Republicans lawmakers are renewing efforts to gut federal funding to NPR and PBS amid the Trump administration’s upheaval of the federal bureaucracy.

Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., is leading a bill in the House of Representatives that would halt taxpayer dollars from going to either media broadcaster and reroute existing federal funds to reducing the national debt, according to legislative text previewed by Fox News Digital.

‘As a former newspaper owner and publisher, I understand the vital role of balanced, non-partisan media. Unfortunately, these taxpayer-funded outlets have chosen advocacy over accuracy, using public dollars to promote a political agenda rather than report the facts,’ Tenney told Fox News Digital.

The legislation’s Senate counterpart is being led by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who told Fox News Digital, ‘Americans have hundreds of sources of news and commentary, and they don’t need politically biased, taxpayer-funded media choosing what they should see and hear. PBS and NPR are free to compete in the marketplace of ideas using donations, but their public subsidy should end.’

Republicans have long targeted NPR and PBS, accusing both outlets of sharing a liberal bias while receiving government funding.

Less than 1% of NPR’s funding comes directly from the federal government, though other funding comes indirectly from grants and dollars allocated to local member stations who then pay fees back to NPR. More than a third of its funding comes from corporate sponsorships.

PBS also gets a mix of federal funds through other avenues.

However, the GOP’s demands to end federal allocations to both outlets now come at a time when the executive branch is fervently searching for places to block government spending that does not align with the Trump administration’s agenda.

Elon Musk, who is leading Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, has been critical of NPR in the past.

‘Defund NPR. It should survive on its own,’ Musk wrote on his X platform earlier this month.

Soon after he acquired X, Musk briefly hit NPR with a ‘State-Affiliated’ media label, which is normally reserved for the media arm of authoritarian governments.

Tenney’s bill is one of multiple efforts targeting NPR and PBS during this Congress. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who chairs the DOGE subcommittee under the House Oversight Committee, said she wants the heads of each organization to come testify before her new panel.

A federal appeals court dismissed the appeal charges brought against President Donald Trump aides Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira by former Special Counsel Jack Smith in his classified documents case, Fox News Digital has learned. 

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the case against Nauta and De Oliveira on Tuesday morning, two weeks after the Justice Department moved to drop the charges.

Nauta, Trump’s valet, and De Oliveira, the property manager of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, had pleaded not guilty to federal charges alleging they conspired to obstruct the FBI investigation into classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. 

The Justice Department had filed a motion in January to drop all criminal proceedings against Nauta and De Oliveira, putting an end to Smith’s probe more than two years after it began.

Former Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith, a former Justice Department official, as special counsel in November 2022. 

Smith, a former assistant U.S. attorney and chief to the DOJ’s public integrity section, led the investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents after leaving the White House and whether the former president obstructed the federal government’s investigation into the matter. 

Smith also was tasked with overseeing the investigation into whether Trump or other officials and entities interfered with the peaceful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election, including the certification of the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6, 2021. 

Smith charged Trump in both cases, but Trump pleaded not guilty.

The classified records case was dismissed in July 2024 by U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen Cannon, who ruled that Smith was unlawfully appointed as special counsel. 

Smith charged Trump in the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., in his 2020 election case, but after Trump was elected president, Smith sought to dismiss the case. Judge Tanya Chutkan granted that request. 

Both cases were dismissed. 

The Justice Department, in January, fired more than a dozen key officials who worked on Smith’s team prosecuting the president, after then-acting Attorney General James McHenry said they could not be trusted in ‘faithfully implementing the president’s agenda.’ 

Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove has also directed acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll to identify agents involved in Jan. 6 prosecutions for internal review. 

President Donald Trump’s nominees to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are part of a group of scientists who just launched a new research journal focused on spurring scientific discourse and combating ‘gatekeeping’ in the medical research community. 

The journal, titled the Journal of the Academy of Public Health (JAPH), includes an editorial board consisting of several scientists who complained of facing censorship during the COVID-19 pandemic.

JAPH’s co-founders include Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard Medical School professor who is a founding fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University who is also Trump’s nominee to be the next NIH director. Kulldorff and Bhattacharya became known during the pandemic for authoring The Great Barrington Declaration, which sought to challenge the broader medical community’s prevailing notions about COVID-19 mitigation strategies, arguing that – in the long run – the lockdowns that people were facing would do more harm than good.

Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon and public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, who is Trump’s nominee to be the next director of the FDA, is on the journal’s editorial board as well.  

JAPH is adopting a novel approach by publishing peer reviews of prominent studies from other journals that do not make their peer reviews publicly available. The effort is aimed at spurring scientific discourse, Kulldorff said in a paper outlining the purposes of the journal’s creation.

The journal will also seek to promote ‘open access’ by making all of its work available to everyone in the public without a paywall, he said, and the journal’s editorial leadership will allow all scientists within its network to ‘freely publish all their research results in a timely and efficient manner,’ to prevent any potential ‘gatekeeping.’

‘Scientific journals have had enormous positive impact on the development of science, but in some ways, they are now hampering rather than enhancing open scientific discourse,’ Kulldorff said. ‘After reviewing the history and current problems with journals, a new academic publishing model is proposed – it embraces open access and open rigorous peer review, it rewards reviewers for their important work with honoraria and public acknowledgment and it allows scientists to publish their research in a timely and efficient manner without wasting valuable scientist time and resources.’

Kulldorff, Bhattacharya, Makary and others on the new journal’s leadership team have complained that their views about the COVID-19 pandemic were censored. These were views that were often contrary to the prevailing ideas put forth by the broader medical community at the time, which related to topics such as vaccine efficacy, natural immunity, lockdowns and more.

‘Big tech censored the [sic] all kinds of science on natural immunity,’ Makary said in testimony to Congress following the pandemic. During his testimony, Makary also shared how one of his own studies at Johns Hopkins during the pandemic that promoted the effectiveness of natural immunity, which one scientific journal listed as its third most discussed study in 2022, ‘was censored.’

‘Because of my views on COVID-19 restrictions, I have been specifically targeted for censorship by federal government officials,’ Bhattacharya added in his own testimony to Congress the same year.

Kulldorff, who has also complained about censorship of his views on COVID-19, argued he was asked to leave his medical professorship at Harvard that he held since 2003, for ‘clinging to the truth’ in his opposition to COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

‘The JAPH will ensure quality through open peer-review, but will not gatekeep new and important ideas for the sake of established orthodoxies,’ Andrew Noymer, JAPH’s incoming editor-in-chief told Fox News Digital. 

‘To pick one example, in my own sub-field of infectious disease epidemiology, we have in the past few years seen too little published scholarship on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. Academic publishing as it exists today is too often concerned with preservation of what we think we know, too often to the detriment of new ideas.’

Bhattacharya and Makary did not wish to comment on this article.

PARKERSBURG, W.V – This darling little town of 30,000 holds an astounding $36 trillion dollars of debt, but it’s not the people’s fault. Allow me to explain.  

Back in 1957, the Bureau of the National Debt was placed in this remote Appalachian city in case of national emergency, which presumably meant nuclear war. So, while New York, Chicago ,and DC were mushroom clouded, the federal government could continue banking. 

This is why, on Tuesday morning, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will arrive in this pleasant hamlet to gain access to more of the comings and goings of America’s money.

The actual thing that exists here in Parkersburg is called the Central Accounting Reporting System (CARS). Some locals told me is resides in the basement of an old building in town. It’s all a little vague and spooky. 

What Musk and his team want is access to the real numbers, the payouts on our debt, our collections, what money is going where. This is where the answers reside. Every single day, the thousand or so federal employees in Parkersburg track and report on that debt.

On Monday evening at the Hotel Blennerhassett, built in 1889 and still an imposing and elegant centerpiece of the area, the impending visit from DOGE was already the talk of the town.  

‘This is a huge part of this city’s economy,’ one local retired attorney told me, adding, ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen to it.’ 

Local Democratic officials have been raising similar alarm bells, as well. Jeff Fox, the Wood County Democratic Party Chair said, ‘Our community relies heavily on the employment provided by the U.S. Treasury here in Parkersburg. The prospect of DOGE’s intervention raises serious questions about job security for our residents.’ 

Fair enough, except that all Musk’s DOGE team is seeking is access to data. There is nothing to suggest that the plan here is to fire anyone, except maybe for Musk’s sometimes overzealous rhetoric. 

And honestly, it is that trolling rhetoric that seems to be leading to the confusion. 

Musk and his team have taken to using a signature scene of the Gen X classic Office Space to explain DOGE. It is the Bobs, brought in to fire people, interrogate them as to ‘what they actually do here.’

But the point of those scenes was not that it was vital that Initech become more efficient, as the tech bros would have it. It was that Peter, the protagonist, wanted more than efficiency for his life. That is precisely why he confused them. 

On the ground in Parkersburg, I cannot provide you with a black and white story of good and evil, of graft and honesty. It’s more complicated than that. It always is. 

There is no apparent reason to think that Musk’s minions are rolling up to the Bureau of Fiscal Service, right across the street from the hotel, with a briefcase full of pink slips. What I saw today was a full parking lot of federal employees’ nice cars outside the building. These are people showing up.

Instead, what Musk really wants is a look under the hood of federal debt, and Parkersburg is absolutely its service station. There may be legitimate concerns about sensitive information contained within, but if President Trump has tasked Musk to suss it out, then he’s allowed to do that. 

I drove across the mountains to Parkersburg in my spunky red Mitsubishi Lancer because it’s the kind of place I like to report on. This DOGE intervention was icing on the cake. 

I don’t know what, if anything, local reaction will be to Musk’s DOGE invasion of Parkersburg Tuesday, but I’m here so I can find out.

Our federal government is probably the biggest and most important thing that has ever existed in the world. It won global wars hot and cold, it landed on the Moon, its glory knows no bounds. 

But all of that was funded in Parkersburg, West ‘By God’ Virginia, and this week, Donald Trump and Elon Musk will be going through the receipts. 

Nobody likes an audit, but maybe it’s time.

Rep. John Larson, D-Ct., appeared to freeze mid-remarks on the House floor on Monday. In the middle of impassioned remarks aimed against President Donald Trump and his team, including Elon Musk, Larson took a long pause and when he resumed speaking his speed was noticeably slower. The lawmaker was also slurring his words.

Following the incident, Larson’s D.C. office put out a statement expressing the congressman’s gratitude to those who reached out and clarifying a possible reason for the lawmaker’s long pause.

‘Congressman Larson appreciates the well wishes from everyone who has reached out. This afternoon, he had what was likely an adverse reaction to a new medication and is having tests administered by the House Attending Physician out of an abundance of caution,’ Larson’s office wrote in a statement.

 ‘He later participated in multiple meetings in his office and was alert and engaged. The Congressman remains in touch with his staff and in good spirits.’

The 76-year-old lawmaker’s office, however, did not provide details on what the medication was or why the congressman was purportedly taking it. Larson also reportedly skipped two House votes held on Monday night, according to Axios.

American voters have grown increasingly concerned over lawmakers’ ages. The issue of age in politics is not new, as former President Ronald Regan combated questions about his age when running for re-election in 1984. Reagan famously joked about the issue in a debate against former Vice President Walter Mondale.

‘I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience,’ Reagan joked during the debate, eliciting laughs from the audience and Mondale.

However, the 2024 election brought age back into the spotlight as many questioned then-President Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities. When the president dropped out of the race in July 2024, some Democrats tried to flip the age question onto Trump, but this mostly fell flat.

Additionally, just days before Larson’s incident, Senator Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who will turn 83 later this month, left the Capitol in a wheelchair as a precautionary issue after falling twice.

‘Senator McConnell is fine. The lingering effects of polio in his left leg will not disrupt his regular schedule of work,’ a spokesperson for the senator said in a statement.

The average age of America’s lawmakers is changing, according to a report from the Pew Research Center. In January, Pew reported that the average age of voting members in the House and the median age in the Senate had dropped. The House’s median age went from 57.9 years in the 118th Congress to 57.5 years in the 119th, while the median age in the Senate went from 65.3 to 64.7 years.

Pew shows that the majority of the House in the 119th Congress is made up of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, with the younger generation slowly outpacing the older one. Baby Boomers are no longer the largest generation in the House, now accounting for just 39% of the legislative body. Their numbers have also dropped in the Senate, despite Baby Boomers still making up a majority of the chamber.

Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., is the only Gen Z lawmaker in Congress. Members of Frost’s generation are not yet eligible to run for Senate, where the minimum age to serve is 30 years old.

President Donald Trump has the highest approval rating now compared to any point during his first term in office, according to a new poll. 

Forty-seven percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance in the less than a month since he was sworn in as the 47th president, the latest national survey by the Pew Research Center found. 

While that’s higher than at any point while he served as the 45th president, Trump’s inaugural approval rating sinks below that of most other presidents since Ronald Reagan. George W. Bush’s approval rating early in his second term, however, was about the same as that of Trump now. 

The poll, conducted Jan. 27 to Feb. 2 among 5,086 adults, found nearly three in ten adults, or 28%, view Trump’s actions as better than expected, while 36% said they have been what they expected. 

His actions are viewed as worse than expected by 35% of adults. 

Americans are fairly evenly split over how they believe Trump’s White House will affect the federal government. The survey found 41% of adults said they believe Trump’s administration will improve the way the federal government works, and 42% said they believe the state of the federal government will worsen with him in office. 

Public opinion on Trump’s agenda remains starkly divided along partisan lines. The poll found 67% of Republicans, including those who lean red, support all or most of Trump’s plans and policies. For Democrats and those who lean blue, 84% support few or none. Almost an identical share of Republicans, 76%, said Trump will improve the way the federal government operates, as Democrats, 78%, said Trump will make the federal government run worse. 

For Republicans, 53% viewed Trump’s recent actions as better than expected, while the poll found 60% of Democrats view the president’s accomplishments as worse than expected. 

As Trump enters his fourth week back in office, his efforts to slash wasteful federal government spending through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have caused a stir in Washington. 

His threat of tariffs against Canada and Mexico and levied against China over the flow of deadly fentanyl across American borders has similarly raised concerns. Trump’s angling for the Panama Canal and Greenland amid the increasing Chinese presence in the Western Hemisphere, as well as his administration overseeing a collapsing ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel in the Middle East have put the world on notice. 

Trump’s advisers are expected to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week in Munich as the war with Russia stretches into its third year. Raging wildfires in California, a deadly military helicopter-passenger jet collision in D.C., and the continuing aftermath of last year’s hurricane devastation in the southeast, particularly in North Carolina, are putting Trump’s new Cabinet chiefs to the test on the domestic front, as is Trump’s crackdown on criminal illegal immigration. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime suggested relations between Washington, D.C., and Moscow are on ‘the brink’ of collapse this week.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov made the announcement during a Monday press conference. Ryabkov reiterated Putin’s stance that there would be no peace in Ukraine unless the country dropped its ambitions to join NATO and ceded Russian-occupied regions.

‘We simply imperatively need to get … the new U.S. administration to understand and acknowledge that without resolving the problems that are the root causes of the crisis in Ukraine, it will not be possible to reach an agreement,’ Ryabkov said.

While President Donald Trump said on Sunday that he has spoken to Putin, a spokesman for the Russian leader declined to confirm the call this week.

Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday that he expects to have ‘many more conversations. We have to get that war ended.’

‘I hate to see all these young people being killed. The soldiers are being killed by the hundreds of thousands,’ he added.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is preparing to meet with Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference later this week after confirming on Friday he is ready to ‘do a deal’ with President Donald Trump.

According to an interview with Reuters, Zelenskyy said he was ready to supply the U.S. with rare-earth minerals in exchange for Washington’s continued backing of its war effort.

‘If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,’ Zelenskyy said. 

The Ukrainian president has made clear he is also open to engaging in peace talks with Russia to end the three-year-long war, though possible terms for securing a peace deal remain varied and unknown. 

Though Zelenskyy has said he is looking for ‘guarantees’ when it comes to future security assurances for the war-torn country.

These security assurances will likely need to be more than a formal handshake paired with a signed document, as Russia has twice violated its last agreement with Ukraine, known as the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

Zelenskyy apparently first floated the idea of trading Ukraine’s mineral resources – roughly 20% of which are located in now Russian-controlled territory, including half of the rare-earth variety – under his ‘victory plan’ first presented to Western allies last fall, reported Reuters.