The Department of Defense is facing sharp criticism over its latest policy that bans reporters from the Pentagon press office, which it has now designated as a classified space.

“The change creates a new barrier compared with previous administrations, under which the office was an open room where reporters could stop by the desks of military public affairs officials without escorts,” The Washington Post reports.

“The Pentagon Press Office has been redesignated as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility due to speechwriters from the Office of the Secretary of War sharing the facility,” acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez said in a statement to The Washington Post, the paper reported.

“These speechwriters routinely handle classified material and require SIPRNet access,” Valdez added. “As a result, journalists will no longer be permitted to enter the office space.”

This “latest designation,” the Post also reported, “creates a scenario in which even if journalists are able to access the Pentagon, their ability to interact with the department’s spokespeople will be reduced.”

Critics blasted the move.

“The administration seems very committed to setting itself up to continue losing in court,” wrote legal analyst Joyce Vance, a former U.S. Attorney. Vance appeared to be suggesting the Pentagon would face another court battle over its move to ban reporters.

Rhetoric professor Matthew Boedy simply called the move “Orwellian.”

Some of the most targeted criticism came from journalists themselves.

Kevin Baron, a longtime defense reporter and the founding executive editor of Defense One, explained that the Pentagon press office is a “giant, open-plan office space, that was specifically designed 20+ years ago to facilitate informing the public by locating Department of Defense public affairs officers and media together.”

“Is it really a press office without the press?” asked WFMY editor Jeremy Vernon.

“Banning journalists from the *press office* in the Pentagon, where they worked professionally in previous administrations, is simply a sign that current DOD leadership fears accountability,” charged The New York Times’ Trip Gabriel.

“The leaders of the ‘biggest, most badass military on the planet,’ in Pete Hegseth’s words, want a safe space from basic public questioning,” observed the Washington Post’s Drew Harwell.

“That Pete Hegseth, what a tough guy. He can do push-ups in photo ops but can’t handle questions from real reporters,” wrote Chris Bury, a DePaul University journalist in residence.

“Taking steps to further restrict press access in the Pentagon during the midst of a war strikes me as a bad thing,” noted The Bulwark’s Sam Stein.

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A federal judge on Monday issued a temporary restraining order against the National Park Service, ordering it to not interfere with a group that had been flying an “8647” flag in Washington, D.C. Common restaurant slang for “eighty-six” goes back nearly a century, the judge noted, saying that it meant “to throw out” or “to get rid of.”

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss issued the two-week restraining order at the request of Accountability Now USA, an anti-Trump group that had been protesting the president “for months at a site in front of the federal courthouse on Constitution Avenue,” Politico reports. The judge “says the banner can’t plausibly be read to threaten violence against President Donald Trump.”

Judge Moss agreed that the group’s goal is to have Trump lawfully removed from office via impeachment, “and that ’86’ is not an unambiguous call to political violence — and certainly not the kind of ‘imminent’ violence that would be necessary to justify restrictions on speech,” Politico noted.

“The Court does not doubt that political violence is on the rise and that it poses a grave threat not just to the targets of the threats but to the country as a whole,” Moss wrote. “But the enormity of that problem does not change the meaning of Plaintiff’s speech, which by any reasonable measure merely advocated for the President’s impeachment and removal from office — that is, ‘to throw [him] out.’”

Anita Carey, an organizer with Accountability Now USA, said that the group was “pleased that the court saw through the government’s baseless accusations about our 8647 flag.”

“We want to lawfully, peacefully, and constitutionally impeach and remove the President from office. We will now resume proudly flying our 8647 flag, and we encourage everyone who agrees with us to do the same,” she said, according to the ACLU of the District of Columbia.

Judge Moss did not mention the Trump DOJ’s case against former FBI Director James Comey, who had posted to social media a photograph of shells arranged in the form of an “8647” message — Comey later deleted the message and apologized, but was indicted in late April. The indictment alleges that any reasonable person would have seen the “8647” message as “a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.”

Last month Trump called Comey a “Dirty Cop.”

Politico notes that Judge Moss’ “determination underscores questions about the genesis of the charges against Comey.” Comey has denied that his “8647” post was intended to provoke violence.

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A prominent economist has calculated the overall cost of President Donald Trump’s Iran war on American consumers, boiled it down to how much it is costing each U.S. household, and is issuing a warning on the economy.

Dr. Mark Zandi is the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics and the co-founder of Economy.com. He puts the total cost of Trump’s war at $100 billion — a conservative estimate to some — which amounts to about $750 per household so far.

That $100 billion includes “the additional U.S. military costs and the higher energy and other prices resulting from the war,” says Zandi, who calls it a “big economic blow.”

Last week, Zandi told CNBC that if prices stay roughly the same, and the war drags on to a full year, the total cost will jump to about $2,000 for each U.S. household.

He warns that while Trump’s “deficit-financed tax cuts have cushioned it” so far, as of the middle of last month, “the bigger tax refunds Americans have received this year no longer cover the higher costs of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel caused by the war.”

Patrick De Haan, the head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, on May 19 reported that “Americans will be spending $2 billion more on gasoline over the four day Memorial Day weekend compared to a year ago, according to GasBuddy estimates, or roughly $22 million more every hour.”

Looking at the “hard-pressed middle and lower-income households,” Zandi found that the financial pressure is “mounting quickly.”

He notes that the U.S. consumer’s savings rate is now “about as low as it ever goes,” and warns that “unless the war ends soon and energy prices come down,” Americans “will have little choice but to rein in their spending, weighing further on the already sagging economy.”

Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon, told CNBC that consumers “are increasingly facing an income squeeze, which is forcing them to use savings, credit and wealth to sustain their spending patterns.”

The Trump White House over the weekend offered a different take.

Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters that “People are spending more on gas, but they’re also spending more on everything else — not just groceries, but restaurants and so on,” MS NOW reported. “I think that that’s a sign that you would see when people are optimistic about the future.”

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