Virginia’s top legislative Democrat sounded an alarm over President-elect Trump’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) plan to tell a portion of the federal workforce “you’re fired” for efficiency’s sake.

The state Senate’s top Republican responded Thursday by saying the majority party is “asking the wrong question.”

Earlier this week, House Speaker Don Scott Jr. wrote a letter to the commonwealth’s unemployment agency warning of the fallout from such a plan and a potential uptick in unemployment claims.

“We should all be concerned about what these changes mean for the employees raising their families in Virginia, paying taxes in Virginia and calling Virginia home,” Scott wrote to Virginia Employment Commissioner Demetrios Melis in a letter reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

TOP DOGE SENATOR DEMANDS LAME-DUCK BIDEN AGENCIES HALT COSTLY TELEWORK, CITING VOTER MANDATE

“Taking President-elect Trump at his word that he will immediately move to downsize the workforce and relocate agencies, we can safely assume that a large portion of our workforce that resides in the commonwealth will be negatively affected,” added Scott, D-Portsmouth.

Scott reportedly said he believes Northern Virginia and the Hampton Roads area he represents would be hardest-hit.

“I have concerns that, in the coming months, not only will our nation experience a mass increase in unemployment due to the proposed changes to our government. But, more importantly, those changes will have a detrimental effect on Virginians, our commonwealth’s unemployment rate and our economy overall,” he told the Times-Dispatch.

However, Senate Minority Leader Ryan McDougle, R-New Kent, said the concept of DOGE addresses a greater concern for Virginians and U.S. taxpayers when it comes to fiscally responsible governance.

“That’s the wrong question,” McDougle said in an interview Thursday.

YOUNGKIN ‘PERSONALLY INVITES’ NEW TRUMP ADMIN TO SETTLE IN VA OVER MD, DC

“The question should be whether we are taking dollars that Virginians are earning and paying to the federal government and whether they are being spent wisely.

“If the federal government is paying people to do jobs they shouldn’t be doing, then that’s spending taxpayer dollars unwisely.”

Trump’s DOGE co-leader, Vivek Ramaswamy, previously told Fox Business, “We expect mass reductions … [and] certain agencies to be deleted outright.” 

Ramaswamy’s counterpart, Elon Musk, has expressed similar sentiments, including a tweet stating, “Delete CFPB,” a reference to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Additionally, Sen. Joni Ernst, the Iowa Republican seen as the top DOGE lawmaker in the upper chamber, is spearheading a bill to relocate about one-third of federal workers outside the District of Columbia-Maryland-Virginia area. The legislation proposed by Ernst has a lengthy acronym, the DRAIN THE SWAMP Act.

Virginia Sen. Ryan McDougle, R-Hanover/New Kent (Virginia Senate)

Ernst also demanded answers from Biden agency heads about work-from-home policies their staffs enjoy.

In his remarks Thursday, McDougle added that if Democrats were so concerned about the subject, they should have balked at plans to funnel Virginia taxpayer funds to the Washington-area Metro system to “subsidize” the lack of ridership from telework policies criticized by Ernst.

“I didn’t feel our Democratic friends were as concerned with the millions of dollars going to fund Metro amid [federal workers not being required to] go into the office and having to subsidize them,” McDougle said.

Virginia’s 2024 budget included about $144 million in Metro funding. Metro CEO Randy Clarke said in June the transit agency found an additional $50 million in efficiencies for its nearly $5 billion budget, according to multiple reports.

Earlier this month, a top Democrat on the state House Labor Committee, said she was “very disappointed” with a response from representatives for Gov. Glenn Youngkin when she voiced concerns about potential federal workforce cuts.

State Delegate Candi Mundon King, D-Dumfries, noted in November that thousands of federal workers live in the state and in her district and called DOGE’s plan “disastrous” after the Virginia Republican Party touted the “streamlin[ing of] government bureaucracy” as “good for all Americans, including Virginians.”

Mundon King’s district sits in the Washington exurb of Prince William County, which, for many years, was led by high-profile conservative Corey Stewart but has recently swung heavily Democratic.

Virginia welcome sign (Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group/Getty)

“No wonder Northern Virginia has lost faith in Virginia Republicans,” Mundon King said.

Youngkin, a successful business executive before entering politics, previously said anyone who leaves the private sector to work in government will immediately recognize it needs drastic adjustments.

“Whether it’s me coming into state government in Virginia or President Trump coming back into the federal government, [we] know it is inefficient. It does not work with the same efficiency you would expect out of a business,” he told The Daily Progress of Charlottesville.

Government efficiency plans “may result in some job losses for the federal government. … The great thing about the Commonwealth of Virginia is we have nearly 300,000 jobs that are unfilled,” he added.

Melis similarly told Scott Virginia is “well prepared” to adapt to changes in employment figures and reassured Mundon King earlier this month that some of the concerns voiced were premature, according to The Roanoke Times.

Youngkin earlier this month invited workers in Trump’s incoming administration to choose Virginia as their place of residence over Maryland or the District of Columbia, citing, in part, lower taxes and better-ranked schools.

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Youngkin spokesman Christian Martinez said Virginia’s economy was “stagnant” and the unemployment system “in shambles” when the Republican took office after eight years of Democratic governorship.

“Commonsense policies to lower the cost of living and bring real business-like efficiency to government have helped fix both,” Martinez said.

“The governor appreciates Speaker Scott’s recent commitments to support further tax relief, which, along with a roaring economy and over 300,000 open jobs, means Virginia is in a great position as the president works to shrink the bloated federal government.”

The Constitution shouldn’t be rewritten for every new communications technology. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this long-standing principle during its most recent term in applying the 1st Amendment to social media. The late Justice Antonin Scalia articulated it persuasively in 2011, noting that “whatever the challenges of applying the Constitution to ever-advancing technology, the basic principles of freedom of speech and the press … do not vary.”

These principles should be front of mind for congressional Republicans and David Sacks, Trump’s recently chosen artificial intelligence czar, as they make policy on that emerging technology. The 1st Amendment standards that apply to older communications technologies must also apply to artificial intelligence, particularly as it stands to play an increasingly significant role in human expression and learning.

But revolutionary technological change breeds uncertainty and fear. And where there is uncertainty and fear, unconstitutional regulation inevitably follows. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, lawmakers in at least 45 states have introduced bills to regulate AI this year, and 31 states adopted laws or resolutions on the technology. Congress is also considering AI legislation.

Many of these proposals respond to concerns that AI will supercharge the spread of misinformation. While the worry is understandable, misinformation is not subject to any categorical exemption from 1st Amendment protections. And with good reason: As Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson observed in 1945, the Constitution’s framers “did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us,” and therefore “every person must be his own watchman for truth.”

California nevertheless enacted a law in September targeting “deceptive,” digitally modified content about political candidates. The law was motivated partly by an AI-altered video parodying Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy that went viral earlier in the summer.

Two weeks after the law went into effect, a judge blocked it, writing that the “principles safeguarding the people’s right to criticize government … apply even in the new technological age” and that penalties for such criticism “have no place in our system of governance.”

Ultimately, we don’t need new laws regulating most uses of AI; existing laws will do just fine. Defamation, fraud, false light and forgery laws already address the potential of deceptive expression to cause real harm. And they apply regardless of whether the deception is enabled by a radio broadcast or artificial intelligence technology. The Constitution should protect novel communications technology not just so we can share AI-enhanced political memes. We should also be able to freely harness AI in pursuit of another core 1st Amendment concern: knowledge production.

When we think of free expression guarantees, we often think of the right to speak. But the 1st Amendment goes beyond that. As the Supreme Court held in 1969, “The Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas.”

Information is the foundation of progress. The more we have, the more we can propose and test hypotheses and produce knowledge.

The internet, like the printing press, was a knowledge-accelerating innovation. But Congress almost hobbled development of the internet in the 1990s because of concerns that it would enable minors to access “indecent” content. Fortunately, the Supreme Court stood in its way by striking down much of the Communications Decency Act.

Indeed, the Supreme Court’s application of the 1st Amendment to that new technology was so complete that it left Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Mike Godwin wondering “whether I ought to retire from civil liberties work, my job being mostly done.” Godwin would go on to serve as general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia — which, he wrote, “couldn’t exist without the work that cyberlibertarians had done in the 1990s to guarantee freedom of expression and broader access to the internet.”

Today humanity is developing a technology with even more knowledge-generating potential than the internet. No longer is knowledge production limited by the number of humans available to propose and test hypotheses. We can now enlist machines to augment our efforts.

We are already starting to see the results: A researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently reported that AI enabled a lab studying new materials to discover 44% more compounds. Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the AI company Anthropic, predicts that “AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years.”

This promise can be realized only if America continues to view the tools of knowledge production as legally inseparable from the knowledge itself. Yes, the printing press led to a surge of “misinformation.” But it also enabled the Enlightenment.

The 1st Amendment is America’s great facilitator: Because of it, the government can no more regulate the printing press than it can the words printed on a page. We must extend that standard to artificial intelligence, the arena where the next great fight for free speech will be fought.

Nico Perrino is the executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the host of “So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast.”

WASHINGTON —  After dealing devastating blows to militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel is now directing its military prowess at another key force backed by Iran: the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

On Friday, Israel said it had attacked Yemen’s international airport in the capital of Sanaa as well as several power plants and seaports, all under Houthi control. That followed Houthi firing of rockets into Israel, one hitting a school. And later Friday, the Houthis said they had targeted Israel’s airport, although that missile was apparently intercepted.

At least nine people were reported killed in Yemen and 16 were injured in Israel in attacks and counterattacks over the last week or so as the two sides ramped up their long-simmering conflict.

The Israeli attack on Yemen’s airport on Thursday took place as the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, waited to board a flight. He was not injured but United Nations officials said aid supplies destined for besieged Yemenis would be interrupted. Israel said the airport was being used by Iran to smuggle weapons to the Houthis.

Israel sought and will receive a rare hearing at the U.N. Security Council on Monday to discuss the Houthi conflict, Israel’s ambassador to the world body, Danny Danon, told The Times. Normally other countries call for sessions to criticize Israel, but Israel was able to take advantage of the U.S. position as the rotating chair of the Security Council.

Danon said he would ask the council to formally condemn the Houthis but remained skeptical of any meaningful action, especially given the veto power held by China and Russia.

“We intend to point out to Iran and the Houthis what happened to Hamas,” Danon said in a telephone interview from New York, site of U.N. headquarters. “It seems that the Houthis have not yet understood what happens to those who try to harm the State of Israel. … We are not playing around.”

The battle in Yemen has often taken a back seat to other explosive, roiling conflicts in the Middle East. For more than a decade, the Yemeni government, backed by Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and other Western powers, has fought Houthi rebels backed by Iran. More than a quarter of a million people have died in attacks and because of food shortages and other humanitarian crises.

The Houthis are one piece of the so-called axis of resistance, a constellation of Iran proxies arrayed around Israel and dedicated to its destruction as well as their own nationalist causes.

Houthi supporters attend an anti-Israel rally in Sanaa, Yemen, on Friday.

(Osamah Abdulrahman / Associated Press)

Over the last 14 months, Israel has pounded Hamas in the Gaza Strip, killing tens of thousands of fighters and civilian Palestinians. The war began when Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostage.

This fall, Israel destroyed much of the leadership and infrastructure of Hezbollah, a militant and political faction in Lebanon that had increased rocket attacks into Israel that it says are in support of Hamas.

Israel has also exchanged missile barrages with the main backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran. Airstrikes reportedly crippled much of Iran’s defensive capabilities.

Separately, Israel’s other Iran-backed nemesis, the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, collapsed this month under pressure from an assortment of rebel groups, the strongest backed by Turkey.

“The Middle East has changed,” Danon said.

What remained were the Houthis. Also claiming they were acting in support of Hamas in the Gaza war, they launched a series of missile attacks on ships traversing the Red Sea as part of a major commerce chain.

The Biden administration also launched airstrikes on the Houthis earlier this year in response to the attacks on sea vessels and has tried to assemble a collection of countries to protect shipping lanes from the Houthis.

“We’ve tried to raise the consciousness of countries, not only in the region but well beyond, of the damage that the Houthi actions are having to international commerce in real and meaningful ways,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said at the Council on Foreign Relations this month.

Smoke rises from the area around the airport after an airstrike, as seen from Sanaa, Yemen, on Thursday.

(Osamah Abdulrahman / Associated Press)

”The rise of the Houthis … has gotten them to a place where they have assets that have built up, that they have not been shy about using,” Blinken said. “My concern … is that even when we get to the point where the conflict in Gaza is over, [the Houthis] may well continue, because they put themselves on the world stage.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking to an Israeli television news channel this week, made clear that the Houthis in Yemen are the next front line.

“We will strike them to the bitter end, until they learn,” Netanyahu said. “Hamas learned, Hezbollah learned, and Syria learned. The Houthis will learn, too.”