Trump Administration Live Updates: Supreme Court Extends Freeze on Use of Alien Enemies Act for Deportations
Reporting from Washington
The Trump administration will not be allowed to deport a group of Venezuelan detainees accused of being members of a violent gang under a rarely invoked wartime law while the matter is litigated in the courts, the Supreme Court said on Friday.
The justices sent the case back to a federal appeals court, directing it to examine claims by the migrants that they could not be legally deported under the Alien Enemies Act, the centuries-old wartime law invoked by the Trump administration. The justices said the appeals court should also examine what kind of notice the government be required to provide that would allow migrants the opportunity to challenge their deportations.
The court said its order would remain in place until the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled and the Supreme Court considered any appeal from that ruling.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote a dissent. He was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
The ruling deals a sharp blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to deploy the wartime law to pursue swift, sweeping deportations of Venezuelan migrants accused of being members of Tren de Aragua, a violent gang.
It also suggests that a majority of the justices may be skeptical of whether the migrants have been afforded enough due process protections by the administration before they are deported, potentially to a prison for terrorists in El Salvador.
The Trump administration has attempted to use the law as a tool in its signature initiative to speed the deportation of millions of migrants, leading to a clash with a skeptical judiciary.
The Supreme Court has already weighed in on the issue once, agreeing in early April to temporarily allow the administration to proceed with its use of the law, provided it gave migrants subject to it the opportunity to challenge their deportations in court.
As those challenges have been filed, several lower court judges have concluded that the administration has exceeded the scope of the law, which can be invoked only when the United States has been subject to “invasion” or “predatory incursion,” and have blocked the deportation of groups of Venezuelans.
Friday’s order came after a high-stakes legal fight between the Trump administration and lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union in one of those challenges. The lawyers rushed to the court on April 18 after getting word that Venezuelan migrants detained in Texas and accused of being members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, had received notices of imminent removal and were being loaded on buses, presumably to be taken to the airport.
The group quickly filed a lawsuit in a federal trial court in Abilene, Texas, on behalf of two of the Venezuelans held at the detention center. Justice Department lawyers responded, telling a trial court judge that they had no immediate plans to deport the detainees.
The judge, James W. Hendrix, who was appointed during the first Trump administration, declined to issue an order temporarily blocking the deportations.
The A.C.L.U. subsequently asked the Supreme Court to act instead.
After midnight on April 19, the justices, temporarily paused the deportations, writing, “The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court,” the order said.
The justices moved swiftly that night, and the emergency application has been pending before the court since.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the justices in a court filing to allow lower courts to weigh in before intervening further in the case. He did not address the specifics of the A.C.L.U. claims that the deportations had been imminent, with buses being loaded for the airport. Rather, he said the government had provided notice to detainees subject to imminent deportation and that they “have had adequate time to file” claims challenging their removal.
In a reply to the court, the A.C.L.U. disputed this, arguing that the Trump administration had taken “actions contrary to this court’s specific ruling” that the government provide notice and time to challenge deportations.
Instead of providing notice to allow detainees to challenge their removal, the A.C.L.U. brief said, “the government gave detainees an English-only form, not provided to any attorney, which nowhere mentions the right to contest the designation or removal, much less explain how detainees could do so.”
The Trump administration plans to release, as early as next week, audio recordings of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. being interviewed by the special counsel who investigated his handling of classified information, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Biden was interviewed at the White House in October 2023 by Robert K. Hur, who had been appointed to investigate whether crimes had been committed related to classified documents found at Mr. Biden’s former office and home after he left the Obama administration.
In 2024, Mr. Hur announced he would not seek to file any charges in the case, in part because Mr. Biden would probably appear to be a sympathetic figure to a jury — an older man with a poor memory.
The planned release comes as Democrats are grappling with new revelations about Mr. Biden’s health in office, and efforts by his aides and other party leaders at the time to quash concerns about his ability to run for re-election.
About a month after Mr. Hur’s announcement, officials released a transcript of the his interview with Mr. Biden. But for more than a year, Republicans have been demanding that the government also release the audio recording, arguing that it might offer evidence of a decline in Mr. Biden’s mental acuity.
“The transcripts were released by the Biden administration more than a year ago,” said Kelly Scully, a spokeswoman for the former president. “The audio does nothing but confirm what is already public.”
The Biden administration kept the audio secret, asserting executive privilege over it. Officials also said releasing such a recording could make it harder for prosecutors to get cooperation from witnesses in future investigations.
Officials at the Trump White House and Justice Department have disagreed with those Biden-era arguments and plan to release the audio, according to two people familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe a decision that has yet to be announced.
The decision was prompted in part by a court deadline next week for the Trump administration to take a position in a lawsuit over the recording.
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The credit rating of the United States received a potentially costly downgrade on Friday, as the ratings firm Moody’s determined that the government’s fiscal outlook had deteriorated as a result of rising debt levels and stood to worsen further if Republicans enact a package of new tax cuts.
The downgrade, to one notch below the highest triple-A rating, amounted to a political and economic repudiation of Washington, where President Trump only hours earlier had pushed his party to adopt a sprawling package that might add trillions of dollars to the nation’s fiscal imbalance.
The downgrade from Moody’s means that each of the three major credit rating agencies no longer gives the United States its best rating. Fitch downgraded the United States in 2023, citing fiscal concerns, and Standard & Poor’s downgraded the country in 2011.
Moody’s pointed to decades of gridlock and dysfunction in the nation’s capital. It found that Democrats and Republicans alike had failed to meaningfully curtail rising U.S. debt, which now towers above $36 trillion.
Nor had the U.S. government tended to myriad well-known, and long-term, financial challenges, Moody’s said, especially the rising costs and persistent underfunding of programs like Social Security and Medicare.
While Moody’s described the U.S. financial system as stable, and found the dollar to be strong and reliable, it also acknowledged the vast policy uncertainty — and it obliquely referred to the ways in which political stability and constitutional order can be “tested at times.”
“Successive U.S. administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs,” the report from Moody’s said. “We do not believe that material multiyear reductions in mandatory spending and deficits will result from current fiscal proposals under consideration.”
Moody’s specifically referred to the Republican push to renew the tax cuts adopted under Mr. Trump in 2017, estimating that an extension would add $4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade.
Still, even with the lower assessments from the rating agencies, investors are likely to snap up the American government’s debt. That’s a reflection of the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency, meaning people from all over the world want to stash their savings in U.S. Treasury bonds even as the government accrues more and more debt.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The decision from Moody’s comes as Republicans struggle to agree to a sprawling fiscal package cutting taxes and reducing spending, with the effort briefly stalling on Friday as some hard-right conservatives demanded steeper spending cuts.
Even with cuts to Medicaid and food stamps that could strip benefits from millions of poorer Americans, Republicans are still not expected to cover anywhere near the $3.8 trillion cost of the tax cut they have prepared. The Trump administration’s blitz to fire much of the federal work force and unilaterally withhold spending has also not generated significant savings.
The Trump administration is pulling back awards that the Biden White House had given to projects in six states through the Tech Hubs Program, the secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, said in a statement. Lutnick said that the previous administration had used a “rushed, opaque and unfair” process to select recipients and that there would be a new competition for the funds. Among the projects losing their grants are a biotechnology hub in Birmingham, Ala.; a critical minerals project in Missouri; an aerospace technology hub in Spokane, Wash.; and a project focused on forest-based biomaterials in Maine. They are welcome to compete again, Lutnick said.
A federal appeals court in Boston has declined to put on hold a lower court’s order ensuring that immigrants have a chance to contest their deportations to countries other than their own if they have reason to fear being sent there. The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit meant that, for now, the Trump administration cannot send immigrants to places like El Salvador or Libya without first giving them at least 15 days to challenge their expulsions.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTMoody’s has downgraded the credit rating of the United States, saying that it did not expect that the Republican fiscal agenda would meaningfully improve the country’s fiscal outlook. The rating went from the highest, Aaa, to the second highest, Aa1. Moody’s downgrade means that none of the three major credit rating agencies give the United States their best rating. Fitch downgraded the United States in 2023, citing fiscal concerns, and Standard & Poor’s downgraded the country in 2011.
Reporting from Washington
The Trump administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to block a judge’s ruling that had temporarily paused plans for mass layoffs and program closures at federal agencies.
Last week, Judge Susan Illston of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California called for a two-week pause on the administration’s actions, which she said were illegal without congressional authorization. Her order barred two dozen federal agencies from moving ahead with the largest phase of President Trump’s efforts to downsize the government.
In the emergency application filed on Friday, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, argued that the lower court's “far-reaching order” would prevent “almost the entire executive branch from formulating and implementing plans to reduce the size of the federal work force.”
That decision was “based on the extraordinary view” that the president lacked the authority to direct executive agencies on how to conduct large-scale downsizing plans, Mr. Sauer said.
Judge Illston’s ruling would prevent the Department of Housing and Urban Development from carrying out layoffs it had planned for Sunday.
The request to the justices was the 15th emergency application that the administration filed to the Supreme Court since Mr. Trump returned to office in January. The applications have included asking the justices to lift a nationwide pause on Mr. Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship, to freeze more than $1 billion in foreign aid and to permit the deportation of Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador without due process.
In February, Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing officials to draft plans for “large-scale” cuts to the federal work force. Several labor unions, advocacy groups and local governments sued, seeking to block the order.
Judge Illston held an emergency hearing in the case last Friday and issued her ruling just hours later.
In the 42-page ruling, Judge Illston determined that the government’s attempt to lay off workers and shut down offices and programs created an urgent threat to scores of critical services. She also noted that the process required consultation with Congress on any plan to abolish or transfer part of a federal agency.
On Monday, the Trump administration filed an emergency request to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, asking it to pause Judge Illston’s order pending appeal. But the administration told the Supreme Court that such a ruling would not come quickly enough.
Of the many lawsuits filed in response to Mr. Trump’s efforts to reshape the federal government, the mass layoffs case is poised to have the broadest effect. Many agencies have not yet announced downsizing plans, but employees throughout the government have been anxiously awaiting announcements.
Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.
Lynsey Chutel and Matej Leskovsek
Matej Leskovsek reported from Sevnica, Slovenia, the hometown he shares with the first lady, and Lynsey Chutel reported from London.
Where is Melania Trump?
No, not the rarely seen first lady, but the statue made in her likeness that watched over her nearby hometown, Sevnica, Slovenia.
The life-size bronze statue, 15 minutes outside Sevnica, disappeared from its perch this week. The theft was reported on Tuesday, the police said. But it’s not clear when, exactly, it was taken, Alenka Drenik, a spokeswoman for the police, said by phone on Friday.
“Police are still assessing the theft, and an investigation is still ongoing,” Ms. Drenik added.
Residents of Sevnica have their suspicions. Some in the town of about 5,000 people in eastern Slovenia say it could have been an act of vandalism; others say it was probably melted down for cash. None of the people interviewed thought, however, that the statue’s disappearance had been in any way political.
“Melania is rarely seen in the spotlight or anywhere else, and even when she does do something, it’s so bizarre, so I don’t even want to think about her that much,” said Igor Pavkovic, who has lived in Sevnica all his life and recalled laughing when he first saw the statue.
The expressionless sculpture, its arm raised in a tight wave, never quite captured the heart of Sevnica’s residents. Originally made of wood, it was hacked from a linden tree and unveiled in 2019 by an artist who used a chain saw to create a very, very rough likeness of the first lady.
Painted powder blue to reflect the cashmere dress and gloves that Ms. Trump wore to her husband’s first inauguration, in 2017, the statue stood nine feet tall. But it was derided as resembling a scarecrow or a Smurf. Anonymous arsonists set the statue on fire on July 4, 2020.
A bronze replacement was erected later that year. Now, only the statue’s heavy Cubist feet, hacked off at the ankles, remain on the tree trunk that had served as the statue’s plinth. It had stood in a lonely field, far away from the municipal apartment block where Ms. Trump grew up and the school she attended. The privately owned field overlooks the Sava River and a verdant valley, but only runners and cyclists would have regularly crossed paths with the statue.
Both the wood and metal iterations had been commissioned by an American artist, Brad Downey, who worked with local artisans to create the sculptures. Mr. Downey said at the time that he saw it as an interrogation of President Trump’s harsh stance on immigration.
“The idea to commission the first monument to Melania has some cheekiness to it, but I wanted to do a serious investigation there,” Mr. Downey said.
While no one has claimed responsibility for the statue’s disappearance, it vanished at a time when public dissatisfaction with Mr. Trump’s second-term policies have been expressed globally through vandalism of Tesla vehicles, the electric car company owned by Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s adviser. Satirical advertisements mocking both men have also popped up around London in recent weeks.
Few in Sevnica said they would miss the statue.
“I only saw it in pictures, and I thought it was very unesthetic,” said Nena Bedek, an art teacher who said she had gone to school with Ms. Trump. “I had the feeling someone was making fun.”
“We were all ashamed of the statue when it was first unveiled, especially Melania and the Knavs family,” Bruno Vidmar, a hotelier whose business has thrived off the factory town’s tenuous claim to the White House. Ms. Trump’s businessman father, Victor Knavs, has been known to stop by Mr. Vidmar’s hotel for dinner when he’s in town.
Ms. Trump was born in Novo Mesto, and her family later moved to Sevnica. She left in 1985 and has not been seen there since. That hasn’t stopped the town from capitalizing on its most famous ambassador. Ms. Trump has inspired coffee, chocolate and comfy slippers, all cleverly branded to avoid copyright claims.
In a gift shop hangs an amateur painting that merges the facade of the White House with Sevnica’s other famous attraction — a 12th-century castle. A patisserie in Mr. Vidmar’s hotel serves a slice of Melania: a white chocolate, cream and mascarpone sponge cake, drizzled with walnuts, pistachios and sesame seeds. Mr. Vidmar’s wife came up with the recipe during Mr. Trump’s first term, the hotelier said.
Locals say it’s fresh and elegant — like Ms. Trump.
“We can be proud of her that she is the first lady now for the second time,” said Meri Kelemina, who lives in a village near where the statue once stood.
She added that the statue and its location had done little for the town and had not flattered Sevnica’s most famous former resident.
“I think she deserves a nice landmark,” she said.
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In promising to investigate James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, Trump administration officials pointed to his apparent reference to a slang term on Instagram, describing it as a call for the president’s assassination.
Mr. Comey’s photo showed shells on a beach arranged to spell “86 47” with the caption: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” The “47” was presumed to refer to President Trump, the United States’ 47th president, and “86” is a term commonly used by restaurants to signify when they are out of a menu item, or by bars and in military and intelligence circles to throw something — or someone — out.
But in some contexts, the term has evolved to mean something more sinister: to eliminate or kill.
According to lexicologists, the term “86” began as diner shorthand in the early 20th century.
“In the ’30s and ’40s, there were numerical codes used in diners,” said Jesse Sheidlower, an adjunct professor at Columbia University whose specialty is slang. “Eighty-one is a glass of water, 82 is two glasses of water, 89 is a pretty girl, and 86 means you’re out of something.”
Even today, it is not unusual to see the number 86 on a menu chalkboards in the dining room and white boards in kitchens.
Slang definitions tend to slide around, though, and terms can mean different things depending on who is using them.
The most common modern usage of “86” is as a verb, meaning to throw out, dismiss or eject. Customers who are tossed out of an establishment for being too drunk, having a history of walking out on the check or generally acting obnoxious, for example, are said to be 86’d.
And like many slang terms having to do with disappearance, “86” has evolved in some contexts to refer to deliberate elimination. This is the sense the noir crime writer James Ellroy meant when he wrote, in his 2021 novel “Widespread Panic,” “it all got tangled up, and poor Janey got 86’d’.”
“Yes, it can mean ‘to murder,’” Mr. Sheidlower added. “But without any very specific indication that that’s the intended meaning, you’d never assume that. The notion that Comey was suggesting this is completely preposterous.”
Still, Mr. Trump and his top advisers interpreted Mr. Comey’s post in that light, even though he subsequently asserted that he “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence” and took down the initial photo.
The pair have a tangled history, dating to Mr. Comey’s decision in 2017 to announce that the F.B.I. was investigating the 2016 Trump campaign and whether it had colluded with Russia to influence the election. Mr. Trump fired him months later.
An inspector general’s report later found Mr. Comey had violated department policies with how he handled memos he took of his conversations with Mr. Trump before his firing, but he was never charged. Mr. Trump also accused Mr. Comey of treason.
When Mr. Trump learned in 2019 that the Justice Department would not file charges against Mr. Comey, he called one aide after another, asking if they agreed with him that Mr. Comey should have been prosecuted. Mr. Trump became so enraged over that decision, as well as other matters, that he took the TV remote control in his private dining room and threw it at a credenza along a wall, according to reporting in the book “Confidence Man.”
In a Fox News interview on Friday, Mr. Trump still appeared to harbor ill will toward Mr. Comey. Criticizing him as a “dirty cop,” the president accused Mr. Comey of having called for his offing.
“He wasn’t very competent but he was competent enough to know what that meant,” Mr. Trump said in an excerpt of a Fox News interview that was to be broadcast on Friday night. He added: “He’s calling for the assassination of the president.”
In his second Instagram post, Mr. Comey said he had assumed the shells spelled out “a political message.” But Mr. Trump’s officials doubled down. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, pointed out during a Fox News interview late Thursday that Mr. Comey had spent his entire career prosecuting the kind of mobsters and gangsters who would commonly use “86” in its most deadly sense, as she accused him of “issuing a hit on President Trump.”
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, wrote on social media that Mr. Comey had “just called for the assassination” of the president, and said that her department and the Secret Service had launched an investigation. In a separate post, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, said his agency would “provide all necessary support.”
“Green’s Dictionary of Slang” cites the first definition of “86” as the restaurant usage, and gives “to kill, murder; to execute judicially” as the second meaning.
“It broadly means unavailability and thus ending,” Mr. Sheidlower said, noting that murderous connotations can attach to almost any slang term having to do with disappearance. “‘End’ itself can be used to mean ‘to kill.’ ”
Slippery meanings are an inherent danger of slang, which can mean different things depending on who’s using it.
“There can be ambiguity because what other people think and what you think don’t have to match,” Mr. Sheidlower said. “That’s the problem with language.”
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
Reporting from Washington
Congressional Democrats are seeking to block more than $3 billion in proposed weapons sales to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates that were announced during President Trump’s visit to the Middle East this week.
The Democrats are targeting a $1.9 billion sale to Qatar and $1.6 billion to the Emirates. The packages include Chinook helicopters, armed drones, hundreds of bombs, targeting kits, F-16 aircraft components and other military equipment.
The State Department approved the proposed sales and formally notified Congress shortly before Mr. Trump’s trip. However, for the sale to the Emirates, the administration bypassed an informal review period that allows senior lawmakers on foreign affairs committees to raise concerns or negotiate changes before full congressional notification.
Leading the opposition is Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, who on Thursday introduced resolutions aimed at blocking the arms sales to both countries.
Mr. Murphy questioned the sale to Qatar in light of reports that the country had offered Mr. Trump a $400 million luxury Boeing jet as a gift.
“Unless Qatar rescinds their offer of a ‘palace in the sky’ or Trump turns it down, I will move to block this arms sale,” Mr. Murphy said in a statement. He also pointed to a $5.5 billion real estate and golf course deal involving the Trump family and a firm affiliated with Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. The project would involve a Trump-branded beachside golf course and luxury villa development in the country.
Senators Tim Kaine of Virginia, Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, all Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee, joined in supporting the resolutions, along with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with Democrats.
The group also expressed concerns about the Emirates sale, saying it was improperly connected to recent investment by a state-backed Emirati firm into a cryptocurrency business linked to the Trump family.
Additionally, the lawmakers criticized the Emirates for its role in the war in Sudan. U.S. and U.N. officials have accused the Emirates of supporting the Rapid Support Forces, a Sudanese paramilitary group that the State Department, during the Biden administration, determined committed genocide in Sudan.
Mr. Trump’s State Department has not made the same determination, though officials have repeatedly condemned the group, including last month after an attack led to the deaths of 300 people and forced hundreds of thousands to flee.
“The U.S. should not be delivering weapons to the U.A.E. as it aids and abets this humanitarian disaster and gross human rights violations,” Mr. Van Hollen said in the statement. “We must stop this corrupt Trump family crypto-for-arms deal and use our leverage to prevent more suffering in Sudan — and bring its civil war to a peaceful resolution.”
A parallel effort is underway in the House. Representatives Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Sara Jacobs of California, the top Democrat on the Africa subcommittee, also introduced resolutions of disapproval targeting the Emirates arms sales.
The Arms Export Control Act gives Democrats a procedural tool to force Congress to debate these issues, one of the few maneuvers lawmakers in the minority have at their disposal to control what is brought up for a vote.
“If a foreign government is participating in this kind of nuclear-grade corruption by directly enriching the president and his family,” Mr. Murphy said, “we are going to force a full Senate debate on that behavior and a vote on their security relationship with the United States.”
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Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is now seeking to investigate a federal agency with a mission similar to its own: the Government Accountability Office, which has been hunting for waste and inefficiency in government since the 1920s.
The Government Accountability Office said in a statement on Friday that it had rejected a request from Mr. Musk’s group to “assign a team” to the century-old budget agency.
“As a legislative branch agency, G.A.O. is not subject to executive orders and has therefore declined any requests to have a DOGE team assigned,” the agency said in its statement.
A spokeswoman for the Government Accountability Office declined to say when the agency was first contacted by Mr. Musk’s group. A spokesman for Mr. Musk’s group did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The confrontation between the two watchdog groups was first reported by Wired.
Mr. Musk’s group has audited agencies across government, and claims to have found $170 billion in savings, although that figure is inflated by errors, guesswork and zombie contracts that were killed but later reinstated.
On the surface, the Government Accountability Office would seem less like a target and more like an ally of Mr. Musk’s group. The office audits federal programs for waste, fraud and mismanagement. Its budget is about $900 million, but the agency says it saves $76 for every dollar invested in its work.
But now the accountability office could become a roadblock for President Trump, who set Mr. Musk’s group in motion.
The older watchdog agency, led by Comptroller General Gene L. Dodaro, finds itself at the center of a brewing battle over a power known as impoundment, the ability of the president to halt the delivery of funds that have been appropriated by Congress.
In his sweeping reconfiguration of American government, Mr. Trump has claimed he has vast powers to direct the course of the nation’s spending. He and his leading budget adviser, Russell T. Vought, maintain that a 1970s law restricting impoundment is unconstitutional, setting up a potential legal clash around the power over the nation’s purse.
Still, the statute empowers the Government Accountability Office to investigate potential violations, and in late April, Mr. Dodaro acknowledged his team had opened more than three dozen probes into reports that the Trump administration illegally withheld congressionally authorized funds.
“We’re trying to get information from the agencies about what their legal position is for not expending the money,” Mr. Dodaro told the Senate at a hearing, as he acknowledged some agencies had been “unresponsive” to the inquiries.
Mr. Dodaro did not signal how his office might proceed, but it has the power under law to sue the administration for violations.
A similar showdown arose at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, as Democrats moved to impeach him. The Government Accountability Office found that the administration had violated the law by illegally withholding roughly $400 million in aid to Ukraine in defiance of Congress, though the administration claimed it had acted lawfully.
Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement that Mr. Musk’s group has no power over the older watchdog group.
“The law is crystal clear: G.A.O. is a legislative branch agency not subject to DOGE or the president’s whims,” Ms. Murray said in a statement. “It is an indispensable, impartial government watchdog, and its independence must remain. My message to Elon and DOGE: get lost.”
Mr. Trump has already faced pushback from legislators of both parties over his effort to take over another congressional institution: the Library of Congress. Mr. Trump recently fired the librarian of Congress before the end of her term, and sought to replace her with his former personal lawyer, now a top official at the Department of Justice.
At a hearing on Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s case, the judge and lawyers for the Trump administration clashed over the legality of his deportation. Judge Paula Xinis noted it would be hard for the government to get the case dismissed because an immigration judge had barred Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador.. “Abrego Garcia was removed without lawful authority — you conceded it,” she said.
“Not to split hairs with your honor, but he was removed lawfully,” said Jonathan Guynn, a Justice Department lawyer. “He shouldn’t be in the United States.”
“He was removed in error,” the judge shot back, her voice rising.
Reporting from Washington
The Federal Reserve will reduce its work force by 10 percent over the next several years to ensure the institution is “right-sized and able” to carry out its duties to foster a healthy economy.
Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the central bank, announced the plan on Friday in an internal note to staff members reviewed by The New York Times. Certain employees will be eligible to participate in a voluntary deferred resignation program that is aimed at giving those close to retirement the option of an earlier exit. That offer will apply only to people at the Washington-based Board of Governors.
Cuts are expected to be made across the entire Federal Reserve System, including the 12 regional banks. Roughly 2,400 people will be affected.
“I have directed the leadership of the Federal Reserve, here at the board and across the system, to find incremental ways to consolidate functions where appropriate, modernize some business practices and ensure that we are right-sized and able to meet our statutory mission,” Mr. Powell said in the memo.
The Fed earlier imposed a hiring freeze on permanent workers as part of its efforts to align with the Trump administration’s decree that no federal position vacant at the time could be filled or new positions created. It also took steps to distance itself from diversity issues as well as those related to climate change — initiatives that President Trump has opposed.
The Fed is a politically independent institution, meaning it is not legally obligated to carry out orders by the executive branch. That buffer from the White House is being legally challenged by the Department of Justice, which has sought more sway over independent agencies.
The announcement on Friday mirrors an effort by the Fed during the Clinton administration to cull its work force, which Mr. Powell cited in his note. At that time, there were “governmentwide efforts to improve efficiency,” as is the case “now,” Mr. Powell said.
Yet at a congressional hearing in February, Mr. Powell pushed back on the idea that the Fed had too many employees. “Overworked, maybe, not overstaffed,” he said.
Mr. Trump is pursuing a similar goal, although much more aggressively than past administrations have. The newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, led by the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, has taken to gutting the federal work force, including shuttering agencies wholesale. Tens of thousands of government employees have since left their jobs.
The Fed’s decision is not tied to the ongoing initiative by DOGE, although some members of the central bank’s staff were contacted this year via email by Mr. Musk’s group, according to people familiar with the matter.
“The Federal Reserve is a careful and responsible steward of public resources,” Mr. Powell said in his note on Friday.
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Republicans on the House Budget Committee just announced the panel will reconvene on Sunday night at 10 p.m. to reconsider their party’s megabill that conservatives on the panel blocked today. It was not clear what changes to the legislation, if any, Republican leaders agreed to make before they meet again.
A federal judge in Maryland, Paula Xinis, accused the Trump administration of deliberately stonewalling lawyers for a Salvadoran man wrongly deported in March. It has been more than a month since the Supreme Court ordered the government to “facilitate” the return of the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to the United States from a prison in El Salvador, and his lawyers are trying to find out what U.S. officials have done to get him back. Judge Xinis said top government officials, in depositions, have demonstrated “just a willful refusal to answer the question.”
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
In a scathing rebuke of the Trump administration’s handling of the war in Ukraine, the former U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, Bridget A. Brink, wrote that she had resigned last month because she could not carry out a policy that “put pressure on the victim, Ukraine, rather than on the aggressor, Russia.”
“I cannot stand by while a country is invaded, a democracy bombarded and children killed with impunity,” Ms. Brink wrote in an opinion essay published Friday in The Detroit Free Press. “Peace at any price is not peace at all — it is appeasement,” she added.
Ms. Brink, a career diplomat who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, resigned in April as tensions over the Trump administration’s policy began to spill into public view. Mr. Trump has said repeatedly that his only goal is to end the killing, but he has largely refrained from saying anything critical of Russia.
After a missile attack on the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih killed 19 people, including nine children, she issued a statement that conspicuously failed to specify that Russia was responsible — a notable deviation from her usually clear language.
As the Trump administration exerted increasing pressure on Kyiv — including briefly halting military assistance and intelligence sharing after President Trump castigated President Volodymyr Zelensky during a disastrous meeting in the Oval Office — Ms. Brink remained silent in public.
But on Friday, she wrote that it had grown evident she could not carry out her duties “in good faith.”
Ms. Brink was nominated to the post by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and arrived in Kyiv in May 2022. There was no immediate comment on her criticism from the State Department. At the time of her resignation, a spokesperson for the department said in an email that Ms. Brink had “been the ambassador there for three years — that’s a long time in a war zone.” And the State Department’s chief spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, had declined to discuss the matter beyond saying, “We wish her well.”
During her time in Ukraine, Ms. Brink developed a reputation as a powerful voice for reform, taking aim at government corruption and working to build durable democratic institutions, sometimes irritating powerful officials in Kyiv.
Ms. Brink also toured the country to bear witness to the devastation being wrought by the Russian invasion.
“Over a career spent in conflict zones, I’ve seen mass atrocities and wanton destruction firsthand but we have never seen violence so systematic, so widespread and so horrifying in Europe since World War II,” Ms. Brink, a native of Michigan, wrote in the Detroit Free Press op-ed.
Ms. Brink added: “Russia’s war is about more than foreign policy or economics. It’s about who we are.”
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Democrats rebuked the Trump administration’s deal to sell hundreds of thousands of artificial intelligence chips to the United Arab Emirates. In a statement on Friday, seven senators and congressmen said the deals “pose a significant threat to U.S. national security and fundamentally undermine bipartisan efforts to ensure the United States remains the global leader in A.I.,” adding, “Rather than putting America first, this deal puts the Gulf first.”
The statement captured the divisions rippling through Washington, with business-minded officials championing the deals and opponents worrying that they would outsource data centers to the Middle East.
One of the five Republicans who voted against their party’s megabill in committee, Representative Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania, said he changed his “yes” vote to a “no” vote at the last minute for procedural, not substantive reasons. Because he voted against the bill, he will be able to ask to call the legislation back up for consideration once Republicans broker a deal.
Reporting from Washington
A federal judge on Friday indefinitely prohibited the Department of Health and Human Services from terminating $11 billion in public health grants set aside for states.
The order extends an earlier, more temporary ruling in April by the judge, Mary S. McElroy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island. In that earlier ruling, she found that the government could not abruptly wipe out a pandemic-era funding stream that many state and local health departments relied upon.
In the opinion Judge McElroy issued on Friday, she wrote: “The health care funding terminations would constrain the States’ infectious disease research, thwart treatment efforts to those struggling with mental health and addiction, and impact the availability of vaccines to children, the elderly, and those living in rural communities. Not to mention that the terminations were effective immediately, ignoring the States’ reliance on the funds.”
The Department announced the cutoffs on March 24. A coalition of 23 states and the District of Columbia then sued to stop the sudden change, arguing that they had been given no time to prepare for budget shortfalls and could face devastating shortages in many critical treatment areas.
Judge McElroy on Friday directed federal health agencies to “take every step necessary to effectuate this order” while the case proceeds — namely, disbursing the funds, which had already been allocated by Congress for the purposes of the state programs. Notably, however, her order only applies to those jurisdictions involved in the lawsuit.
Judge McElroy’s rulings mean that funding will remain in place for that coalition of Democratic-led states, which together represent more than 185 million Americans, or a little over half of the United States population counted in the last census.
In defending the cuts, the Trump administration has argued that since the official end of the emergency over the coronavirus pandemic in 2023, the funding was no longer necessary.
The states behind the lawsuit countered that the funding was intended to address a variety of public health problems — some of them worsened by the onslaught of Covid-19 — and that, much like other federal funding streams the Trump administration has worked to cut off, the money was authorized by Congress and could not be lawfully cut off unilaterally by the health department.
Judge McElroy’s ruling noted that the funds helped address disease outbreaks beyond the coronavirus, including measles and avian flu; bolstered mental health and substance abuse services; and helped support clinics in underserved areas.
“Though Congress appropriated the funds during the pandemic,” she wrote, the funds “did much more than address Covid-related public health concerns.”
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