Zerohedge

Authored by Eric Lendrum via American Greatness,

On Tuesday, it was reported that the Walt Disney Company is preparing to significantly reduce the scale of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and initiatives in response to President Donald Trump’s efforts to crack down on such practices.

As reported by the Daily Caller, Disney’s Chief Human Resources Officer Sonia Coleman made the announcement in an internal memo, which was later reported on by Axios. 

Among other changes, the company will replace its “Diversity and Inclusion” performance factor with a “Talent Strategy” metric that focuses less on identity and more on business success.

Disney will also abandon its “Reimagine Tomorrow” campaign, which had touted efforts to increase “diverse representation” in media produced by Disney. 

The program aimed to see at least 50% of Disney’s characters would consist of “underrepresented groups.”

The company will also revisit disclaimer messages and content advisories that have been added onto older films.

Films such as “Peter Pan” and “Dumbo” would see such warnings appear on-screen before the start of the movie, often referring to “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of peoples or cultures.”

Now, such messages will be moved to the summary section below the media player, and will not play in the movie itself.

Back in 2023, CEO Bob Iger addressed possible changes to the company’s DEI policies, telling shareholders during an annual meeting that “our primary mission needs to be to entertain, and then through our entertainment to continue to have a positive impact on the world.”

“I’m very serious about that,” Iger emphasized. “It should not be agenda-driven, it should be entertainment-driven.”

President Trump has called for the elimination of DEI practices, pointing out that they often ignore merit in favor of arbitrary factors such as racial, gender, and sexual identity. Other companies that have reduced or eliminated DEI efforts in recent weeks include Google, Facebook, John Deere, and American Airlines.

Here we go again. Fire hazard risks are already mounting over Nvidia’s RTX 5090 after a Redditor shared images of the GPU’s wiring harness visibly melted after playing Battlefield 5. The incident has sparked memories of the RTX 4090‘s power connector failures a few years ago. 

At the start of the week, a Reddit user named /u/ivan6953 wrote in the Nvidia subreddit that the power connector on his RTX 5090 had melted while playing Battlefield 5:

I am not distant from the PC-building world and know what I’m doing. The cable was securely fastened and clicked on both sides (GPU and PSU).

I noticed the burning smell playing Battlefield 5. The power draw was 500-520W. Instantly turned off my PC – and see for yourself…

1. The cable was securely fastened and clicked.

2. The PSU and cable haven’t changed from 4090FE (which was used for 2 years). Here is the previous build: https://pcpartpicker.com/b/RdMv6h

3. Noticed a melting smell, turned off the PC – and just see the photos. The problem seems to have originated from the PSU side.

4. Loki’s 12VHPWR pins are MUCH thinner than in the 12VHPWR slot on 5090FE.

5. Current build: https://pcpartpicker.com/b/VRfPxr

I dunno what to do really. I will try to submit warranty claims to Nvidia and Asus. But I’m afraid I will simply be shut down on the “3rd party cable” part. Fuck, man

. . .

The Verge weighed in on the cable incident, noting that another user of the new graphics card also reported a burnt cable issue:

While it’s tempting to blame the MODDIY cable, Spanish YouTuber Toro Tocho has experienced the same burnt cable (both at the GPU and PSU ends) with an RTX 5090 Founders Edition while using a cable supplied by PSU manufacturer FSP. Plastic has also melted into the PCIe 5.0 power connector on the power supply. MODDIY also responded in a Reddit thread, ruling out the “possibility of a defective cable or manufacturing error” and offering to cover the cost of repair if Nvidia and Asus don’t honor their warranties.

YouTuber der8auer has also examined the Reddit poster’s equipment in person, and ruled out any form of user error in the process. He’s also found that this could be related to a current distribution problem with RTX 5090 Founders Edition models instead. Either way, nobody should be blaming 12VHPWR issues on end users.

X user chimed in:

Release a 2000$+ GPU that has a 12VHPWR which are known to have melting issues

RTX 5090 draws even more power than the RTX 4090

This amount of power draw results in a massive 150° Celsius on the 12VHPWR

Why are the cables melting? pic.twitter.com/5O2p5tBR6L

— NikTek (@NikTekOfficial) February 11, 2025

This development comes less than a month after Nvidia stated that its new RTX 50-series cards won’t melt power plugs this time: 

“It is expected that such a phenomenon will not occur in the RTX 50 series. We made some changes to the connector to respond to the issue at the time, and now, about two years later, I understand that such problems do not occur.”

This is a worrisome flashback to the RTX 4090 Founders Edition’s power cable melting incidents a couple of years ago, ultimately leading buyers to file a class-action lawsuit against the US chipmaker. 

Via OpenTheBooks substack,

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform spent today investigating how to address the crisis of improper payments made by the federal government each year. The hearing is called The War on Waste: Stamping Out the Scourge of Improper Payments.

It comes as DOGE works to create lasting efficiencies for taxpayers, and following record improper payments under the Biden administration.

BY THE NUMBERS

During fiscal year 2024, federal agencies reported $161.5 billion in improper payments – money sent to the wrong entity, for the wrong amount or wrong reason – according to data released by the Office of Management and Budget in November.

That means President Biden left office having presided over $925.7 billion in waste, fraud, abuse and duplicative payments – and that’s just what agencies were able to report.

Adjusted for inflation, the figure grows to $986.2 billion – almost a trillion dollars lost through improper payments!

That’s the worst for any president since reporting began in 2004, even when adjusting for inflation.

NOTE: Perhaps unsurprisingly, the single-year record came during the fog of Covid, as enormous amounts of cash were shoveled out quickly by Congress. Fiscal year 2021 say $281.4 billion in improper payments, which we now know includes Covid-related aid that was subject to massive fraud.

BY AGENCY

As Open the Books first reported in RealClearInvestigations, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services wasted $87 billion in improper payments, more than any other government entity. Medicare reimbursements to health providers had a 7.7% mistake rate this year, the worst since percentages were first reported in 2019.

Another $4 billion was sent to recipients who had issues regarding their citizenship, including $824 million in unemployment insurance from the Department of Labor.

The government also sent $346 million to dead people, mostly because the Office of Personnel Management continued to send benefits to retirees who are no longer alive. That’s the highest amount since at least 2021.

The Treasury Department is working to rectify the problem of payments sent to dead people, having reported it recouped $31 million in such payments in five months. 

It did so simply by gaining access to the Social Security Administration’s federal death database. It’s amazing what can happen when the left hand simply knows what the right hand is doing! That said, Open the Books has reported $3.6 billion in Covid stimulus checks went to dead people. 

As our CEO, John Hart, told FOX News, “There are miles to go before we break even.”

Other Covid-era programs continued to have some of the worst improper payment rates. 

Roughly 25%, or $2 billion, of loans forgiven under the Paycheck Protection Program this year were paid improperly.

The data was released on Wednesday afternoon, Nov. 27, the day before Thanksgiving, leaving little time for negative coverage before families began breaking bread.

For comparison, Biden leaves office with an overall mistake rate of 5.42%, slightly higher than President Trump’s 4.94% in his first term. Still, Trump presided over $846.8 billion in improper payments, adjusted for inflation as of last October.

Now, he has an opportunity to make good on the war on waste.

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) published its Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) for February, which boosted its outlook for natural gas by 20% for 2025 after a polar vortex in January led to some of the largest withdraws from underground storage in years. 

“The Henry Hub spot price averaged $4.13 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) in January and reached a daily high of $9.86/MMBtu on January 17 ahead of a cold snap that spread across the United States, leading to above-average inventory withdrawals,” EIA wrote in the STEO report. 

Here is EIA’s outlook on NatGas prices, which was revised higher: “We expect the spot price to rise through 2026, averaging almost $3.80/MMBtu in 2025, up 65 cents from our January 2025 Short-Term Energy Outlook, and reaching nearly $4.20/MMBtu in 2026.” 

This revision follows a massive cold blast across the Lower 48 in January, significantly increasing energy consumption.

Some of our reporting on the cold blast last month:  

• Ski Weather At Vail Resorts “Solid” With Above-Average Snowfall At Northeast Slopes

• Goldman: “Cold January” & “Record LNG Demand” Drive Upside Risk In Natty Prices

• Incoming: “Big Dumps Of Cold Air. Reminiscent Of 2013/14 Winter”

• Doesn’t Fit MSM Narrative: Parts Of US Could Rival Coldest January Since 1977

• Polar Vortex, Back-To-Back-To-Back Winter Storms Target Eastern Half Of US

• Extreme Cold, Snow Places Texas Power Grid & Permian On Alert

• Lower 48 Polar Blast Coldest “Since 1994” As Global Warming Alarmists Go Silent

Even a grid emergency was declared:

• PJM Grid Declares “Max Generation Alert” As Polar Vortex Unleashes Mini Ice Age

EIA explained in a separate report that last month’s cold snap led to the fourth-largest withdrawal from underground NatGas storage.

Here’s more from the report:

Colder-than-normal temperatures across much of the United States in mid-January increased natural gas consumption, resulting in the fourth-largest reported weekly withdrawal from natural gas storage in the Lower 48 states, according to our Weekly Natural Gas Storage Report (WNGSR). During the week ending January 24, 2025, stocks fell by 321 billion cubic feet (Bcf), which was nearly 70% more than the five-year (2020–24) average withdrawal for the same week in January. With withdrawals in January totaling nearly 1,000 Bcf, U.S. natural gas inventories are now 4% below their previous five-year average after being 6% above the five-year average at the start of the 2024–25 heating season, which began in November.

For the week ending January 24, the South-Central region of the United States, which accounted for approximately 35% of working gas in US storage, reported its fourth-largest withdrawal of 136 Bcf. In the East and Midwest, the regions with the next-largest storage inventories, stocks fell by 10% in the East and by 11% in the Midwest over the week. The East and Midwest are also the US regions with the most natural gas consumption in the winter to meet space heating demand.

The EIA’s STEO report also estimated that residential electricity prices would only rise 2% this year—the smallest annual rise since 2020. 

Authored by Robert Curry via RealClearPolicy,

Because common sense is the key to understanding America’s original design at every level, America was long known as “The Common Sense Nation.”   Now, President Trump and his “common sense revolution” might succeed in making America the common sense nation once again.

Unalienable rights and self-evident truths are the core ideas of the American founding. Those ideas are also the core ideas of a philosophical school known as “common sense realism,” inspired by Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and other representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment. In the words of Arthur Herman, “Common Sense Realism was virtually the official creed of the American Republic…” As historian Allen Guelzo explained in “The American Mind,” his indispensable college lecture series, “before the Civil War, every major collegiate intellectual was a disciple of Scottish common sense realism.”

The Founders were guided by the ideas and the thinking of the common sense realists. Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, especially, were thoroughly trained in common sense realism by their teachers who brought those ideas and that manner of thinking from Scotland to America.

Today, the centrality of Scottish common sense realism to the Founding of our nation and to its ongoing sense of purpose is all but unknown. The Founders would be astonished by our ignorance of the men who inspired their work. Admittedly, it has been a struggle—for more than a century, American academia has labored to obliterate the memory of what was once known by virtually every American.

Of course, academia has also been working hard to destroy “common sense” in its ordinary usage, too, insisting that men and women are arbitrarily designated categories, and that the imperative of every English professor is to support violent insurgency. As a witty friend of mine likes to say, “Say what you want about the liberal arts, but they’ve found a cure for common sense.”

Thomas Paine was the great champion of ordinary common sense at the time of the founding. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Paine’s short book Common Sense. This pamphlet was and remains the best-selling American book in publishing history, and it was read aloud in taverns and village squares.  It had a decisive influence on American public sentiment in favor of the Revolution. Paine turned the spotlight of common sense upon monarchial rule to devastating effect.

“One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it to ridicule, by giving mankind an Ass for a Lion.”

The Founders’ wild and crazy idea was that the people are sovereign. At the time, this construction was a contradiction in terms. The monarch was the sovereign. To say that the American people are sovereign was to say that the American people would rule, and that government in America would be the agent of the people. Talk about turning the world upside down! 

The Founders were true revolutionaries, believing that the people were capable of self-rule by virtue of their common sense. Today, the Progressives—whose purpose from their beginning has been to dismantle the America of the founders—often justify their claim to power by claiming that Americans do not have enough common sense to be able to rule themselves. That is a back-handed reference to the fundamental role of common sense in the Founders’ America. 

It certainly feels as if we are now engaged in a titanic struggle to determine America’s future. Perhaps the best way to understand the meaning of that struggle is to see it as an effort to restore rule by the common sense of the American people. President Trump and his common sense revolution may be precisely what patriotic Americans have longed for, and what America has long needed.

Robert Curry is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea and Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World.  Both are from Encounter Books [https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/reclaiming-common-sense/].  His articles and reviews have appeared in American Greatness, the American Thinker, the Claremont Review of Books, and the Federalist.

The US Department of Justice on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the state of New York and key officials over the state’s 2019 “Green Light” law, which has allowed thousands of illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, while blocking federal immigration and border enforcement agencies from accessing the state’s motor vehicle database.

The lawsuit, filed in US district Court in Albany, was announced by Attorney General Pam Bondi during a Wednesday press conference.

BREAKING: @AGPamBondi announces the DOJ has filed charges against the State of New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul, AG Letitia James, and DMV Commissioner Mark Schroeder.

“New York has chosen to prioritize illegal aliens over American citizens. It stops — it stops TODAY.” pic.twitter.com/YkKAPTdtyX

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) February 12, 2025

Aside from the state of NY, Governor Kathy Hochul, state Attorney General Letita James, and DMV Commissioner Mark Schroeder were named as defendants.

🚨🔥BONDI: Leakers on ICE operations will be tracked down and prosecuted:

“We will not stand for it. We will find you. We’re going to investigate it, no matter what agency it came from.”

“You will be prosecuted when we find you.” pic.twitter.com/1jDesIO2tP

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) February 12, 2025

The 2019 Driver’s License Access and Privacy Act prohibits New York sheriff’s departments and other agencies from sharing motor vehicle data with federal authorities for the purposes of immigration enforcement. It has allowed tens of thousands of migrants to obtain driver’s licenses.

Yet, as the Times Union notes, the program has been mired in fraud.

The Times Union reported in 2021 that there had been allegations of widespread cheating in the driver permit program, involving schemes to illicitly obtain driving credentials for immigrants. Many of those individuals allegedly also used the licenses to falsely prove New York residency in order to receive unemployment benefits under the state’s pandemic-era Excluded Worker Fund. The $2.1 billion program had provided unemployment benefits for a short period in 2021 for immigrants who did not qualify for regular state and federal benefits.

In December, following an investigation by multiple agencies, including the New York inspector general’s office, five men, including two immigrants who had returned to Brazil, were indicted on federal charges in Massachusetts for conspiring to apply for New York driver’s licenses for more than 1,000 undocumented immigrants who did not live in New York. 

Those charges allege the group’s conspiracy took place between November 2020 and last September, and that they typically charged customers about $1,400 to obtain a driver’s license. The scheme relied on fraudulent residency documents and falsified driving school certificates, according to the indictment.

When the law was enacted, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other Democrats said it was intended to improve public safety by ensuring that illegal immigrants are authorized to drive – with advocates remaining silent on subsequent allegations of widespread fraud.

“From a state point of view, I want to make sure the people who are driving on our roads pass a driving test. It is a public safety issue,” Cuomo insisted during a February 2020 interview.

In February 2020, former acting director of ICE, Matthew T. Albence, said that law enforcement leaders urged Cuomo and state lawmakers to restore access to NY’s motor vehicle database for ICE and the US Customs and Border Protection.

“New York has barred these two agencies, and only these two agencies, from obtaining information we need to do our jobs, and to keep you safe, and it was done purely for political purposes,” Albence said at the time. “As a 25-year law enforcement professional, it’s unfathomable that information which could be used to prevent crime or a potential terrorist attack is purposefully being withheld in this state, the same state that less than 20 years ago suffered the worst terrorist attack on American soil.”

Authored by Aaron Gifford via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Donald Trump recently put the wealthiest U.S. colleges and universities on notice: If your endowment exceeds $1 billion, prepare for an investigation.

The president said he plans to shut down what he called “illegal and immoral discrimination” conducted under the umbrella of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that involve racial or gender preferential treatment in student admission, financial aid, employment, and curricula at elite institutions.

Under a Jan. 21 executive order that cites long-standing civil rights laws, identity-based functions such as so-called antiracism training or minority hiring initiatives are prohibited. Those who don’t scrap DEI face costly repercussions.

More than 120 U.S. colleges and universities have $1 billion-plus endowments, including all Ivy League institutions and the most selective flagship state universities, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Trump advised that up to nine schools in that category will be audited in the coming months, though any American higher education institution found in violation could lose federal money for research, student financial aid, and other programs under the executive order.

“They are really worried about it—and they should be,” Steven McGuire, a senior fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, told The Epoch Times. “The federal government can do some things that are financially debilitating.”

On Jan. 30, Boston University announced that its Center for Antiracist Research, which employs 13 people, will close at the end of this academic year.

Many other schools across the country, in anticipation or response to Trump’s order or previous anti-DEI laws at the state level, have already rebranded their DEI offices with new descriptions such as “access,” “community engagement,” or “civil rights” to avoid scrutiny. Northeastern University in Boston, for example, now has an office of “Belonging.”

“Our reimagined approach centers on embracing the experiences of individuals across the global university system to maximize impact at the institutional level,” the school’s new Belonging web page states.

Louis Galarowicz, a research fellow at the National Association of Scholars, estimates that large flagship public universities in more populated states spend tens of millions on DEI departments that include investigators who investigate harassment, bias, and “microaggression” complaints.

He said schools have been quick to rebrand themselves to avoid lawsuits, let alone layoffs or program cuts.

“A faculty diversity action plan could be renamed: critical needs hiring program,” Galarowicz told The Epoch Times. “It’s just a disguise, but their purpose hasn’t changed.”

Several institutions removed official DEI statements for faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions last year, but that doesn’t mean they scrapped all race-based initiatives.

The University of Michigan, for example, still follows a five-year plan, DEI 2.0, according to its website. It details how more than a dozen major campus programs are embedded in DEI initiatives and that school leaders are advancing DEI-related ideas through “hundreds of activities.”

The University of Michigan’s Museum of Art, for five years, will dedicate itself to anti-racism efforts and prioritize exhibits that expose colonial histories. The Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning will de-emphasize singular Western historical narratives and center on the global south and historically marginalized populations. The Center for Academic Innovation is responsible for identifying academic performance disparities by race and recommending curriculum changes for “fostering equitable outcomes,” according to the DEI 2.0 plan.

The University of Michigan, with an undergraduate acceptance rate of about 17 percent and an endowment of $19 billion, is a leading academic research institution. The federal government is its primary sponsor for research and provided more than $1.4 billion last year, according to the school’s 2024 financial report. Under Trump’s executive order, the school stands to lose that amount if it doesn’t discontinue DEI 2.0.

The University of Michigan did not reply to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.

Harvard University eliminated its DEI pledge for hiring last year, but it still maintains a well-staffed Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging and has a diversity administrator for each of its 12 schools. It also maintains a Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Academy with workshops on Understanding Unconscious Bias, Power and Privilege, Microaggressions, and Anti-Black Racism, according to its website.

Harvard, with a $50 billion endowment and a 3.5 percent undergraduate acceptance rate, received $686 million for research last year from the federal government, according to its 2024 financial report.

Harvard did not reply to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.

The University of Colorado Boulder’s Critical Needs Hiring Program, though it no longer has diversity in the title, is still centered around recruiting “BIPOC” (black, indigenous, and people of color), according to hundreds of memos from that office obtained and publicized by the National Association of Scholars. That school, with an endowment of about $2 billion, received more than $1 billion in federal grants last year, according to its 2024 financial report.

Read the rest here…

For much of the past few months we had watched in stunned amazement as the world’s most overvalued and censored website, not to mentioned favorite haunt of woke and recently laid off deep state communists and various other radical liberals, saw its price rise by a multiple of 2025 revenue every single day (rising as high as 31 turns of 2025 revenue)…

Reddit is now trading at 28x 2025 revenue https://t.co/k9cUwHm5IT

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 4, 2025

Reddit is now trading at 29x 2025 revenue https://t.co/cFvratd7D2

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 5, 2025

Reddit now trading at 31x 2025 revenue.

It goes up by one turn every day. https://t.co/QLA9RgyWq9

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 7, 2025

… and not all the stupid explanations – it will be used by chatGPT scanners for its content, it is growing faster than X, it should be valued at a multiple of 2026 EBITDA… and we actually aren’t even joking about that, Deutsche Bank really said the stock was cheap because it was trading at only 60x 2026 EBITDA…

… made a shred of sense to explain what was clearly a bubble.

Well, that bubble just popped after hours when the company reported results that were slightly better than estimates, but missed on the all important daily active users, which promptly imploded the unlimited growth story that the narrative has been pushing here.

Here is what the company just reported for Q4:

• Revenue $427.7 million, estimate $405.5 million
  • Advertising rev. $394.5 million, estimate $367.3 million
  • Other revenue $33.2 million, estimate $36.1 million
     
• Adjusted Ebitda $154.3 million, estimate $128.7 million
• Net income $71 million, estimate $46.9 million
   
• Average rev. per user $4.21, estimate $3.91
  • US average rev. per user $7.04, estimate $6.35
  • International average rev. per user $1.67, estimate $1.50
• Free cash flow $89.2 million.

That was the good part, here is the bad: it took a lot of spending to push up the company’s revenues to the desired range

• R&D expenses $188.6 million, estimate $174 million

And here is the ugly: the company missed badly on the number of daily users.

• Daily active users 101.7 million, missing the estimate 103.81 million
  • US daily active users 48 million, missing the  estimate 51.52 million
  • International daily active users 53.7 million, beating estimates of 51.84 million

Worse, while low-ARPU international users continued to grow in Q4, US users actually declined in Q4 from 48.2 million to 48.0 million. So much for the growth case (and that’s even with millions of deep staters laid off thanks to DOGE).

Reddit said user growth slowed after Google made a change to its algorithm that impacted search traffic. The forum-based site had benefited from deals that surface Reddit results in search engines, including Google and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Over the past few years, Google has accounted for as much as 50% of Reddit’s traffic in a single day, making the social media site susceptible to changes in Google’s search engine.

And sure enough, realizing that it had helped blow a huge Reddit bubble, Google changed its algo, Reddit user growth not only slumped, but in the case of the US, it posted its first decline in over a decade.

Commenting on the results, Bloomberg said that RDDT plunged after the slow down in Q4 user growth was seen as “a sign the newly public company is struggling to keep up with larger digital advertising peers Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.”

And sure enough, RDDT shares cratered as much as 20% after hours, but it has a long way to drop as the stock has increased more than sixfold since it went public last March, and had already jumped more than 30% this year, significantly outpacing the broader market. It’s been one of the best performing stocks to go public since the market for IPOs began to slow in 2022. Unfortunately, now that US growth has peaked and is declining, the growth case is over and there will be a lof of pain as the company find its new fair value some 70% lower…

 

Authored by Rudy Blalock via The Epoch Times,

NASA said Tuesday they have revised their strategy in order to expedite the homecoming of two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station (ISS), the space agency said on Feb. 11.

Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been aboard the space station for eight months, are now slated to return to Earth in mid-March—two weeks earlier than the previously anticipated late March or April timeframe, according to NASA.

The change in plans involves SpaceX altering its capsule assignments for upcoming missions.

“Human spaceflight is full of unexpected challenges,” Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said in a statement released by the agency.

The extended stay of Williams and Wilmore stems from a series of setbacks that began in June 2024. Initially, the pair was scheduled to return after a brief June 5 test flight aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule. 

However, the Starliner experienced major issues during the flight, including helium leaks and problems with its reaction control thrusters, as it approached the ISS.

The issues led to NASA’s decision to return the Starliner to Earth without crew members, leaving Williams and Wilmore safe but stranded on the ISS.

“Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest and most routine. A test flight, by nature, is neither safe, nor routine,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson stated at the time.

The situation was further complicated when SpaceX and NASA said they would delay the launch of the replacement astronaut crew to late March 2025 due to necessary preparations for flight of a new capsule, which would have extended Williams and Wilmore’s mission even further without the revisions now in place.

With additional work still needed on the new capsule, NASA has now opted for an older SpaceX capsule for the next crew launch, to bring Williams and Wilmore home earlier, weather permitting on March 12. This capsule had previously been assigned to a private mission organized by Axiom Space, featuring astronauts from Poland, Hungary, and India. As a result of NASA’s decision, the Axiom mission has been postponed to a later date, potentially still within the spring season.

Returning with Williams and Wilmore are NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who were selected to join the pair on the ISS in September 2024, where they have been preparing for their return mission together.

The replacement crew to take over duties at the ISS after a week-long handover period will include two NASA astronauts, as well as one astronaut from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and one Roscosmos cosmonaut.

This latest adjustment comes just two weeks after NASA announced it was working “expeditiously” to bring Williams and Wilmore back as soon as possible. The announcement followed a request by President Donald Trump for SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to speed up the astronauts’ return.

A group of eight federal inspectors general has sued the Trump administration after they were ousted from their jobs last month.

The IGs claim that their firings – which came in the form of a two-sentence email, were illegal because they violated a federal law requiring the White House to inform Congress with 30 days’ notice, and provide “substantive rationale” for the firings, according to their 32-page  complaint filed on Wednesday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia – where we’re guessing they’ll find a sympathetic judge.

The plaintiffs are eight of the 17 Senate-confirmed inspectors general who were fired just four days into President Donald Trump’s second term in what the White House cited as “changing priorities.” They are seeking their jobs back at the departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, Education, Agriculture, Labor and State, and the Small Business Administration.

“IGs must be watchdogs, not lapdogs,” reads the complaint, which names the Trump-appointed leaders or interim acting heads of each agency as defendants, according to the Washington Post.

“Plaintiffs’ purported removals have sent shockwaves and a massive chilling effect through the IG community,” the complaint continues, adding that they “have been sent a message that non-partisanship and truth-telling will not be tolerated. That message will have the effect of intimidating the [inspector general] workforce and thus chill their critical work for the American people.”

The fired IGs who joined the lawsuit are; Rob Storch (Defense), Michael Missal (VA), Christi Grimm (HHS), Sandra Bruce (Education), Phyllis Fong (Agriculture), Larry Turner (Labor), Cardell Richardson (State) and Hannibal “Mike” Ware (SBA).

Only two cabinet-level watchdogs were spared their jobs – those at Homeland Security and the DOJ, after the Tuesday firing of another IG; USAID’s IG Paul Martin, a Biden appointee. Martin was fired after his office issued a blistering report slamming the Trump administration for ‘hobbling’ USAID’s mission (to enrich corrupt politicians and influence the news?), and shrinking its staff.

The Wednesday complaint also claims that Trump has yet to communicate his intention to remove the watchdogs to Congress, in writing or otherwise, using any “substantive rationale for the removal of any IG — let alone the required detailed and case-specific reasons.”

“His only public explanation came during a press gaggle on January 25 … when he stated, ‘I don’t know them … but some people thought that some were unfair, some were not doing their job,’ and falsely asserted that ‘it’s a very standard thing to do.”

“The President did not identify the ‘people’ who supposedly ‘thought’ these things, which IGs any such thoughts pertained to, or how the unidentified IGs supposedly “were not doing their job,” the complaint continues.