At least two U.S. senators have put holds on the nomination of Adm. Kevin Lunday to lead the U.S. Coast Guard, citing concerns with a new workplace harassment policy that downgrades the definition of swastikas and nooses from hate symbols to “potentially divisive.”
The move upends Lunday’s confirmation, which the Senate was due to vote on this week, and raises new questions about the decision to implement the policy revisions after Lunday in November had forcefully denounced such symbols and declared a wholesale prohibition on them.
The holds on Lunday’s promotion were exercised by Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.) and Jacky Rosen (D., Nev.). They follow a series of Washington Post reports detailing plans to include the incendiary language within the Coast Guard’s new workplace harassment manual — and the policy’s quiet implementation this week despite the admiral’s explicit directive last month. The manual is posted online and specifies that the document’s previous version “is cancelled.”
In a statement, Duckworth expressed incredulity at the situation and questioned why Lunday would not update the policy manual “to delete the absurd characterization that clearly states a noose and swastika are merely potentially divisive symbols.” She said that the admiral had affirmed “directly to me” that both “are symbols of hate.”
“This shouldn’t be difficult,” Duckworth said.
Rosen, in a social media post announcing her decision to place a hold on Lunday’s nomination, said it appears he “may have backtracked in his commitment to me to combat antisemitism and hate crimes and protect all members of the Coast Guard.” She said her hold will remain in place “until the Coast Guard provides answers.”
It was not immediately clear why Lunday, who was named the Coast Guard’s acting commandant after the Trump administration ousted his predecessor, did not incorporate his November order into the manual before it took effect Monday, or to what extent the Department of Homeland Security leadership, which has authority over the service, was involved in the revision process.
Two people familiar with policy manual’s overhaul, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, sought to distance Coast Guard leadership from the controversy. “The policy rewrite was bad staff work,” one person, a Coast Guard employee, said. “But the Coast Guard’s hands were tied in how we were able to address the mistake.”
A spokesperson for Lunday did not respond to a request for comment, and the Coast Guard did not address whether Lunday, as acting commandant, had the authority to change the workplace harassment manual or if he required approval from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem.
A spokeswoman for DHS, Tricia McLaughlin, said that by placing a hold on Lunday’s nomination, Duckworth and Rosen were attempting to “extort” the Coast Guard to score “cheap political points.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem on Capitol Hill earlier this month.
“At a time when the threat of antisemitic violence is as widespread as it is right now, using this to politicize one of President Trump’s military nominations is simply disgusting,” McLaughlin said.
The issue has drawn concern from some Republicans, too. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R., Alaska) “has been clear with acting commandant Adm. Lunday since the story broke that the Coast Guard must clarify, in the strongest terms possible, that the Coast Guard does not tolerate symbols of hate, like swastikas and nooses,” his office said in a statement Wednesday.
Sen. James Lankford (R., Okla.) also registered disapproval. In a statement, his office said the senator was “provided assurances” the policy had been corrected. “There is no reason,” it says, “why there should be conflicting policies in place.”
Unless the holds are lifted, Lunday’s nomination will be sent back to the White House at the end of December, forcing President Donald Trump to renominate him or choose someone else for the job, according to a Senate Republican aide.
The Coast Guard’s hazing and harassment policy was an early focus of Lunday’s after the Trump administration, upon entering office in January, fired his predecessor, Adm. Linda Fagan — the first woman to lead a branch of the U.S. military. In announcing Fagan’s removal, officials cited among other things her “excessive focus” on diversity initiatives.
Within days Lunday ordered the suspension of the policy manual that, among its other guidance, said explicitly that the swastika was among a “list of symbols whose display, presentation, creation, or depiction would constitute a potential hate incident.” Nooses and the Confederate flag also matched that description under the previous policy. Lunday was later nominated by Trump to lead the service as its commandant.
The policy manual changes reflect an administration-wide campaign to purge the federal of government of its focus on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). At the Pentagon, for instance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired multiple minority or female military officers in his ongoing effort to eliminate DEI initiatives. He has said, without offering evidence, that the prior administration’s focus on DEI harmed military recruiting.
At the same time, antisemitism is on the rise globally. At least 15 people were killed over the weekend at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia.
The Coast Guard’s new workplace harassment manual, beyond softening the definition of swastikas and nooses, also allows for supervisors to review how such symbols are used or displayed in the workplace instead of immediately prohibiting them.
After the Post in November revealed the Coast Guard’s plan to adopt the new language, Lunday reacted swiftly — stating in a memo to all Coast Guard personnel that his directive barring swastikas and nooses would supersede any other policy language.
Vincent W. Patton, who served as master chief petty officer of the Coast Guard — the highest enlisted position — from 1998 to 2002, on Wednesday cited Lunday’s memo in offering a defense of the admiral and the policy revision. The new manual’s wording gives the Coast Guard more latitude to make judgment calls case by case, he said, adding that Lunday’s letter to all personnel was “very, very clear that hate symbols are prohibited.”
The process and penalties remain the same — regardless of whether the word is “hate” or “potentially divisive,” Patton said in an interview.
Asked if he meant that there could be situations in which someone with a noose or a swastika flag or tattoo was not in violation of the harassment policy, he said “that’s possible.”
“I mean if it was a swastika, they should be out within a second,” Patton said, “but Confederate flags? There should be an open dialogue to determine or define if this person has the potential and willingness to do something hateful.”
Peter Arnett was already an accomplished combat correspondent in 1966 when he embedded with an American infantry battalion tasked with routing out enemy snipers from a tunnel system near Saigon. Mr. Arnett was standing next to the unit commander when bullets tore through the map the officer was holding, hitting the colonel in the chest.
Medics ran up to bandage Lt. Col. George Eyster, a West Pointer who died the next day at a field hospital. Mr. Arnett wrote his obituary, which was among the scores of stories he filed from the humid jungle battlefields of Vietnam for more than a decade. He won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting that year.
Mr. Arnett stayed in Vietnam beyond the very end. When Viet Cong guerrillas entered the Associated Press bureau during the 1975 fall of Saigon, his boss Nate Polowetzky told him to get out of there. Mr. Arnett refused. “He told me, in effect, to go screw myself,” Polowetzky said.
The New Zealand native would go on to cover more wars (15 to 20, he said), including the Gulf War. He was one of the few Western reporters in Baghdad in January 1991 when allied missiles started raining down, reporting live from the city for CNN. He interviewed Saddam Hussein in the second week of the war, and in 1997, Osama bin Laden.
When Mr. Arnett asked bin Laden about his plans, the 9/11 mastermind replied: “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media. God willing.”
Mr. Arnett died Wednesday at 91, in Newport Beach, Calif. The cause was prostate cancer, said his daughter, Elsa Arnett.
After arriving in Vietnam, Mr. Arnett was given lifesaving advice from one of his AP colleagues, Malcolm Browne: Lie prone under fire; look for cover and move toward it; do not get close to a radioman or medic because they are prime targets; and if you hear a shot, don’t get up to see where it came from because the second shot might get you.
Mr. Arnett, one of the most famous journalists of his era, wrote gripping battlefield stories that transported readers sitting in their living rooms to the scene of the news.
The stories that won him the Pulitzer included a dispatch about an Army captain who watched helplessly as a Viet Cong machine gunner kept pummeling the body of one of his men, rolling it over and over. In a story titled “Everyone Knew the Americans Were Coming,” Arnett wrote on a failed U.S. mission aimed at hunting down Viet Cong fighters who easily got away.
Peter Arnett walks in front of a U.S. tank in Vietnam in 1967.
Reporting on the Vietnam War forced Mr. Arnett to repress his human instincts. On one hot day at the Saigon market, Mr. Arnett watched a Buddhist monk squat on the pavement and douse himself in gasoline before flicking a lighter.
“I could have prevented that immolation by rushing at him and kicking the gasoline away,’” Mr. Arnett recalled. “As a human being I wanted to. As a reporter I couldn’t. … If I had stopped him, the [South Vietnamese] secret police who were watching from a distance would have immediately arrested him and carried him off to God knows where. If I had attempted to prevent them doing this, I would have propelled myself directly into Vietnamese politics. My role as a reporter would have been destroyed.”
Instead, Mr. Arnett photographed the burning monk and dashed back to his office to write his story.
But Mr. Arnett’s eagerness to report entangled him in controversy. In the Gulf War, as one of the few Western journalists reporting from behind enemy lines in Iraq, he was granted access by Hussein’s regime to what officials said was an industrial plant that produced milk powder and was the only source of infant formula in Baghdad. It had been hit by U.S. bombs.
Mr. Arnett reported on CNN what he saw and heard, and went to bed. The next day, he learned that he had reported on “one of the most controversial stories of my career.” U.S. officials disputed the claim that the factory made baby milk powder and instead alleged it was used for the production of biological weapons protected by the Iraqi military. White House officials called him a “conduit for Iraqi disinformation,” while Rep. Laurence Coughlin (R., Pa.) called him the “Joseph Goebbels of Saddam Hussein’s Hitler-like regime.”
Sen. Al Simpson (R., Wyo.) went so far as to accuse the brother of Mr. Arnett’s Vietnamese-born wife of being a Viet Cong operative. (Simpson later apologized, saying there was no evidence to prove that claim.)
Mr. Arnett kept reporting, showing the damaged buildings in the town of Al-Dour that Iraqi officials said had been hit by U.S. and allied bombs and had resulted in 24 civilian deaths.
“There was nothing in his tone that was judgmental, nothing that indicated sympathy for the Iraqis,” wrote Howard Rosenberg, the Los Angeles Times’s TV critic. “Without interpretation, he reported only what he said he saw, accompanied by the appropriate disclaimers regarding censorship.”
In 1999, Mr. Arnett left CNN after being involved in a story that alleged that the U.S. military had used deadly sarin nerve gas on deserting American soldiers during the Vietnam War. When a subsequent Pentagon investigation said there was no evidence of sarin gas ever having been shipped to Southeast Asia and disputed other key portions of the story, CNN retracted it.
Mr. Arnett faced further criticism in 2003, when he gave an interview to Iraqi state television.
“It is clear that within the United States there is growing challenge to President Bush about the conduct of the war and also opposition to the war. So our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces … help those who oppose the war,” he said.
The remarks sparked backlash from the administration of President George W. Bush and lawmakers from both parties. His employer, NBC, initially defended him, saying the remarks were “analytical in nature,” but eventually fired him, saying it had been wrong for Mr. Arnett to “grant an interview to state-controlled Iraqi TV — especially at a time of war — and it was wrong for him to discuss his personal observations and opinions in that interview.”
Peter Gregg Arnett was born in Riverton, New Zealand, on Nov. 13, 1934.
He began his journalism career in his country of birth, writing for the Southland Times newspaper. Restless and bored, he left his home country seeking adventure. When he arrived in Southeast Asia, he decided to stay, enchanted by the “opium smugglers, revolutionaries and obscure little wars in obscure little kingdoms.”
He ended up reporting from Thailand and Indonesia before he arrived in Vietnam.
In Vietnam, he worked and competed with the other big-name journalists including David Halberstam and Marguerite Higgins.
He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in the mid-1980s while CNN’s Moscow bureau chief. Mr. Arnett thought it was important that he should be an American citizen because he was representing an American news organization, according to his family. Mr. Arnett said in a 2015 interview that his U.S. citizenship “solidified my credentials to challenge American policy.”
“I was perfectly happy to be a New Zealander, and it wasn’t an issue in my work. The Associated Press and CNN were more interested in the journalism than the nationality,” Mr. Arnett said. He added, however, that there were “a lot of comments during the Gulf War” about his foreign origins.
“But the point was, I was an American. If I hadn’t been, it would have been a way to further discredit my journalism.”
He met Nina Nguyen Thu-Nga, a South Vietnamese woman, while covering the war. He married her and they had two children, Andrew and Elsa, before divorcing in 1983. His frequent and extended travels abroad were to blame, according to Mr. Arnett’s family. They remarried in 2006 and stayed together until his death.
President Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, and other senior officials were looking for a fight.
In the first months of the administration, Miller, the architect of Trump’s anti-immigration and border policies, and his team discussed starting a new war on drugs by striking cartels and alleged traffickers in Mexico, according to one current and two former U.S. officials.
Reducing the power of cartels, an idea that dated back to the first Trump administration, would ease the flow of migrants and narcotics, creating early political wins. But as the administration surged thousands of U.S. troops to the southern border, increased U.S. surveillance flights and boosted intelligence sharing with its neighbor, Mexican military operations across the border curbed cartel action, the people said. That left Miller and his team looking for another target.
“When you hope and wait for something to develop that doesn’t, you start looking at countries south of Mexico,” said the current official, who, like nine others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
The campaign that emerged in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean is unprecedented in its use of lethal force by the U.S. military against alleged drug smuggling groups. These operations, which began Sept. 2, have evolved to embrace the Trump team’s long-running ambition to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom the president has accused of overseeing “narco-terrorists” assaulting the United States.
A U.S. soldier is deployed along the U.S.-Mexico border as part of the Joint Task Force Southern Border mission, in Sunland Park, N.M., on April 4.
Miller has been a driving force behind the administration’s counternarcotics campaign, pressing for results and fresh military options that could be turned into future operations, the current and former officials said.
“President Trump’s counternarcotics policies come from President Trump himself,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “All senior administration officials work closely together to carry out the agenda President Trump was elected to implement, including eliminating the scourge of narco-terrorism that takes tens of thousands of American lives every year.”
Miller could not be reached for comment.
Miller steered the drafting of a July 25 classified directive signed by the president that authorized the military to undertake lethal force against two dozen foreign criminal groups, said a former U.S. official familiar with the campaign and its evolution. The administration has labeled these groups “designated terrorist organizations,” accusing them of using drugs as a weapon to kill Americans, using a moniker that many experts say has no basis in law.
“The president’s memo is the original sin of the whole operation,” the former official said.
That presidential directive provided the foundational authority for an “execute order” that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued on Aug. 5 and that subsequently has been modified. The order, details of which were previously unreported, contains permissive targeting guidelines for lethal operations, current and former officials said. The presidential directive’s existence was first reported by the New York Times.
Together, these two documents guided a military campaign of lethal strikes against criminal organizations, grafting a wartime frame to what has been traditionally treated as a law enforcement problem. The execute order also contains targeting criteria lifted from the language of the counterterrorism campaign against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which some current and former officials say give the Pentagon an overly permissive license to kill.
The department will treat suspected drug smugglers “EXACTLY how we treated Al-Qaeda. We will continue to track them, map them, hunt them, and kill them,” Hegseth said on social media last month.
Pursuant to these orders, the Trump administration has launched strikes on at least 26 boats, killing at least 99 people in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. The Pentagon has not publicly identified those killed, and it is unclear whether it has collected the intelligence to do so.
“The administration appears to have authorized a campaign against civilians and alleged criminals that is now stretching the limits of international law so that it’s now totally unrecognizable,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign and is director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
The White House’s early deliberations about the use of lethal force against cartels contemplated using covert action by theCIA. But as resistance emerged from lawyers and others over the ensuing months, Miller and his team turned increasingly toward the idea of using the military to pursue alleged traffickers.
Miller’s larger vision was to reduce the flow of drugs — and migrants — into the United States. He figured that attacking cartels would diminish their power and help stabilize Latin American countries, resulting in fewer people risking the trek to the United States, according to one of the former U.S. officials familiar with Miller’s deliberations.
As the summer progressed, the White House’s campaigns against narcotics and migration coalesced with a long-held desire of Secretary of State Marco Rubio to force Maduro from power. Rubio and the Justice Department in August doubled to $50 million the reward for information leading to the Venezuelan leader’s arrest, citing an indictment for corruption and drug trafficking during the first Trump administration.
Meanwhile, the White House found a willing partner in Hegseth, who had been knockedoff stride by several missteps and was eager to show he could deliver on a high-priority mission.
“Pete very much wanted to keep Stephen in his good graces and also the president,” said the former official familiar with Miller’s thinking. “And that was a motivation for him — getting behind this campaign in an aggressive way.”
The Defense Department declined to address questions about its operations to strike alleged traffickers and how the mission took shape. Elements of Miller’s leading role were reported earlier by the Guardian.
“This reporting is inaccurate and is built on a false premise that ignores reality,” Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement. The department’s focus, he said, “is, and will continue to be, protecting the Homeland from any threat.”
Widening the scope
The Aug. 5 execute order,or EXORD in Pentagon parlance, stated that the campaign’s goal is to stop the flow of drugs by sea to the United States, two people said.
Initially, the order contained a geographic boundary that designated target areas in international waters off the coast of Venezuela, but it was modified about two months later to include the eastern Pacific area, one current and one former U.S. official said.It specified that at least for the initial strikes, Joint Special Operations Command would be in charge of operations, the two people said.
A still frame from a video posted on social media by President Donald Trump shows a boat allegedly transporting illegal narcotics after a lethal strike on Sept. 2, through U.S. military imagery.
Over the late summer and into the fall, lawyers and policy personnel raised concerns about the legality of the lethal force campaign that was taking shape. Administration officials sought to reassure them by saying that a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memo was being drafted that determined that the lethal targeting of suspected drug runners was lawful under the president’s power to ascertain that the U.S. is in a formal state of war — in this case with alleged drug traffickers.
But the opinion was not signed until Sept. 5 — three days after the first boat strike — and some career lawyers were not permitted to read the draft OLC memo before the execute order was issued, said the former official familiar with the campaign’s evolution.
The OLC memo, signed by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser, asserts that alleged drug trafficking groups are a threat to the United States akin to a foreign nation attempting to invade, Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), who was allowed to read it in his capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the Post in an interview.
The execute order contains targeting instructions that do not require positive identification of any individual but rather “reasonable certainty” that adult males are members of, or affiliated with, a “designated terrorist organization,” or DTO, according to five current and former U.S. officials familiar with the criteria. To mitigate civilian harm, the order requires “near certainty” that no women, children or civilians are present, they said.
The administration is using the phrase “designated terrorist organizations” to refer to 24 alleged drug trafficking groups whose activities it contends are killing millions of Americans.
The term, said Rebecca Ingber, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law and a former State Department law-of-war expert, “is entirely manufactured as a source of targeting authority with no basis in law.”
The list of 24 such groups appears in an annex to Trump’s July directive and also in the EXORD, according to one current and one former official.
The assessment of “affiliation” is based on a number of factors, including the presence of drugs on board the vessel and its route, as well as intercepts of communications, the current and former officials said.
As a result, the campaign may be killing individuals who in some cases have a tenuous link to any organized drug-running operation, said one of the former U.S. officials, who has read the execute order.
“When you define DTO and affiliate so loosely and you’re attacking boats, [the guidelines are] basically meaningless,” the former official said.
If the United States were actually at war, the reasonable certainty standard would be “perfectly reasonable,” said Ryan Goodman, a former Pentagon special counsel who worked on counterterrorism targeting issues in the Obama administration.
“Not being in an armed conflict changes everything,” he said. “The idea that a government would kill people on the basis of ‘reasonable certainty’ that they’re a member of a drug cartel is beyond the pale. Any U.N. body would find that to be a gross violation of human rights.”
Identification and delegation
The targeting requirements, four former officials say, resemble the “signature strikes” of past global counterterrorism campaigns, in which the CIA and the military launched drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen on individuals or groups whose identities were unknown but who were targeted based on a pattern of behavior or other characteristics associated with terrorist activity.
The execute order, which sets the rules of engagement for the military, designates Hegseth as the “target engagement authority” — the official who can approve strike targets. It also stipulates that he can delegate that authority to others in individual missions.
“Now, the first couple of strikes … as any leader would want, you want to own that responsibility,” Hegseth said at a cabinet meeting this monthin response to questions about the first boat strike, details of which — including a subsequent missile strike to kill survivors — were first published bythe Post. “So I said I’m going to be the one to make the call after getting all the information and make sure it’s the right strike.”
Pentagon general counsel Earl Matthews — who had just been confirmed by the Senate on July 29 with a 50-47 vote — signed off on the Aug. 5 order, said a person familiar with the matter. Lawmakers have for weeks requested a copy of the order and related documents but have not received them. Matthews did not respond to a request for comment.
President Donald Trump signed a classified directive that authorized the military to undertake lethal force against two dozen foreign criminal groups.
Trump has asserted, without offering proof, that the U.S. troops know who they are targeting in every case. “We know everything about them. We know where they live. We know where the bad ones live,” he told reporters this month.
The military knew the identities of all 11 people killed in the first attack of the campaign on Sept. 2, Pentagon officials have said. But “they don’t know all of the individuals on many of the other boats” in subsequent strikes, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D., Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told ABC News on Sunday.
Trump posted on Truth Social the day of the first strike that the U.S. military had killed 11 “positively identified” members of the Venezuelan organization Tren de Aragua. He called them “narco-terrorists” operating “under the control of” Maduro, who has been condemned by both the Trump and Biden administrations for illegally retaining power after losing last year’s presidential election.
This week, the commander overseeing that operation, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, told lawmakers that the military knew one of the 11 was a member of Tren de Aragua and the other 10 were affiliates, according to three U.S. officials.
The U.S. intelligence community this year assessed that Tren de Aragua, a transnational crime syndicate, was not directed by Venezuela’s government.
Two family members of men killed on Sept. 2 did not deny that the boat was smuggling marijuana and cocaine. But they said Trump’s allegation the men had worked for Tren de Aragua was inaccurate.
“I knew them all,” one of the family members told the Post in October, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “None of them had anything to do with Tren de Aragua. They were fishermen who were looking for a better life” by smuggling contraband.
In some of the strikes, the targets who have been identified are not high-level operators or cartel bosses, lawmakers said. “It’s one thing to be a narco-terrorist and another thing to be a fisherman that’s getting paid a hundred bucks a couple times a year … to supplement his income” to ferry drugs, Warner told reporters at the Defense Writers Group last week.
Lifting language from the ‘war on terror’
The Aug. 5 execute order adopts the language of previous administrations in successive global counterterrorism campaigns after 2001, but the context is vastly different, current and former officials say.
The fight against ISIS in Iraq from 2014 on generally involved clearing terrain of fighters who often barricaded themselves in buildings in cities teeming with civilians, and U.S. troops were often firing in self-defense at militants shooting at them, former Special Operations personnel said.
In the drug boat campaign, the U.S. military is launching munitions from afar, more like the counterterrorism operations in Yemen and Somalia during the Obama and first Trump administrations.
Under President Barack Obama, outside areas of active hostility, the targeting guidelines required that lethal force be used only when capture was not feasible and only to prevent attacks against U.S. citizens or when targets posed a continuing imminent threat. They required “near certainty” that a target was a member of a terrorist organization.
“Generally you had people swearing allegiance” to a group like al-Qaeda as an indicator of membership, said the former U.S. official, who is familiar with the counterterrorism targeting criteria. “So you had the presence of weapons and good intelligence on planning you could point to, to link people to the group and say this person is a planner of attacks, this is the money guy, this is a recruiter, etc.”
The standard was changed to “reasonable certainty” under the first Trump administration. But for all practical purposes, said a former senior military officer involved in special operations and battle in the Middle East, the military was applying the “near certainty” standard in these areas. The standard was returned to near certainty under Biden.
“In places like Yemen, whether it was under Obama or Trump,” the retired officer said,“we knew who we were going after. We knew what their place in the network was. We knew what the effects of removing them would be on the network. I don’t see that in some of what [the U.S. is] doing right now.”
One major contextual difference in the current operations against seaborne narcotics is the lack of congressional authority. In the battles against al-Qaeda and associated forces, Congress explicitly authorized the campaigns, giving the president permission to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
The execute order and subsequent targeting guidelines were grounded in the 2001 congressional authorization to use military force.
In 2013, during the Obama administration, the “near certainty” standard typically required confirmation via two sources of intelligence, said Huntley, the former military lawyer for Special Operations forces.
A combination of intelligence tools — signals intelligence, eavesdropping, human spies, and drone surveillance — would contribute to a “positive identification of the individual,” Huntley said. To get to “near certainty” that civilians were not present, the attack location was usually a remote area or a place known to be frequented by only members of the terrorist organization that Congress had specifically authorized as a viable target.
If U.S. officials know the identities of who they are striking, as Trump and Hegseth maintain, then they should release them, the former senior military officer said. “It would help build the case,” he said, that the military is acting to protect civilians according to the law of war.
‘Anybody … is subject to attack’
Though the administration’s charges against Maduro have merit, its claims that Venezuela is sending massive amounts of drugs to America do not, analysts and officials have said.The main domestic drug scourge is fentanyl, a synthetic opioid produced in Mexico, not Venezuela.
Many strikes taken have been in the Pacific, the main sea lane used by traffickers from Colombia and Ecuador. Drug running in the Caribbean focuses mainly on non-U.S. markets, such as Europe. The lethal strike on Sept. 2, for instance, targeted a boat carrying cocaine ultimately bound for Suriname, officials have said.
That absence of information has prompted speculation that the larger buildup of U.S. forces in the region is a preparation for an attack on Venezuela. Miller has indicated to colleagues that a strong reaction from Caracas could provide the reasoning to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants from the United States, the former official noted.
This month, Trump suggested that he wanted to go after Colombian targets. “I hear the country of Colombia is making cocaine,” he said. “They have cocaine manufacturing plants. And then they sell us their cocaine. … Anybody that’s doing that and selling it into our country is subject to attack.”
He also has stepped up the pressure on Venezuela, seizing an oil tanker last week off that country’s coast.
“He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Trump’s chief of staff, Susan Wiles, told Vanity Fair in an article published this week. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”
On Tuesday, Trump announced in a social media post a “total and complete blockade” of all sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela, further ratcheting up the pressure.
On Wednesday, Miller amplified Trump’s post, commenting: “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.”
Trump, meanwhile, has been signaling that the campaign is widening.
“We knocked out 96 percent of the drugs coming in by water,” he told reporters Friday in the Oval Office. “And now we’re starting by land, and by land is a lot easier, and that’s going to start happening.”
BALTIMORE — Dr. Oz, mouth full of quinoa, paused midbite.
He motioned a nearby videographer to a spot behind the tent where he and celebrity chef Geoffrey Zakarian sat tasting entries in a staff cooking competition. It was a better angle to capture dozens of employees watching them in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services headquarters parking lot that August day.
The famous television doctor Mehmet Oz hasn’t left the stage. He has found a new one as he runs the federal agency that spends $1.5 trillion a year and oversees health insurance for almost half of all Americans. Instead of a New York City studio, Oz spends his time in drab government buildings. But Oz says his ability to reach people is why President Donald Trump wanted him for the job.
“He’ll say, ‘Oz, he was good on TV. It’s a good sign if you’re on TV because it means people can listen to you and you’re making sense to them,’” he said in his first wide-ranging interview as CMS administrator.
Oz’s ability to reach an audience is undisputed. But he now faces a test of whether showmanship and affability can win over public support as he guides major Medicaid changes, oversees soaring costs of Affordable Care Act plans, and contends with the nation’s chronic malady: paying exorbitant prices for mediocre results.
The issues Oz confronts are among the wonkiest in the federal government, with the lives of millions of Americans at stake. His ability to communicate and charm has earned him praise, even from critics skeptical of a man once summoned before senators for hawking “magic” weight loss from a coffee bean extract. Some of his predecessors under Democratic presidents, with whom he regularly consults, and many at the CMS and in the health industry say he has displayed policy expertise and been effective at boosting morale at his agency.
“I’ve been impressed,” said Andy Slavitt, who was CMS acting administrator under President Barack Obama. “He’s taken it very seriously.”
Oz’s name still provokes eye rolls among some health advocates and Democrats. “Nobody who’s serious in this country takes Dr. Oz seriously,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) recently said.
Critics also say Oz brings with him concerns about his investments into companies that could be regulated by the agency he leads, such as those offering drug discounts, supplements, and AI health technology.
The renowned heart surgeon is better known for his pageantry during 13 seasons of “The Dr. Oz Show,” where he told viewers how to eat more protein or handle menopause. He’s the only administrator since CMS was established in 1977 with no experience in health policy or economics. His only foray into politics was a failed Pennsylvania Senate bid in 2022.
Oz acknowledges that his ascent from television star to the head of a highly technical government agency is surprising. “Of all people, what?” Oz said.
Oz’s central role in implementing cuts to public insurance programs and defending his polarizing boss, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has drawn sharp criticism.
“Maybe he makes funny jokes and he’s a good hang,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a longtime member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. “That doesn’t mean that what he’s doing isn’t pure evil.”
Yet some policy experts said that compared to the tumultuous layoffs, leadership turmoil, and infighting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health, Oz’s agency appears less chaotic — at least so far.
“Out of all of those agency leaders, I think Oz is probably doing the best,” said a former Biden administration health official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly.
From surgeon to celebrity to CMS
Oz is used to career makeovers.
The pioneering cardiac surgeon launched his eponymous show in 2009. On it, he sometimes leaned into the sensational, undergoing a colonoscopy on-screen and entertaining unproven ideas, including that cellphones cause cancer and zodiac signs influence health traits.
But Oz centered the show on the notion that people should control their health through diet and exercise — a precursor to Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement. He explored how poor gut health and chronic inflammation could cause disease, an idea affirmed in peer-reviewed studies. He urged viewers to stop eating processed foods and promoted bone broth and Greek yogurt.
“The MAHA movement was that on steroids,” he said.
In 2016, Trump went on Oz’s show during his presidential campaign to release a letter from his doctor attesting to his health. Six years later, Trump’s endorsement helped Oz win the Republican nomination to run for an open Senate seat in Pennsylvania, though he lost to Democrat John Fetterman.
Oz’s connection to Kennedy goes back even further to a 2010 clean water event in Utah where they skied together. He interviewed Kennedy in 2014 on his show about potential dangers from the vaccine preservative thimerosal, which scientists have deemed safe. During the segment, Oz told pregnant women to take a thimerosal-free nasal flu shot instead.
After Kennedy ended his independent presidential bid to endorse Trump last year, he and Oz threw Trump a fundraiser at Oz’s Pennsylvania home. Oz regularly hosted Kennedy at his Palm Beach, Fla., home as they awaited Senate confirmation.
As Oz tells it, health insurance is “a bit of an away game” for Kennedy. Shortly after the November election, Oz recalls Kennedy saying he was really excited about every part of running HHS — except for the highly technical health insurance programs under CMS’s purview.
‘That crazy guy from TV’
After Oz took the helm of CMS, some questioned whether he would be up for learning its soporific machinery — a job that requires drilling into such doze-inducing terminology as medical loss ratio and bundled payments.
“There was a fair amount of skepticism among people in the beginning, like, Dr. Oz, he’s that crazy guy from TV,” said CMS deputy administrator Kim Brandt, a Trump appointee who worked at the agency during his first term.
Oz, who has medical and business degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, said he has “always been a bit of a wonk” on health policy and enjoys thinking about how the health system works as a whole.
“He’ll sit and talk to you about something like surety bonds for 30 minutes,” said Brandt, whom Oz has dubbed “Kimba.”
He said he started compiling a health policy “bible” for himself as soon as he learned he would be nominated, calling past CMS leaders to learn how the agency works. He has talked many times to Slavitt and Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, who was CMS administrator under President Joe Biden.
And he surrounded himself with deeply experienced senior staff and worked to prevent infighting.
“Don’t waste time on battles that drain you of chi,” he said.
He has been steering the agency in its own wonky way toward Kennedy’s goals of reducing chronic illness, finalizing a Medicare payment rule in October aimed at nudging doctors away from surgeries and toward prevention.
Rep. Richard E. Neal (Massachusetts), the Democratic leader on a committee overseeing health agencies, said he viewed Oz as a moderating force after lawmakers on his panel met with the administrator over the summer.
“He didn’t come across as being radical,” Neal said. “Largely because he’s a real scientist, a real doctor.”
Oz is also by far the richest person in recent history to run CMS, with a net worth between $100 million and $300 million, according to a review of his financial disclosures and previous administrators’ backgrounds. His past financial ties — and the millions he has invested in health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and other health firms — raise questions about how deeply he has profited from industries he now regulates.
He previously advised Eko Health, a company whose AI-enabled heart monitoring device CMS recently approved for funding amid a broader embrace of AI health technology. A CMS spokesperson didn’t explicitly answer whether Oz recused himself from the decision but said he “abided by all of his recusal obligations.”
Last year he co-founded ZorroRX with his son, Oliver, which aims to profit from a drug discount program overseen by a separate branch of HHS — but which could move to CMS under a pending restructuring plan.
Oz said he has divested all of his holdings in healthcare. “There’s not a single thing left in my portfolio which I have any involvement in,” he said.
But Oz also said he transferred his holdings in ZorroRX to a trust managed by Oliver, who is still involved in the company.
Oz also held millions of dollars of stock in iHerb, a wellness company that sells direct-to-consumer folinic acid supplements and other products. At a news conference on autism in September, Oz, along with Trump and Kennedy, praised leucovorin, a highly concentrated folinic acid medication requiring a prescription, as an effective treatment. HHS stressed in an X post that they are different products, after critics questioned on social media whether Oz stood to profit.
CMS spokesman Christopher Krepich said Oz complied with government ethics rules in divesting his ZorroRX and iHerb holdings, but Krepich did not answer whether he transferred his iHerb stock to his son or another relative.
Selling GOP policies
Establishing new Medicaid rules under Trump’s sweeping domestic policy law and selling them to the public poses one of Oz’s steepest challenges. The law, estimated to cut Medicaid spending by $911 billion over a decade, has alarmed Democrats and healthcare advocates, who say millions will be harmed by its work requirements, cuts to states’ funding. and new barriers to enrolling.
Oz emerged as one of the Trump administration’s top advocates for the changes, repeatedly dismissing projections by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that 10 million more people will be uninsured under it.
He has been assuring states that tapping into better health technology will help limit coverage losses, touting plans for a CMS app for Medicaid beneficiaries to quickly report to states how many hours they worked, volunteered, or attended school in a given week to qualify for the insurance.
Oz rarely gives a speech without championing health technology, painting a picture of how it can improve care. He revealed in July that CMS would partner with Google and other tech companies in a “digital health ecosystem” to ease sharing of health information.
Slavitt, the CMS administrator under Obama, said in their conversations Oz tells him about leveling the playing field for “insurgent” smaller tech innovators to compete with “incumbent” healthcare giants such as Epic or UnitedHealthcare.
Oz has also played defense on another hot-button issue vexing Democrats: the expiration of pandemic-era enhanced subsidies for insurance plans sold through the Affordable Care Act, which sparked the longest government shutdown in history. Millions of Americans will have to pay hundreds or thousands more for monthly premiums after the extra subsidies expire Dec. 31.
Oz has stressed the subsidies were always meant to be temporary and noted they prompted more fraud in the marketplaces.
“It’s hard to disentangle Oz with the actions of the Trump administration broadly,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA, a consumer healthcare advocacy organization. “He is a main point person for many of the policy changes to make it harder to get on and stay on coverage.”
Oz has walked a fine line, supporting Trump and Kennedy but sometimes smoothing over controversial things they say.
Oz said it’s unfair to call Kennedy, the founder of an anti-vaccine group, “anti-vax” because he questions vaccine safety. He shares Kennedy’s view that the medical establishment has been too reticent to adjust to new evidence.
“That’s one of the hardest things to do in medicine: change your mind,” he said.
But as Kennedy built a career around vaccine skepticism, Oz hewed more closely to the experts. As Kennedy slammed the coronavirus shots, Oz told his viewers to get them. Unlike its sister agencies, CMS hasn’t pulled back on vaccines other than lifting a requirement that hospitals report COVID vaccinations among staff.
When Trump claimed an unproven link between Tylenol and autism, Oz adopted a more measured tone.
After the president repeatedly told pregnant women to avoid Tylenol, Oz told Newsmax that “of course” pregnant women should take Tylenol for a high fever if a doctor tells them to. On “TMZ Live,” he said Tylenol may be the “best option” for fighting lower-grade fevers during pregnancy.
Charming his audience
But Oz has a more basic goal than playing defense for his bosses. He said his chief aim is to improve outreach to people enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid.
“The most important accomplishment at CMS — if I can pull it off — is to talk to our customers,” Oz said.
He finds the Medicare enrollment booklets “dense” and wants to reach more seniors with an email newsletter instead. He made videos with Martha Stewart and Tony Robbins discussing aging. He pretended to call the Medicare hotline to enroll the day after his 65th birthday.
A team of photographers and videographers often tails him, ready if he has a spontaneous idea for a social media post.
Several hours after the cooking competition, Oz trekked to a roomy basement studio on the CMS campus to record videos promoting Medicare and marketplace enrollment.
Standing in front of a green screen, he launched into the first line as though introducing his show: “Medicare open enrollment is coming in hot.”
For a final video, he removed his jacket to demonstrate yoga moves for seniors.
Oz wants his staff to embrace this camera-ready strategy too. Medicare director Chris Klomp recounted running late at night when Oz called him to coach him on a media appearance.
“He believes in the ‘Fox & Friends’ model,” Klomp said, referring to the morning TV show that regularly features three hosts. “It shouldn’t just be the Oz show.”
Four CMS career staffers said he has been good for morale and more visible than past administrators, although some of them have misgivings about Kennedy and Trump.
He attended an employee Zumba class. Last spring, he was “mobbed” by staff during a lunchtime walk around the Baltimore campus, according to Dora Hughes, a career staffer who directs the CMS Center for Clinical Standards & Quality. Oz held a competition over the summer to see who could clock the most steps. He offered tips for “crushing cubicle cravings” during the holiday season as part of a regular agency update e-mailed to staff. “You don’t have to try every cookie on the cookie table,” he wrote.
As he browsed a farmers market in the CMS parking lot in August, a woman giggled as he donned her bright red glasses and posed with her for a photo. Born to Turkish immigrants, he spoke to another woman in Turkish.
Oz is “hard not to like,” said one CMS career employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.
“Part of me thinks it’s a facade,” the employee said. “And part of me thinks it’s a little reassuring.”
FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino announced Wednesday that in January he will leave the powerful job in which he helped oversee a tumultuous period at the bureau with major shifts of resources and dramatic dismissals of experienced agents.
President Donald Trump commended Bongino on his tenure and suggested that he would be returning to his job as a conservative podcaster.
“Dan did a great job. I think he wants to go back to his show,” Trump told reporters Wednesday afternoon.
Bongino — the second most powerful person in the FBI — had left Washington for the year more than a week ago and said he would not be returning to the agency’s headquarters, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel issue they were not authorized to talk about publicly. He had previously told colleagues that his last official day at the bureau will be in January, according to two people familiar with the matter.
“I want to thank President Trump, [Attorney General Pam Bondi] and [FBI Director Kash Patel] for the opportunity to serve with purpose,” Bongino wrote in a social media post announcing his departure. “Most importantly, I want to thank you, my fellow Americans, for the privilege to serve you. God bless America, and all those who defend Her.”
The departure after less than a year would mark the end of a tumultuous tenure for Bongino, who left a lucrative job as a podcaster to serve as second-in-command at the FBI when Trump became president. Bongino serves under FBI Director Kash Patel.
Patel and Bongino have shifted FBI resources to immigration enforcement, sinking morale at an agency that typically attracts law enforcement officials who are trained to work on more complex investigations. They have also pushed out seasoned veterans within the bureau with years of experience in national security and public corruption probes.
Multiple people familiar with his thinking said he has been unhappy at the FBI and has threatened to leave multiple times.
Three months into his job, Bongino expressed frustration with the demands of the deputy director position during a Fox News appearance.
“I gave up everything for this. My wife is struggling,” he said in the May interview. He continued, “I stare at these four walls all day in D.C., by myself, divorced from my wife — not divorced — but, I mean, separated, and it’s hard.”
When Trump named Bongino deputy director, the president transformed what was long a powerful career position that oversaw the day-to-day operations of the bureau into a political job with a more public presence.
Bongino, a Trump loyalist who had previously worked at the Secret Service, built his reputation within right-wing circles during the Biden administration. He did so in part by spreading conspiracy theories about the FBI and its workforce and criticizing law enforcement as politicized.
After Bongino began his job at the FBI and couldn’t prove the baseless theories he spread on his podcast, many of his right-wing supporters turned on him.
Bongino and Patel — also a conservative media personality — used their platforms, for example, to spread inaccuracies about the high-profile sex-trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, accusing the Biden administration without evidence of covering up key details of the case.
When the Justice Department declared during the summer that there was no rumored “client list” tied to Epstein and that the law enforcement agency would not be releasing any more investigatory files, many people directed their ire at Bongino and Patel and accused the Trump administration of lying to the American people.
In August, the Trump administration named then-Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as the FBI’s co-deputy director, installing the Republican firebrand to serve alongside Bongino. Bailey was considered for a top Justice Department position at the beginning of the administration, but the president opted not to nominate him.
Since joining the bureau, Bailey has assumed a more behind-the scenes role than Bongino. Bailey is expected to remain in his slot as deputy director.
Patel and Bongino have pushed out senior FBI officials across the country, often with no stated reason or in response to far-right critics online who have called for the agents’ removals because of cases they may have been involved in. That has prompted multiple lawsuits against the FBI.
The lawsuits have portrayed Bongino and Patel as more concerned with their reputations online than with learning how the FBI operates.
The Trump administration said Tuesday it was breaking up one of the world’s preeminent earth and atmospheric research institutions, based in Colorado, over concerns about “climate alarmism” — a move that comes amid escalating attacks from the White House against the state’s Democratic lawmakers.
“The National Science Foundation will be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado,” wrote Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget on X. “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”
The plan was first reported by USA Today.
The NCAR laboratory in Boulder was founded in 1960 at the base of the Rocky Mountains to conduct research and educate future scientists. Its resources include supercomputers, valuable datasets, and high-tech research planes.
The announcement drew outrage and concern from scientists and local lawmakers, who said it could imperil the country’s weather and climate forecasting, and appeared to take officials and employees by surprise.
NCAR’s dismantling would be a major loss for scientific research, said Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at NCAR and an honorary academic in physics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Trenberth, who joined NCAR in 1984 and officially retired in 2020, said the research center is key to advanced climate science discoveries as well as in informing the climate models that produce the weather forecasts we see on the nightly news.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement that the state had not received information about the administration’s intentions to dismantle NCAR.
“If true, public safety is at risk and science is being attacked,” said Polis. “Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science. NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families.”
The action comes as Republicans have escalated their attacks on Polis and others in the state for their handling of a case involving Tina Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado who was convicted in state court on felony charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. President Donald Trump announced last week that he is pardoning Peters, who is serving a nine-year sentence, but it is unclear whether Trump has that authority, because she was not convicted in federal court.
In a joint statement, Colorado’s two Democratic senators, John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, and Rep. Joe Neguse (D., Colo.) slammed the move and vowed to fight back against it.
In his social media post, Vought said that “any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location” — but did not specify further.
“The Colorado governor obviously isn’t willing to work with the president,” said a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The official declined to cite any specifics about how Polis is refusing to cooperate, from the administration’s perspective, but denied that the move was in response to the state’s refusal to release Peters from prison.
The facility “is not in line with the president’s agenda,” the official added, noting that it had “been on the radar” of the administration “for a while.”
The National Science Foundation, the federal science agency that funds the center, was blindsided by the announcement, according to a person familiar with NSF operations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution. But they said facilities managers at NSF will need to be involved in moving assets or capabilities. An NSF spokesman did not immediately respond to questions about the plan to dismantle NCAR.
Antonio Busalacchi, the president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which oversees NCAR, said it was aware of reports to break up the center but did not have “additional information about any such plan.”
“Any plans to dismantle NSF NCAR would set back our nation’s ability to predict, prepare for, and respond to severe weather and other natural disasters,” Busalacchi said.
An internal email obtained by the Washington Post, sent Tuesday night, emphasized the critical work NCAR does for “community safety and resilience.”
Busalacchi wrote that the news had come as a shock, and the institution had reached out to NSF for more information. “We understand that this situation is incredibly distressing, and we ask that you all continue doing what you have done so well all year — provide support for one another as we navigate this turbulent time,” Busalacchi wrote.
The center is “quite literally our global mother ship,” Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University professor and chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy, wrote on X. “Dismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.”
NCAR plays a unique role in the scientific community by bringing together otherwise siloed specialists to collaborate on some of the biggest climate and weather questions of our time, Caspar Ammann, a former research scientist at the center, said in an email.
“Without NCAR, a lot could not happen,” he said. “A lot of research at US Universities would immediately get hampered, industry would lose access to reliable base data.”
Ammann added that around the world, weather and climate services use NCAR modeling and forecasting tools.
The Colorado-based center draws scientists and lecturers from all over the world, and through its education programs has helped produce future scientists, Trenberth said.
He said he feared not just for the discoveries and data that would be lost if the center were to close, but for the early careers that could also be affected or destroyed.
“If this sort of thing happens, things will go on for a little while,” he said. “But the next generation of people who deal with weather and science in the United States will be lost.”
More than 74,000 people, with an average age of 28, have applied for roles in Zohran Mamdani’s new administration. Those figures are both a measure of enthusiasm for New York City’s incoming mayor and a sign of how tough the job market is for young people in the five boroughs.
Young voters and volunteers fueled the 34-year-old Mamdani’s fast rise from a relatively unknown Queens assemblyman to mayor-elect of America’s largest city. A lot of them had time on their hands: New Yorkers aged 16 to 24 faced a 13.2% unemployment rate in 2024, 3.6 percentage points higher than in 2019, according to a May report from the New York state comptroller.
New York City had a 5.8% unemployment rate overall in August, 1.3 percentage points above the U.S. average. The city added roughly 25,000 jobs this year through September, compared with about 106,000 during the same period in 2024, according to city data.
Mamdani’s campaign pledge to lower the cost of living in New York resonated with voters struggling to find jobs and establish themselves at a time when rents have stayed high and income growth has slowed. Now he’s looking to hire an unspecified number of roles across 60 agencies, 95 mayoral offices, and more than 250 boards and commissions, with senior roles a priority, according to his transition team.
The typical size of the New York City mayoral staff — commissioners, communications, operations and community affairs — is about 1,100, according to Ana Champeny, vice president of research at the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit finance watchdog. City government in total hired 39,455 people in 2024, according to New York City data.
Applications for roles in Mamdani’s administration have come from workers of all experience levels and from a wide range of backgrounds and industries, said Maria Torres-Springer, co-chair of the mayor-elect’s transition team. About 20,000 of the applicants came from out of state.
When Barack Obama was elected U.S. president in 2008, workers submitted more than 300,000 job applications to his administration. Blair Levin, who co-led the technology transition team for Obama, said he received around 3,000 of those resumes. He whittled the pool down to 75, a relatively easy task because he needed applicants with specific tech and economics skills, he said.
Without invoking the term “AI,” Torres-Springer said the applications would be filtered using “the typical technology that any big corporation would have in an applicant-tracking system.” The resumes will then be sorted and matched to different agencies.
Mamdani’s avid use of social media, which helped him connect with young people during his campaign, has continued into his transition efforts, creating excitement — among young people especially — about the prospect of joining his administration.
“The average age does tell a particularly interesting story in two ways,” Torres-Springer said. “It might be because of volatility in the job market but it’s also because I think we are attracting, the administration is attracting, New Yorkers who may not have considered government in the past.”
Take David Kinchen, a 28-year-old data engineer who moved to New York from northern Virginia three years ago. Since getting laid off from a job in fraud detection at Capital One, he has applied for more than 1,000 roles and completed at least 75 interviews without an offer, he said. Kinchen volunteered for Mamdani’s campaign and applied to the administration, highlighting his tech credentials and a passion for photography.
“I did data engineering, so I could help with database decisions. There was also a creative option on the application, since I could work as a staff photographer too,” Kinchen said.
Another applicant, 22-year-old Aurisha Rahman, has struggled to find a job since graduating with a civil-engineering degree from Hofstra University on Long Island.
“The job market is even worse than it was last fall,” Rahman said. Mamdani’s resumé portal was one of the few places she found open to entry-level applicants.
Rahman, who was born and raised in Queens, said she wants to give back to the city where she was raised and wouldn’t be picky about a position. “Whatever they need, I’ll do it. I don’t care,” she said. “Right now, it’s better to be busy with something than nothing.”
The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing this week that a decision to cut energy grants during the government shutdown was influenced by whether the money would go to a state that tended to elect Democrats statewide or nationally.
Government lawyers also wrote in the filing that “consideration of partisan politics is constitutionally permissible, including because it can serve as a proxy for legitimate policy considerations.”
The remarkably candid admission echoes President Donald Trump’s frequent vows to punish cities and states that he sees as his enemies, from withholding disaster relief for Southern California to targeting blue cities with National Guard troops.
It could also raise the possibility that federal attorneys might make similar arguments in legal challenges to other unilateral cuts implemented by the administration for blue cities and states.
The White House budget office and the Energy Department did not respond to requests for comments about the new filing.
A coalition of Minnesota clean energy groups and the city of St. Paul sued the Trump administration last month in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the Energy Department announced it was slashing 321 grants of about $7.5 billion. The cuts included projects to kick-start the hydrogen industry in California, upgrade the electricity grid serving Indigenous communities in New Mexico and generate new energy mostly from wind and solar in Minnesota.
At the time, Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, touted the cuts on X, declaring “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled” and listed blue states.
California’s Democratic lawmakers had complained about partisan interference in the grant cuts, demanding an investigation by the Energy Department’s acting inspector general. Acting inspector general Sarah B. Nelson wrote in a letter to Democrats this week that her office would be looking into the process for canceling grants “and whether those cancellations were in accordance with established criteria.”
In their lawsuit, the Democratic city and clean energy groups argue that cuts to funding in Minnesota were entirely politically motivated. Justice Department attorneys did not agree that it was solely a political decision but instead claimed that politics was one factor.
During the record-long government shutdown that ended in November, Trump and his allies said they would target Democratic priorities and cut funding to programs in mostly Democratic-controlled states.
“A lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” Trump told reporters in October. “We can get rid of a lot of things we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things.”
At the same time, the government has previously been careful not to invoke political considerations in court cases about its decision-making. In an earlier filing in the same St. Paul case, government attorneys wrote that the terminations were “part of a months-long review process by DOE, and the grant terminations made as part of this review process include entities located in both ‘Red States’ and ‘Blue States’ alike.”
The Monday filing marked the first time the government had acknowledged in the court documents that politics was a factor.
Legal experts said the administration’s statement marks a significant departure from legal norms in which agencies have traditionally steered clear of pointing to partisanship in such cases.
“It really undermines the idea that you’re passing neutral laws that you know are supposed to apply equally to everybody,” said Dan Farber, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley. “I find it really startling they would make that concession.”
The groups are alleging that the administration violated their First Amendment rights by targeting a state that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University, said the free speech claim could chart a new course for grantees impacted by cuts after the Supreme Court previously rejected an effort to restore research funding through the National Institutes of Health based on the argument that the cuts were arbitrary and capricious.
“I cannot believe that the Supreme Court would want to allow a partisan tit-for-tat to develop with each party pulling grants from its perceived partisan foes, but one can never be entirely certain these days,” Super wrote in an email.
Eric Schickler, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said the administration may make the argument that politics can be a proxy for policy considerations in other instances where blue states are systematically disadvantaged, especially if it proves successful in this case. Farber, however, said that the blue cities and states suing the administration could use this latest concession against them in legal attacks.
“I believe this is likely a preview of a strategy that the administration will adopt more broadly if the courts go along with it,” Schickler said.
The admission aligned with what some Energy Department employees noticed over the past several months in the cancellation of grants, according to two workers there who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.
One worker said there were internal discussions at Energy about canceling projects across the country, and that staff were told it would be based on an independent review of criteria including technical merit and alignment with administration objectives. But when she saw a leaked list of canceled grants over the summer, it only effected projects in mostly blue areas: Washington, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts.
The second Energy worker said that, over months, he noticed the same: “One of the most important factors deciding which projects get canceled is what state is the performer in. Is it in a blue or a red state?”
A few times, he and his co-workers tried to make the system work to their advantage.
They would take a project with an original location of New York or California and try to find ways to move the same work to Iowa or Georgia — anywhere tinged red. The original recipient of the project was often bummed, he said, but willing to try to salvage the federal funding and the project, even if it went to someone else. It’s not yet clear if that strategy will pan out, he said.
“The work is fine, the administration likes the work, they just don’t like the person doing it,” he said. “It sucks, but it’s better to have the work happen.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) on Tuesday said President Donald Trump has “real problems” within the Republican Party, adding in an interview with CNN that the president is out of touch with voters on key issues such as affordability.
Greene told Kaitlan Collins on The Source that the “dam is breaking” in terms of Trump’s hold onsupport within the party and that she expects Republicans to struggle in next year’s midterm elections.
Citingthe backlash to Trump’s comments on the death of director Rob Reiner, the 13 HouseRepublicans who voted with Democrats to overturn Trump’s executive order on collective bargaining and Indiana Republicans’ rejection of the president’s redistricting push, Greene said she expected “pushback” within the party to grow as lawmakers enter the campaign phase for the upcoming elections.
“I think the midterms are going to be very hard for Republicans,” Greene said. “I’m one of the people that’s willing to admit the truth and say I don’t see Republicans winning the midterms right now.”
The White House did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Greene’s interview.
Greene had carved out a high-profile role as one of Trump’s most vocal allies, first in the “Make America Great Again” movement and then with her support for the “America First” agenda. But after weeks of speaking out against the president on several issues, Greene and Trump had an acrimonious public split last month after she joined with Democrats on a discharge position to compel a House vote calling on the Justice Department to release files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump, who has called Greene a “Lunatic” and “traitor,” withdrew his endorsement of her reelection. Days after the spat, Greene announced she would resign from Congress as of Jan. 5 and has since criticized the administration for being out of touch with core issues affecting MAGA voters, such as the cost of living and healthcare.
Speaking to the Washington Post this week, Greene described herself as a “bellwether” who is closely attuned to Trump’s base. “I say it, and then within four to six months, everybody’s saying the same thing,” she said.
Trump’s advisers have put the criticism down to “cyclical” feedback and have planned for weekly election rallies so Trump can highlight his achievements, the Post has reported. Polling shows Trump maintains support from the vast majority of the party, even though recent polling shows this has dipped slightly below the usual 90% approval mark.
In the CNN interview Tuesday, Greene said she had only broken with Trump on a few issues — such as the release of the Epstein files, artificial intelligence regulation and foreign workers — “but he came down on me the hardest.”
“He’s got real problems with Republicans within the House and the Senate that will be breaking with him on more things to come,” she added.
Greene also said Trump’s supporters “didn’t appreciate” the president’s reaction to the death of Rob Reiner, who was found stabbed to death alongside his wife, photographer Michele Singer Reiner, in their Los Angeles home Sunday. The couple’s son Nick Reiner faces two counts of first-degree murder, among other charges, in their deaths.
In a social media post less than a day after the Reiners’ bodies were found, Trump suggested the director’s death was somehow linked tohis past criticism of the president: “He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”
Trump’s comments drew bipartisan backlash, including from some prominent figures on the right.
“I thought that statement was absolutely, completely below the office of the president of the United States,” Greene told CNN. “Classless and it was just wrong.”
In the interview, Greene described affordability as a “crisis” that Trump has failed to tackle.
“What I would like to see from the president is empathy for Americans,” she said.
“Donald Trump is a billionaire, and he’s the president of the United States. When he looks into a camera and says affordability is a hoax and just totally tries to make nothing out of inflation, he’s talking to Americans that are suffering, and have been suffering for many years now, and are having a hard time making ends meet.”
Pediatrician Kristin Sohl has lost count of how many times parents of children with autism have asked her for a prescription for leucovorin — the drug thrust into the spotlight after President Donald Trump touted it at a White House event this fall.
Since September, despite the rising queries, Sohl has typically told her patients no.
Early clinical trials of the drug showed hints of promise in boosting communication and cognition for some children with autism. But the studies have been small, often just a few dozen participants. Normally, approval by the Food and Drug Administration comes only after years of large-scale testing. But Trump’s pledge to fast-track the drug in September, bypassing that process, has left many doctors on the front lines divided.
“It leaves me as a practicing physician with a lot of unanswered questions,” said Sohl, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, who has been working in the field of autism for over 20 years.
As interest in the drug surges, Facebook groups devoted to it are swelling in membership, message boards are inundated with questions, and Google searches are climbing. Physicians, who typically rely on evidence-based guidelines and clear treatment algorithms, are finding that with leucovorin they must — lacking robust scientific data — improvise. Some are cautiously moving forward with prescribing the drug, but many are still holding off.
At Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., neurodevelopmental pediatrician Sinan Turnacioglu said the hospital convened a meeting of various departments — including those specializing in autism, developmental pediatrics, genetics and psychiatry, as well as primary care doctors — to come up with a systemwide policy. Their conclusion: that they would like to see more robust research before prescribing it.
Peter Crino, chair of neurology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and who runs a clinic for neurodivergent adults, likewise said he believes the medication is not ready for prime time.
“People are asking me a lot about it, but I do not prescribe it. Gosh I hope there will be something to the drug and it will help people in the future, but the data is simply not there yet,” he said.
Limited evidence
Each conversation Sohl has with families unfolds differently, she said, shaped by a child’s history, a parent’s worry, a flicker of hope. But the script she follows is steady: she lays out what research has shown — and what it doesn’t — about the treatment, then asks what the family hopes the drug might change.
In a field with no cure and few therapies, she uses that same framework to guide discussions about the other latest supposed breakthroughs drifting across social media — broccoli extracts, CBD oil, stem cell therapy, and more. The goal isn’t to dismiss any ideas outright but to ground them in evidence, or show the lack of it, before families decide what to do next.
For leucovorin, Sohl’s main message is that “we’re not on solid science yet.” However, there are “potential suggestions of benefit.”
Leucovorin or folinic acid has a long history of use in the context of cancer for about 50 years. It’s been shown to protect healthy cells from the toxic effects of one particular chemotherapy drug and to enhance the effectiveness of another one. Side effects were very minimal but in cancer patients have included nausea and fatigue.
For some children with autism, the immune system may produce antibodies that block the body’s ability to move folate — a vitamin essential for cell growth and DNA production — into the brain. Leucovorin, a prescription form of folate, offers a potential workaround. It crosses the blood-brain barrier by a different route, delivering the nutrient where it’s needed.
The U.S. clinical trial that got Trump’s attention is being conducted by Richard E. Frye, a pediatric neurologist who was formerly an associate professor at Arizona Children’s Hospital in Phoenix. Its design was considered the gold standard — a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trial — but it only had 48 children, ages 5 to 12, in it. In the trial — published in 2018 in the journal Molecular Psychiatry — the drug was well-tolerated and the parents and doctors reported improvements in communication and behavior.
Frye said in an interview that leucovorin did not work on all of his patients. But it did work for many and that children with no verbal utterances began showing meaningful word approximations, for example, and that those with phrase speech began forming full sentences.
There have been four subsequent trials in other countries, and all four of them also reported significant improvements and no serious harm. But they were also very small. A study in France with 19 patients was published in 2020, in Iran with 55 patients in 2021, in India with 40 patients in 2024, and in China with 80 patients in 2025.
The Trump administration latched onto promising research and promoted efforts to expand access to leucovorin for autism, despite the lack of large-scale clinical trials.
But since then, doctors have been proceeding cautiously. At least two influential medical societies have come out with their own interim recommendations. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Society for Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics both do not recommend the routine use of leucovorin for children with autism. But the AAP left an opening for doctors to prescribe it, stating that pediatric care providers “are encouraged to engage in shared decision-making with families who inquire about or request leucovorin, providing clear information about current evidence and potential risks.”
Crino said that many medical research papers — including those on leucovorin — are written in ways families can understand, and he encourages patients and their families to read the primary studies themselves. He often reviews the papers with them, he added, pointing out the limitations of the research. In the 2024 study, which was published in the European Journal of Pediatrics, for example, the authors reported that many children showed improvements in speech, but none went from nonspeaking to speaking, and the study offered no evidence about whether those changes affected daily life.
“There is a lot going on in scientific research that is getting twisted,” he said.
Turnacioglu said that some of his patients receive leucovorin from other providers. In those cases, he focuses on monitoring their progress by first establishing a baseline assessment of language and adaptive skills and then repeating the same evaluations periodically to track any changes.
In those cases, he focuses on monitoring their progress by first establishing a baseline assessment of language and adaptive skills and then repeating these evaluations periodically to track any changes.
He said the growing interest in leucovorin reflects a broader shift toward more personalized autism treatments, fueled by recent research that supports what clinicians have long observed: autism is not a uniform condition that exists along one continuous spectrum, but rather a collection of distinct conditions that have been grouped under a single label. As a result, different people may require different treatments.
“We don’t yet have enough information to use those findings to guide leucovorin treatment,” Turnacioglu said. “But it’s the kind of direction I’m excited about — figuring out which patients are going to respond to particular treatments.”
An exception
Sohl is part of a team of pediatricians who helped draft the AAP guidelines.
The patients that have approached her are all ages and across the spectrum, including adults and individuals with strong verbal skills. For months, she’d explained her reasons for holding back on leucovorin, and most families accepted them.
Then, in October, a patient sat across from her and she began to wonder if this might be an exception.
He was a teen boy she describes as minimally speaking, whom Sohl had been treating for 10 years. She was impressed by his knowledge of the research on leucovorin, his deep and realistic understanding of the potential risks and benefits, and his eagerness to document any changes both quantitatively and in narrative form. Sohl will be meeting with her patient each month to go over any changes.
“I have low expectations, his mom has low expectations, he has low expectations. But we all agreed it was worth a therapeutic trial,” Sohl said.
With the recent national attention, information about leucovorin has been spreading online far faster than through the slow, methodical channels of medical research, where studies and peer-reviewed papers can take years to emerge. She learns from the parents and patients who are often the first to encounter new ideas circulating in their communities and online.
Sohl tells families that while the drug has shown very little in the realm of side effects, this is in the context of adults with cancer, not children with autism. She said she emphasizes that she does not think this is a dangerous medicine, but there has not been enough research.
“I think it’s my duty as a doctor to say that I don’t know,” Sohl said, “and I want you to know I don’t know.”
