Without effective copyright protections, there is a grave risk that these organizations will no longer be able to produce the high-quality codes and standards that the public and lawmakers have come to rely on.
Dozens of local communities, states, and individuals are suing major oil and gas companies and their trade associations over rising climate costs and for allegedly lying to consumers about climate change risks and solutions. At the same time, some states are enacting or considering laws modeled after the federal Superfund program that would impose retroactive liability on large fossil fuel producers and levy a one-time charge on them to help fund climate adaptation and resiliency measures.
Doing so has failed to prioritize agency internal control processes to adequately protect American taxpayer dollars, leading to documented examples of widespread abuse. Prior versions of OMB's guidance have overly deferred to the direction and priorities of external entities whose views are not binding on the Executive Branch, such as the Government Accountability Office.
Organizational filibustering refers to strategies that delay and obstruct efforts to pursue social justice in systems. These additions can stretch out the process of implementation of diversity strategic plans or multicultural programs for years. Change agents can become battle-fatigued and give up their efforts. They can also become so disheartened that they leave a group or organization altogether.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has made clear that he wants to quickly integrate AI into everything the military does and is demanding that AI companies give the government unrestricted access to their technologies. Anthropic refused to give the Pentagon unfettered access to its AI model, saying it would not allow its model to be used for the mass surveillance of Americans or the development of weapons that fire without human involvement.
The Supreme Court announced Tuesday that it will now employ software to help the justices identify when they should probably recuse themselves from cases. We say "probably," because there's still no actually enforceable ethics code binding Supreme Court justices and the Chief Justice has made very clear that he will ignore any attempt to impose one. Instead, the Supreme Court drafted a 14-page pinky swear that they will follow some of the same rules that bind lower court judges.
The reason for that is simple: the British state is big and getting bigger but as an agent of change it is not up to the job. This is true at both central and local levels. Over the years, the capacity of government to intervene has been pared back and professional expertise has been lost as council services have been outsourced.
Kemi Badenoch's recent ridiculing of the prime minister over a supposed U-turn on digital ID plans (Keir Starmer denies change to digital ID plan is yet another U-turn, 14 January) is the latest example of a frustratingly narrow view of leadership. To the Conservative leader, adapting a policy is a sign of no sense of direction; to those of us who work in product management, it looks like necessary iteration of the process.
In this new season, I'm asking how the Trump White House is rewriting the rules of U.S. politics, and talking to Americans whose lives have been changed as a result. Today's episode examines the destruction of the civil service: the removal of professionals, and their replacement with loyalists. I've seen this kind of transformation before, in other failing democracies. Everyone suffers from the degradation of public services.
The interchamber tensions between Democrats are becoming a regular feature of funding fights in the second Trump term. Lawmakers, strategists and voters alike exploded in anger last March when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and a handful of colleagues allowed a spending package to move forward amid the Elon Musk-led DOGE assault on federal agencies. In November, tempers again flared when a handful of Senate Democrats joined with Republicans to end a record 43-day shutdown.