President-elect Donald Trump 's picks for top jobs in his administration were making the rounds on Capitol Hill on Monday ahead of potential confirmation hearings next month. Some of the choices come with controversy and face pointed questions from Republican senators. Pentagon pick Pete Hegseth has had to deal with multiple allegations of misconduct and sexual impropriety, which he's denied. Tulsi Gabbard, tapped to be the director of national intelligence, has been scrutinized over her views on Russia and a 2017 meeting with Syria's Bashar Assad. Kash Patel, a longtime Trump ally chosen for FBI director, has vowed to take on the alleged "deep state" and Trump's enemies. MORE: How fierce Trump ally Kash Patel could help reshape the FBI or Justice Department Trump defended his selections during an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" that aired in full on Sunday. Patel was meeting with Sens. John Cornyn, Joni Ernst, Mike Lee, Shelley Capito Moore and Chuck Grassley. Cornyn, a key Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said after their meeting that he is inclined to support Patel and believes some of his more extreme views -- such as firing agents or closing the FBI headquarters in Washington -- are "hyperbolic." "My position, as I told Mr. Patel, is that no one should have to go through what President Trump went through by ... a partisan Department of Justice and FBI -- and my goal would be to restore the non-partisan functioning of the chief law enforcement agency in the country -- the FBI and the Department of Justice. To me, that is the goal," Cornyn said. Hegseth was back for more one-on-one meetings with GOP lawmakers after four straight days last week trying to assuage concerns about reports of financial mismanagement, sexual misconduct and public drunkenness. Trump's defense secretary pick met again with Ernst, a top Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and herself a combat veteran and survivor of sexual assault. Ernst notably was not ready to voice support for Hegseth after their meeting last Wednesday. Over the weekend, Ernst said she believed Hegseth should be thoroughly vetted and that she wanted to hear him address how he'd approach sexual assault in the military. Hegseth exited the meeting praising their conversation but would not say whether he felt Ernst was swayed to support him. "She has been dedicated to making the Pentagon work for warfighters for a long time. We've had great, extensive conversations about that. I just appreciate her commitment to the process and am looking forward to working together," Hegseth said. When pressed by reporters again if he could say whether he was able to get Ernst to back him, he demurred. "I would never speak for her," Hegseth said. Ernst later released a statement thanking Hegseth for his "responsiveness and respect for the process." While Ernst didn't explicitly say she would vote yes on Hegseth's confirmation, she said she would "support" him through the process. "Following our encouraging conversations, Pete committed to completing a full audit of the Pentagon and selecting a senior official who will uphold the roles and value of our servicemen and women -- based on quality and standards, not quotas -- and who will prioritize and strengthen my work to prevent sexual assault within the ranks," she said. "As I support Pete through this process, I look forward to a fair hearing based on truth, not anonymous sources." A conservative nonprofit group with ties to billionaire Elon Musk is wading into Hegseth's confirmation fight. Building America's Future is spending half a million dollars on a new ad pushing the Senate to confirm Hegseth as defense secretary, a spokesperson confirmed to ABC News. The ad will run on national television and specifically target digital platforms in Iowa, Ernst's home state. Arriving Monday for her first slate of meetings was Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman and military veteran with no intelligence experience. Gabbard's been accused of voicing support for U.S. adversaries like Russia. She was set to meet with Sens. Mike Rounds, James Lankford and Lindsey Graham. MORE: Trump promised to disrupt Washington. His Cabinet picks would do just that: ANALYSIS Linda McMahon, Trump's pick for education secretary, also was on Capitol Hill to meet with GOP Sen. Roger Marshall and other lawmakers. McMahon told ABC News as she will "fall in" with Trump's education policies if confirmed to the position. However, she distanced herself from Trump's comments about shuttering the Department of Education. "President Trump and I have had lots of conversations, and I think his views he's making clear on his own," McMahon said, adding "I'm not going to get ahead of his policy." ABC News' Benjamin Siegel and Oren Oppenheim contributed to this report.
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Report: Leadership needed to address quantum threat mitigationIndian Prairie School District 204 is seeing rapid growth in the number of students who qualify for language services, officials told the district’s Board of Education recently. In the last 10 years, the number of students who qualify for language services has increased by over 3,000 despite the district’s total student population falling by around the same amount, according to a presentation given by Director of English Language Learner Services Rafael Segarra and English Language Learner Coordinator Traci Wiegel. Now, the district has over 4,200 students in the program, the presentation showed. Just 2.5% of Indian Prairie School District 204’s students qualified for language services in the 2005-06 school year, but during the 2024-25 school year, that number has risen to 15.8%, Wiegel said during the presentation. That’s getting close to the state average of 16.4% of students who need language services, she said. About a third of the increase has happened since 2020, with around 1,000 more students qualifying for language services in the 2024-25 school year than they did in the 2021-22 school year, the presentation showed. The district’s English Language Learning Program has two parts: English as a Second Language, which is often shortened to ESL, and bilingual education, Segarra said during the presentation. The ESL portion of the program is for students who attend a school where less than 20 students need language services within a certain language group, he said. According to the district’s website, the goal of the ESL program is to develop English skills while still learning the content they would in their grade. The program looks to develop both social and academic language across listening, speaking, reading and writing, the website says. Schools with 20 or more students who need language services within the same language group are required by the state to provide bilingual services. Like the ESL program, this Transitional Bilingual Education program looks to teach students English and grade-appropriate content, but it also provides native language instruction and support while transitioning to English, according to the district’s website. Although it used to be a much smaller number years ago, 22 of the district’s 34 schools now qualify for the bilingual program, Segarra said. Those schools include Prairie Preschool, Brookdale Elementary, Brooks Elementary, Cowlishaw Elementary, Georgetown Elementary, Gombert Elementary, Kendall Elementary, Longwood Elementary, McCarty Elementary, Owen Elementary, Peterson Elementary, Steck Elementary, Watts Elementary, Welch Elementary, White Eagle Elementary, Fischer Middle, Granger Middle, Hill Middle, Scullen Middle, Still Middle, Metea Valley High and Waubonsie Valley High schools, according to the presentation. Of those schools, 11 offer bilingual education in a language other than Spanish. In addition to an increase in the number of students who need language services, the district is also seeing an increase in the number of languages spoken in the district, according to the presentation. In the 2021-22 school year, around 109 languages were spoken throughout the district, but that number has risen to 126 this year, the presentation showed. These languages represent all students in the district, not just those who need language services, Wiegel said. While Spanish is the top language spoken by students needing language services, which is 986 students, that number has actually gone down slightly since last school year, the presentation showed. The district is, however, seeing notable increases in the number of students in the English Language Learning Program who speak Russian, Uzbek and Ukrainian, according to Wiegel. The presentation showed that almost 100 more Russian-speaking students are enrolled in the program over last year, while Uzbek saw an increase of 50 students and Ukrainian saw an increase of almost 25 students. As the number of students enrolled in the English Language Learning Program has increased over the past four years, the number of district staff dedicated to the program has risen at a slower rate, according to the presentation. The district had 90 staff members for the program in the 2021-22 school year; now, it has just over 110 full-time equivalent positions, the presentation showed. In fact, the district has slightly less full-time equivalent positions than it did last year because Segarra rearranged some staff across the district to provide as many services as possible without impacting the budget, he said. “We are doing the best job we can with our kids based on what is available in terms of our resources,” he said. However, the number of students who need language services is growing daily, and caseloads are growing faster than is feasible for staff to handle, according to Wiegel. Based on staffing, the average caseload is around 56 students per teacher, she said. To increase the amount of time that teachers have with students, the department is looking for ways to decrease paperwork, Segarra said. An outside company is being considered to help with this problem, he said. The department is also looking at ways to use grant funds to hire more staff, but it is struggling to find certified teachers in languages like Russian, Uzbek, Ukrainian, Telugu and Arabic, according to the presentation. Weigel said the department is looking to hire teacher assistants who speak those languages to help, but “clearly the support from a teaching assistant is not the same as the support from a certified teacher.” In addition to needing more teachers, the department’s administrative team is also “well understaffed” compared to other departments in the district and in neighboring districts, according to the presentation. Another challenge for the department is that some buildings do not have enough space for language services to work effectively, the presentation stated. Some schools have very large populations but small spaces, forcing teachers to only meet with six or eight students at a time, which limits instructional time, Weigel said. However, the recently passed $420 million bond referendum may help this situation, she said. Despite challenges with staffing levels and instructional spaces, students are exiting the program because of their English proficiency level at much higher rates than the state average, the presentation showed. In 2024, 575 students exited the program, which is a 16.7% exit rate, Weigel said. The state’s exit rate was 6.2% in 2024, she said. While the exit rate is great, the percentages sometimes dip year-to-year because the number of students who need language services is growing, according to Segarra. Weigel said the demographics of the program are also changing as the district sees more and more “newcomers,” which are students who were born outside of the U.S. and arrived here within the last year or two. To help these students and their parents, the district formed a Newcomers Committee last year, Segarra said. Because of that committee, the district now has a guide for newcomers, which is set to soon be published in Spanish and Russian, along with professional development and a toolkit for general education teachers, he said. However, most of the students who need language services were born in the continental U.S., according to Segarra. The presentation showed that the district currently has over 2,400 students in the English Language Learning Program that were born in the U.S. rsmith@chicagotribune.comNoneGoogle and the US government faced off in a federal court on Monday, as each side delivered closing arguments in a case revolving around the technology giant's alleged unfair domination of online advertising. The trial in a Virginia federal court is Google's second US antitrust case now under way as the US government tries to rein in the power of big tech. In a separate trial, a Washington judge ruled that Google's search business is an illegal monopoly, and the US Justice Department is asking that Google sell its Chrome browser business to resolve the case. The latest case, also brought by the Justice Department, focuses on ad technology for the open web -- the complex system determining which online ads people see when they surf the internet. The vast majority of websites use a trio of Google ad software products that together, leave no way for publishers to escape Google's advertising technology, the plaintiffs allege. Publishers -- including News Corp and Gannett publishing -- complain that they are locked into Google's advertising technology in order to run ads on their websites. "Google is once, twice, three times a monopolist," DOJ lawyer Aaron Teitelbaum told the court in closing arguments. Presiding judge Leonie Brinkema has said that she would deliver her opinion swiftly, as early as next month. Whatever Brinkema's judgment, the outcome will almost certainly be appealed, prolonging a process that could go all the way to the US Supreme Court. The government alleges that Google controls the auction-style system that advertisers use to purchase advertising space online. The US lawyers argue that this approach allows Google to charge higher prices to advertisers while sending less revenue to publishers such as news websites, many of which are struggling to stay in business. The US argues that Google used its financial power to acquire potential rivals and corner the ad tech market, leaving advertisers and publishers with no choice but to use its technology. The government wants Google to divest parts of its ad tech business. Google dismissed the allegations as an attempt by the government to pick "winners and losers" in a diverse market. The company argues that the display ads at issue are just a small share of today's ad tech business. Google says the plaintiffs' definition of the market ignores ads that are also placed in search results, apps and social media platforms and where, taken as a whole, Google does not dominate. "The law simply does not support what the plaintiffs are arguing in this case," said Google's lawyer Karen Dunn. She warned that if Google were to lose the case, the winners would be rival tech giants such as Microsoft, Meta or Amazon, whose market share in online advertising is ascendant as Google's share is falling. The DOJ countered that it simply "does not matter" that Google is competing in the broader market for online ads. "That is a different question" than the market for ads on websites that is the target of the case, said Teitelbaum. Google also points to US legal precedent, saying arguments similar to the government's have been refuted in previous antitrust cases. Dunn also warned that forcing Google to work with rivals in its ad products would amount to government central planning that the court should reject. If the judge finds Google to be at fault, a new phase of the trial would decide how the company should comply with that conclusion. And all that could be moot if the incoming Trump administration decides to drop the case. The president-elect has been a critic of Google's, but he warned earlier this month that breaking it up could be "a very dangerous thing."
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