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2025-12-28 05:22:58

Elon Musk took to his social media site on Friday to decry New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s pick to lead the city’s fire department, claiming that she couldn’t do the job. The commissioner-to-be, Lillian Bonsignore, is a 31-year FDNY veteran who led the department’s emergency medical services during the Covid-19 pandemic. She will be the second woman to hold the position and the first openly gay person to lead the department. 

That was enough for Musk to weigh in. “People will die because of this,” he wrote, adding, “Proven experience matters when lives are at stake.”

As Gothamist reported, before her retirement in 2022, Bonsignore was both the highest-ranking uniformed woman in FDNY history and the first woman to achieve a four-star rank. At the press conference announcing her appointment, Mamdani praised Bonsignore, saying that “her record speaks for itself,” before detailing her career in the city that spanned from before 9/11 through the worst of the pandemic. 

“I know the job,” Bonsignore said this week. “I know what the firefighters need, and I can translate that to this administration that is willing to listen. I know what EMS needs. I have been EMS for 30-plus years.”

Musk is the richest person on the planet and a rabid opponent of diversity, equity, and inclusion measures, or DEI. He appeared to be claiming that the new head of the FDNY was a diversity hire. He’s written: “Time for DEI to DIE,” “DEI has caused people to DIE,” “DEI is a Civil Rights Act violation,”  “DEI kills art,” “DEI puts the lives of your loved ones at risk,” and “DEI is just another word for racism,” amongst his other previous observations about these efforts.

This isn’t the first time Musk, who is not a resident of New York, has weighed in on Mamdani or his campaign. 

A day before the mayoral election in November, Musk endorsed Mamdani’s leading opponent in the race, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo had resigned in disgrace after the state’s attorney general reported that he had sexually harassed nearly a dozen women. (A later DOJ investigation put that number at 13.) In Musk’s endorsement post, he called the soon-to-be-mayor-elect “Mumdumi.”

Then, on the morning of Election Day, Musk shared a false claim that because Mamdani was listed under both the “Democratic” and “Working Families” party lines on the NYC ballot, the election was a “scam!” But in New York, candidates can appear more than once on a ballot if they are nominated by multiple political parties. Musk also pointed to the layout of the ballot as a problem, since Cuomo’s name appeared in a lower spot on the ballot than Mamdani’s. He failed to mention that this took place because the former governor lost in the Democratic primary and chose to run as an independent later in the election season. 

Despite his recent interest in the FDNY’s leadership, Musk’s work during his time with the federal government imperiled some of NYC’s firefighters. His DOGE team threatened cancer research funding for firefighters who responded to the World Trade Center attacks and were exposed to toxins.

Back in February, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, tried to cancel a $257,000 contract for 9/11-related cancer research. At the time, according to CBS News, “FDNY confirmed researchers working on the career firefighter health study received notice of the CDC contract termination.” Days later, after public backlash, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention restored the contract.  

As he spoke about the FDNY during his commissioner announcement, Mamdani called the first responders, “the heroes of our five boroughs,” who “save lives at a moment’s notice.”

“They deserve a leader who cares about their work,” he continued, referring to Bonsignore, adding, “because she did it herself.”

2025-12-28 02:09:17

The president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is threatening legal action against a jazz musician who cancelled his Christmas Eve performance after the institution’s board of trustees, handpicked by President Donald Trump, voted last week to change the name of the performing arts institution.

The letter from Richard Grenell, the Kennedy Center president, to Chuck Redd, a drum and vibraphone player, says that they will seek $1 million in damages for “this political stunt.”

“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment—explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure,” the letter, shared to the Associated Press, reads, “is classic intolerance.” And, Grenell continues, “Your action surrenders to the sad bullying tactics employed by certain elements on the left, who have sought to intimidate artists into boycotting performances.” 

The move from Grenell, who was appointed by Trump earlier this year, comes after the center’s board of trustees voted to rename the institution the Trump-Kennedy Center. It took less than 24 hours from the board’s meeting in Palm Beach to workers showing up at the building to affix “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND” above “THE JOHN F. KENNEDY MEMORIAL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS.” 

The institution’s website now shows: “The Trump Kennedy Center.” Members of the Kennedy family have denounced the action.

As The New York Times reported, “Even though Mr. Trump had already been calling it that for months in trollish posts online, he acted shocked that his handpicked board had thought to do this for him.” President Trump told reporters that he was “honored” and “surprised” by the vote. 

Redd has hosted the annual “Jazz Jams” Christmas Eve concert since 2006. He told AP that once he saw the name change earlier this month, he “chose to cancel our concert.” According to the AP, Redd often included a student musician in the show, which, he said, is “one of the many reasons that it was very sad to have had to cancel.”

Grenell also took personal jabs at Redd in the letter, claiming that his show wasn’t popular. “The contrast between the public’s lack of interest in your show with the success we are experiencing under our new chairman is drastic,” Grenell wrote. Trump’s board elected him as chairman in February. “The most avant-garde and well-regarded performers in your genre will still perform regularly,” he added, “and unlike you, they’ll do it to sold–out crowds regardless of their political leanings.”

The center’s website still describes Redd as “an accomplished performer.”

Despite Grenell’s insistence that the Kennedy Center has experienced “drastic” success under new management, The Washington Post reports that even before the renaming, ticket sales had tanked. “Nearly nine months after Trump became chair of the center and more than a month into its main season,” the Post noted, “ticket sales for the Kennedy Center’s three largest performance venues are the worst they’ve been in years, according to a Washington Post analysis of ticketing data from dozens of recent shows as well as past seasons. Tens of thousands of seats have been left empty.”

Days after the renaming, Representative Joyce Beatty, a Democrat of Ohio, filed a lawsuit against President Trump and center representatives. The suit holds that the move was illegal because an act of Congress is required to rename the building. Representative Beatty is an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board and called into the board meeting where the change was voted on. 

“For the record. This was not unanimous,” she wrote on X. “I was muted on the call and not allowed to speak or voice my opposition to this move. Also, for the record, this was not on the agenda. This was not consensus. This is censorship.”

2025-12-27 16:01:00

The first pilot episode of Reveal exposed how the Department of Veterans Affairs was overprescribing opioids to veterans and contributing to an overdose crisis. Journalist Aaron Glantz explained how he received—surprisingly quickly—a decade’s worth of opioid prescription data from the federal government. 

“Sometimes, you have to sue to get the records,” he said. “I have to think that there were some people over there in DC who were as concerned as we were about this.”

After that first show was made, host Al Letson didn’t know what to expect. “We weren’t sure if any public radio stations would even air it,” he said. 

Reveal’s VA investigation sparked outrage. Congress held hearings during a government lockdown, and there’s been a sea change in the way veterans are prescribed painkillers. And today, the show is on more than 500 stations. 

This week on Reveal, we celebrate our 10-year anniversary with a look back at some of our favorite stories, from investigations into water shortages in drought-prone California to labor abuses in the Dominican Republic. And we interview the journalists behind the reporting to explain what happened after the stories aired.  

This is a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in March 2025.

2025-12-27 01:09:13

As the clock struck midnight on Christmas morning at one Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, at least one someone was stirring. 

Starting in the early hours of December 25 and ending in the evening, President Donald Trump posted over 100 times on Truth Social. 

Hours before Trump sat alongside first lady Melania Trump to answer the calls of children dialing into the North American Aerospace Defense Command, during which he told kids from Oklahoma that “we’re not infiltrating into our country a bad Santa,” the president shared posts attacking Rep. Nancy Pelosi, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and former President Joe Biden, amongst several others. 

At 12:01, Trump began the spree by sharing an over-eight-minute video by someone explaining “The DEMOCRAT FRAUD PYRAMID.” 

Throughout the day, concluding around 7 o’clock, the president repeated many times that the 2020 election was stolen. He also shared a post that praised White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s handling of the “fake news,” another of someone who called Democrats a “criminal organization,” and one where Trump said, of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), “Throw her out of the U.S., Now!”

Many times, Trump would post a photo or video to his platform and then immediately after post a screenshot of how a supporter responded to his post. For example, around 1 in the morning, Trump shared a video of White House border czar Tom Homan at a press conference, discussing the administration’s mass deportation campaign. Less than one minute later, there’s another Trump post of a user called “RWB_American” on X quoting the video and writing about “the success ICE is having at nabbing illegals that need to be departed.” 

The official Christmas presidential message from the White House, though, had a different tone. 

“The First Lady and I send our warmest wishes to all Americans as we share in the joy of Christmas Day and celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” it began. The message contained religious messages about “the gift of God’s only begotten Son” and Trump’s vow to always remain one Nation under God. (There was a lot of religious messaging across the administration on the 25th, spurring critiques from those saying the various posts skirted the US’s separation of church and state.)

President Trump ended his posting spree with a Merry Christmas message to constituents. It read, in part, “Merry Christmas to all, including the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein, gave him bundles of money, went to his Island, attended his parties, and thought he was the greatest guy on earth, only to “drop him like a dog” when things got too HOT.” 

Then, as a somewhat ominous sign off, Trump wrote: “Enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas!”

2025-12-26 20:30:00

Have you ever reached out to a customer-service helpline and fallen into a vortex of bad phone-tree options, all AI-generated, none of which have anything to do with your problem? There’s no capable human to help—even after you beg for a “representative!” across the automated line.

That’s how Jennifer M., a lifelong resident of Astoria, Queens, felt when her 66-year-old mother-in-law was widowed and fell behind on paying her rent in 2023. Debilitated by severe arthritis and addled by grief, an eviction loomed in less than two weeks. Surely, Jennifer thought, her mother-in-law qualified for some government assistance. But figuring out what kind and from which agencies took her through the frustrating and often-futile process of trying to navigate New York’s byzantine bureaucracy.

“Everyone we would call, they would give us the runaround and send us right back where we started,” she says, asking not to share her last name to protect her mother-in-law’s privacy.

That is, until she requested help from the office of then-New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, who is now mayor-elect of New York City, and reached his constituent services director, Mariela Ortiz.

Ortiz has served in this role for the last three of Mamdani’s five years in the state legislature and has become well-versed in helping the people of New York’s District 36 battle slumlords and unresponsive government agencies. To prove a housing complex was illegally turning off the heat in the middle of the night, for instance, Ortiz once secured a building inspector to do a surprise inspection at midnight. (She hasn’t received complaints about heating there since). After a year of chronic outages, she pushed the city to restore gas to 20 residential customers and a beloved Mexican restaurant. She has even personally accompanied worried constituents to their traffic court and social security hearings.

“Our agencies are here to provide services,” Ortiz says of her job, which entails helping dozens of people per week. “This is what they’re supposed to be doing.”

But in treating constituent problems as urgent and solvable, Ortiz actually provided an answer to a strangely radical hypothetical question: What if every day government services actually worked?

Right now, most New Yorkers don’t think that they do. In fact, only 27 percent of residents rate government services as excellent or good, according to a 2025 report from the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC); in 2017, 44 percent gave satisfactory scores. During outgoing Mayor Eric Adams’s tenure, for example, most city buses received “failing grades” on metrics such as arrival and wait times. Bad landlords cost city taxpayers an estimated $300 million per year in incurred expenses, such as emergency shelter and legal services. Roughly 35 percent of applications for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Food Stamps) took longer than 30 days to process.

“This is a wake-up call that things are not where they need to be in New York,” CBC President Andrew Rein told local news site amNY. “New Yorkers are telling their leadership to focus on these priorities.”

Members of Mamdani’s incoming team—which Ortiz expects to join in some capacity—promise that they will. While the administration’s goals include free city buses, rent freezes, and city-run grocery stores, they also want clean and safe public transit that runs on schedule, and the imposition of immediate consequences for landlords, businesses, and agencies that fail to abide by code.

“There is often low trust in government because our processes are just too hard to navigate,” Elle Bisgaard-Church, Mamdani’s chief of staff in the assembly, and soon in his mayoral office, tells Mother Jones. “It’s really important to us that there are fewer barriers for New Yorkers to get what they need from the government, which is supposed to serve them.”

A prerequisite for addressing constituent problems, however, is knowing what they are. On a recent Sunday, leading up to his January inauguration, Mamdani wanted to find out, so he brought a pen and notepad to a series of 3-minute sit-downs with over 100 New Yorkers.

During his 12-hour “The Mayor is Listening” event at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens on December 14, New Yorkers vented about the kinds of grievances that come across Ortiz’s desk every day: difficulty communicating with New York agencies; road construction work during rush hour traffic; apartments without sufficient heat or hot water in the winter; illegal price gouging in rent-controlled buildings.

I reached out to Mamdani’s incoming deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, who has served in many high-ranking roles across New York City and state government—including as deputy mayor once before under Bill de Blasio—to learn about what the team took away from these brief meetings. There was genuine excitement about the campaign platform, he said, but also earnest demands concerning basic needs.

New York City is “the most expansive major local government in the country,” Fuleihan says. “So the school districts, the water and sewer, streets, traditional city services that we’re going to deliver—excellence has to be achieved [because] New Yorkers will feel that on a day-to-day basis.”

Even with his long experience, Fuleihan, who is 74, says he’s learning a new approach to governance from Mamdani. “He has made clear to us that we’re all going to be part of the effort of listening to New Yorkers,” he says. “That’s not something that somebody in my role would traditionally do, right? They would be in City Hall.”

As an assemblyman, Mamdani took cues from the community when working on advocacy and legislation. When roughly a quarter of constituent complaints pertained to the high Con Edison electric and gas rates, he joined as a party in the New York State Public Service Commission case against the utility company, which helped secure lower rate hikes and more transparency.

According to Ortiz, Mamdani also inserted himself into email chains and joined virtual meetings to push along individual constituent issues. A perk of her boss’s recent mayoral win, Ortiz says, is that agencies seem to be even more responsive to her requests.

Jennifer M’s family crisis was quickly resolved. Given the pressing eviction deadline, Mamdani’s office escalated her mother-in-law’s case with a government housing agency and helped her to apply for a grant that covered her rent so that she was able to remain in her home. As a result of a thorough case assessment, Ortiz also discovered the woman was eligible for a rent-increase exemption for senior citizens and approximately $350 more in monthly Social Security benefits—money the widow has been able to use to stay current on her rent.

After he is sworn in on January 1, the struggle for Mamdani and his team will be expanding this approach for a constituency that will have increased seventyfold, from 122,000 to 8.5 million. He’s made his loftier ambitions clear. But, even before those big plans can be realized, he is determined to expand his previous strategies to improve the efficiency of existing government services.

In that work, Mamdani’s team may discover what so many major corporations seem to forget: Even without bells and whistles, customer service that simply does what it is supposed to do can go a long way to ensure brand loyalty. The same is likely true for voters.

When I asked Jennifer M. which mayoral candidate received her vote in November, she didn’t miss a beat: “Who do you think?”

2025-12-26 20:30:00

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Pete Hegseth, who has taken to calling himself the Secretary of War, says the Defense Department “does not do climate change crap.” Just last week, he asserted that the agency  “will not be distracted” by climate change or “woke moralizing.”

But a new report suggests that the Pentagon is engaging with the issue in one serious way: As it stockpiles dozens of critical minerals, it is threatening the energy transition by hoarding resources that could be used to decarbonize transportation, energy production, and other sectors.

President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocated $7.5 billion to bolster the Pentagon’s reserves of critical minerals like cobalt, lithium, and graphite that are held in six depots nationwide, an effort supervised by the Defense Logistics Agency. Such materials are used in everything from jet engines to weapons systems and often are mined or processed in China or other nations. The materials in the stockpile are only accessible during times of declared war, or by order of the Undersecretary of War, a Defense Logistics Agency spokesperson said.

The report on potential peaceful uses for those materials was released by the Transition Security Project, which analyzes the economic, climate, and geopolitical threats posed by the US and British military. Lorah Steichen, a strategist who prepared the document, said America is essentially facing a choice between missiles and buses. The Pentagon’s planned cobalt and graphite stockpiles (7,500 metric tons and 50,000 metric tons, respectively) could electrify 102,896 buses — dwarfing the 6,000 or so currently operating in the US. Or they could be used to produce 80.2 gigawatt-hours of battery capacity, which is more than twice the energy storage the country has now. 

The International Energy Agency also has said such minerals could be used for peaceful ends, like building batteries, wind turbines, and other technologies underpinning the green transition. But designating a mineral as “critical” allows the government to fast-track mining and procurement for military ends. “The term ‘critical minerals’ originates out of military stockpiling—the criticality of a mineral is linked, in part, to its significance to national security,” Steichen said. 

The last time the Pentagon hoarded nonfuel materials was during the Cold War, when the government sought to create storehouses of industrial raw materials (like metals and agricultural supplies) and limit dependency on other nations. By the late 1990s, the United States began to see other countries—particularly those in the Caribbean—as generally reliable suppliers, and by 2003, the stockpile was reduced to nearly nothing. During Joe Biden’s presidency, there was some movement toward reviving the stockpile specifically to fight climate change. (That plan, according to a DLA spokesperson, never came to fruition.) This year, however, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill allocated $2 billion for expansion of the hoard, and $5.5 billion toward the supply chain infrastructure needed to secure those minerals.

Even some military and governmental experts have agreed that expanding the government’s stash is concerning. A Department of Defense report from 2021, for example, said that if the supply chain for rare earth elements—a subset of critical minerals—is disrupted, “the civilian economy would bear the brunt of harm.” 

“The point here is to push back against some of the bellicose associations of critical minerals and the different assumptions that go into that,” Steichen said. “What are the materials that are actually necessary for the energy transition, compared to this other definition of criticality?”

Militaries aren’t required to report their greenhouse-gas emissions—and the US military, in particular, is the single largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases in the world and accounts for about 80 percent of the US government’s overall emissions. They also generally aren’t required to report the quantities of minerals they’re procuring and using. 

Julie Klinger, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin who studies extraction and resource frontiers, says these things deserve more scrutiny. “Particularly as we’re moving into a time where there is much more overt taxpayer-funded support of critical mineral mining and processing projects, the taxpayer does need to have quite a bit more information,” she said. 

The Defense Logistics Agency made an unusual admission when it released exactly how much cobalt and graphite it is working to procure. Often, Steichen said, such information isn’t easily available to the public. Some numbers are known—for example, a single F-35 warplane reportedly requires about 920 pounds of rare earth minerals for its engines and weapons-tracking systems. But across the Pentagon’s vast web of suppliers, it’s not clear where all the minerals are going.

“It creates an accountability gap and obscures a clear understanding of military resource use,” Steichen said. “We know this is the amount they’re seeking to stockpile—but we don’t know the specific volume of those materials going into different military sectors, or to different military contractors.” 

The Pentagon has been investing in mines that produce some of these minerals in places like Alaska, Idaho, and Saudi Arabia. Right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Rand have spent the past five years urging the government to stockpile these materials to ease its reliance on adversaries like China, which currently dominates the global critical minerals market. 

Researchers like Klinger question the federal decision to prioritize military stockpiling—in part because most critical minerals, like graphite, have the potential to be recycled when they’re used in batteries, but are lost when made into, say, bombs. One thing sustaining demand for fossil fuels is the fact that they are consumed through use, Klinger said. Critical minerals like lithium and cobalt, on the other hand, can, when used for civilian purposes, be reclaimed or recycled. 

“The one application of critical minerals that destroys them through use is literally blowing them up,” she said. “Are these critical minerals going into energy technologies, which then have a whole host of societal benefits, or are they simply being dug out of the ground in one place to be blown up in another place?”