Live Updates: Musk Criticizes A.I. Joint Venture Promoted by Trump
Where Things Stand
Elon Musk: One of President Trump’s closest advisers, the billionaire Elon Musk, made a rare public break with the administration by casting doubt on Mr. Trump’s first major tech investment announcement. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump unveiled a joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle intended to create at least $100 billion in computing infrastructure to power artificial intelligence. But in messages on X, Mr. Musk said that the venture, Stargate, did not have the financing to achieve the promised investment levels. Read more ›
Diversity: Mr. Trump on Wednesday revoked a 60-year-old executive order banning discrimination in hiring practices in the government, his latest action aimed at eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion practices across the federal government. Separately, officials overseeing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across federal agencies were expected to be placed on leave after the administration ordered their offices to be closed. Read more ›
Immigration: The Justice Department has ordered U.S. attorneys to investigate and prosecute state and city law enforcement officials if they refuse to enforce the Trump administration’s new immigration policies, according to a three-page internal department memo. The move comes as the Homeland Security Department prepares to make targeted raids into cities with high numbers of undocumented immigrants, and as a Defense Department officials said the Pentagon would be sending 1,500 troops to the Mexican border.
Elon Musk is casting doubt on the first major tech investment announcement made by President Trump, openly questioning the administration he now serves.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump announced a joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to create at least $100 billion in computing infrastructure to power artificial intelligence, some of which is already underway.
But in two late-night messages on X, Mr. Musk said that the venture, dubbed Stargate, did not have the financing to achieve the promised investment levels.
“They don’t have the money," Mr. Musk wrote in reply to an OpenAI post on the announcement. “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”
The dismissal by Mr. Musk, who is one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers and will head up an agency created to slash the nation’s budget, is one of his first public breaks with the administration. It’s also an unusual move for any senior policy official to question an initiative trumpeted by the president.
Mr. Trump claimed the A.I. announcement as an early trophy, taking credit for the companies’ decision to spend up to $500 billion building data centers, which are huge buildings full of servers that provide computing power. Mr. Trump promised to clear regulatory hurdles for the development of A.I. and to make the United States a global leader in the technology, beating out China.
Stargate already has $100 billion in hand, two people familiar with the venture said. SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX, an investment group in the United Arab Emirates that focuses on A.I., provided the financing.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
Mr. Musk has been battling with OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman. Mr. Musk, who helped found the company, has sued OpenAI and Mr. Altman for antitrust violations.
Mr. Altman took to X Wednesday morning to refute Mr. Musk’s assertions.
“Wrong, as you surely know,” Mr. Altman wrote. “Want to come visit the first site already under way?”
Mike Isaac has covered Meta and Facebook since 2010.
On Tuesday, the day after the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump, many Instagram and Facebook users found themselves following him on the social media apps even though they had not signed up to do so.
What gives?
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said it was part of a regular process in which White House social media accounts are handed over when a new president takes office. It added that there were some other bugs in the process that may have mucked up the gears of the transition.
Let’s walk through what happened.
Why am I following Donald Trump, Melania Trump and JD Vance on Instagram and Facebook?
Just as the federal government has to deal with the transition of power between administrations, Meta has to deal with it, too.
For years, companies like Meta and X — previously known as Facebook and Twitter, respectively — have had to handle the social media accounts held by the office of the president as it changed hands after an election. That ramped up after Barack Obama took office in 2008 and fully embraced social media to garner support from voters digitally. By 2016, the companies needed to figure out how to hand those accounts off between administrations.
Meta and X decided that the official POTUS, VP and first lady accounts on Facebook, Instagram and X would be switched to the new administration while retaining the existing followers of those accounts. That meant that if you followed President Obama in 2016, you were automatically switched over to follow President Trump when he took office in his first administration in 2017. Mr. Obama’s posts were archived under a different handle, while Mr. Trump’s account reset with none of Mr. Obama’s old posts attached.
That transition occurred again in 2020, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected and took over the official presidential account. On Monday, after Mr. Trump was sworn in, the switch occurred again. That’s why you may be seeing his posts in your feed now.
But I swear I wasn’t following any presidential accounts before.
Lots of people have said this week that they never followed Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump before and are sure they have been added as followers against their will.
Meta said it wasn’t forcing people to follow Mr. Trump.
“People were not made to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts for the president, vice president or first lady,” Andy Stone, a Meta spokesman, said in a statement on Threads. “Those accounts are managed by the White House so with a new administration, the content on those pages changes.”
One possible explanation: Four years between administrations is a long time and people can forget what accounts they signed up to follow.
When I try to unfollow these accounts, the apps won’t let me. What’s up with that?
This is where it’s not you, it’s Meta.
The company said it “may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through” as the account transitions occur. It is possible that the company is receiving such a high volume of unfollow requests during the transition that it is running into errors processing them all.
Meta claims it will be sorted out soon, but declined to go into detail on why it was happening.
Why am I seeing recommendations to follow President Trump’s and Vice President Vance’s accounts?
This is another instance of a sweeping change at Meta.
The company previously insisted that users did not want to see political content across its apps and had removed that type of content on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. That meant people saw fewer posts and accounts related to politicians and contentious social issues. It was Meta’s way of making its platform seem, well, a bit nicer.
But this year, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, did an about-face and started reinserting political content into people’s feeds. He and others at Meta said that was because they heard people wanted to see more political content again. The change was part of a larger shift at Meta to allow more types of posts and content to spread across its platform in the Trump era.
You can change your settings in Facebook and Instagram to see fewer political posts.
I’m also seeing people talk about censoring Democrats on social media. What is that about?
Add this one to the list of Meta’s screw-ups.
On Tuesday, people began noticing that they could not search for posts that included the hashtag “#democrats” on some of Meta’s apps. That, along with the new Trump administration and Mr. Zuckerberg’s recent embrace of Mr. Trump, led people to believe that the company was forcing posts from Democrats out of their apps.
Not true, Meta said, adding it had made an unfortunate error that it was working quickly to fix. Mr. Stone said that because of the error, users were unable to search for a gamut of topics and the mistake was affecting “not just those on the left.”
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Reporting from Washington
President Trump on Wednesday threatened to impose tariffs and sanctions on Russia if President Vladimir V. Putin does not reach a deal to end the war in Ukraine.
Mr. Trump has yet to unveil a detailed strategy to end the war, which he promised on the campaign trail to do in 24 hours.
In a post on social media, Mr. Trump said he was “not looking to hurt Russia” but warned that if Mr. Putin did not make a deal “soon” that he had no choice than to put “high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States.”
There is little trade between the United States and Russia to tariff. The entire trade between the two nations in the first 11 months of 2024 was just $3.4 billion, compared to, for example, $700 billion in the same time period between the United States and Canada, according to U.S. census data. Russia’s minuscule trade with the U.S. has already fallen from $36 billion in 2021, the year before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The United States has also already issued sweeping tariffs on Russian metals, and the Biden administration imposed extensive sanctions to cripple the Russian economy. The efforts have failed to push Mr. Putin to halt his invasion of Ukraine.
Hours after he was inaugurated on Monday, Mr. Trump issued some of his most critical comments he had ever made about Mr. Putin when he said the Russian president was “destroying Russia” by waging war in Ukraine. The comments were notable given Mr. Trump’s history of speaking warmly about Mr. Putin, and in 2018 he accepted the Russian leader’s word over his own intelligence agencies at a summit in Helsinki.
The next day, Mr. Trump said sanctions against Russia were “likely.” He dodged a question, however, about whether he thought the war in Ukraine should be “frozen.”
“The war should have never started,” Mr. Trump said at the White House on Tuesday.
In his Truth Social post on Wednesday, Mr. Trump still made time to compliment Mr. Putin.
“I love the Russian people, and always had a very good relationship with President Putin,” Mr. Trump said.
Peter Baker contributed reporting from Washington.
Many of those convicted of storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have celebrated the pardons or commutations that they received this week from President Trump.
Not Pamela Hemphill. A retired drug and alcohol counselor who lives in Boise, Idaho, she pleaded guilty in January 2022 to a misdemeanor offense for entering the Capitol during the riot and was sentenced to 60 days in prison and three years of probation.
She said she did not want a pardon.
“Absolutely not,” Ms. Hemphill said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s an insult to the Capitol Police, to the rule of law and to the nation. If I accept a pardon, I’m continuing their propaganda, their gaslighting and all their falsehoods they’re putting out there about Jan. 6.”
Ms. Hemphill, 71, who was called “MAGA Granny” in some news headlines, has said that she no longer supports Mr. Trump or believes his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. She said that a therapist had helped change her view of the attack by telling her she was “not a victim of Jan. 6; I was a volunteer.”
“I lost my critical thinking,” she said on Wednesday, reflecting on her involvement in the riot and the “Stop the Steal” movement. “Now I know it was a cult, and I was in a cult.”
Her wish to reject the pardon was previously reported by The Idaho Statesman. Ms. Hemphill said she had spoken with a lawyer about spurning the grant of clemency but had not taken any legal action to do so.
It is not clear that she can legally reject the pardon.
“It would be a novel act to file a court case to reject a pardon of a misdemeanor, in part because of the low stakes,” Mark Osler, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, said in an interview.
There is some legal precedent, however, suggesting that any such request could face an uphill battle.
In December, two federal prisoners whose death sentences were commuted last year by President Biden asked a judge to block the reduction in their sentences, arguing that it could jeopardize their appeals. Judge James R. Sweeney II of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana dismissed the prisoners’ requests last week, ruling that the prisoners could not reject their commutations, even if they did not ask for them or want them.
Judge Sweeney pointed to a 1927 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found that a prisoner who had been sentenced to death could not reject a commutation from President William Howard Taft. (Taft, by then the chief justice, did not take part in the case.)
The prisoner argued that the commutation had been issued without his consent. But Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that the president did not need the prisoner’s consent for the commutation to take effect.
“Just as the original punishment would be imposed without regard to the prisoner’s consent and in the teeth of his will, whether he liked it or not, the public welfare, not his consent, determines what shall be done,” Holmes wrote.
Judge Sweeney wrote that the decision, although nearly a century old, “remains good law.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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Reporting from Washington
The Pentagon will send 1,500 active-duty troops to the southwestern border by the end of the month, a Defense Department official said on Wednesday, helping to fulfill one of President Trump’s main goals to stem the flow of migrants into the United States.
The new troops will join 2,500 Army Reserve and National Guard soldiers called to active duty in recent months to support federal law enforcement officials. Their missions include detection and monitoring, data entry, training, transportation and maintenance.
It is unclear what roles the 4,000 troops will now have under the Trump administration.
Mr. Trump on Monday signed an executive order that gave the military an explicit role in immigration enforcement. It also directed the Defense Department to come up with a plan “to seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of the United States by repelling forms of invasion.”
The directive is likely to clash with an 1870s law called the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally limits the use of regular federal troops for domestic policing purposes.
The move, which was reported earlier by Fox News, comes even as the current state of the border is fairly calm, with crossings having fallen sharply after the Biden administration took major steps to limit migration.
The deployment is likely to be the first of several to the border under the new Trump policies, according to the Defense Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational plans.
Reporting from Washington
President Trump on Wednesday revoked a 60-year-old executive order banning discrimination in hiring practices in the federal government, his latest action aimed at gutting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
His order, which the White House called “the most important federal civil rights measure in decades,” revokes Executive Order 11246 signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. It prohibited discriminatory practices in hiring and employment in government contracting and asserted the government’s commitment to affirmative action.
Mr. Trump’s order says that his action “protects the civil rights of all Americans and expands individual opportunity.”
Among its provisions is the elimination of any references to diversity, equity and inclusion in federal contracting and spending.
The government would instead focus on “speed and efficiency,” according to the order. It aims to reduce cost in federal contracting, and requires contractors who do business with the government to follow its interpretation of civil rights laws. The order says the office overseeing contracts would be prohibited from “pushing contractors to balance their work force based on race, sex, gender identity, sexual preference or religion.”
The measure was a sweeping example of Mr. Trump’s declaration that he would return the country to a “merit-based” and “colorblind” society when he took office. The administration has moved swiftly to eradicate all programs and practices in the federal government aimed at addressing systemic inequities.
On his first day in office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that effectively eliminated all diversity and inclusion initiatives that had been ordered by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
In carrying out the order, the Office of Personnel Management ordered agency heads to place all D.E.I.-related personnel on administrative leave by the end of the day on Wednesday and devise plans to lay them off by the end of the month.
Mr. Trump also issued another order on Tuesday directing the Federal Aviation Administration to halt hiring practices that sought diversity, equity and inclusion, asserting that such practices have endangered passengers on airlines.
The Trump administration alleged that under the Biden administration, the agency “betrayed its mission by elevating dangerous discrimination over excellence,” pointing to a deactivated website containing the agencies’ mission statement of hiring a more diverse employee pool.
“Our diversity and inclusion vision is to create opportunities that garner the talents of a diverse, multilevel work force that contributes to the continuous development of superior innovation, technological advancements and excellence in global aviation,” the website stated.
In the order, Mr. Trump said that Biden administration “sought to specifically recruit and hire individuals with serious infirmities that could impact the execution of their essential life-saving duties.” It did not cite any examples.
The order added that D.E.I. practices also penalize “hard-working Americans who want to serve in the F.A.A. but are unable to do so, as they lack a requisite disability or skin color.”
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Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a longtime Republican critic of President Trump who had voted to impeach him in his first term, condemned his legal reprieve for those charged or convicted of crimes in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
“The Capitol Police officers are the backbone of Congress,” Murkowski said in a post on social media. “I strongly denounce the blanket pardons given to the violent offenders who assaulted these brave men and women in uniform.”
As the White House underwent a dramatic remake on Monday, a significant part of its official website fell out entirely: the Spanish-language version.
An “Español” button on the website’s landing page disappeared in the transition from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration to President Trump’s. The internet address for the Spanish-language White House website now leads to a barren page with a three-word message: “Page Not Found.”
A White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, said in a statement that the Trump administration was “committed to bringing back” the Spanish-language version of the website. He did not set a time frame for that restoration.
Different parts of the White House website regularly go offline and are replaced in the opening days of a presidency.
But the Hispanic Federation, a New York-based advocacy group, called on Mr. Trump to reinstate the translated version immediately.
“The administration must demonstrate that communicating with Latinos is a top priority, not just an empty campaign promise,” Frankie Miranda, the federation’s president, said in a statement.
At the start of Mr. Trump’s first term, the Spanish-language White House website also vanished. Sean Spicer, Mr. Trump’s press secretary at the time, promised it would return.
“We’ve got the I.T. folks working overtime right now to continue to get all of that up to speed,” Mr. Spicer said at a news conference in January 2017. “And trust me, it’s just going to take a little bit more time, but we’re working piece by piece to get that done.”
When Mr. Trump left office four years later, the Spanish-language feature was still missing from the White House homepage.
About 13 percent of Americans over the age of 4 speak Spanish at home, according to census data.
Mr. Trump, who began his 2016 presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants drug dealers and rapists, appeared to make significant inroads with Hispanic voters last year in his third presidential run, based on results in counties with large Hispanic populations. He won Miami-Dade County in Florida by 11 points, a remarkable swing in a majority-Hispanic county he lost by 29 points in 2016.
Former Representative Carlos Curbelo, a Miami Republican, said that the disappearance of the Spanish-language website “doesn’t send a great message” and that Mr. Trump missed an opportunity to continue welcoming Hispanic Americans into his coalition.
But he added that the translated version of the website was not as important as it once was.
“Our politics have evolved, and for the average Hispanic voter, there are a lot of issues that are far more important than these details about how government communicates,” Mr. Curbelo said in an interview, adding, “A lot of minority communities want to be considered mainstream.”
The renovation of the White House website has become a digital tradition that follows the swearing-in of each new president, and Mr. Trump’s administration quickly put its imprint on the website this week, replacing what had been a colorful homage to Mr. Biden’s accomplishments and record.
First-time visitors to the new page were met with a video introduction showing cinematic scenes of jets soaring over the White House and Mr. Trump pointing ahead, facing cameras and flashing a thumbs-up.
The video led to a streamlined landing page that declared in large text: “America Is Back.”
The differences from the Biden administration’s White House website were many.
Gone was the commitment to “tackling the climate crisis,” replaced with a pledge to end “policies of climate extremism.”
The Biden administration’s boasts that the White House had “forged historic partnerships” and “restored American leadership” were also gone. In their place was a promise that the United States would “no longer be beholden to foreign organizations.”
“Every single day I will be fighting for you with every breath in my body,” read a message on the homepage above a rendering of Mr. Trump’s signature. “I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve and that you deserve.”
At the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, before Mr. Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021, the website carried a banner that said, “Promises Made, Promises Kept,” and highlighted Mr. Trump’s work to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and help American workers.
But on the evening of Mr. Biden’s first day in office, the page showed Mr. Biden at a lectern, hands folded, in front of a large American flag. At the bottom of the site, an “Español” button had popped up, too.
With the Justice Department under President Trump filing a blizzard of motions seeking to dismiss still-active Jan. 6 criminal cases, a federal judge in Washington defended the underlying investigation on Wednesday.
“Dismissal of charges, pardons after convictions, and commutations of sentences will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021,” Judge Collen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in an order allowing one such dismissal. “What occurred that day is preserved for the future through thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions analyzing and recounting the evidence through a neutral lens.”
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The Trump administration has made a former member of the Navy SEALs who has spoken about the importance of securing the southern border temporary administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to two people familiar with the decision.
Cameron Hamilton was named the “senior official performing the duties of the administrator,” according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. He was named associate administrator for the Office of Response and Recovery on Monday and has since been appointed temporary administrator.
Mr. Hamilton is an unusual choice to lead the agency, even in a temporary capacity. Since Hurricane Katrina, when the federal response was severely criticized, FEMA has been led by disaster management professionals who have run state or local emergency management agencies, or were regional administrators at FEMA.
Mr. Hamilton does not appear to have experience coordinating responses to large scale disasters like the wildfires that are raging in Los Angeles or the hurricanes, floods and earthquakes that FEMA typically manages. FEMA did not respond to requests for comment.
Before joining the Trump administration on Monday, Mr. Hamilton worked as the director of business strategy for a defense contractor in Virginia, a job he took after an unsuccessful run for Congress last June.
As acting administrator, Mr. Hamilton would lead the agency until President Trump nominates a permanent administrator and that person is confirmed by the Senate. The leading candidates for that position include Kevin Guthrie, the director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.
A Navy veteran, Mr. Hamilton worked as an emergency management specialist in the State Department and as a division director in the Department of Homeland Security, where he has said he managed about 4,000 emergency medical technicians along the southern border.
During his run for Congress last year, Mr. Hamilton, a Republican, said immigration and the border with Mexico were his top priorities.
“I saw the southern border, I saw what happened when the administration transitioned to January of 2021,” Mr. Hamilton told the Daily Progress, a newspaper in Charlottesville, Va., during his campaign.
As FEMA’s acting leader, Mr. Hamilton could have the chance to work on border issues. It’s not yet clear how or whether President Trump will use FEMA to help secure the border or deport migrants. But Mr. Trump transferred money from FEMA to pay for detaining migrants during his first administration, and could do so again.
Mr. Hamilton has written posts on social media that were critical of FEMA, including the agency’s decision to begin moving Hurricane survivors in North Carolina out of temporary housing. Last October, he reposted a message from Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican congresswoman from Florida, criticizing FEMA for providing support for undocumented migrants.
“Exactly,” Mr. Hamilton wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Why aren’t more members of Congress saying this?”
Mr. Hamilton faces a challenging task at FEMA. The agency is wrestling with the aftermath of the fires around Los Angeles, as well as the recovery from the remnants of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and more than 100 other major disasters around the country.
David L. Phillips contributed reporting.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the Virginia town where The Daily Progress is based. It is Charlottesville, not Charlotte.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. He reported from Washington.
The Trump White House is moving to paralyze a bipartisan and independent watchdog agency that investigates national security activities that can intrude upon individual rights.
The move comes as the new administration is vowing to put its own stamp on federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It also comes ahead of a new conflict over whether or how Congress should renew a warrantless surveillance law that is set to expire in 2026.
Congress established the agency, called the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, as an independent unit in the executive branch after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It has security clearances and subpoena power, and is set up to have five members, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, who serve six-year terms. Some members are picked by the president, and some are selected by congressional leaders of the other party.
It needs at least three members in order to take official actions like starting a new investigative project or issuing a board report with a policy recommendation. Its work has included scrutiny of surveillance and bulk data collection activities, terrorism watch lists and the use of facial recognition and other biometrics at airports.
On Tuesday evening, each of the three members who were picked by Democrats — Sharon Bradford Franklin, Edward W. Felten and Travis LeBlanc — received an email from the White House telling them to submit resignation letters by the close of business on Jan. 23, according to three people with knowledge of the situation.
The people spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. They said the email, sent by Trent Morse, the deputy director of presidential personnel, told the board members that that President Trump would terminate their positions if they did not resign by that deadline.
The fifth seat is currently vacant. The Trump White House did not tell the board’s sole current Republican-picked member, Beth Williams, to leave, two of the people familiar with the matter said.
The departure of the three Democratic-picked members would mean the agency would lack enough members to function as the Trump administration begins its efforts to reshape the nation’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who is frequently critical of surveillance programs, denounced the move in a statement, saying it was related to accusations that Mr. Trump was trying to install his own loyalists and partisans at the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies to weaponize the government against his enemies.
“By purging the Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, Trump is kneecapping one of the only independent watchdogs over government surveillance who could alert Congress and the public about surveillance abuses by his administration,” Mr. Wyden said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Board was initially set up as part of the White House operation, but Congress later decided to make it an independent agency within the executive branch so that its judgments would carry greater weight.
Ambiguously, however, while Congress declared that the agency was “independent,” the statute establishing the agency does not have a provision that bars presidents from removing its board members without a good cause like misconduct — the usual method by which independent agencies are protected from undue White House interference.
Advisers to Mr. Trump subscribe to a strong view of presidential power called the unitary executive theory, under which the Constitution should be interpreted as giving presidents exclusive control of the executive branch and independent agencies are considered illegitimate. During the campaign, Trump allies vowed to stomp out pockets of independence in the executive branch if he won the election.
Mr. Trump and his allies have been harshly critical of F.B.I. and spy agency power, and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board has sometimes been aligned with that point of view. In 2023, its Democratic members annoyed the Biden White House by recommending that Congress require the F.B.I. to get court orders before looking for Americans’ private communications swept up by a warrantless surveillance program, which the Biden administration opposed.
Privacy advocates reacted with alarm. Among them, Jeramie Scott of the Electronic Privacy Information Center portrayed the Trump White House move as undercutting the purpose of the agency in being able to perform oversight free from interference.
“Calling for current Democratic members of the board to resign or be fired threatens independent oversight of surveillance programs by this administration and future administrations,” he said.
The board also plays a key role in an agreement between the United States and the European Union, which allows businesses to transfer Europeans’ personal data to the United States in part because the board exists as a check on surveillance practices and can oversee a process of addressing complaints from Europeans about any misuse of their data.
Among other things, the board must annually certify that a new Data Protection Review Court inside the Justice Department, which can investigate and render judgments on any European complaints, complies with the pact.
Still, Paul Rosenzweig, a former special advocate to represent Europeans before that court and who resigned this week in protest of Mr. Trump’s return to the presidency, disclosed in a blog post about his resignation that to date the court has yet to hear a case.
Board members either did not respond or declined to comment, and a spokesman for the agency did not have any immediate comment.
An ouster would mean little to Ms. Franklin, a former staff director for the agency who is now the board’s full-time chairwoman. Her term technically ended on Jan. 29, 2024. Under the agency’s statute, members can serve one additional year after their terms end, unless or until their successors are appointed, to keep their seats from becoming vacant. So Ms. Franklin was set to depart the board next week regardless.
But the term for Mr. Felten, a Princeton University computer science and public policy professor, is set to end on Jan. 29 of this year— meaning he has been set to stay in place for another year unless a replacement gets confirmed. And Mr. LeBlanc, a cybersecurity and data privacy lawyer, has been set to stay on the board until as late as January 2029.
While selected by congressional Democrats, both Mr. Felten and Mr. LeBlanc were appointed by Mr. Trump during his first term after also interviewing with the White House.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTOne day after his charges stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol were dismissed in light of Trump’s sweeping pardons this week, Daniel Charles Ball of Florida was re-arrested on new gun charges. As first reported by Kyle Cheney of Politico, Ball was picked up in Florida on a warrant accusing him of being a felon in possession of a weapon. In the Jan. 6 case, he was charged with detonating an explosive device during the attack on the Capitol, injuring several police officers.
As corporate diversity and inclusion programs come under attack, not all companies have scaled back.
At Costco’s annual meeting on Thursday, shareholders will vote on a proposal from the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank, that would require the company to report on any potential risks diversity programs could pose to profits.
Ahead of the vote, Costco’s board delivered a full-throated defense of D.E.I., arguing that such initiatives reward shareholders and “enhance our capacity to attract and retain employees who will help our business succeed.”
Unlike Costco, some of the biggest companies in the country have rolled back efforts to increase workplace racial and gender equity — or at least been quieter about them. They’ve pulled back from these initiatives under pressure from discrimination lawsuits, campaigns by social media influencers like Robby Starbuck and efforts by President Trump, who on Tuesday signed an executive order directing government agencies to investigate D.E.I. programs at publicly traded corporations.
But Costco is one of several large public companies that are publicly maintaining D.E.I. efforts despite the mounting pressure. At many of those companies, commitments to diversity have been in place for more than a decade.
This month, Apple opposed a similar proposal from the think tank. “We strive to create a culture of belonging where everyone can do their best work,” its board wrote to shareholders.
In October, Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, wrote in the company’s annual report on diversity and inclusion that these values “ensure our work force represents the planet we serve, and that the products we build always meet our customers’ needs.”
And on Monday, Pinterest’s chief legal officer, Wanji Walcott, wrote on LinkedIn that the company’s “investments in a diverse and inclusive work force with equitable opportunities” create “immense value for users and advertisers alike.”
Costco, Microsoft, Apple and Pinterest did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the impact of Mr. Trump’s executive order on Tuesday, which calls for agencies to identify “the most egregious and discriminatory D.E.I. practitioners” and propose potential legal or regulatory actions. On Wednesday, Mr. Starbuck said on social media that D.E.I. was “cornered and in a position to die but we must be punishing and relentless in finishing this ideology off.”
Shareholder proposals have become a popular way for corporate activists to contest and support diversity efforts, climate commitments and other social issues. But compared with social media attacks, they have so far yielded few results. Companies including Lowe’s, Molson Coors and Toyota announced changes to their policies after Mr. Starbuck targeted them on social media (“We’ll eventually get to Costco,” Mr. Starbuck wrote on X, but they “were not a company we had down to work on in early 2025.”). But most companies routinely reject shareholder proposals, preferring to maintain control over their policies — even if they are already considering similar changes internally.
In 2024, the National Center for Public Policy Research filed proposals to contest environmental, social and governance policies at 61 companies. None of the proposals passed, and they averaged just 2 percent support, according to the database Proxymonitor.org. John Deere and Boeing were among the companies to oppose the think tank’s anti-D.E.I. proposals, though they later rolled back their diversity programs.
Costco’s opposition to the think tank’s proposal drew attention because it was particularly forceful.
Beth Young, a corporate governance lawyer who advises institutional investors on shareholder proposals, said Costco may be more resistant to cultural headwinds than most companies because it began its diversity and inclusion initiatives long ago. It hired its first chief diversity officer as early as 2004. “They’ve had these commitments for a long time and have attracted an investor base that is at least somewhat aligned with their approach,” she said.
Apple established its first employee groups in 1986 and its supplier diversity program in 1993. Pinterest publicly announced its first diversity goals in 2015. And Microsoft’s chief diversity officer, Lindsay-Rae McIntyre, wrote in a LinkedIn post that “Microsoft’s original mission required a commitment to diversity and inclusion.”
Companies with historical commitments to diversity may view maintaining those benefits as something employees expect, said Vicky Slade, a lawyer at the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine. “Employers understand that if they’ve expressed their values and their commitment to their employees, that is something that matters to retain talent,” she said.
Costco’s relationship with its employees reached a delicate inflection point after a union that represents around 18,000 of its workers voted to authorize a strike if an agreement was not reached in contract negotiations by Jan. 31.
Some companies have aimed their messages of continued support for diversity and inclusion directly at employees. Etsy’s chief executive, Josh Silverman, wrote in an internal memo reviewed by The New York Times that “Etsy remains steadfast in our commitment to building a diverse and inclusive workplace” despite “a broad trend of companies shifting their stances on diversity, equity and inclusion.”
That trend is evident in hiring patterns. In the first two weeks of the year, 561 postings on ZipRecruiter for jobs in D.E.I. programs were active — a 93 percent decline from the same period in 2024.
“This sharp drop suggests that the backlash, which in 2024 largely centered on high-profile companies, could now be spreading to smaller firms and less visible sectors of the economy,” Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, said in an email.
Others see the current trends as a reflection of whether a business is truly dedicated to diversity.
“The companies that were never really committed may use this moment as an opportunity to step back and revert to the status quo,” said John Rice, founder and chief executive of Management Leadership for Tomorrow, a nonprofit that works to advance economic mobility for underrepresented communities. “Others who’ve been doing this work for a long time are going to keep doing it.”
Jordyn Holman contributed reporting.
Reporting from Washington
President Donald J. Trump’s plan to return Denali, the Alaska Native name for North America’s tallest peak, to its earlier name, Mount McKinley, has run into opposition from Alaska lawmakers.
Shortly after taking the oath of office on Monday, Mr. Trump surprised many in the state when he announced “we will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley where it should be and where it belongs.”
“President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent,” he said. “He was a natural businessman, and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal, which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama.”
But Alaska’s two senators, Lisa Murkowsi and Dan Sullivan, both Republicans, said they wanted to keep Denali National Park and Preserve as is, calling Denali the rightful name of the awe-inspiring white peaks, 20,310 feet above sea level in the home of the Koyukon people and other Alaska Native groups.
“I prefer the name Denali that was given to that great mountain by the great patriotic Koyukon Athabascan people thousands of years ago,” Mr. Sullivan said in a video.
In a statement, Ms. Murkowski said she disagreed with Mr. Trump’s decision. “You can’t improve upon the name that Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans bestowed on North America’s tallest peak, Denali: the Great One,” she said. “For years, I advocated in Congress to restore the rightful name for this majestic mountain to respect Alaska’s first people who have lived on these lands for thousands of years. This is an issue that should not be relitigated.”
As the story goes, William Dickey, a prospector in Alaska in the late 1800s on the hunt for gold in the Cook Inlet, admired William McKinley, who was then the president-elect.
Mr. McKinley, who was from Ohio, had no known connection to Alaska and never visited the mountain, but he was a supporter of the gold standard, so Mr. Dickey was a fan. Mr. Dickey used the name Mount McKinley in an article in the New York Sun in 1897 and it stuck. The name Mount McKinley became even more popular after the president’s assassination in 1901.
Alaska Native groups and lawmakers spent decades trying to get the mountain recognized as Denali, which was how the Koyukon people referred to the mountain long before the United States was founded. Other Native groups in the area have their own names for the peak.
For years, Denali versus McKinley was like a game of legislative Ping-Pong. Alaska lawmakers introduced bills to call the mountain Denali and then a lawmaker from Ohio would file a bill to retain McKinley.
In 2015, the Obama administration renamed the mountain Denali.
Sally Jewell, who was the Interior secretary at the time, said that she did not believe Mr. Trump has the authority to change the name back to Mount McKinley. She said that authority rests with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, a federal body that oversees standardized geographic names.
Any proponent of a name change is required by law to make the case before the board, which is made up of representatives of various government agencies. The chairman, Michael Tischler of the Interior department, did not respond to requests for comment.
Under the law, if the board does not act in a “reasonable” amount of time, the Interior secretary does have the authority to change a name. Ms. Jewell said in the case of Denali, Alaska tried for about 40 years to replace Mount McKinley with the Indigenous name and no objections were raised in the state when she did so.
“It is generally accepted as an Alaska Native name and certainly preferred over Mount McKinley,” Ms. Jewell said in an interview.
Mr. Trump’s affinity for Mr. McKinley appears to stem in part from a shared taste for tariffs. In his executive order, Mr. Trump highlighted that Mr. McKinley had “championed tariffs” that he said expanded the U.S. economy, a model that Mr. Trump has said he will follow.
Mr. Trump suggested changing the name in 2017 during his first term, but Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Murkowski objected. Mr. Sullivan at the time told Alaska Public Radio that he had informed Mr. Trump that his wife is Athabascan “and if you change that name back now she’s gonna be really, really mad.”
His executive order this week also seeks to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. The administration does have more leeway there and could simply use Gulf of America in federal references. Other countries don’t have to follow suit, though. President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico responded to Mr. Trump’s plan by suggesting America should be renamed América Mexicana, or Mexican America.
Gerad M. Smith, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Alaska Anchorage, said the name Denali would persist despite Mr. Trump’s efforts.
“Mr. Trump might get the name of the mountain renamed to McKinley, but it’s had its native name for thousands of years,” Dr. Smith said. “Regardless of whether it’s the official name, they’ll still remember that it is Denali for thousands of years after.”
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