Month: November 2025

• Teachers on overseas military bases are facing financial strains as a government shutdown persists.
• Military support staff, unlike soldiers, aren’t getting paid, a break from past shutdown norms.
• Teachers said they are worried about falling behind on rent and other bills.

European landlords don’t understand why their American tenants suddenly can’t make rent.

Teachers and other support staff who work on overseas US military bases are facing a tough situation as the government shutdown approaches the longest in history, and their paychecks dry up. While Trump has found a way to temporarily pay American soldiers around the globe, the over 14,000 people who keep military bases running aren’t so lucky.

Five teachers working for the Department of Defense Education Activity on various European bases told Business Insider they’re scrambling to bring translated letters to their landlords explaining that their employer isn’t sending paychecks at the moment, are full of worry about utility bills arriving, and recounting their situations to incredulous locals.

“Our teachers are all still going to school every day. The aides are still going, the substitutes are still going,” Cathy Indresano, the Italy-based president of the Overseas Federation of Teachers, said, adding that many school workers are often also military spouses. “And of course, we’re all working and nobody’s getting paid.”

This government shutdown ripple effect shows just how far-reaching the ramifications of the appropriations lapse are — especially as the Trump administration unilaterally makes calls on who and who shouldn’t be paid. Typically, Congress passes partial spending measures to keep military operations funded. Without that, this time around, the president decided to send paychecks to military and select law enforcement officers — but base support staffers are on their own, just like hundreds of thousands of other federal workers.

DoDEA’s communications operations chief Jessica Tackaberry told BI that DoDEA schools are considered excepted and operating as normal, as the agency “remains committed” to providing education to military-connected students.

“We understand the difficulties this situation may create for our dedicated educators and staff who are working without pay. DoDEA is closely monitoring the situation and will continue to provide guidance and support to employees as needed,” Tackaberry said. “Despite the fiscal uncertainty, students across our global school system continue to receive the same high-quality, rigorous education that prepares them for college, career, and life success.”

The events of this shutdown “left a whole bunch of people by the wayside, including these folks,” Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said.

The workers Business Insider spoke to are in a unique position: They’re stuck in shutdown limbo thousands of miles away from the stalemate in Washington. They described financial hardships, reduced snacks in classrooms, and having to explain to incredulous locals that yes, they are stuck indefinitely working without pay.

“We’re just a small little entity here that people don’t realize it’s still working away,” Indresano said, “and still supporting the military.”

Behind on rent and dealing with culture shock

Desiree has been teaching abroad for around 11 years. She’s never faced a shutdown like this.

Recent past shutdowns were technically partial shutdowns because the Department of Defense was funded ahead of time and carried on with normal operations, or, as in the 2013 shutdown, legislation was passed that meant troops and other DoD workers could be paid in the event of a shutdown.

The news that Desiree and her colleagues would receive no paycheck came abruptly. Her prorated check for the last days worked in September only covered around a third of rent at the apartment she moved into over the summer. Like other DoDEA employees who live off the base, she’s also stopped receiving her rent stipend. That means she’ll likely be late on her first rent payment.

“Money is just — it’s not flowing, except for out,” she said, adding, “In some situations, I don’t have a whole lot of choice. It has to keep going. I mean, we have to buy food. I have to put gas in my car.”

Desiree said that many teachers may have just incurred moving costs ahead of the start of the school year, and might not be on as firm a financial footing. One fairly new DoDEA employee said that’s exacerbated by the weak dollar compared to the euro. It’s made it even harder to save up ahead of the shutdown.

“My bank account’s already in the negative,” the worker said. “For me personally, I won’t be able to make rent next month. I don’t have it.”

Another strain is that some overseas DoDEA workers aren’t allowed to pick up second jobs, a backup plan helping some US-based federal workers stay afloat. Living across the ocean from loved ones adds to the stress, making things “a little tougher,” as Indresano said.

“Not being in the US, we don’t have the luxury of being able to go to a food bank that they would have there — not that we need that at the moment, but you never know. It depends on how long this lasts,” Indresano said.

The government shutdown hits classrooms overseas

Parents and students on overseas military bases recently fought to keep extracurriculars and sports running amid a funding lapse, but in the day-to-day of teaching, the shutdown still looms. One teacher pointed to the classroom snacks they and their colleagues often pay for out of their own pockets.

“There are families that don’t have the food and things like that,” the teacher said. “So teachers are providing snacks. We can’t go buy that for them because we’re not getting paid.”

Desiree said she’s been unable to buy school supplies, something the school usually gets an allowance for. That means that their ceramics classes could go without clay, and the school could run out of paper soon.

James has been teaching overseas for over two decades. He’s weathered multiple shutdowns, but this is the first time his paycheck has been suspended. Having spent a good amount of time in his local community, he sees familiar faces at the coffee shop and grocery store. Some of the locals have heard about the shutdown, or they ask what’s going on.

“There’s a certain amount of surprise as well as sympathy for what we’re going through,” he said. However, he’s observed that his local friends struggle to “wrap their mind around how Congress, meaning both the House and the Senate,” could let the government shut down and workers go without pay.

“It’s very difficult for them to conceptualize how that happens,” he said.

A group that calls itself “In Maine, Love is Louder” organized a rally in Augusta over the weekend to highlight good things happening in communities statewide.

• Tesla uses a team of data collectors to train Optimus how to be human.
• The workers run, dance, and perform simple tasks like wiping a table hundreds of times.
• Data collectors said the role is physically demanding, occasionally absurd, and always meticulous.

Inside a glass-walled lab at Tesla’s engineering headquarters, dozens of workers act out the motions of everyday life: lifting a cup, wiping a table, pulling open a curtain.

They repeat each action hundreds of times during eight-hour shifts, and their work is captured by five cameras attached to their helmet and a heavy backpack. CEO Elon Musk sometimes stops by to watch, and Tesla investors visit regularly for demos.

It’s like being a “lab rat under a microscope,” one former worker told Business Insider.

The goal is simple: Teach Optimus, the company’s robot, how to move like a human.

Musk has identified Optimus as a crucial part of the business. During the company’s third-quarter earnings call, Musk said that it “has the potential to be the biggest product of all time” and said the company would eventually produce 1 million units per year. He has also projected that Optimus would account for around 80% of the automaker’s value one day.

Tesla intends for Optimus to perform a wide variety of tasks, including factory work, household chores, and caregiving. The work of the “data collection operators” is designed to pave the way for Optimus to replace human labor.

Business Insider spoke with five current and former workers to understand how Optimus is trained. They said the role is physically demanding, occasionally absurd, and always meticulous. They sprint, squat, and dance. If their movements are deemed not “human enough,” one worker said, their performance is critiqued.

A spokesperson for Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

Tesla is one of many tech companies, including Figure and 1X, attempting to replicate complex human behavior in a robot. The ultimate goal, as with much of the AI industry, might be autonomy, but an army of flesh-and-blood workers props up the sleek demos and lofty promises.

‘Teaching a baby’

Training a robot to be human isn’t glamorous.

Most data collectors start out wiping down a table, sometimes for weeks. “You take a step, wipe the table, go into a reset pose, and do it all over again,” one former worker said. It’s “rinse and repeat until break time.”

The workers receive detailed documents about how to perform simple tasks, and they’re guided by a thick, constantly evolving manual, three workers said. They’re also paired up with a peer to ensure the tasks are performed correctly, five people said.

“Tesla is very strict on how everything needs to be done,” one worker said. “It can be very tough mentally and physically.”

Since data collection started, workers have largely used motion capture suits to teleoperate the robot — teaching it with manual movement. In June, the company told workers it was pivoting away from motion-capture suits and teleoperation and toward collecting data using only cameras, Business Insider previously reported. The change followed the departure of program director Milan Kovac.

The worker-mounted cameras point in all directions, helping precisely place the data collectors in the environment, workers said. They said the team was told it would be faster to scale data collection without the motion-capture suits.

Since the June shift, the company has incorporated multiple new training processes, including stationing cameras around workers while they perform tasks, three workers said.

Jonathan Aitken, a robotics expert at the University of Sheffield, told Business Insider that the camera towers could supplement the data by providing a broader view of the environment.

Workers are sometimes outfitted with haptic gloves, which track the minute movements of their hands, three employees said. Musk has said Tesla has spent considerable energy trying to develop a human-like hand for Optimus, calling it “an incredibly difficult engineering challenge.”

Workers have also recorded themselves mirroring each other’s movements, three people said. At the company’s Fremont, California, plant, data collectors have organized vehicle parts and worked on conveyor belts while wearing the headset and backpack, two people said. Experts who spoke with Business Insider said that collecting different data points for the same task can be helpful for training.

Other tasks are so simple that a former worker likened them to “teaching a baby.” Two data collectors said they recorded themselves working on brain teasers designed for actual babies: putting rings on by size and color, or putting shapes into their corresponding slots.

Tesla has also begun using AI-generated prompts to help train the robot, three people said. During some training exercises, workers receive a series of AI-generated prompts via a headset, which is attached to the 30- to 40-pound backpack via wires. Though they’re often wearing the backpack, it sometimes sits nearby on a chair or table.

Workers said the exercises have included squatting, doing the “Chicken Dance,” acting like a gorilla, pretending to vacuum, sprinting for several yards, pretending to golf, and twerking. Workers are expected to perform each exercise within three to five seconds, the workers said. Two people recalled instances where some tasks made them uncomfortable, including AI-generated requests to crawl on all fours or remove a piece of clothing.

Aitken said the seemingly random tasks could help Tesla understand which areas it needs to improve on.

“How do you know you’ve covered the entire range of things you’ll need it to be able to do?” he said.

‘Cardio all day’

The work can take a physical toll, four people said. One former worker described it as “basically doing cardio all day.”

One former worker said they sustained a back injury while training the robot. They said the unbalanced weight of the backpack made it feel like they were constantly “walking with a limp.” They said they went on medical leave as a result.

“I lost feeling in my right leg and had a sharp pain in my back,” they said.

Workers said they saw colleagues sustain back and neck injuries due to the nature of the role.

Some people experienced problems during teleoperation, which can involve motion-capture suits and a virtual reality headset. A mix of poor image quality and the length of time workers spent wearing the gear triggered severe motion sickness, three people said. They said it could be especially disorienting when the robot fell over.

“You’d have the feeling you’re falling because you’re seeing through its eyes, but you’d be standing upright,” one worker said.

For now, teleoperation is mostly reserved for investor visits.

“The investors want to see the bots moving in action,” one former worker said. “When we’re in mo-cap, we’re controlling the bots so it looks more fluid.”

Investors are sometimes accompanied by Musk, who has brought his 5-year-old son X to see the robot, two former workers said. One of the former workers compared the demos to “putting on a big show.”

“It felt like theater,” the former worker said.

Half the time, two workers said, the robot tumbles over when performing tasks that require bending or leaning, sometimes damaging expensive equipment. It’s typically strapped into the gantry — a supportive rig that keeps the robot upright — unless it’s performing tasks that involve traveling more than a few feet, three workers said.

Aitken said the robot should be able to remain upright with ease in a controlled environment like Tesla’s offices. “Having it stand up and maintain balance should be one of the first things you look at,” he said.

Musk said during Tesla’s recent earnings call that the robot is a 24/7 presence at the company’s engineering headquarters and walks around the office and escorts people to meeting rooms.

Kung fu and candy

At one point, more than 100 people worked on data collection, three people said. The company cut dozens of data collectors in September following twice-yearly performance reviews.

Workers are scored on how well they perform the tasks, five people said. They receive feedback on everything from bodily angles to positioning.

The data collectors have an online dashboard with grades based on data quality and quantity. Each worker is expected to gather at least four hours of usable video footage per shift, five people said. If the video footage is deemed unsatisfactory — if the worker’s positioning isn’t quite right, for instance — workers can be penalized.

For the workers who train it, Optimus’ performance metrics are less clear. When training relied primarily on teleoperation, data operators could press a button to see if Optimus would perform the task. (More often than not, it couldn’t, three people said.) Now, these evaluations are less common, and the workers said they have less transparency into the robot’s progress.

In company videos, Optimus can be seen walking, folding laundry, performing kung fu moves at the “Tron Ares” premiere, and handing out candy in Times Square.

A robot demo “is always the very best demo they could show you,” Alan Fern, an AI and robotics expert at Oregon State University, told Business Insider.

“When you see something like it performing kung fu, it looks like it’s doing something intelligent, which leads people to extrapolate its capabilities, but that’s just not true,” Fern said. “It’s just reacting to its environment. There is not a cognitive thought behind it.”

Musk, meanwhile, continues to tout a grand vision. “It won’t even seem like a robot,” he told investors in October. “It’ll seem like a person in a robot suit.”

For now, Optimus is still learning through repetition, trial and error, and endless hours of human labor.

Do you work for Tesla or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at gkay@businessinsider.com or Signal at 248-894-6012. Use a personal email address, a nonwork device, and nonwork WiFi; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

• AI-generated content is increasingly widespread in politics.
• It’s raising concerns among lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
• “When I’m on my feed today, I’m scared to death,” Sen. Chris Murphy told BI.

If you’re worried about the growing use of hyperrealistic AI-generated content in politics, you’re not alone. Some politicians feel the same way.

“When I’m on my feed today, I’m scared to death,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told BI. “I have no idea what’s real and what’s not, and I don’t understand how we have a meaningful political dialogue in this country when there is no way for voters to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not.”

Everywhere you look online, politicians and political groups are using AI to make a point.

Most recently, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated video in which the president is depicted dumping a brown substance widely assumed to be feces onto protestors out of a fighter jet.

“I think it was mud,” Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming told BI. “But maybe not.”

But while Trump and his administration are some of the more consistent distributors of AI-generated content, some Democrats are using AI too.

In the New York City mayoral race, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has posted several AI-generated videos on X attacking Zohran Mamdani, while Gov. Gavin Newsom’s X page is also filled with over-the-top AI-generated images, many of them mocking Trump and other Republicans.

Even Trump himself has said he thinks the proliferation of AI-generated content online is “a little bit scary, to be honest with you.”

“President Trump is the greatest communicator in American history,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston told BI in a statement for this story. “No leader has used social media to communicate directly with the American people more creatively and effectively than President Trump.”

Lawmakers say that as long as those AI-generated videos and images are clearly recognizable as parodies, it’s not a huge deal. But in some cases, it’s not as clear.

“I think it’s a shocking message he was sending to the American people by reposting that, and it’s ridiculous that he did that,” Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona told BI, referring to Trump’s fighter jet video. “But what I’m concerned about are those videos where you can’t tell.”

One recent example: Senate Republicans’ campaign arm posted an AI-generated video of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declaring that “every day gets better for us” amid the ongoing government shutdown.

It was a real quote, said during an interview with Punchbowl News. But the video, which included a small, transparent disclaimer in the bottom right corner, was not.

“These were Chuck Schumer’s own words celebrating the shutdown he has voted for 13 times and the real-world consequences impacting American families,” said Joanna Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which produced the video. “He may wish people didn’t know he said them, but he did — and for $0 our video took a print quote seen by ‘100,000+’ Punchbowl subscribers to over 1.8 million views.”

“I think it’s worrisome. I think it’s something we’re gonna need to think through really hard,” Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri told BI, referring to the general spread of AI-generated political content. “Otherwise, everything you see on TV is gonna be fake.”

‘Regulation of AI is really hard’

Not everyone is worried about AI-generated content. Lummis, who said she was the subject of a parody when she first ran for the office for the first time in 1978, says we’re simply seeing a technologically advanced version of a long-standing practice.

“It’s more sophisticated, just the way movies are more sophisticated than even the original Star Wars movie,” Lummis said. “But it’s not new.”

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee who’s positioned himself as an ally of the burgeoning AI industry, says he doesn’t see the need for specific regulation around political deepfakes.

“I think the protections on free speech are at their height when it concerns political speech,” Cruz told BI, saying that “existing laws concerning fraud” can address the issue. “We need to make sure we’re protecting against real harms, but at the same time, not strangling the development of AI in the cradle.”

Cruz specifically praised Cuomo’s use of AI-generated content to attack Mamdani in the NYC mayoral race, saying that it’s “really effective” even though “nobody on earth” would think that it’s the real Mamdani appearing in the videos.

Even among those who want to see something done, there’s no easy answer available, given free speech protections.

“Regulation of AI is really hard, admittedly,” Murphy said. The Connecticut senator said he was open to trying to ban fake political content “or at the very least requiring clear, indelible watermarks” on AI-generated content.

Hawley is one of several cosponsors of a bill called the “Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act,” which would ban the use of deceptive AI-generated material for the use of influencing elections or raising campaign cash.

“To the extent we can as allowed by the First Amendment, I think we ought to prohibit most of the AI-generated totally fake stuff on TV in elections when it’s meant to influence the outcome of an election,” Hawley said.

For Kelly, the use of AI by American political campaigns is just the beginning of his concerns.

“We need to figure out, how do we make sure that this technology isn’t used against us by our adversaries,” Kelly said. “Forget about how political opponents could use it.”