Politics

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily kept on the job the head of the federal agency that protects government whistleblowers, in its first word on the many legal fights over President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda.

The justices said in an unsigned order that Hampton Dellinger, head of the Office of Special Counsel, could remain in his job at least until Wednesday. That’s when a lower-court order temporarily protecting him expires.

With a bare majority of five justices, the high court neither granted nor rejected the administration’s plea to immediately remove him. Instead, the court held the request in abeyance, noting that the order expires in just a few days.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson has scheduled a Wednesday hearing over whether to extend her order keeping Dellinger in his post. The justices could return to the case depending on what she decides.

Conservative justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito sided with the administration, doubting whether courts have the authority to restore to office someone the president has fired. Acknowledging that some presidentially appointed officials have contested their removal, Gorsuch wrote that “those officials have generally sought remedies like backpay, not injunctive relief like reinstatement.”

Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have rejected the administration’s request.

The conservative-dominated court has previously taken a robust view of presidential power, including in last year’s decision that gave presidents immunity from prosecution for actions they take in office.

The Justice Department employed sweeping language in urging the court to allow the termination of the head of an obscure federal agency with limited power. Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in court papers that the lower court had crossed “a constitutional red line” by blocking Dellinger’s firing and stopping Trump “from shaping the agenda of an executive-branch agency in the new administration’s critical first days.”

The Office of Special Counsel is responsible for guarding the federal workforce from illegal personnel actions, such as retaliation for whistleblowing. Its leader “may be removed by the president only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

Dellinger was appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate to a five-year term in 2024.

“I am glad to be able to continue my work as an independent government watchdog and whistleblower advocate,” Dellinger said in a statement. “I am grateful to the judges and justices who have concluded that I should be allowed to remain on the job while the courts decide whether my office can retain a measure of independence from direct partisan and political control.”

Harris said the court should use this case to lay down a marker and check federal judges who “in the last few weeks alone have halted dozens of presidential actions (or even perceived actions)” that encroached on Trump’s presidential powers.

The court already has pared back a 1935 ruling, known as Humphrey’s Executor, that protected presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed leaders of independent agencies from arbitrary firings.

Conservative justices have called into question limits on the president’s ability to remove the agency heads. In 2020, for instance, the court by a 5-4 vote upheld Trump’s first-term firing of the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court that “the President’s removal power is the rule, not the exception.” But in that same opinion, Roberts drew distinctions that suggested the court could take a different view of efforts to remove the whistleblower watchdog. “In any event, the OSC exercises only limited jurisdiction to enforce certain rules governing Federal Government employers and employees. It does not bind private parties at all or wield regulatory authority comparable to the CFPB,” Roberts wrote.

The new administration already has indicated it would seek to entirely overturn the Humphrey’s Executor decision, which held that President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not arbitrarily fire a Federal Trade Commission member. Trump has taken aim at people who are on the multimember boards that run an alphabet soup of federal agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit System Review Board.

Like Dellinger, they were confirmed to specific terms in office and the federal laws under which the agencies operate protect them from arbitrary firings. Lower courts have so far blocked some of those firings.

source

By Idrees Ali and Nathan Layne

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk’s unprecedented and frantic effort to slash the federal workforce, pushing tens of thousands of workers out of their roles, is starting to draw more significant backlash, even in strongly Republican areas.

At a town hall in his conservative northern Georgia district on Thursday, Republican U.S. Representative Rich McCormick heard catcalls and boos as he attempted to defend Musk’s assault on the federal bureaucracy.

“They’ve been indiscriminate and they’ve taken a chainsaw to these things,” said one attendee at the event in Roswell, about 20 miles (32 km) north of Atlanta. He noted the government had fired and then scrambled to rehire workers responsible for nuclear weapons security and efforts to combat bird flu.

McCormick was met with jeers when he suggested the agencies in question, rather than Musk, were able to decide which specific personnel to lay off. Trump won the district by a 30 percentage-point margin in November.

Another Republican congressman, Scott Fitzgerald, faced a similarly frustrated crowd at a town hall in West Bend, Wisconsin, about 40 miles (64 km) north of Milwaukee.

“Presidents are not kings,” said one attendee in a video broadcast by TMJ4, a local NBC affiliate. “Are you willing to use your subpoena power to tell Musk to stand in front of Congress and answer some hard questions?”

Fitzgerald told the room that Musk has been effective in finding waste and that Congress will have oversight over his efforts, but the crowd cut him off with a chorus of jeers. Trump carried his district, 64% to 36%, in November.

In Westerville, Ohio, Republican U.S. Representative Troy Balderson said Trump’s executive orders were “getting out of control,” the Columbus Dispatch reported.

“Congress has to decide whether or not the Department of Education goes away,” Balderson said at a business luncheon, referring to Trump’s vow to eliminate that department, the newspaper reported. “Not the president, not Elon Musk.”

Later on X, Balderson responded to the newspaper story, saying, “I fully support President Trump’s agenda to rein in our bloated federal government & put Americans first.” Balderson’s district voted for Trump by more than a 2-to-1 margin in November.

200,000 PROBATIONARY WORKERS

Musk, the world’s richest person, and a cadre of aides have laid off more than 10,000 workers and dismantled programs throughout the U.S. government, from the Department of Education to the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Most of the terminated employees began their current position in the last year and were therefore considered probationary, a status that affords them less job protection than other civil service workers.

Roughly half of the 200,000 federal workers with less than a year of service were employed in states that backed Trump in 2024, according to data posted last year by the Office of Personnel Management.

Texas had about 13,000 federal workers with less than a year on the job, slightly more than worked in Washington. Another 9,300 worked in Florida, and 7,400 worked in Georgia.

Nearly 60% of Americans are concerned that Musk’s campaign could eventually harm crucial federal programs such as Social Security retirement payments and student aid, double the number who said they were not worried, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday found. Several recent polls, including the Reuters/Ipsos survey, have shown support for Trump’s performance softening since he took office a month ago.

Asked about complaints from constituents in traditionally conservative districts over Musk’s blunt-force approach, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt accused the media of cherry-picking critics.

“There should be no secret about the fact that this administration is committed to cutting waste, fraud and abuse. The president campaigned on that promise, Americans elected him on that promise, and he’s actually delivering on it,” she said.

MUSK’S CHAINSAW

During an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Musk, who was appointed by Trump to oversee the Department of Government Efficiency, waved a chainsaw on stage that was given to him by Argentine President Javier Milei, who wielded the power tool during campaign rallies as a symbol of cutting government spending.

DOGE’s access to sensitive government data systems has raised further privacy and security concerns among critics. On Friday, the Internal Revenue Service signed a deal with a key Musk aide limiting his access to data and preventing him from viewing information on individual taxpayers, according to an agreement seen by Reuters.

Data posted to the DOGE website detailing headcount and total wages for the National Reconnaissance Office, an intelligence agency that manages spy satellites, was “not intended for public release,” though it is not classified, an agency spokesperson told Reuters on Friday.

The NRO is working to “remedy” the situation, the spokesperson said.

Democrats and labor unions say the DOGE campaign has been chaotic and haphazard rather than targeted. Several unions have filed lawsuits challenging the effort’s legality. Trump and Musk say the government is bloated and wasteful.

The cuts will soon extend to the Defense Department. The Pentagon has identified about 50,000 civilian employees who work throughout the military and fall within the probationary period, an official said on Friday.

But the number who will eventually be removed is expected to be far smaller and the process could take some time, as the Pentagon works through exemptions, which the official said could be fairly broad because of national security implications.

The National Science Foundation, a federal agency that supports science and engineering, has reclassified hundreds of workers from permanent to probationary status in violation of the law, Democratic U.S. Congressman Don Beyer said, exposing the employees to termination.

(Reporting by Idrees Ali and Nathan Layne; Additional reporting by Brad Heath, Doina Chiacu, Susan Heavey, AJ Vicens, Brendan O’Brien and David Morgan; Editing by Scott Malone, Diane Craft and Daniel Wallis)

source

By Michael Erman, Patrick Wingrove and Marisa Taylor

(Reuters) – Elon Musk’s DOGE team has slashed hundreds of jobs paid for by fees from banks, medical device companies and other forms of funding rather than taxpayer dollars, raising the question of whether the cuts will render hoped for savings.

Most of around 200 Food and Drug Administration employees fired over the weekend held jobs that were paid for by fees charged to medical device makers under a 2002 law, according to former employees and sources familiar with the matter, depleting staff needed to approve medically necessary products like stents and implants for consumers. Overall, the FDA has around 20,000 workers.

“The overwhelming majority of those who will be terminated as a result of this are recent hires … funded through user fees. So as a result of that, the federal government will not save money,” said Scott Whitaker, CEO of the medical device industry group AdvaMed. 

“If these cuts are not reversed there’s no question that it will slow down the process for new technologies to get to market and to get to patients,” he added. 

Two financial regulatory agencies that do not rely on direct taxpayer dollars also cut staff in recent days. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is funded by the Federal Reserve, fired dozens of probationary and term-contract workers and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation fired over 100 probationary workers as part of the government-wide staff reductions. Banking fees fund FDIC operations.

U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, one of his closest advisers, have mounted a sweeping campaign to slash the size of the 2.3 million-strong federal workforce, firing thousands of employees in an unprecedented effort that shows no sign of slowing.

Their layoffs at the FDA include employees reviewing Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink. The CFPB overhaul comes as Musk’s X recently announced a deal with Visa to provide payment services to customers of the social media platform. The CFPB is the primary federal regulator tasked with policing consumer protection laws for nonbank financial firms.

While there is general agreement among Democrats and Republicans that the U.S. government is rife with waste and over-staffed, the haste and sweep of cuts in recent weeks has raised questions from agency staff and some lawmakers about the purpose of the reductions and the savings they will produce.

“The FDIC is funded through fees paid by banks, so cutting the FDIC’s expenses does nothing to reduce the federal budget,” said Jeremy Kress, a law professor at the University of Michigan.

FDIC declined to comment. The White House and CFPB did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The total number of firings at the FDA is unknown. But one industry source said that at least 180 of the fired FDA employees held jobs funded by the Medical Device User Fee and Modernization Act, under which the companies pay for the review of their products. A manager at the FDA, who spoke on condition on anonymity, said she was also told 180 and that she had not been told what would happen to the fees already paid.

Reuters spoke to five former employees of the FDA who confirmed they had been fired from their MDUFA-funded roles. 

One, who declined to be named for fear of retribution, said during their last year of tenure, their team had reviewed 100 files that collectively generated more than $1 million in revenue for the agency. Files include new device submissions, marketing applications and other materials medical device companies need approved before bringing products to consumers. Reuters could not independently verify the amount.

As part of the agreement with medical device makers, overseen by Congress, the FDA aimed to meet hiring targets for each year of the latest iteration of MDUFA. Many of those hires from 2023 and 2024 would still have been probationary employees and would likely have been cut.

According to the latest financial document for the agreement posted by the FDA, the agency hired 141 employees to meet the MDUFA guidelines in 2023 and was targeting another 42 last year. 

Nine other former employees for the U.S. departments of Health and Human Services, the Interior, and Agriculture, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said they were also fired despite their roles being funded by user fees, non-governmental grants and other forms of private funding.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Agriculture said they seek “to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve the people, not the bureaucracy.”

Some of their jobs had been to regulate tobacco products and inspect imports of plant and animal products to prevent the spread of invasive species and plant diseases to the United States. One was responsible for the conservation of endangered species in Yosemite National Park.

The FDA collects hundreds of millions of dollars each year from the companies under the MDUFA Act. It was projected to collect nearly $400 million in user fees from the medical device makers last year, most of which goes to payroll and operating expenses for employees at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health.

A spokesperson for the agency was not immediately available to comment.

(Reporting by Michael Erman, Marisa Taylor and Patrick Wingrove, additional reporting by Pete Schroeder and Rachael Levy; editing by Chris Sanders and Anna Driver)

source

By Jasper Ward and Luc Cohen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department has determined that multiple layers of removal restrictions shielding administrative law judges are unconstitutional and will no longer defend them in court, top officials said on Thursday.

Chad Mizelle, the department’s chief of staff, called the administrative law judges, who preside over administrative disputes in the federal government, “unelected and constitutionally unaccountable.”

In a letter to U.S. Senator Charles Grassley that Mizelle posted on X, Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote that the Justice Department would no longer defend removal restrictions for administrative law judges against challenges in courts.

The Justice Department’s policy shift comes as Republican President Donald Trump and his ally, the billionaire Elon Musk, seek to reduce the power of several federal regulatory agencies.

It also comes after several decisions curbing the authority of U.S. agencies by the U.S. Supreme Court, whose conservative justices have indicated skepticism toward expansive regulatory power.

Last year, the Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s use of in-house administrative law judges to decide enforcement actions protecting investors from securities fraud. Conservative and business groups have said the SEC has an unfair advantage litigating cases before its own judges.

Administrative judges operate separately from judges who preside over federal courts, who are known as Article III judges for the section of the U.S. Constitution that established the judiciary. Administrative judges adjudicate matters within agencies that come under the executive branch, which include the Social Security Administration, the U.S. Department of Labor and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

A spokesperson for the Association of Administrative Law Judges, a union that represents 910 administrative law judges who adjudicate cases at the Social Security Administration, said the group was waiting for more information.

Last week, the union asked a judge to block Musk and the Trump cost-cutting effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing their personal and employment records. The union said the disclosure of workers’ personal information poses a security risk.

Justice Department lawyers representing Musk and Doge said in court filing on Wednesday that DOGE and the other defendants had not made any public disclosure of sensitive personal records.

Musk and DOGE did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

(Reporting by Jasper Ward in Washington and Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Sandra Maler, Leigh Jones and Christian Schmollinger)

source

By Timothy Gardner, Leah Douglas, Tim Reid and Valerie Volcovici

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Federal workers responsible for America’s nuclear weapons, scientists trying to fight a worsening outbreak of bird flu, and officials responsible for supplying electricity are among those who have been accidentally fired in President Donald Trump’s rush to lay off tens of thousands of workers.

In an about face, the Trump administration is now rushing to rehire hundreds of these workers, revealing in the process how chaotic and potentially dangerous the rapid dismantling of the U.S. federal bureaucracy has been, labor union officials and governance experts told Reuters.

“This shows a level of absolute incompetence in the firing process,” said Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

“They are taking a chainsaw to public services without any kind of careful review of the people being removed and the tasks they are employed for.”

Anna Kelly, White House deputy press secretary, told Reuters that Trump is moving swiftly to cut wasteful spending and non-critical government jobs.

“Any key positions that were eliminated are being identified and reinstated rapidly as agencies are streamlined to better serve the American people,” Kelly said.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk and his young aides at the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are in the midst of a radical downsizing of the federal bureaucracy at the behest of Trump, who views the government as bloated and corrupt.

DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.

They have adopted a blunt force approach toward the wholesale firing of workers, often focusing on categories of workers who are easier to fire, like probationary employees, rather than looking at individuals and the specific jobs they do.

That approach has led to a host of mistakes.

After nearly 180 workers were fired last week at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), an agency that manages the U.S. nuclear arsenal and secures dangerous radioactive materials around the world, all but 28 of those layoffs were later rescinded.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, whose department oversees the NNSA, told Scripps News on Wednesday that he had moved too quickly in firing workers there.

“When we made mistakes on layoffs at NNSA, we reversed them immediately, less than 24 hours. But the security of our country, our nuclear deterrence, our nuclear weapons, is critical, and we … don’t take that lightly,” Wright said.

The rescinding of the layoffs at NNSA came after managers got emails saying “STOP ALL ACTIONS WITH TERMINATIONS”, according to a copy of the message seen by Reuters.

The impact was still reverberating on Thursday.

“Morale is shit and not a lot of work is getting done because people are shell shocked,” one Energy Department source told Reuters.

Geraldine Richmond, until last month an Energy Department under secretary, told a congressional hearing on Thursday that the speed of the cuts could have long-term impacts on national security and morale among a workforce that handles classified information.

Previous cuts, she said, took nearly two years to execute.

Musk, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office next to Trump last week, said, “We are moving fast, so we will make mistakes, but we’ll also fix the mistakes very quickly.”

And asked on Tuesday if he had any concerns about the re-hiring of workers who had been fired, Trump said, “No, not at all.” He called the work by DOGE “amazing.”

BIRD FLU SCIENTISTS

The U.S. Department of Agriculture this week rehired three workers it fired on February 14 from a laboratory network critical to the agency’s response on bird flu, said Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, told Reuters.

The staff worked at the program office of the National Animal Health Laboratory Network (NAHLN), which coordinates more than 60 labs across the country, many of which process bird flu samples from animals.

Bird flu has infected nearly 1,000 dairy cattle and killed millions of poultry in the past year in an ongoing outbreak that has also sickened nearly 70 people and sharply raised the price of eggs.

The USDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Labor unions have gone to court to slow down the government overhaul and have won some initial victories, but they have also suffered some setbacks.

Steve Lenkart, executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees, a union which represents 110,000 government workers, said the firings, rehirings and the targeting of workers critical to public safety showed a disregard by Musk and Trump for the important role government plays in people’s lives.

“They are not making educated decisions which should be alarming to every American,” Lenkart said.

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest government workers union representing 800,000 federal employees, called the layoffs “reckless.”

FIRED THEN REHIRED

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which fired 1,000 probationary employees this week, is also working to rehire a number of employees who worked on the Veterans Crisis Line, according to Democratic U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth, herself a military veteran.

“After I raised these cases to the VA and spoke out about them, it sounds like, thankfully, at least some of these employees will be rehired,” Duckworth said on her X social media account.

At the Bonneville Power Administration, a public power agency that runs a large hydroelectric dam in the Pacific Northwest, about 200 workers were fired last week.

About 30 were rehired this week after a public outcry over the reliability of the electric supply, according to an aide to Democratic U.S. Senator Patty Murray of Washington State, whose constituents are served by the agency.

Nick Bednar, an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School who has been tracking the government layoffs, said the sledgehammer approach by Trump and Musk is starting to show vulnerabilities.

“They have started to realize that when they adopt that approach, things break very quickly,” Bednar said.

(Reporting by Tim Reid, Timothy Gardner, Leah Douglas in Washington. Additional reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein and Valerie Volcovici, editing by Ross Colvin and Diane Craft)

source

By Jonathan Landay

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday argued that a judge could not block the firing of 21 CIA officers assigned to diversity, equality, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) programs because U.S. spy chiefs have the power to terminate them.

Congress vested CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, with the authority to fire personnel when they deem it “necessary or advisable” in the national interest, the Justice Department said in a brief filed in federal court in Virginia.

The case represents the first public battle between U.S. intelligence officers and President Donald Trump’s new spy chiefs over an order he issued ending DEIA programs across the federal government after his January 20 inauguration.

In its brief, the department opposed a temporary restraining order sought in a lawsuit brought on Monday by 11 CIA personnel, which was joined by 10 more officers during the week, their attorney, Kevin Carroll, told Reuters.

The new plaintiffs include Stephanie La Rue, who oversaw DEIA programs for the 18-agency U.S. intelligence community, said Carroll, a former undercover CIA officer.

The Justice Department filed its brief two days after U.S. District Court Judge Anthony Trenga issued a five-day administrative stay and set Monday for a hearing on the plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order.

The plaintiffs are among 51 intelligence officers assigned to DEIA programs who were placed on paid administrative leave two days after Trump’s order.

All 51 officers were ordered to accept one of three options by 5 p.m. on Wednesday or be fired: retirement by October 1, resignation effective on Tuesday or termination on May 20, according to court papers.

Trenga’s administrative stay, which did not deal with the case’s merits, halted the terminations to give both sides time to make legal arguments.

Among the exhibits filed by the government on Thursday was a February 18 memorandum sent to senior CIA officials in which Ratcliffe indicated that he could order more personnel fired beyond the 51 on administrative leave.

In addition to arguing that Ratcliffe and Gabbard have the legal authority to fire personnel in the national interest, the Justice Department said the plaintiffs had failed to show “a clear likelihood” they would win the case.

It also argued that intelligence personnel are excluded from Civil Service protections and that the court lacked the jurisdiction to decide the case.

Longstanding U.S. Supreme Court rulings make clear that Ratcliffe’s decision to fire the officers “falls well within his discretion,” the department’s brief said.

Carroll told Reuters that the law allows Ratcliffe to fire personnel “for national security concerns, and we’re talking about more than four dozen people being fired for non-national security concerns.”

He also noted that the government said the officers had not lost their security clearances.

(Reporting by Jonathan Landay; Editing by Leslie Adler)

source

(Reuters) – Elon Musk, the billionaire tasked with slashing U.S. federal government spending, took to the stage at a conservative conference outside Washington on Thursday with a gift from Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei: a chainsaw.

“This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy,” said Musk, holding the gleaming power tool aloft at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland.

The red metallic chainsaw, given to Musk by Milei earlier in the day, was engraved on its side with the Argentine leader’s coarse Spanish slogan: “Viva la libertad, carajo,” which loosely translates to “Long live freedom, damn it!”

Musk is leading sweeping cuts under U.S. President Donald Trump that have targeted bank regulators, forest workers, rocket scientists and tens of thousands of other government employees.

On Thursday, 6,000 employees at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service were told they would be fired, a person familiar with the matter said.

Musk, the CEO of automaker Tesla and the world’s richest man, has enthusiastically promoted Milei’s speeches.

Before Milei became Argentina’s president in late 2023, he would often brandish a chainsaw at campaign rallies as a symbol of his drive to cut the size of government.

(Reporting by Nicolas Misculin; Editing by David Alire Garcia and Edwina Gibbs)

source

By Andrew Goudsward

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate confirmed Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick for FBI director, on Thursday, putting a Trump loyalist atop the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency at a time of growing upheaval.

Patel was confirmed by a 51-49 vote. Two moderate Republicans, Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, joined all Democrats in opposing Patel, but it was not enough to overcome broad Republican support.

Collins and Murkowski, in opposing Patel, expressed concern about his past political advocacy for Trump and its potential effect on the FBI’s law enforcement activities.

Republican supporters argued he would reform an agency that has been hampered by a decline in public trust.

Democrats had forcefully opposed Patel’s nomination, saying his past calls for retribution against Trump’s critics made him unfit to lead the FBI.

“Mr. Patel will be a political and national security disaster,” Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement.

Patel takes charge as Trump-backed officials seek to put their stamp on the FBI and its parent agency, the Justice Department, challenging decades-old traditions of independence and reorienting its mission toward Trump’s core priorities.

At least 75 career Justice Department lawyers and FBI officials, who normally keep their roles from administration to administration, have either resigned, been fired or stripped of their posts in the first month of the Trump administration.

Justice Department leadership has ordered broad policy changes, demanded loyalty to Trump’s agenda and sought to drop a corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who courted Trump, citing his cooperation on immigration enforcement.

“Donald Trump himself and those around him have been very clear that they do believe that the president should affect prosecutorial decisions and prosecutorial outcomes,” said Noah Bookbinder, a former federal prosecutor and head of the ethics group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “They were offended by the efforts to prosecute Donald Trump and those close to him, and they see it as part of their mission to exact vengeance.”

Trump-appointed officials have said many early moves are aimed at pursuing the administration’s policy goals and ending what they have described as abuses against Trump and his supporters.

Trump and his allies planned during his campaign to install loyalists in the department and weaken the autonomy of a career workforce that they have long viewed with suspicion. Trump has been ensnared in Justice Department investigations dating back to his first campaign in 2016 and faced two federal criminal cases during his years out of power which were dropped after he won the election before reaching trials.

“This DOJ will return to its core function of prosecuting dangerous criminals, not pursuing politically motivated witch hunts,” a senior official, Chad Mizelle, said in a statement last week. Department officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Prosecutors working on Trump cases repeatedly denied any political influence over those prosecutions.

TRADITION OF INDEPENDENCE

The Trump administration’s efforts have collided with a deeply ingrained tradition of independence in federal criminal investigations, dating back to reforms that followed the Watergate scandal that toppled President Richard Nixon in 1974.

The move by the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, to drop the Adams case caused particular tumult. The top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, where the case was brought, and at least seven other prosecutors in New York and Washington resigned in protest, with some accusing the Trump administration of improper motives.

A top Justice Department official accused the prosecutors of having disordered priorities.

Trump-appointed officials also fired more than a dozen lawyers who were involved in the two criminal cases against Trump and about 18 prosecutors who handled cases arising from the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.

The FBI faced internal strife even before Patel’s arrival. Bove demanded a list from the bureau of all employees who worked on the sprawling investigation into the attack on the Capitol for an internal review.

Its acting director, Brian Driscoll, a career FBI agent, initially resisted and law enforcement groups condemned what they viewed as an unfair attack on career agents who worked on investigations assigned to them. Two groups of FBI agents sued over fears agent names would be publicly released.

The Trump administration has said agents who only followed orders would not be disciplined and has committed, for now, not to identify FBI agents who worked on the January 6 probe.

PATEL’S AGENDA

Patel has vowed that politics will play no role in his leadership of the FBI, but his closeness to Trump has prompted concerns from Democrats and many legal experts.

The top Democrat on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Dick Durbin, last week accused Patel of orchestrating the removal of FBI officials from the outside, citing information from whistleblowers.

Patel has said he will increase the FBI’s role in countering illegal immigration and violent crime, top Trump priorities, by “letting good cops be cops.” He has said he will scale back investigative work at the FBI’s Washington headquarters where many counterintelligence, national security and public corruption probes are housed.

Patel has been among the biggest boosters of claims that a “deep state” within the government has pursued Trump in an attempt to sink his political prospects.

“The erosion of trust is evident,” Patel wrote in a Wall Street Journal essay last month, referring to the FBI.

Patel’s nomination is itself evidence of Trump’s attempts to exert greater control over federal law enforcement. The FBI director, who serves a 10-year term, is not typically a role that turns over with the change to a new presidential administration.

Trump nominated Patel after winning the November election, effectively forcing former Director Christopher Wray, who Trump had appointed to the role in 2017, to resign. Trump fired Wray’s predecessor, James Comey.

(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward, additional reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Scott Malone and Alistair Bell)

source

By Leah Douglas

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Staff at the U.S. farm, environment and interior agencies have been instructed by the Trump administration not to speak with the U.S. Congress, Representative Chellie Pingree said in a letter sent to the agency administrators on Thursday.

Pingree, a Democrat, said the disruption in communication strayed from longstanding relationships with agency staff that provide information critical to Congressional decision-making.

“These staff have always conducted themselves in a professional way with integrity. Unfortunately, nearly all communication has stopped since President (Donald) Trump took office. My understanding is that these staff have been directed not to communicate with Congress,” Pingree wrote in letters sent to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin.

Interior Department spokesperson J. Elizabeth Peace said the agency does not comment on congressional communications.

An EPA spokesperson said the agency was reviewing the letter.

The USDA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Pingree is the top Democrat on the House of Representatives appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Interior, Environment and related agencies.

The letters expressed “outrage” at the firings of thousands of federal workers across the three agencies and requested information by February 27 on the number of terminations and a breakdown by program office, location and other details.

“The chaotic manner in which these mass firings were executed will only make the federal government more inefficient,” the letters said.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has fired thousands of federal workers in a matter of days.

(Reporting by Leah Douglas; Additional reporting by Valerie Volcovici and Nichola Groom; Editing by Sandra Maler and Diane Craft)

source

(Reuters) – White House and Treasury Department officials have agreed to prohibit the Department of Government Efficiency team from accessing personal taxpayer data at the Internal Revenue Service, the Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing two people familiar with the matter.

(Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones; Editing by Caitlin Webber)

source