Outgoing Commerce Official Shreds Elon Musk’s Starlink in Final Email

A top official at the Commerce Department warned in a scathing resignation letter that Elon Musk intends to get rich at the expense of rural Americans.

Evan Feinman, the former director of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program, or BEAD, which provides grants to expand internet access across the country, condemned the efforts of the billionaire bureaucrat—who also happens to own a satellite internet constellation that might directly profit from his dismissal.

“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” Feinman wrote Sunday in a lengthy email to his colleagues, obtained by Politico.

The BEAD program, overseen by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is housed within the Commerce Department, was granted $42.5 billion in 2021 by Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to provide fast internet connection to millions of Americans. As of yet, no internet expansion projects have actually begun, though some states are closer to the finish line than others.

In a statement earlier this month, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed that the Biden administration’s “woke mandates, favoritism towards certain technologies, and burdensome regulations” had prevented BEAD from connecting a single person to high speed internet.

Lutnick promised an overhaul of BEAD that would include “ripping out” the “pointless requirements” imposed by the previous administration, but did not specify what steps that would include, or what regulations he intended to remove.

The potential changes could offer a bigger piece of the pie to Musk’s Starlink by adopting “technology neutral” policies that will make way for the use of satellites in addition to fiber-optic cables. Starlink was expected to haul in around $4.1 billion under the existing rules but could rake in anywhere from $10 billion to $20 billion if Lutnick’s changes are accepted.

Feinman seemed to agree that the Biden administration had inserted some language for “messaging/political purposes, and were never central to the mission of the program.” But he was concerned that Lutnick’s changes could set the program back even further, as three states, Louisiana, Delaware, and Nevada, are currently trapped in limbo as they await approval from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“Shovels could already be in the ground in three states, and they could be in the ground in half the country by the summer without the proposed changes to project selection,” Feinman wrote.

Feinman was concerned that the Trump administration would undermine BEAD to turn a profit, against the best interest of rural Americans, lawmakers, or even the telecommunications industry.

He urged that officials “NOT change it to benefit technology that delivers slower speeds at higher costs to the household paying the bill.”

“Reach out to your congressional delegation and reach out to the Trump Administration and tell them to strip out the needless requirements, but not to strip away from states the flexibility to get the best connections for their people,” Feinman wrote.

Trump over the weekend invoked a sparsely used eighteenth-century law to carry out mass deportations—and, after outrage, justified doing so because we are in a “time of war.” 

On Saturday, the president used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—untouched since the War of 1812 and the Japanese internment of the 1940s—to push the deportation of more than 200 Venezuelans, claiming they were Tren de Aragua gang members. The deportations were carried out despite a court order requiring all planes carrying people deported under the law to remain in the country.  

When asked the following day why he invoked wartime powers, Trump’s answer was telling. 

“Well this is a time of war. Because Biden allowed millions of people, many of them criminals, many of them at the highest level.… Other nations emptied their jails into the United States, it’s an invasion. These are criminals, many many criminals … murderers, drug dealers at the highest level, drug lords. People from mental institutions. That’s an invasion,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, sliding effortlessly into the unfounded, racist rhetoric that has defined his political career. 

“In that sense this is war. In many respects it’s more dangerous than war because you know in war they have uniforms, you know who you’re shooting at, you know who you’re going after,” he continued. “We have thousands of murderers that Biden in his incompetence—he was grossly incompetent—Biden and his people.… It looked like we had an autopen for a president,” he said, insinuating that Biden was using an automatic signing device for all those last-minute pardons he did rather than signing them under his own power. 

Trump’s invocation is a doubling down upon his mass-deportation mission, and setting up a crisis by openly defying the courts. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a fellow authoritarian ruler and Trump ally, mocked the judge’s order, posting video after video of heavily armed police officers leading the returned migrants to prison.

Some Trump voters are waking up to the fact that the president’s aggressive anti-immigration politics affects them, too.

Bradley Bartell, a Wisconsin Trump voter, has been second-guessing his support for the MAGA leader since ICE agents deported his Peruvian wife Camila Muñoz.

Last month, ICE agents stopped the couple at the airport as they returned home from their honeymoon in Puerto Rico.

“Are you an American citizen?” the agent asked Muñoz.

The answer was no. Muñoz, who had been married to Bartell for two years and was caring for her husband’s 12-year-old son as her own, had overstayed her original visa, per USA Today. But the couple felt confident on their flight home since Muñoz had applied for her green card, worked on a W-2 contract, and paid her taxes.

Fearing her wedding ring would be taken from her, Muñoz took it off and stashed it in a backpack that she handed to Bartell, who “shook” as he watched the agents take her away.

“What the fuck do I do?” Bartell told the publication he thought in that moment.

Bartell voted for Donald Trump, believing that the far-right leader would crack down on “criminal illegal immigrants,” but that hasn’t exactly been the case. Instead, Trump’s mass deportation policy has expanded to include immigrants whose legal statuses are under review, even if they’re married to U.S. citizens.

Trump has based his anti-immigrant rhetoric on the falsehood that the people who have entered the U.S. are murderers and rapists, and that they are a drain on the country’s economy and government resources as unemployed migrants struggle to obtain work and housing. In reality, undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens. And in 2022, approximately 4.5 percent of the workforce was undocumented, contributing to some $75.6 billion in total taxes, according to the American Immigration Council.

Overstaying the length of your permitted immigration by expired visa or otherwise is considered an administrative violation—not a criminal one.

But none of that matters under the Trump administration.

“Anyone who isn’t a legal permanent resident or U.S. citizen is at risk—period,” Muñoz’s immigration attorney, David Rozas, told USA Today.

Nora Ahmed, the legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, warned that non-citizens should assume they could be targeted during travel.

“The unfortunate answer is they have to be worried,” Ahmed told USA Today. “If you are not a citizen of the United States, and you are going through an immigration process, your first thought needs to be: How can this process be weaponized against me?”

Some of the other people who have been targeted by the immigration agency have lived in the U.S. for decades. They include a woman in her 50s who has lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years and is married to a U.S. citizen, a woman in her 30s who first came to the states as a teenager and has proof of valid permanent legal residency, a European woman in her 30s engaged to a U.S. citizen, and a woman engaged to a U.S. legal permanent resident and who has lived in the U.S. for nearly a decade, according to interviews and documents obtained by USA Today.

Earlier this month, a Trump supporter in Virginia said he was similarly reconsidering his support for the president after he was racially profiled and interrogated by ICE agents who had their guns drawn.

“I voted for Trump last election, but, because I thought it was going to be the things, you know, like … just go against criminals, not every Hispanic-looking, like, that they will assume that we are all illegals,” Jensy Machado, a naturalized U.S. citizen, told Telemundo 44.

The Trump administration openly defied a court order and deported a Brown University professor and kidney transplant specialist.

Dr. Rasha Alawieh traveled to her native Lebanon to visit relatives last month, and was detained on Thursday upon her return to the U.S. A District Court judge in Massachusetts, Leo Sorokin, ordered the government in a Friday evening ruling to give 48 hours advance notice before deporting Alawieh, but she was put on a flight out of the country the same night anyway.

According to Thomas Brown, an attorney who handles immigration issues for Brown University doctors, Alawieh had a valid H-1B visa, which is granted to skilled foreign citizens in “specialty occupations.” The doctor had studied and worked in the U.S. for six years prior to her rushed deportation, which took place “without any justification and without permitting [her] access to their counsel,” according to a Friday legal complaint from her cousin, Yara Chehab.

Alawieh’s lawyers filed a motion Saturday saying “that Customs and Border Patrol received actual notice of the court’s order and nonetheless thereafter ‘willfully’ disobeyed the order by sending her out of the United States.”

Sorokin then issued a second court order on Sunday saying that there was reason to believe Customs and Border Protection defied his initial ruling on purpose, saying he followed “common practice in this district as it has been for years” and ordered CBP to respond to “serious allegations” at a court hearing scheduled for Monday.

“These allegations,” Judge Sorokin said Sunday in his ruling, “are supported by a detailed and specific timeline in an under oath affidavit filed by an attorney.”

This wasn’t the only court ruling that the Trump administration openly defied over the weekend. The White House deported hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador, alleging they were gang members, despite a court order to halt the deportations. The planes continued on to San Salvador, where their arrival was made into a propaganda video by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele.

Bukele later posted, “Oopsie…Too late,” with a tears-of-joy emoji on X while quoting a news article about the court order, taking the Trump administration’s lead and blatantly disrespecting the federal judiciary. All of this sets off a constitutional crisis in the United States, as Trump’s actions are not likely to be met with punitive articles of impeachment or any other mechanism to enforce a court ruling. The U.S. is now in uncharted territory.

A violent tornado outbreak over the weekend sent millions bracing in the Midwest and South and killed at least 40 people, just days after Donald Trump’s administration ordered another round of massive layoffs at the country’s severe weather tracking agency.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency announced last week that it would terminate 10 percent of its workforce, which will equate to roughly 1,000 of the agency’s 10,000 employees.

NOAA plays an essential role in weather forecasting and warning Americans about natural disasters, including avalanches, electrical events, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, and of course, tornadoes. Reporting from 122 local offices, NOAA officials provide guidance on how to avoid danger.

The agency had already been subject to an earlier round of workforce cuts at the beginning of the month. By the time the latest cuts are complete, one in four jobs at the agency will have been terminated.

Ryan Maue, a private meteorologist who is a conservative and NOAA chief scientist under Trump, warned against the cuts, calling NOAA’s work an “amazing undertaking.”

“You can’t count on TV meteorologists to fill this gap and you can’t count on private meteorology,” Maue told the Associated Press. “You can’t count on your weather app to call you up and alert you’’ to tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, and floods in your area.

NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said that the cuts proposed by the Trump administration posed a serious threat to the work of his agency.

“This is not government efficiency,” Spinrad told the AP. “It is the first steps toward eradication. There is no way to make these kinds of cuts without removing or strongly compromising mission capabilities.”

The powerful storm system was exiting the U.S. on Monday, leaving behind a trail of destruction and fatalities concentrated mostly in Missouri.

Trump posted a statement on social media Sunday saying that his administration was tracking the severe weather event.

“We are actively monitoring the severe tornadoes and storms that have impacted many States across the South and Midwest—36 innocent lives have been lost, and many more devastated,” he wrote.

“The National Guard have been deployed to Arkansas, and my Administration is ready to assist State and Local Officials, as they help their communities to try and recover from the damage. Please join Melania and me in praying for everyone impacted by these terrible storms!”

But before that, he was bragging about having won a golf award at his own club.

The Trump administration is working tirelessly to undo the accomplishments of President Joe Biden—including the ex-president’s pardons.

“The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social within the first hour of Monday.

Trump has accused Biden of not physically signing several of his orders as the basis for undoing them. The allegation was originally hocked by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. On Friday, the New York Post reported that a former Biden staffer had corroborated the detail, though the conservative publication refused to publish the staffer’s name due to a “lack of concrete evidence and refutations by other colleagues.”

“In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!” Trump continued. “The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden. He knew nothing about them, and the people that did may have committed a crime.”

“Therefore, those on the Unselect Committee, who destroyed and deleted ALL evidence obtained during their two year Witch Hunt of me, and many other innocent people, should fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level,” the president wrote. “The fact is, they were probably responsible for the Documents that were signed on their behalf without the knowledge or consent of the Worst President in the History of our Country, Crooked Joe Biden!”

The Constitution offers the president the unique and irrefutable power to issue pardons. In one of his final acts in office, Biden issued a slew of controversial preemptive pardons in January for individuals who had not committed crimes but had investigated, criticized, or worked to prosecute Trump for criminal wrongdoing.

The Senate advanced the House GOP spending bill Friday with some help from across the aisle. Nine Democrats, plus an independent who caucuses with Democrats, joined Republicans in passing the continuing resolution, which will extend government funding until September 30. Those senators were Dick Durbin (Illinois), Brian Schatz (Hawaii), Catherine Cortez Masto (Nevada), John Fetterman (Pennsylvania), Gary Peters (Michigan), Angus King (Maine), Maggie Hassan (New Hampshire), Kirsten Gillibrand (New York), Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire), and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York).

The upper chamber needed 60 votes to pass the measure, requiring the assistance of at least seven Democratic lawmakers to join the Republican effort. The looming alternative was a government shutdown that a coalition of Democrats believed could pressure Republicans to further negotiate down the bill. The shutdown would have begun as soon as Saturday morning, and would have reduced federal services, furloughed thousands of “nonessential” government workers, and potentially paused pay for thousands of “essential” federal employees until the budget was resolved.

Deep divides in the Democratic Party emerged Thursday and Friday as lawmakers debated whether to maintain adamant opposition against the House GOP’s continuing resolution. At a private lunch with the Democratic caucus, Gillibrand was heard screaming about the impacts of a government shutdown through the room’s “thick wood doors,” according to Fox News’s Aishah Hasnie.

How the caucus would vote still wasn’t clear by Friday late afternoon, when Schumer again implored Democrats to vote in favor of the Trump-endorsed budget, arguing that a shutdown would give Trump and Elon Musk carte blanche to destroy vital government services even faster.

House Democrats voted nearly unanimously against the bill earlier this week. After Schumer’s remarks, top House Democrats issued a joint statement reiterating their opposition to the measure, pushing for a four-week spending bill and more time to negotiate the details of a continuing resolution.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries gave a nonanswer when asked whether Senator Chuck Schumer needed to be replaced as Senate minority leader.

Jeffries was speaking to the press Friday regarding the impending government funding deadline, which will come down to a vote in the Senate for the continuing resolution passed by House Republicans. A reporter point-blank asked the New York congressman, “Is it time for new leadership in the Senate?”

“Next question,” Jeffries said, refusing to answer.

When asked if he has lost confidence in Schumer, Jeffries again replied, “Next question.”

“You have dodged multiple times questions about whether you have confidence right now in Schumer, and … none of you are willing to say you have confidence in Chuck Schumer?” a reporter finally asked.

“You keep engaging in parlor games because you want to take the focus off of the American people,” Jeffries said, still refusing to answer the question.

The fact that Jeffries could have easily said “no” but tried to quickly move past the question is telling. Schumer’s decision to support the GOP’s continuing resolution angered many Democrats on Capitol Hill, especially since all but one House Democrat voted against the bill. Some Democrats, including centrists, have reportedly even urged Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a primary challenge to Schumer in 2028.

Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t addressed the question, but former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed the idea of Senate Democrats supporting the Republican bill in a statement on Friday, calling it “unacceptable.”

“I salute Leader Hakeem Jeffries for his courageous rejection of this false choice, and I am proud of my colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus for their overwhelming vote against this bill,” Pelosi said in her statement.

Pelosi, one mustn’t forget, was a major driving force behind Joe Biden stepping down as the Democratic nominee for president in the 2024 election, and her experience and words carry a lot of weight for Democrats in Congress. If Jeffries isn’t publicly supporting Schumer, and Pelosi is publicly criticizing his decision to support the GOP’s continuing resolution, that could mean that Schumer’s days leading Senate Democrats are numbered.

The Trump administration practically declared war on the nation’s judicial system Friday, asserting that the executive branch would aggressively fight court orders requiring them to rehire thousands of federal employees.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the system of checks and balances as “unconstitutional,” telling reporters that the administration would fight back by appealing the decisions with the “full weight” of the White House legal counsel.

“You cannot have a low-level district court judge filing an injunction to usurp the executive authority of the president of the United States,” Leavitt said. “That is absurd.”

Leavitt then said it was within the president’s authority to “fire or hire” judges, while highlighting that federal courts had placed more injunctions on the administration’s “agenda” in the last month than the Biden administration faced during a four-year term. Somehow, Leavitt interpreted that as a personal attack on the president and his policies rather than an indication that the administration’s strategies have been legally dubious.

“It’s very clear that there are judicial activists throughout our judicial branch who are trying to block this president’s executive authority. We are going to fight back,” Leavitt continued, underscoring the fact that Donald Trump has survived “nearly 200” legal challenges and has still ascended to the Oval Office.

But Leavitt’s argument that judicial pushback on Trump’s executive orders is somehow illegitimate ignores the fact that the three branches of government are designed to counterbalance one another. Judges are not supposed to bend to the will of a president’s agenda, but rather determine its legality based on legal precedent and the Constitution. Congress is also supposed to check the executive branch, but the Republican majorities in the House and Senate have effectively ceded that power to Trump, to curry favor with their constituents.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered several agencies to “immediately” reinstate all fired probationary employees on Thursday, slamming the mass firing of federal employees as an “unlawful” directive by the Office of Personnel Management.

Those agencies included the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as the departments of Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury, and Agriculture. The order would also restore numbers at the IRS, which falls under the helm of the Treasury Department and has been hit hard by job cuts in recent weeks.

In a hearing leading up to the decision, Alsup torched the Trump administration’s decision not to submit OPM director Chad Ezell for questioning as a “sham,” and called the White House’s effort to cast the firings as performance failures as “a gimmick.”

Alsup’s order was delivered as federal agencies were due to submit “reduction memos” to the White House that could affect as many as 250,000 additional probationary federal employees.

Another Columbia University pro-Palestine activist has been arrested by immigration officials, the Department of Homeland Security announced Friday, as Trump issued an ultimatum to the university over its federal funding.

Officials arrested Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian from the occupied West Bank, for overstaying her student visa. According to DHS, she had overstayed her visa, which was terminated in 2022 for “lack of attendance.” Kordia was also arrested in April 2024 for her involvement in protests at Columbia.

In addition, the Trump administration revoked the student visa of Columbia doctoral student Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian citizen, on March 5. Srinivasan decided to self-deport, the department said.

In a statement, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said, “It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America. When you advocate for violence and terrorism, that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country. I am glad to see one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathizers use the CBP Home App to self-deport.”

This comes as Trump on Thursday ordered Columbia to enact broad policy changes and place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under “academic receivership” for at least five years—or risk losing all federal funding.

All of this follows the administration’s decision last week to detain legal permanent resident and Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who organized pro-Palestine protests at Columbia, in an effort to deport the activist. At the time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

Trump also celebrated Khalil’s arrest and detention Monday, crowing on his Truth Social account and saying Khalil was the “first arrest of many to come.” Kordia’s arrest and Srinivasan’s visa revocation appear to be making good on Trump’s words. The administration appears to be making an example out of Columbia, which was home to one of the highest-profile protest encampments against Israel’s war in Gaza and in support of Palestinians.

Last week, the Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal grants to the university, a clear warning against any pro-Palestine activism at U.S. universities and in spite of Columbia’s crackdown on student activists. It appears that in Trump’s second term, the First Amendment to the Constitution is under threat at American colleges and universities, historically a home for activism.