It’s just like the classic workplace sitcom premise: Two employees are about to change jobs when…a criminal probe threatens to hold everything up.

Given the awkwardness and abnormality of the leadership transition underway at the Federal Reserve right now, you’d have to pitch this as an auteur-driven cringe comedy. Maybe Mike White will wrap White Lotus Season 4 early.

Incoming Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh’s confirmation process remains stalled by an ongoing Justice Department investigation into comments made by outgoing Chair Jerome Powell.

The investigation, which concerns brief remarks from Powell last summer regarding a Fed building renovation project, is currently being held up by Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, who says he won’t vote to advance a new chair until Powell’s probe is closed.

“Tillis views the probe as politically motivated,” Bloomberg reported.

Coupled with Democrats on the same committee who also want to close the probe before moving ahead with a nomination, Tillis’s stance now effectively blocks Warsh’s nomination from moving forward (for now).

Keep reading.—NP

Internal auditors are more vital than ever, as boards increasingly want them to assess cybersecurity and AI risks atop their traditional duties of evaluating controls, ensuring compliance, and helping prevent fraud. But the internal audit function struggled with budget and staffing cuts in 2025, a survey of North American chief audit executives (CAEs) by the Internal Audit Foundation shows.

Less than half (45%) of the 373 CAEs surveyed said their departments had “mostly or completely sufficient funding,” down from 53% in 2024. Nearly a third (30%) said their funding was “not sufficient.”

Budget cuts intensified in 2025. Nearly one in five CAEs (19%) said their funding decreased last year, up from 11% in 2024. Almost a quarter (23%) said budgets increased in 2025, down from 34% the prior year.

Nearly every sector and industry the survey examined saw cuts. Particularly hard-hit were internal audit departments in nonprofits (33% had smaller budgets), healthcare (33%), and educational services (31%)—sectors that suffered from federal and state funding cuts in 2025, among other financial issues. In contrast, in 2024 these sectors’ budgets dropped by only 9%, 6%, and 9%, respectively.

Keep reading.—CV

Failed login attempts, constantly crashing apps, glacial loading times: These are just some of the small but—when multiplied across years and organizations—consequential friction points that too often define digital workers’ professional lives.

The results? Lower productivity; frustrated workers; greater attrition; security issues; headaches for IT, HR, and the C-suite—and ultimately, a less satisfying consumer experience.

“There’s immense productivity loss. You have frustrated users,” Michael Lovewell, a solution consulting team lead at digital employee experience company Nexthink, told us. “Your applications aren’t being leveraged that you’re spending significant amounts of money on. That leads to a lot of these problems.”

So what’s an IT pro to do? Instead of responding to tech friction fallout after the fact, our sources emphasized the importance of reevaluating outdated protocols, gathering feedback on existing problems, implementing processes to identify issues before tickets start trickling in, and creating tighter feedback loops.

Keep reading.—JG

The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew’s weekly news quiz has been compared to getting a company-wide shout-out from your boss. It’s that satisfying.