President Donald Trump's administration fired Shira Perlmutter, head of the U.S. Copyright Office, on Saturday, Fox News reported. This comes just days after the Librarian of Congress was given the pink slip.
Perlmutter was reportedly ousted without warning this weekend. She received the news via email that read "your position as the Register of Copyrights and Director at the U.S. Copyright Office is terminated effective immediately."
The White House did not provide a response to media inquiries, but this firing is part of a broader trend of house-cleaning in the government. Trump sees some of these bureaucratic holdovers as obstacles to implementing his agenda.
However, the news came after Perlmutter released a report favoring copyrights for materials used to train artificial intelligence, so the left ran with the conspiracy theories. Some are blaming the Department of Government Efficiency head, Elon Musk, as Democrats cry foul.
The Trump administration has been weeding out officials who are adversarial to the president or simply not doing their job. The White House has yet to explain its reasoning for Perlmutter, but there may be a hint based on what happened last week with Carla Hayden, who was removed as Librarian of Congress.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt explained the reasons for Hayden's ouster in a news conference Friday. "We felt she did not fit the needs of the American people," Leavitt explained.
"There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children, and we don't believe that she was serving the interests of the American taxpayer well.So she has been removed from her position, and the president is well within his rights to do that," Leavitt told the press.
Hayden was notified by email as well. "Carla. On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service," the email, sent from the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office, said.
The reasons for firing Hayden have become clear and will likely be similar for Perlmutter. However, Democrats couldn't help but blame Musk for the firing based on Perlmutter's support for copyrights, even with the rise of AI.
According to CBS News, Musk supports abolishing protections for intellectual property based on a tweet he posted. Rep. Joe Morelle, a ranking member of the Committee on House Administration, ran with the idea, calling Perlmutter's "a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis."
The New York Democrat charged that it was "surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk's efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models." There's no telling whether firing one official would end the debate, but it seems Morelle is convinced anyway.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) similarly protested the firing, according to Reuters. They claimed that Congress "purposefully insulated this role and the U.S. Copyright Office from politics."
Without the White House's confirmation, there's no telling what exactly led to Perlumtter's firing. However, leftists will always ascribe the worst motivations to Trump regardless of the truth.
