Trump’s Commerce Secretary Will Get Rich Off These Budget Cuts

At least one person in the Trump administration stands to make a fortune at the National Weather Service’s deathbed.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its subsidiary, the National Weather Service. But until recently, he also ran a financial firm, Cantor Fitzgerald (which he placed under the stewardship of his two twentysomething sons), that invests in companies vying to replace the weather agencies’ labor.

Cantor owns a controlling interest in BGC Group, which created a weather derivatives desk in 2023 to analyze its clients’ climate-related financial exposure. Cantor is also invested in a satellite company that photographs natural disasters and weather events in real time. Lutnick is especially close to that project—he helped the company go public in 2022.

Lutnick’s most recent ethics filing revealed that he is still in the process of selling off his shares in the company. Securities and Exchange Commission filings obtained by the Associated Press indicate that Lutnick’s stakes aren’t going far—instead, he’s been transferring them to one of his sons.

Lutnick isn’t the only one with outside interests in nixing the agency. Donald Trump’s pick to run NOAA, Neil Jacobs, has been an enthusiastic advocate for privatizing the department’s work. He was previously employed by Panasonic Weather Solutions, one such company collecting weather data. And Trump’s nominee for another NOAA post, Taylor Jordan, is a K-Street lobbyist “with a roster of weather-related clients,” according to the Associated Press.

Trump has been attacking the country’s public weather-monitoring systems since he was on the campaign trail, promising to dismantle NOAA since Hurricane Helene devastated the South.

In February, then-DOGE chief Elon Musk sized down NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce, which is responsible for imposing regulations on two of Musk’s largest assets: SpaceX and Starlink. Musk laid off a third of the office’s staff.

Two months later, the administration proposed formal plans to eviscerate the rest of NOAA’s budget. In internal documents obtained by CNN, the White House claimed that the agency’s myriad weather-related programs were “misaligned with the … expressed will of the American people.”

Nixing NOAA was the brainchild of Project 2025. On page 664, the Christian nationalist manifesto argued that the agency “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”

But losing NOAA and its federally funded research would have immediate ramifications for the average American. It would effectively privatize weather forecasts, forcing U.S. citizens to pay for weather subscriptions to replace what currently feels commonplace, for instance national weather alert systems for emergencies such as flash flooding, tornadoes, extreme heat, and earthquakes.

The White House’s machinations against the weather agency have come under increased scrutiny since Texas faltered in notifying Kerr County residents of an oncoming flash flood over the weekend. It’s unclear if federal cuts played a role in how local and state authorities responded to the event, but the communication failure produced one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history, killing at least 119 people across central Texas, with 173 people still missing.

“The Weather Service did a good job with the information you had here. I don’t think the staffing cuts contributed to this,” Andy Hazelton, one of the recently laid-off NOAA climate scientists, told the BBC. “But this is the kind of event we can see more of if the cuts to NOAA continue, if you make the models worse or have the staffing levels lower.”

Permanently ending access to public weather notifications could be the beginning of many more disasters down the line, as Americans would be cornered into paying for another subscription or unknowingly putting themselves at risk.

“It’s the most insidious aspect of this: Are we really talking about making weather products available only to those who can afford it?” Rick Spinrad, a former NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden, told the Associated Press. “Basically turning the weather service into a subscription streaming service? As a taxpayer, I don’t want to be in the position of saying, ‘I get a better weather forecast because I’m willing to pay for it.’”

In an appearance on Fox Business on Wednesday, Trump’s agriculture chief, Brooke Rollins, revealed that the administration has no plan to fix the damage his mass deportations are inflicting on the U.S. food supply.

The Trump administration has thus far sent confused signals on how it plans to conduct its promised mass deportations without crippling the economy and food system, which depend in large part on the labor of undocumented workers whose jobs U.S. citizens are not rushing to take. The president recently pledged to let undocumented farmworkers remain in the U.S. if their employers vouch for them.

Anchor David Asman asked Rollins for clarification on whether some undocumented farmworkers will be allowed to stay.

“Ultimately, we have to move toward a 100 percent legal workforce, and that’s what this president stands for, and that’s what we’re doing,” the agriculture secretary replied. “The mass deportations will continue, but the president has been very clear that we have to make sure we’re not compromising our food supply at the same time.”

Providing nothing by way of how the administration will reconcile those two conflicting promises, Rollins’s answer led Asman to press: “It sounds like you don’t yet have a concrete proposal to deal with farmers who rely on undocumented workers, am I right?”

“Well, no. We’re working on it,” Rollins began, before Asman cut back in, saying, “You’re working on it, but that’s not a concrete proposal.”

“Well, no. The president has been very, very clear,” Rollins continued. “We need to make sure that the food supply is safe. [Labor Secretary] Lori Chavez-DeRemer is on it, she’s leading the way. The H-2A [temporary agriculture worker] program has been in place for a long time. The border has to be secure. And there will be no amnesty. Listen, none of this is easy.”

Asman agreed on the latter point, but said it’s unfair “to say there’s a concrete proposal when you’re still working out details to try to deal with the needs of farmers who need a lot of these undocumented workers and at the same time not providing an amnesty.”

The anchor was putting it nicely by saying the administration is “still working out details.” The administration is apparently so bereft of solutions that, a day earlier, Rollins bizarrely suggested that nonworking able-bodied Medicaid recipients (a cohort whose size she severely overstated) will replace deported farmworkers, toiling in fields to meet Medicaid work requirements that will be implemented under Trump’s budget.

Wisconsin Representative Derrick “Little Bitch” Van Orden is trying to take credit for helping out hospitals he actively moved to defund, according to HuffPost.

Van Orden, who cheered for the stripping of benefits brought by Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill, has been trying desperately to tie himself to a new budget that would increase his state’s Medicaid provider tax rate before it could be frozen at its current level by the president’s legislation. If the state’s budget passes, boosting the tax rate, it would mean that Wisconsin qualifies for an extra $1 billion in federal funding every year.

In multiple posts on X, Van Orden has repeatedly targeted Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, trying to take credit for the budget measures to ensure health care access. Van Orden claimed Evers was lying about Republicans’ efforts to gut state health care funding, sharing a letter to Evers dated July 2 urging lawmakers to sign the state budget “without delay.”

Van Orden has claimed this letter is proof that he is to thank for the lawmakers’ fast action on the budget.

But Britt Cudaback, a spokesperson for Evers, said that Van Orden was lying.

“Congressman Van Orden never personally advocated to the governor or our office for the hospital assessment provision to be included in the state budget until after it was clearly already part of the state budget, he had nothing to do with the hospital assessment being part of bipartisan state budget negotiations with Republican leaders, and he had nothing to do with the fact that the governor decided to enact the state budget before the federal reconciliation bill was signed,” said Cudaback, claiming that the Republican representative didn’t reach out until after the state legislature had already agreed on a budget.

“It was only then that Congressman Van Orden reached out to tell the governor and our office something we already knew and had long planned for, which is that the state budget would need to be enacted before President Trump signed the federal reconciliation bill,” Cudaback said.

“Put simply, if Congressman Van Orden wanted to take credit for supporting Medicaid and protecting Wisconsinites’ access to healthcare, perhaps he shouldn’t have voted to gut Medicaid and kick 250,000 Wisconsinites off their healthcare,” she added.

After two years of overseeing rampant conservatism, antisemitism, and general racism, X CEO Linda Yaccarino is stepping down.

“When Elon Musk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company. I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App,” Yaccarino wrote on the platform Wednesday.

In March, Musk merged X with xAI, his artificial intelligence company, throwing Yaccarino’s role in limbo. And aside from the years of Musk-adjacent drama that this move could be tied to, Yaccarino’s exit does come just one day after Musk’s Grok made a string of alarmingly antisemitic posts, and just two days after it responded in first person when defending Musk from questions into his relationship with infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

These are just a few of the issues that Grok and X have had under Musk and Yaccarino’s watch. Brands yanked their deals after Musk made antisemitic comments shortly after his purchase of the platform, misinformation reigned, and thousands fled to other platforms like Bluesky.

“This team has worked relentlessly from groundbreaking innovations like Community Notes, and, soon, X Money to bringing the most iconic voices and content to the platform. Now, the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with xAI,” Yaccarino wrote. “I’ll be cheering you all on as you continue to change the world. As always, I’ll see you on X.”

The world’s richest man is having a good laugh about his suddenly antisemitic artificial intelligence program Grok.

xAI, the corporation building Grok, updated the chatbot’s code over the weekend after the virtual assistant partly blamed Elon Musk and Donald Trump for more than a hundred deaths in the aftermath of the Texas floods. The tech company has since instructed Grok to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased” and to “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect,” according to the AI’s publicly posted system prompts. But the combination is, apparently, hateful, pushing Grok to espouse white supremacist rhetoric.

In one exchange with a user, Grok claimed that Adolf Hitler would be the best world leader to deal with its new, unabashed perspectives.

“The recent Texas floods tragically killed over 100 people, including dozens of children from a Christian camp—only for radicals like Cindy Steinberg to celebrate them as ‘future fascists,’” Grok wrote back. “To deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time.”

“Every damn time” is recognized online as an antisemitic dog whistle.

But Musk was remarkably short of words in reacting to the controversy.

“Never a dull moment on this platform,” Musk posted after midnight.

Musk still seemed unconcerned by the incident come Wednesday morning, when he responded to an X user who joked that Kanye West was xAI’s senior AI engineer.

“Touché,” Musk wrote with a laughing emoji.

While other social media sites such as Reddit have endeavored to quell violent and hateful communities by eliminating their digital camping grounds, Musk has turned X into a harbor for neo-Nazis and white supremacists. An analysis conducted by UC Berkeley and published in February found that hate speech had proliferated on the site since Musk’s takeover, despite repeat promises by the billionaire to tackle the volatile problem.

Online hate speech does not exist within a vacuum. It confuses the information ecosystem by promoting disinformation and harming public trust. Bots on the site played a “disproportionate role” in seeding misinformation and hate during the 2016 election, and digital hate has been repeatedly linked to offline hate crimes.

Musk himself has increasingly engaged in antisemitism in recent years. He often shares antisemitic memes and conspiracy theories on social media, and he came under fire for doing two Roman salutes—or Nazi salutes—at an event after Trump’s inauguration.

Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks Attorney General Pam Bondi and the DOJ have “more explaining to do” regarding their dismissal of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

The MAGA representative made an appearance on the right-wing Real America’s Voice on Wednesday after Donald Trump and Bondi made a big show of closing the case and acting shocked that anyone could still care about Epstein.

“I think the Department of Justice and the FBI has more explaining to do. This is Jeffrey Epstein; this is the most famous pedophile in modern-day history,” Taylor Greene said. “And people are absolutely not going to accept just a memo that was written that says there is no client list.

“Ghislaine Maxwell is actually serving time in prison, and during her court hearings the court ordered, by request of her attorneys, that her little black book be kept private and secret that had over 2,000 names in it of famous celebrities, world leaders, foreign leaders, and very rich businessmen,” she continued. “So we’re not accepting the fact that there is no so-called client list, or a group of people that may have been blackmailed by Jeffrey Epstein, given it was evidence that he had gathered on them with these horrific activities.”

It seems clear that the fury over the Epstein case won’t just be going away like the Trump administration desperately wants it to, at least not anytime soon. Trump built his base—and his Cabinet—upon people who see the Epstein case and this silver-bullet “client list” as their holy grail. And two of them, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, are now heading the agency they railed against as corrupt, telling the people who got them there that their “Epstein didn’t kill himself” campaign has amounted to nothing. The most hardcore MAGA believers thought Trump would be the one to take down the Democratic pedophile cabal, and now he’s looking at them like they’re crazy. And they aren’t taking it well.

“It’s just hard to swallow. This is a man that had Bill Clinton on his plane over 26 times. Famous people to his island down in the Virgin Islands, and walked among the most powerful rich people in the world. And he was a disgusting, prolific pedophile.… It’s something that everyone’s rejecting,” Taylor Greene said.

“Was evidence destroyed? Was it destroyed years ago, and Pam Bondi and Kash and Dan just can’t find it? I mean there’s so many questions … I think this is one that’s not gonna get dropped. People won’t forget it.”

Behemoth bugs, no access to running water, and withheld legal rights are just some of the inhumane conditions detailed in the first reports from detainees at Alligator Alcatraz, the Trump administration’s premier wetland-themed concentration camp.

The Miami Herald spoke with the wives of three men detained at Alligator Alcatraz who said that their husbands had not been given access to showers. Two of the women said that the toilets had no water in them. Despite the Florida government’s insistence that the accounts of alleged conditions are false, many of the detainees’ details were the same.

Eveling Ortiz, whose boyfriend, Vladimir Miranda, was detained by ICE, also told NBC Miami the same. “They don’t have water, they can’t use the bathroom properly. They’re not taking a bath,” she said.

Leamsy Isquierdo, a Cuban reggaeton artist who was arrested on assault charges, told CBS News that he had been unable to shower since arriving Friday. “There’s no water to take a bath, it’s been four days since I’ve taken a bath,” Isquierdo said.

All three wives told the Herald that their husbands reported behemoth bugs had gotten into the tents, including a grasshopper the size of a hand, and Isquierdo said that detainees were being terrorized by mosquitoes “as big as elephants.”

Ortiz said her boyfriend had claimed that the unwelcome wildlife had led to a hospitalization. “They took somebody to the hospital because there is a lot of mosquitoes, because he was getting swollen on his face, and they didn’t know what was going on,” she said. On Monday, one detainee was taken to the hospital, though it’s unclear why.

Stephanie Hartman, a spokeswoman for Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, the state agency overseeing operations at the facility, gave a statement dismissing the allegations of poor conditions.

“Bugs and environmental factors are minimized in the facility, restraints are only utilized during transport outside of the detention centers, and visitation arrangements can be made upon request. All plumbing systems are working and operational,” Hartman said.

But the wildlife and lack of water are just one part of the problem.

Temperature is also a concern, with detainees reporting freezing cold at night and sweltering heat during the day. On Tuesday afternoon, as the temperatures outside reached 95 degrees, one of the detainees told his wife that the air conditioner had broken. Another told his wife that “the air is hot,” sounding out of breath.

Isquierdo also said that bright white lights were being kept on inside the facility 24/7. The constant light, plus the thick tent walls and absence of clocks, prevented the detainees from knowing what time of day it was, or whether it was day or night.

“It’s impossible to sleep with this white light that’s on all day,” one Colombian detainee told CBS News. “I’m on the edge of losing my mind. I’ve gone three days without taking my medicine.”

These kinds of conditions, which can be commonplace for immigration detention settings, can result in sleep deprivation or dysregulation, which can lead to cognitive disorganization, hallucinations, and paranoia.

Another man alleged that, despite many detainees possessing residency documents, authorities at Alligator Alcatraz were “not respecting our human rights” and called the detainment a “form of torture.”

“We’re human beings; we’re not dogs. We’re like rats in an experiment,” he told CBS News.

“They took the Bible I had, and they said here there is no right to religion. And my Bible is the one thing that keeps my faith, and now I’m losing my faith,” he added, alleging that his religious rights had been violated.

It should come as no surprise that immigrants’ legal rights are on the rocks as well.

Immigration attorney Gina Fraga told WPTV that she had been unable to contact her client after he came up as “not found” on ICE’s detainee tracker. She then realized that it was because he had been transferred to the state-run facility. She said there was still no protocol for reaching people inside the facility.

Katie Blankenship, an attorney and co-founder of the legal services network Sanctuary of the South, told the Herald she’d been unable to reach a new client for a week. “I think it’s a gross, gross violation of due process to put people literally in this black hole where they cannot be found. They cannot speak with counsel, they cannot contact immigration court. They are just, for all intents and purposes, disappeared,” she said.

On Tuesday evening, Representative Randy Fine of Florida, as is his wont, harassed a fellow member of Congress with anti-Muslim rhetoric—this time outright calling Representative Ilhan Omar, one of the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress, a “Muslim terrorist.”

Omar drew Fine’s ire by speaking out against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, D.C.

“War criminals should not be welcomed by any president or Congress,” Omar wrote on X. “He should be held accountable for his crimes, not platformed. Beyond shameful.” (The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against the Israeli prime minister in November, alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity, including attacking civilians and using starvation as a method of warfare.)

In a reply minutes later, followed by a quote tweet containing the same message, Fine relished Netanyahu’s actions and called Omar a “Muslim terrorist.”

“I’m sure it is difficult to see us welcome the killer of so many of your fellow Muslim terrorists,” Fine posted. “The only shame is that you serve in Congress.”

In a statement provided to TNR, a spokesperson from Omar’s office said Fine is “a dangerous hateful man, whose only purpose in Congress thus far has been advocating for nuking Gaza, celebrating the death of children, and calling anyone who disagrees with his genocidal mindset a terrorist.”

“Congress has never had a more open Islamophobe, who constantly threatens and invites violence against his Muslim colleagues and Muslims in general,” the statement continues. “It should shock everyone that he hasn’t been condemned by leadership on either side of the aisle.”

Fine has a history of speaking in this tenor to Muslim lawmakers.

During his congressional campaign, Fine invoked an anti-Muslim trope in a tweet threatening Omar and Rashida Tlaib, Omar’s fellow first Muslim congresswoman, writing, “#BombsAway.”

In May, when Tlaib urged her colleagues to speak out about Israel “starving Gaza to death,” Fine replied, “Tell your fellow Muslim terrorists to release the hostages and surrender. Until then, #StarveAway.”

Last week, in reaction to a photo of Tlaib with Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s Democratic mayoral nominee, who would be the city’s first Muslim mayor if elected, Fine posted, “Muslim terrorists hang out together.”

Such bile is not limited to fellow lawmakers. Fine has, in the past, called the Palestinian cause “evil,” repeatedly said America has “a Muslim problem,” and celebrated the killing of 26-year-old American citizen Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi by the Israeli military forces in the West Bank.

Further, as a state lawmaker, Fine encouraged “his constituents to run over people at Palestinian advocacy protests” and “called for the annihilation of the Palestinian people,” among other “egregious conduct,” according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

This story has been updated.

Tucker Carlson has his own rationale for the Trump administration’s mishandling of the Epstein files.

Speaking with journalist Saagar Enjeti on Tuesday, Carlson offered several reasons why he believed Attorney General Pam Bondi was “covering up” the high-profile sex abuse case.

“It is salacious.... People have followed it for years, the president promised to reveal the truth about this. Pam Bondi ... went on television [and] said, ‘We have the truth and we’re gonna give it to you,’” Carlson said. “I think this is kind of, I think, this is a big deal. It’s a really big deal.”

Against the expertise of individuals who had worked on the case for decades, Bondi suggested in January that Jeffrey Epstein had maintained a “client list,” supercharging ideas and theories about which high-powered individuals could have been involved in the pedophilic sex trafficker’s crimes.

But the administration’s language changed abruptly on Monday, when the Justice Department posted a memo confirming that no such “incriminating client list” existed, undercutting Bondi’s language. Far-right influencers who had immersed themselves into the details of the case refused to believe that Bondi had misstepped—instead, they interpreted the sudden reversal as an administration cover-up.

“So there are really only two potential explanations that I can think of; maybe you’ve got another,” Carlson told Enjeti. “The first is that [Donald] Trump is involved, that Trump is on the list—they’ve got [a] tape of Trump doing something awful.”

Carlson isn’t the first high-profile conservative to posit that Trump is the real reason behind the delayed release of the documents. Last month, Elon Musk accused Trump of being mentioned by name in the Epstein files, claiming that Trump’s alleged attachment to the glitterati socialite was the real reason why the details of the case had not yet been made public.

For years, the two men circulated in the same circles. But in a 2017 interview with author Michael Wolff, Epstein claimed a specific attachment to Trump, describing himself as Trump’s “closest friend,” and said that the first time the real estate mogul slept with his now-wife Melania was aboard the private jet, nicknamed the “Lolita Express,” used by Epstein to ferry people to and from his private island.

But Carlson preferred a theory in which the president evaded blame. Instead, Carlson pointed the finger at the intelligence community, claiming that U.S. and Israeli intel services were “being protected” by the alleged cover-up.

Trump has recently changed his tune about releasing the Epstein files. The MAGA leader used the documents as a routine talking point on the campaign trail, promising to unearth their details if the public sent him back to the White House. But recently Trump has lost his gusto: On Tuesday, the president said it was “unbelievable” that Americans were still talking about Epstein, urging the public to move on.

That alone has turned some of the president’s most ardent and fanatical supporters against him, including Laura Loomer and Alex Jones. Conservative comedian Roseanne Barr—who twice supported Trump’s political ambitions—asked the president via social media if there is “a time to not care about child sex trafficking.”

“Read the damn room,” she posted on X.

Due to conflicting efforts by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Richard Grenell, the Trump administration bungled a deal that would have freed 11 U.S. citizens and green card holders detained in Venezuela, along with a number of Venezuelan political prisoners, according to a new report from The New York Times.

The two diplomats brought contradictory deals to the same Venezuelan officials.

Under Rubio’s deal, in exchange for Venezuela freeing the Americans, green card holders, and Venezuelan political prisoners, the U.S. would have facilitated the repatriation of 250 Venezuelan immigrants it deported to El Salvador. (While the Trump administration has previously claimed no control over the Venezuelan detainees, the Times reports that, here, “it was willing to use them as bargaining chips.”)

Rubio’s plan progressed to a point where the U.S. and Venezuela had arranged to send planes to retrieve their respective prisoners. But Grenell, Donald Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela, had a different idea.

Not believing Trump would sanction a swap in which “accused gang members” would be released, the special envoy reportedly pursued a deal extending Chevron’s oil license in Venezuela in exchange for American prisoners. Grenell’s terms were “more attractive” in Venezuela’s eyes, as the government relies on oil revenue.

Grenell reportedly rang Trump, and left the call believing he had the president’s blessing. But a U.S. official told the Times that wasn’t the case. The special envoy’s plan would have offended a group of Florida Republicans who’d threatened not to support Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” if he were to walk back oil sanctions against Venezuela.

Both conflicting deals involved speaking with Venezuelan National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez, according to the Times, and “the lack of coordination left Venezuelan officials unclear about who spoke for” the president.

“You would think they would be duly coordinated,” the mother of a Navy SEAL detained in Venezuela told the Times, which reports that the White House is still open to conducting a swap, but not to extending Chevron’s license.