Dark Days at DHS

Many posts have discussed immigration. 

Vanessa Romo at NPR:

One of the last remaining checks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and private-prison contractors running immigration detention centers has all but collapsed, leaving thousands of people trapped in a system with nearly nonexistent oversight, according to an NPR review.

The grievance system in immigration detention is designed to offer a safe channel to report violations of detention standards and seek redress, without fear of retaliation. It's often the only recourse for people to submit complaints about detention issues, including mistreatment, unsanitary conditions, medical neglect and sexual assault. But an NPR review of documents, available data and interviews with experts has found the system — which in the best of times was a complex patchwork — barely operates and even at times backfires for those using it. It is one of the few remaining safeguards for immigrants in federal custody after the Trump administration effectively dismantled other oversight offices.

...

Trying to enforce the rules of the grievance system has always been challenging, Chris Brundage, the former deputy of the now-closed Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, told NPR.

That's partly because it's not one single set of standards that all operators must follow, Brundage said. "It's a patchwork system that has never worked as intended," he said, explaining that there are at least three different sets of detention standards that operators are working under, depending on when they signed their contracts. (Some operators are following guidelines established in 2011. Others, an updated version from 2016, and those with new contracts are following 2019 standards.)

...

The Office of Detention Oversight, created by Congress to conduct internal inspections, and the Immigration Detention Ombudsman's office tasked with investigating detainee deaths and other issues have had their budgets gutted and suffered massive layoffs. Both agencies sit within DHS. In the case of the ombudsman's office, one of the only places that detainees could turn to to challenge a grievance denial outside of the immediate detention facility, it was fully shuttered in May.

Another office whose budget has been slashed is the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Brundage noted. In 2025, the administration slashed the CRCL staff from roughly 150 employees down to just a handful, effectively halting operations. The Government Accountability Project reported more than 500 active civil rights and detention-abuse complaints — including allegations of medical neglect, sexual abuse and dangerous conditions in immigration detention — were frozen or left uninvestigated.

...

"I think what happened when these offices were effectively gutted and shut down, you lost that … legitimacy. And legitimacy means that they're following the laws, regulations. But what happens if you don't have transparency into the process and you don't have accountability? Without those two things, that legitimacy erodes, " Brundage said.

GAO Confirms That DOGE Was Sketchy

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Like previous efforts to reduce the deficit by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," DOGE was a failure.

DOGE Wall of Receipts: More Transparency Needed on How Savings Are Derived from Contract, Grant, and Lease Terminations GAO-26-108615 Published: Aug 06, 2026. Publicly Released: Aug 06, 2026.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began posting its estimated savings on a web page known as the Wall of Receipts on February 17, 2025. As of July 7, 2026, the Wall of Receipts reported savings of $110 billion across contracts, grants, and leases, but some savings estimates are incorrect or lack supporting evidence. While DOGE provided some information about estimated savings, several issues limit the transparency and reliability of these reported savings.

• DOGE was not transparent regarding methodologies used to calculate savings. Specifically, DOGE did not use its stated methodology to calculate the majority of savings associated with the contracts reported as terminated. For grants, DOGE did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent of DOGE-reported savings. Similarly, the Wall of Receipts does not include an explanation of how the savings from terminated leases were calculated.
• The Wall of Receipts includes leases identified for termination before DOGE was established. Specifically,108 of the 264 leases identified for termination on the Wall of Receipts, about $15.3 million of the total $53.5 million in savings, were already in process for termination when DOGE was established.
• GAO’s review of selected contracts identified potential cost savings, but the basis for some reported savings is unknown. For example, DOGE reported $1.7 billion in savings on the Department of Defense’s Defense Health Agency contract for IT services at more than 700 military treatment facilities worldwide. While DOGE initially identified the contract for termination, in the end, no action was taken to terminate the contract, or to reduce scope, value, or funding. Thus, no savings were achieved.

While the Wall of Receipts includes some information about the data and sources underlying reported savings, it does not sufficiently disclose limitations affecting data quality. GAO’s key practices for transparently reporting government information state that federal government websites should disclose known data quality issues and limitations.

DOGE launched the initial iteration of the Wall of Receipts in February 2025 less than a month after the entity was established in January 2025. Since the initial launch, there have been no updates on the site to shed additional light on the cost savings methodology or to disclose any data limitations. As of July 7, 2026, the web page remains live. Because U.S. DOGE Service officials did not respond to requests for information, GAO could not determine the reasons why DOGE did not disclose data quality issues and limitations when the website first went live or at any time since then. Publicly reporting government data, such as on the Wall of Receipts, can have significant value. However, conveying the methodologies used to calculate savings, as well as any data limitations on the Wall of Receipts, would provide policymakers and the public with the needed caveats to better interpret and use the information.

Hamilton and the Removal Power

Previous posts have discussed the appointment and removal of executive branch officials.

Gary Schmitt at AEI:

During the First Congress’s debate in which James Madison and others defended the ideas that the president had the constitutional power to remove department heads “at pleasure,” one of Madison’s opponents noted that, in Federalist #77, Alexander Hamilton had written that the Senate’s consent would be necessary not only for an official’s appointment but also “to displace” them. Madison and Hamilton, the two most influential expositors of the newly adopted constitution were seemingly at odds over how the government would remove senior administration figures.

Hamilton, alerted to the fact that his statement in Federalist #77 had been used to challenge Madison’s argument sent a note (see William Smith letter to Edward Rutledge, June 21, 1789) to a Madison ally in the House to let its members know that “upon more mature reflection,” he now agreed with Madison. The power to remove was the president’s alone as a constitutionally implied power of the office.

...

Gutting the Diplomatlic Corps

Many posts have discussed federal employment and bureaucracy.

Abigail Williams at NBC

The State Department declined to provide exact numbers. According to the American Foreign Service Association, around 2,000 U.S. diplomats have left the Foreign Service over the last year, either through layoffs or forced retirements, taking with them decades of institutional knowledge, experience in crisis response and highly specialized language skills paid for by the U.S. government.

Their departure from a workforce that was estimated to be more than 13,000 in 2024 leaves the U.S. at a critical disadvantage, current and former State Department officials say, at a time when the nation is facing an escalating number of foreign policy crises.

...

The leadership vacuum is large. The ambassadorship in Moldova is still vacant, along with more than half of ambassadorships around the globe, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where a worsening Ebola outbreak began. There is no ambassador to Ukraine, and seasoned diplomat Julie Davis, who has been leading the embassy in Kyiv while simultaneously serving as ambassador to Cyprus, is stepping down next month to join others in retirement.

...

In the Middle East, where the U.S. continues to navigate a war with Iran and the fallout with regional allies, half of the U.S. missions, including four Persian Gulf countries, are without formal U.S. ambassadors. Pakistan and Qatar, where officials have taken on critical mediating roles in negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, are without ambassadors.

The absences contributed to the frantic effort to evacuate thousands of Americans who became stranded, and withdraw personnel when Iran began retaliating across the region in March, current and former diplomats say.

Not good pic.twitter.com/yvodGttLpV

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) June 4, 2026

ICE Loses in Court -- A Lot

Many posts have discussed immigration.

 Kyle Cheney at POLITICO:

Ten thousand losses.

That’s the Trump administration’s track record in court as federal judges grapple with the way ICE agents have swept through major U.S. cities and detained thousands of people in support of President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda.

More than 10,000 times, judges have said those detentions, typically carried out with no opportunity for detainees to plead their case, were illegal. That’s roughly 90 percent of all cases — a staggering rejection of a core piece of Trump’s immigration agenda.

Trump’s unprecedented detention policy, which is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court, infuriated lower courts in ways no other modern issue has. It ruptured the relationship between the Justice Department and the judiciary; pitted the administration against itself; and upended innumerable lives — not just of the people swept up by immigration agents, but of their spouses and children, many of whom are U.S. citizens.

POLITICO is tracking the tens of thousands of detention cases that have flooded the system since ICE adopted its detention policy last July. Today we are releasing a full database of those rulings, giving the public an opportunity to see under the hood of our reporting — which has documented the courts’ lopsided results, ICE’s tactics for defying judges’ orders and the rising tensions between the judiciary and the Trump administration.

Federal Boards and Commissions: the Partisanship Issue

Many posts have discussed regulation and the administrative state. 

Chris Piper at the Partnership for Public Service:

Since returning to office, Trump has systematically targeted Democratic members of partisan-balanced boards and commissions. Now, nearly 40% of partisan-balanced boards and commissions have no Democratic members at all. This represents a rapid and historically unprecedented shift in the composition of bodies Congress designed to operate with bipartisan representation.

Of the 33 full-time boards and commissions, 23 include some form of partisan balancing requirement, typically limiting any one party to a bare majority of seats.

Partisan balancing requirements were designed not just to ensure representation, but to force internal contestation—replacing unilateral decision-making with structured disagreement and consensus building. Beyond cross-partisan deliberation, Congress has viewed partisan balancing as an “important restraint on the President from filling every commission seat with Administration partisans.”

In practice, presidents of both parties have historically maintained opposition-party representation, replacing members gradually as terms expired and often renominating incumbents. The Senate reinforced this practice through a long-standing norm of considering nominees to boards and commissions in bipartisan pairs. For example, through 2020, roughly 90% of Federal Election Commission members were confirmed this way.

Trump has abandoned these norms entirely. Since returning to office, he has fired or attempted to fire 16 Democratic members across 11 partisan-balanced boards and commissions while declining to nominate Democratic replacements. Over the same period, 12 new Republican members have been confirmed and zero Democrats.

Problems at Federal Agencies

 Many posts have discussed federal employment and bureaucracy.

Thomas Frank at Politico:

President Donald Trump has rejected disaster aid for Democratic-run states at the highest rate in the 47-year history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

He approved just 23 percent of disaster funding requests from states with a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators since returning to office 14 months ago. For states with a Republican governor and two Republican senators, it’s the opposite — Trump has approved 89 percent of their requests.

There has never been such a sharp partisan disparity in the approval of federal disaster funds since FEMA was created in 1979, according to a review of 2,500 natural disaster declarations by POLITICO’s E&E News.

The denials have blocked Democratic-led states from getting a total of $250 million in disaster aid that would have been approved by every previous president including Trump in his first term, E&E News found.

Trump rejected most of the requests even after FEMA had documented that the damage met its financial threshold to warrant receiving federal aid.

 Sarah Fitzpatrick writes at The Atlantic about FBI Director Kash Patel:

Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff. He is also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Some of Patel’s colleagues at the FBI worry that his personal behavior has become a threat to public safety. An FBI director is expected to be available and focused on his job—especially when the nation is at war with a state sponsor of terrorism. Current and former officials told me that they have long worried about what would happen in the event of a domestic terrorist attack while Patel is in office, and they said that their apprehension has increased significantly in the weeks since Trump launched his military campaign against Iran. “That’s what keeps me up at night,” one official said

Troubled Public Service

 Many posts have discussed federal employment and bureaucracy.

From the Partnership for Public Service:

In 2025, the Trump administration took direct aim at our nation’s professional civil servants through numerous legally contested workforce reductions, haphazard agency restructuring efforts, the unilateral cancellation of government funding without approval from Congress and the weaponization of some federal agencies. This assault on federal civil servants and our national government has resulted in a demoralized and less engaged workforce that has made our country less safe, unhealthier and less prosperous. And when employee engagement suffers, as it has during this past year, our government’s ability to provide essential services to the public declines.

Last August, the Office of Personnel Management canceled the administration of its annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, an instrument that has measured organizational performance across four administrations, including the first term of President Donald Trump, and fulfilled a legal requirement that agencies survey their workforces and make the data public. Consequently, government leaders have been lacking an essential tool that ensures they are effectively managing their workforce to meet the needs of the public.

As a result of this decision, the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service administered its proprietary Public Service Viewpoint Survey to capture the impact of the administration’s actions on government performance and to continue our tradition of holding leaders accountable for improving their workplaces through programming like the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government®.

Unfortunately, the data is clear: The Trump administration has received a failing grade on its management of our government from those who serve our country—the federal workforce.

Our survey data and accompanying anonymous focus groups with federal employees provide stories and experiences of a workforce that has been systemically harassed as well as impeded from providing essential services to the public during the first year of the second Trump administration.

While the results of this survey are not directly comparable with the Office of Personnel Management’s annual FEVS, it contains similar questions and presents the best data source available about the state of federal employee engagement and the impact that it has on essential services for the public. The survey results represent the perspectives of 11,083 employees from across government. To ensure the results are valid and as representative as possible of the opinions of the workforce, we modeled our eligibility requirements and approach to response weighting based on the methodology of the 2024 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.

RFK Stacks Vaccine Panel: Judge Smacks Him Down

Judge Brian E. Murphy: ORDER entered. MEMORANDUM AND ORDER on Plaintiffs' Motion for Preliminary Injunction. Plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary relief is GRANTED in part.(i) The Court STAYS the January 2026 Memo revising the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 705. (ii) The Court STAYS the appointments of the thirteen ACIP members appointed on June 11, 2025, September 11, 2025, and January 13, 2026. (iii) The Court further STAYS all votes taken by the now-stayed ACIP.(MBM) (Entered: 03/16/2026)

Federal District Judge Brian Murphy:

“Science,” like law, “is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge.”  Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark 29 (1997).  History is littered with once-universal truths that have since come under scrutiny.  Nevertheless, science is still “the best we have.”  Id.1   

“Procedure is to law what scientific method is to science.”  In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 21 (1967) (cleaned up).  Although sometimes seemingly tedious, “the procedural rules which have been fashioned from the generality of due process are our best instruments for the distillation and evaluation of essential facts from the conflicting welter of data that life and our adversary methods present.”  Id. 

For our public health, Congress and the Executive have built—over decades—an apparatus that marries the rigors of science with the execution and force of the United States government. One extraordinary product of that apparatus has been the eradication and reduction of certain communicable diseases through the development and use of vaccines.  In the words of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”), “[v]accines are one of the greatest achievements of biomedical science and public health.”2  Since the rise of vaccine development and usage in the early- to mid-1900s, “[t]he United States of America [has been] one of the pioneering nations to conceptualize and implement a robust immunization system that helped the nation tackle major epidemics.”3 

Since its founding in 1964, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (“ACIP”) has aided this endeavor by providing expert guidance on the clinical use of vaccines.4  The Department of Health and Humans Services (“HHS”), which indirectly oversees ACIP, formalized ACIP’s non-partisan, science-backed nature through ACIP’s governance documents.5  And Congress has, in turn, recognized the importance and value of having such independent experts involved in setting our national public health agenda by cementing ACIP’s role in the CDC’s issuance of immunization schedules, which—among other things—determines which vaccines are available to patients through insurers and government healthcare programs.6  This is all to say that there is a method to how these decisions historically have been made—a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements. 

Unfortunately, the Government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.  First, the Government bypassed ACIP to change the immunization schedules, which is both a technical, procedural failure itself and a strong indication of something more fundamentally problematic: an abandonment of the technical knowledge and expertise embodied by that committee.  Second, the Government removed all duly appointed members of ACIP and summarily replaced them without undertaking any of the rigorous screening that had been the hallmark of ACIP member selection for decades. Again, this procedural failure highlights the very reasons why procedures exist and raises a substantial likelihood that the newly appointed ACIP fails to comport with governing law. 

Today, faced with Plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary relief, the Court concludes that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed in showing that the reconstitution of ACIP and the January 2026 changes to the childhood immunization schedule violate the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”).  For the reasons stated below, the Court will grant Plaintiffs’ motion in part.  

CMC Connects: Presidential Power in 2026

Hard Power

Executive Orders

Personnel

• Net reduction of 242,260 employees
• Political and ideological considerations
• SCOTUS case on the FTC

Pardons

Use of Force

CRS counts 469 foreign interventions between 1798 and 2022

Since January 20, 2025:

• Venezuela: boat bombings and capture of Maduro):
• Iran: Airstrikes on nuclear facilities 
• Yemen: Air strikes against Houthi militants
• Counterterrorism Strikes in Iraq, Nigeria, and Somalia.

Domestic use of National Guard, CBP, and ICE

Investigation and Prosecution

• James Comey: charges of making false statements to Congress and obstruction related to his 2020 testimony. The indictment was  dismissed.
• John Bolton: indictment for alleged unauthorized retention and transmission of classified information.
• Letitia James New York Attorney General indicted in October 2025 on bank fraud and false statements charges.  Case dismissed. 
•  Jerome H. Powell said DOJ as opened a criminal investigation into Powell; prosecutors are looking at cost overruns.

Threats: Regulatory Action and Funding

• Universities and funding
• Law firms representing Trump adversaries:  contracts
• Media companies and FCC license threats

Soft Power:  "Power to Persuade"

Support from congressional Republicans and One Big Beautiful Bill

Public approval is down

Disappearing Data

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

A number of posts have discussed presidential documents, official data, and government websites.

Shifra Dayak and Anna Kramer at NOTUS:

NOTUS verified dozens of instances of lapsed federal data to capture the range of information that is no longer being collected, has been paused or is now not available to the public. This is only a small sample of the data collection the Trump administration has made changes to:The Department of Agriculture terminated a report on household food security in September, claiming it was “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.” Feeding America said it relied on this survey to guide its programs.

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped releasing data on maternal and infant mortality in April 2025 after the administration placed all of the agency staff managing the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System on administrative leave. The data collection resumed in at least some states in July 2025, but recent data contains gaps.
• Trump directed the Justice Department last year to suspend a Biden-era database tracking misconduct by federal law enforcement officers.
• The administration removed questions on gender identity from the National Crime Victimization Survey, the National Health Interview Survey and other surveys. Homeless shelters, mental health hotlines and substance use recovery programs all used this data for policymaking and planning.
• The Department of Homeland Security ended public access in October to its public safety and infrastructure dataset, called Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data.
• The National Center for Education Statistics missed a mandated deadline to release its annual report on the condition of the American education system, and the materials released were lacking in data compared to previous years.
• The Health and Human Services Department’s 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health omitted information about drug use based on race and ethnicity. HHS laid off the team that collected the data, though the agency is reportedly working with a contractor to resume its collection.
• The Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Education and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration no longer allow researchers to apply to access and study their data.
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics produces fewer calculations for its producer price index program and has cut down where it collects data from.

Some of these cuts were made without any public fanfare, like the administration’s decision to end DAWN. [Drug Abuse Warning Network]  In other cases, agencies slipped the news into routine announcements. And occasionally, like when the White House mandated that questions about gender identity be removed from federal surveys, the administration touted the deletions as quelling “gender ideology extremism.”

Failed State: Wildfire Recovery

Many posts have discussed disasters.

 David Zahniser at LAT:

It was supposed to be a speech with a clear message of hope for survivors of the Palisades fire.

In her State of the City address in April, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called for a law exempting fire victims from construction permit fees — potentially saving them tens of thousands of dollars as they rebuild their homes.

Eight months later, the City Council is still debating how much permit relief the city can afford. Palisades residents have been left hanging, with some blaming Bass for failing to finalize a deal.
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“This should have been pushed, and it wasn’t pushed,” said electrician Tom Doran, who has submitted plans to rebuild his three-bedroom home. “There was no motor on that boat. It was allowed to drift downstream.”

Since the Jan. 7 fire destroyed thousands of homes, Bass has been announcing recovery strategies with great fanfare, only for them to get bogged down in the details or abandoned altogether.


After two of the most destructive fires in the state’s history, The Times takes a critical look at the past year and the steps taken — or not taken — to prevent this from happening again in all future fires.
Read the stories

At one point, she called for the removal of traffic checkpoints around Pacific Palisades, only to reverse course after an outcry over public safety. She pushed tax relief for wildfire victims in Sacramento, only to abruptly pull the plug on her bill. Her relationship with Steve Soboroff, her first and only chief recovery officer, quickly unraveled over pay and other issues. He left after a 90-day stint.

Critics in and outside the Palisades say the mayor’s missteps have undermined public confidence in the rebuilding process. They have also made her more politically vulnerable as she ramps up her campaign for a second term.

Pandemic Preparedness

Many posts have discussed COVID and pandemic preparedness.

Britt Lampert and Anemone Franz at  The Hill:

The White House’s pandemic preparedness team has quietly withered to a single part-time employee.

Last month, Dr. Gerald Parker, the top White House pandemic preparedness official, resigned as senior director for the National Security Council’s Biosecurity and Pandemic Response directorate. His exit drew needed, though still scant, attention to a troubling reality: the biosecurity office now has no full-time staff, and the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR), which some headlines mistakenly claimed Parker led, has sat empty since late June.

This collapse comes as pandemic preparedness and public health programs are being dismantled, measles outbreaks in undervaccinated communities reach a 33-year high, and H5N1 bird flu spreads through U.S. farms. The White House offices responsible for coordinating the U.S. government’s response to biological threats have effectively vanished.

Congress established OPPR in 2022 with broad bipartisan support to coordinate and strengthen domestic pandemic preparedness and response. It worked alongside the National Security Council’s Global Health Security and Biodefense directorate (renamed Biosecurity and Pandemic Response, or BPR, in 2025), which focused on global threats to national security.

As OPPR’s first (and so far only) director, Maj. Gen. Paul Friedrichs told Congress the office was meant to build on “the foundation laid by multiple administrations over the past twenty years which have recognized that biological threats are increasing in frequency and impact.

 Jennifer Calfas, Josh Dawsey and  Sabrina Siddiqui at WSJ:

As President Trump sat with top donors at his New Jersey golf club this month, he made a private admission: He believed the coronavirus vaccine was one of the biggest accomplishments of his presidency, but he couldn’t bask in it.

Trump told donors at a dinner—who were paying $1 million to be there—that he wished he could talk more about Operation Warp Speed, the government program he initiated that helped expedite the development of the vaccine, attendees said. The guests included Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla, whose company developed one of the first Covid-19 vaccines.

Trump’s private comments illuminate the fraught politics around vaccines that the White House is confronting, which reached a boiling point Wednesday after the administration fired the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other top officials quit their jobs in the midst of disagreements with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policy.

The agency is now facing a crisis. Longtime officials there said Kennedy is ignoring scientific findings to pursue an antivaccine agenda, threatening public health as the calendar gets closer to winter and seasonal outbreaks of Covid and other viruses.

Fewer But Less Qualified Agents

Devlin Barrett and Adam Goldman at NYT:

The Trump administration is preparing to lower the recruitment standards for F.B.I. agents, eliciting alarm from many agents who worry that the move will undermine the agency’s primary mission of conducting complex investigations and tracking threats to national security.

Under a plan pushed by the director, Kash Patel, and his deputy, Dan Bongino, the F.B.I. will start welcoming new classes of recruits who will receive less training and no longer be required to have a college degree, according to people familiar with the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe it.

The shift comes as the agency anticipates losing more than 5,000 employees by September, largely as a result of agents, analysts and others taking severance or early retirement packages offered by the Trump administration to try to reduce the budget.

Instead of spending about 18 weeks training at the academy in Quantico, Va., the group of agents, tentatively scheduled to start in October, will receive eight weeks, according to the people. And the agents will no longer need to fulfill a longstanding requisite for joining the bureau: a bachelor’s degree.

...

Current and former agents said they worried that the changes would transform the bureau from an investigative agency focused on national security into something more akin to a federal police force. One of Mr. Patel’s favorite sayings is “let good cops be cops,” which grates on many agents who privately point out that they are not, in fact, cops.

The Secret Service Screwed Up

 One year ago, a shooter nearly killed Trump.  The Senate Homeland Security Committee has a report on how badly the Secret Service screwed up:

1. USSS denied multiple requests for additional staff, assets, and resources to protect President Trump during the campaign.
2. USSS did not fire a single person involved in the planning and execution of the Butler rally. USSS formally disciplined only six personnel, some of whom received their disciplinary decision as recently as July 2025. In two instances, the final disciplinary decision was a reduced punishment from what was originally recommended.
3. Former Director Kimberly Cheatle falsely testified to Congress that no USSS asset requests were denied for the Butler rally.
4. Despite USSS leadership receiving an intelligence briefing regarding the protectee and authorizing counter-snipers at all of President Trump’s outdoor rallies a day prior, counter-snipers were not present at the July 9 Doral campaign rally.
5. There were ill-defined responsibilities for USSS agents serving in advance roles.
6. USSS agents failed to communicate crucial information regarding the suspicious individual to President Trump’s shift detail, which had the ability to prevent him from taking the stage.
7. Pertinent threat intelligence related to the protectee was not shared with USSS agents in charge of security at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally.
8. There was a severe lack of coordination and communication between USSS and state and local law enforcement from the advance process through the event.

FEMA Red Tape Hampers Disaster Response

Previous posts have discussed budget cuts.

Gabe Cohen and Michael Williams, CNN:

As monstrous floodwaters surged across central Texas late last week, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency leapt into action, preparing to deploy critical search and rescue teams and life-saving resources, like they have in countless past disasters.

But almost instantly, FEMA ran into bureaucratic obstacles, four officials inside the agency told CNN.

As CNN has previously reported, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — whose department oversees FEMA — recently enacted a sweeping rule aimed at cutting spending: Every contract and grant over $100,000 now requires her personal sign-off before any funds can be released.

For FEMA, where disaster response costs routinely soar into the billions as the agency contracts with on-the-ground crews, officials say that threshold is essentially “pennies,” requiring sign-off for relatively small expenditures.

In essence, they say the order has stripped the agency of much of its autonomy at the very moment its help is needed most.

“We were operating under a clear set of guidance: lean forward, be prepared, anticipate what the state needs, and be ready to deliver it,” a longtime FEMA official told CNN. “That is not as clear of an intent for us at the moment.”

For example, as central Texas towns were submerged in rising waters, FEMA officials realized they couldn’t pre-position Urban Search and Rescue crews from a network of teams stationed regionally across the country.

In the past, FEMA would have swiftly staged these teams, which are specifically trained for situations including catastrophic floods, closer to a disaster zone in anticipation of urgent requests, multiple agency sources told CNN.

But even as Texas rescue crews raced to save lives, FEMA officials realized they needed Noem’s approval before sending those additional assets. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began, multiple sources told CNN.

Cutting the National Weather Service

Previous posts have discussed budget cuts.

Christopher Flavelle at NYT:

Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose.

Texas officials appeared to blame the Weather Service for issuing forecasts on Wednesday that underestimated how much rain was coming. But former Weather Service officials said the forecasts were as good as could be expected, given the enormous levels of rainfall and the storm’s unusually abrupt escalation.

The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said — the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.

What ICE Can and Cannot Do

 Many posts have discussed immigration.

Russell Contreras at Axios:

ICE is tasked with enforcing the nation's immigration laws anywhere within the nation's interior (the Border Patrol's jurisdiction is 100 miles into the interior, from any land or maritime border).

• ICE agents can arrest anyone they suspect of being in the U.S. illegally. They can arrest U.S. citizens only if they see them "breaking laws."
• To conduct raids or operations targeting suspects, ICE agents only need an "administrative warrant" — a warrant signed by a supervisor, not a judge, Rebekah Wolf, director of the American Immigration Council's Immigration Justice Campaign, tells Axios.

ICE agents can conceal their identities and refuse any request to disclose their personal information.

• This has led to conflicts between people ICE agents have encountered, as well as allegations by Trump's administration that protesters have tried to dox agents involved in raids.
• Wolf said officers in other agencies are required to identify themselves and provide badge numbers to prevent impersonators. ICE has no such requirement, and there have been reports of ICE impersonators harassing people, creating more chaos and uncertainty in some communities.

ICE doesn't have to collect evidence for cases and has few parameters around its use of force.

• Because it's such a young agency, it hasn't faced many lawsuits and court challenges to its use-of-force policies, unlike other federal agencies such as the FBI, the Forest Service or the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
• That's resulted in few directives aimed at limiting ICE agents' tactics.
• ICE units can conduct pre-dawn raids, unannounced entries (with judicial or administrative warrants), and surveillance without many of the public accountability rules that serve as checks on local authorities.

ICE agents can't enter a private home unless they have a judicial warrant.

• They still must adhere to the Constitution regarding the search and seizure limits protecting U.S. citizens.
• Although ICE isn't supposed to place U.S. citizens in immigration detention, Cárdenas says its agents have been detaining U.S.-born Latinos and dismissing their proof of citizenship as fake before eventually letting them go.
• This has led to allegations of racial profiling.
• ICE did not immediately respond for comment on these episodes.

ICE also can't force a local law enforcement agency to join an operation, but police are obligated to keep order if protesters surround and ICE operation.

 

Waste, Fraud, Abuse

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Americans vastly overestimate the amount of waste in the budget

Former DOGE employee Sahil Lavingia spoke to NPR:

I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse. I was expecting some more easy wins. I was hoping for opportunity to cut waste, fraud and abuse. And I do believe that there is a lot of waste. There's minimal amounts of fraud. And abuse, to me, feels relatively nonexistent. And the reason is — I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing.

The government has been under sort of a magnifying glass for decades. And so I think, generally, I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was. This isn't to say that it can't be made more efficient — elimination of paper, elimination of faxing — but these aren't necessarily fraud, waste and abuse. These are just rooms to modernize and improve the U.S. federal government into the 21st century.

DHS Management Problems

Besides not knowing what habeas corpus means, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has had problems.

 Associated Press:

A widely anticipated list of “ sanctuary jurisdictions” no longer appears on the Department of Homeland Security's website after receiving widespread criticism for including localities that have actively supported the Trump administration's hard-line immigration policies.
The department last week published the list of the jurisdictions. It said each one would receive formal notification the government deemed them uncooperative with federal immigration enforcement and whether they’re believed to be in violation of any federal criminal statutes.

The list was published Thursday on the department’s website but on Sunday there was a “Page Not Found" error message in its place.
...

The list, which was riddled with misspellings, received pushback from officials in communities spanning from urban to rural and blue to red who said the list doesn’t appear to make sense.

In California, the city of Huntington Beach made the list even though it had filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s immigration sanctuary law and passed a resolution this year declaring the community a “non-sanctuary city.”

MIKE BALSAMO, SCOTT BAUER AND ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON at AP:

A claim by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that an immigrant threatened the life of President Donald Trump has begun to unravel.

Noem announced an arrest of a 54-year-old man who was living in the U.S. illegally, saying he had written a letter threatening to kill Trump and would then return to Mexico. The story received a flood of media attention and was highlighted by the White House and Trump’s allies.

But investigators actually believe the man may have been framed so that he would get arrested and be deported from the U.S. before he got a chance to testify in a trial as a victim of assault, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press. The person could not publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

Law enforcement officials believe the man, Ramon Morales Reyes, never wrote a letter that Noem and her department shared with a message written in light blue ink expressing anger over Trump’s deportations and threatening to shoot him in the head with a rifle at a rally. Noem also shared the letter on X along with a photo of Morales Reyes, and the White House also shared it on its social media accounts. The letter was mailed to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office along with the FBI and other agencies, the person said.