Trump’s “Buyout” Purge Comes for the CIA

Trump’s “buyout” offer (aka the “agree with me or leave” special) has hit the CIA.

The Central Intelligence Agency on Tuesday became the first of the intelligence community to receive Trump’s exit offer of eight months of pay and benefits. The agency is also now enforcing a hiring freeze, and anyone who was hired or in the process of getting hired at the CIA will likely have their offers pulled—especially if their background doesn’t align with the Trump administration’s goals, an aide told The Wall Street Journal.

Those goals are more aggressive surveillance and more anti-China activity, the aide said. Trump’s CIA plans to spy on allied governments like Mexico and take a more hardline approach to drug cartels, classifying them as terrorist organizations. This buyout is yet another step in Trump’s efforts to reshape the federal bureaucracy in his image and fill it to the brim with loyalists who will carry out his goals no questions asked.

The buyout itself is also highly questionable, as Trump does not have the line-by-line authority to authorize funds for such a thing.

“There’s no statutory authority that I can see for the president making this offer,” Senator Tim Kaine told The Wall Street Journal. “The administration immediately knows, you don’t want to work for me. They’ll find some other way to get rid of you. You should not raise your hand.”

Some federal workers in other agencies have resisted the buyouts thus far. How the CIA will respond remains to be seen.

After days offline, USAID’s website was finally restored late Tuesday … with a notice announcing that all employees will be placed on administrative leave.

“On Friday, February 7, 2025, at 11:59 pm (EST) all USAID direct hire personnel will be placed on administrative leave globally, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs,” the notice said. “Essential personnel expected to continue working will be informed by Agency leadership by Thursday, February 6, at 3:00pm (EST).”

The Department of State, which has seemingly absorbed USAID, “is currently preparing a plan” to assist its personnel posted outside of the U.S. to return home, according to the announcement. The Agency would arrange and pay for the return of its employees within 30 days, and would “provide exceptions and return travel extensions based on personal or family hardship, mobility or safety concerns, and other reasons.”

The rest of the website is empty. The newest announcement comes just days after Musk declared that the agency would be shuttered and sent agents from the Department of Government Efficiency to raid USAID’s offices for access to all personnel and payment files.

On Tuesday, some USAID employees received letters telling them they’d been placed on administrative leave with pay “until further notice,” according to correspondence reviewed by The Hill. Those who had already been locked out of the internal system did not receive a letter.

It seems that Musk’s illegal plans to dismantle the world’s single largest humanitarian donor are proceeding according to schedule, without organized pushback from Democrats, and to the delight of America’s global adversaries.

Donald Trump’s latest plan to effectively “take over the Gaza strip” is seemingly too extreme for his Republican colleagues—though their tepid responses still leave wiggle room for Trump to push forward with the idea.

In a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, the president claimed that the United States would push Palestinians out of their home and “own it and be responsible.” That spontaneous and brazen idea caught most of his conservative colleagues—both in Congress and the media—off guard, as they grappled with whether Americans could be convinced to send their loved ones overseas to ethnically cleanse a war-torn region.

“We’ll see what our Arab friends say about that,” South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham told Politico. “I think most South Carolinians would probably not be excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza. I think that might be problematic, but I’ll keep an open mind.”

Graham added that he imagined Gaza would be a “tough place to be stationed as an American.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune told the outlet that how to achieve peace in the Middle East is still “a subject of conversation,” though he added that it sounds like Trump has “got an idea on that.”

Meanwhile, Senator Josh Hawley said, “I don’t know that I think it’s the best use of United States resources to spend a bunch of money in Gaza. I think maybe I’d prefer that to be spent in the United States first. But let’s see what happens.”

Another Republican senator, granted anonymity to candidly react to Trump’s invasion, said that they “did not have this” on their “bingo card.”

Even Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy sounded skeptical of the plan, optimistically saying Wednesday morning that Trump “knows the United States can’t invade another country.”

The definition of ethnic cleansing is the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society, per the Oxford English Dictionary. Ethnic cleansing has not been identified as an independent crime under international law, according to the United Nations.

Representative Ilhan Omar’s Republican colleagues are once again calling for her to be deported because they don’t understand U.S. law.

Representative Brandon Gill posted on X Tuesday in response to a post falsely claiming Omar was “hosting workshops” with Somali immigrants about their legal rights in the face of Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation orders.

“America would be a better place if @IlhanMN were deported back to Somalia,” Gill wrote, directing racist vitriol at a fellow member of Congress and a U.S. citizen.

Omar came under intense scrutiny after a whiny Elon Musk shared a link to a fake video that supposedly showed her “conducting seminars” with Somali immigrants on how to “evade” deportation. Musk claimed that she was “breaking the law. Literally. Outright.”

In the video, a clip of Omar explaining in Somali about Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination—a legal right that undocumented immigrants are free to exercise when encountering ICE agents—was spliced together with footage of unidentified people apparently of East African descent sitting in a room.

“She’s a major grifter and she hates America,” Musk wrote in a separate post on X.

Omar was quick to hit back at Musk Tuesday. “Well it just shows you how much he lacks an understanding of what our, of what the laws of this country are,” Omar said during an interview on CNN.

It appears that Gill has joined Musk in his weak understanding of American law—if that wasn’t obvious enough from his call to deport a U.S. citizen.

She clarified that the footage of her had been taken out of context from an interview with a journalist, who asked what her advice would be to undocumented Somalis, and that she hadn’t held a meeting like the one described.

Musk’s attacks against Omar come as she has been outspoken against his unlawful efforts to dismantle USAID.

Donald Trump’s federal government funding freeze is hurting the Head Start program, despite a court order blocking the freeze last week.

In multiple states, the early childhood education program’s offices are getting error messages when they try to access the accounts used to request funds, HuffPost reported Tuesday, citing earlier reports from PBS NewsHour journalist Lisa Desjardins.

“We’re aware of at least 40 programs that have requested funds to draw them down and have not received those funds as of yet,” Tommy Sheridan, a deputy director at the National Head Start Association, told HuffPost.

The Department of Health and Human Services provides grants to more than 1,600 Head Start organizations around the country to provide services to families with young children, including education. While the organizations receive funds annually, they also can draw down money as they need it during the year.

Desjardins said she confirmed that Head Start offices in Washington state, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were having “rolling blackouts” in their efforts to access funding. One official told HuffPost that the Head Start issues are due to a resulting technical glitch.

“That has been resolved, and any ongoing error messages being reported by Head Start providers are a result of the residual backlog of payment approvals from that technical glitch,” the official said.

The Justice Department said in a court filing Monday that it instructed federal agencies to unfreeze funds on Friday, but a federal judge in Washington expressed concern that the funding freeze remained in place despite the court’s order.

Head Start serves about 800,000 preschool children with $10 billion in grants per year, and the program usually receives bipartisan support from Congress to protect it from cuts. However, the conservative manifesto Project 2025, drafted by the Heritage Foundation, called for eliminating the program, and the Trump administration’s staffers have extensive ties to the document.

Several of Trump’s policies and executive orders are straight out of the right-wing Project 2025 playbook, and his funding freeze was so ill thought out and ill planned that we are seeing damaging effects even after it was supposed to be halted. Like many of the president’s actions over the past few weeks, the freeze has only caused chaos and confusion, hurting vulnerable children in the process.

Elon Musk is sending his digital minions after Representative Ilhan Omar, all based on a fake video posted by the pitiable right-wing shill Ian Miles Cheong.

On Tuesday, Cheong posted an obviously edited video in which he claimed the progressive congresswoman was “conducting seminars for Somalians who are living illegally in the U.S. without documentation, providing guidance on how to evade deportation.”

The video shows a random room full of unidentified people of seemingly East African descent, then cuts to Omar being interviewed in a completely different room.

The richest man in the world shared the video, clutching at his pearls. “She is breaking the law. Literally. Outright,” he wrote on X of Omar allegedly telling immigrants that they were not required to answer questions if detained by ICE. And that didn’t even happen.

Hundreds of Musk’s fans began flocking to Omar’s page, so much so that she had to clear the air herself.

“Hey Elon, every single person in this country deserves to know their rights. That’s legal. Maybe you should brush up on our laws given the fact you’re breaking them to steal American’s sensitive data,” Omar wrote, in reference to Musk’s aggressive takeover of the Treasury’s payment system. “PS. This video is manipulated, and I wasn’t even at the event shown.”

It’s ironic that a man who spends all day moaning about left-wing misinformation and suppression is using his massive platform to spread his own. And he’s just getting started.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune is playing dumb when it comes to Donald Trump’s significant efforts to shutter USAID.

Since taking office, Trump has made several major moves to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development: He signed an executive order pausing all foreign aid, issued a stop-work order sending staff and contractors home, and sent agents from the Department of Government Efficiency to raid USAID’s offices for personnel and payment files. But, supposedly, his main guy in the Senate has no idea what’s going on.

Benjamin Weiss of Courthouse News asked Tuesday whether Thune believed Trump had the authority to “unilaterally close” a federal agency without congressional approval. The South Dakota Republican acted like he had no idea what he was being asked about.

“It was my understanding, I don’t think they’re closing an agency, but I do think they have the right to review funding and how those decisions are made and what priorities are being funded,” Thune replied, according to Fox News’s Chad Pergram.

“I think that’s probably true of any administration when they come in … we’re trying to determine again, how the the various programs are authorized and funded under USAID, how those dollars are being spent, whether they’re being spent wisely and well and consistent with the purpose for which they are, are intended,” Thune said.

“It’s in need of reform. It’s in need of transparency and greater accountability. And I think that’s what the administration’s trying to achieve,” Thune said.

Yes, transparency—but that’s not what a group of Democratic leaders got when they marched down to USAID headquarters on Monday and were denied entry from the offices.

Thune’s statement seems particularly divorced from reality, considering that Elon Musk announced Trump’s intention to shutter the agency and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s plan to absorb some parts of the organization and abolish the rest.

FBI agents who worked on cases related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection are suing to prevent Donald Trump’s new leaders at the Justice Department from retaliating against them.

Agents at the intelligence bureau filed two separate lawsuits on Tuesday against the Justice Department. The first class action lawsuit was filed in federal court anonymously and accuses the DOJ’s Trump-appointed leadership of putting together lists of agents who worked on cases seeking future punitive action for January 6, citing a survey being circulated in the bureau. The agents fear that Trump’s DOJ will make the lists public, or use them to punish agents they think are disloyal.

“Plaintiffs legitimately fear that the information being compiled will be accessed by persons who are not authorized to have access to it,” the lawsuit states. “Plaintiffs further assert that even if they are not targeted for termination, they may face other retaliatory acts such as demotion, denial of job opportunities or denial of promotions in the future.”

The lawsuit claims that the agents’ First Amendment rights were violated, as was the federal Privacy Act. It seeks to prevent the DOJ from collecting and circulating the identities of the FBI agents and other bureau employees in ways that could tie them to the January 6 cases, or to the case on Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.

The FBI Agents Association, representing several other agents at the bureau, is also suing the DOJ over fears of retaliation for work relating to the January 6 attacks, fearing that their personal information will be exposed. In both lawsuits, agents fear that even if Trump doesn’t take direct action against them, his DOJ loyalists would be giving a hit list to the MAGA right, including the more than 1,500 January 6 defendants he pardoned.

Trump has targeted the bureau for revenge and tried to fire six senior agents last week. His nominee to run the law enforcement agency, Kash Patel, has already compiled an enemies list and refuses to answer questions about it. If Patel is confirmed, Trump will not only be able to take his revenge against those who investigated him and his supporters, but also protect his loyalists from prosecution when they break the law.

Trump is preparing an executive order to abolish the Department of Education—a move that will undoubtedly hurt teachers, students, and parents in red states the most.

The draft order will direct the department to slash spending and slash staff, according to The Washington Post. Such an aggressive decision on such a large scale would have sweeping consequences.

“The Dept of Education provides crucial funding for low-income public schools—eliminating it would result in the loss of 6% of teachers’ jobs nationwide,” former adviser for Barack Obama, Steven Rattner, wrote on X.

Rattner shared a chart based on data from the Center for American Progress on states’ K-12 education funding under Title I, the Education Department’s main federal program to help low-income students. Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Nevada, and Arizona—states that all went for Trump—are the most reliant on that funding, and the most likely to lose hundreds of teachers under Trump’s proposals. Many other red states are not far behind. This will likely lead to a devastating domino effect of educational instability in states that need it the most.

Donald Trump’s administration has removed thousands of pages of information from the U.S. government’s websites as part of its sweeping effort to remove references to diversity, gender, and environmental justice.

As part of the de-wokeification process, Trump’s administration has eviscerated more than 8,000 pages of materials just since Friday about a range of topics, from census methodology to resources about postpartum depression, according to an analysis from The New York Times.

The biggest targets have been the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Census Bureau, which each lost more than 3,000 pages.

In the past week, the CDC’s website saw the removal of resources about HIV and STI treatment guidelines, as well as a guide for young people seeking gender-affirming care.

Other information struck from the record included warning signs for Alzheimer’s disease, materials for overdose prevention training, and vaccine guidelines for pregnant people. The Times noted that the use of the phrase “pregnant people,” as opposed to “women,” may have contributed to the guidelines’ removal.

The CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index, which uses census data to determine how at risk someone is to experience a natural disaster through the lenses of geography, race, income level, and education, was also removed, according to The Guardian.

The National Institutes of Health removed a portal with information about maternal morbidity and mortality.

Some CDC files, not included in the Times’ analysis, were removed and then restored with information missing. The agency’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey data briefly disappeared, but then was restored with one of its gender columns missing and its data documentation deleted, the Associated Press reported.

Of the more than 3,000 articles removed from the Census Bureau site, most were filed under research and methodology, but other areas with missing pages included data stewardship and documentation for several data sets. On Monday, users hoping to retrieve data on certain topics from the census were greeted by a response that said the area was “unavailable due to maintenance,” according to the AP.

But that wasn’t all.

More than 1,000 pages were removed from the website for the Office of Justice Programs, a research and grant-making organization that works to provide local and state law enforcement with resources and training. All state-level data on hate crimes was removed from the Justice Department’s website (the months after Trump’s first election saw a significant spike in hate crimes, according to FBI data).

The Food and Drug administration removed nearly 100 pages, including 60 that mentioned expanding diversity in drug trials. The Department of the Interior deleted several pages mentioning “environmental justice.” Head Start, the IRS, and several other agencies also saw hundreds of pages scrubbed out of existence. There are links to archived versions of some of these pages here.