Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) sent messages to all members of Congress terminating their positions, stating “Your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment.” All Democratic and independent members of Congress, as well as two Republicans, found themselves locked out of their offices after everything inside had been confiscated.   read more

The Supreme Court on Friday rejected an emergency appeal to stop Texas from enforcing its challenged voter ID law. But the court said it could revisit the issue as the November elections approach. The law has been in effect for recent elections, even after a trial judge struck it down in 2014 and an appellate panel found last year that the law had a discriminatory effect on minority voters.   read more

President Barack Obama announced new steps Friday to help curb gun violence, including by identifying the requirements that “smart guns” would have to meet for law enforcement agencies to buy and use them as well as sharing mental health records with the federal background check system. The president also called for more attention to be paid to the mentally ill.   read more

Houston’s efforts to use local clean air laws to regulate pollution in the home of the nation’s largest petrochemical complex were halted Friday by a Texas Supreme Court ruling in favor of energy and chemical companies that claimed the city had overreached. The coalition made up of ExxonMobil Corp. and other companies with nearby refineries and plants had sued in 2008 after Houston passed ordinances that required businesses to pay registration fees.   read more

The Senate has confirmed an Air Force general to be the first female officer to lead one of the military’s warfighting commands. By voice vote late Thursday, the Senate approved Gen. Lori Robinson to be commander of U.S. Northern Command. The command is responsible for preventing attacks against the United States.   read more

Seattle’s warrantless searches of garbage to enforce its recycling law is unconstitutional, a judge ruled. Though Seattle has one of the highest recycling and composting rates in the nation, the city passed a law in September 2014 that fines residents for discarding food or recyclables in their personal garbage bins. Garbage collectors and Seattle Public Utilities inspectors enforced the law by searching garbage cans without suspicion or warrants.   read more

A U.S. aerial gunship attack on a hospital in Afghanistan that killed 42 people occurred because of human errors, process mistakes and equipment failures, and none of the aircrew or U.S. ground troops knew the target was a hospital, a top U.S. general said Friday. Sixteen military members have been disciplined for their roles in the tragedy, Gen. Joseph Votel said. None face criminal charges.   read more

While checks of criminal histories have become routine in the public and private sectors, a regulation being proposed by the Obama administration would remove a barrier that discourages many freed prisoners from applying for jobs. The rule would prevent supervisors interviewing applicants for about half of all federal positions from asking about a job seeker’s criminal or credit history until a conditional offer is made.   read more

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials say there’s no clear evidence the agency violated its own rules when it posed as The Associated Press to unmask a criminal, according to a report obtained through a public records lawsuit. However, the internal FBI report being made public by the AP and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press says “an argument can be made” that field agents bucked protocol by not informing senior brass in Washington of the 2007 operation.   read more

Women would be required to register for the military draft under a House committee’s bill that comes just months after the Defense Department lifted all gender-based restrictions on front-line combat units. A divided Armed Services Committee backed the provision in a sweeping defense policy bill that the full House will consider next month, touching off a provocative debate about the role of women in the military.   read more

Long wait times are a known problem at hospitals and health centers run by the Indian Health Service, particularly in rural areas where unemployment and poverty levels are high, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said Thursday. New patients waited up to four months to see a physician at a facility on the Navajo Nation and up to a month for a routine vision check at a clinic in the Billings, Montana, region, staff told federal investigators.   read more

Wall Street dominates political giving. But it’s these donors, a much smaller subset of the securities sector, who play with the biggest money. The fact that hedge fund money continued to flood the presidential race after one of the donors’ favorite candidates — Rubio — dropped out would be surprising were it not for the anti-Donald Trump movement. For this group, there’s still work to be done with their money — namely, beating back Trump’s ascension to the Republican nomination.   read more

Now that the U.S. government has acknowledged that Western-built chemical weapons sickened U.S. soldiers in Iraq, The New York Times says the CIA can no longer deny access to records about it. The Pentagon acknowledged that more than 600 U.S. soldiers had been exposed to sarin in Iraq. The CDC links the chemicals to burns, blisters, infertility, eye damage, scarring of the respiratory system, and cancer risk. The military denied medical care to soldiers who were wounded by these weapons.   read more

The rapid escalation of border enforcement over the past three decades has backfired as a strategy to control undocumented immigration between Mexico and the U.S., according to new research that suggests further militarization of the border is a waste of money. "Rather than stopping undocumented Mexicans from coming to the U.S., greater enforcement stopped them from going home," said one of the researchers. "Greater enforcement also increased the risk of death and injury during border crossing."   read more

Aircraft which can't be deployed is not a solution to the need for deployed aircraft. The Pentagon's Frank Kendall has called this "acquisition malpractice." Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James: "People believed we could go faster, cheaper, better" by designing and building the F-35 concurrently, "and that the degree of concurrency would work. Indeed it has not worked as well as we had hoped and that's probably the understatement of the day." The F-35 won't be combat capable any time soon.   read more

Suing someone in Nebraska is cheaper and easier. The cost to file a lawsuit in that state is $45. About 79,000 debt collection lawsuits were filed in Nebraska courts in 2013 alone. Suing became an irresistible bargain for debt collectors. It’s a deal collectors have fought to keep, opposing even the slightest increase. For debtors, unaffordable debts turn into unaffordable garnishments, destroying already tight budgets and sending them into a loop.   read more

Vet Brian Sweeney grew emotional after a reporter read him details of the new bladder cancer research. Sweeney recalled in Vietnam once driving through a misty fog of chemicals so thick he had to stop the vehicle and turn around. “I didn’t know it at the time, but that was probably Agent Orange,” he said. When he went to the VA to see if he could receive benefits, the claims specialist “pretty much told me I wasn’t eligible because Agent Orange doesn’t cause bladder cancer.”   read more