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A pivotal meeting on vaccine guidance is underway—and former CDC leaders are alarmed

On Thursday, an advisory CDC panel that develops vaccine guidance met for a two-day discussion on multiple childhood vaccines. During the meeting, which was underway as The Checkup went to press, members of the panel were set to discuss those vaccines and propose recommendations on their use. Monarez worries that access to childhood vaccines is under threat—and that the public health consequences could be dire. “If vaccine protections are weakened, preventable diseases will return,” she said.

Feds Launch Investigation Into Faulty Tesla Doors

U.S. regulators just launched an investigation into faulty door handles on certain Tesla cars, after receiving several reports of exterior handles glitching and leaving children trapped inside. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Tuesday that it’s opening a preliminary probe into Tesla’s electrically powered door handles, focusing on 2021 Model Y vehicles. The review covers nearly 175,000 cars and will gauge how widespread and serious the problem is. “At this time,

CISA warns of actively exploited Dassault RCE vulnerability

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning of hackers exploiting a critical remote code execution flaw in DELMIA Apriso, a manufacturing operations management (MOM) and execution (MES) solution from French company Dassault Systèmes. The agency added the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-5086 and rated with a critical severity score (CVSS v3: 9.0), to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV). DELMIA Apriso is used in production processes for digitalizing and m

France confirms new Apple spyware campaign alert

In a threat and incidents report released today, France’s Information Security Agency confirmed that Apple issued a new wave of threat notifications earlier this month. Here are the details. The alert didn’t specify who was behind the recent campaign According to the agency’s report, Apple sent its latest round of security alerts to French citizens on September 3, 2025, marking the fourth campaign just this year. Previous notification waves were sent on March 5, April 29, and June 25. As the

NASA found clues of life on Mars, but budget cuts threaten future missions

An exciting discovery on Mars is being overshadowed by turmoil at NASA, with budget cuts threatening to destroy a scientific legacy that has been built over decades. Yesterday, the agency shared a finding, published in Nature, of potential biosignatures identified by the Mars Perseverance rover in a 3.5 billion-year-old rock. “This very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars,” said Transportation Secretary and Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy in a press confe

Senators demand ICE cease use of facial recognition app

Senators Edward J. Markey, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley sent a letter Thursday to Acting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Todd Lyons urging the agency to stop using “Mobile Fortify,” a smartphone app that uses biometric identification, including facial recognition. The lawmakers said facial recognition remains unreliable and warned that real-time surveillance could have a chilling effect on constitutionally protected activities. "As studies have shown, when individuals believ

Google Is Telling People DOGE Never Existed

Here’s a Mandela effect event that you probably thought was real: The Department of Government Efficiency, the pseudo-agency run by Elon Musk to cut “fraud, waste, and abuse” from federal operations, didn’t actually exist. At least, that is what Google’s AI Overview response will tell you if you search certain content related to DOGE’s operations. A Bluesky user who goes by iucounu first pointed out this mistake in Google’s comprehension skills, finding that querying the search engine for infor

Is Congestion Pricing Working? The MTA’s Revamped Data Team Is Figuring It Out

For the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s data and analytics team, January 5, 2025, felt a lot like kismet. Three and a half years earlier, New York state legislators had passed a law requiring the MTA to release “easily accessible, understandable, and usable” data to the public; by January 2022, MTA chair and CEO Janno Lieber officially announced the new team’s formation. Meanwhile, New York City’s controversial congestion pricing program, which tolls cars entering Manhatta

Topics: agency data mta new team

Trump Ends Union Protections for NASA Employees, Citing ‘National Security’

Just before Labor Day weekend, the White House issued an executive order that excludes NASA and other agencies from collective bargaining rights. NASA employees have previously expressed public dismay against the administration’s budget cuts to the agency and its policy against diversity programs, and the latest order is another major blow to the staff. President Donald Trump signed the new order on August 28, ending collective bargaining at a number of federal agencies with national security m

The CDC’s New Acting Director Is a Peter Thiel Pal (and a Total Nightmare)

As America's pivotal health agency descends into chaos, the White House has selected the worst possible person to run it. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is in chaotic disarray, as a slew of resignations and an unprecedented walkout of staff have roiled the agency. At the center of the controversy is the CDC’s weirdo director, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose most recent contribution to public health dialogue was a bizarre rant about what passes through his mind as he stares at childr

FEMA’s Chaotic Summer Has Gone From Bad to Worse

On Thursday, Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem claimed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency “is much more responsive under President Trump to people’s needs than it has been under previous administrations.” Speaking at the public third meeting of the FEMA Review Council, a group appointed by Donald Trump at the beginning of this year to oversee reform of the agency, Noem encouraged those listening to “be vocal” about positive interactions with the Trump administration

FEMA's Chaotic Summer Has Gone From Bad to Worse

On Thursday, Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem claimed that FEMA “is much more responsive under President Trump to people’s needs than it has been under previous administrations.” Speaking at the public third meeting of the FEMA Review Council, a group appointed by Donald Trump at the beginning of this year to oversee reform of the agency, Noem encouraged those listening to “be vocal” about positive interactions with the Trump administration. “Tell the story of how different

FEMA Staffers Warned of Looming ‘Katrina-Level’ Disaster, Then Got Suspended

It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina slammed into the U.S. Gulf Coast, killing nearly 1,400 people and displacing up to 1.2 million more. The storm’s impact overwhelmed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, revealing fatal flaws in its disaster response. The agency’s failure prompted Congress to overhaul FEMA largely through the ​​Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act (PKEMRA). This set higher expectations for its leaders and enhanced its autonomy within the Department of Homela

Trump administration suspends FEMA employees who warned about disaster response

is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home , a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FEMA has suspended at least 30 employees after they warned that spending limits, staffing cuts, and gaps in leadership hurt the agency’s ability to respond to disasters. The employees rece

DOGE uploaded live copy of Social Security database to ‘vulnerable’ cloud server, says whistleblower

A top Social Security Administration official turned whistleblower says members of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uploaded hundreds of millions of Social Security records to a vulnerable cloud server, putting the personal information of most Americans at risk of compromise. Charles Borges, the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer, said in a newly released whistleblower complaint published Tuesday that other top agency officials signed off on

Tesla faces U.S. auto safety probe over faulty crash reporting

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, attends the Viva Technology conference at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 16, 2023. Elon Musk's Tesla is facing a federal probe by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration after the U.S. auto safety agency found that the company was not reporting crashes as required. According to documents posted to NHTSA's website on Thursday, the agency's Office of Defects Investigation had "identified numerous incident reports" from Te

It Might Already Be Too Late to Save NASA

One of president Donald Trump's long-held desires has been to replace NASA with private spaceflight enterprises. With cronies in charge at the agency to execute draconian budget cuts to that end, it looks like the president is about to get his wish. As Aviation Week reports, the agency is gearing up to be gutted as its leadership prepares to enact the Trump administration's outrageous budget reductions, which include thousands of layoffs and nearly 50 percent lobbed off its science budget, whic

A Bug at Social Security Admin Has Been Rerouting Phone Calls to Random Offices

A technical issue at the Social Security Administration recently caused phone calls to various field offices to be routed to other offices that didn’t have jurisdiction over the claims, thus making service fulfillment difficult. On Tuesday, NPR reported that the agency’s field offices were having difficulties connecting callers to the proper staff who could fulfill their requests. “If it’s someone else’s office, the jurisdiction is someone else’s,” Angela Digeronimo, a SS claims specialist in W

Amazon's cloud business giving federal agencies up to $1 billion in discounts

Attendees walk through an exposition hall at AWS re:Invent, a conference hosted by Amazon Web Services, in Las Vegas on Dec. 3, 2024. Amazon Web Services has agreed to provide U.S. federal agencies with up to $1 billion in discounts for cloud adoption, modernization and training through 2028, an agency overseeing government procurement announced Thursday. The agreement is expected to speed up migration to the cloud, as well as adoption of artificial intelligence tools, the General Services Adm

NASA faces brain drain as thousands exit under voluntary resignation scheme

Almost 3,900 of NASA's workforce is set to leave the agency thanks to voluntary incentives, with senior staffers among those heading out the door. The figures were reportedly issued by NASA HQ on Friday. About 3,000 employees opted to take part in a second round of the agency's Deferred Resignation Program. Some 870 participated in the first round, earlier this year. The exodus has led observers to bemoan the loss of talent. Former Hubble astronaut Dr John Grunsfeld described the departures to

Nearly 4,000 NASA Employees Quit as Part of Trump Buyouts

More than 20% of NASA’s civil workforce has elected to leave the agency since President Trump took office in January, the agency revealed on Friday, July 25. In the latest wave of resignations, thousands accepted deals through the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program. In a statement emailed to SpaceNews on Friday, NASA said about 3,000 employees applied for buyouts through a second round of the program. Earlier this year, the first round saw 870 staffers leave the agency. The nea

4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

Nearly 4,000 NASA employees have opted to leave the space agency through the Trump administration's deferred resignation program, NASA said on Saturday. The cuts amount to an estimated 20% of NASA's workforce, and will reduce the agency from 18,000 to 14,000 employees, NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner said in a statement shared with NPR. The total number includes the agency's loss of 500 other workers due to normal attrition, she said. During a second round of the program, which closed at midni

The Download: saving the US climate programs, and America’s AI protections are under threat

Nonprofits are trying to preserve a US effort to modernize greenhouse-gas measurements, amid growing fears that the Trump administration’s dismantling of federal programs will obscure the nation’s contributions to climate change. The Data Foundation, a Washington, DC, nonprofit, is fundraising for an initiative that will coordinate efforts among nonprofits, technical experts, and companies to improve the accuracy and accessibility of climate emissions information. It will build on an effort to

America’s AI watchdog is losing its bite

It found that the security giant Evolv lied about the accuracy of its AI-powered security checkpoints, which are used in stadiums and schools but failed to catch a seven-inch knife that was ultimately used to stab a student. It went after the facial recognition company Intellivision, saying the company made unfounded claims that its tools operated without gender or racial bias. It fined startups promising bogus “AI lawyer” services and one that sold fake product reviews generated with AI. These

Topics: agency ai ftc house trump

FDA employees say the agency's Elsa generative AI hallucinates entire studies

Current and former members of the FDA told CNN about issues with the Elsa generative AI tool unveiled by the federal agency last month. Three employees said that in practice, Elsa has hallucinated nonexistent studies or misrepresented real research. "Anything that you don't have time to double-check is unreliable," one source told the publication. "It hallucinates confidently." Which isn't exactly ideal for a tool that's supposed to be speeding up the clinical review process and aiding with maki

Topics: agency elsa fda told tool

Conduct rules are coming for Google and Apple in the UK

Apple and Google face new rules governing how they run their smartphone software and app stores in the UK, as Britain’s antitrust agency looks to impose new European-style controls on the Big Tech companies. The proposed interventions could trim fees of up to 30 percent that Apple and Google charge for digital transactions through their mobile app stores, as well as prevent them from designing their systems to favor their own apps and services. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority on Wed

What will become of the CIA?

In December, 1988, as the Soviet Union was beginning to come apart, Senator Bill Bradley, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, convened a closed-door hearing with several of the C.I.A.’s top Soviet experts. These were analysts, not operatives. They did not run spies or weapons, or shoot poisoned darts at people; mostly, they sat at their desks at Langley, reading Pravda or studying photographs of Soviet military parades. The hearing found them in a melancholy mood, pondering

EPA Employees Still in the Dark as Agency Dismantles Scientific Research Office

Employees of the crucial scientific research arm of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have been left with more questions than answers as the agency moves to officially wind down the office following months of back-and-forth. On Friday evening, the EPA issued a press release announcing a reduction in force at the Office of Research and Development (ORD), citing the move as part of a larger effort to save a purported $748.8 million. On Monday, some employees at ORD, the largest office in

What Will Become of the CIA?

In December, 1988, as the Soviet Union was beginning to come apart, Senator Bill Bradley, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, convened a closed-door hearing with several of the C.I.A.’s top Soviet experts. These were analysts, not operatives. They did not run spies or weapons, or shoot poisoned darts at people; mostly, they sat at their desks at Langley, reading Pravda or studying photographs of Soviet military parades. The hearing found them in a melancholy mood, pondering

FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors

It was not immediately clear how FEMA’s responsiveness to calls after the Texas floods compared to its performance after past disasters. FEMA does not publicly release that data on a regular basis. The agency did publish similar data on Oct. 29, 2024, days after Hurricane Helene barreled across the South and nearly three weeks after Hurricane Milton hit Florida. That information showed that the agency did not answer nearly half of the 507,766 incoming calls over the course of a week, E & E News

Topics: agency did fema mr trump