Commerce Department seeks to secure drone technology, supply chain from China, Russia
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(WASHINGTON) — The Commerce Department on Thursday proposed a rule to secure the technology and supply chain of drones from foreign adversaries, including the potential ability of China and Russia to remotely access and manipulate the devices to expose sensitive U.S. data.
The rule, proposed by the department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), seeks to implement a rule that would explain how foreign adversary involvement in “supply chains, including acute threats from China and Russia — may offer our adversaries the ability to remotely access and manipulate these devices, exposing sensitive U.S. data,” according to a department news release.
BIS is hoping to get feedback on how information from drones is used and how it could pose a national security risk from adversaries, according to the Commerce Department.
“Securing the unmanned aircraft systems technology supply chain is critical to safeguarding our national security. This [rule making notice] is an essential step in protecting the United States from vulnerabilities posed by foreign entities,” said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
The deadline for public comments on this rule is March 4, 2025.
It is the latest step in rulemaking from the Commerce Department.
Last year, BIS proposed a rule to ban Chinese software in cars from entering into the United States due to national security risks.
(WASHINGTON) — Environmental nonprofits are gearing up to challenge some of the actions President Donald Trump has issued since taking office.
There is litigation coming for the majority of the executive orders Trump has signed so far that affect the environment, conservation and decarbonizing the economy, several nonprofits told ABC News.
Environmental lawyers are also on standby for any directives issued in the future that could violate existing environmental laws, according to several sources familiar with the lawsuits already being prepared against the Trump administration.
The White House did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
How environmental groups are responding to Trump’s executive orders
Trump began his second term as president by signing a slew of executive actions, including an order that attempts to revoke action taken by President Joe Biden in the last weeks of his term to ban all future offshore oil and natural gas drilling on America’s East and West coasts, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s North Bering Sea.
While Trump immediately vowed to reverse the ban when it was signed on Jan. 6, that could prove difficult. The law Biden invoked, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, was written so a presidential action under its authority is permanent — providing legal precedent to ensure it stands, several environmental lawyers told ABC News, describing Trump’s move as illegal.
“We’ll see them in court at some point,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “I think we will prevail on this.”
Trump’s vow to revoke the ban is an attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to increase fossil fuel production, Sam Sankar, senior vice president at Earthjustice, the nation’s largest public interest environmental law firm, told ABC News.
In doing so, he is ignoring a large swath of U.S. coastline communities who would prefer for drilling to decrease, said Joanne Spalding, director of the environmental law program at the Sierra Club.
“People in Florida don’t want drilling. People in California don’t want drilling,” Spalding told ABC News. “There’s lots of places where people are not interested in having that activity on their coastlines.”
Existing environmental laws could also serve as roadblocks as Trump aims to increase the amount of federal land that will be subject to drilling, the experts said.
Separately, groups criticized Trump’s planned 10-to-1 deregulatory freeze, which would require the federal government to repeal 10 existing rules, regulations or guidance documents in order to adopt a new one, as “completely arbitrary,” Spalding said.
That order is “almost verbatim” to a two-for-one deregulatory freeze issued in 2017 that “never amounted to anything,” Hartl said.
“A lot of what we’ve seen, even in the first two weeks, have been almost just copy-and-paste activities from executive orders that we saw in the first Trump administration,” he said.
What worries conservation nonprofits the most
The potential dismantling of several federal agencies that conduct important work for conservation is a concern for environmental groups.
The Office of Management and Budget Office’s move to suspend federal financial aid programs could be a warning sign for federal agencies that conduct environmental work that does not align with Trump’s agenda, Hartl said.
“Right now, the biggest threat to the environment is Trump’s across-the-board attempt to simply dismantle the federal government,” he said.
In addition, the presence of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and DOGE head Elon Musk’s buyout offer to millions of federal employees could severely disrupt the conservation work of several agencies, he added.
“If you don’t have people working at the EPA, it’s pretty hard to keep the air clean, the water clean,” Hartl said. “If you don’t have folks working at the National Park Service, how are you going to run your national parks? How are you going to protect endangered wildlife?”
In addition, the potential defunding of the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Act — both by enacted by Biden — poses serious setbacks for decarbonizing the country’s economy and moving toward a net-zero economy by 2050, environmental advocates said. Both are “the most important pieces of legislation ever in addressing global climate change,” Spalding said.
As part of his executive actions, Trump temporarily suspended the disbursement of funds from the IRA. Sankar said that has worried NGOs because the money is intended to advance the development of a clean energy economy as well as improve public health and support communities that bore the brunt of the impact of the fossil fuel economy.
“We are looking at and developing lawsuits aimed at ensuring that the money flows to the intended recipients,” he said.
Several lawsuits challenging the authority of DOGE are also being prepared, according to the groups.
Lessons learned from the 1st Trump administration
Many of Trump’s declarations are relatively symbolic or declare an intention but don’t necessarily constitute any actual action, environmental law experts said.
“Trump likes just holding up his signature, and that’s the main reason we we see him doing these flurry of executive orders,” Hartl said, adding that a lot of Trump’s actions were not effective during the first term.
Along with the executive orders comes rumor and speculation about what they actually can achieve, which makes it difficult for nonprofits to take immediate action, Sankar said.
Because of this, environmental groups may be more selective this time around about which executive actions they actually decide to take to court — especially since nonprofits don’t have endless resources to challenge every order, Spalding said.
“We’re always very choosy about our litigation to make sure that we have the best claims with the clients who are most clearly affected,” Sankar said.
This time around, environmental lawyers will be more savvy about responses, Spalding said.
“We’ll continue to focus on those priorities and make sure that we’re engaged every step of the way during the regulatory rollback process,” she said.
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(BOISE, Idaho) — The Idaho House has passed a resolution calling on the Supreme Court to reconsider its 2015 decision on same-sex marriage equality.
The court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision established the right to same-sex marriage under the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The resolution comes after Associate Justice Clarence Thomas’s expressed interest in revisiting the Obergefell decision in his concurring opinion on the Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned the federal right to abortion.
Thomas, who issued a dissenting opinion in 2015 against same-sex marriage, wrote in 2022, “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”
Lawrence v. Texas overturned a law criminalizing same-sex sexual conduct and Griswold v. Connecticut overturned state restrictions on the use of contraceptives.
The Fourteenth Amendment states: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The Respect for Marriage Law signed by former President Joe Biden in 2022 guarantees the federal recognition of same-sex and interracial marriages and acts as a limited remedy if the Supreme Court were to overrule the Obergefell precedent. The law does not enshrine a right to same-sex or interracial marriage nationwide, but instead requires all states to recognize these marriages if legally certified in the past or in places where they were legally performed.
Same-sex couples across the country have long had concerns about the fate of legalized gay and lesbian marriages.
In Rochester, New York, the city’s First Universalist Church asked themselves what they could do to affirm LGBTQ identities as a religious organization amid a rise in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. So, they organized a “Big Gay Wedding” to officiate the marriage ceremonies of queer couples en masse with the support of volunteer photographers, florists and others from the community.
“We wanted to be able to provide the service for our community, to be able to celebrate queer love and celebrate queer joy, to have some time for folks to get married who might not be able to otherwise afford a marriage in a congregation, and we want it to be like this big and joyous and beautiful celebration that really brings our community together,” the church’s Reverend Lane-Mairead Campbell previously told ABC News.
Events like Campbell’s “Big Gay Wedding” have begun to pop up around the country, helping residents to make precautionary changes.
“We still have the ability to do this regardless of what happens legally in the months and years ahead,” said Campbell. “We understand that queer and trans people have been here and have existed in times when oppression has been great and where we have had to hide, but we have never ceased to exist … In my denomination, we’ve been doing queer weddings since well before it was legal, and we will continue to do them well after.”
The Idaho House argues that “marriage as an institution has been recognized as the union of one man and one woman for more than two thousand years, and within common law, the basis of the United States’ Anglo-American legal tradition, for more than 800 years.”
The resolution states that the Supreme Court decision is “in complete contravention of their own state constitutions and the will of their voters, thus undermining the civil liberties of those states’ residents and voters.”
A 2024 Gallup poll found that 69% of Americans continue to believe that marriage between same-sex couples should be legal, and 64% say gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable.
Sarah Warbelow, the vice president for legal affairs for the Human Rights Campaign, criticized the Idaho effort.
“This cruel action by Idaho Republicans amounts to nothing more than shouting at the wind,” said Warbelow. “A majority of Americans of all political affiliations support marriage equality. Resolutions are not laws, and state legislatures lack the power to dismantle marriage equality. They cannot touch the guaranteed federal protections for same-sex couples under the Respect for Marriage Act.”
(CHARLOTTE, N.C.) — The man who in 2016 showed up to a popular pizza restaurant with a gun, claiming there were children being trafficked in the basement, died in an officer-involved shooting on Thursday outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, according to authorities.
Edgar Maddison Welch was armed when he tried to take action against “Pizzagate,” a conspiracy theory that spread during the election cycle of 2016.
It falsely claimed that the New York City Police Department had discovered a child sex trafficking ring in the basement of Comet Ping Pong Pizza in Washington, D.C. The conspiracy theory falsely claimed that the criminal ring was run by operatives from within the Democrat Party.
Welch fired three shots at the restaurant in an effort to “self investigate” the ring, which didn’t exist. He was sentenced to four years in prison.
An officer made a traffic stop on the vehicle after observing that it belonged to Welch, who had an outstanding warrant for his arrest, the statement said.
“A vehicle stop was made by the officer and during his interaction with the driver, the officer recognized the front seat passenger as the person with the outstanding warrant for arrest,” according to the KPD.
“The officer who initiated the traffic stop approached the passenger side of the vehicle and opened the front passenger’s door to arrest the individual,” according to Kannapolis Chief of Police Terry Spry.
During the traffic stop, it was discovered that Welch was armed. Officers called for him to drop his gun, but he “failed to comply,” according to the statement.
“When he opened the door, the front seat passenger pulled a handgun from his jacket and pointed it in the direction of the officer,” he said in the statement, referring to Welch by his position within the vehicle.
“That officer and a second officer who was standing at the rear passenger side of the Yukon gave commands for the passenger to drop the gun,” Spry said.
His statement continued: “After the passenger failed to comply with their repeated requests, both officers fired their duty weapon at the passenger, striking him.”
Welch died two days later at a nearby hospital, Spry said.
The incident is being investigated by an outside police agency to determine if there was any wrongdoing.
