DOGE aide Tyler Hassen expected to leave Interior
Hassen, an early DOGE appointee at Interior during the Trump administration, was elevated to a senior role on Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's team when he was promoted to be acting assistant secretary of policy, management and budget — putting him at the helm of cost cutting-efforts and a reorganization.
The Interior Department appeared to confirm Hassen's looming departure in a statement on Friday.
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'Tyler Hassen is a true American patriot who made the selfless decision to leave a successful career in the private sector to serve our great nation as part of the Trump administration,' said Interior spokesperson Aubrie Spady. 'His dedicated work to make the Department more efficient and better stewards of taxpayers' money will be felt for generations to come. We are so lucky to have Tyler on the team and look forward to witnessing the continued impact of his amazing and transformative work.'
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The Hill
32 minutes ago
- The Hill
What critics don't understand about Trump's energy policies
A recent New York Times article made some alarming claims: China is racing ahead in clean energy, while America under Trump clings to fossil fuels. Beijing is supposedly building wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles for a decarbonized world, while Washington is instead doubling down on obsolete oil, gas and coal. The contrast is stark and seemingly damning — the U.S., the article suggests, is losing the future. But this story is misleading. What the article misses is the deeper logic shaping the Trump administration's energy policy. It has little to do with nostalgia or climate skepticism, and everything to do with the demands of artificial intelligence. Trump's energy agenda is being guided by a different kind of technological revolution. Massive AI models, sprawling data centers and next-generation chip foundries demand vast, uninterrupted flows of energy. However clean or cheap they may be, wind and solar, by their intermittent nature, cannot deliver the stable, high-density power these systems require. That distinction, between intermittent and dispatchable energy, is the real dividing line in global energy strategy today. And it's why Trump's policy may be more forward-looking than critics realize. If you want to understand the real rationale, look to Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. In a recent interview, he stated, 'To achieve Nvidia's and America's dream to win the AI race, we've got to produce a lot more electricity.' Wright's position is blunt but accurate. Natural gas, followed by nuclear and coal, is what now powers most of America's electricity, and it is these sources that will fuel the AI boom. 'Expanded natural gas electricity production … that'll be the workhorse of winning the AI race,' Wright explained. Thus, in Wright's view, the Trump administration policy isn't to reject the future but rather to win it by unleashing American energy production to support the backbone of tomorrow's economy: AI chips, training clusters and data centers. Contrast that with the Biden administration's approach. The Inflation Reduction Act was a landmark in climate legislation, pouring hundreds of billions into renewables, clean tech and place-based development incentives. It was designed to build solar farms, wind capacity and green manufacturing hubs, especially in disadvantaged communities. But for all its strengths, the law was designed in a pre-ChatGPT world. A 2023 Treasury Department fact sheet on the law goes on at length about electric heat pumps, rooftop solar and tax credits for underserved areas. It says nothing about AI, chip fabrication or crypto foundries. The Biden plan focused on equity and emissions, while Trump's plan focuses on watts and AI's electricity demands. That contrast became even sharper with Trump's second-term executive orders. Within days of taking office, Trump moved to dismantle the regulatory infrastructure supporting Biden's climate agenda. He ordered agencies to fast-track fossil fuel development and streamline the permitting of pipelines and power stations. Biden-era climate councils and carbon accounting models were scrapped. Electric vehicle mandates were rolled back. Furthermore, Trump's executive orders on nuclear power called for 300 new gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2050. Advanced reactors are to be deployed at AI data centers and military bases within two years. Uranium enrichment, the revival of shuttered nuclear plants and fuel recycling are all being ramped up under the banner of national security. From liquefied natural gas exports to uranium enrichment, the Trump message is consistent: deregulate, drill, and build. Trump's coalition is not anti-technology — in fact, it is aggressively trying to corner the energy inputs required for technological supremacy, even if it means tearing up climate policy to get there. That brings us back to the New York Times's climate article's core claims. The piece frames the global energy race as a contest between a clean-energy China and a fossil-fueled America, casting the U.S. as the laggard. But that reading confuses the form of energy with its function. The future won't be won by whoever builds the most solar panels. It will be won by the country best positioned to power the technologies that drive tomorrow's economy. And right now, that technology is artificial intelligence. AI isn't just another app layer. It's a foundational shift in computing, manufacturing, defense and global finance. It demands enormous, stable, always-on energy loads. That means natural gas, nuclear and dispatchable capacity, not just wind and sun. By this logic, it may be China — not the U.S. — that's making the bigger strategic misstep. Beijing is doubling down on renewables, but those technologies weren't built to power the AI revolution. Meanwhile, Washington, under Trump, is retooling its energy policy to meet precisely that demand.
New York Times
33 minutes ago
- New York Times
Has A.I. Become Part of Your Life?
If artificial intelligence is going to change the world, then it has already begun to do so: People are using A.I. to code apps, apply for jobs, create marketing pitches. They're using it to visualize their ideas, adjudicate arguments and teach school kids. Many are talking with chatbots as they would with friends or lovers or advisers. The contours of A.I.'s transformations are being negotiated now not just by A.I. companies and researchers, but by its consumers. Many people are integrating A.I. deeply into their professional and personal lives. And the flexibility and accessibility of general-purpose A.I. tools makes it easy for even new users to use it for purposes unanticipated by those who built them: For instance, people started using large language models like ChatGPT in place of personal trainers long before specialized apps were developed for that purpose. The terms under which we use A.I. are also up for grabs. Will our government allow A.I. to proliferate unconditionally, or will we try to restrict and regulate it? Will we welcome A.I. anywhere it can be used, or will we try to cordon it off from certain parts of our lives with new social norms and etiquette? One of the deepest and most abiding fears about artificial intelligence is that it will replace human beings. But beneath the big existential questions are more practical concerns. Will A.I. make the human accountant or human software engineer as rare as a candle maker or shoemaker? Will A.I. create new kinds of jobs, the way technological advances gave us the job of software engineer in the first place? Perhaps equally important as the effects on jobs and the labor market is how A.I. might play a human shaped-role in our everyday lives, as a therapist, say, or a confidant. We want to hear from you. How has A.I. become part of your life? We'd like to hear about the ways that you've been using models and what concerns, if any, that you have about using them. We may use a selection of your responses in a future project. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@ Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Deadly partnership: US, Israel share blame for Gaza catastrophe
For decades, countless U.S. officials have proclaimed that the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable. Now, the two countries function as accomplices while methodical killing continues in Gaza, with both societies directly — and differently — making it all possible. On Monday, the Israeli human rights organizations B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel released reports concluding that genocide has been underway. Their intervention is significant. According to the New York Times, they are the first such Israeli groups to make this designation. Documenting 'coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip,' B'Tselem flatly declared that 'Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.' Many respected legal scholars, political leaders and aid groups are increasingly making the same declaration, as Julian Borger reported Monday in The Guardian. An official declaration has been referred to the International Court of Justice, with some experts predicting a decision in late 2027 or early 2028. The policies of Israel's government, however, still appear aligned with the attitudes of a majority of Jewish Israelis. In a recent survey released by the aChord Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, three-quarters of Jewish Israelis, and 64 percent of all Israelis, said they largely agreed with the statement that 'there are no innocent people in Gaza' — nearly half of whom are children. This week, the Times also noted that 'a majority of Israelis have long wanted a deal that would end the war in exchange for the release of all the hostages still held in Gaza and relieve soldiers exhausted by months of deadly conflict.' But the majority's primary concern is for the well-being of Israelis, with scant regard for the Palestinian people facing slaughter and famine. 'There is no more 'permitted' and 'forbidden' with regard to Israel's evilness toward the Palestinians,' dissident columnist Gideon Levy wrote three months ago in the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz. 'It is permitted to kill dozens of captive detainees and to starve to death an entire people.' The biggest Israeli media outlets, he said, echo and amplify sociopathic voices. 'Genocide talk has spread into all TV studios as legitimate talk. Former colonels, past members of the defense establishment, sit on panels and call for genocide without batting an eye.' Last week, Levy provided an update: 'The weapon of deliberate starvation is working. The Gaza 'Humanitarian' Foundation, in turn, has become a tragic success. Not only have hundreds of Gazans been shot to death while waiting in line for packages distributed by the GHF, but there are others who don't manage to reach the distribution points, dying of hunger. Most of these are children and babies…They lie on hospital floors, on bare beds, or carried on donkey carts. These are pictures from hell. In Israel, many people reject these photos, doubting their veracity. Others express their joy and pride on seeing starving babies.' Amid reports and horrific images that have appeared in recent days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said no one in Gaza is starving and denied a 'policy of starvation' on the part of Israel, instead blaming Hamas for the lack of food. His claims about Hamas, however, have been debunked. 'The Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter,' the Times reported last weekend. And in comments on Monday from his golf course in Scotland, even President Donald Trump broke with Netanyahu to acknowledge there was 'real starvation' happening: 'Based on television…those children look very hungry.' Beyond food, a daily process continues to exterminate more and more of the 2.1 million Palestinian people who remain in Gaza — bombing and shooting civilians while blocking all but a pittance of the food and medicine needed to sustain life. After destroying Gaza's hospitals, Israel is still targeting health care workers — killing at least 70 in May and June — as well as first responders and journalists. The barbarism is in sync with the belief that 'no innocent people' are in Gaza. A relevant observation came from Aldous Huxley in 1936, the same year that the swastika first appeared on Germany's flag: 'The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.' Kristallnacht happened two years later, inaugurating the Nazi regime's organized persecution of Jewish people, which culminated in the Holocaust. Renowned genocide scholar Omer Bartov explained during an interview on 'Democracy Now!' in mid-July that genocide is 'the attempt to destroy not simply people in large numbers, but to destroy them as members of a group. The intent is to destroy the group itself. And it doesn't mean that you have to kill everyone. It means that the group will be destroyed and that it will not be able to reconstitute itself as a group. And to my mind, this is precisely what Israel is trying to do.' Bartov, who is Jewish and spent the first half of his life in Israel, said: What I see in the Israeli public is an extraordinary indifference by large parts of the public to what Israel is doing and what it's done in the name of Israeli citizens in Gaza. In part, it has to do with the fact that the Israeli media has decided not to report on the horrors that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is perpetrating in Gaza. You simply will not see it on Israeli television. If some pictures happen to come in, they are presented only as material that might be used by foreign propaganda against Israel. Now, Israeli citizens can, of course, use other media resources. We can all do that. But most of them prefer not to. And I would say that while about 30 percent of the population in Israel is completely in favor of what is happening, and, in fact, is egging the government and the army on, I think the vast majority of the population simply does not want to know about it. A large majority of Israelis — 82 percent, according to a recent poll conducted by Pennsylvania State University — want their government to forcibly remove Palestinians from Gaza. That displacement would be on a scale even larger than the Nakba, or mass displacement, that occurred in Palestine during the late 1940s. Netanyahu is now moving to fulfill those wishes. 'Netanyahu is expected to propose to the political-security cabinet a plan to annex areas in the Gaza Strip,' Haaretz reported on Monday. 'The process will continue gradually until the entire Strip is annexed. According to details presented by Netanyahu in talks with ministers, the plan has received approval from the Trump administration.' In Israel, 'compassion for Palestinians is taboo except among a fringe of radical activists,' Adam Shatz wrote last month in the London Review of Books. At the same time, 'the catastrophe of the last two years far exceeds that of the Nakba.' The consequences 'are already being felt well beyond Gaza: in the West Bank, where Israeli soldiers and settlers have presided over an accelerated campaign of displacement and killing (more than a thousand West Bank Palestinians have been killed since 7 October); inside Israel, where Palestinian citizens are subject to increasing levels of ostracism and intimidation; in the wider region, where Israel has established itself as a new Sparta; and in the rest of the world, where the inability of Western powers to condemn Israel's conduct — much less bring it to an end — has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim to uphold.' The loudest preaching for a 'rules-based order' has come from the U.S. government, which makes and breaks international rules at will. During this century, in the Middle East, the U.S.-Israel duo has vastly outdone all other entities combined in the categories of killing, maiming and terrorizing. In addition to the joint project of genocide in Gaza and America's long war in Iraq, the United States and Israel have often exercised an assumed prerogative to attack Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, along with encore U.S. missile strikes on Iraq as recently as last year. Israel's grisly performance as 'a new Sparta' in the region is co-produced by the Pentagon, with the military and intelligence operations of the two nations intricately entangled. With at least 70 percent of its arsenal coming from the U.S., the Israeli military has been able to turn Gaza into a genocide zone. Last year, while writing an afterword about the war on Gaza for the paperback edition of 'War Made Invisible' — which details how America has shifted to a perpetual state of war — I mulled over the relevance of my book's subtitle: 'How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.' As the carnage in Gaza worsened, the reality became clearer that the Orwellian-named Israel Defense Forces and U.S. Defense Department are essentially part of the same military machine. Their command structures are different, but they are part of the same geopolitical Goliath. 'The new era in which Israel, backed by the U.S., dominates the Middle East is likely to see even more violence and instability than in the past,' longtime war correspondent Patrick Cockburn wrote this month. The lethal violence from Israeli-American teamwork is of such magnitude that it epitomizes international state terrorism. The genocide in Gaza shows the lengths to which the alliance is willing and able to go. While public opinion is very different in Israel and the United States, the results of the governments' policies are indistinguishable. American public opinion about arming Israel is measurable. As early as June 2024, a CBS News poll found that 61 percent of the public said the U.S. should not 'send weapons and supplies to Israel.' Since then, support for Israel has continued to erode. In sharp contrast, on Capitol Hill, the support for arming Israel is measurably high. When Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders' bills to cut off some military aid to Israel came to a vote last November, just 19 out of 100 senators supported the measures. Very few of his colleagues have voiced anywhere near the extent of Sanders' moral outrage as he keeps speaking out on the Senate floor. In the House, only 26 out of 435 members have chosen to become cosponsors of H.R.3565, a bill introduced more than two months ago by Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., that would prevent the U.S. government from sending certain bombs to Israel. 'Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II,' the Congressional Research Service reports. During just the first 12 months after the war on Gaza began in October 2023, Brown University's Costs of War project found, the 'U.S. spending on Israel's military operations and related U.S. operations in the region' added up to $23 billion. The resulting profit bonanza for U.S. military contractors is notable. So is the fact that the U.S.-Israel partnership exerts great American leverage in the Middle East — where two-thirds of the world's oil reserves are located. The politics of genocide in the United States involves papering over the enormous substantive gap between the opinions of the electorate and the actions of the U.S. government. While the partnership between the governments of Israel and the United States has never been stronger, the partnership between the people of Israel and the United States has never been weaker. But in the U.S., consent of the governed has not been necessary to continue the axis of genocide. 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