Trump’s Firing Spree Hits Weather Forecasters at Worst Time Possible

The Trump administration’s mass layoffs have now come for the government agency that provides weather forecasts, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The agency, which is overseen by the Department of Commerce, began mass cuts on Thursday, with some fired employees being given less than two hours’ notice, NPR reports. Some of the staff managing central weather forecasting models had to rush to transfer access to employees who weren’t fired.

The cuts leave the NOAA short-staffed as severe weather is expected to threaten the southeastern U.S. next week, and hurricane season will arrive in the Atlantic in the next few months.

It’s not clear how many employees were fired, but NOAA has 12,000 employees who work on weather forecasting, managing oceanic fisheries, protecting coastal resources, and managing maritime maps critical to global shipping. The weather reports that Americans read on their phones and watch on TV are sourced from the National Weather Service, which is part of the NOAA.

Experts say that staff reductions could reduce the accuracy of forecasts or delay updating maritime maps that are key to safe passage within America’s oceanic waters.

“Breaking up, defunding, or reducing NOAA’s highly integrated workforce will severely impact our nation’s economy,” NOAA’s former administrators wrote in an open letter to Congress. “It will also make it more difficult to receive weather forecasts, be assured of the safety of seafood, and ensure the timely delivery of purchases from overseas, which are delivered primarily through our nation’s ports.”

“We all earned our positions,” one former NOAA employee who worked in fisheries policy told NPR anonymously. “It’s so disheartening. And it’s really reducing the intellectual and regulatory capabilities of the agency.”

These cuts seem to back what was spelled out in Project 2025 months ago: The agency should shift away from its vital public services and into commercial operations, like selling its valuable weather and environmental data to private companies. In the eyes of the Trump administration, the benefits the agency provides could soon be reduced to a dollar sign.

Trump plans to sign an executive order that makes English the official language of the United States. This will be the first time this country has an official language, as first reported by Meredith McGraw of The Wall Street Journal.

This order will likely have no actual impact on the material conditions of daily life in the U.S. It’s merely a symbolic show of power and arrogance, similar to Trump’s insistence that the international waters of the Gulf of Mexico be called the “Gulf of America.”

“We have languages coming into our country,” Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last year. “These are languages—it’s the craziest thing—they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.”

The U.S. has never had a national language in its entire history, and the country has typically prided itself on being a land of immigrants from all over the world. The order will end a Clinton-era federal mandate that requires federal agencies and other recipients of federal aid to provide non-English speakers with language assistance.

A federal judge has ordered the Office of Personnel Management to rescind “illegal” instructions to cull the workforce of federal agencies.

In an email sent across agencies on February 14, OPM instructed agency heads to “separate probationary employees you have not identified as mission-critical.”

U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California issued an order Thursday saying the directions were unlawful overreach by the OPM and “should be stopped, rescinded.”

“The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees within another agency,” Alsup said. “It can hire its own employees, yes. Can fire them. But it cannot order or direct some other agency to do so.

“OPM has no authority to tell any agency in the United States government, other than itself, who they can hire and who they can fire, period. So on the merits, I think, we start with that important proposition,” he said.

Alsup stopped short of ordering the reinstatement of ousted probationary employees; rather, he ordered the OPM to reverse its order requiring mass terminations and inform federal agencies that it had no authority to require them to shrink their workforce.

The judge also called for a hearing, at which the acting OPM Director Charles Ezell will testify. It is not yet clear when exactly that hearing will be.

Alsup defended the scores of probationary employees threatened by the OPM’s order as “the lifeblood of our government.”

“They come in at the low level and they work their way up, and that’s how we renew ourselves and reinvent ourselves,” Alsup said.

Previous rounds of government-wide layoffs recommended by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have specifically targeted probationary employees, who have been employed for less than a year and therefore lack the job protections of their colleagues.

Despite the fact that, by law, agencies can only fire probationary employees if their “performance or conduct demonstrates that they are unfit for federal employment,” a review by the Office of Special Counsel found that agencies had fired their employees without specifying an issue with their work, and in some cases without referring to their work at all.

For that very reason, the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent federal board, granted a request from the OSC Tuesday to pause the termination of six employees, which could potentially be extended to save more wrongfully terminated federal workers.

The White House’s “Epstein files” stunt is causing a rift in the MAGA movement.

One of the far-right influencers who received a binder from the Trump administration—conspiracy and mommy blogger Jessica Reed Kraus—attacked Laura Loomer Thursday, accusing the pro-Trump influencer of being “jealous” that the president had chosen not to make the contents of the folders publicly available.

“Laura LOOMER calling us pedophile apologists is the last straw,” Kraus posted on her Instagram story. “She has no idea about any of the details we received today and is spewing horrific claims in spite of it.”

Jeffrey Epstein orchestrated a child sex trafficking ring in which he raped countless young girls and helped his wealthy and famous affiliates do the same. He allegedly killed himself in a jail cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019. Earlier this week, Attorney General Pam Bondi pledged to release the details of Epstein’s flight logs as well as a list of his connections to the public by Thursday, though what the Justice Department ultimately posted to its website wasn’t anything that hadn’t already been public for several years.

Donald Trump has achieved Messiah-like status within the QAnon conspiracy circle for years thanks to its principal belief that, despite being named and photographed as an associate of Epstein’s, and despite being found liable by a jury for sexually abusing Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll, Trump will rid the world of Satan-worshipping, liberal-minded pedophiles who run the government and media.

When some MAGA talking heads—including DC Draino’s Rogan O’Handley, Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik, Liz Wheeler, and Mike Cernovich—refused to share the contents of the binders after waltzing out of the executive office, Loomer took to social media to accuse the lot of participating in a showcase meant to deceive the American public.

“THEY ENGAGED IN DECEPTION TO RUN COVER FOR PEDOPHILES!!!” Loomer wrote on X. “THEY POSTED SELFIES WITH PROP BINDERS! LIARS AND DECEIVERS.”

The continued botched release of the Epstein list—paired with another stunt by the House Judiciary GOP on Thursday that made a practical joke of the lackluster release—was enough to make some of Trump’s strongest supporters question his leadership.

“If I’m gonna be fair these questions needs to be asked today. Why is the release of the Epstein list always a shit show?” posted Barstool Sports co-founder Dave Portnoy. “What’s the point of booting out illegals and criminals while somehow becoming a safe haven for the Tate brothers? Why is Crypto in the toilet if Trump is crypto king? How far does Tesla stock have to crash before Elon goes back to work?”

Donald Trump’s name has appeared seven times in the “Epstein files” his own administration has released.

The files—released after a photo op with right-wing influencers holding large shiny binders—don’t seem to contain anything that isn’t already public information. They include flight logs, an evidence list, and redacted pages from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s address book.

Trump was first mentioned on page 24 of the first flight log, on October 11, 1993. He was mentioned again, twice, on page 2 of the log on May 15, 1994, as were his then-wife, Marla Maples, his daughter Tiffany Trump, and their nanny. Each of the listed dates also had Epstein’s own initials on them, suggesting that he was on the exact same flight as Trump for at least three of the seven times Trump’s name shows up in the flight log.

This release has completely failed to live up to the hype. The influencer photo op paired with the obvious lack of new information, along with the knowledge that there are apparently thousands more pages of Epstein files, infuriated the MAGA faithful who’d been waiting for vindication of their sex trafficking cabal conspiracy theories.

A name in the flight log does not confirm or deny any criminal activity, but it does confirm that Trump had a real relationship with the convicted predator, who killed himself in 2019 while awaiting federal trial. Attorney General Pam Bondi hinted that more files will be released Friday.

Trump has yet to comment.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez captured the mood of the moment in an interview this week with NPR. 

The New York congresswoman said that these days, government is working very well for the wealthy, while often failing ordinary people. 

“Everything feels increasingly like a scam,” Ocasio-Cortez told the outlet. “Not only are grocery prices going up, but it’s like everything has a fee and a surcharge. And I think that anger is put out at government.”

The congresswoman expressed her anger at the cuts to the federal government that President Trump and Elon Musk have been pursuing for the past month. 

“I mean to the FAA? No. To the NIH? No,” she said. “I actually don’t want someone taking a wrecking ball to someone’s chemotherapy to just see what happens.”

She called out Trump administration officials for threatening to investigate her—and specifically Tom Homan, President Trump’s border czar, who said last week that Ocasio-Cortez was violating the law by trying “to educate people how they evade law enforcement.”

“I was informing all of my constituents of their constitutional protections and in particular, their constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure,” she said, and had a question for the Justice Department: “Well, there is a member of the Trump administration who is threatening and seeks to open an inquiry. And are you going to do it?”

Ocasio-Cortez told NPR that she sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi after the interview, which said, “I write to request clarity on whether the Department of Justice has yielded to political pressure and attempts to weaponize the agency against elected officials whose speech they disagree with.”  

Donald Trump has now been brutally fact-checked by two different world leaders over his incessant whining about getting a payday from war-torn Ukraine. 

During a joint press conference Thursday with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump was once again complaining that the U.S. had been scammed into sending billions in military aid to Ukraine, while other nations were making their money back. 

“We wanted to have a little bit of what the European nations had,” Trump griped. “You know, they get their money back by giving money, we don’t get the money back. Biden made a deal, he put in $350 billion, and I thought it was a very unfair situation.”

“We’re not getting all of ours,” Starmer interjected. “I mean, quite a bit of ours was gifted, it was given.”

Starmer’s correction was nearly identical to a fact-check from French President Emmanuel Macron  during a press conference Monday, when he was also forced to push back against the grievance-addled U.S. president’s false claims that Europe was simply “loaning” their money to Ukraine.

“No, in fact, to be frank. We paid,” Macron said. “We paid 60 percent of the total effort, and it was through, like the U.S., loans, guarantee, grants, and we provided real money, to be clear.”

Macron had emphasized that Ukraine ought to be compensated by Russia for the deaths of citizens and destruction of property. 

Trump’s obsession with getting paid back for America’s supposedly humanitarian and military assistance has become a central feature of his efforts to resolve Russia’s deadly invasion of Ukraine. Never mind how strange it is to demand payment for emergency aid in the first place.

U.S. and Ukraine officials entered the final stages of a contentious mineral agreement, which would funnel half of the Eastern European nation’s rare earth minerals—hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of materials—into the American market. The deal would serve to pay back some of what the U.S. spent but wouldn’t do anything to ensure Ukraine’s security or economic interests in the future. 

Trump has expressed hostility toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, claiming he was enjoying the “gravy train” of U.S. aid and calling him a “dictator.” But on Thursday, Trump claimed he didn’t remember saying that. 

The official social media account for the House Judiciary GOP rickrolled the Epstein files on Thursday.

On the heels of a political stunt in which the Trump administration gifted large binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase One” to a cadre of MAGA influencers, Republicans in office suddenly decided it would be kosher to use the abhorrent sex trafficking case to make a quick joke.

“#BREAKING: EPSTEIN FILES RELEASED,” the official X account for the House Judiciary GOP posted alongside a shortened URL that actually directed users to Rick Astley’s music video for “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

The disgusting gimmick appalled users on the social media platform, some of whom were shocked that the Republican Party would risk the American public’s cybersecurity by sending them down an unknown web address to access highly coveted, classified information.

“Sending the American people to a tiny url that redirects to an unknown destination is a great way to ensure trust in the cybersecurity domain,” posted one user.

For years, Jeffrey Epstein orchestrated a child sex trafficking ring in which he raped countless young girls and helped his wealthy and famous affiliates do the same. He allegedly killed himself in a jail cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019. Earlier this week, Attorney General Pam Bondi pledged to release the details of Epstein’s flight logs as well as a list of his connections to the public by Thursday, though that still has not happened.

“The ‘Epstein Files’ are something of a white whale for the QAnon wing of MAGA, as they believe that its release would reveal the villainous liberal cabal that secretly coordinates international child sex trafficking,” wrote The New Republic’s Malcolm Ferguson. “Many in the conspiracy community believe that Epstein’s death—and the botched release of this list—is part of a greater ‘deep state’ coverup.”

So the White House’s gag earlier in the day, unsurprisingly, ruffled feathers on the far right. After some MAGA talking heads—including DC Draino’s Rogan O’Handley, Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik, Liz Wheeler, and Mike Cernovich—refused to share the contents of the binders after waltzing out of the executive office, others on the right were left screaming and scrambling online for actual details related to Epstein’s activities.

“THERE ARE NO EPSTEIN FILES!!!” Laura Loomer claimed on X. “THE BINDERS ARE PROPS. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE RIGHT WING PAID INFLUENCERS LIED TO ALL OF YOU TODAY! THEY ENGAGED IN DECEPTION TO RUN COVER FOR PEDOPHILES!!! THEY POSTED SELFIES WITH PROP BINDERS! LIARS AND DECEIVERS.”

Donald Trump awkwardly joked to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer about hanging his country out to dry in a war against Russia, leaving the close U.S. ally speechless.

During a joint press conference Thursday, Starmer was describing the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom as “the greatest alliance for prosperity and security” that the world had ever seen.

“Whenever necessary, we’ve absolutely backed each other up—” Starmer said, before the president interjected.

“Could you take on Russia by yourselves?” Trump asked, turning to Starmer.

“Well, heh,” said Starmer laughing. Trump broke into a smile, laughing along with the press.

“Alright, one or two more,” Trump said, changing the subject.

Trump’s unsettling joke comes as the all-too-eager U.S. president and Russian President Vladimir Putin cozy up together, amid high-stakes negotiations to end Russia’s deadly invasion of Ukraine—showing just how willing the Trump administration is to throw its allies to the dogs at Moscow’s command.

Starmer’s visit led to several bumpy moments between the two world leaders. At one point, Trump hinted at a tense discussion between himself and Starmer. “You’ve been terrific in our discussions. You’re a very tough negotiator, however. I’m not sure I like that—but that’s OK,” Trump said.

At another point, when asked to respond to Trump’s comments about making Canada the fifty-first state, Starmer tried to reply, before being forcefully cut off by the president.

“You mentioned Canada. I think you’re trying to find a divide between us that doesn’t exist,” Starmer said. “We’re the closest of nations, and we had very good discussions today, but we didn’t—”

“That’s enough,” Trump interjected. “That’s enough. Thank you.”

Last month, Elon Musk set his sights on unseating Starmer, consulting with his right-wing allies to devise a strategy to oust the Labour Party’s leader.

The president of the United States begged a Fox News anchor to tell viewers that he’s doing a “good job.”

Shortly after the end of his first Cabinet meeting—which saw Elon Musk loom over a room of practically mum agency heads—Trump was caught on an Associated Press live feed suggesting to Fox & Friends host Lawrence Jones that the journalist tell America the meeting went off without a hitch.

“Lawrence! Look at Lawrence! This guy’s making a fortune! He never had it so good,” Trump shouted over the table shortly after the Wednesday meeting ended.

“Lawrence, say we did a great job, please. OK? Say it was unbelievable,” Trump added right before the AP’s feed cut off.

The embarrassing request echoed another major political flub from 2016, when Republican presidential primary candidate Jeb Bush pleaded with a crowd at one of his rallies to “please clap.”

Trump’s stunning appeal came after Jones used his time with the president to ask several vanilla questions, including which of his Cabinet members was his favorite, and whether the administration should fire all the generals involved in the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

“Well, that’s a great idea,” Trump said of the Afghanistan plan, before facing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “I’m not going to tell this man what to do, but I will say that if I had his place, I’d fire every single one of them.”

But the president’s plea to his favorite network comes on the heels of a flurry of attacks by his administration against the press at large. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the administration would take control of the White House press pool, hand-selecting which outlets are allowed access to the president and possibly replacing reporters from legacy publications with right-wing podcasters.

The White House Correspondents’ Association, which has handled press pool coverage since its founding in 1914, said that the decision “tears at the independence of a free press.”

And earlier this month, the Trump administration banned the Associated Press from accessing Air Force One and the Oval Office on the basis that the newswire chose to continue referring to the recently renamed “Gulf of America” as the “Gulf of Mexico” for its global audience.