By JOSHUA GOODMAN and RYAN J. FOLEY

MIAMI (AP) — Hundreds of federal employees who lost their jobs in Elon Musk’s cost-cutting blitz are being asked to return to work.

Related Articles

At UN, Trump attacks climate change efforts in front of leaders of drowning nations

Trump’s Tylenol and vaccine warnings leave some pregnant women concerned, others angry

FACT FOCUS: A look at false and misleading claims made by Trump about autism, Tylenol and pregnancy

Trump administration designates Barrio 18 gang as foreign terrorist organization

Scientists rebuke Trump’s Tylenol-autism claim, stress fever is bigger danger in pregnancy

The General Services Administration has given the employees — who managed government workspaces — until the end of the week to accept or decline reinstatement, according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press. Those who accept must report for duty on Oct. 6 after what amounts to a seven-month paid vacation, during which time the GSA in some cases racked up high costs — passed along to taxpayers — to stay in dozens of properties whose leases it had slated for termination or were allowed to expire.

“Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed,” said Chad Becker, a former GSA real estate official. “They didn’t have the people they needed to carry out basic functions.”

Becker, who represents owners with government leases at Arco Real Estate Solutions, said GSA has been in a “triage mode” for months. He said the sudden reversal of the downsizing reflects how Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency had gone too far, too fast.

Rehiring of purged federal employees

GSA was established in the 1940s to centralize the acquisition and management of thousands of federal workplaces. Its return to work request mirrors rehiring efforts at in several agencies targeted by DOGE. Last month, the IRS said it would allow some employees who took a resignation offer to remain on the job. The Labor Department has also brought back some employees who took buyouts, while the National Park Service earlier reinstated a number of purged employees.

Critical to the work of such agencies is the GSA, which manages many of the buildings. Starting in March, thousands of GSA employees left the agency as part of programs that encouraged them to resign or take early retirement. Hundreds of others — those subject to the recall notice — were dismissed as part of an aggressive push to reduce the size of the federal workforce. Though those employees did not show up for work, they were to be paid through the end of this month.

GSA representatives didn’t respond to detailed questions about the return-to-work notice, which the agency issued Friday. They also declined to discuss the agency’s headcount, staffing decisions or the potential cost overruns generated by reversing its plans to terminate leases.

“GSA’s leadership team has reviewed workforce actions and is making adjustments in the best interest of the customer agencies we serve and the American taxpayers,” an agency spokesman said in an email.

Democrats have assailed the Trump administration’s indiscriminate approach to slashing costs and jobs. Rep. Greg Stanton of Arizona, the top Democrat on the subcommittee overseeing the GSA, told AP there is no evidence that reductions at the agency “delivered any savings.”

“It’s created costly confusion while undermining the very services taxpayers depend on,” he said.

DOGE identified the agency, which had about 12,000 employees at the start of the Trump administration, as a chief target of its campaign to reduce fraud, waste and abuse in the federal government.

A small cohort of Musk’s trusted aides embedded in GSA’s headquarters, sometimes sleeping on cots on the agency’s sixth floor, and pursued plans to abruptly cancel nearly half of the 7,500 leases in the federal portfolio. DOGE also wanted GSA to sell hundreds of federally owned buildings with the goal of generating billions in savings.

GSA started by sending more than 800 lease cancellation notices to landlords, in many cases without informing the government tenants. The agency also published a list of hundreds of government buildings that were targeted for sale.

DOGE’s massive job cuts produced little savings

Pushback to GSA’s dumping of its portfolio was swift, and both initiatives have been dialed back. More than 480 leases slated for termination by DOGE have since been spared. Those leases were for offices scattered around the country that are occupied by such agencies as the IRS, Social Security Administration and Food and Drug Administration.

DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts,” which once boasted that the lease cancellations alone would save nearly $460 million, has since reduced that estimate to $140 million by the end of July, according to Becker, the former GSA real estate official.

Meanwhile, GSA embarked on massive job cuts. The administration slashed GSA’s headquarters staff by 79%, its portfolio managers by 65% and facilities managers by 35%, according to a federal official briefed on the situation. The official, who was not authorized to speak to the media, provided the statistics on condition of anonymity.

As a result of the internal turmoil, 131 leases expired without the government actually vacating the properties, the official said. The situation has exposed the agencies to steep fees because property owners have not been able to rent out those spaces to other tenants.

The public may soon get a clearer picture of what transpired at the agency.

The Government Accountability Office, an independent congressional watchdog, is examining the GSA’s management of its workforce, lease terminations and planned building disposals and expects to issue findings in the coming months, said David Marroni, a senior GAO official.

Foley reported from Iowa City, Iowa.

Lori Barghini and Julia Cobbs are returning to the airwaves with a new podcast, “Lori and Julia Still LOUD!” which debuts Oct. 1.

The pair hosted the afternoon talk show “Lori and Julia” for 22 years on MyTalk 107.1 and helped to establish the station as a go-to for women’s voices. Last year, they surprised listeners when they announced they were ending the program, citing Barghini’s desire for more free time as well as the rigors of producing the show, which aired three hours a day, five days a week. Now, they’ll issue two new hour-long podcasts each week.

“It’s going to be perfect for us,” Barghini said. “We’re going to love this new schedule.”

Barghini said she always knew they would end up doing a podcast at some point, but she wanted to take at least a year off before pursuing the new venture. The first person they talked to was Ginny Hubbard, CEO of MyTalk’s parent company Hubbard Radio.

“She said she hoped we’d talk to her first and I told her, ‘Absolutely, you hired us for the radio. Of course we’re coming to you first,’” Barghini said.

They reached an agreement to produce “Still LOUD!” for Hubbard Radio’s Gamut Podcast Network, which distributes shows featuring longtime KQRS “Morning Show” host Tom Barnard and Pioneer Press columnist Joe Soucheray along with other local and national podcasts.

Listeners can expect to hear a similar format to the pair’s radio show. “We’re going to continue to be People magazine for people’s ears,” Barghini said. “We’ll talk about pop culture, what TV shows we’re obsessed with, movies, music, whatever we find interesting.”

Initially, it’ll just be the two of them, but they do plan to start inviting guests once they get settled. And Barghini said “Still LOUD!” will be a bit looser and more informal now that they’re freed from the constraints of commercial radio: “I like that idea that we can be — I don’t want to say raunchier, because Julia doesn’t really like raunchy — but I like the idea of being able to be more frank about some things we might have pulled back on (on the air). You know, we’ll just be laying it out there.”

The pair, who are sisters-in-law, have remained close in the time since they left MyTalk and have hosted some public events together. They just returned from a group trip they led to Paris.

Julia Cobbs and Lori Barghini visited La Galerie Dior during a recent group trip they led in Paris. (Courtesy of Julia Cobbs)

Tuesday, they recorded their first trial run of the podcast.

“The hour went by just like that,” Barghini said. “It did feel (like riding a bike again), but we didn’t have to be aware of stopping the clock or changing directions every 10 minutes. It was nice to be able to go on and off and on something like we used to in the early days on the radio, when we didn’t have any advertisers. It was just us entertaining each other.”

New episodes of “Lori and Julia Still LOUD!” will drop at 11 a.m. Wednesdays and Fridays and can be found on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, Google or wherever listeners find their podcasts.

By MATT O’BRIEN

ABILENE, Texas (AP) — The afternoon sun was so hot that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman traded his usual crewneck sweater for a T-shirt on the last legs of a Tuesday visit to the massive Stargate artificial intelligence data center complex that will power the future of ChatGPT.

Related Articles

Build-A-Bear continues to rack up market gains, despite tariffs and teetering mall traffic

‘Coolest Thing Made in MN’ among these 8 remaining products

Powell signals Federal Reserve to move slowly on interest rate cuts

US stocks slip as Wall Street’s relentless rally takes a pause

Fed rate trimmed: What does it mean for you?

OpenAI announced Tuesday that its flagship AI data center in Texas will be joined by five others around the U.S. as the ChatGPT maker aims to make good on the $500 billion infrastructure investment promoted by President Donald Trump earlier this year.

Stargate, a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank, said it is building two more data center complexes in Texas, one in New Mexico, one in Ohio and another in a Midwest location it hasn’t yet disclosed.

But it’s the project in Abilene, Texas, that promised to be the biggest of them all, transforming what the city’s mayor called an old railroad town.

Oracle executives who visited the eight-building complex said it is already on track to be the world’s largest AI supercluster once fully built, a reference to its network of hundreds of thousands of AI chips that will be running in its massive, H-shaped buildings.

Altman said, “When you hit that button on ChatGPT, you really don’t — I don’t, at least” — think about what happens inside the data halls used to build and operate the chatbot.

He and Oracle’s new co-CEO Clay Magouyrk also sought to emphasize the steps they’ve taken to reduce the energy-hungry complex’s environmental effects on a drought-prone region of West Texas, where temperatures hit 97 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday.

“We’re burning gas to run this data center,” said Altman, but added that “in the long trajectory of Stargate” the hope is to rely on many other power sources.

The complex will require about 900 megawatts of electricity to power the eight buildings and their hundreds of thousands of specialized AI chips.

One of the buildings is already operating, and a second that Altman and Magouyrk visited Tuesday is nearly complete. Each server rack in those buildings holds 72 of Nvidia’s GB200 chips, which are specially designed for the most intensive AI workloads. Each building is expected to have about 60,000 of them.

More than 6,000 workers now commute to the massive construction project each day, in what Mayor Weldon Hurt described as a significant boost to the local economy. The campus and nearby expansion will provide nearly 1,700 jobs onsite when fully operational, Oracle said, with “thousands more indirect jobs” predicted to be created.

Hand-made signs lining the roads to the center market “move-in-ready” homes for workers.

A sign advertises housing for workers along the road to the Stargate artificial intelligence data center complex on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt O’Brien)

“AI WORKERS? HUGE DISCOUNTS” says one promising homes with one to six bedrooms.

But Hurt also acknowledged that residents have mixed feelings about the project due to its water and energy needs.

The city’s chronically stressed reservoirs were at roughly half-capacity this week. Residents must follow a two-day-a-week outdoor watering schedule, trading off based on whether their address numbers are odd or even.

One million gallons of water from the city’s municipal water systems provides an “initial fill” for a closed-loop system that cools the data center’s computers and keeps the water from evaporating. After that initial fill, Oracle expects each of the eight buildings to need another 12,000 gallons per year, which it describes as a “remarkably low figure for a facility of this scale.”

“These data centers are designed to not use water,” Magouyrk said. “All of the data centers that we’re building (in) this part of Stargate are designed to not use water. The reason we do that is because it turns out that’s harmful for the environment and this is a better solution.”

The closed-loop system shows that the developer is “taking its impact on local public water supplies seriously,” but the overall environmental effect is more nuanced because such systems require more electricity, which also means higher indirect water usage through power generation, said Shaolei Ren, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has studied AI’s environmental toll.

Indeed, the data center complex includes a new gas-fired power plant, using natural gas turbines similar to those that power warships. The companies say the plant is meant to provide backup power for the data halls and is a better option than traditional diesel generators. Most of the power comes from the local grid, sourced from a mix of natural gas with the sprawling wind and solar farms that dot the windy and sunny region.

Ren said that “even with emission-reduction measures, the health impacts of essentially turning the data center site into a power plant deserve further study for nearby communities.”

Arlene Mendler, who moved to a rural area north of Abilene, Texas more than 30 years ago for the natural setting, is photographed on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt O’Brien)

Arlene Mendler, a Stargate neighbor, said she wished she had more say in the project that eliminated a vast tract of mesquite shrubland, home to coyotes and roadrunners.

“It has completely changed the way we were living,” said Mendler, who lives across the street. “We moved up here 33 years ago for the peace, quiet, tranquility. After we got home from work, we could ride horses down the road. It was that type of a place.”

Now, she doesn’t know what to do about the constant cacophony of construction sounds or the bright lights that have altered her nighttime views. The project was essentially a done deal once she found out about it.

“They took 1,200 acres and just scraped it to bare dirt,” said her husband, Fred Mendler.

Mahesh Thiagarajan, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, shows media the Stargate artificial intelligence data center project in Abilene, Texas on Tuesday Sept. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt O’Brien)

The first time most residents heard of Stargate — at least by that name — was when Trump announced the project shortly after returning to the White House in January. Originally planned as a facility to mine cryptocurrency, developers had pivoted and expanded their designs to tailor the project to the AI boom sparked by ChatGPT.

The partnership said at that time it was investing $100 billion — and eventually up to $500 billion — to build large-scale data centers and the energy generation needed to further AI development. More recently, OpenAI signed a deal to buy $300 billion of computing capacity from Oracle. It’s a huge bet for the San Francisco-based AI startup, which was founded as a nonprofit.

OpenAI and Oracle invited media and politicians, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, to tour the site for the first time Tuesday.

Cruz called Texas “ground zero for AI” because if “you’re building a data center, what do you want? No. 1, you want abundant, low-cost energy.”

From left, Rep. Jodey Arrington, Sen. Ted Cruz, Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman answer questions during a news conference on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025 in Abilene, Texas. (AP Photo/Matt O’Brien)

Of the other five Stargate data center projects announced Tuesday, Oracle is working with OpenAI to build one just northeast of Abilene, in Shackelford County, Texas, and another in New Mexico’s Doña Ana County. It also said it is working to build one in the Midwest.

Softbank said it has broken ground on two more in Lordstown, Ohio, and in Milam County, Texas.

The projects offer OpenAI a way to break out from its longtime partnership with Microsoft, which until recently was the startup’s exclusive computing partner. Altman told The Associated Press his company has been “severely limited for the value we can offer to people.”

“ChatGPT is slow. It’s not as smart as we’d like to be. Many users can’t use it as much as they would like,” Altman said. “We have many other ideas and products we want to build.”

The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP’s text archives.

A 62-year-old man was sentenced Monday to eight months in the Washington County Jail after authorities found child sexual abuse material on his laptop while investigating a report that he molested a teen boy at his Newport apartment in 2021.

Davyd M. Bryan Delving-Thompson, now of St. Paul, reached a plea agreement with prosecutors in October that included the dismissal of a second-degree criminal sexual conduct charge in exchange for admitting to four counts of possession of child pornography.

Davyd M. Bryan Delving-Thompson (Courtesy of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office)

Washington County District Judge Siv Mjanger accepted the agreement, but gave Delving-Thompson five more months in jail after he violated terms of his conditional release from jail after his plea. A two-and-a-half year prison term was stayed in favor of five years of supervised probation. He was given credit for just over three months in custody already served after his arrest.

According to the criminal complaint, a man reported in August 2021 that his two sons responded to an ad on Craigslist for a photo shoot and one of them — a 13-year-old — became a victim of sexual abuse.

The boy’s adult brother said he had exchanged emails with a man, whom authorities later identified as Delving-Thompson, about the online ad. The brother said he and his brother met the man, who went by “Michael,” at his apartment building in the 2300 block of Hastings Avenue in Newport.

Once in his living room, Delving-Thompson used his cellphone to take pictures of the brothers, who had their shirts off and were wearing swim trunks and underwear. Delving-Thompson “wanted them to pretend they were at the beach,” the complaint said.

They then went to his bedroom, where the brothers laid down with their backs to each other. Delving-Thompson closed the blinds for privacy. He rubbed the boy’s arm “to calm him down” and then his back, chest and legs, the complaint said. He then allegedly touched the boy’s penis.

The boy told Delving-Thompson that he wanted to go back to the living room and put on his shirt, but he asked the boy not to. In a hallway, Delving-Thompson asked the boy if he could touch his penis again, but the boy refused and Delving-Thompson “did it anyway,” the complaint said.

Delving-Thompson gave $300 to the brothers, who then left.

Related Articles

Former DFL lawmaker Nicole Mitchell sentenced to 6 months in jail for burglary

Driver sentenced to workhouse for going 77 mph on St. Paul street, fatally striking pedestrian

St. Paul man sentenced in 2023 shootout at White Bear Lake bar

Letters: If Hamas cared about civilians at all it would release the hostages

Meet Haley Taylor Schlitz, Minnesota’s youngest assistant attorney general

Investigators searched Delving-Thompson’s apartment and seized a cell phone, tablet computer and laptop computer. Digital forensic analysis revealed the laptop had four photos and two videos of prepubescent boys and girls doing sexual acts. The photos were determined to be child sexual abuse material, identified by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

In December, two months after Delving-Thompson entered his guilty plea, he violated terms of the judge’s conditional release order by using the internet and a chat group, according to prosecutors. An arrest warrant was issued and he was taken into custody on Aug. 13.

Conditions of his probation include following recommendations of a psychosexual evaluation, no pornography and no contact with minors. After probation, he must register as a predatory offender for five years.