TV News LIES

The Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency team continue to crash into more federal agencies– shutting down ongoing work and firing thousands of federal employees.

The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve some 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year.

The U.S. absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the Trump administration’s commitment to common defense and demands for increased European military spending.

The US agency charged with overseeing nuclear weapons is looking to contact workers who were fired on Thursday as part of the Trump administration’s federal cost-cutting measures, but are now needed back.

Officials with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) attempted to notify some probationary employees who had been let go that they are due to be reinstated – but they struggled to find them because their contact information was missing.

“The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel,” the agency said in an email, obtained by NBC News.

The Trump administration fired 20 immigration judges without explanation, a union official said on Saturday amid sweeping moves to shrink the size of the federal government.

On Friday, 13 judges who had yet to be sworn in and five assistant chief immigration judges were dismissed without notice, said Matthew Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents federal workers. Two other judges were fired under similar circumstances in the last week.

It was unclear whether they would be replaced. The US Department of Justice’s executive office for immigration review, which runs the courts and oversees its roughly 700 judges, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

Immigration courts are backlogged with more than 3.7m cases, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, and it takes years to decide asylum cases. There is support across the political spectrum for more judges and support staff, though the first Trump administration also put pressure on some judges to decide cases more quickly.

More...

The semi-autonomous agency that oversees U.S. nuclear weapons production and stockpiling dismissed dozens of employees Thursday after the Trump administration denied a request for a national security exemption to stop the layoffs.

Former NNSA administrator Jill Hruby, who led the organization from July 2021 through her Jan. 20 resignation, said the cuts originally impacted "over 300" of National Nuclear Security Administration's approximately 1,900 federal employees before the agency began reversing layoffs.

In a Friday evening statement, Department of Energy press secretary Ben Dietderich said, "Less than 50 employees were dismissed from the NNSA." The targeted workers were relatively new employees in their probationary period, during which they don't have civil service firing protections.

More...

Some federal employees who have been laid off were reportedly given only 30 minutes to pack their belongings and vacate federal offices. Federal agencies were ordered by Donald Trump to fire mostly probationary staff, with as many as 200,000 workers set to be affected and some made to rush off the premises, the Washington Post reported.

More mass layoffs came on Friday as approximately 2,300 employees have been fired from the US interior department.

The interior department oversees the US’s natural resources and manages 500m acres of public land, including national parks. The widespread layoffs were confirmed by three sources with knowledge on the subject, who spoke to Reuters anonymously.

Probationary employees at two US agriculture department research agencies were also fired, Reuters reported, citing two anonymous sources. The exact number of terminated workers has not been confirmed, but layoffs reportedly happened overnight.

More...

A federal judge in New York on Friday extended the temporary block against Elon Musk, President Donald Trump’s appointee to look for government waste, from gaining access to confidential government information.

New York Attorney General Letitia James led a lawsuit from 19 states seeking to continue blocking Musk's Department of Government Efficiency's access to Treasury Department computer systems. U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas extended the order Friday that another judge put in place Feb. 8 but did not say when she would rule on a more permanent preliminary injunction.

The case was one of three featuring challenges from states and unions against Musk's efforts to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government.