SHERO on Sunday

A lightning-fast comprehensive rundown of the week's biggest events for February 17th - February 23rd, 2025.

DOGE director Elon Musk appeared at the conservative CPAC gathering outside Washington on Thursday waving a chainsaw in the air, showing openness to auditing the Federal Reserve and accusing Democrats of “treason.” (Photo via screen grab of video.)

Welcome to the Sunday Recap, where you can quickly check in to review the week with a minimal time commitment, and make sure you did not miss anything. There are also several links within each snippet to give you more detail from credible and free sources if you want to dive deeper on any issue.

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Gun Violence This Week

At SHERO, we document all mass shooting incidents for the week every Sunday, so please take a moment to review them and remember to keep up the fight for sensible gun reform. There were three separate mass shooting incidents in the United States this past week, where three people were killed and 12 were injured.

1. Sunday, February 16, 2025: Decatur, Georgia

2. Tuesday, February 18, 2025: Tampa, Florida

3. Saturday, February 22, 2025: York, Pennsylvania

• The DOGE team, under the direction of Elon Trump, landed at the Social Security Administration this week, with Musk drawing attention for his outlandish claims that large numbers of 150-year-old “vampires” are receiving Social Security payments.

• A new “Covid-like” bat virus, that has the capacity to spread to humans and is similar to the one that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, has been discovered by a Chinese researcher.

• Trump has begun implementing his second-term agenda through a quick flurry of executive orders and directives, and many of the plans he has rolled out so far closely align with those detailed in Project 2025's Playbook, which lays out ways to overhaul the executive branch. To keep track of Trump’s detrimental progress, you can follow with this Project 2025 Tracker.

• Since going after the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) last week, Trump and Elon Musk have set their sights on annihilating a critical arm of the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Agency that is responsible for handling all of the long-term local disaster recovery that FEMA doesn't cover.

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