‘Meta owes us an explanation,’ group says as organizers fear censorship after account goes dark for several hours
The coalition leaders behind nationwide pro-democracy protests that have drawn millions of Americans to the streets in recent years were frustrated when its Instagram account was temporarily shut down during its latest demonstration on Saturday.
The No Kings movement’s account went dark for several hours while protests focused on increasing early voter turnout were underway, sparking censorship fears.
Ex-president urges Americans to defend congresswoman, saying ‘there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her’
Former US president Barack Obama condemned comments by Donald Trump’s “border czar” that the Republican presidential administration could “of course” strip Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar of her citizenship and deport her.
Obama wrote Sunday morning, on X, that “the full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president.”
DUBAI, Oct 18 (Reuters) – Iran’s offer to the United States to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days is still on the table, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told Iranian media...
Mike Huckabee calls for arrest and prosecution of those responsible as Heidi Levine, 63, recovers in hospital in Israel
The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has denounced the settler attack that left the Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine badly beaten and needing surgery as a “despicable act of terror” and called for the arrest and prosecution of those responsible.
Levine, 63, an award-winning journalist who lives in Israel, was set upon last Friday by masked Israeli settlers who used clubs and other weapons to attack Palestinian people attempting to harvest their olives in occupied West Bank towns.
The string of sharp queries, some from voters who said they had supported him and President Donald Trump, previewed the rocky path Vance may face trying to answer for the administration's record if he runs for president himself in 2028.
Two people killed and at least 17 injured as Russia and Ukraine continue to trade strikes on power infrastructure
Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday thanked the Trump administration for resuming intelligence sharing between the two countries, but maintained the US had intentionally throttled its Starlink satellite internet access so that Donald Trump could send a “message” in his ongoing feud with the Ukrainian president.
In an interview on NBC, Zelenskyy said the US had “unblocked” intelligence on impending Russian ballistic missile strikes, which have pounded the country’s energy infrastructure as winter draws in.
Two people killed and at least 17 injured as Russia and Ukraine continue to trade strikes on power infrastructure
Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday thanked the Trump administration for resuming intelligence sharing between the two countries, but maintained the US had intentionally throttled its Starlink satellite internet access so that Donald Trump could send a “message” in his ongoing feud with the Ukrainian president.
In an interview on NBC, Zelenskyy said the US had “unblocked” intelligence on impending Russian ballistic missile strikes, which have pounded the country’s energy infrastructure as winter draws in.
America's interminable war with Iran has killed thousands, disrupted commerce that flows through the Strait of Hormuz, and raised prices on the home front.
But there may be one silver lining. In an attempt to lower gas prices that spiked because of the war, the Trump administration has repeatedly issued waivers of the Jones Act, a century-old law that requires all goods moved between American ports to be carried on American-built, American-crewed ships.
With the law (temporarily) not being enforced, commerce has exploded.
Just look at how much propane has been shipped from the mainland United States to Puerto Rico, says Colin Grabow, a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute and perhaps the nation's foremost advocate for abolishing the Jones Act.
America is one of the world's leading producers and exporters of propane, but the lack of Jones Act–compliant ships capable of carrying gas means that it has been nearly impossible to ship propane from the mainland to outlying parts of the country. In the past, Puerto Rico has imported gas from Nigeria, Chile, and elsewhere because those deliveries don't have to comply with the Jones Act.
For years, libertarians have argued that the Jones Act unfairly impoverishes American consumers and businesses that want to buy and sell things within the same country in order to artificially inflate the price of moving those things across water. Waiving the law seems to have proven that point: There are plenty of ships capable of moving gas and oil around the country as long as the government gets out of the way.
"The instant the Jones Act no longer applied to energy shipments, mainland propane displaced foreign imports, suggesting it had been the cheapest option all along," says Grabow.
Puerto Rico is hardly the only winner.
The Jones Act waivers are offering a glimpse into a world where the law doesn't exist. From March through mid-August, there had been 210 voyages completed that otherwise would have been deemed unlawful without the waivers, according to an analysis of Maritime Administration data by the Institute for Energy Research.
It's a world where American oil and natural gas can be more easily shipped from the Gulf Coast to New England, which had previously been importing energy from Russia and Europe. Another big winner is California, which had been importing gasoline from as far away as the Bahamas because it was nearly impossible to legally ship gas from Texas or Alaska to the West Coast.
President Donald Trump reupped the Jones Act waiver in mid-May. Another extension, issued in August, will last for 90 days but applies only to ships carrying energy products such as gas and oil. Before that waiver expires in November, lawmakers ought to kill the Jones Act permanently.
There is some irony in the fact that one of Trump's most successful policy maneuvers has paused a protectionist law that limited commerce, when so much else of his economic policy has been focused on erecting barriers to trade. It's also amusing that it was a war in the Middle East—something Trump pledged to avoid—that triggered this change.
Still, the proof is in the shipping. The free traders were right all along.
Move comes after Trump administration announced restrictions that could slash water supplies
Arizona has joined Nevada in its legal battle against the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to their shares of the shrinking Colorado River.
The move comes after the interior department announced restrictions this summer that could slash the water supplied to lower basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – over the next two years depending on the river’s condition.
Federal officer slammed vehicle into a construction worker while pursuing a man who died in similar circumstances
A federal officer slammeda vehicle into a Houston construction worker and broke his leg, believing him to be a man who apparently died years ago, the dead man’s family said on Friday, further calling into question the account given by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The worker, 48-year-old Miguel Parra Hernandez of Mexico, remains hospitalized with multiple leg fractures and needs reconstructive ankle surgery, according to FIEL, a Houston-based immigration advocacy group. At a news conference on Friday, the group said the alleged suspect’s family had shared documentation proving his death.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described Donald Trump’s decision to roll back sanctions on Russia as a “reward” for Vladimir Putin and warned it will embolden the Russian leader and intensify the Kremlin’s war, as Moscow launched one of its worst strikes yet on Ukraine’s power plants in an attempt to black out the country’s cities before winter.
The Ukrainian president also said he expected the Trump administration to lift more sanctions against Russia in the future and called for Europe to establish its own negotiations with Moscow as the US has sought better ties and business deals with the Kremlin.
Minnesota lawmaker’s attorneys asked for return of seized items and the preservation of any recordings of search
Ilhan Omar’s attorneys have asked the US Department of Justice to return property that federal agents removed days earlier from her home during a search.
The lawyers for the Minnesota Democrat contended that the seizure as “neither justified nor lawful”, according to a letter that the Associated Press reported on Friday.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described Donald Trump’s decision to roll back sanctions on Russia as a “reward” for Vladimir Putin and warned it will embolden the Russian leader and intensify the Kremlin’s war, as Moscow launched one of its worst strikes yet on Ukraine’s power plants in an attempt to black out the country’s cities before winter.
The Ukrainian president also said he expected the Trump administration to lift more sanctions against Russia in the future and called for Europe to establish its own negotiations with Moscow as the US has sought better ties and business deals with the Kremlin.
Setting aside the jokes about the shortness of Katie Zacharia’s tenure as White House press secretary, the controversy over her claim to be a lawyer obscures a more damaging issue. For years, she promoted some of the most heinous and bizarre conspiracy theories bubbling up from the right-wing swamp. Simply put: Zacharia was ousted for the wrong reason. Her embrace of extreme and downright loony assertions amount to a much stronger basis for dismissal than her bogus lawyer claim.
Zacharia’s social media history suggests a worldview colored by baseless thinking, defamatory accusations and sinister fantasies — not exactly a good look for someone tasked with conveying the U.S. president’s policies and actions to the press and public with authority and integrity. The noxiousness of her posts and reposts was apparently evident even to her, since she deleted many of them before her new role was announced.
According to reporting by CNN, the Bulwark and the newsletter Popular Information, Zacharia has repeatedly accused people, particularly Democrats, of sexually molesting children. In April 2022, she reposted and later deleted a Truth Social post from “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander: “Democrats want to mask and rape your children. That’s their satanic platform.”
She repeatedly referred to Democratic operative and former White House chief of staff John Podesta as a “pedo,” apparently still connecting him to an outrageous child-abuse conspiracy theory that had been debunked years earlier. She later paid tribute to the late Robert David Steele, a conspiracist who claimed that children were being kidnapped and sent to a colony on Mars: “He was exposing the pedo rings of the elite cabal,” Zacharia wrote. “May he Rest in Peace and the work of his hands not have been in vain.” In another Truth Social post, she noted that “the radical left Hollywood elites are sick pedo cannibals.” She added, “Change my mind.”
If Trump does indeed find another role for Zacharia in his administration, questions should be asked.
Another of Zacharia’s reposts suggested that Joan Rivers’ death in 2014 was somehow connected to an insulting crack the comedian once made about the Obamas: “Remember that time Joan Rivers said Obama was gay and Michelle had a dick then suddenly died?”
This wasn’t the output of a mischievous teen troll; Zacharia’s controversial deleted posts and reposts date from as recently as 2022. By then, Zacharia was in her late 30s and had been employed in various senior communications roles, including most recently as an adviser to Truth Social, the Trump-owned social media platform.
Zacharia’s deleted posts on political issues were problematic for another reason. For instance, she re-posted and deleted a tweet accusing the Justice Department of covering up the crimes of people involved in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, an opinion at odds with the administration she was tapped to speak for. Last year, she advocated suspending habeas corpus — the fundamental right to challenge detention in court — for migrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an extreme and authoritarian measure. (Zacharia’s legal theory, if any, was that the Constitution justifies denial of this right in cases of rebellion or invasion.)
In its article Tuesday on this social media activity, CNN reported that neither Zacharia nor White House communications director Steven Cheung directly addressed the issue. In a statement, CNN reported, Cheung called her “uniquely qualified” and “whip smart to help inform the American people.” The White House responded to Popular Information’s request for comment by referring it “to the President’s TRUTH on Katie,” a post in which Trump praised Zacharia as “a loyal and brilliant supporter, right from the beginning.” Zacharia wasn’t asked about these posts in interviews with three conservative outlets, including Fox News, between Thursday and her ousting Friday.
Clearly, the safe space couldn’t last. Trump apparently realized that if she ever assumed the podium again, Zacharia would inevitably face a barrage of questions about herself. That, too, is problematic: A press secretary shouldn’t be the story. But Zacharia’s history of hair-raising statements rightly made her one.
The lawyergate bubble burst in just five days. On Thursday, in an interview with right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec — himself a noted purveyor of conspiracy theories — Zacharia acknowledged that she didn’t pass the California bar exam. On advice from legal experts, she said, she decided that it was proper to call herself a lawyer but not an “attorney.” She said much the same to the New York Times, which reported on Thursday that she had identified herself on LinkedIn as general counsel to a group led by a Trump loyalist. In the wake of a CNN report Thursday that Zacharia had shared at least 15 social media posts over the past two years in which she referred to herself as an attorney, she told Sean Hannity that those were retweets of a title she had been given — but she was out shortly after lunchtime Friday.
But if Trump does indeed find another role for Zacharia in his administration, questions should be asked. Among them: Did she really think Hollywood “elites” engaged in pedophilia and cannibalism? How did she come by this knowledge, and who are the individuals who’ve engaged in these repulsive crimes? Is the Justice Department still covering up Epstein’s crimes? Does she truly believe there’s a lost colony of kidnapped children on Mars? As press secretary, there was no way Zacharia could keep the public focus on war, the economy, healthcare and the midterm elections while also defending a conspiracy about Joan Rivers’ death. But a less prominent position doesn’t moot the questions that should be asked if Zacharia is drawing a taxpayer-funded salary.
For Trump, media controversy may be on brand. The White House’s most recent top spokesperson had been a font of misinformation, outrageous “theories” and mortifying lies. In view of her boss’ track record, that may not be a bug or even a feature. It may be why Zacharia got the job in the first place.
Katie Zacharia came under scrutiny for her legal credentials shortly after her first press briefing on Tuesday.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
President Donald Trump chose Katie Zacharia to serve as the new White House press secretary.
After five days, a White House official said that she is "transitioning out" of the role.
Zacharia is among three other former press secretaries with tenures lasting under two months.
Katie Zacharia's first briefing as President Donald Trump's press secretary was on Tuesday. By Friday, the White House confirmed she was out.
The record five-day tenure came after days of missteps by Zacharia, and amid two watchdog groups filing complaints with the State Bar of California on Wednesday, asking it to investigate whether she violated California law by calling herself a lawyer.
While the longest-serving press secretary was Stephen Early, who held the post for 12 years under Franklin D. Roosevelt, only four press secretaries have lasted under two months.
Here's a closer look at White House press secretaries with the shortest tenures.
Katie Zacharia
Katie Zacharia served as press secretary under Donald Trump for five days.
Samuel Corum/Pool/FTWP
Katie Zacharia made her White House press briefing debut on Tuesday and quickly came under intense scrutiny over her legal credentials.
Shortly after Tuesday's briefing, she was asked which state she passed the bar exam in and replied: "When I moved to China."
On Thursday in an interview with right-wing provocateur Jack Posobiec, Zacharia said she took the bar exam but failed, and never retook it.
Zacharia moved to China after earning her law degree in 2011, and told Posobiec she had already preregistered for the bar exam before moving to Beijing, where her husband was working at an American private equity firm.
"I didn't want to withdraw from that," Zacharia said of the bar exam. "And we knew we would be moving out to China, and I was obviously incredibly distracted and overwhelmed and excited for finally being married to someone who I had been long-distance from for at least a year."
She served as press secretary between October 12 and October 16.
Stephen Early
Stephen Early served as Franklin D. Roosevelt's press secretary for 12 years. He briefly served as acting press secretary under Harry S. Truman in December 1950 for 14 days.
Original Caption
Stephen Early is both the longest-serving press secretary in US history and the press secretary with the second-shortest tenure.
He was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's press secretary for 12 years, from 1933 to March 1945.
Early then briefly returned as acting press secretary under President Harry S. Truman in December 1950 after the death of press secretary Charles Ross.
Early was in the position for 14 days, from December 5 to December 18, 1950.
Jerald TerHorst
Gerald TerHorst served as press secretary under President Gerald Ford for 31 days.
UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Jerald TerHorst served as President Gerald Ford's press secretary for over one month, from August 9 to September 8, 1974.
He resigned in protest of Ford's pardon of former President Richard Nixon following the Watergate scandal.
TerHorst said he could not defend Ford's decision in good conscience, despite his long-standing friendship with the president.
Jonathan Daniels
Jonathan Daniels (far left) served as press secretary under both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman for 48 days.
Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
Jonathan Daniels served a short tenure as press secretary at the end of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency and at the beginning of Harry S. Truman's.
That brings his tenure to 48 days, from March 29 to May 15, 1945.
He was appointed shortly before Roosevelt's death and stayed on temporarily to help Truman transition into the presidency.
Truman then selected Charles Ross as Daniels' replacement.
Katie Zacharia left her White House press secretary job after five days. Anthony Scaramucci, who also had a short tenure in the Trump administration in 2017.
Dustin Chambers/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Katie Zacharia left her White House press secretary job after five days.
Anthony Scaramucci can relate.
The internet is awash with memes that measured Zacharia's run in "Scaramuccis."
Katie Zacharia’s run as White House press secretary lasted five days, and memes about her exit are rolling in.
There is someone who can relate: Anthony Scaramucci, whose brief stint as Trump’s White House communications director in July 2017 became a pop-culture unit of time — a “Scaramucci,” or “Mooch” — for measuring short-lived political appointments.
Scaramucci held the role for roughly 10 days — six if not including the time lapsed between Trump's announcement and his first day — before Trump fired him.
Scaramucci has been following Zacharia's journey closely and, in a series of tweets, has gone from wishing her well to offering advice.
It started on Thursday, when Scaramucci placed his bet that Zacharia would "make it."
Dear @katiezacharia — speaking as the world's leading expert on short White House tenures: turn off the news and go enjoy your family. In time you’ll realize that the Universe did you a major favor.
Workers have long been told to stay in a job for at least a year to avoid looking uncommitted to future employers. A string of short stints can still raise eyebrows, but the dates on a résumé don’t always tell the whole story.
Leadership consultants have previously told Business Insider that quick moves that come with more responsibility and opportunities to build skills can strengthen a résumé, in which quick changes in roles could be seen as a sign of ambition and adaptability rather than instability.
Zacharia succeeded Karoline Leavitt, who left in August to spend more time with her young children. She became Trump’s sixth press secretary across his two terms, and the fourth to last less than a year.
While there is helpful career advice out there for Zacharia, a LinkedIn profile picture of Zacharia with the infamous "#Opentowork" tag has also taken off on X. The tweet was originally posted by the Democrats' official account.
The green tag itself has been a much-debated topic on the professional networking platform.
Some recruiters have previously told Business Insider that the label is the "biggest red flag" to hiring managers because it suggests "desperation." Data from 2024, however, show that workers with the public green tag receive 40% more messages from LinkedIn Recruiter than those who use only the private signal.
President Donald Trump on Thursday called off plans to livestream the December 3 military execution of Nidal Hasan after the announcement generated widespread disgust.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last week that the U.S. government would livestream the firing-squad execution of Hasan, a former Army major who shot and killed 13 people at the Fort Hood Army base in 2009. A court-martial jury sentenced Hasan to death in 2013.
It would have been the first public execution in the United States since a hanging in Missouri in 1937, though the last well-known public execution occurred a year earlier in Kentucky. Rainey Bethea, a black man, was hanged before a crowd of roughly 20,000 people in Owensboro. Kentucky became the last state to outlaw public executions two years later.
The plan to livestream Hasan's execution drew comparisons to the Taliban. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called it "a barbaric promotion of a culture of death." Writing at The Lamp, an orthodox Catholic journal, Matthew Walther noted that it would be the "first ever government-sanctioned snuff film in American history."
However, Trump and Hegseth didn't trip over just liberal and religious pieties, but a deep-rooted American aversion to bloody displays of state power that goes back to the colonial era.
Lynn Novick, the director of Ken Burns' upcoming PBS documentary series Crime and Punishment in America, tells Reason that public executions "haven't been a regular part of American life since the Colonial time in the early years of the Republic, and there's really good reasons for that."
One of American colonists' many complaints about oppressive British rule was England's expansive criminal code, known derisively as the "bloody code" because it contained more than 200 capital crimes.
"In Colonial America, [an execution] was an everyday occurrence," Novick says. "There were executions all the time, and one of our scholars told us that most people would have seen someone executed in their lifetime."
Excessive capital punishment also ran contrary to emerging theories by leading Enlightenment thinkers that punishment should be proportional to the crime and not driven by revenge or bloodlust.
Perhaps more importantly, public executions were disorderly affairs that, rather than reinforce the power of the state, inflamed the passions of the mob to a dangerous degree. "In many cases, crowds would become very boisterous, riotous, angry, excited," Novick says. "There were sometimes violent outbursts at these events."
As a result, many of the Founding Fathers saw frequent public executions as disruptive to the fragile social order. The early American republic's move away from sanguinary spectacle was driven by a desire to create a stable, virtuous citizenry and sever itself from the European continent's tradition of public torture and execution.
As Reason described in a recent cover story, the result of this was the invention of the American penitentiary in the early 1800s, which was sold as a humane and rehabilitative replacement for the whipping post and gallows.
States transitioned from public to private hangings behind their newly built prison walls in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before switching to the use of the electric chair. This was not done out of entirely humanitarian concerns, especially in the South, where public executions often became quasi-religious ceremonies, with the condemned declaring their ultimate victory over death (and the state) through Jesus Christ.
"Executions had contested meanings," Michael Ayers Trotti wrote in The End of Public Execution. "They were moments of justice, of state power; but they were also moments of religion, exceptional moments that transcended normal life."
The main reason that public executions disappeared over the long term, though, is obvious to anyone who's not a sociopath: It's weird and dehumanizing to gather in a crowd to watch someone else be killed, to participate in the government's promotion of its power to take a human life.
Rachel Abbott, who witnessed Bethea's 1936 hanging when she was 5 years old, told WKU Public Radio in 2016 that she had nightmares about it years later.
"I remember it well, but I didn't want to," she said. "I tried to get away from it because it was hurting me so bad. I started having me nightmares after I was older. It's like his spirit was just hanging all around me. The first thing you'd know I'd start crying because I felt he wanted me to help him get buried, get sent back to his gravesite by his father. I still have tears running when I think of it."
Three senior House Republicans are calling on the Department of Homeland Security to revoke special inspection privileges granted to vessels operated by Chinese state-owned shipping giant COSCO, citing allegations that...
As the Trump administration's short-lived Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project implemented its plan to downsize the federal workforce, there was much wailing from the liberal institutions in Washington, D.C.
Federal employee unions filed lawsuits to block the effort. NPR ran profiles of federal workers who, for the first time, faced the prospect of potentially not having absolute job security forever. The Brookings Institution wondered how many jobs the federal government could shed before it crashes.
The answer: plenty. The Trump administration has cut more than 10 percent of the federal workforce, and the government hasn't crashed. Indeed, it hasn't even shrunk—if you're counting by dollars spent instead of people employed.
In a new article for City Journal, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Judge Glock highlights the tremendous gap between the dire predictions about DOGE's cuts and the reality that has emerged, more than a year after DOGE was shut down. Despite having only a modest impact on spending, Glock writes, DOGE "had a massive impact on the federal civil service."
This is true—to a point, more on that in a moment—and notable. Aside from a modest downsizing in the 1990s, the number of people employed by the federal government has been steadily growing for decades. Reversing that trend is one of the few genuinely libertarian accomplishments by the Trump administration.
The cuts to the federal workforce prove that "DOGE worked," argues Glock.
Well, hold on.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who departed the DOGE project before Trump's inauguration and is now running for governor of Ohio) set some very ambitious goals after being appointed DOGE co-chairs in late 2024. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in November 2024 where they promised "we won't just write reports or cut ribbons. We'll cut costs."
Yes, Musk and Ramaswamy also said they would reduce the federal workforce. But that was presented as a natural consequence of cutting spending, not as the primary goal.
Think about it like this. If I spent months promising my friends and family that I would lose 50 pounds on a new diet, and then didn't lose any weight, would it be fair to say the diet worked?
What if I reduced the number of donuts I eat every day, but still didn't lose any weight? Sure, that might be good for my health in some way—just like reducing unnecessary workers in the federal government is good for America's fiscal health—but it certainly wouldn't mean I had achieved the goal of losing weight.
Finally, even the claim that DOGE cut the federal workforce requires an asterisk. As Glock also notes in his report, the decline in federal workers has been offset by an increase in federal contractors.
It's not a one-for-one trade, of course. The new contractors are overwhelmingly concentrated in places like the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon, while the cuts mostly targeted other areas, like the Department of Health and Human Services.
"Most of that increase came from the buildup in homeland-security and defense contracting, including purchases such as surveillance aircraft and tanks, rather than substitutes for government workers," Glock writes. "DOGE achieved real contract savings, but these were more than offset by higher spending elsewhere, reflecting a shift in priorities rather than an overall reduction in contracting."
So, the government is eating fewer donuts but more pizza.
There might be libertarian reasons to prefer contractors over government employees. They are less likely to hold those jobs for life, for one. But there's nothing inherently good about a government policy that cuts jobs in some areas just to create more room in the budget for poorly trained immigration enforcement agents and defense contractors. That may even be a negative outcome for liberty.
In the end, the DOGE project looks less like a meaningful attempt at cutting government spending or employment levels and more like a way to purge parts of the federal workforce likely to get in Trump's way during his second term. "As long as [Trump's] larger commitment is to extending his power rather than rolling back power itself, you shouldn't expect the government to stop growing," as Reason's Jesse Walker wrote last year in comparing DOGE to President Richard Nixon's attempted purge of the civil service.
Did DOGE work? Only if you grade it on a pretty dramatic curve.
Yes, it proved that a president can slash bureaucratic jobs—particularly the bloated managerial and administrative types—without doing much damage to the government's core responsibilities. That's a lesson future administrations should remember.
Maybe, someday, a president will try applying the same logic to government spending too.
Katie Zacharia held her first press briefing at the White House on Tuesday.
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
President Donald Trump chose Katie Zacharia to serve as the new White House press secretary.
Five days later, a White House official said that she is "transitioning out" of the role.
She succeeded Karoline Leavitt, who left the job in August.
Katie Zacharia held her first briefing as White House press secretary on Tuesday, taking over the role previously held by Karoline Leavitt.
Days later, a White House official confirmed to Business Insider that she is "transitioning out" of the role after Trump said that he told her to reconsider.
Zacharia was the second press secretary to serve in Trump's second term, and the sixth across his two non-consecutive terms. Leavitt left the job in August to spend more time with her young children.
In a Truth Social post announcing his hiring of Zacharia, President Donald Trump wrote that "She has an unblemished record of support, and has been a loyal and brilliant supporter, right from the beginning," adding that "She is, likewise, a devoted fan and member of MAGA!"
Zacharia did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider on Friday, after her departure was announced.
Here's what to know about her.
What was Katie Zacharia doing before this?
Katie Zacharia on the South Lawn of the White House.
Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images
Zacharia previously worked as a senior communications advisor at Trump Media and Technology Group, which runs Truth Social, a White House official confirmed to Business Insider.
Zacharia previously worked as a spokesperson for former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem at the Department of Homeland Security, and as a commentator for Fox News and Newsmax.
Her LinkedIn profile also indicates that she serves as general counsel for the conservative nonprofit Fix California, and served as a White House intern in 2006, during President George W. Bush's second term.
Is Katie Zacharia a lawyer?
Zacharia earned a bachelor's degree in political science and government from Pepperdine University and a law degree from Pepperdine Caruso School of Law.
"I had already preregistered for the bar exam," she said. "Basically, during the summer, I knew I would be living in China and the results of the bar were inconsequential, and I sat for it because I didn't want to have a withdrawal status."
Zacharia's LinkedIn profile lists her as working as an associate at the Beijing law firm Zhong Lun from August 2011 to June 2013.
Zacharia added that she "consulted attorneys and legal professionals" to confirm that she could call herself a lawyer and offer legal analysis on cable news since she holds a law degree and had "actual substantive legal experience."
Zacharia told Business Insider in a statement that she "practiced international transaction law, with all the appropriate credentials."
The White House referred Business Insider to Zacharia's comments on Fox News.
Who is Katie Zacharia's husband?
Tyler Zacharia and Katie Zacharia at the premiere of "David."
Tibrina Hobson/Getty Images
Zacharia is married to film producer Tyler Zacharia, who has produced movies such as "Young Washington" and "David" with Angel Studios, a production company specializing in faith-based films.
He also served as an executive producer of the 2019 movie "The Irishman" starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, according to his IMDbpage.
They wed in 2011.
Does Katie Zacharia have children?
Zacharia and her husband share four children, ages 12, 10, 8, and 6.
At her first press briefing, when Zacharia was asked about balancing work and motherhood, she said her family was planning to move from California to Washington, DC, so she could be present with them while working in the White House. She also called Trump "the most family-friendly president we've ever had."
"The fact that he knew I had four kids, and he knew that this job would be demanding, and still placed his trust in me, shows that I know I'm capable of being able to step up to that," she said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
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