Another American hospital falls victim to a ransomware attack; the RansomHouse gang announced the hack of Loretto Hospital in Chicago.”
The RansomHouse gang announced the hack of Loretto Hospital in Chicago, the groups claims to have stolen 1.5TB of sensitive data.
The Loretto Hospital is a not-for-profit, community-focused health care provider. They provide healthcare services including: primary care, geriatric medicine, vision care, behavioral health services, pediatrics, womens health, pediatric medicine, family planning and dental services. The hospital was founded in 1939 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
At the time of writing, the group has yet to publish any evidence of the alleged stolen data.
RansomHouse is a data extortion group that has been active since Dec 2021. Unlike other extortion group, the gang doesn’t encrypt data, but focuses on data theft to speed up its activity. Victims include AMD and Keralty. They shame non-payers by leaking data. Backups are insufficient; IPS is recommended for protection.
American hospitals are a privileged target for threat actors due to the huge trove of sensitive data they manage.
Ransomware attacks on U.S. healthcare providers surged in 2024, with 98 attacks compromising 117 million records. Hospitals often face system lockdowns, forcing a switch to manual processes. High-profile breaches include Change Healthcare (100M records), Summit Pathology (1.8M), OnePoint Patient Care (796K), and Boston Children’s Health Physicians (909K).
In 2023, Loretto Hospital experienced another data security incident. On January 19, 2023, a former employee misappropriated security camera footage of a limited number of patients and posted it on Facebook. The footage was removed after the incident was discovered. Loretto identified the impacted individuals and notified them by mail on March 15, 2023, offering guidance on protecting their information. The exposed information consisted of security camera footage of a small number of patients.
Ann and Billie Dumaliang say they’re “done with being friendly” with Maria Antonia Yulo-Loyzaga. The renowned conservationists and sisters, in an exclusive new interview with TIME, accuse the Philippine Environment Secretary of “malicious” actions, being “allergic to criticism,” and “strong arming” them into “abandoning” Masungi Georeserve, the internationally-acclaimed ecotourism site they manage just outside Manila.
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Their anger stems from shock. The Dumaliangs were surprised to see on the news that the Department of Environment and Natural Resources was evicting them from part of Masungi Georeserve—a move that could threaten their overall efforts to protect the 6,600-acre conservation area.
On March 7, the department said in a press conference that it canceled a 2002 deal it had with longtime developer Blue Star Construction Development Corporation—the Masungi Georeserve Foundation Inc.’s affiliate company owned by Ben Dumaliang, the sisters’ father—over alleged failure to deliver a contracted government housing project as well as other alleged violations. The canceled deal covers some 740 acres, including the georeserve’s Discovery Trail. The department has ordered Blue Star to leave that 740-acre area within 15 days.
“Everyone was quite caught off guard,” Ann Dumaliang tells TIME. “Not just because we were not involved in it at all, but because this is also the first time that they are raising all of these issues in the last 20-plus years that we have been protecting this place.”
Masungi Georeserve is a popular eco-tourism destination, known for its rainforest and picturesque limestone formations. The site, its officers, and its rangers, have been recognized worldwide for conservation and geotourism efforts—standing out especially in a country that’s deemed the deadliest in the continent for environmental defenders.
The Discovery Trail has allowed visitors to trek through the conservation area for at least 1,500 Philippine pesos ($26) to see karst limestones and other flora and fauna. Billie Dumaliang says the funds collected go toward the reforestation of the more than 5,900 acres around it—an area also under threat if a separate 2017 joint contract gets canceled—and help to pay the up to 100 rangers protecting the reserve.
In Friday’s press briefing, an environment department official said, “everyone, even those with us in conservation and [environment] protection, if they violate the law, the government will take action.”
But the Dumaliang sisters, who are trustees of the foundation, reject accusations of violating the law and decry unfair treatment. “[Other alleged] violators get, what, one to four show-cause orders?” Ann said. “We get an immediate cancellation. It’s terrible.” Billie added that the department’s move stands “in stark contrast to all of these environmentally destructive projects … that have been allowed to go on for all these years and despite strong opposition.” Yulo-Loyzaga has previously been blamed for failing to swiftly address controversies surrounding the country’s environmental landmarks.
The sisters also disputed Blue Star’s alleged failure to deliver on contractual obligations, claiming it was the department who did not hold up its end of the contract and did not engage with Masungi Georeserve’s officers. Billie Dumaliang says she believes environment secretary Yulo-Loyzaga has been particularly “vindictive,” after groups such as theirs have criticized her. “We’re very vocal about this, we’ve exposed illegal activities, we make her look bad, but these are very petty reasons for taking a course of action that is not in line with the mandate of the department,” Billie said.
Billie added that Yulo-Loyzaga’s directive on Masungi also “puts into question the commitment of the current administration to its international commitments on climate change, human rights, biodiversity, land degradation, and peace.” The Philippines has pledged to rehabilitate 7.1 million hectares of degraded and deforested land by 2028.
Some Philippine lawmakers are also questioning the rationale behind the cancellation of the Blue Star contract. In statements on social media, Senator Nancy Binay criticized the haphazard decision and asked what the department’s plan and vision for the Georeserve is after the cancellation, while Representative Raoul Manuel slammed the department for failing to have a dialogue with the Masungi Georeserve Foundation before cancelling and painting the organization as an “enemy.”
The Philippine environment department and secretary did not immediately respond to specific queries from TIME, referring instead to a primer made by the department that outlines the history of the Blue Star contract as well as Blue Star’s alleged violations, including: imposing fees and constructing facilities in the site without local permits, fencing a portion of government property, and failing to complete agreed upon housing units in the area.
For now, the Dumaliangs are planning to exhaust their legal remedies, even as the department mulls involving the police to enforce the eviction. They are aware of the security risks—those with interests in the land, such as resort owners, have been linked to attacks on the site’s rangers and officers patrolling and protecting the site, and the georeserve has been the subject of online smear campaigns and threats. They believe that with the order, Masungi’s detractors are “emboldened” to continue the harassment and potentially escalate violence. They say the order sends a “chilling effect” to all environment defenders.
But still, they aren’t planning to leave Masungi without a fight. “We will invoke our right, of course, to continue our work,” Billie said. “If we need to use our bodies to shield, then we will.”
LOS ANGELES — When artificial intelligence-backed tractors became available to vineyards, Tom Gamble wanted to be an early adopter. He knew there would be a learning curve, but Gamble decided the technology was worth figuring out.
The third-generation farmer bought one autonomous tractor. He plans on deploying its self-driving feature this spring and is currently using the tractor’s AI sensor to map his Napa Valley vineyard. As it learns each row, the tractor will know where to go once it is used autonomously. The AI within the machine will then process the data it collects and help Gamble make better-informed decisions about his crops — what he calls “precision farming.”
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“It’s not going to completely replace the human element of putting your boot into the vineyard, and that’s one of my favorite things to do,” he said. “But it’s going to be able to allow you to work more smartly, more intelligently and in the end, make better decisions under less fatigue.”
Gamble said he anticipates using the tech as much as possible because of “economic, air quality and regulatory imperatives.” Autonomous tractors, he said, could help lower his fuel use and cut back on pollution.
As AI continues to grow, experts say that the wine industry is proof that businesses can integrate the technology efficiently to supplement labor without displacing a workforce. New agricultural tech like AI can help farmers to cut back on waste, and to run more efficient and sustainable vineyards by monitoring water use and helping determine when and where to use products like fertilizers or pest control. AI-backed tractors and irrigation systems, farmer say, can minimize water use by analyzing soil or vines, while also helping farmers to manage acres of vineyards by providing more accurate data on the health of a crop or what a season’s yield will be.
Other facets of the wine industry have also started adopting the tech, from using generative AI to create custom wine labels to turning to ChatGPT to develop, label and price an entire bottle.
“I don’t see anybody losing their job, because I think that a tractor operator’s skills are going to increase and as a result, and maybe they’re overseeing a small fleet of these machines that are out there, and they’ll be compensated as a result of their increased skill level,” he said.
Farmers, Gamble said, are always evolving. There were fears when the tractor replaced horses and mules pulling plows, but that technology “proved itself” just like AI farming tech will, he said, adding that adopting any new tech always takes time.
Companies like John Deere have started using the AI that wine farmers are beginning to adopt. The agricultural giant uses “Smart Apply” technology on tractors, for example, helping growers apply material for crop retention by using sensors and algorithms to sense foliage on grape canopies, said Sean Sundberg, business integration manager at John Deere.
The tractors that use that tech then only spray “where there are grapes or leaves or whatnot so that it doesn’t spray material unnecessarily,” he said. Last year, the company announced a project with Sonoma County Winegrowers to use tech to help wine grape growers maximize their yield.
Tyler Klick, partner at Redwood Empire Vineyard Management, said his company has started automating irrigation valves at the vineyards it helps manage. The valves send an alert in the event of a leak and will automatically shut off if they notice an “excessive” water flow rate.
“That valve is actually starting to learn typical water use,” Klick said. “It’ll learn how much water is used before the production starts to fall off.”
Klick said each valve costs roughly $600, plus $150 per acre each year to subscribe to the service.
“Our job, viticulture, is to adjust our operations to the climatic conditions we’re dealt,” Klick said. “I can see AI helping us with finite conditions.”
Angelo A. Camillo, a professor of wine business at Sonoma State University, said that despite excitement over AI in the wine industry, some smaller vineyards are more skeptical about their ability to use the technology. Small, family-owned operations, which Camillo said account for about 80% of the wine business in America, are slowly disappearing — many don’t have the money to invest in AI, he said. A robotic arm that helps put together pallets of wine, for example, can cost as much as $150,000, he said.
“For small wineries, there’s a question mark, which is the investment. Then there’s the education. Who’s going to work with all of these AI applications? Where is the training?” he said.
There are also potential challenges with scalability, Camillo added. Drones, for example, could be useful for smaller vineyards that could use AI to target specific crops that have a bug problem, he said — it would be much harder to operate 100 drones in a 1,000 acre vineyard while also employing the IT workers who understand the tech.
“I don’t think a person can manage 40 drones as a swarm of drones,” he said. “So there’s a constraint for the operators to adopt certain things.”
However, AI is particularly good at tracking a crop’s health – including how the plant itself is doing and whether it’s growing enough leaves – while also monitoring grapes to aid in yield projections, said Mason Earles, an assistant professor who leads the Plant AI and Biophysics Lab at UC Davis.
Diseases or viruses can sneak up and destroy entire vineyards, Earles said, calling it an “elephant in the room” across the wine industry. The process of replanting a vineyard and getting it to produce well takes at least five years, he said. AI can help growers determine which virus is affecting their plants, he said, and whether they should rip out some crops immediately to avoid losing their entire vineyard.
Earles, who is also cofounder of the AI-powered farm management platform Scout, said his company uses AI to process thousands of images in hours and extract data quickly — something that would be difficult by hand in large vineyards that span hundreds of acres. Scout’s AI platform then counts and measures the number of grape clusters as early as when a plant is beginning to flower in order to forecast what a yield will be.
The sooner vintners know how much yield to expect, the better they can “dial in” their wine making process, he added.
“Predicting what yields you’re going to have at the end of the season, no one is that good at it right now,” he said. “But it’s really important because it determines how much labor contract you’re going to need and the supplies you’ll need for making wine.”
Earles doesn’t think the budding use of AI in vineyards is “freaking farmers out.” Rather, he anticipates that AI will be used more frequently to help with difficult field labor and to discern problems in vineyards that farmers need help with.
“They’ve seen people trying to sell them tech for decades. It’s hard to farm; it’s unpredictable compared to most other jobs,” he said. “The walking and counting, I think people would have said a long time ago, ‘I would happily let a machine take over.’”
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A curated weekday guide to major news and developments over the weekend. Here’s today’s news:
SYRIA
More than 1,000 people have been killed in clashes between government security forces and Assad regime loyalists on Syria’s Mediterranean coast over the last four days, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said yesterday. Eyewitnesses say that armed men loyal to the new Syrian government committed atrocities during the unrest, including by carrying out field executions. Christina Goldbaum and Reham Mourshed report for the New York Times; Mostafa Salem reports for CNN.
Syria’s interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa yesterday called for national unity, vowing to hold accountable “anyone involved in the bloodshed of civilians” who “overstepped the powers of the state.” He did not directly comment on the accusations that his supporters committed atrocities. Lucy Clarke-Billings and Gabriela Pomeroy report for BBC News.
Israel will let Syrian Druze workers enter the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights from Syrian territory, Israel’s defense ministry said yesterday. Reuters reports.
RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR
Russian strikes killed at least 25 people in Ukraine and injured dozens through the weekend, Ukrainian officials said. Commenting on the strikes, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that “[t]his is what happens when someone appeases barbarians.” Henri Astier reports for BBC News.
Russia is advancing in Kursk, with Ukraine struggling to retain its sole territorial bargaining chip in the conflict as Russian and North Korean troops seized territory in recent days, according to soldiers in the area. Separately, Ukrainian soldiers and military analysts say Kyiv has stalled Moscow’s offensive in the Donetsk region in recent months and started to win back small patches of land. Evgeniia Sivorka, James Marson, and Jane Lytvynenko report for the Wall Street Journal; Marc Santora reports for the New York Times.
RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR — U.S. RESPONSE
The United States has “temporarily suspended” the sharing of satellite imagery with Ukraine in accordance with President Trump’s orders, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency said on Friday. Analysts say the move, coupled with the U.S. halt of military aid and intelligence-sharing with Ukraine, could potentially give Russia a decisive advantage on the battlefield. Eve Sampson reports for the New York Times.
“Anybody else would” take advantage of the halt in U.S. aid for Kyiv to step up attacks, Trump said on Friday, commenting on Russia’s strikes on Ukraine. Trump added that he is finding it “more difficult” to deal with Ukraine than Russia in negotiations. Hours earlier, the President stated he was “strongly” considering imposing large-scale sanctions on Russia to force it into a peace deal. Michael Birnbaum, Sabrina Rodriguez, and Kostiantyn Khudov report for the Washington Post; Ian Aikman and Tom Bateman report for BBC News; Erica L. Green reports for the New York Times.
The Trump administration is examining how to ease sanctions on Russia’s oil and gas industry to deliver swift economic relief if Moscow agrees to end its war in Ukraine, according to two sources. Jarrett Renshaw and Jonathan Saul report for Reuters.
Trump has privately told his aides a minerals deal between Washington and Kyiv won’t be enough to restart aid and intelligence sharing and that he wants Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to change his attitude to making concessions to Russia and planning elections in Ukraine, according to an administration official and another U.S. official. Courtney Kube, Kristen Welker, and Carol E. Lee report for NBC News.
ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR
Israel has cut off the electricity supply to Gaza, disconnecting power to a desalination plant producing drinking water for part of the territory, officials said yesterday. A Hamas spokesperson called the decision part of Israel’s “starvation policy.” Melanie Lidman and Samy Magdy report for AP News.
Israel’s defense ministry will open an office to manage the mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to other countries, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said yesterday. The formation of the new office was not immediately confirmed by the defense ministry. Gerry Shih reports for the Washington Post.
Israel and Hamas on Saturday signaled they were preparing for the next phase of Gaza ceasefire negotiations, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announcing that Israeli negotiators will travel to Doha today and Hamas saying there were “positive” indicators in the talks. Nidal Al-Mughrabi reports for Reuters.
ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR — U.S. AND INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE
Israel objected to the Trump administration’s covert direct negotiations with Hamas in a “difficult” call between Netanyahu’s close aide Ron Dermer and U.S. hostage envoy Adam Boehler last Tuesday, according to an Israeli official. Boehler yesterday said that while he understands Israel’s concerns, the United States is “not an agent of Israel” in the efforts to broker a ceasefire. Barak Ravid reports for Axios; Avery Lotz reports for Axios.
The foreign ministers of France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom on Saturday announced they support Egypt’s “realistic” plan for the reconstruction of Gaza that would avoid displacing Palestinians from the territory. Lucy Clarke-Billings reports for BBC News.
Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, is expected to travel to Doha tomorrow to join the ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, two U.S. officials said. Barak Ravid reports for Axios.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ACTIONS
The Justice Department has transferred at least three top officials in the National Security Division, a move that sources say amounts to a complete overhaul of the Division’s leadership. On Friday, the DOJ also removed a top ethics official, a pardon attorney, and a head public records officer, the sources added. Perry Stein and Salvador Rizzo report for the Washington Post.
Two New York federal prosecutors who worked on the case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams have been escorted out of their workplace by federal law enforcement officials after being placed on leave by the Justice Department on Friday, according to law enforcement sources. At least one other DOJ attorney was also placed on leave, apparently over social media comments about the interim U.S. attorney for D.C., Ed Martin, the sources added. Ryan J. Reilly and Tom Winter report for NBC News.
Trump has instructed officials to exclude non-profit organizations that engage in activities that have a “substantial illegal purpose” from a student loan forgiveness program in an executive order published Friday. The move appears to target groups supporting undocumented immigrants, diversity initiatives, or gender-affirming care for children. Stacy Cowley reports for the New York Times.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem yesterday announced that Todd Lyons, ICE’s former assistant director of field operations, will serve as the agency’s new acting Director. Noem also pledged to step up polygraph testing of employees to identify personnel leaking information to the media. Christine Fernando reports for AP News.
The Trump administration has told the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to prepare to lose another 1,000 workers, raising concerns among scientists that NOAA’s lifesaving forecasts might be hindered as the hurricane season approaches. Raymond Zhong, Austyn Gaffney, and Christopher Flavelle report for the New York Times.
The Homeland Security Department on Friday said it would end its collective bargaining agreement with Transportation Security Administration workers, claiming the union contract was imperilling the safety of travellers. Tim Balk reports for the New York Times.
U.S. FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Calls for negotiations by “bully states” are aimed at dominating others and not resolving issues, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Saturday, in an apparent response to Trump’s comments that he has written to Khameini to kick start negotiations on a new nuclear deal. Mohammed Tawfeeq and Donald Judd report for CNN.
The Trump administration has asked researchers and organizations working overseas to disclose ties to entities regarded as hostile, including “entities associated with communist, socialist or totalitarian parties,” according to a questionnaire seen by the New York Times. Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Apoorva Mandavilli report.
Panama on Saturday released dozens of migrants held in a remote camp following their deportation from the United States, telling them they have 30 days to leave Panama. Some migrants said the move leaves them in legal limbo and with no money. Megan Janetsky, Alma Solis, and Matias Delacroix report for AP News.
More than 80 Afghan women who fled the Taliban to pursue higher education in Oman say they now face imminent return back to Afghanistan due to the Trump administration’s foreign aid cuts. Yogita Limaye reports for BBC News.
The State Department yesterday ordered non-emergency government personnel to leave South Sudan’s capital amid escalating tensions in the country. AP News reports.
OTHER U.S. DOMESTIC DEVELOPMENTS
The Secret Service yesterday shot a man near the White House after an “armed confrontation” with federal officials, the agency said in a statement, adding that the man’s condition is unknown. Luke Broadwater and Adam Goldman report for the New York Times.
The Justice Department should dismiss a corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams “with prejudice,” an outside legal expert appointed by the judge overseeing the case opined on Friday, saying that the move would “eliminate the appearance problems” inherent in Adams being subject to an “ever-looming prospect of reindictment.” Shayna Jacobs reports for the Washington Post.
Immigration agents on Saturday arrested a Palestinian graduate student who has played a prominent role in pro-Palestinian protests at New York’s Columbia University, the Student Workers of Columbia labor union said in a statement. Jonathan Allen reports for Reuters.
President Trump’s family business on Friday sued Capital One for allegedly “unjustifiably terminating” its accounts over the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. Ben Protess reports for the New York Times.
A federal judge in Missouri on Friday found the Chinese government responsible for covering up the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and hoarding protective equipment, awarding damages of more than $24 billion that Missouri officials vowed to enforce by seizing Chinese assets. Mitch Smith reports for the New York Times.
OTHER GLOBAL DEVELOPMENTS
Former central banker Mark Carney will be the next Prime Minister of Canada following a landslide victory in a contest to lead Canada’s ruling Liberal Party yesterday. Carney is expected to call an election in the coming weeks, according to sources. Anna Mehler Paperny reports for Reuters.
Armed men who attacked a U.N. helicopter on an evacuation mission killed one crew member and injured two others in a volatile part of South Sudan on Friday, the U.N. said. Declan Walsh reports for the New York Times.
Romania’s central election authority yesterday barred the far-right pro-Russian candidate Calin Georgescu from running in May’s presidential election re-run, saying Georgescu violated electoral rules during his first run. Carmen Paun reports for POLITICO.
Poland must “drastically” increase the size of its military and even “reach for opportunities” related to “nuclear and unconventional weapons,” Poland’s Tusk said on Friday. Andrew Higgins reports for the New York Times.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION LITIGATION
A group of labor unions on Friday asked a federal court for an emergency order restraining DOGE from accessing the sensitive Social Security data of millions of Americans. Fatima Hussein and Lindsay Whitehurst report for AP News.
A group of Native American tribes and students on Friday sued the Trump administration in a bid to reverse the recent firings of federal workers at Native schools the group says has severely lowered their quality of education. Rachel Nostrant reports for the New York Times.
Microsoft researchers reported that North Korea-linked APT tracked as Moonstone Sleet has employed the Qilin ransomware in limited attacks.
Microsoft observed a North Korea-linked APT group, tracked as Moonstone Sleet, deploying Qilin ransomware in limited attacks since February 2025. The APT group uses Qilin ransomware after previously using custom ransomware.
“Moonstone Sleet has previously exclusively deployed their own custom ransomware in their attacks, and this represents the first instance they are deploying ransomware developed by a RaaS operator.” Microsoft wrote on X.
In May 2024, Microsoft observed the North Korea-linked group “Moonstone Sleet” (Previously tracked as Storm-1789) using known and novel techniques like fake companies, trojanized tools, a malicious game, and custom ransomware for financial gain and espionage.
Storm-1789, initially linked to other North Korean threat groups, has since adopted unique tactics, tools, and attack infrastructure.
Moonstone Sleet threat actors target financial and cyberespionage victims using trojanized software, custom malware, malicious games, and fake companies like StarGlow Ventures and C.C. Waterfall to engage victims on LinkedIn, freelancing sites, Telegram, and email.
The APT group has also spread malware via a fraudulent tank game (DeTankWar) and engaged in ransomware attacks using FakePenny. Additionally, they attempt to infiltrate organizations by posing as software developers seeking employment.
The Qilin ransomware group has been active since at least 2022 but gained attention in June 2024 for attacking Synnovis, a UK governmental service provider for healthcare. The group typically employs “double extortion,” stealing and encrypting victims’ data, then threatening to expose it unless a ransom is paid. In July 2024, Sophos’ Incident Response team observed Qilin’s activity on a domain controller within an organization’s Active Directory domain, with other domain controllers also infected but impacted differently.
The attackers breached the organization via compromised credentials for a VPN portal that lacked multi-factor authentication (MFA). The threat actors conducted post-exploitation activities eighteen days after initial access.
Recently, the Russian-speaking Qilin Ransomware group claimed responsibility for an attack on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.
The group stated that it stole sensitive data such as private correspondence, personal information, and official decrees. The ransomware group declared that they had already sold some of the alleged stolen information to third parties.
Bernard M. Baruch, the American financier and statesman, famously said in 1946, “Every man has the right to an opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”
Trump administration officials will better achieve a just and lasting end to Russia’s unprovoked, illegal, and murderous (all facts) war in Ukraine if they first agree on what motivated Russian President Vladimir Putin to act. It was a revanchist desire to regain a lost empire that begins but doesn’t end with Ukraine. For Putin, any agreement he signs must serve that purpose.
Second, Trump administration officials need to be clear on what Putin is trying to achieve beyond that, beginning with the subjugation of other countries that once belonged to the Soviet bloc, including current members of NATO.
Putin is determined, working in a “no limits” partnership with Beijing, to roll back US global influence and replace it with a world order of Russia and China’s own making. Putin has said so plainly, as has Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has remarked to the Russian leader, “Now there are changes that haven’t happened in a hundred years. When we are together, we drive these changes.”
Peace through strength
With that as context, the best war-ending formula publicly available, one that begins with a deep understanding of those immutable facts, was published in Foreign Affairs this past Friday as “A Plan for Peace Through Strength in Ukraine.” Its authors are consistently wise voices on the United States’ role in the world: Stephen Hadley, a former US national security advisor; Daniel Fried, a former US ambassador to Poland; and Franklin D. Kramer, a former senior Pentagon official.*
The essay’s two most crucial paragraphs suggest a course correction in the Trump administration’s current approach, one involving both Europe and the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine. This shift is necessary, the authors argue, if the president wants to avoid the fate of “the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
President Donald Trump was factually correct in his recent address to Congress in saying that then President Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 demonstrated weakness, which then encouraged Putin to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. One can draw a clear line. Building on that lesson, the authors argue that Trump accepting Russia’s “apparent terms for ending the war” risks demonstrating a similar weakness with similar outcomes.
“The best path to end the war will instead follow a ‘peace through strength’ approach,” write the authors. “Such an approach would substantially enhance Europe’s role in supporting Ukraine militarily and economically, with a limited but important backup role for the United States; accept the current lines of control between Russian and Ukrainian forces, without recognizing Russian annexation or sovereignty over Russian-occupied areas; and prepare the path for a negotiated settlement—all while considering, in the likely event that negotiations fail, how to achieve a cease-fire through unilateral action.”
Those last few words regarding the potential need for unilateral action are significant, as Putin is unlikely to accept any deal that would ensure outcomes that would serve Ukrainian, US, and allied interests.
So, it’s not too early for Trump administration officials to conjure a robust war-ending option absent Russia’s agreement, if Trump wants his place in history to be that of a global hero, worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. The alternative is to risk falling into the trap of emboldening Putin, à la Biden.
“To pave this path,” the authors write, “Ukraine, Europe, and the United States must focus on four priorities: strengthening Ukraine militarily, applying additional economic pressure on Russia (but relaxing sanctions if it complies with an agreement), addressing Ukrainian security and economic needs through EU membership, and deterring Russia by granting Ukraine NATO membership.”
Nothing in the Foreign Affairs essay is more controversial or necessary than the deterrence value of offering Ukraine NATO membership if the country’s lasting security can’t be guaranteed through a ceasefire and peace agreement—or if Russia breaks an agreement that it signs, which it has a habit of doing.
The authors don’t mention that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seemed to take Ukraine’s NATO membership off the table on February 12. It’s unclear whether US negotiators have yet done the same. If so, they should put NATO membership back into the mix, both because history has shown it is the region’s most effective security guarantee and because it provides Trump with powerful leverage.
The author of Trump: The Art of the Deal recently lectured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office that he was playing weak cards. No one understands better than Trump how foolish it would be to throw away your best cards at the beginning of a negotiation.
The Foreign Affairs authors are arguing that it is only the prospect of Alliance membership, should Putin continue to threaten Ukraine or not live by any agreement’s requirements, that would compel him to comply with peace terms. Finnish President Alexander Stubb has made a similar argument.
Write the authors: “A negotiating position based on these four priorities”—Ukraine’s military strength, economic pressure on Moscow, EU membership for Ukraine, and the deterrence value of NATO membership—“will give Ukrainians the confidence to negotiate and Putin the incentive to make negotiations successful.”
Beyond that, they write, to reach an agreement, “U.S. negotiators will have to avoid falling into a Russian trap that focuses first on improving U.S.-Russian relations while deferring the issue of Ukraine so that Russian forces have more time to take more Ukrainian territory.”
The hard truth about hard power
It’s worth considering other facts as US negotiators proceed.
There is a false notion that NATO provoked Russian intervention in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 by agreeing in Bucharest in 2008 that both countries would someday become Alliance members.
Hadley was on the ground in Bucharest negotiating the agreement on behalf of the Bush administration with recalcitrant German and French officials, who balked at giving those countries firmer and faster guarantees. It was that mushy middle ground that doomed them.
Want proof? Look at the former Soviet bloc countries that did become NATO members after the Cold War. They have remained stable and secure ever since, and they will do so as long as Russia believes that the United States and its NATO allies stand by their “all for one and one for all” security guarantee under the North Atlantic Treaty’s Article 5.
Under the headline “The real reason Russia invaded Ukraine (hint: it’s not NATO expansion),” the Atlantic Council’s Andrew A. Michta writes that much of the public debate about the war in Ukraine “seems increasingly disconnected from reality. The responsibility for the invasion and the carnage is unequivocally Russian President Vladimir Putin’s, and this simple fact ought to be the departure point for any rational path to ending the conflict.”
Michta argues, “The West is responsible not because it sought to redefine the security architecture of Europe’s historical crush zone in a way that favors its interests and the region’s stability and security, but rather because it failed to take the second fundamental step: the West failed to back up the new security architecture with hard power.”
Unlike in the aftermath of World War II, Michta writes, when the United States brought massive amounts of power to stabilize and rebuild Europe and deter any attempts at Soviet aggression against the free world, “the post-Cold War settlement was accompanied by a bewildering degree of disarmament across the collective West.”
Michta worries about a Ukraine deal that not only confirms Russia’s territorial gains, possibly allowing it to absorb the country over time, but also frees Russia to seek further gains, regionally and elsewhere, in its increasingly close partnership with China.
“Add to this the strategic myopia of key European politicians who, instead of recognizing what their weakness has wrought, speak instead about ‘being abandoned by America,’ and you have the perfect storm brewing just over the horizon,” writes Michta.
Michta usefully reminds readers that deterrence requires both military capabilities and the willingness to use them. “If you have neither,” he writes, “the correct term is ‘appeasement,’ with all that this is likely to entail down the line.”
Put most simply, the Trump administration’s negotiations with Russia will either deter or appease Putin’s well-telegraphed ambitions. The peace plan outlined in Foreign Affairs is a good place to start if Trump wants to avoid appeasement.
Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.
This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.
Note: Stephen Hadley is an executive vice chair of the Atlantic Council board of directors, Daniel Fried the Council’s Weiser family distinguished fellow, and Franklin D. Kramer a board member.
Last May, Columbia student activist Mahmoud Khalil said his status as a foreign national made him “nervous” to participate in the encampment that roiled campus.
“Since the beginning, I decided to stay out of the public eye and away from media attention or high-risk activities,” he told Al Jazeera. He apparently did not consider blabbing to Qatar’s media mouthpiece either media attention or a high-risk activity. Oops.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked Khalil’s visa—he is a Syrian national, according to ICE—and sent immigration enforcement officials to detain him. When Khalil’s attorney said Khalil had received a green card, one of the officials told the attorney the State Department had revoked that as well. A senior State Department official told us Rubio pulled both the visa and green card.
The arrest, which came to light on Sunday, is the first high-profile action under Rubio’s “Catch and Revoke” effort targeting foreign Hamasniks causing trouble on college campuses. Khalil became one of the Columbia encampment’s public faces last spring when he led negotiations with administrators and demanded they divest from Israel. Columbia suspended him shortly thereafter before dropping the disciplinary charges. Khalil pledged to secure Israeli divestment by “any available means necessary” and participated in Wednesday’s occupation of the Barnard library.
“This should serve as a warning to foreign students on temporary status in America—under this administration, if you support terror groups, we will deport you,” a senior State Department official told us. Rubio issued a similar statement, saying he will “be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
If that seems hyperbolic, it’s not: The Columbia University Apartheid Divest group Khalil belongs to commemorated the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7 by endorsing Hamas’s “armed resistance,” lauding the “Al-Aqsa Flood” as a “moral, military and political victory,” and quoting the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
As the Trump administration takes aim at DEI in higher education, it may have a new target: Northwestern’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing (ISGMH).
Founded in 2015 as “the first university-wide institute in the country focused exclusively on research to improve the health of the sexual and gender minority community,” the institute received a $1.3 million grant from Joe Biden’s NIH in 2022. At the same time, it “hosted a summer program for graduate scholars that it offered only to ‘Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and also sexual and gender minorities,” our Lexi Boccuzzi reports.
Beyond attracting the administration’s ire—the grant is active through 2027, and roughly half of the funds are yet to be distributed—the program’s racial and sexual requirements could prompt legal challenges. “Similar racial restrictions for a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Vermont prompted the school to pull the job posting amid threats from attorneys,” writes Boccuzzi. “Northwestern appears to have made a similar move—sometime between September and January, the ISGMH amended the webpage for its summer program to remove references to race, gender, and sexual orientation, archives of the site show.”
Speaking of DEI, one of the Biden EPA’s first moves was the creation of an employee-led “DEIA implementation team” that empowered staffers to establish equity workgroups. The result, internal agency documents and communications obtained by our Thomas Catenacci show, was the repeated use of taxpayer dollars to “de-gender” bathroom and police pronoun use.
The EPA’s LGBTQIA+ Workgroup, for example, unveiled its “priority actions” during a 2023 presentation. They included the implementation of all-gender bathroom and locker rooms, the addition of “gender pronouns” in internal communications, and the adoption of a “style manual requirement for gendered honorifics in Agency Correspondence,” according to slides from the presentation.
“And the group achieved many of its objectives,” writes Catenacci. “Across the EPA’s 118 facilities, the group said the agency’s number of gender-neutral restrooms and gender-neutral locker rooms swelled to 140 and 15, respectively, as a result of its work. The Biden EPA also committed to constructing all-gender restrooms in future building renovations.”
“The documents are the latest evidence of how ingrained DEI efforts were at the EPA and across the entire Biden administration”—efforts that “likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars in man-hours. The average EPA employee’s annual salary is $102,489, 42.9 percent higher than the national average for government employees, while officials known to have been involved in the initiatives were paid as much as $168,400, according to Open Payrolls.”
Israel announced it would cut off its supply of electricity to Gaza, furthering its plans—first reportedby the Free Beacon—to cut off aid and “eradicate Hamas.”
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.) went on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday and things got awkward when she was pressed about boys competing in girls’ sports: “For me though, I think this issue is being brought up in order to make sparks and see sparks fly,” she said, declining to say whether she supported or opposed boys competing against girls.
Sixty-five percent of U.S. voters agree that “no one has any idea what the Democratic Party stands for, other than opposing Donald Trump,” according to Democratic pollster Blueprint.
Gov. Tim Walz (D.) said he and Kamala “played it too safe last year” and should have “just rolled the dice and done the town halls.” More Walz—that would’ve done the trick.
Experts warn of a large-scale cryptocurrency miner campaign targeting Russian users with SilentCryptoMiner.
Kaspersky researchers discovered a mass malware campaign spreading SilentCryptoMiner by disguising it as a tool to bypass internet restrictions. While investigating the increased use of Windows Packet Divert (WPD) tools by crooks to distribute malware under this pretense, the researchers spotted the campaign.
Threat actors distribute malware in archives with fake installation instructions, urging users to disable security tools to allow their execution. Using this social engineering trick, threats like stealers, RATs, Trojans, and crypto miners can persist undetected. Common malware families include NJRat, XWorm, Phemedrone, and DCRat.
The malware campaign is infecting users with a miner disguised as a DPI bypass tool. The attackers modified a popular tool that is available on GitHub. Kaspersky already identified over 2,000 victims in Russia, but the true number may be higher. A YouTuber with 60,000 subscribers unknowingly helped spread the malware, linking to a malicious archive in videos that amassed 400,000 views before the link was removed.
Attackers used the malicious site gitrok[.]com to distribute an infected archive, which had over 40,000 downloads. They also manipulated YouTubers by falsely claiming copyright strikes, threatening channel shutdowns unless they posted videos with malicious links. A Telegram channel and a popular YouTube account with 340,000 subscribers also spread the malware. By December 2024, reports emerged of further miner-infected versions spreading via Telegram and YouTube.
The discovered infected archives contained an additional executable, with a modified start script tricking victims into disabling antivirus protections. The first-stage malware is a Python-based loader that was packed with PyInstaller and sometimes obfuscated using PyArmor. It fetched a second-stage payload from hardcoded domains, executing it as t.py in a temporary folder. The payload was only accessible from Russian IPs, suggesting a targeted attack on Russian users.
“The downloaded di.exe is a SilentCryptoMiner sample based on the open-source miner XMRig. This is a covert miner able to mine multiple cryptocurrencies (ETH, ETC, XMR, RTM and others) using various algorithms. For stealth, SilentCryptoMiner employs process hollowing to inject the miner code into a system process (in this case, dwm.exe).” reads the report published by Kaspersky. “The malware is able to stop mining while the processes specified in the configuration are active. It can be controlled remotely via a web panel.”
“The miner can prevent the execution in a virtualized environment and verify its file size (680-800 MB) to ensure it was executed by the intended loader. Its configuration is Base64-encoded and encrypted with AES-CBC. The miner halts when specific monitoring tools run and fetches updates every 100 minutes. It uses Pastebin to store its configuration, with multiple accounts distributing the malicious files.” concludes the report. “The topic of restriction bypass tools is being actively exploited to distribute malware. The above campaign limited itself to distributing a miner, but threat actors could start to use this vector for more complex attacks, including data theft and downloading other malware. This underscores once again that, while such tools may look enticing, they pose a serious threat to user data security.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says he has a singular mission. “Your job [as secretary] is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone. Everything else that distracts from that shouldn’t be happening,” he said during his confirmation process. Since taking the helm at the Pentagon, Hegseth has doubled down. “We do warfighting here at the Department of Defense,” he said at a Pentagon town hall, demanding a “laser focus on readiness, lethality, and warfighting.”
Not everyone at the Defense Department seems to have gotten the message. Right now, the U.S. military is looking to pour money into the renovation of 35 golf course sand traps at the Woodlawn Golf Course at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Contracting documents show that Air Force Special Operations Command also wants to purchase sterile mushroom compost for the golf course greens at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico. It is also looking into hydroseeding at that same course. The Army, for its part, plans to issue a service contract that will cover maintenance in the golf course clubhouse at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York.
What golf has to do with lethality is a question that the Defense Department failed to answer. Nor would the Pentagon weigh in on the hundreds of millions of dollars wrapped up in, or swallowed up by, military golf courses over decades. The Pentagon did not provide a full tally of its current inventory of golf courses, which The Intercept put at around 145. What is clear is that critics have been raising alarms about the military’s golf obsession for at least 60 years, and, despite claims of a new dawn at the Pentagon, putting-green pork is still par for the course.
“The military shouldn’t be in the golf resort business.”
“The military shouldn’t be in the golf resort business,” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending.
The courses instead tend to serve a clientele of military retirees and dependents. Some are open to public membership. Service members, he said, are seldom primary beneficiaries. “They don’t have the spare time to go golfing for hours during the week,” Murphy said.
Even at a time of rampant cost-cutting across the federal government — including calls from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency to cut as many as 80,000 jobs from the Department of Veterans Affairs — the U.S military’s golf habit is not on chopping block.
“This is reflective of a broader disconnect between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and its actions, particularly when it comes to Pentagon spending,” Murphy said. “Just like you don’t pour money into sand traps if your goal is defense, you don’t give Congress the go-ahead to boost Pentagon spending by $100 billion if your goal is to cut wasteful spending at the Pentagon.”
Critics have called out the Pentagon on its golf courses for at least six decades. In 1965, the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) cited the Pentagon for spending almost $2 million on land to build an 18-hole golf course at Fort Gordon (now Fort Eisenhower), Georgia, when there was already a nine-hole course at the base. The agency said the property should be sold off.
Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis., said in 1975 that the $14 million a year spent on the Defense Department’s 300 courses, including 19 in foreign countries, was a “waste of the taxpayers money.” He complained that the funds came “directly out of the defense budget.” It took until the late 1980s for Congress to finally curb the use of such appropriated funds for military golf courses.
In the decades since, the Pentagon’s golf courses — run by the military’s Morale, Welfare, and Recreation as well as Marine Corps Community Services programs — have shrunk in number. The Intercept counted about 145 golf courses, although this is something of an understatement. The Army owns 54 separate golf courses, and while some are just nine holes, many others have the standard 18 holes and still others boast 27 or even 36 holes. The Intercept also counted 51 courses for the Air Force, 29 for the Navy, and 10 for the Marine Corps.
Military courses are classified as revenue-generating programs that should provide “for a majority” of their operating expenses or be supported by other sources of revenue, such as military bowling alleys and eateries, as well as outside donations. Golf course funding is not supposed to come from congressional appropriations, and Pentagon boosters have long wielded this as a cudgel in defense of the military’s golf obsession. But critics question why such funds are used for putting greens instead of troops.
“If the Pentagon and the armed services want to raise private money to supplement support activities for members of the military,” said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, “it would be better spent bolstering services for personnel suffering from PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, and other negative consequences of serving in war zones — services that are underfunded currently.”
As with many Pentagon policies, regulations governing military golf courses aren’t as simple as they seem. For one, there are loopholes that allow golf courses “in foreign countries or isolated installations within the United States” to receive appropriated funds. This is no small matter since Defense Department golf courses dot the world.
The Air Force, alone, boasts overseas golf courses from the Alpine Golf Course at Aviano Air Base in Italy, and Hodja Lakes Golf Course at Incirlik Air Base in Türkiye, to Tama Hills Golf Resort at Yokota Air Base in Japan, and West Winds Golf Course at Kunsan Air Base in South Korea. All told, there are at least two dozen DoD courses in foreign countries, not to mention two in the U.S. island territory of Guam. And even when host nations defray the cost of upkeep, golf-related spending still raises questions about Pentagon priorities. Senate investigators found, for instance, that while Japan paid $2.9 million for golf course netting at the Army’s Camp Zama in the 2010s, the money could have been better spent on constructing a much-needed fire station on a U.S. base.
Whether military golf courses actually generate profit and conduct repairs and improvements exclusively with non-appropriated funds has also been as much aspiration as a hard and fast rule. When the General Accounting Office examined Defense Department golf courses in the 1990s, investigators found courses losing money or using taxpayer funding at 40 percent of the bases analyzed. Of 10 bases inspected, two had courses that lost $43,645 and $225,546, respectively, in a single year. Another two bases used congressionally appropriated funds for their golf courses, including maintenance of a golf clubhouse and repairs to golf course structures.
Since then, stories have regularly bubbled up about financially troubled military courses that turn out to be more boondoggle than boon. In 2013, the Pelican Point Golf Course at Florida’s Tyndall Air Force Base shut down after running an average annual deficit of $270,000 for the better part of a decade. It was the same story at Marshallia Ranch Golf Course at Vandenberg Air Force (now Space Force) Base in California. “The golf course has been losing money for nearly 10 consecutive years,” Col. J. Christopher Moss said in 2016. Silver Spruce Golf Course on Peterson Space Force Base closed in 2022 after “hemorrhaging” $1.2 million over a decade. And last year, Mesquite Grove Golf Course located on Dyess Air Force Base in Texas closed, having lost $450,000 in 2023 and $2.5 million, in total, over 14 years.
In 2017, scandal swirled around a nine-hole golf course, tucked away on the grounds of the U.S. Armed Forces Retirement Home in D.C., which had been blowing taxpayer dollars on course upkeep for a quarter-century. An investigation by Todd Weiler, then the assistant secretary of defense with oversight over the AFRH, found the agency was plagued by a “lack of financial oversight and business acumen.”
Weiler discovered that the golf course was drawing on its trust fund, which included congressionally appropriated money as well as 50-cent deductions from paychecks of military enlistees, to pay for the course’s maintenance. Due to a bureaucratic quirk — while its CEO reports to the defense secretary, the agency is technically embedded in the executive branch — the course was skirting the department regulations that are supposed to bar taxes from paying for golf. “I knew they were violating Defense Department policy, but as they are going to point out, they don’t have to abide by it,” Weiler explained at the time. “But I mean, do you need a specific law to tell you not to spend taxpayer money on a golf course?” (A 2023 GAO report found the AFRH was still financially troubled and faced a plummeting trust fund.)
In May 2018, the Air Force Academy in Colorado celebrated the opening of a new clubhouse at the Eisenhower Golf Course. Carlos Cruz-Gonzalez, the Academy’s deputy director for installations, boasted that clubhouse construction was completely covered by funds generated by Air Force Morale, Welfare, and Recreation programs. “It wasn’t paid for with tax dollars,” he said at the time. “It was built by funds from the Air Force Non-Appropriated Funds programs, generated by services such as outdoor rec, the clubs and bowling alleys.”
“Taxpayers have historically had to cover some of the costs associated with golf course renovations like these.”
The Intercept discovered a contract announcement that appears to contradict Cruz-Gonzalez’s boasts, noting that costs were paid with a mix of non-appropriated funds and appropriated operation and maintenance funds. The 16,500-square foot clubhouse, which serves two 18-hole golf courses, has two elevators, “high end commercial kitchen equipment,” locker rooms for golfers, a pro shop, and large capacity community rooms, including a banquet facility with “breathtaking views of the magnificent Rocky Mountains”; Tavern 34 Lounge, a bar serving “specialty drinks”; and The Grill, a restaurant that the Air Force says “serves up excellent breakfast and lunch fare.” All told, the facility cost more than $7 million in non-appropriated money and almost $300,000 in so-called O&M funding.
“This contract announcement confirms that taxpayers have historically had to cover some of the costs associated with golf course renovations like these. The fact that these funds are coming out of the Pentagon’s Operation and Maintenance accounts is also troubling,” said Taxpayers for Common Sense’s Murphy. “Operations and Maintenance funding is the backbone of U.S. military operations, yet each year, Congress routinely siphons money from O&M to pay for parochial increases to the Pentagon budget. It seems the Pentagon is also happy to raid O&M, at least when there’s a golf course club house on the line.”
The Air Force Academy acknowledged a request from comment from The Intercept but did not provide one prior to publication.
The Trump administrationannounced this week that hundreds of federal properties were available for sale, as part of an effort to shrink the federal real estate portfolio and the size of government. The General Services Administration, the government’s real estate arm, released a list of 443 structures and properties deemed “not core to government operations.” A GSA spokesperson said such assets cost over $430 million annually to operate and maintain. The GSA’s list of properties was, however, withdrawn a day later.
Currently, no military golf courses are up for sale on the GSA’s website. The Intercept sent questions to the GSA by email and was instructed to then “call for assistance.” The GSA’s phone systems were, however, out of order.
The Department of Government Efficiency — which boasts of achieving savings through a combination of efforts including “asset sales” — did not reply to questions about the possible sale of DoD golf courses.
Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin who retired from Congress in 2024 and is one of the most outspoken critics of the Pentagon’s mammoth property portfolio, has called for a sale of the military’s golf courses. “The Defense Department owns a property book in the hundreds of billions of dollars — and a lot of that is things like golf courses that the Pentagon does not need to own,” he said last year. “We can recycle those assets and take the savings and invest it in quality training and living conditions for our troops.”
“You don’t need to be a military strategist to understand that Pentagon-operated golf courses are not essential to national security.”
The Pentagon did not provide an estimate of the total worth of its golf courses, but The Intercept found, using recent Pentagon property data, that the costs to replace just the facilities (buildings and other structures) on five golf courses — two in Germany and one each in Japan, Korea, and Massachusetts — total more than $200 million. Add in the structures on another 140 military golf courses and factor in the cost of the land, and the value must be astronomical.
“You don’t need to be a military strategist to understand that Pentagon-operated golf courses are not essential to national security. The Pentagon should be looking at all of its infrastructure and proposing reductions to address excess capacity, which it has said rests at about 19 percent,” Murphy told The Intercept by email. “A new Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process could save taxpayers billions of dollars per year by shedding excess infrastructure, and closing the Pentagon’s golf courses should be part of that process.”
President Donald Trump walks to Marine One after golfing at Trump National Golf Club on Nov. 27, 2020, in Sterling, Va. Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Profligate spending on golf is de rigueur under President Donald Trump, who reportedly played at least 289 rounds of golf, at a cost to taxpayers of at least $150 million for travel and security, during his first term. In 2019, Trump also faced corruption allegations following reports that U.S. military personnel were frequently staying at a Trump golf resort in Scotland. He countered that he was not enriching himself, but that he was instead losing money as a result.
Trump had, by the middle of last month, already spent around $11 million in taxpayer dollars on golf this year. Each trip to his Florida country club Mar-a-Lago costs, on average, $3.4 million, including travel on Air Force One, limousines for Trump’s motorcade, and the stationing of armed boats nearby, according to a 2019 GAO report. The DoD incurred most of these costs. Ironically, Trump could save taxpayers money by playing at the many military golf courses closer to the White House, such as the two 18-hole championship golf courses at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, the Marine Corps’ Medal of Honor Golf Course in Virginia, the two championship 18-hole golf courses at the Army’s Fort Belvoir Golf Club also in Virginia, or at the Armed Forces Retirement Home course in Washington, D.C.
While critics have called out the Pentagon’s frivolous focus on golf for at least 60 years, the DoD has consistently played through. During that time, the U.S. military has been mired in losses and stalemates from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, to Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. In each conflict, the U.S. military killed far more people than it has lost on the battlefield, but in none was it able to achieve victory. Despite this, Hegseth remains obsessed with the idea of lethality at all costs. His department, however, continues to divide its attention between the battlefield and the fairway.
“Secretary Hegseth’s focus on ‘lethality, lethality, lethality’ is a very narrow view of who our military personnel are and what they should be focused on. Ideally, our military is a defensive force that is much more than just a killing machine,” said Hartung, before drawing attention to Hegseth’s recent efforts to eliminate diversity programs at the Pentagon. “If he wants to strip down what he sees as extraneous activities, it is the height of folly to eliminate programs designed to curb racism and misogyny in the ranks — which are deeply divisive when they are not dealt with — while continuing to support things like golf courses which have nothing to do with promoting his goal of a more capable fighting force.”
Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency employees spent work hours implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies throughout the agency—focusing in particular on “de-gendering” bathrooms, hiring more gay and transgender employees, and introducing new gender-neutral honorifics such as “Mx.,” according to internal agencydocuments and communications reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Under the leadership of then-EPA administrator Michael Regan, in 2021, the agency created an employee-led “DEIA implementation team” that was empowered to establish workgroups and take DEI-related actions. The goal, according to the Biden EPA, was to “embed” DEI agency-wide, create “cultural change,” and establish the agency as a DEI model for the entire federal government.
The EPA documents—which were first obtained by the watchdog group Functional Government Initiative and shared with the Free Beacon—show the EPA’s DEI initiatives were largely coordinated by its LGBTQIA+ Workgroup, which reported to senior leadership. The workgroup’s members included a scientist, environmental protection specialist, engineer, plant pathologist, climate policy analyst, attorney adviser, and research ethicist among others.
The documents are the latest evidence of how ingrained DEI efforts were at the EPA and across the entire Biden administration. President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign took aim at such efforts and, on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order dismantling all existing taxpayer-funded DEI initiatives and DEI offices. “The public release of these plans demonstrated immense public waste and shameful discrimination,” the order stated.
The agency’s DEI initiatives likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars in man-hours. The average EPA employee’s annual salary is $102,489, 42.9 percent higher than the national average for government employees, while officials known to have been involved in the initiatives were paid as much as $168,400, according to Open Payrolls.
“In the Biden years, Americans endured crisis after crisis, many of them—rampant illegal immigration, draconian COVID-19 measures, and skyrocketing fuel costs—of the president’s own making,” the Functional Government Initiative told the Free Beacon. “What was the administration instead focused on? A phony crisis of inequity, racism, and ‘transphobia,’ which could only be met by wasting vast resources on un-American, divisive initiatives.”
“Unfortunately, the EPA wasn’t alone: the rot grew across the federal government with the encouragement of the administration,” it added. “This was not presidential leadership, but rather government dysfunction.”
The EPA’s LGBTQIA+ Workgroup, meanwhile, outlined its DEI-related activities during a summit in September 2023 hosted by the left-wing group Out and Equal.
According to slides of its presentation reviewed by the Free Beacon, the group’s top recommendations for the EPA were to “de-gender” restroom and locker room access, increase participation in voluntary self-disclosure of sexual orientation and gender identity, incorporate LGBTQIA+ prospective employees into recruiting activities, add gender pronouns on email signatures, and change internal style manual requirements for gendered honorifics.
The Biden EPA’s LGBTQIA+ Workgroup highlighted its top recommendations for “priority action” during a presentation during a left-wing conference in 2023.
The workgroup noted in the presentation that it met weekly to craft its recommendations and that it informed EPA leaders in 2023 that it would not sunset as originally planned, and would continue meeting.
And the group achieved many of its objectives: Across the EPA’s 118 facilities, the group said the agency’s number of gender-neutral restrooms and gender-neutral locker rooms swelled to 140 and 15, respectively, as a result of its work. The Biden EPA also committed to constructing all-gender restrooms in future building renovations, continuing to retrofit existing restrooms, and replacing male/female signage on existing single-use restrooms with signs that are more inclusive.
The EPA workgroup added that, if it felt internal resistance to the changes, it would “educate contractors and EPA employees on why these changes are needed.”
The LGBTQAI+ workgroup’s accomplishments included expanding gender-neutral bathrooms, increasing self-identification of sexual orientation, and including the option for employees to include pronouns in email signatures.
In addition, because of the workgroup’s advocacy, the EPA added pronouns to emails, targeted specific offices where people were “misgendered” with expanded trainings, and issued an October 2023 memorandum authored by then-deputy administrator Janet McCabe allowing employees to select their preferred honorifics such as “Mx.” instead of “Mr.” or “Mrs.”
“This update also includes some very important improvements that will help advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in our writing,” McCabe wrote in the memorandum.
Then-EPA deputy administrator Janet McCabe issued a memo allowing employees to go by “Mx.” instead of “Mr.” or “Mrs.”
Since Trump took office, however, the EPA has gutted DEI and related environmental justice activities. Administrator Lee Zeldin, for example, has announced that the agency has canceledmillions of dollars in DEI spending and placed 171 DEI and environmental justice employees on administrative leave.
“The previous Administration used DEI and environmental justice to advance ideological priorities, distributing billions of dollars to organizations in the name of climate equity. This ends now,” Zeldin said last month. “We will be good stewards of tax dollars and do everything in our power to deliver clean air, land, and water to every American, regardless of race, religion, background, and creed.”
