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Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- The Taliban on Thursday freed George Glezmann, an American held in Afghanistan for more than two years, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on X. Glezmann, a Delta Air Lines mechanic who had been visiting Afghanistan as a tourist at the time of his detention in 2022, was designated as wrongfully detained by the State Department in 2023. His release followed several rounds of negotiations in Doha involving Taliban officials, Qatari mediators, and U.S. envoy Adam Boehler. Glezmann is the third American captive to be released by the Taliban since January.
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet voted unanimously overnight to fire Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency, by April 10 or sooner. Netanyahu first announced plans to dismiss Bar on Sunday, citing the lack of trust between the Shin Bet director and himself. Bar pushed back against his ouster in a letter to the Cabinet on Thursday, describing it as illegal and “entirely tainted by conflicts of interest.” The move—the first time in Israel’s history that the government has fired a Shin Bet head—is likely to face challenges in the country’s high court.
- Hamas on Thursday launched its first rocket barrage at central Israel in more than five months, targeting the country’s second-largest city of Tel Aviv and surrounding areas. There were no reported casualties from the rockets, which the Israeli military said were either intercepted or fell in open areas. Meanwhile, Israeli forces expanded their ground operations in Gaza, conducting raids in the southern city of Rafah. The renewed fighting followed the collapse of a U.S.-brokered ceasefire early Tuesday morning.
- The Chinese government has sentenced a former research engineer to death for allegedly selling classified information to foreign governments, the Ministry of State Security said Wednesday. “Desperadoes who want to take shortcuts to heaven will all suffer consequences,” the ministry said in a statement. The researcher, identified only as Liu, allegedly sold material he had saved from his former job at a research institute to a foreign spy agency, after falling into debt due to bad investment. Liu is the third Chinese citizen to be sentenced to death on espionage charges in the past 12 months.
- President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order beginning the process of dismantling the Department of Education. The order directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps” permitted by law to shutter the Cabinet-level agency and “return authority over education” to states and localities. But it’s unclear which programs will be targeted; the White House said Thursday the department would continue to fulfill certain “critical functions,” including enforcing civil rights laws and administering federal student loans. Abolishing the agency entirely would require an act of Congress.
- President Trump announced Thursday that he’d reached an agreement with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the prominent New York-based law firm targeted last week by an executive order revoking its security clearances. In exchange for the order’s reversal, the president said the firm “acknowledged the wrongdoing” of its former lawyer Mark F. Pomerantz, who oversaw the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s investigation into Trump. Following a White House visit by its chairman, Brian Karp, the firm also agreed to contribute $40 billion in pro bono legal services to several of the Trump administration’s initiatives. Executive orders targeting at least two other private law firms still stand.
Zeitenwende 2: Electric Boogaloo
For Europe, President Donald Trump’s dramatic dressing down of Ukraine’s wartime leader in the Oval Office last month was a wake-up call. As the U.S. threatens to jettison its historic commitment to transatlantic security, and Russia continues to menace the continent, European countries are now eyeing their largest military buildup since the Cold War—for Kyiv’s sake and their own.
Gathering in Brussels on Thursday, European Union leaders reiterated their support for Ukraine and set into motion plans to bolster their collective defense. “We have to rearm ourselves because otherwise we will be the next victims of Russian aggression,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said from the meeting. But as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s refusal to support a joint statement affirming the summit’s goals demonstrated, intra-European divides could derail the bloc’s efforts to navigate an increasingly unstable security situation. And the continent’s fragmented and undersized defense-industrial sector presents additional challenges as it seeks to undertake an ambitious ...
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Trump Shuts Down Expert Economic Panels
The Trump administration terminated two additional economic data advisory committees this week: the Bureau of Labor Statistics Technical Advisory Committee (BLSTAC) as well as the bureau’s Data Users Advisory Committee (DUAC). The move, first reported and confirmed by The Dispatch, comes on the heels of the administration’s shuttering of two other expert panels earlier this month.
Administration officials say the terminations were done in the name of efficiency and will result in no adverse effects on the quality of federal economic data—economic data that, supporters say, is a crucial component of market-affecting decisions made by government executives. Meanwhile, committee members maintain the panels, some of which have existed for more than 25 years, help statistical agencies operate more efficiently and successfully navigate ongoing challenges in data collection and analysis.
On Wednesday morning, members of both BLSTAC and DUAC received nearly identical letters—copies of which were obtained by The Dispatch—informing them that their committees had been terminated. The move came on the heels of President Donald Trump’s February 19 executive order directing the elimination of federal advisory committees deemed “unnecessary.”
Earlier this month, members of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC), which also advised BLS as well as the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the Census Bureau, were notified that the committee had been terminated. A separate BEA Advisory Committee was also closed at the same time. Notices posted on both committees’ webpages said the Secretary of Commerce determined that their purposes “have been fulfilled.” Both committees were established in 1999, and their charters had been regularly renewed since. The terminations sparked a round of news reports and concerns about the potential repercussions for the quality of the government’s economic statistics.
As of Thursday night, no notices of termination had been posted about the BLSTAC and DUAC. Instead, their pages appear to have been quietly deleted this week.
“This decision was made in line with the president’s executive order to reduce the federal bureaucracy,” Department of Labor spokeswoman Courtney Parella told TMD on Wednesday when asked for a comment on the new terminations. “These advisory committees fulfilled their intended purpose, and this decision has no effect on the functionality of BLS.”
Letters sent to BLSTAC and DUAC members Wednesday were more laudatory. “The agency has benefitted greatly from your insights and expertise,” the letters stated. “Your recommendations have assisted us in developing and delivering better products for our data users, and the discussions we have had concerning our surveys and methods have been of great value.”
Economic statistical agencies are tasked with continually updating and improving their data collection and analysis as the economy evolves. The charters of the now-closed committees detail how the bodies assisted the government. “In order to best serve the information needs of its diverse user communities, the BLS requires ongoing feedback from its customer base,” the DUAC charter notes. “The DUAC provides advice to the BLS from the points of view of data users from various sectors of the U.S. economy, including the labor, business, research, academic, and government communities, on matters related to the analysis, dissemination, and use of the Bureau’s statistics … and on gaps between or the need for new Bureau statistics.”
The BLS produces some of the nation’s most closely watched economic data, including on employment and prices. “The BLS often faces highly technical issues while developing and maintaining the accuracy and relevancy of its data,” the BLSTAC charter explains. “These issues range from how to develop new measures to how to make sure that existing measures account for the ever-changing economy. The BLS presents issues and then draws on the specialized expertise of Committee members.”
Though the committees have been shuttered as part of a campaign to reduce bureaucracy and improve efficiency, members said their work represented a huge net benefit to the government. “It was a committee of about 16 really high-level experts who volunteered their time for the sole purpose of offering advice to the three key economic statistical agencies in the U.S. government,” said David Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the director of U.S. economic research at Bloomberg Economics who served as the most recent FESAC chair. “What these outside experts were united by was a conviction that economic measurement is super important, very interesting, intellectually, continually changing, and worth getting right, because the quality of the data affects the quality of decision making.”
“[The BLSTAC] cost the federal government next to nothing and during my tenure never veered into anything remotely partisan,” Jared Murray, a professor of statistics and data sciences at the University of Texas, Austin and a member of the technical advisory committee, told TMD. “Everyone was simply dedicated to making BLS data collection, analysis, and dissemination the best it could be.”
Committee members could have their travel fees to attend meetings reimbursed but were otherwise uncompensated. The DUAC’s annual costs, which included travel and administrative staff support, were estimated to be $150,000. The BLSTAC’s annual costs were an estimated $140,000, FESAC’s $120,000, and the BEA Advisory Committee’s $90,000.
“The projects on which I advised BLS were, ironically, focused on how existing data could be used to make data collection more efficient and reduce respondent burden without sacrificing data quality,” Murray added. “To say I’m disappointed is an understatement.”
Today’s Must-Read
Anne Cohen—an ADRC faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center who leads work on neuroimaging and identifying biomarkers of Alzheimer’s in patients—uses positron emission tomography imaging of research participants’ brains to work on the early detection of the disease before cognitive symptoms emerge. Cohen has been busy over the last two months, not with her own research, but trying to keep the ARDC open. The ADRC, like the other 35 Alzheimer’s research centers across the country, relies on funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Toeing the Company Line
Kill Switch
Don’t trust Americans.
The Opportunity Cost of Trolling Our Northern Neighbor
A poorer Canada means a poorer United States.
Grizzly Bears Need Local Support
Federal oversight alone won’t save an icon of the American West.
Assessing J.D. Vance’s Claims About Immigration and Economic Growth
The U.S. has experienced GDP per capita growth while its immigrant population has expanded.
Abundance About-Face
‘I want sad, beige politics.’
Worth Your Time
- In a touching tribute to parenthood, Marc A. Thiessen reflected on his son Max’s hockey journey for the Washington Post. “Hockey is a game of statistics, so here are mine: During Max’s childhood, I drove two minivans into the ground, one with 153,672 miles on the odometer the other with 238,810. And as of this writing, I have put another 96,983 miles on a used Suburban. That’s almost half a million miles. … If even half of those miles were for hockey travel (a conservative estimate), that is the equivalent of about 10 trips around the globe,” he wrote. “Even if Max had never made it to college hockey, all the time on the road, and hours spent at the rink would have been worth it. Hockey gave Max so much happiness, amazing experiences and friendships that will last a lifetime. But it gave me something truly priceless — the chance to show him how much he is loved. The greatest gift you can give your children is your time. I know because I was a child of divorce, and did not see my own father much growing up. I was determined when I became a dad, I would be present for my kids. I hope all those hours spent behind the wheel, and the glass at the rink, showed Max just how precious he is to me — and that there is no way I would have rather spent my time than driving across North America to be with him and watch him play.”
Presented Without Comment
Gizmodo: DoorDash Partners with Klarna for Deferred Payments—in Case You Need a Loan to Pay for Your Burrito
Also Presented Without Comment
Axios: [Reps.] AOC, Ilhan Omar Join the Pile-on Against Senate Democrats
As some House Democrats urge her to challenge [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer, [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez said at a rally in Tempe, Arizona: “One thing I love about Arizonans is that you all have shown that if a U.S. Senator isn't fighting hard enough for you, you're not afraid to replace her with one who will.”
…
“I am disgusted that several Senate Democrats gave up our first point of leverage,” Omar said … at a town hall meeting in her home state. The Minnesota Democrat said her party “needs to be sort of come to Jesus moment,” adding: “We have people who want to bring a knife to a gunfight and are not rising up to the moment.”
Also Also Presented Without Comment
The Hill: UFC Legend Conor McGregor Running for President of Ireland
In the Zeitgeist
Move over, ABBA. The repertoire of Buena Vista Social Club just arrived on the stages of Broadway, in a musical merging traditional Cuban tunes with a healthy dose of 1950s nostalgia.
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