple, Nvidia, and many others rely on “intends to invest $100 billion in chip manufacturing plants in the U.S. over the next four years,” likely linked to the president’s tariffs.
Sometimes these announcements feature news that isn’t quite new, like the Stargate Project’s first datacenter that was already under construction, and Apple’s $500 billion plan that the WSJ said was “mostly already in the books.” TSMC already has a pricey and delayed project under way in Arizona, so we’ll see how this announcement turns out.
The US General Services Administration (GSA) laid the team off in an overnight email explaining the decision came from “top levels of leadership within both the Administration and the GSA,” reports NextGov.
Established in 2014, 18F aimed to modernize government technology products and recently helped realize the IRS Direct File program, which now offers free tax filing in 25 states.
[nextgov.com]
Agency chair Brendan Carr criticized Verizon’s “lack of progress” on ending DEI initiatives in a letter telling its executives to contact FCC staff working on its pending Frontier acquisition, according to Bloomberg. That implies the merger’s approval is tied to Carr’s DEI agenda, fellow Commissioner Geoffrey Starks told the outlet in a statement critical of the move.
DEI is also at the center of the FCC’s Comcast probe.
Disclosure: Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.
Why? The grant application — for a project on the evolution of mint — discussed the diversity of plants and mentioned that there was a female scientist on the team, ProPublica reports. It’s just one example of how all kinds of work is getting caught up in the anti-civil rights crusade jeopardizing scientific research.
The wrecking ball the Trump administration and DOGE have taken to federal government agencies is already having an impact in Antarctica. Questions loom about whether US stations will be able to survive the chaos. And the US could wind up ceding influence on the continent to other countries, Wired reports.
“Even brief interruptions will result in people walking away and not coming back,” Nathan Whitehorn, an Antarctic scientist at Michigan State University, tells Wired.
[wired.com]
After questions were raised earlier this month about the line item proposing $400 million for “Armored Tesla (Production Units),” the State Department said the solicitation stemmed from a Biden-admin request. However, an NPR reporter says a document shows the Biden administration had approved less than $500k to look into armoring electric vehicles, while experts said the new figure would just about account for replacing the department’s entire 3,000-vehicle fleet with Tesla trucks.
This Wall Street Journal report looks into Apple’s history of spending to give some context to its half-trillion-dollar Monday morning announcement.
There’s a note from a UBS analyst outlining that the firm is a “skeptic” because coming up with new funds to invest would mean increasing Apple’s balance sheet leverage or reducing the cadence of stock buybacks. Otherwise, despite accounting for “some new, incremental spending domestically,” the report finds that based on analysts’s existing projections, “Apple’s announced figure is in line with what one might expect the company to be spending anyway, given its financials.”
As shown in a clip posted by The Handbasket writer Marisa Kabas, people in the Department of Housing and Urban Development HQ were greeted on day one of their mandatory return to office with what appears to be an AI-generated video of Donald Trump kissing Elon Musk’s feet. It is visible in the post, and they are both left feet, for some reason.
She writes that the video played on loop for about five minutes, until staff unplugged them.
[bsky.app]
Closely following similar news from Coinbase on Friday, Robinhood says:
On February 21, 2025, the SEC’s Enforcement Division advised RHC in a letter that it had concluded its investigation and did not intend to move forward with an enforcement action.
As we noted last week, the crypto industry donated heavily in the 2024 election cycle, and Robinhood lists the $TRUMP memecoin on its platform. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev noted making a $2 million donation to Trump’s inaugural campaign fund in a Fox News interview, claiming the Biden administration engaged in “open warfare” with the crypto industry.
