Trump’s first 100 days: all the news affecting the tech industry

Around 20 technologists at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were fired on Thursday evening, gutting a team that specialized in understanding Big Tech’s entrance into financial products, three sources familiar with the matter tell The Verge.

It follows an earlier round of layoffs of mostly contractors and probationary employees on Tuesday, as reported by Wired, representing the latest cuts to an agency with oversight over a field that one of Elon Musk’s companies is trying to enter. Musk, who now leads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has announced plans for his company X to enter the payments business, which is an area the CFPB oversees for potential consumer harm.

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The Trump administration is attempting to take back around $20 billion of funding that the Biden administration previously awarded to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump’s appointee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lee Zeldin, posted a cryptic video last night and followed up with a press release today claiming “roughly $20 billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA.” He later clarified that “at this point, there is zero reason to suspect any wrongdoing by the bank,” but that “the financial agent agreement with the bank needs to be instantly terminated” and the money returned to the EPA.

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As Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have sought to gut and remake the federal government to their liking, federal workers have changed how they communicate with one another and with friends. They have locked down communication channels, migrated to new platforms, and what was once skepticism has grown into deep distrust — not just of their boss’s boss’s boss, but of the very services they use to communicate with one another, worried that their messages will be leaked to the government.

Multiple federal workers who spoke to The Verge on the condition of anonymity said they’ve moved sensitive conversations from text messages and Facebook Messenger to the encrypted messaging app Signal. Many are downloading and using Signal for the first time to communicate with each other — away from the eyes of Trump and Musk loyalists but also from mainstream tech companies. For some, everything but the most innocuous conversations have been moved. Photos of pets might stay on typical channels; almost everything else is on Signal.

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Elon Musk’s X has agreed to pay President Donald Trump “about $10 million” to settle his lawsuit against Twitter, reports The Wall Street Journal. The settlement would come on top of an estimated $250 million that Musk, who now seemingly has broad authority over government agencies as the head of DOGE, put toward helping Trump get elected last year.

Trump sued Twitter, Facebook, and Google over his account suspensions following the January 6th, 2021, riot at the US Capitol, and a judge dismissed this lawsuit in 2022, rejecting arguments that the company was a state actor or that Section 230 is unconstitutional.

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Waste.gov, a new government website registered by the Trump administration, has been hidden and locked down after 404 Media reported that it mostly displayed an unedited WordPress template.

The archived version of the site contained the tagline, “Tracking government waste,” and another new website, DEI.gov, redirects to the same URL. But the rest of site displayed filler text from the WordPress Twenty Twenty-Four theme that’s also displayed in a demo, 404 reported. The text had nothing to do with government waste — instead, it hawked a made-up architecture firm called Études that claims it “seamlessly merges creativity and functionality to redefine architectural excellence.”

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The Trump administration brought webpages back online, meeting a court-ordered deadline at 11:59PM on February 11th.

Doctors for America (DFA), which represents physicians and medical students, filed suit last week against the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) for taking health data off government websites.

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Federal Communications Chair Brendan Carr has asked his agency to investigate Comcast’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices, as first reported by Newsmax. “We have received an inquiry from the Federal Communications Commission and will be cooperating with the FCC to answer their questions,” Comcast spokesperson Joelle Terry confirms to The Verge.

Carr writes in the letter that the FCC is looking for signs that the company’s initiatives have violated federal employment law, writing: “I expect that this investigation into Comcast and its NBCUniversal operations will aid the commission’s broader efforts to root out invidious forms of DEI discrimination across all of the sectors the FCC regulates.”

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The Trump administration breached a federal privacy law by letting workers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access information on millions of government workers, privacy advocates including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) allege in a new lawsuit filed on behalf of two labor unions and a group of current and former federal employees.

The groups allege that DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) violated the Privacy Act of 1974, which protects information maintained by federal agencies. OPM maintains information on “tens of millions of current and former federal employees, contractors, and job applicants,” including disabilities, background check information, and health records, the lawsuit says. The agency also has information on workers in “highly sensitive roles for whom even acknowledging their government employment may be problematic,” such as Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) workers, it adds. The labor groups allege Musk and his DOGE staffers were allowed to access OPM computer networks that stored this information before they were even considered government employees, putting workers’ sensitive information in jeopardy.

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President Donald Trump wants to make America incandescent again. He posted on his social media platform Truth Social that he plans to end Biden-era standards for lightbulbs that accelerated the adoption of LED lighting.

According to that post, he’ll direct his appointee Lee Zeldin to “go back to the common sense standards,” for lightbulbs. Zeldin is the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, although Trump calls him “secretary” in his post. And while Trump singled out Zeldin, it’s the Department of Energy that sets efficiency standards for light bulbs and appliances.

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Elon Musk’s role in carrying out President Donald Trump’s dirty work has triggered a wave of opposition that is spilling over into protests against his flagship company, Tesla. Over the last week, some people have held demonstrations while others have vandalized Tesla vehicles owned by individual buyers and showrooms — with actions stretching from New York, Colorado, and California, to as far as The Netherlands and Germany.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has accessed sensitive government data and cut congressionally mandated funds to agencies. After court orders demanded a halt to some of its actions, Musk and Vice President JD Vance have hinted they may ignore the rulings. Tesla’s hundreds of showrooms, as well as other locations, present a ripe target for venting frustrations about Musk’s political activities.

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Almost 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, America has gotten herself a new king. His name is Elon Musk.

“Wait a minute,” you may be saying. “What about President Donald Trump?” Trump ran, much like Silvio Berlusconi before him, primarily to avoid prosecutions. He has never liked being president and he has already gotten what he wants. He’s not the power center. Musk is.

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A federal judge temporarily blocked Elon Musk’s DOGE from accessing Treasury Department records containing personal information like Social Security numbers early this morning, reports Inner City Press.

The order is in response to a lawsuit filed yesterday in New York’s Southern District Court. The suit alleges that the administration exceeded its authority, broke the US Administrative Procedures Act, and violated the US Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine when it granted DOGE access to the Treasury’s federal payments system.

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Marko Elez, the 25-year-old staffer Department of Government Efficiency staffer linked to a social media profile with racist posts, “will be brought back,” shortly after he resigned, Elon Musk announced on X.

Elez resigned from his role where he reportedly had the ability to rewrite code in sensitive payments systems at the US Treasury, once The Wall Street Journal inquired about his connection to a deleted account. That account, which the Journal found previously had the username “@marko_elez,” called for reinstating a “eugenic immigration policy,” repealing the Civil Rights Act, and said that “99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs.”

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Within the past week, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-affiliated staffers have gained unprecedented access to sensitive US financial systems with data on millions of Americans, claimed to shut down one federal agency without an act of Congress, and invaded numerous government agencies. They’ve been opposed by lawsuits, public protests, and resistance within those agencies — and the situation remains constantly in flux.

As a deadline for workers to accept a so-called “deferred resignation” looms on Monday, here’s where the rest of Musk’s government takeover attempt stands.

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