BRUSSELS — The gasoline-powered car is outlasting the policies that had aimed to banish it.
The latest example of the combustion engine’s staying power came Tuesday, when the European Union said it would back away from a landmark pledge to ban emissions from new vehicles in 2035. That announcement came one day after Ford said it would scale back electric vehicle production plans, joining a long list of American and European automakers to rethink climate strategies.
Those retreats, taken together, show that the full-on electric transition is far less certain than it might have looked several years ago — and that polluting cars and trucks could remain on roads across Europe and America for decades to come. The moves also sharpen the contrast between the West and China, which has developed a massive and lucrative EV market supplied by state-backed automakers.
In the United States, where President Donald Trump has portrayed electric cars as an expensive “scam,” the White House has cut EV incentives and this month announced plans to weaken fuel efficiency standards for new cars and trucks.
European officials say they favor a future that is mostly electric, and many countries still have EV incentives in place. But Brussels faced intense pressure from the continent’s automakers to dilute the 2035 ban. Those legacy carmakers, with huge workforces and factories built around combustion engines, have struggled to compete with China’s low-cost, high-quality EVs.
The revised proposal will force carmakers to meet 90% fleetwide emissions reductions compared with 2021 levels. That means most vehicles will be fully electric. But it also leaves room for hybrids — including those with a plug-in option — and gas-powered vehicles.
Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, the director of the Center Automotive Research in Bochum, Germany, said he sees the world’s auto industry splitting into three parts — one in the United States, fully supportive of gas cars; one in China, all in on EVs; and another in Europe, where policies are now muddled. He said Chinese automakers are likely to benefit most from that dynamic because the Chinese market dwarfs those in the U.S. and Europe and looks to keep growing — and electrifying.
American and European markets have had a hard time splitting from the gas-powered vehicles because combustion engines have higher profit margins. But that strategy leaves them in a long-term bind.
“In the future, China will define the rules of the car industry,” Dudenhöffer said.
With a license to keep producing gas vehicles, he said, Western manufacturers “earn some kind of short-term windfall. But in the long term, they lose a lot. The advantages of the Chinese carmakers will be larger and larger.”
Ford, in its announcement, said it was seeking out “higher-return opportunities” by expanding gas and hybrid options. It said it would produce a gas-powered pickup truck at a Tennessee plant while putting a hold on production of its flagship EV, the F-150 Lightning.
Carmakers such as Volvo and Porsche have also pulled back from more ambitious EV plans. Earlier this year, Stellantis, which includes the Jeep and Fiat brands, shifted away from plans to be fully electric in Europe by 2030.
The gas vehicle ban had been a core component of Europe’s much-heralded climate plan, introduced four years ago as officials cited the “generational task” of saving the planet. At the time, E.U. leaders said they had put the continent’s car industry — which accounts for 7% of Europe’s gross domestic product — at the forefront of innovation by creating a clear future target.
But large automakers — including Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, and BMW — have seen their market values nosedive. In a strategic error, the EVs they produced tended to be high-end, not for the mass market. In the meantime, leaders in Germany and Italy described the 2035 target as a danger to European jobs.
“Such a hard cutoff in 2035 will not take place, if I have anything to do with it,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had said.
The U.S. Coast Guard on Thursday deleted language from its new workplace harassment policy that had downgraded the definition of swastikas and nooses from overt hate symbols to “potentially divisive,” an abrupt turnaround after the more lenient interpretation of those items was allowed to take effect this week despite objections from Congress.
In a message to all Coast Guard personnel, Adm. Kevin Lunday, the service’s acting commandant, said those revisions had been “completely removed” from the policy manual. The document, a copy of which was reviewed by the Washington Post, now shows a large black bar obscuring the relevant chapter in its table of contents and a message directing readers to a separate manual outlining the Coast Guard’s civil rights policies.
Lunday’s message also says that a separate directive he issued last month prohibiting swastikas and nooses “remains in full effect.”
The sudden turn of events appeared to satisfy Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.) and Jacky Rosen (D., Nev.), who said after Lunday’s announcement that they had lifted their holds on his nomination to become the service’s full-time commandant. Both cited their disapproval of the new policy when explaining earlier this week why they had taken such measures.
Lunday’s announcement caps a tumultuous few weeks within the Coast Guard, following Washington Post reports detailing the service’s plan to include the incendiary language within its new workplace harassment manual, its vow to reverse course in the face of widespread criticism, and the wording’s surprising retention as the new manual took effect earlier this week.
In response to the Post’s initial reporting in late November, Lunday issued an order condemning and categorically prohibiting swastikas and nooses, and said then that his directive would supersede any other policy language. But for reasons that remain unclear, Lunday’s order was never incorporated.
Two people familiar with the policy manual overhaul said this week that the Coast Guard, which is overseen by the Department of Homeland Security, wanted to strike the “potentially divisive” wording from the document but was unable to do so. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the contentious situation.
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 and inclusion 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.
In a statement announcing that she had lifted her hold on his nomination, Rosen said she had put another on Sean Plankey, Trump’s nominee to be the director of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and “will keep that hold in place until we see that this new policy works to protect our men and women in uniform from racist and antisemitic harassment.” She also chastised leadership within the Coast Guard and at DHS who, she said, had been “evasive, misleading, and elusive” as lawmakers sought assurances the “potentially divisive” wording would be cut from the policy manual.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said in a social media post earlier Thursday that the language was being removed from the manual “so no press outlet, entity or elected official may misrepresent the Coast Guard to politicize their policies and lie about their position on divisive and hate symbols.”
Neither DHS nor the Coast Guard has addressed questions seeking to understand whether Lunday, as acting commandant, was empowered to change the manual’s wording on his own or if DHS leadership had to approve it.
The lack of action, particularly amid a rise in antisemitism, incensed an array of lawmakers, including Republicans, who said Lunday had pledged to them that the “potentially divisive” wording would be removed from the policy manual before it went into effect.
Several expressed anger at the existence of an official U.S. government document defining swastikas, inseparable from the extermination of millions of Jews in World War II, and nooses, a symbol of racial hatred, as “potentially divisive.”
Sen. James Lankford (R., Okla.) was among those who registered disapproval with what his office called the Coast Guard’s “conflicting policies.” A GOP aide said Lankford took his concerns directly to the Trump administration and urged officials to change the manual.
The Democratic National Committee will not publicly release its autopsy of the 2024 presidential campaign, party officials said, a reversal intended to avoid a contentious reckoning over the party’s failure.
Operatives involved in drafting the autopsy worried that revisiting Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump would reignite the fiery internal debates that consumed the party in the wake of the 2024 loss at a time when Democrats are eager to celebrate a string of wins in 2025 and focus on the 2026 midterms, the officials said.
But by declining to make the report public, the party is also keeping the lessons learned from its 2024 failures limited to a small group of insiders and dodging a public accounting that many Democrats believe is necessary to avoid repeating past mistakes.
There remain sharp internal debates, for example, over the party’s stance on transgender rights, its handling of generational change, and whether Harris’ selection as President Joe Biden’s replacement on the ticket was properly conducted.
“We completed a comprehensive review of what happened in 2024 and are already putting our learnings into motion,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement that did not directly address the committee’s decision to shield the report. “In our conversations with stakeholders from across the Democratic ecosystem, we are aligned on what’s important, and that’s learning from the past and winning the future. Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.”
Democratic officials briefed on the report’s contents said the autopsy chastises the party for failing to adequately listen to voters in 2024. The report describes a feeble response to concerns about public safety and immigration in particular, allowing Republicans to dominate the issues, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private findings. That amplified the Democrats’ credibility problem on the election’s central issue: the economy.
Another key takeaway, officials said, was that the party took young voters for granted, neglecting a group that normally supports its candidates in overwhelming numbers. As a result, they swung toward Trump, with the president winning a majority of first-time voters and increasing his share of youth voters by double digits. The report faults a party wedded to traditional media that often bypasses these voters. It calls for greater engagement with nontraditional media, something that vexed the Harris campaign.
The report, generated based on hundreds of interviews with Democrats in all 50 states, also highlights missteps in how Democrats contact voters, the officials said, noting that while the party reached more voters than ever last year, the outreach was ineffective, led to poor-quality conversations with swing voters, and came too late in pivotal states. The changes suggested by the party, the officials said, include measuring the success of an outreach program by the impact of the conversations, not the number of attempted calls, while also investing in more long-term party building so voter contact does not begin weeks before Election Day.
Democratic officials have struggled to craft and discuss the report for much of the year amid internal debates over the party’s direction and leadership.
They were in the final stages of preparing it in October and began briefing top operatives and donors on its contents. But the expected public release was delayed until after off-year elections in November, with the party hoping to keep the focus on races they eventually swept in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia.
Those preliminary briefings did not include any reflection on the handling of Biden’s late withdrawal from the race, his perceived infirmity and the lack of a competitive process used to select Harris as his replacement, which many Democrats have said was central to their party’s defeat. Members of the Democratic committee, including Martin, argued that little could be learned from those reflections, given that it is unlikely the party will face a similar situation again. Still, the lack of any reflection on Biden or Harris led some party insiders to criticize the report as intentionally avoiding what many saw as the most decisive issue in the 2024 loss.
The delays in releasing the report have spurred internal Democratic grumbling, and the committee’s decision to keep it private was already stirring up Democratic anger.
“A handful of wins is not the same as the rehabilitation of the Democratic brand, which is required to build real governing majorities and a national coalition,” said Alyssa Cass, a Democratic operative in New York. ”Achieving that requires real soul-searching and new ideas, and it would be nice for candidates and campaigns to know they had a partner in that hard work, instead of an institutional structure buried in the sand.”
Other Democrats echoed Cass, casting the decision as the Democratic National Committee looking to obscure its own failings in 2024.
But some Democratic operatives, especially those close to the committee, praised the decision as prudent. “Democrats don’t need to engage in a hand-wringing exercise about last year’s elections when we’re winning this year’s elections,” said Xochitl Hinojosa, a former top spokesperson for the DNC.
How the party handles learning from the 2024 loss could prove critical for years to come. Democratic officials and campaign operatives from winning campaigns this year have already said they used lessons from the 2024 campaign to strengthen their operations. And some of the party’s most high-profile members, including Harris, have begun to break from the policies that defined the Biden administration.
In a speech Friday night at the Democratic National Committee meeting in Los Angeles, Harris argued that both Democrats and Republicans have failed to address Americans’ deep financial anxieties and lack of confidence in government.
“Both parties have failed to hold the public’s trust. Government is viewed as fundamentally unable to meet the needs of its people,” Harris said in an implicit condemnation of the Biden administration, which she served in for four years as his vice president and defended throughout her unsuccessful presidential campaign.
Trump “is not the only source of our problems,” Harris said, arguing that the rise of his political movement is “a symptom of a failed system that is the result of years of outsourcing and offshoring, financial deregulation, growing income inequality, a broken campaign finance system and endless partisan gridlock.”
The Trump administration will repurpose $2.6 billion in military housing assistance to pay $1,776 “warrior dividend” bonuses to service members, according to a senior administration official.
In a prime-time address Wednesday night, President Donald Trump announced the Christmastime bonuses “in honor of our nation’s founding in 1776.”
“Nobody deserves it more than our military. And I say congratulations to everybody,” Trump said.
The president said the money for the bonuses came from revenue from import taxes he’s imposed on trading partners worldwide. That was incorrect, however, and Trump does not have the authority to spend the money from tariffs without authorization from Congress.
But lawmakers this summer did approve $2.9 billion to supplement the military’s basic allowance for housing as part of Trump and the GOP’s mammoth tax and immigration law, the One Big Beautiful Bill.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Pentagon to spend most of that money as a one-time payout on the bonuses, said the senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
The use of the housing funds to pay the bonuses was reported earlier by Defense One.
Roughly 1.45 million service members, including 174,000 reservists, will receive the bonuses, which Hegseth said in a video Thursday would be tax-free.
“This warrior dividend serves as yet another example of how the War Department is working to improve the quality of life for our military personnel and their families,” Hegseth said.
Trump renamed the Department of Defense as the Department of War in September, designating that as the department’s “secondary title” and authorizing its use. It’s unclear whether Trump has the authority to permanently rename cabinet departments without congressional approval.
“I can think of no better Americans to receive this check right before Christmas, whether it’s for pay, housing, faith, support, all elements of what we’re doing are to rebuild our military,” Hegseth said.
The defense secretary called the payment “a direct investment in the brave men and women who carry on the legacy of our armed forces every single day,” and said military members in pay grades E-1 to O-6 would be eligible. The top pay grade eligible includes the ranks of colonel in the Air Force, Army, Marines and Space Force, and captain in the Navy and Coast Guard.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump said his staff originally presented him with a plan for $1,775 bonuses.
“And I said, ‘Wow, I think we can afford one more dollar,’” Trump said.
In Congress, reaction to the bonuses was mixed, largely along party lines. Sen. Roger Wicker (Mississippi), the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview that the payments were “quite appropriate.”
He added in a statement that the bonuses would “put real money in the pockets of our service members and their families, helping provide greater stability and improved housing options as they manage the unique demands of military life.”
Sen. Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the top Democrat on the panel, said he was concerned that pulling the money for the bonuses from the housing assistance program would prevent the Defense Department from improving housing for service members and conducting overdue maintenance.
“There has been a real fundamental need for housing improvements and maintenance,” Reed said. “I think they could find a better source for the funds.”
Sen. Chris Coons (Delaware), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, was more blunt — both about the purpose of the checks and Trump’s authority to issue them.
“Read the Constitution! You can’t just sprinkle the country with checks just because you came up with it late at night,” Coons said.
The National Defense Authorization Act, which Trump is set to sign into law Thursday evening, approves pay increases for troops, and the annual appropriations bill — which Congress has yet to pass — funds it, he said.
“That’s how we do this, not game-show checks. Not last minute whimsy by a president,” Coons said. “This is a classic campaign stunt that does not serve our warfighters, our Constitution, or our republic well.”
The Trump administration has a track record of aggressively shifting resources around the Pentagon to goose service members’ compensation.
During the government shutdown, the administration twice moved money from other parts of the Pentagon budget to keep paying troops. Doing so without the approval of lawmakers — who normally have a say over large changes in federal spending — was controversial in Congress, where aides from both parties acknowledged that the move was probably illegal.
ROME — In his highest-profile move to direct the U.S. church since becoming pope, Leo XIV accepted the resignation of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the prominent archbishop of New York, replacing him with a 58-year-old Illinois native who “played in the same parks, went swimming in the same pools [and] liked the same pizza places” as the Chicago-born pope.
Ronald A. Hicks, currently bishop of the Diocese of Joliet, southwest of Chicago, is viewed as cut from the same theological cloth — as well as nearly the same streets — as the new pontiff. He will take over one of the most visible archdioceses in the Catholic world at a time when it is grappling with the serious financial fallout of the clerical abuse scandals.
The product and protégé of influential figures in the Chicago church, including Cardinal Blase Cupich, Hicks is widely seen as a mild-mannered moderate, observers say, who rarely delves into the world of divisive politics. That is likely to mark a tonal shift from Dolan, a charismatic conservative who delivered blessings at both of President Donald Trump’s inaugurations and compared slain activist Charlie Kirk to a saint, and whom the U.S. leader has described as a “great friend.”
“I believe the message from Leo is that he wants an archbishop of New York who can be less identified with one political party, with one platform, with one trench in this situation of polarization,” said Massimo Faggioli, a professor in ecclesiology at Trinity College Dublin.
“Hicks is not a woke liberal for sure, but I believe he is very different from Dolan, whose instincts were to very openly justify and excuse President Trump,” Faggioli said. “I don’t think that’s going to continue, honestly. This is a sign of change.”
At St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan on Thursday, Dolan introduced Hicks to the media as an “early Christmas gift.” Hicks thanked him and Leo and reassured New Yorkers that while he was a Chicago Cubs and deep-dish fan, he loved their pizza and would root for their teams.
He said he understood that these were “complex and challenging days.”
“I feel the hope that so many who came to our shores … came through this very harbor here in New York, including my own family” carried, he said. “I am committed to working … to make real the promise of the golden door by acting in mutual respect and working to uphold human dignity.”
Switching to Spanish, Hicks, who, like Leo, spent years serving the church in Latin America, expressed deep love of the “Latino culture” and “Hispanic people.”
In a telephone interview with the Washington Post, Cupich compared Hicks in some respects to a fellow Chicagoan: the pope.
Both men, he said, emphasize “listening.”
Hicks would not hesitate to “speak out” when warranted, but “he’s not going to come at things in terms of an ideology,” he added.
“So he’s an individual who’s going to look at what the facts are and, and focus on how people’s lives can hear the truth of the Gospel. And walk with people in a very patient way.”
“I think he’s a balanced individual who knows and accepts the tradition of the church, but also is one who realizes, as Pope Francis put it, that realities are greater than ideas,” Cupich said of Hicks.
The decision — announced Thursday by the Vatican but widely rumored for days — places Hicks atop the Archdiocese of New York, second in size only to Los Angeles’ in the United States, at an age that is one year younger than Dolan when Pope Benedict XVI named him to the job in 2009.
In the Catholic Church, bishops and cardinals are expected to offer resignations upon turning 75 — an age Dolan reached in February. Acceptance is at the prerogative of the pope, and cardinals can and do serve longer. Leo has said he would like to make retirement at 75 the norm for the Catholic hierarchy, but he has also spelled out room for exceptions for some cardinals, who, he has said, could serve for up to an additional two years.
“We must all cultivate the inner attitude that Pope Francis has defined as ‘learning to say goodbye,’ a valuable attitude when preparing to leave one’s position,” Leo said in an address last month.
The appointment elevates an apprentice of Cupich — one of Leo’s staunchest allies and a cleric who has been criticized by some conservatives for showing leniency to politicians who support abortion rights and welcoming LGBTQ+ Catholics.
Both Leo and Hicks were Chicago Catholics influenced by one of the most important figures in the 20th-century American church — Joseph Bernardin, a former cardinal and archbishop of Chicago. Bernardin, who ordained Hicks, defended the changes of Vatican II in the 1960s and promoted the “consistent ethic of life” that sought to link views against abortion to opposition to the death penalty and nuclear weapons.
Some ultraconservative Catholics noted that Leo had appeared to seize an opportunity to replace Dolan, rather than permit him — as frequently happens — to serve beyond age 75. Some noted that Leo this week also elevated Bishop Ramón Bejarano, who has publicly apologized to LGBTQ+ Catholics for the “pain” caused to them by the church, to head the Diocese of Monterey, California.
In recent weeks, Leo — who has repeatedly said he does not want to exacerbate political divisions — has grown bolder about criticizing the policies of the Trump administration, describing its migrant crackdown as “inhuman” and taking aim at U.S. attacks against alleged drug boats off the Venezuelan coast.
Perhaps the highest-profile American Catholic cleric, Dolan is a media-savvy traditionalist who, ahead of the 2024 election, praised Trump — who is not Catholic — for taking “his Christian faith seriously.”
During a September appearance on Fox & Friends, Dolan called Kirk “a modern-day Saint Paul.”
“He was a missionary, he’s an evangelist, he’s a hero,” Dolan said. “He’s one, I think, that knew what Jesus meant when he said, ‘The truth will set you free.’”
As frequently happens with Catholic clerics, however, Dolan was not always easy to label — and was criticized by some archconservatives for permitting celebrations for LGBTQ+ Catholics in his archdiocese.
Some saw Hicks’s selection by Leo as one of balance. He is seen, for instance, as less “liberal” than, say, Cardinal Robert McElroy, who was named archbishop of Washington in January by Francis.
“I think that Hicks will be less vocal on political issues than Dolan and McElroy,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior analyst at the Religious News Service. “I think, especially at the beginning, he will focus on the pastoral. For example, on immigration, he simply endorsed and repeated what the [U.S. bishops conference] had said.”
Hicks mixes pastoral outreach with a more traditional focus on the Holy Eucharist and the role of Christ at Mass. His appointment comes after U.S. bishops named a noted conservative — Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley — to head their conference last month.
“Here we see the road map of Leo — which is to overcome polarization,” Marco Politi, a longtime Rome-based Vatican watcher, said of Hicks’ appointment.
Born in Harvey, Ill., Hicks was ordained to the priesthood in Chicago in 1994. Like Leo, he served the church for years in Latin America, in Hicks’ case, as director of an orphanage in El Salvador. Cupich appointed him vicar general of the Archdiocese of Chicago in 2015 and an auxiliary bishop in 2018. Pope Francis elevated him in 2020 to serve as bishop of Joliet.
Asked about Leo by Chicago station WGNTV after the pope’s May selection to replace Francis, Hicks said: “I recognize a lot of similarities between him and me. So we grew up literally in the same radius, in the same neighborhood together. We played in the same parks, went swimming in the same pools, liked the same pizza places to go to. I mean, it’s that real.”
That doesn’t mean they see eye-to-eye on everything.
Leo “is and always will be a [White] Sox fan,” Hicks said. “And, I grew up a Cub fan. I’m a Cubs fan because my father is a die-hard Cubs fan. He wanted us to know we were loved, but that we’d stay Catholic and Cubs fans. In my family, there was not getting around either of those things.”
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.
