Donald Trump

elon-musk-to-“fix”-community-notes-after-they-contradict-trump

Elon Musk to “fix” Community Notes after they contradict Trump

Elon Musk apparently no longer believes that crowdsourcing fact-checking through Community Notes can never be manipulated and is, thus, the best way to correct bad posts on his social media platform X.

Community Notes are supposed to be added to posts to limit misinformation spread after a broad consensus is reached among X users with diverse viewpoints on what corrections are needed. But Musk now claims a “fix” is needed to prevent supposedly outside influencers from allegedly gaming the system.

“Unfortunately, @CommunityNotes is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media,” Musk wrote on X. “Working to fix this.”

Musk’s announcement came after Community Notes were added to X posts discussing a poll generating favorable ratings for Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That poll was conducted by a private Ukrainian company in partnership with a state university whose supervisory board was appointed by the Ukrainian government, creating what Musk seems to view as a conflict of interest.

Although other independent polling recently documented a similar increase in Zelenskyy’s approval rating, NBC News reported, the specific poll cited in X notes contradicted Donald Trump’s claim that Zelenskyy is unpopular, and Musk seemed to expect X notes should instead be providing context to defend Trump’s viewpoint. Musk even suggested that by pointing to the supposedly government-linked poll in Community Notes, X users were spreading misinformation.

“It should be utterly obvious that a Zelensky[y]-controlled poll about his OWN approval is not credible!!” Musk wrote on X.

Musk’s attack on Community Notes is somewhat surprising. Although he has always maintained that Community Notes aren’t “perfect,” he has defended Community Notes through multiple European Union probes challenging their effectiveness and declared that the goal of the crowdsourcing effort was to make X “by far the best source of truth on Earth.” At CES 2025, X CEO Linda Yaccarino bragged that Community Notes are “good for the world.”

Yaccarino invited audience members to “think about it as this global collective consciousness keeping each other accountable at global scale in real time,” but just one month later, Musk is suddenly casting doubts on that characterization while the European Union continues to probe X.

Perhaps most significantly, Musk previously insisted as recently as last year that Community Notes could not be manipulated, even by Musk. He strongly disputed a 2024 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate that claimed that toxic X users were downranking accurate notes that they personally disagreed with, claiming any attempt at gaming Community Notes would stick out like a “neon sore thumb.”

Elon Musk to “fix” Community Notes after they contradict Trump Read More »

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Acer CEO says its PC prices to increase by 10 percent in response to Trump tariffs

PC-manufacturer Acer has said that it plans to raise the prices of its PCs in the US by 10 percent, a direct response to the new 10 percent import tariff on Chinese goods that the Trump administration announced earlier this month.

“We will have to adjust the end user price to reflect the tariff,” said Acer CEO Jason Chen in an interview with The Telegraph. “We think 10 percent probably will be the default price increase because of the import tax. It’s very straightforward.”

These price increases won’t roll out right away, according to Chen—products shipped from China before the tariffs went into effect earlier this month won’t be subject to the increased import taxes—but we can expect them to show up in PC price tags over the next few weeks.

Chen also said that Acer was considering moving more of its manufacturing outside of China as a result of the tariffs, something that Acer had done for some of its desktop PCs after Trump imposed similar tariffs on Chinese imports during his first term. Manufacturing systems in the US is also “one of the options,” according to Chen.

Acer CEO says its PC prices to increase by 10 percent in response to Trump tariffs Read More »

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DOGE’s .gov site lampooned as coders quickly realize it can be edited by anyone

“An official website of the United States government,” reads small text atop the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) website that Elon Musk’s team started populating this week with information on agency cuts.

But you apparently don’t have to work in government to push updates to the site. A couple of prankster web developers told 404 Media that they separately discovered how “insecure” the DOGE site was, seemingly pulling from a “database that can be edited by anyone.”

One coder couldn’t resist and pushed two updates that, as of this writing, remained on the DOGE site. “This is a joke of a .gov site,” one read. “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN,” read another.

404 Media spoke to two other developers who suggested that the DOGE site is not running on government servers. Instead, it seems to be running on a Cloudflare Pages site and is relying on a database that “can be and has been written to by third parties and will show up on the live website,” the developers told 404 Media.

Archived versions of the DOGE site show that it was basically blank before Tuesday. That’s when Musk held a DOGE press conference in the Oval Office, promising that DOGE is “actually trying to be as transparent as possible.” At that time, Musk claimed that DOGE was being “maximally transparent” by posting about “all” actions to X (Musk’s social media platform) and to the DOGE website. (Wired deemed the DOGE site “one big X ad” because it primarily seems to exist to point to Musk’s social media platform.)

According to 404 Media, after Musk made that statement, his team rushed to build out the DOGE website, mirroring X posts from the DOGE account and compiling stats on the federal workforce.

But in rushing, DOGE appears to have skipped security steps that are expected of government websites. That pattern is troubling some federal workers, as DOGE has already been dinged by workers concerned by Musk’s team seizing access to sensitive government information and sharing it in ways deemed less secure. For example, last week, Department of Education officials raised alarms about DOGE employees using personal emails viewed as less secure than government email addresses, seemingly in violation of security protocols. These personal emails also seemed to shroud the true identities of DOGE staffers, whereas other government employees must use their full names in official communications.

DOGE’s .gov site lampooned as coders quickly realize it can be edited by anyone Read More »

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Queer-friendly data on car crash deaths removed from NHTSA website


Potential road hazard ahead

Trump targeting car crash data sparks concerns over datasets collected since 1975.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

In early February, a dataset tracking car crash deaths in the US curiously went missing from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) website.

Unlike other Donald Trump-ordered changes to government websites in which entire studies were removed and later court-ordered to be restored, only the most recent data on car crash deaths from 2022 was deleted from download files on NHTSA’s website.

The odd removal sparked concerns that the Trump administration may be changing or possibly even ending the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS)—a collection of police-reported data from every state that has tracked car crash fatalities since 1975. The Health department has said the data is used to help reduce deaths from not wearing a seatbelt or deaths involving a drunk driver.

NHTSA did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But the agency eventually provided a vague response to Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, an organization that advises lawmakers and bills itself as a “unique partnership of insurers, law enforcement, public health, and consumer experts working together to make America’s roads safer.”

“The file was taken down for some minor corrections and should be back up by the end of this week,” NHTSA told Advocates without any further explanation of what fixes were needed.

Ars spoke to several safety organizations and auto industry analysts who depend on FARS data to analyze trends, including efforts to flag the most dangerous cars in America.

A rumor began circulating that the 2022 data was yanked because NHTSA began allowing “other” sexes to be monitored in FARS data starting with that report. It was expected that NHTSA pulled the data down to comply with a Trump executive order “defending women” by banning government “efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex.”

To get to the bottom of the rumors, Ars consulted an archived version of the FARS downloads page, which showed that the 2022 dataset was available as recently as January 30. The uncensored data showed that unlike prior years, 22 car crash victims were documented using a category in 2022 for sex that had never been tracked previously, “Other (e.g., “X”, Non-Binary, Not Specified, etc.).”

NHTSA has not directly confirmed if the dataset is being changed to remove this data or if other “minor corrections” were needed. More will be revealed once the dataset comes back online, supposedly within the next few days.

Karl Brauer, an executive analyst for iSeeCars.com, which offers a car search engine and uses FARS data to help buyers steer clear of the “most dangerous” vehicles on US roads, told Ars that NHTSA’s public silence on the missing data means industry stakeholders don’t really know right now how FARS data might be changing.

“We can only speculate regarding NHTSA curtailing access to FARS data, but it’s disappointing given FARS’ value as a reference point for vehicle safety,” Brauer said. “Hopefully, this is a temporary situation that will be resolved shortly and not an indication that NHTSA no longer plans to compile this data. Consumers should be able to review all aspects of a vehicle’s safety, including how many fatalities it has been involved in.”

Trump targeting car crash data

Among the most dangerous cars on the road last year, iSeeCars flagged the Hyundai Venue, Chevrolet Corvette, Mitsubishi Mirage, Porsche 911, and Honda CR-V Hybrid as the “top five most dangerous cars.” Those cars had “fatal accident rates nearly five times higher than the average vehicle” from 2018 to 2022, their report said.

And “despite Tesla’s advanced driver-assist technology,” the Model Y and Model S both made the list, too, with Tesla maintaining “the highest fatal accident rate by brand.”

Back in December, when Trump was preparing to take office, a document seen by Reuters reportedly showed that his transition team was angling to “drop a car-crash reporting requirement opposed by Elon Musk’s Tesla.”

This car crash data, which is compiled due to a mandatory reporting requirement from carmakers, is different from FARS data, which comes from police reports. But a source told Reuters that Musk maintains that the mandatory reporting rule is “unfair” to Tesla because Musk “believes” Tesla reports “better data” than other car brands. That “makes it look like Tesla is responsible for an outsized number of crashes involving advanced driver-assistance systems,” the source told Reuters.

Trump reportedly tasked his transition team with coming up with a 100-day strategy to kill off the reporting requirement. That move seemingly would make FARS data even more important to safety organizations and government officials that would otherwise lose data that helps track vehicle safety concerns, particularly with innovative automated-driving systems.

The University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute houses the Center for the Management of Information for Safe and Sustainable Transportation (CMISST), which also regularly analyzes car crash data. A CMISST spokesperson told Ars that NHTSA has also removed Crash Report Sampling System (CRSS) data from 2022. Even temporary removals make it harder for outside researchers to get a clear picture of road safety, the spokesperson told Ars.

“These datasets are world-leading in their scale and completeness, with FARS a complete census of fatal crashes involving someone who died within 30 days as a result of a crash on public roads,” CMISST’s spokesperson said. “CRSS is in some ways even more world-leading because it is a well-designed complex probability survey of police-reported crashes across the US, which allows us to have nationally representative estimates of the incidence of such crashes, including many key characteristics of the circumstances, the vehicles, and the people involved.”

Joseph Young, director of media relations for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), told Ars that, like many others, his organization had “previously downloaded the dataset and continues to use it for analysis, so this removal doesn’t cause any immediate issues for our team.” But Young agreed that “it does complicate others’ ability to access the full dataset.”

Currently, the official FARS query tool still shows 2022 data, Young noted, but an Ars review confirmed that the tracking of “other” sexes is not available through that interface. So the only way to see changes once NHTSA uploads the new file will be to consult the archived dataset.

FARS saves lives, experts say

FARS data is released as soon as it’s available to try to prevent as many vehicle fatalities as possible. The version of the 2022 data that is missing from NHTSA’s site today is not the final draft, which is expected to be published in the spring. Around the same time, the first draft of the 2023 data should be available, CMISST’s spokesperson told Ars, as long as the Trump administration doesn’t de-prioritize sharing the data. Young told Ars that IIHS’ “bigger concern” than the missing 2022 data is whether there will be delays in posting new data.

“The latest FARS data is used extensively for research purposes and also for informing the public and decision makers about important trends in traffic safety, so it’s important that it be available as soon as possible,” Young told Ars.

Peter Kurdock, general counsel for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, told Ars that the key government datasets that his organization relies on to monitor highway safety do not currently appear to be at risk. But those reports are frequently updated, and any potential delays could make it harder to answer granular data-driven questions like “What type of pedestrians are being hit?” or “What time of day are they being hit?”

“All that stuff’s very important to the policy we develop, and we have to answer questions from policymakers as well,” Kurdock told Ars.

Advocates’ senior research director, Shaun Kildare, added that carmakers shouldn’t want this dataset to be messed with any more than outside safety researchers, because otherwise they would have to rely on spotty customer reports to monitor issues with their vehicles.

“In the past 50 years, [there were] 860,000 lives saved [and] nearly 50 million people that avoided injury,” Kildare said, citing NHTSA data. “I think the overall benefits [of collecting FARS and other crash data to set Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards] were somewhere in the $17 trillion range in terms of benefits and cost savings to the US,” he added.

A CMISST spokesperson told Ars that there remains a critical need to closely track car crash fatalities, which, despite safety stakeholders’ best efforts, reportedly continue to rise in the US.

“Given that fatalities have been going in the wrong direction over the last approximately 15 years, these data are critical to knowing where we are at with fatal (and non-fatal) crashes and which groups of crashes (e.g., pedestrians at night) are particularly on the rise,” CMISST’s spokesperson said.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Queer-friendly data on car crash deaths removed from NHTSA website Read More »

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After Trump killed a report on nature, researchers push ahead with release

But one word in the federal register notice describing key principles of the nature report—”inclusive”—may have triggered Trump’s decision to end it. Christopher Schell, a lead author of a chapter called “Nature and Equity in the US,” told The Times that his chapter’s focus on environmental justice may have made the project an easy target for Trump.

On day one of his administration, Trump issued executive orders rescinding Biden-era priorities and ending several environmental justice and equity initiatives in government. According to an analysis from two experts at Harvard’s energy and environmental law program, Carrie Jenks and Sara Dewey, Trump claimed, “without explanation,” that the Biden initiatives violate “longstanding Federal civil-rights laws” and “threaten the safety of American men, women, and children.”

Now “federal agencies no longer have a mandate, unless required under separate rules, to consider how their actions will disproportionately harm low-income communities, communities of color, and other vulnerable populations,” the Harvard researchers warned.

Trump contradictions in environmental orders

Grist reported on the scramble to salvage a wide range of Trump-purged climate data like the National Nature Assessment that could help protect vulnerable communities by remaining in the public sphere. That report noted that climate data access was similarly lost during Trump’s prior administration, when “as much as 20 percent of the EPA’s website became inaccessible to the public” and the government’s “use of the term ‘climate change’ decreased by more than a third.”

But even if some members of the public remain jaded from Trump’s prior administration, researchers working on the nature report told The Times that their biggest concern in moving forward with the report is that the general public views government studies as more authoritative than independent studies. The fear is that even if the report is eventually published, its impact could be watered down without the government’s involvement or endorsement.

After Trump killed a report on nature, researchers push ahead with release Read More »

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DOGE can’t use student loan data to dismantle the Education Dept., lawsuit says

Microsoft declined to comment, but allegedly the DOGE employees are “using AI software accessed through Microsoft’s cloud computing service Azure to pore over every dollar of money the department disburses, from contracts to grants to work trip expenses,” one source told the Post.

The lawsuit noted that several DOE employees have tried to block DOGE’s access by raising red flags up the command chain, but DOE leadership directly instructed lower-level employees to grant DOGE access, the same source alleged.

A big concern is that DOGE funneling education data into AI systems will cause sensitive data to be stored in a way that makes it more vulnerable to cyberattacks or data breaches. Another issue could be the AI system being error-prone or potentially hallucinating data that is driving decisions on major DOE cuts.

On Thursday, a DOE deputy assistant secretary for communications, Madi Biedermann, issued a statement insisting that DOGE employees are federal employees who have undergone background checks to be granted requisite security clearances.

“There is nothing inappropriate or nefarious going on,” Biedermann said.

Trump has similarly waved away concerns over DOGE’s work at DOE and other departments that officials worry are experiencing a “blitz” of seemingly unlawful power grabs, the Post reported. On Monday, Trump told reporters that “if there’s a conflict” with DOGE accessing Americans’ data, “then we won’t let him get near it.” But seemingly until Trump agrees there’s a conflict, Musk’s work with DOGE must go on, Trump said.

“We’re trying to shrink government, and he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else, if not better,” Trump suggested.

While thousands of Americans are suing, confused over whether they need to urgently protect their private financial data, one DOE staffer told the Post that DOGE “is working with almost unbelievable speed.” The staffer ominously suggested that it may already be too late to protect Americans from invasive probes or defend departments against cuts.

“They have a playbook, which is to get access to the data,” the staffer told the Post. “And once they’re in, it’s already over.”

DOGE can’t use student loan data to dismantle the Education Dept., lawsuit says Read More »

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Internet Archive played crucial role in tracking shady CDC data removals


Internet Archive makes it easier to track changes in CDC data online.

When thousands of pages started disappearing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website late last week, public health researchers quickly moved to archive deleted public health data.

Soon, researchers discovered that the Internet Archive (IA) offers one of the most effective ways to both preserve online data and track changes on government websites. For decades, IA crawlers have collected snapshots of the public Internet, making it easier to compare current versions of websites to historic versions. And IA also allows users to upload digital materials to further expand the web archive. Both aspects of the archive immediately proved useful to researchers assessing how much data the public risked losing during a rapid purge following a pair of President Trump’s executive orders.

Part of a small group of researchers who managed to download the entire CDC website within days, virologist Angela Rasmussen helped create a public resource that combines CDC website information with deleted CDC datasets. Those datasets, many of which were previously in the public domain for years, were uploaded to IA by an anonymous user, “SheWhoExists,” on January 31. Moving forward, Rasmussen told Ars that IA will likely remain a go-to tool for researchers attempting to closely monitor for any unexpected changes in access to public data.

IA “continually updates their archives,” Rasmussen said, which makes IA “a good mechanism for tracking modifications to these websites that haven’t been made yet.”

The CDC website is being overhauled to comply with two executive orders from January 20, the CDC told Ars. The Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government requires government agencies to remove LGBTQ+ language that Trump claimed denies “the biological reality of sex” and is likely driving most of the CDC changes to public health resources. The other executive order the CDC cited, the Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing, would seemingly largely only impact CDC employment practices.

Additionally, “the Office of Personnel Management has provided initial guidance on both Executive Orders and HHS and divisions are acting accordingly to execute,” the CDC told Ars.

Rasmussen told Ars that the deletion of CDC datasets is “extremely alarming” and “not normal.” While some deleted pages have since been restored in altered versions, removing gender ideology from CDC guidance could put Americans at heightened risk. That’s another emerging problem that IA’s snapshots could help researchers and health professionals resolve.

“I think the average person probably doesn’t think that much about the CDC’s website, but it’s not just a matter of like, ‘Oh, we’re going to change some wording’ or ‘we’re going to remove these data,” Rasmussen said. “We are actually going to retool all the information that’s there to remove critical information about public health that could actually put people in danger.”

For example, altered Mpox transmission data removed “all references to men who have sex with men,” Rasmussen said. “And in the US those are the people who are not the only people at risk, but they’re the people who are most at risk of being exposed to Mpox. So, by removing that DEI language, you’re actually depriving people who are at risk of information they could use to protect themselves, and that eventually will get people hurt or even killed.”

Likely the biggest frustration for researchers scrambling to preserve data is dealing with broken links. On social media, Rasmussen has repeatedly called for help flagging broken links to ensure her team’s archive is as useful as possible.

Rasmussen’s group isn’t the only effort to preserve the CDC data. Some are creating niche archives focused on particular topics, like journalist Jessica Valenti, who created an archive of CDC guidelines on reproductive rights issues, sexual health, intimate partner violence, and other data the CDC removed online.

Niche archives could make it easier for some researchers to quickly survey missing data in their field, but Rasmussen’s group is hoping to take next steps to make all the missing CDC data more easily discoverable in their archive.

“I think the next step,” Rasmussen said, “would be to try to fix anything in there that’s broken, but also look into ways that we could maybe make it more browsable and user-friendly for people who may not know what they’re looking for or may not be able to find what they’re looking for.”

CDC advisers demand answers

The CDC has been largely quiet about the deleted data, only pointing to Trump’s executive orders to justify removals. That could change by February 7. That’s the deadline when a congressionally mandated advisory committee to the CDC’s acting director, Susan Monarez, asked for answers in an open letter to a list of questions about the data removals.

“It has been reported through anonymous sources that the website changes are related to new executive orders that ban the use of specific words and phrases,” their letter said. “But as far as we are aware, these unprecedented actions have yet to be explained by CDC; news stories indicate that the agency is declining to comment.”

At the top of the committee’s list of questions is likely the one frustrating researchers most: “What was the rationale for making these datasets and websites inaccessible to the public?” But the committee also importantly asked what analysis was done “of the consequences of removing access to these datasets and website” prior to the removals. They also asked how deleted data would be safeguarded and when data would be restored.

It’s unclear if the CDC will be motivated to respond by the deadline. Ars reached out to one of the committee members, Joshua Sharfstein—a physician and vice dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement at Johns Hopkins University—who confirmed that as of this writing, the CDC has not yet responded. And the CDC did not respond to Ars’ request to comment on the letter.

Rasmussen told Ars that even temporary removals of CDC guidance can disrupt important processes keeping Americans healthy. Among the potentially most consequential pages briefly removed were recommendations from the congressionally mandated Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

Those recommendations are used by insurance companies to decide who gets reimbursed for vaccines and by physicians to deduce vaccine eligibility, and Rasmussen said they “are incredibly important for the entire population to have access to any kind of vaccination.” And while, for example, the Mpox vaccine recommendations were eventually restored unaltered, Rasmussen told Ars that she suspects that “one of the reasons” preventing interference currently with ACIP is that it’s mandated by Congress.

Seemingly ACIP could be weakened by the new administration, Rasmussen suggested. She warned that Trump’s pick for CDC director, Dave Weldon, “is an anti-vaxxer” (with a long history of falsely linking vaccines to autism) who may decide to replace ACIP committee members with anti-vaccine advocates or move to dissolve ACIP. And any changes in recommendations could mean “insurance companies aren’t going to cover vaccinations [and that] physicians will not recommend vaccination.” And that could mean “vaccination will go down and we’ll start having outbreaks of some of these vaccine-preventable diseases.”

“If there’s a big polio outbreak, that is going to result in permanently disabled children, dead children—it’s really, really serious,” Rasmussen said. “So I think that people need to understand that this isn’t just like, ‘Oh, maybe wear a mask when you’re at the movie theater’ kind of CDC guidance. This is guidance that’s really fundamental to our most basic public health practices, and it’s going to cause widespread suffering and death if this is allowed to continue.”

Seeding deleted data and doing science to fight back

On Bluesky, Rasmussen led one of many charges to compile archived links and download CDC data so that researchers can reference every available government study when advancing public health knowledge.

“These data are public and they are ours,” Rasmussen posted. “Deletion disobedience is one way to fight back.”

As Rasmussen sees it, deleting CDC data is “theft” from the public domain and archiving CDC data is simply taking “back what is ours.” But at the same time, her team is also taking steps to be sure the data they collected can be lawfully preserved. Because the CDC website has not been copied and hosted on a server, they expect their archive should be deemed lawful and remain online.

“I don’t put it past this administration to try to shut this stuff down by any means possible,” Rasmussen told Ars. “And we wanted to make sure there weren’t any sort of legal loopholes that would jeopardize anybody in the group, but also that would potentially jeopardize the data.”

It’s not clear if some data has already been lost. Seemingly the same user who uploaded the deleted datasets to IA posted on Reddit, clarifying that while the “full” archive “should contain all public datasets that were available” before “anything was scrubbed,” it likely only includes “most” of the “metadata and attachments.” So, researchers who download the data may still struggle to fill in some blanks.

To help researchers quickly access the missing data, anyone can help the IA seed the datasets, the Reddit user said in another post providing seeding and mirroring instructions. Currently dozens are seeding it for a couple hundred peers.

“Thank you to everyone who requested this important data, and particularly to those who have offered to mirror it,” the Reddit user wrote.

As Rasmussen works with her group to make their archive more user-friendly, her plan is to help as many researchers as possible fight back against data deletion by continuing to reference deleted data in their research. She suggested that effort—doing science that ignores Trump’s executive orders—is perhaps a more powerful way to resist and defend public health data than joining in loud protests, which many researchers based in the US (and perhaps relying on federal funding) may not be able to afford to do.

“Just by doing things and standing up for science with your actions, rather than your words, you can really make, I think, a big difference,” Rasmussen said.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Internet Archive played crucial role in tracking shady CDC data removals Read More »

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Tariffs may soon spike costs of cars, household goods, consumer tech


“A little pain”: Trump finally admits tariffs heap costs on Americans.

Canadian and American flags are seen at the US/Canada border March 1, 2017, in Pittsburg, New Hampshire. Credit: DON EMMERT / Staff | AFP

Over the weekend, President Trump issued executive orders heaping significant additional tariffs on America’s biggest trading partners, Canada, China, and Mexico.

To justify the tariffs—”a 25 percent additional tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent additional tariff on imports from China”—Trump claimed that all partners were allowing drugs and immigrants to illegally enter the US. Declaring a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Trump’s orders seemed bent on “downplaying” the potential economic impact on Americans, AP News reported.

But very quickly, the trade policy sparked inflation fears, with industry associations representing major US firms from many sectors warning of potentially derailed supply chains and spiked consumer costs of cars, groceries, consumer technology, and more. Perhaps the biggest pain will be felt by car buyers already frustrated by high prices if car prices go up by $3,000, as Bloomberg reported. And as Trump eyes expanding tariffs to the European Union next, January research from the Consumer Technology Association showed that imposing similar tariffs on all countries would increase the cost of laptops by as much as 68 percent, game consoles by up to 58 percent, and smartphones perhaps by 37 percent.

With tariffs scheduled to take effect on Tuesday, Mexico moved fast to negotiate a one-month pause on Monday, ABC News reported. In exchange, Mexico promised to “reinforce” the US-Mexico border with 10,000 National Guard troops.

The pause buys Mexico a little time to convince the Trump administration—including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and potentially Commerce Secretary nominee Howard Lutnick—to strike a “permanent” trade deal, ABC News reported. If those talks fall through, though, Mexico has indicated it will retaliate with both tariff and non-tariff measures, ABC News reported.

Even in the best-case scenario where no countries retaliate, the average household income in 2025 could drop by about $1,170 if this week’s new tariffs remain in place, an analysis from the Budget Lab at Yale forecast. With retaliation, average income could decrease by $1,245.

Canada has already threatened to retaliate by imposing 35 percent tariffs on US goods, although that could change, depending on the outcome of a meeting this afternoon between Trump and outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Currently, there’s seemingly tension between the Trump administration and Trudeau, however.

On Saturday, Trudeau called Trump’s rationale for imposing tariffs on Canada—which Trudeau noted is responsible for less than 1 percent of drugs flowing into the US—”the flimsiest pretext possible,” NBC News reported.

This morning, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, reportedly criticized Canada’s response on CNBC. While Mexico is viewed as being “very, very serious” about Trump’s tariffs threat, “Canadians appear to have misunderstood the plain language of the executive order and they’re interpreting it as a trade war,” Hassett said.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to lower prices of groceries, cars, gas, housing, and other goods, AP News noted. But on Sunday, Trump clearly warned reporters while boarding Air Force One that tariffs could have the opposite effect, ABC News reported, and could significantly worsen inflation the longer the trade policy stands.

“We may have short term, some, a little pain, and people understand that, but, long term, the United States has been ripped off by virtually every country in the world,” Trump said.

Online shoppers, car buyers brace for tariffs

In addition to imposing new tariffs on these countries, Trump’s executive orders also took aim at their access to the “de minimus” exemption that allows businesses, including online retailers, to send shipments below $800 into the US without being taxed. That move could likely spike costs for Americans using popular Chinese retail platforms like Temu or Shein.

Before leaving office, Joe Biden had threatened in September to alter the “de minimus” rule, accusing platforms like Temu or Shein of flooding the US with “huge volumes of low-value products such as textiles and apparel” and making “it increasingly difficult to target and block illegal or unsafe shipments.” Following the same logic, it seems that Trump wants to exclude Canada, China, and potentially Mexico from the duty-free exemption to make it easier to identify illegal drug shipments.

Temu and Shein did not respond to Ars’ request to comment. But both platforms in September told Ars that losing the duty-free exemption wouldn’t slow their growth. And both platforms have shifted business to keep more inventory in the US, CNBC reported.

Canada is retaliating, auto industry will suffer

While China has yet to retaliate to defend such retailers, for Canada, the tariffs are considered so intolerable that the country immediately ordered tariffs on beverages, cosmetics, and paper products flowing from the US, AP News reported. Next up will be “passenger vehicles, trucks, steel and aluminum products, certain fruits and vegetables, beef, pork, dairy products, aerospace products, and more.”

If the trade wars further complicate auto industry trade in particular, it could hurt US consumers. Carmakers globally saw stocks fall on expectations that Trump’s tariffs will have a “profound impact” on the entire auto industry, CNBC reported. And if tariffs expand into the EU, an Oxford Economics analysis suggested, the cost of European cars in the US market would likely increase while availability decreases, perhaps crippling a core EU market and limiting Americans’ choice in vehicles.

EU car companies are already bracing for potential disruptions. A spokesperson for Germany-based BMW told CNBC that tariffs “hinder free trade, slow down innovation, and set a negative spiral in motion. In the end, they are detrimental to customers, making products more expensive and less innovative.” A Volkswagen spokesperson confirmed the company was “counting on constructive talks between the trading partners to ensure planning security and economic stability and to avoid a trade conflict.”

Right now, Canada’s auto industry appears most spooked by the impending trade war, with the president of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, Flavio Volpe, warning that Canada’s auto sector could “shut down within a week,” Bloomberg reported.

“At 25 percent, absolutely nobody in our business is profitable by a long shot,” Volpe said.

According to Bloomberg, nearly one-quarter of the 16 million cars sold in the US each year will be hit with duties, adding about $60 billion in industry costs. Seemingly the primary wallet drain will be car components that cross the US-Canada and US-Mexico borders “as many as eight times during production” and, should negotiations fail, could be getting hit with tariffs both ways. Tesla, for example, relies on a small parts manufacturer in Canada, Laval Tool, to create the molds for its Cybertruck. It already costs up to $500,000 per mold, Bloomberg noted, and since many of the mold components are sourced from Canada currently, that cost could go up at a time when Cybertruck sales already aren’t great, InsideEVs reported.

Tariffs “necessary”

William Reinsch, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former US trade official, told AP News that Trump’s new tariffs on raw materials disrupting the auto industry and others don’t seem to “make much economic sense.”

“Historically, most of our tariffs on raw materials have been low because we want to get cheaper materials so our manufacturers will be competitive … Now, what’s he talking about? He’s talking about tariffs on raw materials,” Reinsch said. “I don’t get the economics of it.”

But Trump has maintained that tariffs are necessary to push business into the US while protecting national security. Industry experts have warned that hoping Trump’s tariffs will pressure carmakers to source all car components within the US is a “tough ask,” as shifting production could take years. Trump seems unlikely to back down any time soon, instead asking already cash-strapped Americans to be patient with any rising costs potentially harming businesses and consumers.

“We can play the game all they want,” Trump said.

But to countries threatening the US with tariffs in response to Trump’s orders, it likely doesn’t feel like a game. According to AP News, the Ministry of Commerce in China plans to file a lawsuit with the World Trade Organization for the “wrongful practices of the US.”

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Tariffs may soon spike costs of cars, household goods, consumer tech Read More »

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OpenAI teases “new era” of AI in US, deepens ties with government

On Thursday, OpenAI announced that it is deepening its ties with the US government through a partnership with the National Laboratories and expects to use AI to “supercharge” research across a wide range of fields to better serve the public.

“This is the beginning of a new era, where AI will advance science, strengthen national security, and support US government initiatives,” OpenAI said.

The deal ensures that “approximately 15,000 scientists working across a wide range of disciplines to advance our understanding of nature and the universe” will have access to OpenAI’s latest reasoning models, the announcement said.

For researchers from Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Labs, access to “o1 or another o-series model” will be available on Venado—an Nvidia supercomputer at Los Alamos that will become a “shared resource.” Microsoft will help deploy the model, OpenAI noted.

OpenAI suggested this access could propel major “breakthroughs in materials science, renewable energy, astrophysics,” and other areas that Venado was “specifically designed” to advance.

Key areas of focus for Venado’s deployment of OpenAI’s model include accelerating US global tech leadership, finding ways to treat and prevent disease, strengthening cybersecurity, protecting the US power grid, detecting natural and man-made threats “before they emerge,” and ” deepening our understanding of the forces that govern the universe,” OpenAI said.

Perhaps among OpenAI’s flashiest promises for the partnership, though, is helping the US achieve a “a new era of US energy leadership by unlocking the full potential of natural resources and revolutionizing the nation’s energy infrastructure.” That is urgently needed, as officials have warned that America’s aging energy infrastructure is becoming increasingly unstable, threatening the country’s health and welfare, and without efforts to stabilize it, the US economy could tank.

But possibly the most “highly consequential” government use case for OpenAI’s models will be supercharging research safeguarding national security, OpenAI indicated.

OpenAI teases “new era” of AI in US, deepens ties with government Read More »

trump-cribs-musk’s-“fork-in-the-road”-twitter-memo-to-slash-gov’t-workforce

Trump cribs Musk’s “fork in the road” Twitter memo to slash gov’t workforce


Federal workers on Reddit slam Office of Personnel Management email as short-sighted.

Echoing Elon Musk’s approach to thinning out Twitter’s staff in 2022, Donald Trump’s plan to significantly slash the government workforce now, for a limited time only, includes offering resignation buyouts.

In a Tuesday email that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent to nearly all federal employees, workers were asked to respond with one word in the subject line—”resign”—to accept the buyouts before February 6.

“Deferred resignation is available to all full-time federal employees except for military personnel of the armed forces, employees of the U.S. Postal Service, those in positions related to immigration enforcement and national security, and those in other positions specifically excluded by your employing agency,” the email said.

Anyone accepting the offer “will be provided with a dignified, fair departure from the federal government utilizing a deferred resignation program,” the email said. That includes retaining “all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload” and being “exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason).”

That basically means that most employees who accept will receive about nine months’ pay, most likely without having any job duties to fulfill, an FAQ explained, “except in rare cases.”

“Have a nice vacation,” the FAQ said.

A senior administration official told NBC News that “the White House expects up to 10 percent of federal employees to take the buyout.” A social media post from Musk’s America PAC suggested, at minimum, 5 percent of employees are expected to resign. The move supposedly could save the government as much as $100 billion, America PAC estimated.

For employees accepting the buyout, silver linings might include additional income opportunities; as OPM noted, “nothing in the resignation letter prevents you from seeking outside work during the deferred resignation period.” Similarly, nothing in the separation plan prevents a federal employee from applying in the future to a government role.

Email echoes controversial Elon Musk Twitter memo

Some federal employees fear these buyouts—which critics point out seem influenced by Musk’s controversial worker buyouts during his Twitter takeover—may drive out top talent, spike costs, and potentially weaken the government.

On Reddit, some self-described federal workers criticized the buyouts as short-sighted, with one noting that they initially flagged OPM’s email as a scam.

“The fact you just reply to an email with the word ‘resign’ sounds like a total scam,” one commenter wrote. Another agreed, writing, “That stood out to me. Worded like some scam email offer.” Chiming in, a third commenter replied, “I reported it as such before I saw the news.”

Some Twitter employees similarly recoiled in 2022 when Musk sent out an email offering three months of severance to any employees who couldn’t commit to his “extremely hardcore” approach to running the social network. That email required workers within 24 hours to click “yes” to keep their jobs or else effectively resign.

Musk’s email and OPM’s share a few striking similarities. Both featured nearly identical subject lines referencing a “fork in the road.” They both emphasized that buyouts were intended to elevate performance standards—with OPM’s email suggesting only the “best” workers “America has to offer” should stick around. And they both ended by thanking workers for their service, whether they took the buyout or not.

“Whichever path you choose, we thank you for your service to The United States of America,” OPM’s Tuesday email ended.

“Whatever decision you make, thank you for your efforts to make Twitter successful,” Musk’s 2022 email said.

Musk’s email was unpopular with some Twitter staffers, including one employee based in Ireland who won a $600,000 court battle when the Irish Workplace Relations Commission agreed his termination for not clicking yes on the email was unfair. In that dispute, the commission took issue with Musk not providing staff enough notice and ruled that any employee’s failure to click “yes” could in no way constitute a legal act of resignation.

OPM’s email departed from Musk’s, which essentially gave Twitter staff a negative option by taking employee inaction as agreeing to resign when the staffer’s “contract clearly stated that his resignation must be provided in writing, not by refraining to fill out a form.” OPM instead asks federal workers to respond “yes” to resign, basically agreeing to sign a pre-drafted resignation letter that details the terms of their separation plan.

While OPM expects that a relatively modest amount of federal workers will accept the buyout offers, Musk’s memo had Twitter employees resigning in “droves,” NPR reported, with Reuters estimating the numbers were in the “hundreds.” In the Irish worker’s dispute, an X senior director of human resources, Lauren Wegman, testified that about 87 percent of the 270 employees in Ireland who received Musk’s email resigned.

It remains unclear if Musk was directly involved with the OPM plan or email drafting process. But unsurprisingly, as he’s head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk praised the buyouts as “fair” and “generous” on his social media platform X.

Workers slam buyouts as short-sighted on Reddit

Declining the buyout guarantees no job security for federal workers, OPM’s email said.

“We will insist on excellence at every level—our performance standards will be updated to reward and promote those that exceed expectations and address in a fair and open way those who do not meet the high standards which the taxpayers of this country have a right to demand,” the email warned.

“The majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized through restructurings, realignments, and reductions in force,” OPM’s email continued. “These actions are likely to include the use of furloughs and the reclassification to at-will status for a substantial number of federal employees.”

And perhaps most ominously, OPM noted there would be “enhanced standards of conduct” to ensure employees are “reliable, loyal, trustworthy,” and “strive for excellence” daily, or else risk probes potentially resulting in “termination.”

Despite these ongoing threats to job security that might push some to resign, the OPM repeatedly emphasized that any choice to accept a buyout and resign was “voluntary.” Additionally, OPM explained that employees could rescind resignations; however, if an agency wants to move quickly to reassign their roles, that “would likely serve as a valid reason to deny” such requests.

On Reddit, workers expressed concerns about “critical departments” that “have been understaffed for years” being hit with more cuts. A lively discussion specifically focused on government IT workers being “really hard” to recruit.

“Losing your IT support is a very efficient way to cripple an org,” one commenter wrote, prompting responses from two self-described IT workers.

“It’s me, I work in government IT,” one commenter said, calling Trump’s return-to-office mandate the “real killer” because “the very best sysadmins and server people all work remote from other states.”

“There is a decent chance they just up and ditch this dumpster fire,” the commenter said.

Losing talented workers with specific training could bog down government workflows, Redditors suggested. Another apparent government IT worker described himself as “a little one man IT business,” claiming “if I disappeared or died, there would be exactly zero people to take my place. Between the random shit I know and the low pay, nobody is going to be able to fill my position.”

Accusing Trump of not caring “about keeping competent workers or running government services properly,” a commenter prompted another to respond, “nevermind that critical departments have been understaffed for years. He thinks he’s cutting fat, but he’s cutting indiscriminately and gonna lose a limb.”

According to another supposed federal worker, paying employees to retire has historically resulted in spikes in agency costs.

“The way this usually works is we pay public employees to retire,” the commenter wrote. “Then we pay a private company twice the rate to do the same job that public employee was doing. Sometimes it’s even the same employee doing the work. I’ve literally known people that left government jobs to do contractor work making far more for doing the same thing. But somehow this is ‘smaller government’ and more efficient.”

A top 1 percent commenter on Reddit agreed, writing, “ding ding ding! The correct answer.”

“Get rid of career feds, hire contractors at a huge cost to taxpayers, yet somehow the contract workers make less money and have fewer benefits than federal employees,” that Redditor suggested. “Contract companies get rich, and workers get poorer.”

Cybersecurity workers mull fighting cuts

On social media, some apparent federal workers suggested they might plan to fight back to defend their roles in government. In another Reddit thread discussing a government cybersecurity review board fired by Trump, commenters speculated that cybersecurity workers might hold a “grudge” and form an uprising attacking any vulnerabilities created by the return-to-office plan and the government workforce reduction.

“Isn’t this literally the Live Free or Die Hard movie plot?” one Redditor joked.

A lawsuit filed Monday by two anonymous government workers, for example, suggested that the Trump administration is also rushing to create an email distribution system that would allow all government employees to be contacted from a single email. Some workers have speculated this is in preparation for announcing layoffs. But employees suing are more concerned about security, insisting that a master list of all government employees has never been compiled before and accusing the Trump administration of failing to conduct a privacy impact assessment.

According to that lawsuit, OPM has hastily been testing this new email system, potentially opening all government workers to harmful data breaches. The lawsuit additionally alleged that every government agency has been collecting information on its employees and sending it to Amanda Scales, a former xAI employee who transitioned from working for Musk to working in government this month. The complaint suggests that some government workers are already distrustful of Musk’s seeming influence on Trump.

In a now-deleted Reddit message, the lawsuit alleged, “Instructions say to send these lists to Amanda Scales. But Amanda is not actually an OPM employee, she works for Elon Musk.”

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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trump’s-reported-plans-to-save-tiktok-may-violate-scotus-backed-law

Trump’s reported plans to save TikTok may violate SCOTUS-backed law


Everything insiders are saying about Trump’s plan to save TikTok.

It was apparently a busy weekend for key players involved in Donald Trump’s efforts to make a deal to save TikTok.

Perhaps the most appealing option for ByteDance could be if Trump blessed a merger between TikTok and Perplexity AI—a San Francisco-based AI search company worth about $9 billion that appears to view a TikTok video content acquisition as a path to compete with major players like Google and OpenAI.

On Sunday, Perplexity AI submitted a revised merger proposal to TikTok-owner ByteDance, reviewed by CNBC, which sources told AP News included feedback from the Trump administration.

If the plan is approved, Perplexity AI and TikTok US would be merged into a new entity. And once TikTok reaches an initial public offering of at least $300 billion, the US government could own up to 50 percent of that new company, CNBC reported. In the proposal, Perplexity AI suggested that a “fair price” would be “well north of $50 billion,” but the final price will likely depend on how many of TikTok’s existing investors decide to cash out following the merger.

ByteDance has maintained a strong resistance to selling off TikTok, especially a sale including its recommendation algorithm. Not only would this option allow ByteDance to maintain a minority stake in TikTok, but it also would leave TikTok’s recommendation algorithm under ByteDance’s control, CNBC reported. The deal would also “allow for most of ByteDance’s existing investors to retain their equity stakes,” CNBC reported.

But ByteDance may not like one potential part of the deal. An insider source told AP News that ByteDance would be required to allow “full US board control.”

According to AP News, US government ownership of a large stake in TikTok would include checks to ensure the app doesn’t become state controlled. The government’s potential stake would apparently not grant the US voting power or a seat on the merged company’s board.

A source familiar with Perplexity AI’s proposal confirmed to Ars that the reporting from CNBC and AP News is accurate.

Trump denied Oracle’s involvement in talks

Over the weekend, there was also a lot of speculation about Oracle’s involvement in negotiations. NPR reported that two sources with direct knowledge claimed that Trump was considering “tapping software company Oracle and a group of outside investors to effectively take control of the app’s global operations.”

That would be a seemingly bigger grab for the US than forcing ByteDance to divest only TikTok’s US operations.

“The goal is for Oracle to effectively monitor and provide oversight with what is going on with TikTok,” one source told NPR. “ByteDance wouldn’t completely go away, but it would minimize Chinese ownership.”

Oracle apparently met with the Trump administration on Friday and has another meeting scheduled this week to discuss Oracle buying a TikTok stake “in the tens of billions,” NPR reported.

But Trump has disputed that, saying this past weekend that he “never” spoke to Oracle about buying TikTok, AP News reported.

“Numerous people are talking to me. Very substantial people,” Trump said, confirming that he would only make a deal to save TikTok “if the United States benefits.”

All sources seemed to suggest that no deal was close to being finalized yet. Other potential Big Tech buyers include Microsoft or even possibly Elon Musk (can you imagine TikTok merged with X?). On Saturday, Trump suggested that he would likely announce his decision on TikTok’s future in the next 30 days.

Meanwhile, TikTok access has become spotty in the US. Google and Apple dropped TikTok from their app stores when the divest-or-ban law kicked in, partly because of the legal limbo threatening hundreds of billions in fines if Trump changes his mind about enforcement. That means ByteDance currently can’t push updates to US users, and anyone who offloads TikTok or purchases a new device can’t download the app in popular distribution channels.

“If we can save TikTok, I think it would be a good thing,” Trump said.

Could Trump’s plan violate divest-or-ban law?

The divest-or-ban law is formally called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. For months, TikTok was told in court that the law required either a sale of TikTok US operations or a US ban, but now ByteDance seems to believe there’s another option to keep TikTok in the US without forcing a sale.

It remains unclear if lawmakers will approve Trump’s plan if it doesn’t force a sale of TikTok. US Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), who co-sponsored the law, issued a statement last week insisting that “ByteDance divesting remains the only real solution to protect our national security and guarantee Americans access to TikTok.”

Krishnamoorthi declined Ars’ request to comment on whether leaked details of Trump’s potential deal to save TikTok could potentially violate the divest-or-ban law. But debate will likely turn on how the law defines “qualified divestiture.”

Under the law, qualified divestiture could be either a “divestiture or similar transaction” that meets two conditions. First, the transaction is one that Trump “determines, through an interagency process, would result in the relevant foreign adversary controlled application no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary.” Second, the deal blocks any foreign adversary-controlled entity or affiliate from interfering in TikTok US operations, “including any cooperation” with foreign adversaries “with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm or an agreement with respect to data sharing.”

That last bit seems to suggest that lawmakers might clash with Trump over ByteDance controlling TikTok’s algorithm, even if a company like Oracle or Perplexity serves as a gatekeeper to Americans’ data safeguarding US national security interests.

Experts told NPR that ByteDance could feasibly maintain a minority stake in TikTok US under the law, with Trump seeming to have “wide latitude to interpret” what is or is not a qualified divestiture. One congressional staffer told NPR that lawmakers might be won over if the Trump administration secured binding legal agreements “ensuring ByteDance cannot covertly manipulate the app.”

The US has tried to strike just such a national security agreement with ByteDance before, though, and it ended in lawmakers passing the divest-or-ban law. During the government’s court battle with TikTok over the law, the government repeatedly argued that prior agreement—also known as “Project Texas,” which ensured TikTok’s US recommendation engine was stored in the Oracle cloud and deployed in the US by a TikTok US subsidiary—was not enough to block Chinese influence. Proposed in 2022, the agreement was abruptly ended in 2023 when the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) determined only divestiture would resolve US concerns.

CFIUS did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.

The key problem at that point was ByteDance maintaining control of the algorithm, the government successfully argued in a case that ended in a Supreme Court victory.

“Even under TikTok’s proposed national security agreement, the source code for the recommendation engine would originate in China,” the government warned.

That seemingly leaves a vulnerability that any Trump deal allowing ByteDance to maintain control of the algorithm would likely have to reconcile.

“Under Chinese national-security laws, the Chinese government can require a China-based company to ‘surrender all its data,'” the US argued. That ultimately turned TikTok into “an espionage tool” for the Chinese Communist Party.

There’s no telling yet if Trump’s plan can set up a better version of Project Texas or convince China to sign off on a TikTok sale. Analysts have suggested that China may agree to a TikTok sale if Trump backs down on tariff threats.

ByteDance did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Trump’s reported plans to save TikTok may violate SCOTUS-backed law Read More »

all-federal-agencies-ordered-to-terminate-remote-work—ideally-within-30-days

All federal agencies ordered to terminate remote work—ideally within 30 days

Exceptions may be granted

Ezell’s memo expanded criticism of the Biden administration’s approach to remote work, suggesting that it enabled federal unions’ alleged attempts “to abuse the collective-bargaining process to guarantee full-time telework into the indefinite future and forestall any requirement to return to the office.”

Suspecting that the “rampant use of telework is likely underreported,” the committee’s report concluded that “even the reported levels are excessive, there is little evidence that it is enhancing productivity or addressing recruitment and retention gaps, and there is evidence it is harming agency missions and citizen-facing services.”

To overcome these supposed deficiencies, the committee recommended that remote work policies be linked to performance metrics, rather than “employee preferences or union demands.” Any remote work that is granted should be tracked through automated systems, the report further prescribed, and any attempts for federal agencies to compete for talent using remote work perks should not be tolerated.

This will allow the government to alleviate the “national embarrassment” of empty offices and “dispose of unneeded property and terminate unnecessary leases,” the report said.

While some employees may be eligible for RTO exemptions—either to accommodate a disability or qualifying medical condition, or for some “other compelling reason certified by the agency head and the employee’s supervisor”—Ezell’s memo insisted that a general return-to-office push was necessary. He said that Trump’s presidential memo reflected “a simple reality” that “the only way to get employees back to the office is to adopt a centralized policy requiring return-to-work for all agencies across the federal government.”

“Seeking to cajole individual agencies to try to get employees to return to the worksite has not succeeded,” Ezell said.

Although Trump’s memo set no deadline for RTO efforts to begin, Ezell gave federal agency heads rather short notice to fall in line. All agencies must submit their RTO plans by 5 pm ET on Friday, January 24, Ezell’s memo said.

Those plans should specify “the date that the agency will be in full compliance with the new telework policy,” with a recommended deadline of 30 days to comply, Ezell said.

All federal agencies ordered to terminate remote work—ideally within 30 days Read More »