White House Pulls 180 on Hundreds of Workers Fired by DOGE

The Trump administration is begging General Service Administration employees fired by DOGE and Elon Musk to come back.

The GSA is a logistics-focused branch that acquires and oversees federal workplaces both physically and virtually. In March, Musk pushed thousands of GSA employees to either resign or retire early, and outright fired hundreds of others. Those who were fired by DOGE are now being given until the end of the week to decide whether to return to their jobs. If they accept, they will come back to work on October 6.

Musk’s impact on the agency has been debilitating. Headquarters staff was cut by nearly 80 percent, portfolio managers cut by 65 percent, and facility managers cut by 35 percent, according to an official who spoke with the Associated Press.

DOGE also planned to cancel more than half of the GSA’s 7,500 leases and sell hundreds of government-owned buildings. It’s clear now that it seriously overreached, with 131 leases expiring before employees actually moved out of the buildings.

The chaos DOGE caused—and the backtracking it’s doing now—shows that the federal bureaucracy is not as wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive as the world’s richest man constantly claimed it to be. DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” pledged to save the United States $460 million just through lease cancellations. It didn’t even get close, as the savings are at an estimated $140 million.

“Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed,” former GSA real estate staffer Chad Becker, told the Associated Press. “They didn’t have the people they needed to carry out basic functions.”

GSA isn’t the only federal agency being negatively impacted by the cuts that were supposed to save it. From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the Social Security Administration, DOGE has absolutely failed to make anything more efficient, leaving only more mess behind.

Senator Lindsey Graham said he hopes the president runs for an illegal third term.

Speaking on Fox New’s Hannity Tuesday night, the South Carolina Republican fawned over Donald Trump’s supposedly tough talk at the United Nations General Assembly.

“Trump 2028. I hope this never ends,” Graham said.

Graham was practically giddy as he recounted Trump’s surprising admission during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that NATO countries should feel free to shoot down Russian jets if they enter foreign airspace, following apparent incursions in Poland, Estonia, Norway, and most recently, Denmark.

“He’s tried to go out of his way to get [Vladimir] Putin to the table. We don’t want to humiliate Russia, we just want to end the war,” Graham said. In reality, Trump refused to say whether he still trusted Putin, granting Moscow yet another month to make progress on a deal with Kiev.

But Graham was mostly excited about Trump’s promise to supply weapons to NATO “for NATO to do what they want with them.” Russia would now face “high-end American weapons sold to NATO for the benefit of Ukraine, and this war is coming to your backyard here with no limitations like Biden,” Graham said.

“He’s everything Biden wasn’t. He stood up to the U.N. in the U.N. and called them out for who they are,” Graham said. Unlike Biden, Trump has figured out how to make a buck off the endless war, instead of sending military aid to finish it.

Graham wasn’t done singing Trump’s praises. “This guy is a cross between PT Barnum and Ronald Reagan,” he said. “He’s got—he’s in everybody’s head.”

The senator also applauded Trump for mocking Europe’s reliance on Russian oil. “We don’t have to live with a Europe that’s buying Russian oil at the time we’re all trying to stop the war with Russia and Ukraine. So I hope he runs again,” Graham said.

Again, the South Carolina Republican seems not to care that Trump’s remarks are part of his own plan for American energy expansion—though the Kremlin certainly saw it that way. Or maybe that’s what the fascism fanboy likes about the circus showman president: finding creative ways to make a dollar.

It’s not clear that Trump, who hocks “Trump 2028” hats, sees himself as constrained by the Twenty-Second Amendment—not to mention the Constitution in general. In March, he told NBC’s Kristen Welker that he was “not joking” about considering a third term, claiming that there were “methods” by which he could remain in the White House.

Donald Trump’s flubdub at the United Nations is apparently going to get people fired.

The president and his administration are still fuming over two technical difficulties that Trump experienced at the U.N.’s New York City headquarters, including a teleprompter error and a “broken” escalator that left his posse stunned and confused about how to advance up the static staircase.

Speaking with Fox News Tuesday evening, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that the mistakes appeared to be “sabotage” and that the administration would sic the Secret Service on the individuals responsible.

“It does appear to be sabotage with the escalator and the teleprompter,” said host Jesse Watters. “What is the White House going to do about that?”

“Well Jesse, that’s definitely what it appears to be to me,” Leavitt responded. “There was some concerning reporting from the London Times, as you pointed out that U.N. globalist staffers were basically plotting to set up the president of the United States.”

Leavitt was referring to an article in The Times that reported U.N. workers had been overheard joking about shutting the escalator down on Trump, though no evidence has emerged indicating that they followed through on the joke.

Leavitt further accused the U.N. of lowering the president’s audio during his speech, highlighting the paranoia rampant amongst the MAGA elite.

“First it was the escalator, then it was the teleprompter.… The audio inside of the room was much lower and different for the president of the United States than for the previous speaker,” Leavitt said.

“When you put all of this together, it doesn’t look like a coincidence to me,” she continued. “And if we find that these were U.N. staffers who were purposefully trying to trip up, literally trip up, the president and the first lady of the United States, well, there better be accountability for those people, and I will personally see to it, Jesse.”

Trump warned in real time that whoever was behind the teleprompter fiasco would have to face the fire for troubling the start of his speech.

“I can only say that whoever’s operating this teleprompter is in big trouble,” the president said, drawing laughs from the audience.

But as it later turned out, the problems likely stemmed from his own team. According to a U.N. official, Trump staffers were in charge of operating his teleprompter and had also accidentally triggered a stop mechanism on the escalator ahead of the president’s ascent.

Add Theo Von to the list of Trump-supporting comedians who are finally realizing that this brutal deportation campaign is indeed what they voted for.

On Tuesday evening, the official Homeland Security X account posted yet another bizarrely aesthetic, meme deportation video with a viral TikTok sound in the background.

The video opens with Von—who hosted President Trump and Vice President JD Vance on his podcast last year, and attended the inaugration—bluntly saying, “Heard you got deported, dude. Bye,” in response to a fan asking him to record a message for their recently deported friend. The rest of the video details DHS’s arrest and deportation numbers.

The borrowed clip was from January, when MAGA shill Benny Johnson and others on the right applauded Von. “Theo Von is all of us,” Johnson said at the time.

Now Von is having the same second thoughts that many MAGA-leaning comedians who openly endorsed Trump are having.

“Yooo DHS i didnt approve to be used in this. I know you know my address so send a check. And please take this down and please keep me out of your ‘banger’ deportation videos,” Von posted late on Tuesday night. “When it comes to immigration my thoughts and heart are alot more nuanced than this video allows. Bye!”

Von is reaping what he happily sowed. He had the president and his vice president on his podcast during the campaign to talk about cocaine, was a guest at the inauguration, has traveled with the president since then, and is now the unwilling face of deportation. (Additionally, asking for DHS to cut you a check before asking to take the video down is tacky at best, but what else is to be expected from the podcaster?)

Von isn’t the only “funny” guy regretting his decision to cozy up to Trump. In July, podcaster Joe Rogan expressed his shock and horror at Trump deporting innocent people with no criminal records.

“We were told there would be no—well, there’s two things that are insane. One is the targeting of migrant workers. Not cartel members, not gang members, not drug dealers,” he said. “Just construction workers showing up in construction sites and raiding them. Gardeners. Like, really?”

Comedian Andrew Schultz felt similarly.

“Everything [Trump] campaigned on I believe he wanted to do. And now he’s doing the exact opposite thing of every single fuckin’ thing,” Schultz said on his Flagrant podcast in July. “There’ll be people that like, they’ll DM me and be like, ‘You see what your boy’s doing? You voted for this.’ I’m like, I voted for none of this!”

All of these men are foolish for thinking Trump just wouldn’t be as brutal as he had promised over and over again he would be. It absolutely is what they voted for. Maybe next time they’ll think about this before they pick up the microphone.

As Donald Trump’s allies and the Federal Communications Commissions chair scramble to pretend that the censorship of Jimmy Kimmel Live! was anything other than the president wanting to control the media, Trump himself revealed the truth while issuing a threat to ABC.

In a Truth Social post published an hour before the show returned to air Tuesday, Trump decried ABC’s decision to reverse its cancellation, accusing the network of being too favorable to his political opponents, and threatened to again go “after them.”

“I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled!” the president wrote, later adding, “Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE. He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution.

“I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative,” he continued, referring to a $15 million settlement ABC News paid to Trump’s presidential library last year to settle a defamation suit.

Since Kimmel’s censorship, FCC Chair Brendan Carr and others have argued that the decision was the result of private entities making independent decisions about what to air (no matter that Carr had threatened companies that platformed the late-night host, or that the broadcasting companies that have yanked the show accordingly happen to have major business before the agency he heads).

In 136 words, the president blew all MAGA rationalizations out of the water: Trump just wants to punish media figures he deems guilty of lèse-majesté against him.

After spending months making concessions to Russia, Donald Trump has suddenly changed his tune on the foreign power’s invasion of Ukraine, claiming that the non-NATO ally could reclaim all of its occupied territory—and then some.

“After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” Trump posted on Truth Social Tuesday.

Trump suggested that Ukraine had a fair shot at reclaiming its “original borders” so long as it received the financial support of Europe and NATO. Trump further derided Russia as a “paper tiger” that had, in its failure to completely decimate Ukraine, shown the international community that it was not a genuine military threat.

The president’s comments, which followed a raving speech he delivered before the U.N. General Assembly earlier Tuesday, were a stark reversal of his historically soft approach to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump has little to show for the profound international recognition he’s offered the Kremlin over the course of his second administration. Against the advice of world leaders, Trump invited Putin to Alaska in August—tasking U.S. soldiers to literally roll out the red carpet for the Russian dictator. It was the first time that Putin had stepped foot on U.S. soil in more than a decade.

But the unprecedented reception did not inspire the Kremlin to budge on its peace terms. The superpower has instead insisted on receiving “international legal recognition” of its 2014 annexation of Crimea, an internationally recognized portion of Ukraine, along with four regions it has claimed in the three years since it first invaded Ukraine.

“When the people living in Moscow, and all of the Great Cities, Towns, and Districts all throughout Russia, find out what is really going on with this War … Ukraine would be able to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that!” Trump wrote, promising an uninterrupted supply of weapons to NATO allies. “Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act.”

Notably, Trump has dramatically changed the nature of U.S. military aid to Ukraine. Since taking office, he has railed that the U.S. was getting the short end of the stick and forced the switch to a plan where Washington and its allies supply Ukraine with arms from American stocks using funds from other NATO members.

At one point, the Trump administration stopped aid to Ukraine altogether—a move that was quickly reversed when it was revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had authorized the pause without actually telling Trump.

With Jimmy Kimmel Live! returning to the air Tuesday evening, the Federal Communications Commission chair who jawboned ABC and companies that own its stations into censoring Jimmy Kimmel can’t keep himself from weighing in on the affair.

While ABC on Monday reversed its decision to cancel the show, Sinclair Broadcast Group, followed by Nexstar Media Group, announced that they will not air the show on the roughly 70 ABC affiliates owned across the country between them.

The companies first pulled Kimmel’s show last week, after FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened those who platform the comedian following a joke he made about Trump and MAGA’s response to the death of Charlie Kirk. Both companies have business before the FCC, which helps explain their swift and ongoing capitulation to Carr. (Nexstar is pursuing a multibillion-dollar merger that would expand its reach to 80 percent of TV households in the country—a number so large that it would require the FCC to lift the existing 39-percent cap limiting companies’ reach.)

Carr, who has spent the past week trying to paint the incident as anything other than a patent instance of a government official applying pressure to influence private decision-making, was delighted by the news that Sinclair and Nexstar won’t change their stance.

Carr took to X to lash out against Democratic state Senator Scott Wiener, who reacted to the news of Sinclair’s decision to keep Kimmel censored despite ABC’s reversal by proposing breaking up the massive conglomerate. “Corporate media consolidation doesn’t jibe with democracy,” Wiener wrote, in a post published before Nexstar followed in Sinclair’s footsteps.

Carr argued that Wiener’s statement showed that it’s Democrats—not Republicans—who are the censorial ones. Nexstar and Sinclair, he claimed, had decided independently that suspending Kimmel “made sense.”

Wiener responded in disbelief at the FCC chair’s hypocrisy: “Do you people hear yourselves?? BREAK UP SINCLAIR.”

Carr fired off another tweet, in which he attempted to describe the incident—in which two of the country’s largest, and ever consolidating, media conglomerates, are truckling to an agency whose approval they need—as a heartwarming underdog story. Democrats, he said, “simply can’t stand that local TV stations—for the first time in years—stood up to a national programmer” in ABC.

President Trump repeatedly blamed the United Nations for his teleprompter issues and a malfunctioning escalator in a spiteful Tuesday speech to the General Assembly. But it seems that both issues were caused directly by his own team.

“All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle,” Trump said after claiming to have brought so much peace and prosperity to the world without any international assistance. “If the first lady wasn’t in great shape, she would’ve fallen. But she’s in great shape … and then a teleprompter that didn’t work. These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter. Thank you very much.”

But according to the Associated Press’s Farnoush Amiri, an anonymous U.N. official said the escalator in question was actually stopped prematurely by someone from Trump’s group, who ran ahead of the group and accidentally triggered a stop mechanism. The official added that the teleprompter that Trump was so upset about was also being operated by his White House.

Trump’s churlish speech—and his faulty finger-pointing—only further display how isolating his presidency has been on an international level. Trump’s constant hammering of the U.N. may cause countries that once depended on us as allies to go elsewhere, or strengthen their relationships without us.

A Guatemalan family says immigration enforcement agents held their autistic 5-year-old daughter outside their home in Leominster, Massachusetts, last week in order to induce her father to surrender to them.

As Telemundo reported Monday, the father—a man named Edward Hip, who has lived in the country for more than two decades and has an active asylum application—was reportedly driving with his daughter when he called his wife at home and said someone seemed to be following them. When they got home, Hip “managed to run back into the parking lot of my house,” his wife said, but agents got hold of the child.

Video footage obtained by Telemundo shows the father and mother pleading with several men, apparently federal agents, surrounding the girl in a driveway. “They took my daughter, she’s 5 years old. She has autism spectrum,” the woman can be heard shouting in the recording.

“We didn’t take your daughter,” one of the agents said, to which the mother replied, “OK, give me my daughter back.”

In another portion of the video, agents can be seen gesturing for the parents to come over. “Is that your daughter? Come here so I can see those IDs,” one asked. Hip responds that he can “give it through the door,” but the agent, pointing in front of him, says, “You can do it right here.”

The local police department apparently intervened, rescuing the girl from the federal agents. Arriving at the scene, NBC Boston reports, “Leominster police recovered the child and returned her to the family.” Two days later, though, federal agents returned, arresting Hip out of his car.

Department of Homeland Security official Tricia McLaughlin called the story “a disgusting smear,” on X, alleging that Hip had prior arrests, “ignored law enforcement emergency lights to pull over,” and “abandoned” his daughter in the car as he fled inside. 

“Officers helped rescue the child and called local police to report the abandonment,” McLaughlin wrote.