Category: National

(WASHINGTON) — As Elon Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency works to reduce government spending by eliminating waste and cutting diversity programs, his SpaceX corporation currently has a multibillion dollar contract to help NASA land the first woman and first person of color on the moon.

In 2021, NASA announced that it had awarded a $2.9 billion contract to SpaceX to build a spacecraft for long-term human exploration of the moon under its Artemis program.

“NASA is getting ready to send astronauts to explore more of the Moon as part of the Artemis program,” NASA said in the 2021 press release. “At least one of those astronauts will make history as the first woman on the Moon. Another goal of the Artemis program includes landing the first person of color on the lunar surface.”

In 2023, NASA announced that the crew for the Artemis moon exploration mission would be Navy Capt. Victor Glover, a Black Engineer of the Year Award honoree, and North Carolina native Christina Koch, the record-holder for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, as well as former chief of the Astronaut Office Reid Wiseman and Canadian astronaut and fighter pilot Jeremy Hansen.

“For a woman to be on the crew and for a Black astronaut to be on the crew, because that’s what our office looks like, to me it is important,” Glover told ABC News’ Linsey Davis in February 2024.

Musk, as the head of DOGE, is taking a knife to federal agencies and programs as part of President Donald Trump’s efforts to reduce the size of government. He has claimed to have cut a billion dollars’ worth of federal DEI programs, and sources say DOGE has directed agencies to remove anything DEI-related from bulletin boards, including posters and signs, and has checked bathroom signs to ensure they comply with Trump’s executive orders to eliminate DEI initiatives from the federal government.

NASA representatives and representatives for SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.

Since the 2021 announcement of the partnership with SpaceX, NASA has announced additional contracts for Musk’s space company as part of the moon landing mission. So far, SpaceX has received $2.8 billion in obligations, with the possibility of the total award going up to $4.4 billion, according to federal spending data.

SpaceX has received more than $18 billion in federal contracts over the last decade, with NASA making up $13 billion of that, federal spending data shows.

“SpaceX will not let NASA down!” Musk tweeted in 2022 in response to a post by then-NASA administrator Bill Nelson announcing an additional $1.15 billion contract for the company.

Last month, NASA said the agency would comply with Trump’s executive order aimed at ending DEI programs, by amending certain program elements, including ending the “Inclusion Plan Pilot Study,” removing requirements for “Inclusion Plans,” and removing “references to NASA’s DEIA programs.” It’s not yet clear if NASA’s compliance with Trump’s DEI order extends to each of its contractors.

The Artemis program was first established in 2017 under a directive from Trump during his first administration, with the aim of bringing humans to the moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, plus a long-term goal of expanding to Mars.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told embassy officials in Guatemala this week that it was “not our intention” to uproot families deployed overseas with USAID, despite the agency issuing a 30-day mandate for their return.

“I know it’s hard to ask for patience. I know it’s hard to ask for trust,” Rubio said, according to a partial transcript of his meet-and-greet with embassy staff that was obtained by ABC News.

Rubio, who was tapped to serve as the acting director of the aid agency, also seemed to acknowledge the administration’s haphazard approach to cutting USAID — which handles foreign aid, disaster relief and international development programs — saying it was undertaken “in a manner that we would have preferred to be different, but we’re forced to do because of impediments that we would confront.”

Elon Musk, the head of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, said earlier this week he was “in the process” of “shutting down” the agency with the backing of President Donald Trump, as part of efforts to trim the size of the federal government and eliminate waste.

The Trump administration on Wednesday placed all direct-hire employees at USAID on administrative leave starting Friday, with plans to recall all foreign-based USAID employees back to the U.S. within 30 days.

In the transcript of Rubio’s meeting with Guatemalan embassy staff, he says that the ambassador to Guatemala “handed” him a list of USAID programs in the country that he said “align with our U.S. goals and our interests.” That list was the result of an all-night scramble by staff who were directed to compile it shortly after the secretary arrived in the country, according to an embassy official.

Rubio said that document “gave us the idea that we should ask the same exercise be conducted by every Mission around the world so that intelligent decisions can be made” regarding which programs to keep, before the end of Thursday.

The directive has quickly resulted in pushback from some USAID staff stationed abroad, who say the Thursday deadline set by State Department leadership will be extremely difficult for most posts to meet, and that it may be part of a strategy to avoid lawsuits from agency employees that could slow down its dismantling.

“Absolutely impossible,” one USAID employee told ABC News. “Clearly, the 90-day foreign aid review has been compressed to two days.”

Rubio’s remarks came in response to concerns from Haven Cruz-Hubbard, the USAID mission director for Guatemala, who asked about the administration’s efforts to curb foreign aid. Rubio insisted that “the United States is not walking away from foreign aid. It’s not.”

“I want to tell you that this is not about politics, but foreign aid is the least popular thing Government spends money on,” Rubio said, according to the transcript. “And I spent a lot of time in my career defending it and explaining it, but it’s harder and harder to do across the board — it really is.”

Rubio’s private comments generally reflect what he’s said publicly about the cuts to foreign aid — but his sentiments seemed more sympathetic toward the workers whose careers and livelihoods hang in the balance.

“For those of us in charge of doing the work of foreign policy, we understand [foreign aid] is essential,” he said.

The New York Times was first to report on the partial transcript.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(HOUSTON) — A man aboard a Frontier Airlines flight en route to Houston had to be restrained by fellow passengers on Wednesday after he began kicking seats and hitting a window, eventually breaking the plexiglass, police said.

The flight, F9 4856, departed from Denver and was in the air for about 20 to 30 minutes, when a woman asked the man behind her to switch seats, according to passenger Victoria Clark. This man quickly became enraged, profusely kicking the woman’s seat and trying to break the window, Clark said.

“I started having a panic attack,” Clark told ABC News. “[I thought] it could be a terrorist attack.”

The man continued to hit the window and was eventually able to break the plexiglass, passengers said. Without an air marshal on board, flight attendants asked if there was any law enforcement to help, passengers recounted. That’s when Tanner Phillips, a former member of the military, said he stepped in.

“This guy was just going crazy,” Phillips told ABC News. “He was screaming in multiple languages, punching out the window and laying back and trying to kick it out. I wanted to help as much as I could.”

Phillips said he and several others grabbed hold of the man, using zip ties and boot laces to restrain him and put him back in his seat. Instead of making an emergency landing, the flight continued toward its destination of Houston — forcing the group of good Samaritans to ensure the man did not escape for about two hours.

The man’s blood was everywhere around the window and the ceiling of the aircraft, since the plexiglass cut up his hands, Phillips said.

“You never know what someone is capable of,” Phillips said. “I’m really grateful that we were able to handle the situation and no one got harmed.”

Once the plane landed safely in Houston at around 10:20 p.m. local time, Clark said everyone felt an immense sigh of relief.

“People were clapping,” Clark said. “Everyone was saying thank you to all the gentlemen that helped make sure that we got there safely.”

The Houston Police Department said they received a report that there had been a “combative passenger on board,” and were already on the scene by the time the plane had landed.

Frontier Airlines declined to press charges at the scene, and police are reaching out to airport officials to see what happened to the man. Since the man is not currently facing charges, his name was not released, according to police.

Several passengers, including Jessica Brown and her daughter Chloe Starks, hope this incident shows the need for increased security aboard aircrafts, so that something like this does not happen again.

“It’s just insanity. I don’t wish this on my worst enemy,” Brown told ABC News. “I wish in 2025 we would not have situations like this.”

-ABC News’ Lindsey Krill and Jennifer Watts contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(BOSTON) — As more than two million federal employees face a midnight Thursday deadline to accept the Trump administration’s buyout offer, a federal judge in Massachusetts will consider an eleventh-hour request to block the buyout from moving forward.

U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. set Thursday afternoon hearing to consider a request by three federal unions to issue a temporary restraining order that would suspend Thursday’s deadline for the buyout and require the Office of Personnel Management to provide a legal basis for the unprecedented offer, which offers to continue to pay federal employees through Sept. 30, 2025, if they resign by Thursday at 11;59 p.m..

Three unions representing a combined 800,000 federal civil servants argue that the “deferred resignation” offer is unlawful, arbitrary, and would result in a “dangerous one-two punch” to the federal government.

“First, the government will lose expertise in the complex fields and programs that Congress has, by statute, directed the Executive to faithfully implement,” the lawsuit said. “And second, when vacant positions become politicized, as this Administration seeks to do, partisanship is elevated over ability and truth, to the detriment of agency missions and the American people.”

The lawsuit comes as at least 40,000 federal workers — roughly 2% of the civilian federal workforce — have accepted the deferred resignation offer to leave the federal government since last week, ABC News has reported.

The three unions — the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Association of Government Employees, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — argue that the OPM violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to provide a legal basis for the buyout offer and leaving open the possibility that the government might not follow through with the buyout once federal employees agree to resign.

The lawsuit added that the buyout’s promise of payments through September violates the law because the current appropriation for federal agencies expires in March. Moreover, the buyout is unfair because it was made alongside a threat of future layoffs, the lawsuit said.

The buyout offer, part of DOGE head Elon Musk’s effort to trim the size of government under President Donald Trump, was sent out under the subject line “Fork in the Road” — the same language Musk used when he slashed jobs at Twitter after taking over that company in 2022.

“To leverage employees into accepting the offer and resigning, the Fork Directive threatens employees with eventual job loss in the event that they refuse to resign,” the unions’ lawsuit says.

Overall, the lawsuit alleges that the OPM rushed the offer with a questionable legal basis, largely mimicking Elon Musk’s management style following his takeover of Twitter.

“OPM’s rapid adoption of Musk’s private-sector program confirms that the agency took very little time to consider the suitability of applying an approach used with questionable success in a single for-profit entity to the entirety of the federal workforce,” says the lawsuit.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — The Department of Justice and lawyers representing a group of FBI agents involved in investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack were in active negotiations Thursday to reach an agreement that would prevent the DOJ from publicly releasing the identities of any bureau employees currently under review for potential disciplinary action or firings.

The anonymous group of FBI agents is seeking a temporary restraining order to keep the FBI from releasing the names on a list the bureau collected as part of what the plaintiffs’ lawsuit says is the agency’s plan to engage in “potential vigilante action” to retaliate against government employees who worked on Jan. 6 cases or Donald Trump’s classified documents case.

U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, in a hearing Thursday, said she was “sympathetic” to the argument that the public release of any names on the last would do serious damage — but the lawyers representing the agents struggled to provide evidence that the DOJ intends to publicly release the information, rather than use the material for an internal review as they have vowed in court filings.

“Our argument is that the threat to national security is so extreme that we cannot risk letting it happen first, and then trying to put it back together,” said attorney for the agents Margaret Donovan in arguing for the temporary restraining order.

“I appreciate that, and I’m sympathetic to that argument,” Judge Cobb said. “A fear of something happening is not sufficient, even if — you know — the fear is a serious one.”

Lawyers representing the plaintiffs warned that the Trump Administration and DOGE head Elon Musk have demonstrated a willingness to publicly name officials they’ve accused of wrongdoing, such as the 51 former intelligence officials who wrote a letter about the Hunter Biden laptop and were later stripped of their security clearances in a Day-1 executive order by President Donald Trump.

“We have seen Elon Musk, working for the so-called DOGE agency, release names of individuals in public service. We have seen Jan. 6 pardonees very active on social media around the time of the survey, anticipating that the names would be released,” Donovan said. “We have a good faith reason to believe that those names may get out.”

With the Department of Justice publicly vowing to keep the names of agents private, and the plaintiffs lacking clear evidence showing an intent to release the names, both sides reached an impasse after the morning hearing, with plans to negotiate in private before the hearing resumes.

“We’re in between somewhat of a rock and a hard place on all of that,” plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Zaid said.

In a court filing submitted Thursday morning, the Justice Department urged the judge hearing the case to reject the plaintiffs’ request to impose a restraining order blocking any public release of the list.

DOJ attorneys argued in the filing that the motion for the restraining order is based largely on speculation and that the FBI agents have failed to show they face any imminent threats in connection with the list.

Trump pleaded not guilty in 2023 to 40 criminal counts related to his handling of classified materials after leaving the White House, and, separately, to charges of undertaking a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The classified documents case was dismissed last year by a federal judge, and both cases were subsequently dropped following Trump’s reelection in November due to a longstanding DOJ policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — Champion figure skaters are coming together for a tribute show called “Legacy on Ice” to honor the victims of the American Airlines plane crash.

The event will be on Sunday, March 2, at 3 p.m. at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C.

Olympians Tara Lipinski, Kristi Yamaguchi, Scott Hamilton and Johnny Weir are among those participating. The show will raise funds to support victims’ families, first responders and aviation professionals, U.S. Figure Skating said.

More than a dozen of the victims killed in the Jan. 29 plane crash were young skaters, their parents and coaches returning home from a national figure skating development camp in Wichita, Kansas.

The plane, which departed from Wichita, was about to land at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, D.C., when it collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter, sending both aircraft plunging into the Potomac River.

Sixty-four people were on board the plane and three soldiers were on the helicopter. No one survived.

“As we begin to heal from this devastating loss, we look forward to honoring the enduring memories of these athletes, coaches and family members who represented the best of the figure skating community,” U.S. Figure Skating interim-CEO Samuel Auxier said in a Wednesday statement announcing the tribute show.

“We can think of no better way of celebrating their legacies than through the sport they loved,” Auxier said.

Tickets will go on sale on Monday, Feb. 10, on Ticketmaster.

Click here to learn more about the victims.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — Internet-connected cameras made in China are giving the Chinese government the ability to “conduct espionage or disrupt US critical infrastructure,” according to a Department of Homeland Security bulletin obtained by ABC News.

The cameras typically lack data encryption and security settings and, by default, communicate with their manufacturer. It’s believed there are tens of thousands of Chinese-made cameras on the networks of critical U.S. infrastructure entities, including within the chemical and energy sectors, the bulletin said.

Chinese cyber-operatives have previously exploited internet-connected cameras and the fear is China could gain access and manipulate systems without tighter restrictions on these cameras, the DHS warns.

“A cyber actor could leverage cameras placed on IT networks for initial access and pivot to other devices to exfiltrate sensitive process data that an actor could use for attack planning or disrupting business systems,” the bulletin said. “A cyber actor could use cameras placed on safety systems to suppress alarms, trigger false alarms, or pivot to disable fail-safe mechanisms.”

So far, China has successfully kept U.S. regulators from blocking the use of internet-connected cameras made in China through the use of a practice known as “white labeling,” where the cameras are imported after they’re packaged and sold by another company, according to the bulletin.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — A federal judge on Thursday will consider whether to block the Federal Bureau of Investigation from assembling a list of agents involved in cases related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack for potential disciplinary action or firings.

A class action lawsuit filed anonymously by a group of FBI agents alleges that the country’s leading law enforcement agency is planning to engage in “potential vigilante action” to retaliate against government employees who worked on Jan. 6 cases or Donald Trump’s classified documents case.

The lawsuit warned that the effort to survey thousands of FBI agents about their past work could be “catastrophic to national security” and result in the termination of as many as 6,000 FBI agents.

The plaintiffs warned that the Department of Justice may seek to publicly disseminate the names of agents that investigated the conduct that allegedly stemmed from the sitting president.

“Such public disclosures would directly put the safety of all impacted individuals at risk as well as their family members,” the lawsuit said.
In a court filing submitted Thursday morning, the Justice Department urged the judge hearing the case to reject the plaintiffs’ request to impose a restraining order blocking the collection the list.

DOJ attorneys argued in the filing that the motion for the restraining order is based largely on speculation and that the FBI agents have failed to show they face any imminent threats in connection with the list.

Trump’s federal classified documents case and his Jan. 6 case were both dropped following Trump’s reelection in November due to a longstanding Justice Department policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — A winter storm has pummeled the Midwest and the Northeast with sleet, freezing rain and snow, leaving dangerous travel conditions for millions.

In Cleveland, cars, trees and power lines have been coated in sheets of ice, and in Kansas, the icy roads were blamed for car accidents.

The ice targeted Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia overnight as the storm moved east.

Snow and sleet reached New York City early Thursday morning, causing a treacherous commute during rush hour.

“Avoid unnecessary travel, and if you must drive, slow down, use caution and give plows and spreaders room to work,” the New Jersey Department of Transportation said.

The icy mix is expected to change to rain later in the morning from New York City to Philadelphia to D.C.

New England, including Boston, will see snow and an icy mix into the afternoon.

Another storm with snow, sleet and freezing rain is forecast for the Midwest and the Northeast this weekend.

A winter storm watch already has been issued for parts of Upper Midwest, including Minneapolis, where up to 8 inches of snow is possible.

This new storm will then track east, reaching the Interstate 95 corridor Saturday evening into Sunday morning with snow, ice and rain.
 

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW ALBANY, Ohio) — Police are looking for a motive after a man allegedly killed two people and injured four others in a workplace shooting at an Ohio manufacturing facility, officials said.

Officers responded to an active shooter report at a New Albany facility run by KDC/One, a beauty products manufacturer, around 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, New Albany police said.

One victim was found shot dead inside the building and five others were hospitalized, police said. Police announced early Thursday that one of the five people in the hospital died from their injuries. The four surviving victims remain hospitalized in unknown conditions, police said.

About 150 employees were safely evacuated, police said.

The suspect, identified as employee Bruce Reginald Foster III, fled the scene just before police arrived, New Albany Police Chief Greg Jones said.

Foster, 28, was taken into custody Wednesday morning at a home in Columbus, Jones said.

A motive remains under investigation, Jones said at a news conference Wednesday.

Authorities interviewed the evacuated employees and “nobody had reported that there was any conflict or that [Foster] was in trouble at work,” Jones said.

The chief described the victims as Foster’s co-workers and said they likely knew each other.

New Albany is a safe community, but “any community in America can fall victim to random workplace violence,” New Albany Mayor Sloan Spalding said at the news conference.

Foster legally bought the gun used in the shooting in September 2024, authorities noted.
 

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.