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A journalist with The Associated Press thought she had a big scoop. Little did she know she would have to be scooped off the ground after being obliterated in a fact-check by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.FAA staff fired over the weekend included personnel that worked radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, among others. Hundreds were fired, just weeks after a fatal mid-air collision in DC killed 67. One employee said they were harassed on Facebook by @DOGE… — Tara Copp (@TaraCopp) February 17, 2025 More fake news from the @AP 1. DOGE doesn’t even have a Facebook page...

... The problem with that starts with the fact that it's not in a database. It's a wildly heterogeneous collection of different databases, ISAM files, and card images, and I would bet money that a lot of it is on old 7-track tapes. Some of these are probably stored in Iron Mountain or a similar installation. Also, some of the data may still be just on paper, as, apparently, government retirement records are. So what Big Balls and the other wizards are going to need to do to start with is find the data. I'm willing to bet there's no...

Four young coders sat in Treasury’s basement. Their screens cast blue light across government desks. Their mission? Crack the deep state. “We’re in,” Akash typed. “All of it.” Within hours: $17 billion in waste exposed. No committees. No approvals. No red tape. Just four coders with a bunch of laptops. Moving faster than bureaucracy could react. By the time resistance drafted its first memo… Three more systems were already mapped.

The U.S. economy created 598,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March than previously estimated, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said on Friday. The final nonfarm payrolls benchmark revision was less than the 818,000 reduction the BLS estimated in August. The numbers are not seasonally adjusted. Economists had expected the level of employment over the 12-month period would be reduced by about 668,000 jobs following updates to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data for the first quarter from which the BLS based the payrolls benchmark revision.

What the thread title says. I know there's a lot floating around on the internet, but I'd like to get an official list from DOGE. It's hard to distinguish between truth and fiction here. I'd like to see a downloadable file I could load into a spreadsheet or database so I could do my own searches and analysis. The fields I'd like to see are recipient, amount, date, description, justification, decision maker (they probably won't allow that, but I'd like to see it), what types of verification were required, what types of verification were completed. I could probably think of...

Unions will undoubtedly howl. So will progressives. And Musk’s plans will probably face legal challenges. But even as many observers recoil, quite understandably, from Musk’s brutal style, there is one point that no one should ignore: if Doge can actually unleash digital reform in the US government, and in a non-corrupt manner, that would be an unambiguously good thing. Indeed, if I had a Musk-focused magic wand, I would wish him to make digital reform, not trolling his critics, Doge’s main priority. Digitising government is not just the key to creating greater efficiency and effectiveness; it could also restore some...

The pace of inflation picked up in the final full month of Joe Biden’s presidency, capping off the worst burst of soaring consumer prices in forty years. The personal consumption expenditures price index rose by 0.3 percent in December, an acceleration from the 0.1 percent increase in November. Over the course of 2024, the index—which is the Fed’s favored measure of inflation—rose 2.6 percent, still well-above the Fed’s two percent target. After excluding volatile food and energy prices, “core” inflation rose 2.8 percent last year, including a 0.2 percent rise in December. In November, core inflation rose 0.1 percent. The...

The Big Apple saw a 2% drop in major crime in the first few months of the fiscal year — along with a dip in transit crime, an early peek at Mayor Eric Adams’ annual report revealed. The Adams administration is expected to tout a 7% drop in transit crime, a 9% reduction in car thefts, 3% fewer grand larcenies, a 4.8% decrease in robberies and a 2.8% dip in burglaries from July to October of last year compared to the same time period in 2023, according to a City Hall source. “Our administration is focused on making New York...

A law enforcement expert is poking holes in the now-former Biden administration Department of Justice's repeated claims that violent crime sank to a 50-year record low, saying the agency "manipulated data" to reach its conclusion. In 2024, the Biden administration repeatedly claimed that violent crime was at a 50-year low, based on FBI statistics. The FBI defines the following as "violent crime": murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. But Ken Alexandrow, a security expert who served for 26 years as a Nashville, Tennessee, police officer, said the former administration "manipulated data" to reach a certain outcome. "The way crime...

Nearly four weeks since the start of the PowerSchool data breach began families, teachers and school districts remain in the dark about the scope of the breach compromising personal information uploaded on the platform.PowerSchool, a cloud-based platform that tens of thousands of schools use all over the country, has been the official student information system (SIS) since 2009 in South Carolina and 2013 in North Carolina.

After suffering alarming spikes in violent crime, some cities are now reporting better news. Washington, D.C., is reporting a 35% decrease in violent crime for 2024. That’s after a 39% increase in crime in 2023 and the most murders in 25 years. But how likely are we to get at the truth when it comes to crime statistics? Questions were raised about possible manipulation of the number when the FBI released its annual crime data in 2023, going into the election year. The statistics showed a 2.1% decrease in violent crime in 2022 under the Biden administration. To many, the...

An estimated 100 million Apple users are at risk of falling victim to malware. Cybersecurity software company Check Point issued an urgent warning to the millions of Mac users around the world who may be preyed on by malicious actors evading the devices’ built-in antivirus systems. According to the company, cybercriminals have developed malware, dubbed the “Banshee macOS Stealer,” which secretly steals credentials and other sensitive data while operating undetected for more than months. The malware first emerged last year in what Check Point calls “underground forums” and was called a “stealer-as-a-service” that was available to purchase for just $3,000....

AI takes an immense amount of resources—from endless water to an estimated $1 trillion worth of investor dollars—but Elon Musk warned the technology has already run out of its primary training resource: human-created data. Engineers and data scientists train AI by essentially reducing the entire internet, all books, and every interesting video published into a token that AI can digest and learn from, Musk told Mark Penn, CEO of marketing company Stagwell, in an interview streamed on X Wednesday. But AI has already consumed that information, and requires even more data to fine-tune itself.

The flight data and cockpit voice recorders on the Jeju Air jet that crashed on Dec. 29 stopped recording about four minutes before the airliner hit a concrete structure at South Korea’s Muan airport, the transport ministry said on Saturday. Authorities investigating the disaster that killed 179 people, the worst on South Korean soil, plan to analyze what caused the “black boxes” to stop recording, the ministry said in a statement. The voice recorder was initially analyzed in South Korea, and, when data was found to be missing, sent to a US National Transportation Safety Board laboratory, the ministry said....

President-elect Trump announced Tuesday that Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani plans to invest $20 billion in the United States “over a very short period of time” to build data centers across the country. The investment will support the construction of new data centers in the Midwest and Sun Belt regions, with the first phase of the project focusing on Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana. The influx of funds will help “keep America on the cutting edge of technology,” Trump said at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago. “Artificial intelligence is very big into the data centers, and that’s...

Colorado’s employment counts have become so unreliable the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in an unprecedented move, has stopped issuing reports based on them. “BLS has observed data quality problems because of ongoing issues with the modernization of Colorado’s unemployment insurance system. As a result, BLS is temporarily suspending publication of Colorado employment, unemployment, and wage data,” the bureau said in a statement issued Dec. 18. The suspension was made in a program called State and Metro Area Employment, Hours & Earnings. It follows an earlier decision by the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, or QCEW program, to suspend...

According to a federal survey of school leaders, 40% of students in the nation’s public schools were behind grade level in one or more subjects at the beginning of the school year. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) announced its findings this week that the percentage of students school leaders estimated to be behind where they should be was down 7% from the 2022-23 school year but still 8% higher than before the pandemic. School leaders told the federal education statistics agency in October that over a third of students were behind entering the 2024-25 school year. NCES data...

Arizona governor Katie Hobbs has called for a repeal of the state’s abortion reporting law, claiming — inexplicably — that giving people as many facts and statistics about abortion as possible is an “attack on women.” Hobbs statement came as the state’s Department of Health released its annual abortion report. The report gives a variety of data surrounding abortion in the state, including the number of abortions by mother’s age and race, methods of abortion used, gestational age of child, reported maternal reasons for abortion, and more. Absolutely no personal or identifying information is shared, and women do have the...

A new report by the House Judiciary Committee exposed how more than 14,000 federal employees accesses the private financial data for Americans over 3,000,000 times. The Committee and Select Subcommittee launched this investigation into government-led financial surveillance after a whistleblower disclosed that following the events of January 6, 2021, Bank of America (BoA), voluntarily and without legal process, provided the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with a list of names of all individuals who used a BoA credit or debit card in the Washington, D.C. region around that time.

The rapid growth of data centers to support AI is significantly increasing global electricity demand.This surge in demand threatens to outpace the development of renewable energy sources.International regulations are needed to ensure tech companies use clean energy and minimize their impact on climate goals.The global electricity demand is expected to grow exponentially in the coming decades, largely due to an increased demand from tech companies for new data centers to support the rollout of high-energy-consuming advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI). As governments worldwide introduce new climate policies and pump billions into alternative energy sources and clean tech, these...