When the ‘“department of government efficiency” was raging unchecked through the federal government in February 2025, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, ordered his subordinates to find cuts of 8% a year for the next five years, theoretically trimming a total of $340m from the Pentagon budget.
The disclosure briefly sent Palantir and defense stocks tanking – though soon the plan evaporated, as if it never existed.
Instead, Hegseth is now demanding a $454bn increase for 2027 military spending, to a total of almost $1.5tn, in what he describes as a “generational investment”.
Adjusted for inflation, that would for the first time match – and even exceed – US military spending at the height of the second world war during national mobilization, according to a chart prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
A Secret Service agent assigned to JD Vance’s protective detail is “the subject of an administrative investigation, and potential criminal inquiry, involving allegations of compromising operational and information security”, according to the Secret Service chief of communications.
Concerns are growing in southern California over a cluster of “exceptionally rare” cancer cases that has sickened multiple children in a suburban community.
House Democrat calls Trump's new tariffs 'an end-run around the Supreme Court and Congress', not an attempt to end forced labor.
The House on Thursday approved a resolution to remove U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran, in a vote that reflected growing frustration inside Congress over the war and the ability of lawmakers to conduct oversight.
Lawyers with the Department of Justice on Thursday agreed to unilaterally withdraw a series of subpoenas that sought to compel New York Times journalists to testify about their sources and to access their phone records. 
