OUR PICKSWhat Trump’s Spy Chief Pick Signals | Rules of Engagement When the Troops Appear at Polling Sites | US Plan to Combat Screwworm Involves a Lot More Flies, and more

What Trump’s Spy Chief Pick Signals  (David Ignatius, Foreign Policy)
Bill Pulte has no intelligence experience but has proved he’ll target the U.S. president’s foes.

Trump Officials Planned to Mark 2.7 Million Living People as Dead, Whistleblower Claims  (Meryl Kornfield, Washington Post)
A former Social Security executive said the plan, which was not carried out, would have used a death database to pressure immigrants to leave the country.

The US Has a Plan to Combat Screwworm. It Involves a Lot More Flies  (Emily Mullin, Wired)
Releasing sterilized flies can crash a local population of flesh-eating screwworms. But the US currently has limited capacity to produce them.

Inside Trump’s Suddenly Softened New Green Card Policy  (Lauren Kaori Gurley and Ian Duncan, Washington Post)
Big business, including tech and AI companies, launched a quiet but extensive lobbying effort against the green card policy requiring applicants to apply from abroad.

The Trump Administration’s Reckless Attack on Radiation Protection Will Have Long-Term Consequences for Public Safety  (Frank von Hippel, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
Worldwide, regulations limiting doses from the radiation emitted by nuclear fissions and decays are based on the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model. This hypothesis posits that, irrespective of whether ionizing radiation comes in a pulse or over years, the additional risk of developing cancer as a result is proportional to the cumulative amount of energy deposited per gram of tissue, with weighting risk factors for radiation type, sex, age, and specific organs.
Since 1975, the US nuclear industry has been required to limit exposures to workers and the public to “as low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA) levels. What the ALARA level should be is determined by cost-benefit analysis in which the costs of dose reductions are compared with the benefits to workers and the public, measured in terms of reduced disease and longer life expectancy.
In May 2025, four months after taking office, the Trump administration challenged this five-decade-old regulatory approach as part of an Executive Order “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission” (NRC).
The damage that will result from the evisceration of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will not be immediate and may arguably turn out to be minor on the scale of the damage the Trump administration is doing in other policy areas. But public safety analysts and decision makers must keep track of the dismantlement of regulatory structures that have been built over generations. Hopefully, it will be possible to reconstruct some of them, with improvements where possible. In the meantime, however, the attacks of the Trump administration on public safety must be exposed.

A Federal Judge Strikes Down Trump Administration Immigration Policy Affecting 39 Countries  (Michael Casey | AP, Washington Post)
A federal judge has struck down a Trump administration policy enacted after the shooting of two National Guard members that made it harder for immigrants from dozens of countries to stay and enter the country

Trump Announces $800 Million Plan to Prop Up the Struggling Coal Industry  (Evan Halper, Washington Post)
The coal subsidies would tap funds passed by Congress for clean energy. They would be used to open the first new U.S. coal plants since 2013 and keep 14 struggling facilities operating.

Rules of Engagement When the Troops Appear at Polling Sites  (Dan Maurer, Lawfare)
State election officials can mitigate the perils of federal “armed men” at the polls.