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Donald Trump promises wildfire aid for Los Angeles after standoff over California water policies
- President Donald Trump visited California on Friday to discuss the Los Angeles fires.
- During a roundtable with California officials, Trump promised to help fund relief efforts.
- The meeting came after weeks of Trump threatening to withhold federal funds for recovery.
President Donald Trump traveled to California on Friday afternoon to meet with local leaders, pledging to provide federal disaster relief for people affected by the deadly wildfires ravaging the region.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom greeted Trump cordially on the runway at the Los Angeles International Airport despite tense exchanges between the pair in recent weeks. The governor and president embraced briefly before addressing reporters for short remarks.
"We're going to need your support. We're going to need your help," Newsom said as he stood next to Trump. "You were there for us during COVID, I don't forget that, and I have all the expectations that we'll be able to work together to get this speedy recovery."
"We are going to get it fixed, and we're going to get it permanently fixed," Trump responded, "We're looking to get something completed and the way you get it completed is to work together. They are going to need a lot of federal help."
During a subsequent roundtable with California officials, Trump promised to help fund relief efforts but did not specify how much federal aid would be provided to the state. He also said he would issue an executive order to route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to Southern California and Central Valley for "beneficial use," echoing a statement in an earlier memo directed to the Secretary of Commerce and Secretary of the Interior.
Trump's visit to the state came after the recently inaugurated president repeatedly criticized California's water policies and threatened to withhold federal aid to help Los Angeles recover from the Palisades and Eaton fires, which killed 28 people. AccuWeather estimates the economic damage from the wildfires totals more than $250 billion, making it one of the costliest wildfire disasters in modern US history.
Newsom and Trump have had tense relations since the president's first term. They clashed over California's declaration as a "sanctuary state" for immigrants in 2017 and the state's right to set its own vehicle emission standards. Trump canceled nearly $1 billion in federal grants for California's high-speed rail in 2019. Newsom also characterized Trump as a threat to American democracy throughout much of last year's presidential campaign, while Trump frequently refers to the governor as "Newscum."
Ahead of the meeting, the Los Angeles Times reported that Newsom had been excluded from a list of participants released by the White House who would attend the briefing.
Over the past week, Trump also repeatedly accused Newsom of having water "pouring into the Pacific Ocean" and of creating "an inferno," including during a press conference on Tuesday where he announced massive funding for an AI initiative.
"I don't think we should give California anything until they let the water flow down," Trump said in an interview with Fox's Sean Hannity on Wednesday, referring to a perceived lack of water being diverted from Northern California to the more drought-prone south.
Newsom's spokesperson, Izzy Gardon, told Business Insider the Governor is "committed to advocating for the needs of Californians in partnership with the federal administration."
Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Los Angeles obtains water from various sources, mostly imported from outside the county. Aside from 660,000 acre-feet of local groundwater every year, a large amount of water comes from the city's 112-year-old aqueduct that runs from the Owens Valley east of the Sierra Nevadas. The city also imports water from the Metropolitan Water District, which relays water from the Colorado River.
"Presidents and their administrations do have the power to stop or delay disaster funds, although they rarely do," wrote Karrigan BΓΆrk, professor at the California Environmental Law and Policy Center at UC Davis, in a blog post, citing when the first Trump administration delayed $20 billion in disaster aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017.
BΓΆrk also warned that interference from the president would fundamentally change authority over water rights from the state to the federal government, which would risk opposition from many western states, and that water flowing into the ocean is needed to keep salinity down so that water can remain fresh for human use.
It remains unclear how much federal funding California will receive for Los Angeles. Trump said at an earlier stop in North Carolina on Friday that he might issue an executive order to "fundamentally reform and overhaul FEMA" or "recommend that FEMA go away."
Trump Publicly Spars with Karen Bass After Touring Wildfire Damage
JD Vance breaks Senate tie, votes to confirm Hegseth in a victory for Trump
- Pete Hegseth has been confirmed as defense secretary after a tie-breaking vote by JD Vance.
- The outspoken Army National Guard veteran and former Fox News host faced major controversies.
- Hegseth's confirmation suggests major changes may be in store for the Pentagon.
Vice President JD Vance on Friday delivered his first tie-breaking vote in the senate, confirming Pete Hegseth, a Trump confidant and Iraq veteran, as defense secretary after a contentious battle over his qualifications.
Democrats and three Republicans questioned Hegseth's readiness to lead the Pentagon, as the US Army National Guard veteran and former "Fox & Friends" host lacks experience in the defense industry or running large organizations that have characterized past defense secretaries.
Hegseth was barely confirmed on Friday night after a 50-50 Senate vote, which required a tie-breaking vote by Vance. Republican Senators Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, Susan Collins from Maine, and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska voted against Hegseth. All Democratic senators voted no.
The confirmation was only the second time in US history that the Vice President has been required to break a tie for a cabinet appointment. The first was Betsy DeVos' 2017 confirmation as secretary of education during President Donald Trump's first term.
Hegseth's confirmation is one of the closest ever for the position, which has often seen strong bipartisan support. For comparison, Lloyd Austin, a retired Army general tapped by former President Joe Biden, received 93 votes in 2021. In addition to Hegseth, one of the other closest votes occurred in 2013, when the Senate confirmed former President Barack Obama's pick, Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator and Vietnam combat veteran, by 58-41.
Hegseth's nail-bitter confirmation in the GOP-led Senate is a victory for Trump's unconventional Cabinet nominations. Since Trump announced his pick in November, Hegseth's personal history, controversial comments on culture war topics, and qualifications for the position have all been under fire.
At the Fox News host's confirmation hearing in January, he faced intense questioning, walking back previous comments he made against women serving in combat roles and promising to bring a warrior ethos back to the Pentagon.
He has also received support from many Republicans and veterans. Tim Kennedy, a retired Army Green Beret and mixed martial artist, has repeatedly advocated for Hegseth's candidacy, calling him "an agent of change." On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said that Hegseth would bring "a warrior's perspective to the role of defense secretary and will provide much-needed fresh air at the Pentagon."
Hegseth's confirmation may bring radical changes to the Pentagon that had been resisted in Trump's first term. It was Hegseth who then advised Trump to pardon troops accused or convicted of war crimes over the objections of top Pentagon leaders who worried this would erode the discipline and order in their ranks.
By rhetoric and background, Hegseth has been seen by lawmakers and officials as an unconventional pick.
Hegseth, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was among a group of National Guard members who had their orders to secure then President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration revoked after the January 6 insurrection due to controversy over his tattoo of a Jerusalem cross; he also has a tattoo of a Christian motto that dates to the Crusades and has been adopted by the alt-right.
Hegseth has also received backlash over his views of women serving in combat roles. During a podcast episode after Trump's reelection, Hegseth said, "I'm straight-up just saying we should not have women in combat roles," arguing it hurt the military's readiness. At his confirmation hearing in January, he took a different tone.
"Yes, women will have access to ground combat roles, given the standards remain high, and we'll have a review to ensure the standards have not been eroded in any one of these cases," Hegseth said, noting that if he's confirmed, he'll initiate a review of gender-neutral standards.
He has also been grilled about his drinking, beliefs against diversity, equity, and inclusion, and his personal history. During a media blitz to shore up his struggling candidacy, he vowed "there won't be a drop of alcohol on my lips" while he's the SECDEF.
In November, sexual assault allegations against Hegseth from an incident in 2017 were made public. At the time, Hegseth told police that the encounter was consensual and denied any wrongdoing; he was never criminally charged. In November, he told reporters that the matter was fully investigated and he'd been cleared.
Hegseth, an avowed opponent of the Defense Department's efforts to diversify its disproportionately white workforce, suggests major changes may be in store beyond the removal of any DEI or so-called "woke" policies.
His selection by Trump is also a sign the White House is focused on purging the military's top ranks of purported "woke generals," along the lines of the "warrior board" reviews first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
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Joe Biden's parting gift to Elon Musk: 2 11th-hour filings that bolster the tech big's beef with Sam Altman, Microsoft
- On its last business day, the Biden administration issued a report that now has an unlikely fan.
- Elon Musk is using the report as evidence in his antitrust suit against Sam Altman and OpenAI.
- Biden's outgoing DOJ also weighed in on Musk's behalf.
Former President Joe Biden left Elon Musk what amounts to a parting gift: a pair of scholarly papers drafted by his Justice Department and his Federal Trade Commission.
Both describe the potential illegality of overly-cozy partnerships between giant cloud service providers like Microsoft and leading artificial intelligence developers like OpenAI.
Musk is now using these Biden administration filings as fuel for his ongoing 2024 lawsuit against colleague-turned-rival Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO. The two men helped co-found OpenAI in 2015, with Musk sinking $44 million into the venture before their falling out three years later.
Musk's lawsuit accuses Altman of betraying OpenAI's founding mission as a non-profit research lab dedicated to keeping AI technology safe and freely available for the good of mankind.
Under Altman's leadership, OpenAI is now "a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon," the most recent version of the lawsuit alleges.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who in 2023 launched a competing AI effort, is seeking to break up the mutually beneficial β he says monopolistic β partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft.
Under the partnership, the software giant provides vital cloud server space and funding β a "$13 billion commitment," the lawsuit alleges. In return, Microsoft gets exclusive rights to the startup's technology, a suite of AI products that includes ChatGPT.
Musk's lawsuit, filed in federal court in Oakland, California, accuses Altman of racketeering, calling the four-year-old Microsoft-OpenAI alliance an unregulated "de facto merger." He seeks to void the companies' licensing agreement and pocket cash damages.
Microsoft "stands to make hundreds of billions from its methodical infiltration of, and increasing leverage over, the non-profit, its technology, and employees," the suit alleges.
Musk spent at least $277 million backing President Donald Trump's campaign for reelection. Still, the Biden administration's recent support of Musk's claims is not surprising, his attorney, Marc Toberoff, told Business Insider on Friday.
Concern over Big Tech monopolies goes beyond politics, the lawyer said.
"The DOJ and FTC took principled stands," Toberoff said of the back-to-back Biden administration filings. "Concern over OpenAI and Microsoft transcends party, because their coordinated conduct threatens the safe and effective development of by far the most transformative technology of our time."
The DOJ filing was the first to drop into the Musk v Altman docket.
Dated January 10, it supports Musk's claims that Microsoft and OpenAI violated federal antitrust laws by letting two people serve on the boards of directors of both companies β a practice called "interlocking directorates."
LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman served on the boards of OpenAI and Microsoft from March 2017 until March 2023, the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit also alleges that Deannah "Dee" Templeton, Microsoft's vice president of partnerships and operations, served on both boards from November 2023 until July 2024.
Altman's side has countered that neither Hoffman nor Templeton β both named as defendants in Musk's lawsuit β remain on OpenAI's board.
In late December, Musk asked the US District Court judge presiding over his lawsuit to bar the defendants from "benefiting from wrongfully obtained competitively sensitive information or coordination via the Microsoft-OpenAI board interlocks."
The DOJ filing supported that request.
Having directors serve on the boards of intertwined companies lets them share sensitive information, potentially undermining fair competition, the DOJ told Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.
The FTC's filing was next to drop into the Musk v Altman docket.
Dated January 17 β the last full business day of the Biden administration β it casts a critical eye on three multi-billion-dollar partnerships involving AI, listing them as "Microsoft-OpenAI, Amazon-Anthropic, and Google-Anthropic."
Microsoft's $13.75 billion investment in OpenAI dwarves those of the other two partnerships, the report says. The report pegs Amazon's investment in Anthropic at $8 billion and Google's investment in Anthropic at $2.55 billion.
"These partnerships involve relationships between the world's current largest Cloud Service Providers ("CSPs") and two of the most prominent AI model developers," the report reads.
"These partnerships therefore have potential for significant impact on AI technology, workers, and consumers," it warns.
By Inauguration Day, Musk's lawyers had attached the report as Exhibit 3 to to its latest court filing.
Musk and his co-plaintiffs "agree with the analytic frameworks" of the FTC and DOJ findings, Musk's side wrote.
Attorneys for Altman and Microsoft did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
The lawsuit's next court date is February 4.
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Stargate's first data center is underway in Texas. Public filings show how much it will cost to build.
- President Donald Trump announced the $500 billion AI project, Stargate, earlier this week.
- Stargate's first data center is under construction in Abilene, Texas, said Oracle CTO Larry Ellison.
- Public filings for an Abilene development matching Ellison's description shed some light on costs.
Construction on what appears to be two buildings on Stargate's first data center campus, now underway in Texas, is expected to be complete by the end of the year and cost an estimated $1.1 billion, according to public filings.
President Donald Trump announced the formation of Stargate, a joint venture between Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank, at a White House press conference on Tuesday. He pledged to spend $500 billion building AI data centers in the US.
Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison, who joined Trump, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son at the briefing, said the first Stargate data centers are currently being built in Abilene, Texas.
"We've been working with OpenAI for a while and Masa for a while. The data centers are actually under construction β the first of them are under construction in Texas," said Ellison. "Each building is a half million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20 and other locations beyond the Abilene location, which is our first location."
Little else has been revealed about Stargate. Registration forms filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for a data center development in Abilene matching Ellison's description of Stargate give some insight into the cost of building the data centers.
The development is registered with the TDLR under the name "Project Ludicrous," located at an address attached to the Lancium Clean Campus β a 1,000-acre site in Abilene owned by energy tech company Lancium. The owner of Project Ludicrous is listed as Abilene DC 1 LLC, an affiliate of data center development startup Crusoe. According to the Texas state comptroller's records, Oracle is the occupant of the data center owned by Abilene DC 1, LLC, located at the Lancium Clean Campus in Abilene. A Texas-based Oracle employee is also listed as the tenant contact for Project Ludicrous in the TDLR filings.
Between July and December 2024, agents for Project Ludicrous filed four different TDLR filings for two buildings.
Construction on the first building, a 482,000-square-foot one-story "data hall" estimated to cost $292 million, began in June 2024 and is scheduled to be completed by May 30, 2025. The estimate also includes plans for a guard house, fire pump building, and mechanical and electrical enclosures. A second filing for the building, made in September, indicates that tenant improvements costing $140 million began in December and are expected to be completed by September 15, 2025.
A second building registered under Project Ludicrous, a 484,960-square-foot "1-story data center" with a cost estimate of $292 million, went under construction in September and is expected to be completed in one year, the filings said. Tenant improvements, expected to begin in March and be completed by December 24, are estimated at $384 million.
The San Antonio Express-News previously reported on these filings.
Lancium, the landowner, first struck a development deal with the city of Abilene in 2021 for what it calls the Lancium Clean Campus. The site was initially meant to power bitcoin mines with renewable energy generation, although that never came to fruition.
In November, Crusoe announced plans for a $3.4 billion data center development on the Lancium Clean Campus and said it had already fully leased the space to a "Fortune 100 hyperscale tenant," with occupancy expected to begin in the first half of 2025.
The Information first reported Oracle's plans to lease a data center site in Texas from Crusoe, intending to eventually rent servers to OpenAI.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said that the Stargate "buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements."
"Lancium is excited to be building its Lancium Clean Campus in Abilene, Texas, in partnership with Crusoe and the Development Corporation of Abilene (DCOA) and to be at the forefront of the growth of the AI infrastructure industry in the US," a spokesperson for Lancium wrote in response to a request for comment from Business Insider. The spokesperson said the company could not "provide any new commentary about Abilene or any of our other Clean Campuses."
Oracle, OpenAI, and Crusoe did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Do you have insight, information, or a tip to share with this reporter? Contact Ellen Thomas via the secure messaging app Signal at +1-929-524-6964.
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Trump admin tells agencies to start firing DEI staffers
The Trump administration is directing the heads of federal agencies to "take action to terminate" staffers of DEI offices, according to a memo from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management issued Friday night.
Why it matters: The White House purge of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) programs and workers, begun Monday, is happening at lightning speed.
State of play: "[E]ach agency, department, or commission head shall take action to terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and 'environmental justice' offices and positions within sixty days," the memo reads.
- The memo updates a directive sent earlier this week that told agencies to submit written plans for executing a "reduction-in-force," i.e., layoffs, no later than January 31.
- But the new memo says agencies should start issuing these reduction-in-force notices now.
- It's not clear how many DEI staffers there are within the federal government, which employs millions of workers.
- In many cases it may not be possible to simply fire these workers; processes for doing so will vary.
Zoom in: The memo Friday night follows a directive issued earlier this week that ordered department and agency heads to close DEI offices β some of which are tasked with addressing accessibility issues for disabled people.
- Agencies were ordered to put staff on paid leave, as well as take down all DEI websites, social accounts, and "outward facing media." They were also told to withdraw any plans in the equity and inclusion space and cancel all trainings and contracts.
- The directive included an email template that called on government employees to snitch on colleagues that were continuing these practices.
Between the lines: The barrage of orders on DEI is creating an atmosphere of fear and anxiety for federal workers, advocates say.
- The Trump administration argues that these programs are actually discriminatory for giving preference to people based on their racial, ethnic or gender identity.
What they're saying: "Ultimately, these attacks on DEIA are just a smokescreen for firing civil servants, undermining the apolitical civil service, and turning the federal government into an army of yes-men loyal only to the president, not the Constitution," said a statement from the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, from earlier in the week when the first directive was issued.
Zoom out: The crackdown is moving in parallel to a retreat from these policies in corporate America. On Friday, Target said it was pulling back on DEI.
- A few companies are defending their practices, though, including Costco and JPMorgan Chase.
Context: Trump's orders targeted a number of policies from the Biden administration, which sought to cast a wider net in hiring.
- Those efforts did increase the share of federal employees with disabilities in particular.