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The Pentagon has pulled key protections for its civilian personnel, directing managers to move with “speed and conviction” to fire underperforming workers, according to a memo issued one day before the U.S. government shut down.

“Supervisors and human resources (HR) professionals are directed to act with speed and conviction to facilitate the separation from Federal service of employees performing unsuccessfully,” states a Sept. 30 memo signed by the Pentagon’s top personnel policy officer, Under Secretary of Defense Anthony Tata.

It also warns that managers will be held accountable if they don’t address “poor employee performance.”

The new guidelines, which became public Tuesday, have sparked fears that they could be used to push out anyone at the Pentagon who doesn’t agree with or toe the line on the Trump administration’s programs.

It’s unclear how many employees may have been fired since the memo took effect. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hill.

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Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukraine overnight into Saturday killed at least four people and wounded 20, officials said, and prompted fresh pleas from Ukraine’s president for Western air defense systems.

In the capital, Kyiv, two people were killed and 13 were wounded in a ballistic missile attack in the early hours of Saturday, Kyiv’s police said.

A fire broke out in a non-residential building in one location, while debris from intercepted missiles fell in an open area at another site, damaging windows in nearby buildings, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service wrote on the message app Telegram.

“Explosions in the capital. The city is under ballistic attack,” Mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote on Telegram during the onslaught.

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A federal judge in Portland, Oregon, on Friday rejected the Trump administration’s request to immediately lift her order blocking the deployment of federalized national guard troops to the city, saying that she would decide the matter by Monday.

The hearing in Portland and one in Washington DC are the latest in a head-spinning array of lawsuits and overlapping rulings prompted by Trump’s push to send the military into Democratic-run cities despite fierce resistance from mayors and governors. Troop deployment remains blocked in the Chicago area, where all sides are waiting to see whether the US supreme court intervenes to allow it.

The Portland district court judge, Karin Immergut, had previously issued two temporary restraining orders blocking the deployment of national guards troops there, in response to a persistent but small protest outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office.

Her first order, blocking the deployment of 200 troops from the Oregon national guard, said that Donald Trump had exceeded his authority by taking federal control of the troops based on his claim that the city was in a state of war-like rebellion. Trump’s assessment, Immergut ruled, was “simply untethered to the facts”.

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The U.S. military is sending an aircraft carrier to the waters off South America, the Pentagon announced Friday, in the latest escalation of military firepower in a region where the Trump administration has unleashed more rapid strikes in recent days against boats it accuses of carrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group to deploy to the U.S. Southern Command region to “bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said on social media.

The USS Ford, which has five destroyers in its strike group, is now deployed to the Mediterranean Sea. One of its destroyers is in the Arabian Sea and another is in the Red Sea, a person familiar with the operation told The Associated Press. As of Friday, the aircraft carrier was in port in Croatia on the Adriatic Sea.

The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations, would not say how long it would take for the strike group to arrive in the waters off South America or if all five destroyers would make the journey.

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'We're just gonna kill people': Trump says he doesn't need a declaration of war for strikes on suspected drug smugglers

Donald Trump’s statement on Thursday that he has no intention of asking Congress for a declaration of war ahead of possible strikes on suspected drug smugglers in Venezuela, “we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country”, thrilled his supporters but disturbed many Americans.

Asked by a reporter if he intended to go to Congress, Trump suggested that his administration would brief lawmakers on the military operation, but said that he saw no reason to seek congressional authorization.

While Trump supporters posted video of the remarks on social media with a mic-drop emoji, a Democratic party account posted it without comment, apparently certain that the president’s violation of constitutional provision that only Congress can declare war was obvious.“I don’t think we’re gonna necessarily ask for a declaration of war, I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK? We’re gonna to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead,” the president said.

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The U.S. military launched its eighth strike against an alleged drug-carrying vessel, killing two people in the waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday, marking an expansion of the Trump administration’s campaign against drug trafficking in South America.

The attack Tuesday night was a departure from the seven previous U.S. strikes that had targeted vessels in the Caribbean. Hegseth said on social media that the latest strike killed two people, bringing the death toll to at least 34 from attacks that began last month.

The strike marks an expansion of the military’s targeting area in South American waters as well as a shift to Colombia, where much of the cocaine from the world’s largest producer is smuggled. Hegseth’s post also draws a direct comparison between the war on terrorism that the U.S. declared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Trump administration’s crackdown.

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