EPA

Elon Musk claims that President Trump and DoGE are shutting down USAID.He made his claim on X Spaces last night following the administrative leave of two senior security officials at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) after they denied the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) the ability to receive sensitive data from the agency, the Guardian reports.DoGE was created on Trump’s first day to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Headed by Musk, the department has already taken action to bring to light extensive federal spending and has been granted access to the US Treasury’s federal payment system.Musk said that USAID is beyond repair.

Last night’s elections saw several narrow wins for candidates endorsed by Donald Trump, along with deep divisions in the Democratic Party over a race to helm one of the highest-profile state’s attorneys offices in the nation.One of the weirdest races of the cycle came to an end fairly quickly last night, with Bernie Moreno, the preferred choice of Donald Trump and much of MAGA world, carrying every county to win just above 50 percent in the Ohio Senate primary. The final days of the election were marred by a bizarre allegation from the Associated Press that Moreno had a male-seeking account on AdultFriendFinder, a website used mostly for casual hookups. Moreno is married to a woman and has children.

As former president Donald Trump seems to be cruising to the GOP nomination — a NewsNation poll has him ahead fifty points over his nearest rivals — his critics in the media and on the left are trotting out a familiar attack. Over the past two weeks, the headlines have been inescapable: Trump is a nasty authoritarian who wants to dismantle America’s democratic political system. This shouldn’t be all that surprising, since we heard similar cries ahead of his election 2016, namely over his support for a “Muslim ban” (a national security travel ban that included countries that are majority Muslim) and for mass deportations of illegal aliens.As the Iowa caucuses creep closer, the revamped, breathless accusations have increased in number and fervor.

The Environmental Protection Agency has just released its most aggressive emissions rules to date. The rules demand that coal and gas plants capture almost all of their emissions. In essence, fossil fuel plants will have to cut their emissions by 90 percent between 2035 and 2040 or shut down. Unless, of course, they can afford to run carbon capture systems or swap out natural gas for hydrogen. But is that even realistic? “By requiring carbon capture or hydrogen burning, two technologies that haven’t even had multiple successful demonstration projects, let alone mature supply chains, the Biden administration is essentially signing a death warrant for fossil fuel plants,” Isaac Orr, an energy analyst at the Center for the American Experiment, said in an email.

Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) authority to proceed with President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is much more significant than the narrow grounds on which it was decided. The Clean Power Plan was already dead. It had been repealed and replaced by the Trump administration, decisions that were later struck down by a court of appeals. Moreover, there is history between the EPA and the Supreme Court. In 2014, the Court ruled against the EPA’s rewriting of the Clean Air Act to facilitate its use as a tool of climate policy, which was already seen as “poor and probably unworkable” by officials in the Obama administration.

Boris Johnson is considering doing something that should be a duty for every leader. In the wake of sanctions poised to disrupt the 8 percent of domestic oil and 18 percent of diesel the UK imports from Russia, Johnson is reportedly toying with the idea of putting his country first and on the road to self-sufficiency by lifting the UK’s moratorium on fracking. The British government banned hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in 2019. Fracking is a method of extracting oil and natural gas by drilling deep underground and fracturing shale rock with a fluid mixture (99 percent water and sand) that allows fossil fuels to flow out, be captured, processed and used to myriad ends (including gasoline).

Scott Pruitt is the greatest-ever Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. To be fair, though, the competition was never exactly stiff. The bar was set low right from the start, under the Nixon-era administrator William Ruckelshaus.Ruckelshaus is best known for his decision to ban the use of the insecticide DDT in the US. This, in turn, led to a near-global ban which deprived the world of its most effective prophylactic against the malarial mosquito, arguably causing millions of unnecessary deaths.But what was perhaps most shocking about Ruckelshaus's decision was that it ran roughshod over science and due process.