This is Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howell.

It's Thursday, February 23rd, and this is your morning wire, after an update.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg traveled to East Palestine, Ohio 20 days after

the Norfolk Southern toxic-trained derailment upended the Ohio town.

Buttigieg has received criticism for not responding to the incident publicly sooner and for

lacking transparency with the press.

Secretary is defending his response.

In retrospect, should you have come a little sooner?

So again, on terms of timing of the visit, I'm trying to strike the right balance,

allowing NTSB to play its role in making sure we're here in that show of support.

Meanwhile, the National Transportation Safety Board released a preliminary report Thursday,

saying that the catastrophic derailment was caused by an overheated wheel bearing on the 23rd

of 149 rail cars.

A bill to ban sex change procedures on minors in Tennessee passed in the state house today,

and now heads to the desk of Republican Governor Bill Lee.

If signed, the bill will ban such procedures as mastectomies on minor girls who say their

voice and make it illegal to give children cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for the sake of

transgender identity. These medical procedures cause serious and lifelong harms and carry additional

unknown risks. These procedures provided only in the last decade or so on any kind of a large scale,

provide no reliable evidence of any long-term benefit. The bill easily passed the Republican

controlled body by a vote of 77 to 16. The Daily Wires' Matt Walsh is widely credited with bringing

attention to the issue. More than 900,000 Americans were without power across six states today,

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