Members of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency gained access over the weekend to a payroll system that processes salaries for about 276,000 federal employees across dozens of agencies, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The move overruled objections from senior IT staff who feared it could compromise highly sensitive government personnel information, including by making it more vulnerable to terrorist cyberattacks, these people said.

Congress has to step up and take some responsibility for the shaping of public policy.

Despite the hand-wringing of the commentariat, the fights between the Trump White House and some federal trial judges has yet to reach a “constitutional crisis.” A few federal district judges have issued scores of injunctions temporarily blocking some elements of Trump’s agenda for his first 100 days. But rather than a breakdown in the constitutional order, this jostling fulfills the Framers’ design for the separation of powers, which encourages conflict between the branches of government.

The idea of “lived experience” exerts wide sway across many areas of social policymaking today, from homelessness to mental illness to addiction. Those crises have deepened in recent years, even as lived experience’s influence has continued to grow.

Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have their fair share of disagreements about policy and politics.

But they both agree that Tim Walz is an excellent vice presidential nominee.

“Gov. Walz is the real deal,” Manchin gushed, saying he’d “bring balance back to the Democratic Party.”

Walz is “a uniter for not just the Democratic Party but for the entire United States,” Ocasio-Cortez claimed.

Vice President Harris’s quick pivot to her White House bid has prompted an about-face on multiple key issues that could affect outcomes in battleground states, handing former President Trump and Republicans a prime attack line.

In the roughly one week since Harris replaced President Biden as the probable Democratic nominee, her campaign has moved to distance her from a series of positions she took when she was a candidate in the 2020 presidential primary.

President Joe Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office Wednesday night in the culmination of a pivotal few weeks that saw him relinquish the Democratic presidential nomination — an act that may one day be the defining moment of his political career.

The speech was an attempt to exit political life gracefully, but it also served as a reminder that only days after the president announced his unprecedented decision, the nation has already moved on.

Now that it is looking increasingly like Vice President Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee for 2024, her liberal past has come back to haunt her once more. Before becoming the vice president under President Joe Biden, Harris served as a senator for California. According to data from 2019, she was the most left senator, even to the left of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

Using stats from Govtrack.us for the 2019 report card, Jeremy Redfern, the press secretary for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) highlighted such findings in a quoted repost of the governor. 

Ahead of a lunch meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House in March, JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon didn’t know what to expect.

Dimon wasn’t sure of her political agenda when it came to the economy and business. His previous interactions with Harris had been limited, though the pair had a testy back-and-forth nearly a decade earlier while she was California attorney general during the mortgage foreclosure crisis.

President Joe Biden’s decision to abandon his reelection bid and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris means that Harris could soon become the standard-bearer for the Democratic Party’s biggest priorities — including abortion rights, climate change and student debt relief.

Her track record as a California attorney general, a U.S. senator and Biden’s No. 2 provides only so many clues about how she might lead.

Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed liberal positions on climate and energy before joining the Democratic ticket with President Joe Biden in 2020, stances that will now receive much greater scrutiny as she pursues the presidency with Biden’s endorsement.

While her stances on energy have closely aligned with Biden during their first term, her past record on fossil fuels and climate is to the left of Biden’s positioning and could serve as a hurdle to wooing fossil fuel-friendly swing states that could determine the November elections.