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

President Obama issued several executive orders beginning in 2011 instructing agencies to perform retrospective analyses of rules “that may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome, and to modify, streamline, expand, or repeal them" as needed. But researchers discovered few agencies had plans to measure the effectiveness of the regulations, which ranged from enhanced tank car standards for high hazard flammable trains to minimum wages for federal contractors.   read more

Critics accused the GEBN of trying to reshape public opinion about soft drinks to protect Coca-Cola’s bottom-line. The outcry prompted the medical school’s leadership to return the money, saying “the funding source has distracted attention from its worthwhile goal.” Professor Marion Nestle called the network “a front group” for Coca-Cola intended to promote the message that obesity is primarily caused by a lack of exercise, not by overconsumption of junk food.   read more

“By making next year’s election a national holiday, President Obama would signal a strong national commitment to voting and help serve as a counter-balance to the 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted the historic Voting Rights Act,” the groups said. “Since this decision, nearly every state has introduced bills to make voting harder...through discriminatory voter ID bills or drastic cuts to early voting days, same-day registration, and other suppressive measures.”   read more

The mistakes involved “beneficiaries who had returned to work and had earnings above program limits,” the GAO reported. Auditors also noted the agency’s “process for handling work reports by beneficiaries has internal control and other weaknesses that increase the risk of overpayments, even when DI beneficiaries follow program rules and report work and earnings.”   read more

In Mexico, President Peña’s presidential campaign used neuropolitical techniques to gauge voters’ brain waves, skin arousal, and heart rate. One way the new methods are applied is by placing cameras in digital billboards and recording people's facial reactions to political messages. Use of neuropolitics could increase during the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Hillary Clinton’s campaign already hired a neuromarketing firm to help it improve its targeting and messages.   read more

Defense officials have denied SIGAR easy access to documents, which is unusual and possibly illegal given the inspector general’s mandate to investigate Pentagon spending in Afghanistan. “Frankly, I find it both shocking and incredible that DOD asserts that it no longer has any knowledge about TFBSO, an $800 million program that reported directly to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and only shut down a little over six months ago,” Sopko wrote to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.   read more

No sooner was the plan finalized than officials—mostly Republicans—in 26 states sued to block it. “America’s history of political conflict over climate change and the legal challenges to the Clean Power Plan might suggest that the nation is divided over regulating carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants,” said Yale's Anthony Leiserowitz. “This study finds the opposite: A large majority of Americans in almost every state supports setting strict emission limits on coal-fired power plants.”   read more

The town of Pagedale needs more revenue, so officials ticket residents for unmowed lawns, mismatched window coverings, toys in the yard, fallen tree limbs, and not having pants pulled up high enough. The number of tickets issued for such violations has increased 495% in the city since 2010. They result in people, many of them elderly, owing thousands of dollars to the city in fines for housing violations they were already struggling to afford to fix. Some people have even been briefly jailed.   read more

From the 1950s through the 1980s, the number of “floating voters,” or swing voters, amounted to between 10% and 15% of the voting public. That figure has now fallen to about 5%, according to “Polarization and the Decline of the American Floating Voter” by Michigan State political scientist Corwin Smidt. He found that voters currently have stronger identification with political parties and are more consistently loyal to them.   read more

Companies such as BP, Shell and Texaco, which is now part of Chevron, were also among those that questioned climate science and joined organizations that fought policies designed to tackle the problem. According to energy industry experts, those companies could also be investigated to determine whether their public stance on the issue coincided with their internal discussions. "ExxonMobil is not alone,” said professor Stephen Zamora. “This is not likely to be an isolated matter.”   read more

The problem was brought into sharp relief last year when a Tulalip boy killed four fellow students and himself with his father’s gun. The father, who had a restraining order against him, shouldn’t have been able to buy the gun but the order was never entered into federal databases."People with criminal records have been known to go from reservation to reservation. Without a one-stop place for information sharing, we’re all kind of working in the blind,” said tribal chairman Sheldon.   read more

Early in his Washington tenure, Mader was the IRS security specialist during a time when the agency came under fire because its employees were found to be looking at tax returns of celebrities and others they had no business viewing. He subsequently became a key figure in a fundamental IRS reorganization. That change resulted in the removal of several layers of management and caused the agency to move from a regionally based organization to one with customer-oriented divisions.   read more

Bodde returned to Nepal as ambassador in 2012. While there, he worked to build relationships with Nepal’s young people. While Bodde’s confirmation to the Nepal post was fairly routine, his next hearings might be more difficult. Republicans who now control the Senate may take the opportunity to bring up the 2012 attack on the Benghazi consulate in which a previous U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans died.   read more

Luli-Faber is from Shkodër, Albania, and was educated at the University of Tirana in her home country. In the mid-1990s, she studied for her master’s degree at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo, but completed it at the Marin Barleti University in Albania. From 1995 to 2000, Luli-Faber worked for Deloitte & Touche in Tirana and in Prague.   read more

“I have nothing to say about that right now,” said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. But University of Washington women’s soccer coach Amy Griffin has identified more than 60 soccer players, particularly goalies, who played on crumb rubber turf and have been diagnosed with various forms of cancer. The Washington State Department of Health is now conducting its own study of the playing fields.The EPA in 2008 declared the crumb rubber fields to be safe.   read more

The states with the highest death rates also have higher speed limits. All have top speed limits of at least 70 mph and some, like Montana, have top limits of 80 mph. For a time in the 1990s, Montana had no top speed limit, merely requiring motorists to drive in a “reasonable and prudent manner.” The researchers also found that states with poorer and less-educated populations had higher road death rates than those having populations with higher incomes and more education.   read more