Without warning or consultation, Congress just received an $810 million package of pocket rescissions from the Administration.  This is the most recent attempt by this Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to undermine Congress’s Constitutional power of the purse.    This move shows that OMB intentionally withheld these funds for months to execute this unlawful cancellation of appropriations that were approved on a bipartisan basis and signed into law.     Not only is the delay itself an impoundment that was not reported to Congress, but also it is a usurpation of Congress’s appropriations powers.  OMB is an agency of the executive branch.  It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding.   The independent Government Accountability Office has concluded that pocket rescissions are unlawful and not permitted by the Impoundment Control Act. Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law.   I will work with my colleagues to address these illegal actions.

Japanese scientists removed the extra chromosome that causes Down syndrome for the first time using CRISPR.

Flock Safety has issued a legal demand seeking the removal of a public map showing the locations of approximately 300,000 of its surveillance devices across the United States.

Chamath on Obama’s AI Warning: Follow the Money President Obama last week: “If we are thinking about AI just in terms of how do we cure cancer or get better energy, you can do that without having agentic AI. That's a misalignment between what our society needs and the commercial imperatives that these companies are facing.” @Chamath: “This is a very important moment for a very simple reason, which is we, as in the world, are about to endow three, four, five, six companies with about $10T of wealth. And what Obama knows very well is that most of those companies are overwhelmingly left-leaning. And what he also knows is that there is a huge portion of that money that will then get put into philanthropic and charitable causes that then he, and the people around him, will be beneficiaries of. That is the truth. We already know this because we know that some of these frontier corporations actually ask you to stand up DAFs and have a portion of your stock that you're willing to pledge. So this money is going to go to things other than consumption or savings. And so it's going to go into PACs, it's going to go into political movements, and (Democrats) stand to disproportionately benefit. So this has nothing to do with prosperity. This is a very simple political calculus. If you freeze frame the economy the way it is today, a handful of organizations that will disproportionately be able to affect the Democrats will win. They will capture the lion's share of the economic gains, and then they will help the Democrats win power. That's all this is.”

Flock Safety has issued a legal demand seeking the removal of a public map showing the locations of approximately 300,000 of its surveillance devices across the United States.