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Wired – no paywall: “Engineers and executives at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are drawing healthy taxpayer-funded salaries—sometimes from the very agencies they are cutting. Some staffers at Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are drawing robust taxpayer-funded salaries from the federal agencies they are slashing and burning, WIRED has learned. Jeremy Lewin, …
TMP Looting Watch by Josh Marshall – In case you didn’t hear the GSA today announced it’s going to sell off many if not all of the central buildings making up the headquarters of the American republic. Those buildings include FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, the buildings which are the headquarters of the DOJ, HHS, …
These are all the products we’ve mentioned since 2020 in Recomendo, Cool Tools, our YouTube channel, podcast, and other newsletters, including Gar’s Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What’s in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper and Book Freak. Please share suggestions, corrections, and other feedback to [email protected].
HuffPo: “Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been prohibited from co-authoring publications with World Health Organization staff, dealing a blow to global research efforts and continuing the Trump administration’s aggressive attack on government-funded science. “CDC staff should not be co-authors on manuscripts/abstracts with WHO staff,” an interim guidance document dated Thursday …
Just Security: “What follows is a timeline of actions that highlight the alarming level of politicization and weaponization of the Department of Justice under the second Trump administration. Politicization includes the misuse of the Department’s powers for political purposes rather than the independent and impartial enforcement of the laws. Weaponization includes a deliberate and systematic …
EFF: “At EFF we spend a lot of time thinking about Street Level Surveillance technologies—the technologies used by police and other authorities to spy on you while you are going about your everyday life—such as automated license plate readers, facial recognition, surveillance camera networks, and cell-site simulators (CSS). Rayhunter is a new open source tool …
TechDirt: “While political reporters are still doing their view-from-nowhere “Democrats say this, Republicans say that” dance, tech and legal journalists have been watching an unfortunately recognizable plan unfold — a playbook we’re all too familiar with. We’ve seen how technology can be wielded to consolidate power, how institutional guardrails can be circumvented through technical and …
CREW – “On January 24, 2025, the Trump administration decommissioned the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD) in an apparent violation of federal law. CREW sent a letter to the Department of Justice Inspector General and Acting National Archivist asking them to investigate and take corrective action. NLEAD was created in 2023 as a centralized …
phiresky’s blog – “Libraries have been trying to collect humanity’s knowledge almost since the invention of writing. In the digital age, it might actually be possible to create a comprehensive collection of all human writing that meets certain criteria. That’s what shadow libraries do – collect and share as many books as possible. One shadow …
The American Democracy Scorecard is a living, interactive resource that grades the country’s biggest corporations on their support for democracy. The project evaluates corporations’ statements and efforts in support of our democracy, alongside their political spending and actions around January 6th, state and federal voting legislation, election integrity, and other democracy-related issues. The goal is …
“A rarely used amendment to the Endangered Species Act allows for the creation of a committee nicknamed “the God Squad” to take unprecedented action during emergencies like hurricanes and wildfires. Trump wants to convene this committee to bypass endangered species protections and other environmental regulations to ramp up timber production across 280 million acres of …
Comparing and ranking 250 cities around the world – “Good public transit connects people to places. Ideally, this is done efficiently and sustainably, with transit routes and stations serving and connecting the most amount of people possible. But in reality, there’s a lot of variation within and between cities in how effectively this is done. …