Around a dozen current and former federal workers are behind a new website created as an outlet to share anonymous stories and technical expertise about the Department of Government Efficiency’s dismantling of government agencies.

“We the Builders” aims to be a secure outlet for government workers to share how their workplaces are being impacted by DOGE, and a place to explain the real world impact of its access to government tech systems, a former federal worker behind the project tells The Verge. The website was created by people who “made government websites easier to use while protecting the integrity of your personal information,” according to its description. Had DOGE wanted “to use technology to build a more efficient country, they would ask us,” the site says. “But they haven’t. They are destroyers. We are the builders.”

The website is aimed at informing the general public about what’s happening inside federal agencies, as well as explaining how a database being accessed by DOGE in Washington, DC could impact citizens in tangible ways all across the country. “I want to make sure that people understand that data matters,” says the former federal worker, who was granted anonymity for fear of retribution and harassment in going public, but whose identity has been confirmed by The Verge. “If I can explain that in a way that helps you to be able to protect yourself and advocate for yourself, then I’m doing my job.”

While social media forums like Reddit and Instagram have already become gathering places for federal workers to commiserate, We the Builders aims to offer an alternative outlet for workers who may be fearful to share their stories even through an anonymous social media account. The team says they are working with a security consultant to ensure that submissions remain secure and anonymous to the public. They also plan to vet submissions for accuracy and use their networks to confirm that they are coming from real federal workers.

So far, the site hosts a couple anonymous blog posts explaining the work of the US Digital Service — which has been renamed to incorporate the acronym DOGE under President Donald Trump — and comparing the former USDS and DOGE’s approach to efficiency. It describe’s USDS’ method as “Precision Engineering for Public Good,” and DOGE’s as “Disruption Without Understanding.”

The former government employee says they hope visitors to the website “can walk away with a more nuanced understanding of what’s happening. I’m hoping that federal workers can see stories of people like them, and also help them make decisions for themselves, and to feel supported.”

Newly appointed Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson praised his former boss, the conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as “the most important judge of the last 100 years,” in a memo to agency staff honoring Black History Month. The message, obtained by The Verge and confirmed by the FTC, sheds light on how Ferguson may align himself with Thomas — one of the court’s foremost critics of tech’s legal liability shield Section 230 and a skeptic of diversity measures — especially as the FTC chair is tasked with taking on consumer protection cases, which in the past have included considering the role of racial bias in technology.

In the February 7th email, Ferguson took the opportunity to share his thoughts on Thomas, whom he clerked for and calls a friend. Thomas overcame “a difficult upbringing” and later had his views on the law “pilloried by American elites,” according to Ferguson. Rather than “hold grudges against America” for his experience of poverty and segregation, Ferguson says, Thomas pulled himself up by his bootstraps and proved that “any American can overcome the hardships of the past and achieve greatness.” More recentl …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A US federal judge declined to block Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing or transferring data from seven government agencies, or stop further firings of their workforce.

DC District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan denied a temporary restraining order (TRO) sought by a group of 14 Democratic state attorneys general, led by New Mexico. The states had argued that Musk and DOGE have acted to trim the federal workforce, agency projects, and gain unprecedented data access without the proper authority. The Trump administration told the court that Musk is actually not an employee nor administrator of DOGE at all — he is instead an employee of the separate White House Office and advisor to the president. Chutkan found the states couldn’t meet the high standard for the emergency block by showing that they’d be irreparably harmed unless she stopped DOGE. It’s not enough to posit the mere possibility that the group would take “take actions that irreparably harm” the states, she says.

Still, Chutkan seems open to aspects of the states’ case. The AGs “raise a colorable Appointments Clause claim with serious implications. Musk has not been nominated by the President nor confirmed by the U.S. Senate, as constitutionally required for officers who exercise ‘significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States,’” she writes. “Accepting Plaintiffs’ allegations as true, Defendants’ actions are thus precisely
the ‘Executive abuses’ that the Appointments Clause seeks to prevent.” Chutkan also admonishes the Trump administration counsel in a footnote where she suggests an official’s sworn declaration characterizing the authority that Trump’s executive order creating DOGE “contemplates” appears to contradict the plain text of the order. “Defense counsel is reminded of their duty to make truthful representations to the court,” she writes.

The states still have the opportunity to pursue the case on the merits, and file for a preliminary injunction. That would provide a new opportunity to seek to stop Musk and DOGE’s access to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), and Transportation.

“While we are disappointed that the court declined to issue a temporary restraining order, we remain committed to putting an end to Elon Musk’s unlawful power grab,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez says in a statement. “Every day that he is allowed to operate without a congressional mandate and with little apparent supervision, Musk is destabilizing our government and disrupting critical funding for education, public health and national security. His move fast and break things mentality is not only reckless, but also unconstitutional, and we are prepared to pursue this case for as long as it takes to bring this chaos to an end.”

Nearly 400 videos that were posted on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s YouTube page have been removed, as the Trump administration continues to pare back the agency, including its team of skilled technologists.

The CFPB YouTube page, which has 15,000 subscribers and was created in 2011, has had every one of its videos removed as of Friday. An archived version of the page shows that as recently as February 8th, it hosted 386 videos. The archived page shows videos with titles like “Five tips for when you can’t pay your bills,” “How do I dispute an error on my credit report?” and “How can I improve my credit scores?”

Facebook and X accounts for the agency have also been taken down, although it’s unclear when. The homepage of the CFPB website delivers a 404 error message, though other pages on the site are still active.

The removals seem to be part of a larger dismantling of the agency, which oversees consumer protection issues in financial service. That’s an area that’s increasingly come to include tech players, including X; X is owned by Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk, who’s been leading the charge on slashing the federal workforce. About 20 technologists in the bureau were suddenly terminated on Thursday evening, The Verge reported, ravaging a team that provided deep expertise to help hold companies accountable for their financial technology services.

Across several agencies, the government has hurriedly removed webpages to comply with President Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders at the start of his term. Many pages that hosted health information were brought back online this week to comply with a court order. Later, the Trump administration updated those pages with a disclaimer against “gender ideology,” noting it was forced by a court to restore the information.

There could be a brief reprieve for the CFPB after a new court order. On Friday evening, a judge put a pause on further firings of CFPB staff without cause, and ordered the agency not to delete agency records or data at least until a hearing on March 3rd.

Two government watchdogs will investigate the Department of Government Efficiency’s access to sensitive Treasury payments systems, they confirmed in letters to Congress.

In a letter to Senate Democrats, Treasury Deputy Inspector General Loren Sciurba said that the office opened an audit into the Bureau of Fiscal Service’s payments systems on February 6th. The IG’s office will investigate whether adequate controls were in place to grant access to the system, and to ensure that only legally sound payments are disbursed. The bureau’s system is the one that a DOGE staffer had been given access to with the ability to both read and write code, Wired reported, though Trump officials denied he could alter the system. The Treasury’s payments systems manage the flow of more than $5 trillion in payments for services like Social Security benefits and veterans’ pay.

The IG’s office expects the audit to be completed in August, but promised to give “interim updates” should they discover “critical issues” before then. “[W]e recognize the danger that improper access or inadequate controls can pose to the integrity of sensitive payment systems,” Sciurba writes. A letter from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) similarly confirms the congressional watchdog will investigate and coordinate with the IG’s office.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) shared the letters, which responded to their requests for the offices to conduct independent probes into DOGE’s access to the Treasury systems. They asked the investigators to determine what information DOGE staffers accessed, whether they had appropriate clearances to do so, and whether any guardrails were put in place to prevent conflicts of interest or personal gain for DOGE head Elon Musk’s businesses. Warren found the Treasury Department’s earlier response to her inquiry about the payments system access from the Treasury Department to raise “more questions than answers,” prompting her and colleagues to turn to the independent watchdogs.

Toward the start of his term, President Donald Trump ousted more than a dozen inspectors general from agencies, despite federal law requiring 30 days’ notice to Congress to dismiss the Senate-confirmed investigators. The Treasury Department’s IG was among those Trump sought to oust, The Washington Post reports, but since Sciurba is a career civil servant that is leading the office after the acting inspector general retired in December, he couldn’t be kicked out entirely. While the president has authority to nominate and remove IGs, who are supervised by agency heads, they can’t be blocked from auditing that agency, and also dually report to Congress.

As the new Congress has already started working on legislation to protect kids from social media harms, Roblox is doubling down on its efforts to convince lawmakers it shouldn’t be lumped in with products like Instagram and YouTube.  

Even though the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) failed to become law last year, despite passing handily in the Senate, protecting kids from social media still seems to be one of the few issues that unites many Democrats and Republicans. It’s not yet totally clear what kind of legislation will be viable this year or what role (if any) the Trump administration will try to play. But last week, the Senate Commerce Committee advanced the Kids Off Social Media Act (KOSMA), a bipartisan bill that would bar kids under 13 from making social media accounts and restrict platforms from implementing recommendation algorithms for kids under 17. 

Most mainstream social media platforms say they don’t make their services available to kids under the age of 13. But Roblox is one of the few large internet platform companies that openly hosts young people on its services, which it promotes as a good place for kids to learn technical and social skills. Roblox is an …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Around 20 technologists at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were fired on Thursday evening, gutting a team that specialized in understanding Big Tech’s entrance into financial products, three sources familiar with the matter tell The Verge.

It follows an earlier round of layoffs of mostly contractors and probationary employees on Tuesday, as reported by Wired, representing the latest cuts to an agency with oversight over a field that one of Elon Musk’s companies is trying to enter. Musk, who now leads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has announced plans for his company X to enter the payments business, which is an area the CFPB oversees for potential consumer harm.

In a copy of a termination letter obtained by The Verge, the CFPB acting chief human capital officer Adam Martinez references President Donald Trump’s executive order instructing the Musk-run Department of Government Efficiency to help cull the federal workforce. Around 7 PM Eastern Time on Thursday, members of the technology team received the termination notices in their personal emails. One member of the team — who like others in this story spoke on background to candidly share their e …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Popcorn brand LesserEvil is the latest group caught up in the chaos of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency’s whirlwind of action over the past couple of weeks. The company recently sent a cryptic email to customers after the brand owner’s connection to a DOGE staffer became public.

LesserEvil CEO Charles Coristine is reportedly the father of one of DOGE’s youngest and now most-infamous staffers, Edward Coristine. The 19-year-old high school graduate goes by “Big Balls” online, Wired reports, and was reportedly granted access to some of the government’s most sensitive systems, despite dubious security clearance. The White House has insisted that DOGE is working within the law and with appropriate authorization, though it hasn’t provided much detail on staffers’ background checks.

On a Reddit forum for federal workers, a post with 4,000 upvotes links the DOGE staffer to his popcorn CEO dad, and urged others to boycott the snack. “People like Edward don’t become this way overnight and generally are enabled by their parents,” the anonymous poster wrote. “Until he shows otherwise, Charles and LesserEvil have essentially given their stamp of approval for this. They clearly don’t share our values and think very little of federal workers. I personally will be taking my business elsewhere.”

In an email addressed to “our LesserEvil community” on Wednesday, the brand wrote, “In light of recent events, we feel compelled to reaffirm that LesserEvil is in no way affiliated with any political figures, political policies or political groups. Our values remain the same as they’ve always been: health, sustainability and affordability.” The email does not name any individual or organization, and is signed only by “LesserEvil” and from a generic email address.

“We are not just a brand, a person, or a headline,” the brand writes, “but a community of individuals coming together through their passion for making better-for-you, organic snacks – for snackers of all creeds and beliefs – in an effort to create a more wholesome world.”

Waste.gov, a new government website registered by the Trump administration, has been hidden and locked down after 404 Media reported that it mostly displayed an unedited WordPress template.

The archived version of the site contained the tagline, “Tracking government waste,” and another new website, DEI.gov, redirects to the same URL. But the rest of site displayed filler text from the WordPress Twenty Twenty-Four theme that’s also displayed in a demo, 404 reported. The text had nothing to do with government waste — instead, it hawked a made-up architecture firm called Études that claims it “seamlessly merges creativity and functionality to redefine architectural excellence.”

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire leading the Department of Government Efficiency, which has been behind quiet efforts to gain access to sensitive government systems and enact deep cuts to congressionally funded agencies, has touted the transparency of the program as recently as Tuesday from the Oval Office.

“We actually are trying to be as transparent as possible,” he told reporters gathered in the White House. “We post our actions to the DOGE handle on X, and to the DOGE website.” That website, however, contains hardly any information besides a tagline saying, “The people voted for major reform.” The group does seem to post some updates on its actions to the DOGE handle on X, but much of what has become publicly known about the group’s dealings has been based on reports in the press. Musk hasn’t directly promoted the Waste.gov URL from his X account, and Reuters reports that the website was created last week.

Before it went behind a password wall, 404 noted that even Waste.gov seemed to run afoul of recent executive actions from President Donald Trump focused on purging diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which has forced many agencies to take down and reevaluate resources on their sites. The template text on the archived version of the site boasted a “diverse clientele” for the architecture firm.

The Trump administration breached a federal privacy law by letting workers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access information on millions of government workers, privacy advocates including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) allege in a new lawsuit filed on behalf of two labor unions and a group of current and former federal employees.

The groups allege that DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) violated the Privacy Act of 1974, which protects information maintained by federal agencies. OPM maintains information on “tens of millions of current and former federal employees, contractors, and job applicants,” including disabilities, background check information, and health records, the lawsuit says. The agency also has information on workers in “highly sensitive roles for whom even acknowledging their government employment may be problematic,” such as Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) workers, it adds. The labor groups allege Musk and his DOGE staffers were allowed to access OPM computer networks that stored this information before they were even considered government employees, putting workers’ sensitive information in jeopardy.

DOGE lacks “a lawful and legitimate need for such access” to OPM files, the groups allege. They’re asking the US District Court in the Southern District of New York to suspend DOGE staffers’ access to the system, and prevent them from using any information they allegedly illegally accessed already. They also want the court to order any copies of data unlawfully accessed to be destroyed.

OPM is already facing a separate lawsuit from labor groups over the Trump administration’s “fork in the road” offer of deferred resignation, which promised payment that Congress had not yet appropriated. A federal judge has s0 far delayed the deadline for federal workers to opt to take the offer, pending further consideration by the court.

While the Trump administration has insisted that DOGE staffers have legally accessed information and have the necessary clearances to do so, they have not provided much detail on what those clearances are. Government workers have expressed skepticism that the inexperienced cadre of staffers at DOGE could have made it through the typically arduous clearance process to access sensitive information in the few weeks that Trump has been in office. The lawsuit insists that any exceptions to the Privacy Act, like for law enforcement purposes, are not applicable in this case.

Increased access to OPM information could create new vulnerabilities for that data, experts fear. After all, OPM databases were breached in 2014, resulting in sensitive information on more than 20 million people being compromised.

The labor unions and employees “reasonably fear harmful consequences of the disclosure and use” of information accessed by DOGE, the lawsuit claims. “President Trump, DOGE director Elon Musk, and others have repeatedly threatened to fire government employees they view as disloyal. They have repeatedly and unlawfully purported to fire government employees and shutter entire departments. And they have affirmatively put in place policies that seek to terminate government employees based on their gender identity.”

“The White House will continue to fight these battles in court, and we expect to be vindicated,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “The President has every right to exercise his executive authority on behalf of the American people, who gave him a historic mandate to govern on November 5th.”

The lawsuit is just one of several legal challenges to DOGE’s infiltration and attempts to dismantle federal agencies. Others target the Treasury Department for allowing access to its sensitive payments system, and another has sought to halt the US Agency for International Development (USAID) from being thrown in the “wood chipper,” as Musk has said. While the cases make their way through the courts, Democratic lawmakers have struggled to find ways to slow what several of them have called an illegal coup, and the Trump administration has already reportedly shown tolerance for flouting court orders.

Correction, February 11th: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified President Donald Trump as one of the defendants in the lawsuit. He is not directly named as a defendant.

Marko Elez, the 25-year-old staffer Department of Government Efficiency staffer linked to a social media profile with racist posts, “will be brought back,” shortly after he resigned, Elon Musk announced on X.

Elez resigned from his role where he reportedly had the ability to rewrite code in sensitive payments systems at the US Treasury, once The Wall Street Journal inquired about his connection to a deleted account. That account, which the Journal found previously had the username “@marko_elez,” called for reinstating a “eugenic immigration policy,” repealing the Civil Rights Act, and said that “99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs.”

Musk posted a poll on X Friday asking if the DOGE staffer who “made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym” should be brought back. As of that afternoon, 78 percent of nearly 400,000 respondents voted “yes.”

Vice President JD Vance weighed in to say that while he “obviously disagree[s] with some of Elez’s posts,” he doesn’t believe that “stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.” Musk apparently agrees — he responded to Vance in a post Friday afternoon, saying, “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine.”

Elez isn’t the only DOGE staffer drawing scrutiny. 19-year-old Edward Coristine was fired from an internship at a cybersecurity company in 2022 where he was accused of leaking internal information to rivals, Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg also found a Discord account it linked to Coristine where he claimed to still have access to the company’s computers, but claimed he “never exploited it because it’s just not me.”

Within the past week, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-affiliated staffers have gained unprecedented access to sensitive US financial systems with data on millions of Americans, claimed to shut down one federal agency without an act of Congress, and invaded numerous government agencies. They’ve been opposed by lawsuits, public protests, and resistance within those agencies — and the situation remains constantly in flux. 

As a deadline for workers to accept a so-called “deferred resignation” looms on Monday, here’s where the rest of Musk’s government takeover attempt stands.

What has DOGE accessed?

Musk’s pseudo-department has reportedly deployed employees to at least 11 agencies: the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the General Services Administration, the Department of Labor, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the Small Business Administration, and the Treasury.

Last week, he attempted to trim the federal workforce by offering legally dubious “def …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” program, meant to push out career government workers as part of the Elon Musk-run Department of Government Efficiency’s alleged effort to cut federal spending, several outlets report.

The program gave employees a deadline just before midnight on Thursday to accept the offer, which was billed by the Trump administration as a buyout. It promised to pay out employees through September if they resigned by the deadline — even though the government is not funded past March 14th. A group of unions representing federal employees sued the Office of Personnel Management and its acting director, claiming the directive violates the Administrative Procedure Act because it is “arbitrary and capricious” and promises money that hasn’t been appropriated by Congress.

U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. agreed to pause the clock on the deadline until at least Monday, when he will hear further arguments, according to ABC News. “I believe that’s as far as I want to go today,” he said, per ABC.

The action is a slight reprieve for federal workers whose jobs and lives have been in flux since Elon Musk’s takeover of many aspects of the federal government through his leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). A General Services Administration official had warned in an email obtained by The Washington Post that layoffs were “likely” should too few employees accept the deferred resignation agreement. Outlets including CNN reported that at least 40,000 workers, or about two percent of the two million who received the offer, had volunteered for the package as of Wednesday; the White House had been targeting five to ten percent.

The long block outside of the US Treasury Department on Tuesday was lined with protesters. They flooded across the street with signs bearing slogans: “Nobody elected Musk”; “This is illegal”; “Stop the coup.” It was one of multiple DC protests targeting billionaire Elon Musk’s reported access to core government payment systems, attended by Democratic members of Congress — and citizens who fear too few people are standing in Musk’s way.

“What we’re witnessing here is the biggest heist in American history,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) told the tightly packed crowd, which was peppered with signs, surgical masks (a common protest security measure), and an orange mylar balloon that resembled a cartoon of President Donald Trump. The vibe was orderly but energetic. Some signs called for Musk’s arrest, and at one point, protesters began an impromptu chant of “lock him up.”

In just the last few days, Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — a new temporary organization Trump created out of the United States Digital Service and appointed Musk to lead — have consolidated power and targeted a growing list of federal departments. He’s taken it upon h …

Read the full story at The Verge.

As the third week of Donald Trump’s presidency begins, workers across federal agencies are scrambling to find their footing among the chaos.

From the US Agency for International Development and the Department of Agriculture, to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Labor, federal workers are facing an onslaught of changes that threaten to upend their work and the systems that keep the country running. Sweeping orders from the White House threatened to freeze funding for basic grants and programs, before being blocked by a judge and walked back by Trump. Using a made up meme agency, unelected billionaire Elon Musk is attempting to stage a takeover reminiscent of his remaking of Twitter, now X, except this time hollowing out the US government. 

“A lot of us are scared and feel betrayed,” a person who works for USAID told The Verge. “When [people] get hired, they take an oath to protect the constitution.” And with Musk actively dismantling the humanitarian agency, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday he now runs, workers at other agencies are wondering if the same could happen to their workplaces. “I think everyone is really scared about wh …

Read the full story at The Verge.

In the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have reportedly gained access to core parts of the American government’s payment systems, including systems that affect Social Security and Medicare benefits — as federal workers and government officials struggle to respond.

DOGE, an unofficial “department” that Trump declared part of the US Digital Service, is purportedly tasked with cutting government waste. Musk has turned that mission into a broad gutting of federal agencies, including offering federal workers months of paid leave billed as “deferred resignation.” But things ramped up even more over the weekend, as Musk and his associates forced out civil servants who refused access to sensitive data and computer systems.

The news started on Friday with the departure of a Treasury Department top career official. David Lebryk announced his retirement after clashing with Musk surrogates about accessing a payment system that disburses trillions of dollars for federal worker salaries, Social Security, and Medicare, according to The Washington Post. On Saturday, The New York Times reported that Musk now has read-only access to that system, giving him more insight and potential control over government spending — and likely access to your Social Security number.

Musk spent much of the weekend lashing out about purported “illegal payments” to charities and accusing, without evidence, career Treasury officials of “breaking the law every hour of every day by approving payments that are fraudulent or do not match the funding laws passed by Congress.” (The department’s job is to facilitate vast numbers of payments vetted by other agencies.)

Career civil servants at the Office of Personnel Management soon found themselves locked out of the agency’s computer system that maintains federal employees’ personal data, Reuters reported on Sunday. Unnamed agency officials linked the action to Musk’s aides.

OPM spokesperson McLaurine Pinover told The Verge that the Reuters report was not accurate but did not elaborate. Representatives for the Treasury Department, US Digital Service, and the US Agency for International Development did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the recent reporting.

It’s not entirely clear who the alleged Musk proxies are, but Wired reports that at least several of the engineers aiding his government takeover are just barely out of college.

Trump has made few comments on Musk’s actions. Speaking with reporters on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews on Sunday, Fox News reports, the president said Musk was “doing a good job,” though he added that, “sometimes we won’t agree with it and will not go where he wants to go, but I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy, very smart, and he’s very much into cutting the budget of our federal government.”

Musk has railed in particular against USAID, calling it a “criminal organization.” On Monday he said he and Trump sought to shut down the agency entirely, without addressing their legal authority to do so, NBC News reports. Several Democratic lawmakers spoke out against Musk’s attempt to wind down the agency and said only Congress is able to make such a declaration, vowing to fight the attempted takeover and calling it a constitutional crisis. “Elon, if you want to run AID, get nominated by Trump and go to the Senate, and good luck in getting confirmed,” says Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA).

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said Musk’s business interests are at the heart of the Trump administration’s motivations behind the changes. “Let’s not pull any punches about why this is happening,” Murphy says. “Elon Musk makes billions of dollars based off of his business with China, and China is cheering at this action today. There is no question that the billionaire class trying to take over our government right now is doing it based on self-interest.” Murphy adds that Musk’s actions represent a “smoke screen” to “create the illusion that they’re saving money” to pass a major corporate tax cut.

Musk is pursuing unprecedented access to government systems while running several companies — including Tesla, SpaceX, and X — with vested interests in different government policies and grudges against other private companies. Over the weekend, X expanded its antitrust lawsuit over an advertiser boycott to include Lego, Nestlé, and Pinterest.

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) demanded answers from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Musk’s reported access to the Treasury payments system. And protests outside federal buildings have begun popping up, including one on Sunday where DC Media Group reports protesters sought to block access to OPM.

Even so, some anonymous Reddit users who identified themselves as government employees said they planned to keep plugging away more or less as usual. “I’m going to continue to do my job,” one user writes in a thread about how to handle the situation. “Use your headphones and remain unbothered,” says another. Another offers: “head down eyes and ears open.”

NetChoice has filed its 10th lawsuit in an ongoing fight against a broad slate of state internet regulations — this time against a Maryland law billed as protecting kids from inappropriate material online. It’s the latest effort to oppose what NetChoice calls an unconstitutional speech code in disguise.

NetChoice has become one of the fiercest — and most successful — opponents of age verification, moderation, and design code laws, all of which would put new obligations on tech platforms and change how users experience the internet. Most notably, the group successfully argued a landmark Supreme Court case over attempted bans on much internet moderation in Florida and Texas, resulting in a ruling that content moderation is protected by the First Amendment, a precedent that’s become useful in its other cases.

NetChoice’s latest suit opposes the Maryland Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, a rule that echoes a California law of a similar name. In the California litigation, NetChoice notched a partial win in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the district court’s decision to block a part of the law requiring platforms to file reports about their services’ impact on kids. (It sent another part of the law back to the lower court for further review.)

A similar provision in Maryland’s law is at the center of NetChoice’s complaint. The group says that Maryland’s reporting requirement lets regulators subjectively determine the “best interests of children,” inviting “discriminatory enforcement.” The reporting requirement on tech companies essentially mandates them “to disparage their services and opine on far-ranging and ill-defined harms that could purportedly arise from their services’ ‘design’ and use of information,” NetChoice alleges.

NetChoice points out that both California and Maryland have passed separate online privacy laws, which NetChoice Litigation Center director Chris Marchese says shows that “lawmakers know how to write laws to protect online privacy when what they want to do is protect online privacy.” 

Supporters of the Maryland law say legislators learned from California’s challenges and “optimized” their law to avoid questions about speech, according to Tech Policy Press. In a blog analyzing Maryland’s approach, Future of Privacy Forum points out that the state made some significant changes from California’s version — such as avoiding an “express obligation” to determine users’ ages and defining the “best interests of children.” The NetChoice challenge will test how well those changes can hold up to First Amendment scrutiny.

NetChoice has consistently maintained that even well-intentioned attempts to protect kids online are likely to backfire. Though the Maryland law does not explicitly require the use of specific age verification tools, Marchese says it essentially leaves tech platforms with a no-win decision: collect more data on users to determine their ages and create varied user experiences or cater to the lowest common denominator and self-censor lawful content that might be considered inappropriate for its youngest users. And similar to its arguments in other cases, Marchese worries that collecting more data to identify users as minors could create a “honey pot” of kids’ information, creating a different problem in attempting to solve another. 

The issue of age verification has already come before the Supreme Court this term in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, a case dealing with a Texas law that seeks to impose age verification requirements on sites with a high proportion of sexually explicit content. At oral arguments, some of the justices seemed open to the state’s assertion that age verification tools have advanced enough to provide a reliable picture of a users’ age without compromising their privacy. They appeared skeptical that alternatives like parent-controlled filtering, which were promoted by previous Supreme Court rulings, could be considered reasonably effective.

Marchese sought to separate the issues in NetChoice’s latest lawsuit from the ones in FSC v. Paxton. While the outcome of that case could significantly impact content that might be considered legally harmful to minors, he emphasized that this case involves speech that is lawful to access at any age.

“NetChoice, and our industry, fully agree that minors need to be protected online,” says Marchese. “But ultimately, we don’t achieve that outcome by passing unconstitutional bills into unconstitutional laws. An unconstitutional law protects no one, especially minors.”

Canada will set its own tariffs against US goods in retaliation to broad 25 percent tariffs President Donald Trump announced Saturday on Canadian imports. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a 25 percent tariff on a total of $155 billion worth of American goods — $30 billion of that on Tuesday when Trump’s tariffs go into effect, then an additional $125 billion after 21 days. Trudeau also warned that the US tariffs will harm both countries’ economies, particularly the auto industry. “This is a choice that, yes, will harm Canadians, but beyond that, it will have real consequences for you, the American people,” he said in a press conference Saturday.

Trudeau offered a “far-reaching” list of products that would be subject to import taxes, including American alcohol, orange juice, clothing, appliances, lumber, and plastics, along with “much, much more.” Non-tariff moves like reexamining public procurement policies are also on the table. However, he said that actions like limiting energy exports would require more careful consideration because “no one part of the country should be carrying a heavier burden than any other.”

The sweeping US tariffs, which include a lower 10 percent tariff on energy products from Canada, are a major shift in trade policy between the two countries. Trump claims the tariffs — which he also imposed on Mexico, and increased on goods from China — are meant to incentivize these countries to stem the flow of illegal fentanyl into the US.

The US tariffs include a clause seeking to prevent retaliation, outlets including The Wall Street Journal report, which would increase the penalties should the countries impacted impose their own tariffs. Despite this, Trudeau says that Canada’s new tariffs “are strong but appropriate in this case, and we will continue to defend Canada, Canadians, and our future.”

Apple wants to ensure it has a voice in the remedies trial for the Justice Department’s search monopolization case against Google, and filed an emergency motion to stay the proceedings while it appeals the district court’s denial of its request to be more directly heard in the case.

The remedies phase of the trial is set to begin in April, since US District Court Judge Amit Mehta already found Google liable for illegal monopolization in the general search market. Even though Apple is not technically a party in the case, it has played a significant role in it — the billions of dollars Google pays Apple each year for default placement on iOS helped convinced Mehta of Google’s monopoly power.

Mehta denied Apple’s request to take a limited role in the remedies phase of the case in an order earlier this week, saying it didn’t file fast enough. Instead, he said, Apple could file post-hearing briefs explaining its views. The DOJ and state plaintiffs had opposed Apple taking part in the proceedings, while Google did not take a position.

Apple believes it now needs to take a role in the case because unlike in the earlier stage, its interests may no longer be sufficiently represented by Google. The government’s proposals to end lucrative deals for Apple — where Google pays for default positioning — “implicates concerns unique to Apple,” it says. Apple worries that Google will need to decide which arguments to focus on most — including the government’s request that the Chrome browser business be spun out — and the ones that concern Apple might not be adequately covered.

Apple writes that if its appeal isn’t handled until after the remedies trial has begun and it’s unable to participate, “Apple may well be forced to stand mute at trial, as a mere spectator, while the government pursues an extreme remedy that targets Apple by name and would prohibit any commercial arrangement between Apple and Google for a decade. This would leave Apple without the ability to defend its right to reach other arrangements with Google that could benefit millions of users and Apple’s entitlement to compensation for distributing Google search to its users.”

While Mehta hopes to resolve the case by August, Apple says that “the concern about a short delay is outweighed by the need for a fully developed record that includes information that only Apple can develop,” like how the DOJ’s proposals to eliminate Google’s monopoly power would impact Apple, and why they might not work. Apple said in its initial motion to intervene that it would offer evidence that despite the government’s suggestions, it would not create a general search engine were it not bound by its default agreement with Google.

If Mehta doesn’t grant the stay pending appeal, Apple requested at the very least that it gain access to discovery and depositions as a non-party while the Circuit Court considers its appeal. “Absent a stay,” the company writes, “Apple will suffer irreparable harm.”

Generative artificial intelligence output based purely on text prompts — even detailed ones — isn’t protected by current copyright law, according to the US Copyright Office.

The department issued this guidance in a broad report on policy issues regarding AI, focused on the copyrightability of various AI outputs. The document concludes that while generative AI may be a new technology, existing copyright principles can apply without changes to the law — and these principles offer limited protection for many kinds of work.

The new guidelines say that AI prompts currently don’t offer enough control to “make users of an AI system the authors of the output.” (AI systems themselves can’t hold copyrights.) That stands true whether the prompt is extremely simple or involves long strings of text and multiple iterations. “No matter how many times a prompt is revised and resubmitted, the final output reflects the user’s acceptance of the AI system’s interpretation, rather than authorship of the expression it contains,” the report says.

This decision would seemingly rule out protections for works like “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” a controversial award-winning Midjourney-generated image whose creator fought an extended battle to register it with the Copyright Office.

The office demonstrates the unpredictability of AI systems with a Gemini-produced image of a cat smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper, noting that Gemini ignored some prompt instructions and added a few things of its own — including an “incongruous human hand.” It contrasted this process with Jackson Pollock’s splatter painting method, where he didn’t control the exact placement of the paint on the canvas, but “controlled the choice of colors, number of layers, depth of texture, placement of each addition to the overall composition — and used his own body movements to execute each of these choices.” Ultimately, the office writes, “the issue is the degree of human control, rather than the predictability of the outcome.”

At the same time, the Copyright Office says that simply using AI to assist in human creative output does not necessarily jeopardize that work’s ability to be protected by the law. There’s a difference between AI being used as a tool to assist a creative work and “AI as a stand-in for human creativity,” and the office says that further analysis is warranted. But it assures creatives that using AI to outline a book or come up with song ideas shouldn’t impact the ability to copyright the final human-produced work, since the author is simply “referencing, but not incorporating, the output.”

Artists can get some protection if they feed their own work into an AI system for modification — by, say, using a tool to add 3D effects to an illustration. AI-generated elements of the work still wouldn’t be protectable, but if the original product remains recognizable, the “perceptible human expression” in the work could still be covered by copyright.

People can also receive protection for works that incorporate AI-generated content as long as there’s significant creative modification. A comic with AI-generated images can be covered if a human arranges those images and pairs them with human-written text, though the individual AI-generated images wouldn’t be protected. Likewise, “a film that includes AI-generated special effects or background artwork is copyrightable, even if the AI effects and artwork separately are not.” On a “case-by-case determination,” even prompt-generated images could be protected if a human selects and remixes specific areas of the picture. The office compares these scenarios to making copyrightable derivative works of human-created art — minus the original human.

A separate question is whether text prompts themselves can be protected by copyright. Overall, the office compared prompts to “instructions” that convey uncopyrightable ideas, but it acknowledged some particularly creative ones could include “expressive elements.” This doesn’t, however, translate into the work they produce being protected.

The Copyright Office didn’t rule out the potential for this to change if the technology evolves. “In theory, AI systems could someday allow users to exert so much control over how their expression is reflected in an output that the system’s contribution would become rote or mechanical,” the report says. But as of now, it doesn’t seem that prompts “adequately determine the expressive elements produced, or control how the system translates them into an output.”

This document is part of a larger effort by the Copyright Office to clarify policy questions and identify legal gaps around AI, starting with a July 2024 report encouraging new deepfake laws. The office next plans to issue a third and final report on its findings on “the legal implications of training AI models on copyrighted works.”