Julian Sanchez:
Hey folks, a relatively quick news roundup for you today here on WatchCats for Thursday, April 3rd.
Reports show that in March, layoffs in the United States hit the highest level since the coronavirus pandemic, according to report from the job placement firm Challenger, Gray, & Christmas.
And almost all of that is apparently DOGE. March saw 275,000 layoffs, of which nearly 80%, or 216,000 were accounted for by federal government layoffs linked to the government ah Department of Government Efficiency's attempt to reduce federal employment.
That's not great news under any circumstances, but certainly combined with markets in free fall following the announcement of a new draconian package of tariffs it's easy to see a kind of anti-synergy emerging between the combination of job losses and skittish, skittish markets that are unlikely to be doing a great deal of hiring in the near future.
On the DOGE chopping block, in addition to many other cultural and intellectual institutions that have been targeted in recent days, is the Wilson Center, an independent foreign policy think tank, first established in memory of Woodrow Wilson in the nineteen sixties. Following a visit from Doge staff, the head of the Wilson Center, former Republican Congressman Mark Green, stepped down, and about a third of that institute's staff have been said to have been placed on administrative leave.
So this is the latest instance—similar to what we already already seen with the U.S. Institute for Peace—of a traditionally independent, nonpartisan intellectual institution being radically shrunk and also placed more directly under executive branch control.
Additional programs on the chopping block, according to an article in Wired magazine, include the Manufacturing Extension Partnership operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology at the Department of Commerce.
The Manufacturing Extension Partnership has offices in all 50 states that provide, essentially, subsidized consulting services to manufacturing businesses. That is being effectively defunded. It remains to be seen whether it will be able to continue operating on a kind of market basis. So keep an eye on that.
And finally, via FedScoop, we learn that DOGE staff have gained access to the databases of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
This is a huge pool of cloud-based data that the agency operates that collects a substantial amount of personal information about people seeking asylum, people applying for green cards and for citizenship. And, of course, it retains a lot of information about naturalized citizens. So add that to the federal employment databases and Social Security databases, some of which have been paused by court order, but which certainly the DOGE appears to be ah determined to gain access to. Add to that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services databases as another pool of extremely sensitive personal information now under DOGE control.
Again, and something we've covered here before on the podcast, including in our interview with cybersecurity expert Tara Wheeler, there is a lot of concern among cybersecurity experts about the prospect of centralized access to such pools of sensitive personal data, not merely because of fears about how that data might be abused by the people authorized to access it, but because when access to sensitive data is centralized, the consequences of security breaches, if and when they occur, are much more dire. And certainly in recent years, we've seen several high-profile breaches of sensitive government databases, including most infamously one at the Office of Personnel Management.
That is it for today. We'll be back with more news soon. And stay tuned for the WatchCats podcast proper, where, again, soon we'll be speaking with Wired reporters McKenna Kelly and Vittoria Elliott.
See you soon.
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