CLIMATEWIRE | President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for NASA administrator is an experienced commercial astronaut who staunchly supports increased investment in human-crewed space exploration.
But Jared Isaacman’s views on climate change — a major NASA research priority — remain unclear.
The billionaire has described himself as a “moderate who occasionally weighs in on various issues” and who is “firmly anchored in the middle.” Some of his posts on the social media platform X suggest he may be supportive of climate action. He has also responded occasionally to other posts criticizing commercial space travel for environmental reasons, suggesting that humans can prioritize both space exploration and threats to humans on Earth.
“[W]e can attempt to unlock the mysteries of the universe and improve the climate here at home,” he said in an Aug. 30 post on X. “Those who see this as a binary choice, where resources must be allocated to one side or the other, are incredibly shortsighted.”
But Isaacman hasn’t publicly commented on his climate change views in interviews, to the knowledge of POLITICO’s E&E News. That leaves some researchers unsure about the future of NASA’s vast Earth science functions, given Trump’s denial of climate change and conservative plans to dismantle climate research initiatives across the federal agencies.
“It’s clear that he’s a big fan of human spaceflight and would go every day if he could. He understands science because he jam-packed as much science as he possibly could into his missions,” said former NASA employee Keith Cowing, who runs the watchdog site NASAWatch.com. “But as far as the other stuff like climate, I don’t know what his stance is on there.”
Isaacman did not respond to a direct message on X asking him to clarify his views on global warming, and the Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
Isaacman’s stance on climate change is also unlikely to be “the final arbiter of what NASA does,” Cowing said. “That will come from the bigger picture that the Trump administration will put forth, and you know they’ve expressed doubts about climate change being a priority.”
Trump has repeatedly questioned the science of human-caused climate change, has vowed to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement for a second time, and has doubled down on his promise to expand the development of fossil fuels. Climate scientists are also concerned that Trump may turn to Project 2025, a 900-page conservative policy plan spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, as a road map for federal research priorities.
Project 2025 calls for major overhauls of some federal science agencies, particularly those focused on climate change. The plan suggests that Trump should dismantle NOAA and calls for his administration to “reshape” the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which coordinates federal research on climate and the environment.
The blueprint doesn’t outline specific plans for NASA’s Earth science capabilities. But it asserts that the “Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.”
While Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 during his campaign, he recently tapped a number of the plan’s architects and supporters for his new administration. The announcements have rekindled concerns among climate scientists that the Project 2025 blueprint will heavily shape the incoming administration’s strategies.
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NASA conducts crucial climate science, such as monitoring Earth’s rising temperature. NASA Earth Observatory video by Lauren Dauphin, using GEOS data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC
Have you ever worked for a leader who made a mistake, a bad decision, or didn’t know the answer to something and, rather than admit it, they deflected it by blaming someone else, justifying it, or acting like it didn’t happen? This lack of accountability happens all too often in the workplace and it undermines trust, engagement, and communication. Leadership accountability is at the heart of any organization’s ability to achieve optimal performance and build a strong culture.
Workers today place a higher premium on their leaders walking the talk and being more accountable. At a time when we continue to experience accelerated change, increased complexities, growing pressures, and competing priorities, demonstrating accountability as a leader couldn’t be more critical. In fact, accountability was one of eight key factors driving positive work-related outcomes according to McKinsey & Company’s The State of Organizations 2023 report. The report also found that organizations with high leadership accountability tend to be healthier.
Without accountability, even the most talented and well-intentioned leaders fail. They fail to meet their performance goals, develop their teams, hire top talent, coach their employees, communicate clearly, and optimize performance. In short, they fail the business overall. This is a lot of failings, but when leaders are committed to achieving optimal performance by aligning their thinking, behaviors, and attitude with their words, they can avoid these kinds of failures.
I’m a big believer that leaders are the thermostat in any organization—meaning they have the power to set the right temperature and create the right environment for how things are done and how people are treated. Here are five behaviors that matter the most for leaders to demonstrate accountability and make a real impact on team performance, personal relationships, and the success of the organization.
Consistency matters
Being predictable is okay. The reality is employees want to be led. They want to work for a leader who provides them with guidance and helps them navigate the terrain of uncertainty and change. When people know what to expect from you and how you’ll respond, it enhances engagement, increases satisfaction, and improves decision making . . . all of which leads to greater productivity. I asked more than 50 people what it meant for a leader to be consistent. The most consistent responses were:
“They do what they say they’re going to do.”
“Who I see today is the same person I will see tomorrow.”
Sweeping restrictions on abortion across the U.S. have already had major ripple effects in reproductive health care. During president-elect Donald Trump’s next administration, restrictions on abortion are likely to ramp up, and birth control may be next. The double hit is causing some people to urgently consider long-acting reversible contraception such as intrauterine devices (IUDs), or permanent contraception such as sterilization.
“I’ve definitely noticed a change post-Dobbs,” says Rachel Flink-Bochacki, an ob-gyn who practices in New York State, referencing the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that eliminated the nationwide right to abortion. In particular, Flink-Bochacki noticed an increased level of interest in sterilization among her patients. “It was a common conversation among ob-gyns, where we were all sort of saying, ‘Does anyone feel like we’re getting way more consults for this?’”
The data suggest this perception had some truth to it, says Xiao Xu, a health economist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. In a recent report in JAMA, she and her colleagues found a statistically significant increase in sterilization procedures nationwide in the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs decision, which overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion. The study also found that states with abortion restrictions continued to show higher rates of sterilization six months later. Other research has shown increases in long-acting reversible contraception use and sterilization procedures since Dobbs. These measures can prevent pregnancy for years at a time or for the rest of someone’s life. They are also less prone to failure than a daily pill and other short-term and temporary contraception.
The results of the 2024 election appear to have further amplified this interest: reports from Planned Parenthood, which provides family planning and other reproductive health services, suggest sharp increases in appointments for vasectomies, IUDs, and birth control implants at centers nationwide. That’s not surprising. “If abortion is becoming more difficult to do, women may turn to contraception to prevent a need for abortion,” Xu says. “Any abortion-targeted policy can have an impact broader than abortion care itself.”
Long-Acting Contraception
Three methods of long-term birth control are currently available: an arm implant, several varieties of IUDs, and sterilization procedures. All are extremely effective, with fewer than one pregnancy per year for every 100 people using them. In a survey conducted between 2017 and 2019, when abortion remained legal nationwide, some 24 percent of women relied on either their own or a partner’s sterilization for birth control, while 10 percent relied on an IUD or arm implant. People interested in any of these approaches will first consult with their doctor before scheduling the IUD or implant insertion or surgery, all of which are usually outpatient procedures.
Sterilization involves procedures such as a vasectomy, which cuts or blocks the tubes that carry sperm out of the testes, or a bilateral salpingectomy, which removes the fallopian tubes that carry eggs to the uterus. Both procedures are conducted under anesthesia but are typically minimally invasive; they are also irreversible. Flink-Bochacki notes that the consultation process includes a doctor evaluating that someone has fully thought through the decision, although some practitioners may refuse to perform these procedures on people without children. In the wake of Dobbs, she notes, reproductive health advocates have created online lists of doctors who are willing to perform these procedures on people without children.
The arm implant and IUDs only work on people who can get pregnant, and they are long-lasting but not permanent. “They are phenomenal options, and they are reversible, so if you don’t like [them], you can obviously have [them] removed, and your fertility returns and there’s no long-term effects,” Flink-Bochacki says. (She notes that IUDs and implants are also the most popular form of contraception among ob-gyns themselves.)
“Brain rot” is the official Word of the Year for 2024, according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s publisher, Oxford University Press. Here’s how that august chronicler of English defines the phrase: brain rot is the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state,” resulting from the “overconsumption” of trivial material—especially stuff found on the Internet.
Brain rot is a symptom of mindless scrolling through nonsense memes and sludge content. It is the sensation of faculties warmly smothered by one too many AI-generated pictures; see the off-putting depictions, popular on Facebook, of Jesus fused with crustaceans.
Of course, the term doesn’t describe literal decomposition, which happens rapidly to most dead human brains (although, curiously, not all of them). “‘Brain rot’ speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time,” Oxford Languages president Casper Grathwohl said in a press release. “It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology.”
The expression’s usage frequency spiked 230 percent between 2023 and 2024, the dictionary-maker says, and it was especially common this year on TikTok. It beat out five other words du jour curated by Oxford’s linguists and submitted for public voting, in which 37,000 people participated. (Another shortlisted word was “slop,” which describes the low-quality images and text churned out by large language models.)
Notably, the expression is probably most used by the people who consume or produce most of the content blamed for brain rot. Gen Z and Gen Alpha have readily adopted the phrase, Grathwohl notes, with an attitude both tongue-in-cheek and self-aware. It’s a joke, but it may have some teeth: 2024 was also a year of pronounced concerns about mental health harms and Internet use. In June U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for warning labels on social media platforms.
To be sure, brain rot has been with us for years. Before the Internet, television was the great brain-rotter of its time. And Oxford has traced the expression to its first recorded use in Walden, the 1854 book by protohippie Henry David Thoreau. “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot,” Thoreau wrote, “will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot—which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” Our distractions may change, but our worries and complaints about them are ageless.
Working with family members in a business setting is a unique experience that brings both opportunities and challenges. Entrepreneurial families—those engaged in creating and managing businesses over generations—often rely on the strength of family ties to create long-lasting ventures. However, combining family and business dynamics introduces complexities that need to be managed in order to avoid heaven becoming hell.
Fortunately, by understanding the potentially difficult dynamics of working with relatives, you can navigate potential pitfalls and increase your family business’s odds of long-term success.
Here are the key advantages and disadvantages of working with relatives:
The pros of working with relatives
1. Strong trust and loyalty
One of the most significant advantages of working with family members is the inherent trust that comes from a lifelong relationship. Family members often feel a strong sense of loyalty to each other, which can lead to more dedication to the business and a willingness to go the extra mile. This trust can foster a safe and supportive work environment where individuals feel comfortable sharing ideas, taking risks, and stepping up when needed. With family members involved, there’s often less worry as interest is closely aligned with the business’s success. This trust helps families make difficult decisions together and endure challenges, which is especially important for businesses that aim to sustain success across generations.
2. Shared vision and values
Family businesses often benefit from a strong, shared vision that unites family members around a powerful sense of purpose. This shared vision drives both the business and the family forward. When family members share similar beliefs about what they want to achieve (e.g., commitment to quality, customer service, and/or ethical practices), decision-making becomes more cohesive and unified. This alignment of values can set a family business apart, creating a unique culture and identity that resonates with both customers and employees.
3. Long-term commitment
Family members often have a vested interest in the business’s success over the long term, as the company is not just a job but a representation of the family’s legacy. This long-term commitment means that family members are more likely to make sacrifices for the good of the business, such as reinvesting profits instead of taking dividends or working extra hours during challenging times. This perspective encourages sustainable growth rather than short-term gains, helping family businesses weather economic downturns and build a resilient foundation for future generations. The motivation to pass on a healthy business to the next generation can drive family members to make decisions that protect and preserve the business over time.
4. Flexibility and support
In family businesses, members are often willing to step into various roles or take on additional responsibilities to keep the company running smoothly. Family members may support each other through personal and professional challenges, providing a level of flexibility and understanding that might not be found in nonfamily businesses. This adaptability can be especially valuable in smaller or growing
businesses, where resources are limited, and everyone must wear multiple hats. Additionally, family businesses often provide a supportive work environment that encourages family members to develop their skills and talents, knowing that their success directly contributes to the family’s legacy.
The cons of working with relatives
1. Blurring of professional and personal boundaries
One of the biggest challenges in working with family members is maintaining a clear separation between personal and professional lives. Family dynamics—such as sibling rivalries, parental expectations, or longstanding disagreements—can easily reverberate into the workplace, complicating relationships and decision-making. And vice versa, disputes in the working environment can be brought home, rusting family relationships. Without clear boundaries, work-related issues can strain personal relationships, and personal conflicts can negatively affect business performance. This blurring of personal and professional lines can lead to stress, resentment, and even burnout if family members feel they can never truly leave work behind.
Earth’s surface is a turbulent place. Mountains rise, continents merge and split, and earthquakes shake the ground. All of these processes result from plate tectonics, the movement of enormous chunks of Earth’s crust.
This movement may be why life exists here. Earth is the only known planet with plate tectonics and the only known planet with life. Most scientists think that’s not a coincidence. By dragging huge chunks of crust into the mantle, Earth’s middle layer, plate tectonics pulls carbon from the planet’s surface and atmosphere, stabilizing the climate. It also pushes life-fostering minerals and molecules toward the surface. All of those factors add up to a place where life thrives from ocean abysses to towering peaks.
But researchers don’t know why or when plate tectonics started, making it hard to determine how essential this process was to the evolution and diversification of life. Some think plate movement fired up as little as 700 million years ago, when simple multicellular life already existed. Others believe only single-celled organisms reigned when Earth’s plates first cracked apart.
In fact, as new methods allow scientists to look ever-deeper into the past, some are now arguing that plate tectonics emerged very soon after Earth’s formation — perhaps predating life itself. If this hypothesis is true, it may suggest that even the most primitive life evolved on an active planet — and that means plate tectonics could be an essential ingredient in the search for alien life.
“The only way we can reliably see a long-term history is on our own planet,” said Jesse Reimink, a geoscientist who studies early Earth history at The Pennsylvania State University. “We really need to understand the life cycle of a planetary body before we can do a lot with the exoplanet data.”
Destruction of evidence
Only Earth has jigsaw-like tectonic plates that crash together and pull apart like bumper cars. The other rocky planets in the solar system have a single, rigid shell of crust — a geological arrangement that scientists call “stagnant lid” or “single lid” tectonics.
In plate tectonics, pancake-like chunks of brittle crust and upper mantle ride on the hotter, more mobile mantle below. New crust forms at midocean ridges, where gaps between separating plates create space for magma from the mantle to rise. In a geologic balancing act, dense oceanic crust is destroyed at subduction zones, where one plate slides under another. The oldest known bit of oceanic crust, located in the Mediterranean, dates to just 340 million years ago, making it far too young to be useful for pinpointing when plate tectonics arose.
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Plate tectonics may have played a larger role in the evolution of life on Earth than we previously thought. Andrzej Wojcicki/Science Photo Libary/Getty Images
Women have endured critiques over their appearance since their entry into public spaces. But since Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss in the United States presidential election, criticism of women and their bodies has become even more explicit and misogynistic. The goal is to tell women to “get back in the kitchen” at home and stay out of the public domain. Combatting this bias against women is more important than ever, as disapproval of women’s appearance and bodies still happens to women at work every day in subtle and overt ways.
When one professional worked at a public relations agency, the male chief executive officer told her to “help the receptionist lose some weight.” He considered the female receptionist’s “sloppy appearance” a bad first impression to people coming into the office. Another professional worked in an organization where there were plenty of women in director roles, but almost all were “thin, blonde, white, [and] usually tall as well.”
Yet being attractive may not be an advantage either. Colleagues told a scientist that she was “too cute to be taken seriously” and that she “must struggle to convey [her] intellect.” In another case, the female
supervisors of a social worker were concerned that she was too distracting to male clients. The social worker felt she was to blame. So, she dressed very conservatively and gained weight to “make [herself] less attractive.”
Lookism, also known as pretty privilege, explains that physically attractive people have advantages in the workplace. While research on this beauty advantage exists, it does not sufficiently address differences between women and men. Like so many workplace generalizations, what is true for men is not necessarily true for women. Not only do women perceived as unattractive encounter workplace disadvantages, but attractive women do as well. In fact, women are criticized for their appearance no matter how they look. The femaleness of their body stands out, considered abnormal in a traditionally male space.
Through our research of 913 women leaders, social media posts, articles, and our own experiences, we found myriad ways that women’s appearance at work is “never quite right.”
‘The impossible tightrope of looking good but not too good at work’
Women walk a fine line when it comes to clothing at work. A health services researcher noted that some women were criticized for dressing “too sexy” while others were deemed “too sloppy.” She called it “the impossible tightrope of looking good but not too good at work!” One woman working a $30,000 per year job was told she needed to purchase a new wardrobe because her clothing was not “professional enough.” She said, “With what money am I to purchase professional attire?”
Lending money to a friend or family member can put a strain on the relationship if you’re not careful.
Nearly a quarter of people who lent money or covered a group expense with the expectation of being paid back say doing so negatively impacted their relationship with the other party, Bankrate’s 2024 financial taboos survey found.
While a common rule of thumb is to simply not expect to receive the money back after loaning it out, there’s another way to navigate this dilemma without going bankrupt yourself: Set boundaries and clearly communicate them.
“Decide if you can afford to give them the money and if you can’t, you may not really be in a position to help,” Aja Evans, a board-certified therapist who specializes in financial therapy, tells CNBC Make It. “You cannot potentially sink your own ship to bail out someone else.”
That’s not to say having that conversation is easy, Evans says. Often, close friends or family members may be aware of the things you’re spending money on, like clothes or vacations, and make judgements about what you can or can’t afford.
But it’s important to remind yourself that no one knows your money better than you, Evans says. “Just because you have it in your account doesn’t mean you can give it,” she says. “Especially if you know other bills are coming.”
Here’s an example of a healthy boundary you can set when asked to loan money and how to navigate the potential guilt that may come if you say no.
Give what you can afford
Directly saying no when a friend or family member asks for money can be hard, especially if you’ve loaned them money in the past. That’s why it’s OK to start small, Evans says.
One way to do that is by lending what you can afford, even if it’s less than they’ve requested, she says. Say a friend asks to borrow $100, but you know giving them the full amount would significantly impact your budget. Try offering an amount that is more feasible for you, such as $20 or $30.
And while you don’t necessarily owe them an explanation for why you can’t give them the full amount they’ve requested, it can be helpful to honestly communicate the other financial obligations you’re managing, Evans says.
“That’s a healthy boundary because, while you may not be able to give all of what they want, you’re giving what you can without sinking your own ship,” she says.
It’s OK to feel guilty
It’s common to feel guilty after refusing to lend money to a friend or family member, even if you’re proud of yourself for setting the boundary, Evans says. To deal with the guilt, it can be helpful to write down your financial boundaries and the reasons you’re setting them.
No part of our body is as perishable as the brain. Within minutes of losing its supply of blood and oxygen, our delicate neurological machinery begins to suffer irreversible damage. The brain is our most energy-greedy organ, and in the hours after death, its enzymes typically devour it from within. As cellular membranes rupture, the brain liquifies. Within days, microbes may consume the remnants in the stinky process of putrefaction. In a few years, the skull becomes just an empty cavity.
In some cases, however, brains outlast all other soft tissues and remain intact for hundreds or thousands of years. Archaeologists have been mystified to discover naturally preserved brains in ancient graveyards, tombs, mass graves, and even shipwrecks. Scientists at the University of Oxford published a study earlier this year that revealed that such brains are more common than previously recognized. By surveying centuries of scientific literature, researchers counted more than 4,400 cases of preserved brains that were up to 12,000 years old.
“The brain just decays super quickly, and it’s really weird that we find it preserved,” says Alexandra Morton-Hayward, a molecular scientist at Oxford and lead author of the new study. “My overarching question is: Why on Earth is this possible? Why is it happening in the brain and no other organ?”
Such unusual preservation involves the “misfolding” of proteins—the cellular building blocks—and bears intriguing similarities to the pathologies that cause some neurodegenerative conditions.
As every biology student learns, proteins are formed by chains of amino acids strung together like beads on a necklace. Every protein has a unique sequence of amino acids—there are 20 common types in the human body—that determines how it folds into its proper three-dimensional structure. But disturbances in the cellular environment can make folding go awry.
The misfolding and clumping of brain proteins is the underlying cause of dozens of neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and the cattle illness bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also called mad cow disease. Now scientists are discovering that some misfolded proteins also can form clumps after death—and persist for hundreds or thousands of years.
Only in recent years have scientists begun to seriously investigate these bizarre cases. A big breakthrough occurred in 2008 when archaeologists discovered the 2,500-year-old skull of a man who had been hanged, decapitated, and dumped into an irrigation channel in Heslington, England. All other soft tissue had long since vanished, but investigators were stunned to find that the skull still contained a shrunken brain.
A team of neuroscientists at University College London analyzed the ancient brain with a chemical analysis technique known as liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry and identified nearly 800 preserved proteins—the most ever discovered in an archaeological specimen. They concluded the ancient brain was preserved by the aggregation of proteins.
When Protein Folding Goes Wrong
In living organisms, protein folding is very context-dependent, and disturbances in the cellular environment can make it to go astray.
A classic example is egg white. Normally, it is a transparent liquid, but when conditions change—as when an egg is fried or boiled—its proteins unravel, become entangled, and form clumps. “That’s an aggregate,” says Ulrich Hartl, a leading researcher of protein-folding diseases at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. “The same thing happens in your brain at a microscopic level.” Many diseases share a similar underlying mechanism: the protein abandons its healthy native state, unfurls, and becomes entangled in a jumbled mass with other misfolded proteins.
In diseases, the misfolded version becomes the protein’s most thermodynamically stable state, often making the aggregations irreversible. Hartl says he would not be surprised if a similar mechanism lay behind ancient brain preservation. “It’s fascinating that the brain can be preserved for such a long time after death,” he says. “The question of interest for me is: Does this reflect, in any way, what is going on during neurodegeneration?”
Enduring Brains
The discovery of the Heslington brain stimulated new research into brain preservation. The epicenter of this effort is the University of Oxford, and its lead investigator is Morton-Hayward, a former mortician turned molecular scientist. Now a Ph.D. candidate, she has gathered the world’s largest collection of ancient brains—more than 600 specimens up to 8,000 years old from locales such as the U.K., Belgium, Sweden, the U.S. and Peru—and she is analyzing how they were preserved. (The specimens were collected in accordance with Oxford’s research ethics guidelines.)
To understand why these brains haven’t decayed, Morton-Hayward has peered at ancient brain tissue with powerful microscopes. She has placed mouse brains in jars of water or sediment to measure how they decompose over time. She has employed mass spectrometry to identify the proteins and amino acids that persist in the ancient brains. She has identified more than 400 preserved proteins. (The most abundant of these is myelin basic protein, which helps form the insulating sheath on our neural wiring.) She has sliced up ancient brain tissues and taken the samples to the Diamond Light Source synchrotron (the U.K.’s national particle accelerator) to pummel them with electrons traveling at almost the speed of light to understand the metals, minerals and molecules involved in the preservation process.
Bodies can avoid decomposition via embalming, freezing, tanning, or dehydration, but Morton-Hayward focuses on cases where brains are the only soft tissues remaining. Typically, the preserved brains come from waterlogged, low-oxygen burial environments such as low-lying graveyards or, in the case of the Heslington brain, an irrigation ditch. Human brains are composed of about 80 percent water, and the rest is roughly divided between proteins and lipids (fatty, waxy or oily compounds that are insoluble in water). The Oxford researchers suspect that this unique chemistry makes neural tissue especially amenable to preservation.
Former President Donald Trump’s social media company outsourced jobs to workers in Mexico even as Trump publicly railed against outsourcing on the campaign trail and threatened heavy tariffs on companies that send jobs south of the border.
The firm’s use of workers in Mexico was confirmed by a spokesperson for Trump
Media, which operates the Truth Social platform. The workers were hired through another entity to code and perform other technical duties, according to a person with knowledge of Trump Media. The reliance on foreign labor was met with outrage among the company’s own staff, who accused its leadership of betraying their “America First” ideals, the person said.
The outsourcing to Mexico helped prompt a recent whistleblower letter from staff to Trump Media’s board that has been roiling the company.
That complaint, reported by ProPublica last month, calls for the board to fire CEO Devin Nunes, a former Republican congressman. The letter alleges he has “severely” mismanaged the company. It also asserts the company is hiring “America Last” — with Nunes imposing a directive to hire only foreign contractors at the expense of “American workers who are deeply committed to our mission.”
“This approach not only contradicts the America First principles we stand for but also raises concerns about the quality, dedication, and alignment of our workforce with our core values,” the complaint reads.
A Trump Media spokesperson said the company uses “two individual workers” in Mexico. “Presenting the fact that [Trump Media] works with precisely two specialist contractors in Mexico as some sort of sensational scandal is just the latest in a long line of defamatory conspiracy theories invented by the serial fabricators at ProPublica,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson declined to answer other questions about the company’s Mexican contractors, including how much they’ve been paid, how many have been used over time, and how their hiring squares with Trump’s promises to punish firms that send jobs outside of the U.S. The Trump campaign did not respond to questions.
For a company of its prominence, Trump Media has a tiny permanent staff, employing just a few dozen people as of the end of last year, only a portion of whom work on the Truth Social technology.
Trump Media’s hiring of Mexican coders also prompted frustration within the staff, the person with knowledge of the company said, because they were perceived by staff to not have the technical expertise to do the work.
On its homepage, Truth Social bills itself as “Proudly made in the United States of America. 🇺🇸”
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Trump’s social media company outsourced jobs to workers in Mexico even as the former president publicly railed against outsourcing on the campaign trail and threatened to levy heavy tariffs on businesses that send jobs south of the border.Credit: Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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James' World 2 