United Kingdom on CrossGov.com

US Russia Sanctions Move in Both Directions as the EU's 22nd Package and Britain's 600 Tankers Carry the Load

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The United States imposed its toughest Russia sanctions in October 2025, when it designated Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two largest oil companies. Those designations stand. Since then Washington has moved in both directions. In 2026 it removed several names from its lists, issued licences letting already-loaded Russian oil cargoes be delivered and kept extending the deadline for Lukoil to sell its foreign assets. On 1 October it designated A7, a Russia-linked payments network used to evade sanctions, under its Iran and criminal-network authorities.

US Court Throws Out 4chan's Suit Against Britain's Ofcom, but Offshore Online Safety Fines Still Go Unpaid

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In September 2026 a federal judge in Washington threw out a lawsuit that two American websites, 4chan and Kiwi Farms, had brought against Britain’s online safety regulator. The ruling settled one question: a US court won’t stop a foreign regulator from fining American sites. It left another open: whether anyone can make them pay.

Between April 2025 and June 2026, Britain’s online safety regulator, Ofcom, fined nine providers based outside the UK under the Online Safety Act. The fines had a face value of £6.1 million, before daily penalties. When asked under freedom of information rules how much had been paid, Ofcom withheld the figure.

Permitting Reform Compared: The US Rewrites NEPA, Britain Passes Its Planning Act and the EU Proposes Deadlines With Tacit Approval

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The environmental impact statement for an 88-mile railway in Utah ran to 3,600 pages. When the case reached the US Supreme Court in May 2025, the justices used it to change how the country’s main environmental review law works. In Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, the Court told judges to give agencies substantial deference on how they carry out reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, and said agencies don’t have to study separate projects upstream or downstream of the one in front of them.

US Visa Bans and Tariff Threats Meet Europe's Digital Services Act Fines on X and Temu

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In late December 2025 Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced visa bans on five Europeans connected to online content rules. They included Thierry Breton, the former EU commissioner who had driven the Digital Services Act, and the heads of three campaign groups that work on online hate and disinformation. The European Commission strongly condemned the move. Emmanuel Macron called it intimidation and coercion. A US judge later issued a temporary order protecting one of the five, Imran Ahmed.

As Washington Fights the States Over AI Rules, the EU Delays Its High-Risk AI Act Obligations to December 2027

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The United States has no federal AI law, and the administration’s main AI fight in 2026 is with American states that wrote their own. Across the Atlantic, the EU has the opposite problem: one detailed law for 27 countries, which it has just slowed down.

The EU’s AI Act was meant to bite hardest on 2 August 2026. That was the date when rules for high-risk AI, the systems that screen job applicants, score credit, grade exams or support policing, were due to apply. They didn’t. Brussels moved the date, by law, a month before.

Five Eyes Under Strain: Allies Limit Intelligence Sharing With Washington Case by Case

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The UKUSA agreement was signed in March 1946, between Britain and the United States. Canada joined in 1948, Australia and New Zealand in 1956. For most of the eighty years since, the arrangement now called Five Eyes has been the closest intelligence partnership between sovereign states anywhere. Raw signals intelligence moves between the five almost as if they were one service.

That still mostly holds. What changed in 2025 is the edges. Several allies now decide case by case what they hand to Washington, and Washington has started deciding case by case what it hands back.

Why Government IT Projects Fail: HealthCare.gov, the FBI's Virtual Case File and the Lessons From Phoenix, Horizon and Robodebt

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 1 October 2013 HealthCare.gov opened and buckled on day one. The HHS inspector general later counted nearly $800 million obligated across 60 contracts by February 2014. A decade earlier the FBI had scrapped its Virtual Case File after three years and $170 million. And GAO says the federal government still spends about 80% of its more than $100 billion a year in IT on running systems it already has.

US Federal Workforce Shrinks by 11% While Britain's Civil Service Stays Near a 20-Year High

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The US federal workforce fell by nearly 256,000 people, more than 11%, between December 2024 and January 2026, according to GAO. Eighteen of the 22 large agencies it examined shrank by more than 10%.

Britain set out to shrink its state too. In March 2025 Chancellor Rachel Reeves promised to cut departments’ running costs by 15% by 2029-30 and said civil service numbers could fall by 10,000. In January 2026 the target rose to a 16% cut in administrative costs over five years. Yet the Office for National Statistics counted 557,000 civil servants in June 2026, 1,000 fewer than in March and 6,000 more than a year earlier. In full-time equivalents the civil service reached about 524,000 in March 2026, the highest since 2005.

Statistics Agencies Under Strain: BLS After the Firing, ONS After the Review, and Argentina's Shelved Inflation Index

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 1 August 2025, hours after the July jobs report came out, President Trump fired the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer. The report showed 73,000 new jobs, and revisions cut the previous two months by a combined 258,000. The President said the numbers were rigged. He gave no evidence.

It took a year to replace her. The first nominee, E.J. Antoni of the Heritage Foundation, was named in August 2025 and withdrawn at the end of September. The Bureau of Labor Statistics ran under an acting commissioner, William Wiatrowski. In January 2026 the President nominated Brett Matsumoto, a BLS price-index economist since 2015 who had also worked at the Council of Economic Advisers. The Senate confirmed him by 51 votes to 47 in August 2026.

GSA's $50 Billion Multiple Award Schedule vs Britain's G-Cloud: Two Ways to Buy Government Technology

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The General Services Administration’s Multiple Award Schedule is the federal government’s biggest catalogue of things it can buy without a full tender. GSA says it moves more than $52 billion a year in products and services. An analysis of GSA data puts fiscal 2025 sales at about $50.6 billion, with about 14,600 contract holders and roughly a third of sales going to small businesses.

It’s in the middle of a shake-up. In fiscal 2025 GSA cut about 1,600 contracts it judged unnecessary. In May 2026 it reorganised its Federal Acquisition Service, putting the schedule in one office alongside its big governmentwide IT contracts. And since March 2025, an executive order has made GSA the central buyer of common goods and services for the whole government.

California High-Speed Rail Loses Its Federal Grants as Britain's HS2 Resets at Up to £102.7 Billion

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 16 July 2025 the Federal Railroad Administration terminated about $4 billion in grants to California’s high-speed rail project. The Transportation Department put its projected total cost at $135 billion, with about $15 billion spent over 16 years. California is now laying track in the Central Valley with no federal money at all.

Britain’s HS2 tells the same story at a different scale. On 19 May 2026 Britain’s Transport Secretary, Heidi Alexander, gave Parliament the new price of HS2. The line from London to Birmingham will cost between £87.7 billion and £102.7 billion. In 2019 prices, the estimate is now £70.9 to £82.2 billion, against £35 to £45 billion before. The first trains, between Old Oak Common in west London and Birmingham Curzon Street, are expected between May 2036 and October 2039. The full route into Euston follows between 2040 and 2043.