David Hogg's organization gave $100,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee after angering House Democrats with plans to back primary challengers against their older incumbents, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The donation addresses one of the central complaints of Hogg's detractors, particularly battleground district Democrats — that his efforts will draw resources away from the fight to retake the House.

• Hogg told the New York Times his group, Leaders We Deserve, will spend $20 million going after older House Democrats in solidly blue districts.
• Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-Mich.) previously told Axios: "I can think of a million better things to do with twenty million dollars right now."

Driving the news: Leaders We Deserve made the donation on Thursday, two days after its primary efforts were first reported, a source familiar with the matter told Axios.

• The gift was first reported by Politico, though Hogg disputed the notion that he is "trying to make nice" with House Democratic leaders.
• "This is not me playing nice. It is demonstrating my commitment to winning back the house and making Hakeem Jeffries the Speaker," the 25-year-old Democratic National Committee vice chair posted on X.

Zoom in: Hogg suggested he will continue to go full bore with his efforts to drive out House Democrats' oldest members.

• "We absolutely cannot wait for people to retire at their own leisure or to let them sit there and do nothing while the country is burning," he said in his social media post.
• Leaders We Deserve did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the donation.

Zoom out: The DCCC announced Friday that it raised $36.9 million in the first three months of 2025.

• That figure put them narrowly ahead of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which brought in $36.7 million during the same period.

• Honeywell developed two new systems designed to make takeoffs and landings safer.
• Surf-A alerts pilots about potential runway collisions.
• Smart-X lets pilots know if they are taking off or landing on a taxiway instead of a runway.

Honeywell Aerospace Technologies has developed a series of new systems that alert pilots to impending danger during takeoffs and landings. They say the technology could help make aircraft collisions and near-misses a thing of the past

I recently took a demonstration flight aboard Honeywell's Boeing 757 test plane, showcasing its new Surface Alert, or SURF-A, and existing Smart-X systems.

Both systems are built into the plane's avionics software and warn pilots directly, giving them precious extra seconds to react.

"Pilots are our last line of defense. They are the ones who can help mitigate a disaster. These are tools, a third set of eyes to help increase their situational awareness," Thea Feyereisen, a human factors expert who helps lead research and development at Honeywell Aerospace, told Business Insider in an interview.

According to a recent study by Boeing, the minutes surrounding an aircraft's takeoff and landing account for nearly two-thirds of all deadly aviation accidents, but only 6% of a flight's total time.

Here's a closer look at my test flight.

The test flight started with an early morning briefing at the Signature Aviation private jet terminal on the northern edge of Atlanta's international airport.

The Honeywell team gave us an overview of its new SURF-A tech, which is expected to receive FAA certification next year. The system warns pilots if a plane is already on or about to cross the runway they are approaching.

The flight would also demonstrate their existing Smart-X technology that lets pilots know if they are about to take off or land on a taxiway or if there won't be enough runway to land safely.

Both systems are available as software upgrades on aircraft equipped with Honeywell's popular enhanced ground proximity warning systems, or EGPWS.

After the briefing, we boarded Honeywell's Boeing 757-200 test plane.

The Honeywell jet was the fifth 757 ever to roll off Boeing's assembly line. It entered service with Eastern Airlines in 1983 and was acquired by Honeywell in 2005.

Since joining the Honeywell fleet, the jet has clocked over 4,000 flight hours on more than 1,000 test flights.

It's set up to test everything from weather radars and in-flight WiFi to sustainable aviation fuel. The jet has also been fitted with an extra engine pylon on the starboard side of its fuselage to test turbofan and turboprop engines.

After boarding, the Honeywell team gave the passengers a pre-flight safety briefing.

Unlike most Boeing 757s, the aircraft features built-in air stairs that can be deployed at airports without the capability of supporting a jetliner of its size.

Here is my seat for the demo flight.

Seat 1B is an old-school domestic first-class seat immediately in front of the bulkhead.

In front of the seat is a large LCD screen connected to four cameras in the flight deck.

The four cameras let the passengers see the cockpit displays and gave us a pilot's eye view of the flight.

Soon, we were off the ground and en route to an airport in Albany, Georgia, about 180 miles south of Atlanta.

The test flight consisted of half a dozen simulated test scenarios, with a Honeywell-owned King Air turboprop test plane serving as the offending aircraft that triggered the safety alerts.

During the short 20-minute flight south, I had the chance to stroll around the cabin.

Here's one of the plane's two Rolls-Royce RB211 turbofan engines, each producing a whopping 40,000 lbs of thrust. The 757 has a reputation among pilots for being an absolute hotrod, even when loaded with passengers and cargo.

Further back in the cabin, a group of Honeywell engineers monitored the plane's systems.

Even though this was a demo flight with media, there was still precious data that could be collected.

The first scenario involves a plane on the landing runway.

SURF-A warned the pilots repeatedly with aural and visual signals about "Traffic on Runway" when it detected the King Air sitting at the end of the runway.

The scenario simulates how the system might have provided additional reaction time in situations like the February 2023 incident, in which a FedEx Boeing 767 cargo plane nearly landed on top of a Southwest Boeing 737 attempting to take off from the same runway in Austin.

The test flight also showed SURF-A alerting when a plane crosses the runway during takeoff.

This scenario is much like the incident from January 2023 when a Delta 737 had to slam on its brakes after an American Airlines jet crossed the runway from which it was trying to take off.

SURF-A is also designed to alert a landing plane if an aircraft is crossing the runway.

It could help prevent incidents like the Southwest Airlines flight that narrowly avoided colliding with a private jet crossing the runway as it descended to land at Midway Airport in Chicago in February.

Honeywell also showed off its Smart-X runway awareness and alerting system, or RAAS.

The system, already on the market, alerted pilots when they tried to take off from and land on a taxiway.

In March, a Southwest Airlines jet mistook a taxiway at Orlando International Airport for a runway and attempted to take off from it. The Boeing 737 accelerated to 70 knots before being ordered by air traffic control to stop.

Smart-X also alerts pilots when their landing approach is at too high an altitude or they've gone too far down the runway to stop safely.

After landing, the system will also call out the maximum distance the pilots have left to stop before the runway ends.

After completing the test scenarios, I had the chance to ride in the cockpit jumpseat for the short flight back.

We touched down safely back in Atlanta on Runway 28, concluding our two-hour-long test flight.

After our flight, the Boeing 757 was refueled and prepped for more demonstrations.

The aircraft spent a few days in Atlanta before returning to its base in Phoenix.

• AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps are bracing for cuts, throwing members' career planning into doubt.
• Young members told BI they thought their services would be a launching pad for future opportunities.
• Many said they don't have clear back-up plans, especially with the difficult job market.

Javon Walker-Price was squished in a van on Wednesday afternoon, driving from Nebraska to Iowa when the news came: His group of AmeriCorps members was being sent home.

By Thursday, Walker-Price's whole crew had to be on planes. They were only three months into a ten-month service contract and had been preparing to go out to Minnesota to fix up cabins and trails at a campground.

"It happened so fast," Walker-Price, 20, said. "One minute we were working, and the next minute we were told to pack our bags and come back to Iowa as soon as possible to get on the flight. It took everybody by surprise."

Walker-Price is just one of the thousands of AmeriCorps volunteers who are dealing with — or bracing for — the firings that have come to many other federal agencies. Members of the White House DOGE Office visited both AmeriCorps and Peace Corps headquarters earlier this month, throwing the agencies' futures into question.

Founded in 1993 and 1961, respectively, AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps annually enroll hundreds of thousands of young adults domestically and abroad. They receive a stipend for living expenses to do a range of service work, from environmental conservation to education, in local communities. Members who complete their service can also get educational grants for graduate school or to pay off student loans. The experience is often a launchpad for a career in public service. Now, members waiting to see if they get the chop are worried their careers will falter.

"They should not be dumped out unceremoniously into a job market that is not prepared to receive them," said Curt Ellis, the CEO and cofounder of FoodCorps, a nonprofit that works with about 150 AmeriCorps members each year. A current AmeriCorps staff member said the competition in the job market "is just going to be insane for everyone."

Business Insider spoke to nine early-career AmeriCorps and Peace Corps members and full-time agency or partner organization staff about what the cuts mean for their futures.

The White House confirmed to BI that roughly 75% of full-time AmeriCorps employees were placed on administrative leave this week. The agency reportedly shut down a program that focuses in part on disaster preparedness, sending home all members and placing them on administrative leave. There's no clear timeline for when employees will return to work or be fired.

An administration official said that the staff shake-up comes because "AmeriCorps failed eight consecutive audits and is entrusted with over $1 billion in taxpayer dollars every year." Representatives for AmeriCorps did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

A representative for the Peace Corps told BI that the agency is in "full compliance with executive orders and other presidential actions," and that while the agency is subject to the federal hiring freeze, "volunteer recruitment activities continue."

'I don't know what I'm going to do'

Though most of the members BI spoke with had not been cut at the time of writing, all said they're bracing for the possibility

"The writing is on the wall," a 24-year-old Peace Corp member in the South Pacific said.

"The whole AmeriCorps community that I'm involved with is just anxious about if cuts do happen, how do we pay our bills?" a 26-year-old AmeriCorps member working in Texas said. "How do we keep moving forward with our lives?"

For many, AmeriCorps seemed like a reliable doorway to a stable career path — the 26-year-old said it was acting as a "stepping stone" to a permanent job.

Meredith B., a 28-year-old AmeriCorps member in Boston, said she took her job, in part, because of a shaky labor market. "I said, 'Oh, I'll work for the government in an almost unrelated position that still employs my skills. This will be safe.'"

"They're willing to hire people who don't have much experience, and they teach you all the skills you need in a very open environment where it's okay to make mistakes and not know what you're doing," a 22-year-old AmeriCorps member in North Carolina said. "By the end, you have those skills to go into whatever other career you're trying to go into."

Now, members are wondering whether their months, or in some cases years, of service will still set them up for success.

"I wish I knew," the Peace Corps member said about his contingency plan if his job gets cut. "It's rough because a lot of the off-ramps I would've had previously have now either been cut or have been severely negatively affected."

He wanted to work for the federal government or a nonprofit organization that received now-slashed federal funding. He's worried now that the few government jobs that are available will go to older people with more experience and degrees.

"They are being flooded by very, very well-qualified government workers that I cannot compete with. So right now I don't know what I'm going to do."

Meredith B. said that she doesn't have any sort of safety net, like many other people her age. All of her belongings were ruined in Hurricane Helene — what she has left fits in the two suitcases she brought with her to Boston.

"That's all the things I own in this world now, except I bought a pair of pants recently," she said.

A path forward, suddenly blocked

A former worker at the agency who served under Obama, Trump, and Biden also said AmeriCorps set young people up for a career in service.

"I've seen it time and time again," they said. "That service connected them to a lifetime of continued commitment and impact."

It's not just future jobs that hang in the balance — many members of AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps use education grants from the programs to pay off student loans or get another degree. Libby Stegger, the founder and executive director of Civic Bridgers in Minnesota, which partners with AmeriCorps, said she doesn't know what would happen to members' education awards if funding is cut.

"That is something that is very appealing to folks of all ages, and especially to folks who are early career," she said of the education grants. "Particularly for people who might otherwise not have access to those kinds of education funding opportunities, that is a tremendous benefit."

The 26-year-old AmeriCorps member said he "wouldn't even consider" grad school if his education award gets cut, and the Peace Corps member said going to grad school with the money had been key to his long-term goal of working in the federal government.

Cuts are also rippling down to students who are still in high school or college. Elizabeth Baz, 18, applied to AmeriCorps for a gap year.

"I was really hoping that AmeriCorps would kind of help me just get my life together and help me gain some more self-discipline and more life skills," she said. Baz said she still plans to take a gap year, but doesn't know what to do with it now.

The AmeriCorps member in North Carolina said it's more than sad to think about younger people not having the same opportunities she did — it's worrying. For the AmeriCorps member in Texas, his service made him feel more American, and he worries his family won't have that same experience.

"I have here on my desk a picture of my little nephews," he said, choking up. "And I think about all the work that we're doing now is to potentially have that same space for them to also experience whenever they're my age."

By Thursday night, Walker-Price had made it home to Virginia, but he had trouble sleeping in the quiet. He had gotten used to the sounds of his AmeriCorps cohort, who had become more like family.

"We planned on being with AmeriCorps for 10 months," Walker-Price said, "and just being sent home immediately, now it's like, what am I going to do?"

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• The Trump administration's Ukraine peace deal faces a critical deadline, Rubio warns.
• Trump's patience is waning as progress on ending the Ukraine war remains elusive.
• US withdrawal could collapse the peace process, impacting sanctions and military aid.

President Donald Trump's negotiations to end the Ukraine war are going nowhere. Ukraine is on board, but Russia isn't.

Now, Trump's top diplomat is signaling he could walk away from the table. It's a classic dealmaking technique straight out of Trump's 1987 book, "The Art of the Deal."

"We're not going to continue with this endeavor for weeks and months on end," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday after tense meetings with European and Ukrainian officials. "So we need to determine very quickly now, and I'm talking about a matter of days, whether or not this is doable in the next few weeks."

"If it's not possible... then I think the president is probably at a point where he's going to say, 'well, we're done,'' Rubio added.

Trump, who campaigned on ending the Ukraine war rapidly, wrote in his book to "know when to walk away from the table."

"The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it," he wrote. "That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you're dead. The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have. Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can't do without."

The book may be decades old, but it's as relevant as ever to Trump's negotiating strategies — at least according to some in his orbit.

"Many of you in the media clearly missed 'The Art of the Deal,'" press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier this month in response to questions about Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs strategy. "You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here."

Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Business Insider that "it is difficult to know how seriously to take Rubio's suggestion that the United States is ready to 'move on' if progress on ending the war in Ukraine is not in the immediate offing" because "the Trump administration's position on many policy issues changes on an almost daily basis."

"It remains unclear whether moving on means giving up on efforts to bring the war to a close, ending US support to Ukraine, abandoning the attempt to reset relations with Russia — or some combination of all three," added Kupchan. "Clearly, the Trump administration is frustrated that its pledges to end the war are not panning out."

Kupchan said that hope lies in the pending minerals deal, over which negotiations are ongoing. "Kyiv has a compelling interest in convincing Trump not to walk away from supporting Ukraine — and the minerals deal can help achieve that outcome. An agreement of some sort looks likely, although its terms are still in play."

Rubio's ultimatum landed just as Vice President JD Vance, meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Rome, expressed optimism about ending the "very brutal war." Rubio's comments from Paris, where he presented a US peace framework that reportedly received an "encouraging reception," painted a more urgent picture.

The Kremlin acknowledged "some progress" but noted difficult contacts with Washington, insisting on protecting Russian interests. Rubio's explicit "matter of days" deadline suggests Moscow's pace isn't matching Washington's demands.

If the US does step back, the implications are stark. Without Washington wielding its unique leverage — the threat of tougher sanctions on Russia or cutting off Kyiv's military aid pipeline — most observers believe the peace process would likely disintegrate.

Tom Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and former Biden administration official, called it "absolutely absurd" that the administration is about to throw in the towel on negotiations on the Russia-Ukraine war without even trying to put pressure on Russia. "Ukraine wants an immediate cease-fire. Putin's maximalist objectives and desire to subjugate Ukraine are the main obstacles to peace.

Ian Bremmer, the founder and president of Eurasia Group, told BI that "US coordination on negotiations with Europe and Ukraine in Paris sends a clearer message to Putin that if he wants a deal with Trump (which has lots of long-term strategic advantages for the Kremlin), he's going to have to accept a cease-fire. Your move, Putin."

• China's air force is capable of denying US superiority in the first island chain, the top US commander in the Pacific said.
• Adm. Samuel Paparo said that China's fighter fleet, bombers, and missiles are enough to cause problems.
• He said that neither side would see air supremacy in a potential war.

China can prevent the US from achieving air superiority within the key first island chain, America's top commander in the Indo-Pacific region said.

Last week, Adm. Samuel Paparo, the head of US Indo-Pacific Command, gave China "high marks" in its ability to prevent the US from achieving air superiority in the first island chain, the strategic archipelagos in East Asia that includes Japan, Taiwan, and the northern Philippines, among other territories.

In a hearing with the US Senate Armed Services Committee, Paparo pointed to China's air force. He said that China now has 2,100 fighters and 200 H-6 bombers and a production rate for fighters that's currently 1.2 to 1 over the US.

China still operates a lot of older airframes, but the number of capable fourth-generation platforms is on the rise, as is its number of fifth-gen fighters. And the country continues to work on new aircraft designs.

"Furthermore," Paparo explained during the hearing, "their advanced long-range air-to-air missiles also present a tremendous threat." China has prioritized building up its missile stockpiles and capabilities in recent years, particularly ones capable of targeting US and allied forces and installations, including insufficiently defended airfields, in the region.

Air superiority, like the US military has enjoyed in conflicts in the Middle East in recent decades, requires securing a substantial degree of control over the skies with little interference from the enemy, meaning aircraft can operate with flexibility and provide support for other forces.

Ceding that air superiority, Paparo said, "is not an option if we intend to maintain capability against our adversaries and the ability to support our allies," especially in the first island chain.

But both the US and Chinese air forces have been rethinking what air superiority would look like in a conflict and questioning whether that is even possible for more than brief windows of time.

With both sides employing advanced sensors and long-range weapons, including formidable air defenses, permanently controlling the skies seems increasingly unlikely.

That said, the admiral explained that he has "some game," too. In a conflict, neither Beijing or Washington's forces would likely achieve air supremacy, or complete control, Paparo said.

"It will be my job to contest air superiority, to protect those forces that are on the first island chain, such as 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force," the commander explained to lawmakers, "and also to provide windows of air superiority in order to achieve our effects."

Officials and experts have often discussed what the future US Air Force strategy against China should look like, the role of unmanned aerial systems in that, and how air power could determine the outcome of a war.

Also important is considering how China's air defense systems would protect important targets, such as critical command and control centers, air bases, and radar sites.

Researchers have said that China could more easily devastate American airpower than the other way around.

Some have pointed to the importance of hardening US airbases and bolstering air defenses in the Indo-Pacific to improve the survivability of American aircraft should China launch a missile strike. Lawmakers in Washington have said the US isn't doing enough in that regard.