Stunning Republican losses in the midterms could spell the end of Pete Hegseth’s tenure as the secretary of defense. From Vice President JD Vance to Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), Hegseth’s own party is setting him up to take the fall for election losses blamed on the U.S. war with Iran. In a rambling post on X on November 4, Vance said the reason the GOP lost was “obvious to almost…
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The Trump administration awarded a small biosecurity company nearly $40 million to screen for Ebola and other infectious diseases just months after a firm linked to President Donald Trump’s elder sons invested in its parent company, according to records and interviews. The contracts, one to screen for Ebola in several U.S. airports and the other to respond to disease outbreaks in the…
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With Democrats’ decisive midterm election wins, incoming committee chairs are promising a blitz of investigations. Targets include potential abuses of power by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a culture of self-enrichment without precedent in modern American history.
This is an appropriate reaction to two years of nearly unchecked executive power. But these investigations can be only as good as the records that agencies and the White House have preserved, and the effectiveness and independence of the system charged with releasing them. Lawmakers will be stymied if the records they demand have been destroyed or have vanished into encrypted, auto-deleting apps, or if agencies continue to weaponize their classification authority.
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Top Oversight Dem Rep. Garcia posts: ‘LAWYER UP.’
November 4, 2026 / 01:35
This anti-accountability obfuscation is poised to play out on two fronts.
Across federal agencies, there is little reason to believe political appointees who regularly stonewall will begin complying with congressional inquiries. Secrecy has been the norm in the second Trump administration. We are likely to see agencies refuse to respond to committee requests for information, ignore Freedom of Information Act requests on investigative topics and continue to scrub government websites of public information. All this is compounded by the administration’s systematic purging of career inspectors general and replacement of those independent professionals with political loyalists so far unwilling to investigate waste, abuse and potential destruction of evidence.
There is little reason to believe political appointees who regularly stonewall will begin complying with congressional inquiries.
Inside the White House, secrecy tactics could grow even more brazen. To ensure that critical records — from President Donald Trump’s working papers to the communications of high-level appointees,
After slashing funding for programs that documented atrocities and protected human rights abroad, President Donald Trump’s State Department is now granting one of its first new human rights awards to a controversial South African organization that promotes the disputed notion that white farmers are a violently targeted, persecuted group, according to multiple sources knowledgeable about the…
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The Trump administration has likened the need to build out the nation’s artificial intelligence infrastructure to the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort that produced the world’s first atomic bomb. The White House’s point person on the effort, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, has spoken of the “AI arms race” with China as an existential issue for the nation.
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PACs and executives from three of the leading private prison companies have donated close to $1.2 million to candidates, fundraising committees, and political party committees during this year’s midterm election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records. A GEO Group subsidiary, GEO Reentry Services LLC, donated an additional $4.4 million to MAGA Inc.
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