Is Project Esther working?

– moves that have drawn widespread criticism.“Elon Musk’s DOGE was like one of his rockets exploding soon after liftoff, thereby demonstrating how not to do things,” Graffy told Al Jazeera.

“The difference is that for one, the learning experience is paid in money; for the other, the price is paid in human lives,” she added.A major point of criticism directed at Trump and Musk centred on their decision to severely scale back USAID’s operations.By late February, the main offices of the agency in Washington, DC, had been essentially shut down.

Following the dismissal of roughly 1,600 employees and the placement of approximately 4,700 more on leave, staff were given just 15 minutes to gather their belongings and exit the building.Secretary of State Marco Rubio later

that 83 percent of all contracts managed by USAID had been closed.

In March, a federal judge in Maryland stated that DOGE had“Parents want a one-stop shop to verify their child’s age and grant permission for them to download apps in a privacy-preserving way. The app store is the best place for it, and more than one-third of US states have introduced bills recognising the central role app stores play,” the companies said.

Kathleen Farley, vice president of litigation for the Chamber of Progress, a group backed by Apple and Alphabet, said the Texas law is likely to face legal challenges on First Amendment grounds.“A big path for challenge is that it burdens adult speech in attempting to regulate children’s speech,” Farley told the Reuters news agency in an interview on Tuesday. “I would say there are arguments that this is a content-based regulation singling out digital communication.”

Child online safety groups that backed the Texas bill have also long argued for app store age verification, saying it is the only way to give parents effective control over children’s use of technology.“The problem is that self-regulation in the digital marketplace has failed, where app stores have just prioritised the profit over safety and rights of children and families,” Casey Stefanski, executive director for the Digital Childhood Alliance, told Reuters.