The Democratic Party has been criticized for maintaining a gerontocracy—being ruled by the elderly—instead of shifting direction with a new generation of voices. The bulk of the criticism came after 74-year-old Virginia Representative Gerry Connolly defeated 35-year-old New York progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the role of ranking member of the House Oversight Committee. Connolly had the backing of several veteran lawmakers, most notably influential...

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have grand ambitions for their supercharged government consultancy. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is going to solve the U.S.’s debt problem. It’s going to dramatically reduce the government’s power and slash the size of its workforce. And it’s going to crack down on that perpetual, easily named enemy: waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending. Or, so they say. Here’s the thing: those are completely different objectives that can be in...

House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-La.) agreement with Democrats to prevent a government shutdown until March includes provisions that would give members of Congress their first pay raise since 2009 and allow them to opt out of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

President-elect Donald Trump will start his second term with an even larger web of financial entanglements, reviving concerns over how a billionaire businessman and his allies can serve in the White House without conflicts of interest. Trump promised the Trump Organization’s pursuits would be walled off from his duties as president upon first entering office in 2017. But his sprawling interests, in particular the properties he owns as a real estate developer, prompted lawsuits on...

Elon Musk, who has been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to lead a committee to ferret out government waste, wrongly posted to X that members of Congress are trying to vote themselves a 40% raise. A continuing resolution put forward by Republicans leading the House Appropriations Committee does attempt to allow an automatic congressional pay increase — which has drawn blowback from some members of Congress — but the maximum possible raise in 2025 would be 3.8%, not 40%....

President-elect Donald Trump is soon to be back in office — and grandiose commitments from CEOs sure look poised to return, too. In a Monday briefing alongside SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Trump announced the company’s commitment to invest $100 billion in US projects during his second term, with the promise of creating 100,000 new jobs. According to Trump, the new investments by SoftBank, a Japanese tech and telecom company, will focus on artificial intelligence and emerging...

The Justice Department (DOJ) on Wednesday announced a lawsuit against the pharmaceutical chain CVS, accusing it of filling vast amounts of illegal opioid prescriptions and then billing it to the federal government. The department claimed that the company, beginning in October of 2013, contributed to the opioid epidemic by ignoring red flags on prescriptions, filling dangerous quantities of opioids and dangerous combinations of drugs, which was then billed to the federal...

Trump’s nominee to the prominent and troubled public-health agency could bring much-needed reform. If confirmed, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, has the opportunity to bring much-needed accountability and mission-oriented leadership to an organization in desperate need of both. Most Americans would be incensed if they paid millions of dollars for research into critically important subject matter...