Here’s what happened under President Donald Trump’s administration this week that you may have missed.
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Trump keeps embracing AI
There are now near-daily reports of artificial-intelligence bots found misbehaving, hackingor going rogue. But this week Trump continued the government’s buy-in of AI by unveiling a chatbotto help people research and eventually enroll in government services.
Then Trump announced that tech executives, some of whom have been asking for the government’s help to rein the technology in, had reached a voluntary agreement not to push things too far. “This is going to be all for the good, and we’re going to have it be nice and safe,” Trump said.
Trump and his sons invest heavily in AI.
Critics compared Trump’s stance to relying on Boeing to regulate its own planes or drug companies to regulate their own medicine. And they point out there should be little trust in AI companies when trillions of dollars are at stake. “Relying on ‘self-regulation’ is how we got into this mess,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said this week.
The administration did launch an investigation into the safety of some of the biggest AI tools on the market this week. It’s not clear what the investigation might entail, The Washington Post’s Ian Duncan reports, but he said having an ongoing investigation could buffer the administration from Congress demanding new laws to regulate AI.
The White House is spending taxpayer money on Trump’s image
Trump has told Republican voters to act as if he’s on the ballot this November. He’s free to spend his own campaign money to help connect those dots for voters. But the Trump administration recently launched TV ads, paid for with taxpayer dollars, that seem entirely focused on politics. “This is the final battle. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists,” Trump says in on ad that ran on national TV over the weekend. The Trump administration calls them “public service announcements.”
The ads may run afoul of a decades-old law prohibiting taxpayer dollars for overt political campaigning.
“No,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters this week when asked if the ads featuring Trump were appropriate. “It’s not even a close question.”
Members of Congress spend millions on these kinda-sort-of campaign ads, too, Bloomberg News reported, by using taxpayer money to communicate with voters about what they’ve been doing.
Hegesth is slimming down the military
The U.S. military left Iraq this week, a momentous step after two decades of presence there.
It’s the end of an agreement from President Joe Biden’s era to withdraw troops from America’s longest war, but it also matches up with what appears to be Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s vision for the military: He is dramatically reducing its senior leadership (especially among women and people of color), wants to boost drone fighting, is bringing in Elon Musk and is trying to shift military culture to be more religious and, in his words, “less woke.”
“The previous administration forced out so-called toxic leaders in favor of promoting risk-averse, get-along-to-go-along conformists,” Hegseth told troops this week. “It was the true politicization of our military, stupid and dangerous.”
Many Democrats and some Republicans have raised concerns that Hegseth is injecting too much politics into military readiness decisions, The Post’s Tara Copp reports. (A prime example: when an Army leader was abruptly fired as the Army was looking into a helicopter flyby in front of musician Kid Rock’s estate.)
The Supreme Court lets Trump deport migrants to countries where they aren’t citizens
This may be Trump’s most controversial mass deportation policy, legally speaking: To quickly deport migrants, the administration has found countries across the world that will take them, rather than haggle with the migrant’s home country.
Lower courts have found the practice violates migrants’ due-process rights: Some are protected by U.S. law from not going home, and they don’t have a chance to claim a similar fear of torture or persecution if sent to another country.
This week, the Trump administration successfully appealed to conservatives on the Supreme Court, who agreed to let Trump continue his third-country deportations while they hear arguments on it later this year. The court also will hear arguments on the Trump administration’s denying bond hearings to immigrants.
Legal and immigration experts will be watching these cases closely. By detaining migrants for months, or removing them from the country quickly without due process, Trump is testing a theory of almost unlimited presidential power.
“If the courts aren’t checking his power, then all our rights are in jeopardy,” David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, said in a recent interview. “All they have to do is put you on a plane and remove you from the country, and you’re in an El Salvadoran prison, and they could say, ‘Eh, there’s nothing to even fix the mistake.’”
Trump is moving to set up a federal school voucher program
In a first, under rules released this week, the Treasury Department would allow people who owe money in taxes to essentially donate to voucher programs, which help fund private schools. It would steer billions of taxpayer dollars to private schools without regulations for those schools, The Post’s Lauren Lumpkin reports.
But in a twist, the money also could go to some public school students for tutoring or after-school programs and school supplies. That’s divided some Democrats and others in the education world who oppose voucher programs for taking money from public schools, she reports. States have to opt in by the new year.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers union, is urging governors to reject the federal program.
“This is a poison pill for the 90 percent of American children who attend public schools,” Weingarten said in a statement. “For every precious public dollar funneled to private schools under this scheme — money that could be spent on instruction, lowering class sizes, modern buildings or new books in the library — public school parents will be hunting for stray pennies on the floor.”
Amber Phillips writes The 5-Minute Fix newsletter, a quick analysis of the day’s biggest political news. Send her an email here, or ask a question that could be featured in an upcoming newsletter.
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