May 28 2025

Musk Criticizes Trump Tax Bill, Federal Bureaucracy "Worse Than I Realized"

Starship Reaches Space, But Fails On Re-Entry

House Tax Bill Throws Lifeline to Rent-Setting Algorithm Firm RealPage

West's Groundwater Loss Worse Than Previously Thought, Accelerating, Study Finds

US-South Korea Alliance Shows Cracks Amid Tensions, As Pentagon Preps Option to Withdraw 4,500 Troops

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1. Musk Criticizes Trump Tax Bill, Federal Bureaucracy "Worse Than I Realized"

A. Elon Musk has strongly criticised Donald Trump’s showpiece tax bill, claiming it “undermines” the work done by his government cost-cutting team, in comments that are likely to widen the rift between the billionaire and the president he bankrolled last year. In a preview of an interview with CBS Sunday Morning released late on Tuesday, the Tesla chief executive, who until recently led the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, said he was “disappointed to see the massive spending bill, which increases the budget deficit . . . and undermines the work that the Doge team is doing”. The US House of Representatives last week passed the bill by a single vote, paving the way for the first big legislative success of Trump’s second term. It will now be put to a vote in the Senate. The president, who had to browbeat several Republican holdouts in Congress into voting for what he dubbed the “Big Beautiful Bill”, called it “arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country!”

FT

B. STARBASE, Tex. — Elon Musk, returning to SpaceX on Tuesday for a test flight of his Starship spacecraft, said in an interview that slashing the size of federal government proved far tougher than he expected and lamented the intense criticism leveled at the U.S. DOGE Service, which he led. “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he said. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.” He said repercussions over DOGE cuts had been severe. “DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” he said. “So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.” He expressed dismay over the reputational hit his companies took: “People were burning Teslas. Why would you do that? That’s really uncool.”

Washington Post

2. Starship Reaches Space, But Fails On Re-Entry

The latest flight of SpaceX’s Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, got all the way up to space, but not all the way back down to Earth. The upper-stage vehicle coasted through space on Tuesday, surpassing flights in January and March that ended in explosions and showers of debris over the Atlantic Ocean. But halfway through its journey, the spacecraft sprang a propellant leak. That caused it to start spinning out of control. The Starship vehicle used in the test flight was not able to survive the intense heat, breaking up as it fell back into the atmosphere. By design, the debris fell into the Indian Ocean, far from areas inhabited by people. That suggests SpaceX engineers still have much work to do with Starship, especially the upper-stage vehicle, before the spacecraft can be reused frequently, a necessity for fulfilling the vision of Elon Musk, who founded the company in order to send people to Mars one day.

NYT

3. House Tax Bill Throws Lifeline to Rent-Setting Algorithm Firm RealPage

Data company RealPage is confronted with state and local efforts to ban its algorithmic pricing system for landlords in the rental-apartment market. Now, a provision buried in House Republicans’ mega tax bill is throwing the company a lifeline. The bill that the House passed last week would prevent state and local governments from regulating artificial intelligence and automated decision systems for 10 years. That decadelong moratorium faces an uphill battle in the Senate. And the bill would do little to halt class-action lawsuits that allege RealPage violated antitrust and consumer-protection laws. But if the House tax bill becomes law, it would provide RealPage with significant legal relief. The provision would effectively muzzle some of the dozens of local and statewide efforts to outlaw algorithmic pricing systems, including RealPage.

WSJ

4. West's Groundwater Loss Worse Than Previously Thought, Accelerating, Study Finds

The dwindling flow of the Colorado River has alarmed the American West for years, but the water losses happening underground are even worse, according to a new study that uses satellite data to measure groundwater supplies across the Colorado River Basin. The research found that the region lost 27.8 million acre-feet of groundwater since 2003, roughly the same volume as the total capacity of Lake Mead — the nation’s largest reservoir — and that the decline accelerated rapidly over the past decade. These groundwater losses accounted for more than twice the amount taken out of reservoirs in the region during that time.

Washington Post

5. US-South Korea Alliance Shows Cracks Amid Tensions, As Pentagon Preps Option to Withdraw 4,500 Troops

A. This month, South Korea and the US staged their latest joint naval drills. Destroyers and patrol aircraft rehearsed responses to potential incursions by North Korean drones and special forces across the maritime border. “With the overwhelming power of the South Korea-US combined fleet, we will strongly retaliate against any enemy provocation,” South Korean navy commander Ryu Yoon-sang declared. But behind the boilerplate expressions of common resolve, experts describe a series of possible crises brewing in US-South Korea relations. Despite an alliance that goes back decades, the two countries are threatening to diverge on sensitive questions of trade, regional security and the growing North Korean nuclear threat. When US President Donald Trump announced a 25 per cent “reciprocal” tariff on Korean imports, South Korean officials were shocked. They had believed a long-standing, comprehensive free trade agreement under which South Korea in effect does not levy tariffs on American goods would set them apart. Policymakers in Seoul also worry that America’s fixation on the rise of China will lead it to neglect deterrence efforts against Pyongyang, while also pressuring South Korea into a more confrontational stance towards Beijing. While many of these fears reflect long-standing tensions, they have been exacerbated by the return to power of Trump, whose repeated declarations of admiration for North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un stand in contrast with his often contemptuous attitude towards the South. During his first term, Trump threatened to pull out of the Korea-US (Korus) free trade agreement that came into force in 2012, and to withdraw US troops from the Korean peninsula in a dispute over cost-sharing. The fact that South Korea has a record trade surplus with the US has only added fuel to the fire.

FT

B. WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is weighing a withdrawal of thousands of American troops from South Korea, according to military officials familiar with the discussions, a move that could stir new anxiety among allies worried about the White House commitment to Asia. An option being developed by the Pentagon is to pull out roughly 4,500 troops and move them to other locations in the Indo-Pacific region, including to Guam, the officials and a person familiar with the matter said. The idea is being prepared for consideration by President Trump as part of an informal policy review on dealing with North Korea, two of the officials said.

WSJ

May 28, 1830: Andrew Jackson signs the Indian Removal Act into law

On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signs the Indian Removal Act into law. The bill enabled the federal government to negotiate with southeastern Native American tribes for their ancestral lands in states such as Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. As a result, some 60,000 Native Americans were forced westward into “Indian Territory” (present-day Oklahoma). The mass migration resulted in more than 4,000 deaths and became known as the Trail of Tears.

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Sources

1. A. https://www.ft.com/content/cac27eba-6ed7-4d65-baef-cc043a07aa9d B. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/05/27/elon-musk-spacex-starship-doge/
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/science/spacex-starship-launch-elon-musk-mars.html
3. https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/rent-setting-algorithms-find-legal-lifeline-4822ad5f?mod=hp_lead_pos10
4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/05/27/american-west-drought-water-colorado-river/
5. A. https://www.ft.com/content/337ee9b3-208b-447c-9172-8e8f29f7d15d B. https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/u-s-considers-withdrawing-thousands-of-troops-from-south-korea-725a6514?mod=hp_lead_pos10