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 Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), charged with overseeing nearly 170,000 miles of hazardous liquid pipelines in the United States, is coming under scrutiny in the wake of oil spills in Montana and Michigan, and th...   read more

At first the Department of Defense was justifying its decision to buy helicopters from Russia because the immediacy of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan demanded the use of non-competitive contracts to get the necessary equipment into the hands of...   read more

Gulnara Karimova, daughter of Uzbekistan’s notorious dictator, won’t enjoy New York’s Fashion Week after all.   IMG, which puts on the celebrated fashion event, decided to cancel Karimova’s fashion show following media stories about her father...   read more

Christian Prosl has served as Ambassador of Austria to the United States in Washington, D.C., since May 2009.    Born August 21, 1946, in Eisenstadt, Austria, Prosl grew up in Vienna and earned undergraduate degrees at the University of Vienna...   read more

In agreeing to pay the largest settlement by a bank to date involving sanctions violations, JPMorgan Chase will fork over $88.3 million to the Department of the Treasury.   Treasury officials went after JPMorgan for breaking U.S. embargo laws ...   read more

With food-stamp benefits more than doubling in recent years, the restaurant industry has decided it wants in on the action.   Federal law currently prohibits restaurants from accepting food stamps, although exceptions are allowed for the disab...   read more

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to cut a group of Idaho farmers any slack in their fight against the federal government for contaminating their crops with a powerful herbicide.   The issue dates back to 1999-2000, when the Bureau of...   read more

Clothing brand Lacoste has one devoted customer it wished it didn’t: mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik.   The man behind the July 22 massacre in Norway that killed 77 people says his favorite line of clothing is Lacoste, which offers the id...   read more

America’s national parks can be great learning tools, providing information to people of all ages about natural and man-made history. But when it comes to educating visitors about Native Americans, the parks still have a long ways to go.   At ...   read more

In the days following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many people I spoke with simply could not understand why anyone, anywhere, would not like Americans, even if it was just a few dozen fanatics. In one form or another, they asked: W...   read more

The Social Security Administration (SSA) has spent tens of millions of dollars paying beneficiaries after they’ve died, some for as long as decades.   An audit by the agency’s inspector general found that since 2008 $40.3 million was paid to m...   read more

Methyl bromide, a hazardous pesticide that most farmers were supposed to stop using six years ago, is still being sprayed in large quantities in parts of California.   An international agreement called for the phaseout of methyl bromide by 200...   read more

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Arizona has been accused of trying to cover up a link between the murder of a Customs and Border Protection agent and a controversial anti-drug program that allowed guns to fall into the hands of cartels.   Shortl...   read more

Senate Republicans want to strip President Barack Obama and all future presidents of the ability to decide whether terrorism suspects should be handed over to civilian law enforcement or the military, preferring instead that detainees automatica...   read more

When the U.S. government wasted somewhere between $30 billion and $60 billion on contracts for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it did so in a variety of ways.   For example, the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) in 2005 hired Supreme Foodservice of ...   read more

Civil libertarians won an important victory in federal court on Tuesday involving the government’s use of cell phone data to track suspects without a warrant.   Since the September 11 attacks, U.S. intelligence and federal law enforcement agen...   read more