Politics

By Timothy Gardner, Leah Douglas and Nathan Layne

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The campaign by President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk to radically cut back the U.S. bureaucracy spread on Friday, firing more than 9,500 workers who handled everything from managing federal lands to caring for military veterans.

Workers at the departments of Interior, Energy, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture and Health and Human Services had their employment terminated in a drive that so far has largely – but not exclusively – targeted probationary employees in their first year on the job who have fewer employment protections.

The firings, reported by Reuters and other major U.S. media outlets, are in addition to the roughly 75,000 workers who have taken a buyout that Trump and Musk have offered to get them to leave voluntarily, according to the White House. That equals about 3% of the 2.3 million person civilian workforce.

Trump says the federal government is too bloated and too much money is lost to waste and fraud. The government has some $36 trillion in debt and ran a $1.8 trillion deficit last year, and there is bipartisan agreement on the need for reform.

But congressional Democrats say Trump is encroaching on the legislature’s constitutional authority over federal spending, even as his fellow Republicans who control majorities in both chambers of Congress have largely supported the moves.

The speed and breadth of Musk’s effort has produced growing frustration among some of Trump’s aides over a lack of coordination, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, sources told Reuters.

In addition to the job reductions, Trump and Musk have tried to gut civil-service protections for career employees, frozen most U.S. foreign aid and attempted to shutter some government agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau CFPB almost entirely.

Almost half of the probationary workers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others at the National Institutes of Health are being forced out, sources familiar with the job cuts told Reuters.

The U.S. Forest Service is firing around 3,400 recent hires, while the National Park Service is terminating about 1,000, people familiar with the plans said on Friday.

The tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service is preparing to fire thousands of workers next week, two people familiar with the matter said, a move that could squeeze resources ahead of Americans’ April 15 deadline to file income taxes.

Other spending cuts have raised concerns that vital services were in danger. A month after wildfires devastated Los Angeles, federal programs have stopped hiring seasonal firefighters and halted removal of fire hazards such as dead wood from forests, according to organizations impacted by the reductions.

Critics have questioned the blunt force approach of Musk, the world’s richest person, who has amassed extraordinary influence in Trump’s presidency.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday shrugged off those concerns, comparing Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency to a financial audit.

“These are serious people, and they’re going from agency to agency, doing an audit, looking for best practices,” he told Fox Business Network.

Musk is relying on a coterie of young engineers with little government experience to manage his DOGE campaign, and their early cuts appear to be driven more by ideology than driving down costs, budget experts say.

‘BETRAYED BY MY COUNTRY’

Fired federal workers expressed shock.

“I’ve done a lot for my country and as a veteran who served his country, I feel like I’ve been betrayed by my country,” said Nick Gioia, who served in the army and worked for the Department of Defense for a total of 17 years before joining the USDA’s Economic Research Service in December only to be fired late Thursday.

“I don’t feel like this has anything to do with federal workers, I feel like this is just a game,” said Gioia, who lives in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and has a child with epilepsy. “To sit here and watch people like Mr. Musk tweet out how he feels like he’s doing a great job, he doesn’t realize what he’s doing to people’s lives.”

Steve Lenkart, executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees union, which represents more than 100,000 workers, said he expects Musk, whose SpaceX businesses has major contracts with the U.S. federal government, and the Trump administration to concentrate on agencies that regulate industry and finance.

“That’s really what this whole thing is really all about,” Lenkart said. “It’s getting government out of the way of industry and incredibly rich people, which is why Elon Musk is so excited about this.”

NUCLEAR CUTS ‘PARTLY RESCINDED’

Some attempts to fire government employees have been impeded by federal judges or second thoughts.

About 1,200 to 2,000 workers at the Department of Energy were laid off, including 325 from the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nuclear stockpile, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.

But those layoffs at have been “partly rescinded” to retain essential nuclear security workers, one of the sources said. It was unclear how many of the 325 firings were pulled back.

The administration has temporarily agreed not to fire any more staff at the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a court order issued on Friday, offering workers there an 11th-hour reprieve ahead of feared mass layoffs.

Unions representing federal workers have sued to block the buyout plan.

Three federal judges overseeing privacy cases against DOGE heard cases on Friday whether Musk’s team should have access to Treasury Department payment systems and potentially sensitive data at U.S. health, consumer protection and labor agencies.

In one of those, a federal judge in New York extended a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE from accessing Treasury Department systems. That order had been in place since Saturday.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner and Leah Douglas in Washington and Nathan Layne in New York; Additional reporting by Susan Heavey, David Lawder and Tom Hals; Writing by Joseph Ax and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Scott Malone, Nick Zieminski, Alistair Bell and William Mallard)

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Republican Vivek Ramaswamy is preparing to launch his 2026 bid for Ohio governor on Feb. 24 in his native Cincinnati, with ensuing announcements held over two days in the Columbus, Toledo and Cleveland areas, The Associated Press has learned.

The 39-year-old biotech entrepreneur, a 2024 presidential candidate who left President Donald Trump’s government efficiency initiative last month, will kick off his closely watched campaign at Cincinnati’s CTL Aerospace Inc. He’ll then head to New Albany, outside Columbus, to deliver remarks at Axium Packaging later that evening, according to a person close to the campaign who sought anonymity to discuss the unannounced details.

On Feb. 25, Ramaswamy plans events at Glass City Center in Toledo and The Local Bar in Strongsville, a suburb of Cleveland.

Ramaswamy will enter a GOP primary to succeed term-limited Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine that’s already been joined by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost and Heather Hill, a former member of the state Martin Luther King Commission. Former Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, long viewed as a frontrunner in that contest, dropped out of the running last month after being appointed to the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Vice President JD Vance, a friend of Ramaswamy’s since the two attended Yale Law School.

Former Ohio Health Director Dr. Amy Acton is running on the Democratic side.

As Ramaswamy seeks to overcome a lack of political or government experience, he has already secured the endorsements of two sitting Republican statewide officials: Secretary of State Frank LaRose and Treasurer Robert Sprague.

The person close to the campaign said Ramaswamy is also scheduled to speak at 30 county Republican dinners this spring. Those events will take place from March 3 through May 22.

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By Alexandra Ulmer, Gram Slattery and Nandita Bose

(Reuters) -As tech billionaire Elon Musk expands his influence over more than a dozen U.S. federal agencies, frustration is growing among some top aides to President Donald Trump, who want more coordination from Musk’s team as he slashes the U.S. government, according to four people aware of the tensions.

Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and her team have at times felt out of the loop as Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency seeks to fire thousands of federal workers while accessing sensitive data and disrupting operations, the four people said. Wiles and some of her top aides spoke to Musk recently about the issues, according to one of the sources. 

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Tuesday, Musk projected alignment between himself, his tight-knit group of DOGE staffers and Trump. But underlying tensions with some White House officials highlight potential difficulties for Trump in balancing his core team with Musk’s DOGE staff as they upend agencies in a sweeping restructuring that has challenged congressional authority and faced a series of lawsuits. 

In the recent conversation, Wiles and her staff delivered a message to Musk: “We need to message all this. We need to be looped in,” according to the source familiar with the encounter. Reuters was not able to determine the specific date they spoke or what, if any, changes Musk made after that conversation. The source added that Trump himself continued to speak positively about Musk to donors and others.

Musk did not respond to a request for comment. The White House declined to comment. An official with knowledge of the matter pushed back at the sources’ description of tensions, saying initial “operational hiccups” had been smoothed out. Musk sends reports to Wiles at the end of each day and they speak by phone almost every day, the official said. 

The official added that it was Musk’s idea to speak with reporters on Tuesday at the Oval Office with his four-year-old son by his side. “He showed up with his kid. We rolled with it,” the official said. 

On Tuesday, Trump issued an executive order that expanded Musk’s power over the federal bureaucracy, requiring federal agencies to work with DOGE to make large workforce reductions and limit hiring. The order calls for DOGE to station a “team lead” at every government agency who will oversee all hiring decisions. 

“This is a unified team,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Wednesday. “Elon Musk is serving at the pleasure of the president, just like everybody else on this team. He takes directives directly from the president of the United States.”

In a subsequent statement to Reuters on Friday after this story was published, Leavitt said: “This story is complete bullshit from unknown sources who have no idea what they are talking about.”

At the Oval Office news conference, with Trump beside him, Musk defended his role as an unelected official who has been granted unprecedented authority by the Republican president to dismantle parts of the U.S. government. He told reporters he speaks to Trump nearly every day, saying his work is in the interest of the public and democracy.

“The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get,” said Musk. “All of our actions are maximally transparent.”

DOGE, however, has operated in deep secrecy. It has provided almost no information on whom it employs, where it is operating or what actions it is taking inside government agencies. It posts little information about its work, providing only dollar figures for purported cuts in specific agencies and little concrete detail. It has stunned federal employees, sending its members into at least 15 agencies and gaining access to sensitive data. As a “special government employee,” Musk’s financial disclosure filings will not be made public, the White House has said.

One of the four sources said that Wiles was not upset with Musk’s efforts to dismantle government agencies and downsize the federal workforce, but rather with his approach. Wiles, one of the two managers of Trump’s 2024 election campaign, wants Musk and DOGE to keep her team informed and work in a more orderly fashion, said the source, who has direct knowledge of the matter. 

“There is some frustration, but it’s overblown to say it’s a rift,” the source said.

The fourth source, an associate of high-ranking White House officials, described the friction as more serious and said Wiles’ subordinates had expressed discomfort over information that Musk released on his social media platform X before it had been vetted by senior White House staff. “They’re definitely finding things out on Twitter.”

CONCERN OVER EMAILS

One point of contention is a series of emails that Musk associates began sending out to federal employees, including a January 28 message offering two million federal workers financial incentives to quit. Wiles and her team did not sign off on some of those emails, according to one of the four sources and a separate, fifth, source close to Trump.

To be sure, many of Trump’s close allies and White House aides appear to revel in Musk’s uncompromising style of governance. But his backing is far from unanimous, according to Reuters interviews.

Musk, the world’s richest person, spent over a quarter of a billion dollars to help Trump win last year’s presidential election. After Trump’s November victory, Musk began to spend extended periods of time with Trump, who has called Musk “fantastic” and praised DOGE staffers as a group of “super geniuses.” 

As chief of staff, Wiles is one of Washington’s top power brokers. Under her management, Trump’s latest presidential campaign was widely praised as his most disciplined to date. She has a reputation for being self-effacing, turning down an invitation from Trump to speak to the crowd on the night he won the election. Multiple White House officials said they’ve never heard her raise her voice. She is often spotted by Trump’s side while traveling on Air Force One. On a recent trip to California, when the cameras turned in her direction, she moved away.

Musk, meanwhile, is known for his intense, freewheeling approach to work and his enthusiasm for the limelight. He often posts dozens of times a day on his social media platform X, takes suggestions from site users and touts his propensity to work through the weekend. 

(Ulmer reported from San Francisco. Slattery and Bose reported from Washington. Additional reporting by Jeff Mason and Steve Holland. Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Jason Szep)

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Federal workers all over the country responded with anger and confusion Friday toward President Donald Trump and his administration’s aggressive effort to shrink the size of the federal workforce by ordering agencies to lay off probationary employees who have yet to qualify for civil service protections.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he will only agree to meet in person with Russian leader Vladimir Putin after a common plan is negotiated with Trump. Vice President JD Vance will meet with Zelenskyy later on for talks about how to negotiate a settlement to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Here’s the latest:

An advocacy group has filed a complaint with the Office of Special Counsel, the federal agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers, asking for an investigation into whether the mass firings violated federal personnel practices.

Democracy Forward’s complaint also asked that the firings be halted while that inquiry is being conducted.

The complaint charges that the Trump administration violated federal personnel rules by dismissing employees solely because they were in their probationary periods — not because of work performance.

How many dismissed employees are represented in the complaint has not been made public. But, like a class-action lawsuit, that number could grow over time.

The White House is planning to hold a reception honoring Black History Month next week and has invited former wide receiver Antonio Brown.

The onetime Pittsburgh Steelers star posted an invitation to the Feb. 20 event on social media.

The White House press office confirmed Brown’s invitation but offered no further details about the event.

Brown played in Pittsburgh from 2010 to 2018 before he was traded to the Raiders — a team then-based in Oakland — in the spring of 2019. That followed a series of public missteps, including famously opting not to show up for the team’s 2018 season finale.

The White House barred a credentialed Associated Press reporter and photographer from boarding the presidential airplane Friday for a weekend trip with Trump, saying the news agency’s stance on how to refer to the Gulf of Mexico was to blame for the exclusion. It represented a significant escalation by the White House in a four-day dispute with the AP over access to the presidency.

The administration has blocked the AP from covering a handful of events at the White House this week. It’s all because the news outlet has not followed Trump’s lead in renaming the body of water, which lies partially outside U.S. territory, to the “Gulf of America.”

Journalists consider the administration’s move a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment — a governmental attempt to dictate what a news company publishes under threat of retribution. The Trump administration says the AP has no special right of access to events where space is limited, particularly given the news service’s “commitment to misinformation.”

AP calls that assertion entirely untrue.

“Freedom of speech is a pillar of American democracy and a core value of the American people. The White House has said it supports these principles,” AP spokeswoman Lauren Easton said Friday night. “The actions taken to restrict AP’s coverage of presidential events because of how we refer to a geographic location chip away at this important right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution for all Americans.”

▶ Read more about the dispute over “Gulf of Mexico”

U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan heard arguments Friday in Washington on a restraining order request to stop Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency from accessing federal agencies’ data and initiating government layoffs.

Attorneys general from 14 states are challenging Musk and his DOGE team’s authority to access sensitive government data and exercise “virtually unchecked power,” citing constitutional provisions that delineate the powers of Congress and the president.

Chutkan made no immediate decision and asked plaintiffs to draft a proposed restraining order by Saturday evening.

“Once financial or other confidential data is made public you can’t un-ring that bell, you can’t get it back,” Chutkan said.

Chutkan previously presided over Trump’s election interference case before it was dismissed.

A federal judge has offered a stern warning to attorneys challenging moves made by Trump’s administration: Don’t expect a hearing when a phone call will do.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes gave the verbal rebuke Friday to former U.S. Solicitor General Seth Waxman, who now is representing eight government watchdogs suing the Trump administration over their mass firing last month.

Waxman’s legal firm had filed an emergency motion asking that the inspectors general be reinstated to their positions at various federal agencies. The judge refused, instead setting an expedited briefing schedule for the case.

“Why on earth this could not have been handled with a five-minute phone call is beyond my comprehension,” Reyes said.

She and her clerk have been “working around the clock on really monumental, time-sensitive issues,” such as a lawsuit challenging Trump’s ban on transgender people in the military, she said.

More than 30 lawsuits against the Trump administration are pending in federal court in Washington.

The Justice Department has formally asked a court to dismiss corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Acting Deputy U.S. Attorney General Emil Bove and lawyers from the department’s public integrity section and criminal division in Washington filed paperwork seeking to end the case. A judge still has to sign off on the request.

The formal move to end the prosecution was expected, and it came after days of turmoil in the Justice Department. At least seven prosecutors in New York and Washington quit rather than carry out a directive to halt the case.

Among the people leaving were the interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan and a veteran prosecutor who worked on the Adams case, along with the acting chief of the public integrity section.

The Justice Department’s three-page motion sought to dismiss the case without prejudice, meaning the charges could be revived in the future.

Trump has signed an executive order formally creating a National Energy Dominance Council and directed it to move quickly to drive up already record-setting domestic oil and gas production.

Trump’s administration also announced it has granted conditional export authorization for a huge liquefied natural gas project in Louisiana, the first approval of new LNG exports since former President Joe Biden paused consideration of them a year ago.

And Trump said he has directed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to undo Biden’s ban on future offshore oil drilling on the East and West coasts. Biden’s last-minute action last month “viciously took out” more than 625 million acres (253 million hectares) offshore that could contribute to the nation’s “net worth,” Trump said.

▶ Read more about the efforts to drive up U.S. oil and gas production

David Rice, a disabled Army paratrooper who had been a probationary employee since joining the U.S. Department of Energy in September, found out Thursday night he had lost his job.

Rice, who worked as a foreign affairs specialist on health matters for the department relating to radiation exposure, said he had initially been led to believe that his job would be safe. But when he logged in for a meeting Thursday night, he saw an email saying he’d been fired.

“It’s just been chaos,” said Rice, 50, who bought a house and moved to Melbourne, Florida, after getting the job.

Rice said he is in favor of making the government more efficient, but he’s frustrated with how it’s being done.

“It’s just random people, they’re probational people, getting fired for no reason other than the fact that they’re easier to let go,” he said.

He also said he hopes people realize that government employees aren’t the bad guys.

“We’re just out here trying to do something that we actually believe in, that matters,” Rice said.

The Trump administration agreed to halt any plans for mass layoffs, deletion of data or removal of funding from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The agreement was ordered by a judge after the employees’ union filed a lawsuit to prevent the agency’s dismantling. Their lawyers argued Friday that fast action was needed to prevent large-scale firings and deletion of its data.

The order will stay in place at least until March 3, when U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson will hear arguments in the case.

The administration has already ordered the CFPB to stop nearly all its work and closed its building.

The agency was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal.

Nicholas Detter had been working in Kansas as a natural resource specialist, helping farmers reduce soil and water erosion, until he was fired by email late Thursday night.

That’s despite Detter, who had been employed by the Agriculture Department’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, agreeing to the administration’s deferred resignation program, under which he was supposed to be paid until Sept. 30 if he agreed to quit.

Detter responded to the letter accepting the deferred resignation, according to documents shared with The Associated Press. While his response was acknowledged, he never received the official agreement.

He said when the Trump administration first announced the deferred resignation program, he understood that it was part of an effort to improve the efficiency of the federal government, but he said “that’s not what this has been.”

“None of this has been done thoughtfully or carefully,” he said

Detter said laying off workers like him will create backlogs in the program that was created in the wake of the 1930s Dust Bowl to try keep America’s farmland healthy and productive.

Among those impacted by the federal layoffs is Andrew Lennox, a 10-year Marine veteran who was working as a probationary employee at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

He received an email Thursday evening “out of the blue” informing him that he was being terminated.

“In order to help veterans, you just fired a veteran,” said Lennox, 35, a former USMC infantryman who was deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

Lennox had been working as an administrative officer at the VA since mid-December and said he “would love nothing more” than to continue the work.

“This is my family, and I would like to do this forever,” he said.

In a post on its website, the VA announced the dismissal of more than 1,000 employees, saying the personnel moves “will save the department more than $98 million per year” and be better equipped to help vets.

“I was like: ‘What about this one,’” Lennox said.

Federal workers were responding with anger and confusion Friday as they grappled with the Trump administration’s latest effort to shrink the size of the federal workforce by ordering agencies to lay off probationary employees who have yet to qualify for civil service protections.

As layoff notices began to go out agency by agency this week, federal employees from Michigan to Florida were left reeling from being told that their services were no longer needed.

Many of those impacted say they had already accepted the administration’s deferred resignation offer, under which they were supposed to be paid until Sept. 30 if they agreed to quit. That left some wondering how many others who signed will nonetheless be fired.

The White House and Office of Personnel Management, which serves as a human resources department for the federal government, declined to say Friday how many probationary workers, who generally have less than a year on the job, have so far been dismissed.

▶ Read more about the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the government workforce

Singer-songwriter Victoria Canal has decided to perform as scheduled at the Kennedy Center on Saturday, but she will donate all of her proceeds to Trans Equality Now.

Since Trump fired the board of directors and was elected board chair of the center, numerous officials and performers have quit or canceled appearances, including the actor Issa Rae.

In a statement issued Friday through her manager, Canal noted she had been recognized at the Kennedy Center during the Obama administration as a Presidential Scholar in the Arts, a “memory I still cherish.”

“After learning about the changes in leadership at the Kennedy Center, including Trump becoming self-appointed Chairman, I was debating whether or not to perform,” she said.

“I am a proud queer, Latina, disabled woman and ally to the unprotected and vulnerable trans community in the United States,” she added. “I figured if the new guys want to eliminate DEI, I’ll let them decide to cancel the show if they want to — otherwise, see you February 15th.”

NCSU is the state’s largest public university by population, with more than 38,400 students as of Fall 2024.

“Given the uncertain impacts of the presidential administration’s Executive Orders and guidance, the potential shut down of the federal government on March 14, and financial challenges that the state government is dealing with, leadership is becoming increasingly concerned with our budgets over the next year or two,” Warwick Arden, the university’s executive vice chancellor, said in a memo to the university’s college deans and vice provosts.

Student workers, including graduate student appointments, and part-time employees are not a part of the hiring freeze, Arden said.

“I also encourage you to be conservative in the use of all your funds given the challenging financial climate we currently find ourselves in,” Arden added.

The president and the billionaire will sit with the Fox News host next week, the network announced on Friday.

It’s their first televised sit-down together and comes as Musk leads Trump’s effort to slash the size and scope of the government, with efforts to freeze spending and fire federal workers proceeding in earnest.

Top Republicans say they trust Doug Collins. Democrats have no such faith that cutting $98 million through dismissals won’t harm veterans.

“I take Secretary Collins at his word when he says there will be no impact to the delivery of care, benefits, and services for veterans with this plan,” said Rep. Mike Bost, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

The ranking Democrat, Rep. Mark Takano, said the firings show a shocking disregard. The terminated include disabled veterans, military spouses and medical researchers.

Trump said Keir Starmer asked during their phone call Thursday to visit him in the U.S., which he accepted.

“Friendly meeting, very good. We have a lot of good things going on,” he said.

No date was set, Trump said, but it could be next week or the week after.

Alice Weidel is the co-leader and candidate for chancellor of the far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party.

Vance met Weidel during a visit to Munich on Friday, nine days before a German election, in which he lectured European leaders about the state of democracy and said there is no place for “firewalls.”

Mainstream German parties say they won’t work with the party, which polls put in second place ahead of the Feb. 23 election.

Schools, colleges and states that require immunizations against COVID-19 may risk of losing federal money under an executive order President Donald Trump signed Friday.

It should have little national impact: Most schools have dropped such mandates. And it isn’t clear what money is at risk.

Candidate Trump often said he would “not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate,” but this order applies only to COVID-19 vaccines.

All states require schoolchildren to be vaccinated against certain diseases including measles, mumps, polio, tetanus, whooping cough and chickenpox. And all allow exemptions for certain medical or religious reasons.

▶ Read more about Trump’s executive order on vaccines

The president was asked by a reporter at the White House about the prosecutors resigning over the Justice Department’s push to drop the criminal case against New York City’s mayor.

“I know nothing about the individual case. I know that they didn’t feel that it was much of a case,” Trump said.

“It looked to me to be very political,” he added, and questioned why the prosecutors didn’t complain weeks earlier, though the prosecutors began raising objections this week when instructed to drop the case.

▶ Read more on Trump and the mayor’s corruption case

Prosecutor Hagan Scotten is at least the seventh to resign rather than follow Trump administration orders in the corruption case.

Scotten told acting deputy U.S. Attorney General Emil Bove on Friday it would take a “fool” or a “coward” to meet his demand to drop the charges.

Bove told prosecutors that Mayor Eric Adams is needed to support the administration’s immigration enforcement and that the charges could be reinstated after this year’s mayoral election.

A Special Forces troop commander in Iraq who graduated at the top of his Harvard Law class and clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, Scotton wrote Bove: “No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.”

▶ Read more from Scotten’s letter

Volodymyr Zelenskyy appealed to Trump’s dealmaking history in seeking the U.S. president’s leadership to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

“He is a strong man. And if he will choose our side, and if he will not be in the middle, I think he will pressure and he will push Putin to stop the war. He can do it,” Zelenskyy said.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “President Trump will be the one at the table with Zelenskyy and Putin,” and he expects Putin to claim victory ”no matter what.”

“I think everyone will try to come out of this situation as winners,” Zelensky acknowledged. “The United States wants victory. The Russians want this victory very much, you understand. And Ukraine — it deserves it, that’s all.”

▶Read more about Trump’s dealmaking with Russia and Ukraine

A second federal judge on Friday paused Trump’s executive order halting federal support for gender-affirming care for transgender youth under 19.

U.S. District Court Judge Lauren King granted a temporary restraining order after the Democratic attorneys general of Washington state, Oregon and Minnesota sued the Trump administration last week. Three doctors joined as plaintiffs in the suit, which was filed in the Western District of Washington.

The decision came one day after a federal judge in Baltimore temporarily blocked the executive order in response to a separate lawsuit filed on behalf of families with transgender or nonbinary children.

Judge Brendan Hurson’s temporary restraining order will last 14 days but could be extended, and essentially puts Trump’s directive on hold while the case proceeds. Hurston and King were both appointed by former President Joe Biden.

▶ Read more on the Seattle lawsuit and what the ruling means

The Associated Press interviewed four such conservatives about Musk’s effort to slash the federal workforce and disfavored programs.

Some point to early successes. Others see DOGE stoking outrage without targeting the biggest spending: defense spending and programs with bipartisan support like Medicare and Social Security.

The DOGE website claims at least $5.6 billion in savings so far — a tiny fraction of Musk’s initial goal of $2 trillion.

“This thing has paid for itself many times over now,” said Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Relief.

But Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jessica Riedl said: “So far, DOGE seems more about looking for symbolic culture war savings than truly reducing the budget deficit in any meaningful way.”

▶ Read more about how budget hawks view DOGE’s progress

“Clearly it’s a new day,” new Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told reporters outside the White House.

She said Trump’s winning back the presidency shows the American people “believe that government was too big.”

Rollins said Elon Musk’s government efficiency team was working at her agency and that it had already canceled some contracts and nearly 1,000 employee trainings related to diversity, equality and inclusion.

Rollins also said she’d welcome input from the Department of Government Efficiency on the nation’s food stamp program.

Trump’s mass layoffs of federal workers and spending freezes could come back to bite him in the economic data.

The monthly jobs reports could start to show a slowdown in hiring, if not go negative at some point after the February numbers are released. The last time the economy lost jobs during a month was in December 2020, when the United States was still muscling its way out of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Overall, it doesn’t seem that DOGE has managed to actually cut spending substantively yet — instead they’ve just created chaos,” said Martha Gimbel, executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale University. She noted that employers that rely on government grants and contracts would also show declines in hiring, if not worse.

“Given everything that is happening in the federal government, it is very plausible that job growth could turn negative at some point,” Gimbel said. “But it may take a few more reports for the impact to show up.”

The Golden Theatre marquee for the new musical “Operation Mincemeat” is dark because special light bulbs ordered to spell out the show’s title are stuck in China, said Rick Miramontez, president of DKC/O&M and a spokesman for the show.

Thousands of the ceramic yellow LED bulbs by Satco were meant to arrive in early February, in time to install them for Saturday’s first preview. Now the show on the Great White Way, named after Broadway’s famous theater lights, will have to welcome theatergoers with a blank space.

On Feb. 1, Trump announced a 10% tariff on imports from China, which led the country to quickly implement retaliatory tariffs on select American imports.

The bulbs have apparently been caught in the contest. The ad agency in charge of the marquee was told March would be the earliest they’d arrive.

Zelenskyy made his remarks Friday during a meeting with U.S. Vice President JD Vance. The two met at the Munich Security Conference.

Many observers, particularly in Europe, are hoping Vance will shed at least some light on U.S. President Donald Trump’s ideas for a negotiated settlement to the war.

German defense minister Boris Pistorius said U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s comparison of Europe to “ugly Soviet-era” authoritarianism was unacceptable.

Vance lectured European governments about free speech nine days before Germany’s election, accusing them of hostility to the idea that “somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election.”

Pistorius countered that Germany’s right-wing AfD party can campaign completely normally, and “democracy doesn’t mean that the loud minority is automatically right.”

“Democracy must be able to defend itself against the extremists who want to destroy it,” Pistorius said.

▶ Read more on European reaction to Vance’s lecture on democracy

Two senior Senate Democrats are asking President Donald Trump to reinstate the top watchdog for the U.S. Agency for International Development, calling his firing illegal.

Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking Democrat on the foreign affairs committee, and Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the homeland security committee, wrote Trump saying the firing of Inspector General Paul Martin without justification appeared to be an act of retaliation.

Martin’s office had released a report the day before warning that dismantling USAID had all but eliminated proper oversight for billions of dollars in unspent humanitarian funds.

Shaheen and Peters say the law requires 30 days notice to Congress and a reason.

Republicans are trying again to exclude people in the U.S. illegally from the numbers used to portion out congressional seats among the states. But a new study suggests their inclusion has had little impact on presidential elections or control of Congress.

If residents lacking permanent legal status had been excluded from the apportionment process from 1980 to 2020, no more than two House seats and three Electoral College votes would have shifted between Democrats and Republicans, according to demographers from the University of Minnesota and the Center for Migration Studies of New York.

“This would have had no bearing on party control of the House or the outcome of presidential elections,” they wrote.

▶ Read more about the GOP push to change how Census numbers determine state representation

Hungary’s nationalist prime minister said Trump’s administration will reconnect Russia with Europe’s economies and energy networks if the war in Ukraine ends.

“The United States has initiated a change that puts the whole Western world’s system of arguments, value system, and way of thinking on a new track,” Orbán said on Hungary’s state radio. “This process is progressing much faster than many people thought. We call this the Trump tornado.”

Hungary, unlike most European countries, continues to rely on Russian oil and gas. Orbán predicted the European Union will “fall apart” if energy prices aren’t brought down.

▶ Read more on the Hungarian leader’s views of Trump

During the Munich Security Conference, Zelenskyy said he would only agree to meet in person with Russian leader Vladimir Putin after a common plan is negotiated with U.S. President Trump.

He also said he believes Trump is the key to ending the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and that the U.S. president had given him his cellphone number.

Grenell, currently working on special projects for Trump, suggested he’d be interested in the 2026 race to succeed Democrat Gavin Newsom if the former vice president throws her hat in the ring.

“If Kamala Harris runs for governor, I believe that she has such baggage … that it’s a new day in California, and that the Republican actually has a shot,” Grenell told reporters. “And I wouldn’t say no.”

Grenell spoke after taking part in Vice President JD Vance’s meetings with world leaders in Munich.

Harris hasn’t publicly expressed an interest in the governor’s race, but would be a heavy favorite to win the Democratic nomination.

A large group of federal workers and labor activists rallied in Washington Friday morning against the layoffs.

Many wore masks to protect their identities, for fear of reprisal from the administration. One carried an enormous silver spoon covered in aluminum foil, in reference to the “Fork in the Road” letter informing federal workers of government-wide buyouts.

One rally-goer who identified himself as Jeff, held a “No One Voted for Elon Musk” sign. He said Democrats should be more forceful, saying “We can’t fight illegality with legality.”

▶ Read more about layoffs of federal workers

Zelenskyy spoke Friday at the Munich Security Conference, saying that the United States, including the Biden administration, never saw Ukraine as a NATO member.

He is expected to meet later with U.S. Vice President JD Vance.

Trump has upended years of steadfast U.S. support for Ukraine. Many observers, particularly in Europe, hope Vance will shed at least some light on Trump’s ideas for a negotiated settlement to the war following a phone call between Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin this week.

▶ Read more about Zelenskyy and Vance’s comments at the Munich Security Conference

Nearly 1,300 probationary employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — roughly one-tenth of the agency’s workforce — are being forced out under the Trump administration’s move to get rid of all probationary employees.

The Atlanta-based agency’s leadership was notified of the decision on Friday morning. The verbal notice came from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in a meeting with CDC leaders, according to a federal official who was at the meeting. The official was not authorized to discuss it and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The affected employees are supposed to receive four weeks of paid administrative leave, the official said, adding that it wasn’t clear when individual workers would receive notice.

With a $9.2 billion core budget, the CDC is charged with protecting Americans from outbreaks and other public health threats. Before the cuts, the agency had about 13,000 employees, including more than 2,000 staff work in other countries.

The vice president warned Europe’s elected officials that they risk losing public support if they don’t quickly change course.

“If you’re running in fear of your own voters there’s nothing America can do for you,” he told the Munich security conference.

Vance’s speech made just a passing mention of the 3-year-old Russia-Ukraine conflict at a time of intense concern and uncertainty over the Trump administration’s foreign policy.

▶ Read more on the Trump administration’s statements in Munich

The Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General said it was launching an audit of the security controls for the federal government’s payment system after Democratic senators raised red flags about the access provided to Trump aide Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team.

The audit will also review the past two years of the system’s transactions as it relates to Musk’s assertion of “alleged fraudulent payments,” according to a letter from Loren J. Sciurba, Treasury’s deputy inspector general, that was obtained by The Associated Press.

The audit marks part of the broader effort led by Democratic lawmakers and federal employee unions to provide transparency and accountability about DOGE’s activities under President Donald Trump’s Republican administration. The Musk team has pushed for access to the government’s computer systems and sought to remove tens of thousands of federal workers.

▶ Read more about the inspector general’s audit of US government payment system security

The Trump administration is cutting $336 million in contracts designed to help schools and states adopt best practices in the classroom.

An Education Department news release said officials uncovered “wasteful and ideologically driven spending” at 10 regional centers hired to help schools apply research such as “equity audits.”

The department said it plans to open new contracts to replace the Regional Educational Laboratories. They were ordered by Congress in 1965 and are still required under federal law, with a mission to support school policies that improve student outcomes.

Trump officials also cut four contracts for equity service centers totaling $33 million. Without providing evidence, the department said the centers supported “divisive training in DEI, Critical Race Theory and gender identity.”

Vance met separately with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, and said NATO members must spend more on their militaries.

Vance told Rutte that the Trump administration wants to ensure “that NATO does a little bit more burden sharing in Europe, so the United States can focus on some of our challenges in East Asia.”

Rutte agreed: “We have to grow up in that sense and spend much more.”

Steinmeier told the conference that how exactly the Russia-Ukraine war ends “will have a lasting influence on our security order and on the position of power of Europe and America in the world.”

▶ Read more on developments in Munich

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By Brad Heath and Mike Spector

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s early actions in office have in many cases expanded upon proposals from Project 2025’s conservative policy blueprint that the Republican tried to distance himself from on the campaign trail, a Reuters review found.

From actions halting U.S. aid abroad to fortifying the southern border and restrictions on transgender athletes, Reuters identified more than a dozen Trump executive orders or other policy moves that exceed in ambition or scope what Project 2025’s 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” book advocated in a series of detailed policy proposals.

The conservative initiative caused an uproar on the campaign trail, with Democrats calling it a set of extremist ideas that would form the basis for Trump’s potential second-term agenda if elected. Trump, however, repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025 during the presidential campaign, saying he had not read the policy blueprint.

While Trump has so far not adopted some of Project 2025’s most aggressive ideas, his blizzard of more than 50 executive orders and series of other policy moves during his initial weeks in office have gone beyond some of its other proposals.

For example, Project 2025 recommended “scaling back” roughly $40 billion of annual U.S. aid spending through the U.S. Agency for International Development, which administers much of America’s foreign assistance. But the administration, after tapping billionaire Elon Musk to downsize the federal bureaucracy, has moved to dismantle the agency altogether.

A U.S. judge on Thursday extended for one week a pause on the administration’s plan to put thousands of the agency’s workers on leave.

Where Project 2025 advocated Congress fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump simply declared an “emergency” and ordered U.S. troops and Homeland Security officials to build it.

And Trump’s order effectively barring transgender girls from women’s sports goes beyond Project 2025’s recommendation to roll back some of President Joe Biden’s efforts to extend civil rights protections to transgender students.

Trump has installed one of Project 2025’s architects, Russ Vought, as the head of the Office of Management and Budget.

Vought on Friday became acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and told its nearly 2,000 employees to stop working. Project 2025 had called for the agency’s elimination. A union of Treasury employees filed a lawsuit this week seeking to block the stop-work order.

The White House said Trump’s moves are the fulfillment of pledges he made on the campaign trail.

The president “had nothing to do with Project 2025,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said.

“In his first few days in office, President Trump has delivered on the promises that earned him a resounding mandate from the American people – securing the border, restoring common sense, driving down inflation, and unleashing American energy,” Fields said.

Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

Ellen Keenan, a spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation, which organized Project 2025, said: “This is about President Trump delivering on his promises to make America safer, stronger, and better than ever before, and he and his team deserve the credit.” 

Trump’s administration has so far not taken on some of the blueprint’s most contentious ideas, including rescinding approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. And where Project 2025 recommended banning TikTok, Trump has said his administration won’t enforce a law that blocks the popular short video app.

Courts have begun issuing orders blocking some of the administration’s more aggressive actions, including its efforts to unilaterally halt government spending, end birthright citizenship and move transgender women inmates to men’s prisons.

Still, a federal judge on Wednesday allowed Trump to proceed with a buyout offer to federal workers, which the government said 75,000 people accepted.

Despite Trump’s campaign promises, his push to reshape Washington through unilateral executive action – which has upended U.S. foreign aid, thrown the top ranks of federal law enforcement into disarray and moved to redefine who can be a U.S. citizen – has surprised even allies in the conservative legal movement. 

“There are broad divisions within the conservative legal movement about whether any of this is appropriate,” said Jonathan Adler, a Case Western Reserve University law professor and conservative legal scholar.

(Editing by Deepa Babington)

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(Reuters) – As tech billionaire Elon Musk expands his influence over more than a dozen U.S. federal agencies, frustration is growing among some top aides to President Donald Trump, who want more coordination from Musk’s team as he slashes the U.S. government, according to four people aware of the tensions.

Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and her team have at times felt out of the loop as Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency seeks to fire thousands of federal workers while accessing sensitive data and disrupting operations, the four people said. Wiles and some of her top aides spoke to Musk recently about the issues, according to one of the sources. 

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Tuesday, Musk projected alignment between himself, his tight-knit group of DOGE staffers and Trump. But underlying tensions with some White House officials highlight potential difficulties for Trump in balancing his core team with Musk’s DOGE staff as they upend agencies in a sweeping restructuring that has challenged congressional authority and faced a series of lawsuits. 

In the recent conversation, Wiles and her staff delivered a message to Musk: “We need to message all this. We need to be looped in,” according to the source familiar with the encounter. Reuters was not able to determine the specific date they spoke or what, if any, changes Musk made after that conversation. The source added that Trump himself continued to speak positively about Musk to donors and others.

Musk did not respond to a request for comment. The White House declined to comment. An official with knowledge of the matter pushed back at the sources’ description of tensions, saying initial “operational hiccups” had been smoothed out. Musk sends reports to Wiles at the end of each day and they speak by phone almost every day, the official said. 

The official added that it was Musk’s idea to speak with reporters on Tuesday at the Oval Office with his four-year-old son, X, by his side. “He showed up with his kid. We rolled with it,” the official said. 

On Tuesday, Trump issued an executive order that expanded Musk’s power over the federal bureaucracy, requiring federal agencies to work with DOGE to make large workforce reductions and limit hiring. The order calls for DOGE to station a “team lead” at every government agency who will oversee all hiring decisions. 

“This is a unified team,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Wednesday. “Elon Musk is serving at the pleasure of the president, just like everybody else on this team. He takes directives directly from the president of the United States.”

At the Oval Office news conference, with Trump beside him, Musk defended his role as an unelected official who has been granted unprecedented authority by the Republican president to dismantle parts of the U.S. government. He told reporters he speaks to Trump nearly every day, saying his work is in the interest of the public and democracy.

“The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get,” said Musk. “All of our actions are maximally transparent.”

DOGE, however, has operated in deep secrecy. It has provided almost no information on whom it employs, where it is operating or what actions it is taking inside government agencies. It posts little information about its work, providing only dollar figures for purported cuts in specific agencies and little concrete detail. It has stunned federal employees, sending its members into at least 15 agencies and gaining access to sensitive data. As a “special government employee,” Musk’s financial disclosure filings will not be made public, the White House has said.

One of the four sources said that Wiles was not upset with Musk’s efforts to dismantle government agencies and downsize the federal workforce, but rather with his approach. Wiles, one of the two managers of Trump’s 2024 election campaign, wants Musk and DOGE to keep her team informed and work in a more orderly fashion, said the source, who has direct knowledge of the matter. 

“There is some frustration, but it’s overblown to say it’s a rift,” the source said.

The fourth source, an associate of high-ranking White House officials, described the friction as more serious and said Wiles’ subordinates had expressed discomfort over information that Musk released on his social media platform X before it had been vetted by senior White House staff. “They’re definitely finding things out on Twitter.”

CONCERN OVER EMAILS

One point of contention is a series of emails that Musk associates began sending out to federal employees, including a January 28 message offering two million federal workers financial incentives to quit. Wiles and her team did not sign off on some of those emails, according to one of the four sources and a separate, fifth, source close to Trump.

To be sure, many of Trump’s close allies and White House aides appear to revel in Musk’s uncompromising style of governance. But his backing is far from unanimous, according to Reuters interviews.

Musk, the world’s richest person, spent over a quarter of a billion dollars to help Trump win last year’s presidential election. After Trump’s November victory, Musk began to spend extended periods of time with Trump, who has called Musk “fantastic” and praised DOGE staffers as a group of “super geniuses.” 

As chief of staff, Wiles is one of Washington’s top power brokers. Under her management, Trump’s latest presidential campaign was widely praised as his most disciplined to date. She has a reputation for being self-effacing, turning down an invitation from Trump to speak to the crowd on the night he won the election. Multiple White House officials said they’ve never heard her raise her voice. She is often spotted by Trump’s side while traveling on Air Force One. On a recent trip to California, when the cameras turned in her direction, she moved away.

Musk, meanwhile, is known for his intense, freewheeling approach to work and his enthusiasm for the limelight. He often posts dozens of times a day on his social media platform X, takes suggestions from site users and touts his propensity to work through the weekend. 

(Ulmer reported from San Francisco. Slattery and Bose reported from Washington. Additional reporting by Jeff Mason and Steve Holland. Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Jason Szep)

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(Reuters) -Some parts of the U.S. military are preparing lists of weapons programs they have long wanted to cancel in a bid to get ahead of what could be drastic cuts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

Members of DOGE are expected at the Defense Department as soon as Friday, WSJ said, citing defense officials.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday said that he had already been in touch with Musk and expressed confidence in the effort to find billions in cost-cutting and to make the Pentagon more efficient.

“There’s plenty of places (at the Pentagon) where we want the keen eye of DOGE, but we’ll do it in coordination,” Hegseth said.

U.S. President Donald Trump had earlier said he expected Elon Musk to find hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse at the Pentagon during an audit that the billionaire will lead.

The Pentagon declined to comment on the WSJ report.

(Reporting by Chandni Shah in Bengaluru; Editing by Alex Richardson)

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By John Kruzel

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Donald Trump’s broad assertions of power appear to be advancing an aggressive version of a legal doctrine called the “unitary executive” theory that envisions vast executive authority for a president, setting up potential U.S. Supreme Court showdowns.

The conservative theory’s advocates argue that Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which delineates presidential powers, gives the president sole authority over the federal government’s executive branch. It envisions robust powers even when Congress has sought to impose certain limits, such as restricting a president’s ability to fire the heads of some independent agencies. 

The Supreme Court is expected to be called upon to review at least one key legal dispute over the Republican president’s contentious actions implicating this doctrine, with numerous legal challenges already moving through lower courts. 

Trump’s firing of a member of the National Labor Relations Board, an independent executive branch agency created by Congress, may test the willingness of the nation’s top judicial body to embrace the robust view of the theory that Trump’s administration is expected to present. And the nine justices could be asked to overturn a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent that limits a president’s ability to dismiss certain agency heads.

Under the Constitution, the U.S. government is divided into the executive, legislative and judicial branches – set up in the 18th century to ensure checks and balances within the American system. Advocates of the unitary executive theory argue that presidents legally can remove any executive branch official, including heads of independent agencies, even if such action would violate job protections enshrined in laws passed by Congress.

The doctrine was first popularized four decades ago by lawyers in Republican former President Ronald Reagan’s administration and may be pushed further during the Trump era.

The theory’s view of the president’s removal power has been embraced gradually in recent decades by the Supreme Court, whose current 6-3 conservative majority includes three justices appointed by Trump. But it has yet to endorse actions like some of Trump’s sweeping assertions of executive power since returning to office on January 20.

“Trump has claimed the power to dismiss the heads of independent agencies, though Congress has restricted such authority,” University of North Carolina School of Law professor Michael Gerhardt said. “If the court allows Trump to do that, or does not interfere with Trump’s doing that, it will help to cement the unitary theory of the executive into American constitutional law.”

Some scholars said Trump’s more contentious actions in recent weeks were reminiscent of a view he expressed in 2019 during his first term in office when he said: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

“It does seem to me like Trump has gone beyond that classic understanding of unitary executive theory toward something even more extreme,” New York University School of Law professor Noah Rosenblum said. “Witness, for example, his rejection of Congress’ power of the purse, or his attempt to dissolve an agency that exists as a matter of law.”

Various plaintiffs have challenged Trump’s actions to oust agency leaders, undermine federal workforce protections and dismantle congressionally established agencies including the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as the legality of an entity he created that is led by Elon Musk dedicated to downsizing the government.

THEORY GAINS TRACTION

Steven Calabresi, a prominent champion of the doctrine, was working as an assistant to the Reagan administration’s Attorney General Ed Meese when he became interested in the subject. The theory arose from the widely shared view among Justice Department officials at the time that a law passed establishing a special prosecutor to investigate what was called the Iran-contra scandal was an unconstitutional intrusion by Congress on presidential powers.

“The idea of there being a prosecutor in the executive branch who’s independent of the president was contrary to the unitary executive, because we thought the Constitution gave all of the executive power to the president,” Calabresi said.

His interest in the theory was reinforced by his frustrations with civil servants ignoring orders from Meese to grant asylum to people who fled the Soviet Union or China and faced execution if deported – the sort of bureaucratic resistance, Calabresi said, that Trump “now calls the ‘deep state.’”

“I remain very much of the view that Article II does give the president all of the executive power, and I think the president has the ability to control subordinates in the executive branch who are exercising executive power,” said Calabresi, now a law professor at Northwestern University in Illinois. 

Calabresi added that “the core of the unitary executive theory is that the president can fire subordinates in the executive branch.”

But how far does the doctrine go? 

“The core of the theory was that the president could fire officers in the executive branch at will, without any restraint from Congress,” University of Illinois Chicago law professor Steve Schwinn said. “But some advocates picked up that idea, drew on the logic, and used it to argue for more expansive presidential power in general.”

A 1935 PRECEDENT

Trump’s firing of Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board, paralyzed an agency that safeguards the rights of American workers. 

Andrea Katz, a professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, said that “by firing a commissioner whose tenure was protected by a term limit, Trump was essentially breaking a law to trigger a constitutional confrontation.”

Wilcox has argued in a lawsuit that her removal violated a federal law that allows a president to oust a board member only for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office. Wilcox’s lawsuit cited the Supreme Court’s 1935 ruling in a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States.

That ruling involved a conservative-majority Supreme Court restraining the actions of a Democratic president, Franklin Roosevelt. It decided that a president does not have unfettered power to remove commissioners of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission after Roosevelt fired an FTC commissioner over policy differences.

The Trump administration has a deadline this month to file a brief laying out its legal arguments in the Wilcox case. 

“The Trump administration will almost surely defend its removals by asking the Supreme Court to adopt a more muscular version of the unitary executive theory,” said Christine Chabot, a professor at Marquette University Law School in Wisconsin.

The Wilcox dispute, Chabot said, is “a perfect test case for the Supreme Court to overrule Humphrey’s Executor.”

Trump’s actions may push beyond the limits of what the doctrine would allow, according to some scholars.

Schwinn, a critic of the doctrine, said that “the Trump administration’s efforts to close entire agencies are the clearest example of a robust unitary executive theory in practice.”

“Congress has the authority to create those agencies, to grant them power and to fund them,” Schwinn said. “The president has no authority to dismantle them without explicit authorization from Congress.”

Peter Margulies, a professor at Roger Williams University School of Law in Rhode Island, said that Trump’s executive orders “double down on the most extreme versions of the unitary executive theory.”

Margulies pointed to Trump’s efforts to fire civil service employees in a manner that seems designed to hollow out the federal workforce. 

“He’s going further than most scholars who endorse the unitary executive, and much further than the Supreme Court,” Margulies said.

Rosenblum said Trump also seems to believe he has “dispensation power,” the power unilaterally to suspend a law.

“Not even the most aggressive theorist of the unitary executive believes that,” Rosenblum said. “The dispensation power was a royal power that the founders (of the country) believed had no place in a republic like the United States.”

(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Wisconsin’s top school official faces the first big hurdle of her reelection bid in the spring primary on Tuesday, when she’s running against two challengers in a far different political and electoral environment than she did in her successful 2021 campaign.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly seeks a second four-year term in the nonpartisan role. Looking to unseat her are Jeff Wright, superintendent of the Sauk Prairie School District, and Brittany Kinser, an education consultant and founder of a state literacy initiative.

The top two vote-getters will advance to the general election on April 1, when voters will also decide a competitive race for state Supreme Court. At stake is management of a public school system that includes nearly 900,000 students, 111,000 faculty and staff members, 2,190 schools and an annual budget of roughly $9 billion.

Underly has the backing of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and the state branch of the American Federation of Teachers. The state’s largest teachers’ union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, endorsed Underly in 2021 but opted not to back any candidate this year. The organization’s political action committee, however, has recommended voting for Wright.

Wright ran as a Democrat for the state Assembly in 2016 and 2018 but lost both races with about 49% of the vote. Kinser supports Republican-backed initiatives to fund alternatives to traditional public schools and is running as the conservative choice in the race.

Kinser leads the field in campaign fundraising thanks to a flurry of contributions in January from big-dollar Republican donors. She had raised $316,000 through Feb. 3, compared with $123,000 for Wright and $121,000 for Underly.

In 2021, Underly narrowly topped the seven-candidate primary field with 27% of the vote. Six candidates were aligned with Democrats, but none emerged as the clear alternative to Underly among Democratic voters. That helped the sole Republican-backed candidate that year, Deborah Kerr, to nab the second spot on the general election ballot with 26% of the vote. Underly went on to win the general election that year with 58% of the vote in a one-on-one contest with Kerr.

This year, three candidates are competing for two spots, and the primary has become several contests stuffed into a single race: one between Underly and Wright among Democratic-leaning voters, another with Kinser trying to consolidate enough support among Republican-leaning voters to outperform one or both of her rivals, and another with all three candidates competing for independent and crossover voters to tip the scales in their favor.

With only two candidates this year to potentially split the support of Democratic-leaning voters, Kinser would likely need to far outperform Kerr’s 26% in the 2021 primary to earn a spot on the April ballot, assuming a competitive contest between Underly and Wright.

The primary will be the state’s first election since Republican Donald Trump narrowly won Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes in the November presidential contest. The 2021 contest was held on the heels of Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 victory over then-President Trump in Wisconsin and in the Electoral College.

The Associated Press does not make projections and will declare a winner only when it’s determined there is no scenario that would allow the trailing candidates to close the gap. If a race has not been called, the AP will continue to cover any newsworthy developments, such as candidate concessions or declarations of victory. In doing so, the AP will make clear that it has not yet declared a winner and explain why.

Recounts are not automatic in Wisconsin, but a trailing candidate may request one if the winning vote margin is less than 1 percentage point. The AP may declare a winner in a race that is eligible for a recount if it can determine the lead is too large for a recount or legal challenge to change the outcome.

Here’s a look at what to expect on Tuesday:

The Wisconsin spring primary will be held Tuesday. Polls close at 9 p.m. ET.

The Associated Press will provide vote results and declare winners in the nonpartisan primary for state superintendent of public instruction. It is the only statewide contest on the ballot, although various local jurisdictions will also hold elections on Tuesday.

Any registered voter may participate in the nonpartisan primary for state superintendent.

As of Feb. 1, there were nearly 3.9 million active registered voters in Wisconsin. The state does not register voters by party.

The last primary for state superintendent was in 2021, when it was also the only statewide contest on the ballot. Roughly 326,000 votes were cast in that election, which was about 9% of registered voters and about 7% of the voting age population. About 47% of voters cast their ballots before primary day.

As of Thursday, nearly 90,000 ballots had been cast before primary day.

In 2024, the AP first reported results at 9:09 p.m. ET in the August congressional primaries and at 9:11 p.m. ET in both the April presidential primary and the November general election. The election night tabulation ended at about 3 a.m. ET in both the presidential and congressional primaries with about 99% of total votes counted. Election night tabulation ended at 5:47 a.m. ET in the November general election with about 98% of the total vote counted.

As of Tuesday, there will be 42 days until Wisconsin’s spring election on April 1.

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By Brendan Pierson

(Reuters) -A federal judge on Thursday blocked, for now, U.S. health agencies from enforcing President Donald Trump’s order ending all federal funding or support for healthcare that aids gender transitions for people younger than 19.

U.S. District Judge Brendan Hurson in Greenbelt, Maryland, who was appointed by Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, issued the temporary restraining order in response to a lawsuit by families of transgender teens and LGBT advocacy groups, lawyers for the plaintiffs announced.

“The president’s orders sought to take away from transgender young people the very care that they, their families, and their medical providers all agree is best for them – medical care that is evidence-based and well-established,” Omar Gonzalez-Pagan of Lambda Legal, one of the lawyers, said in a statement.

“But these decisions are for patients, their families, and their doctors to make, not for politicians or Washington bureaucrats.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump, a Republican, said in his January 28 order that it is “the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

The order directed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to “take all appropriate actions to end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.” That could include imposing conditions on healthcare providers receiving any federal funds, which virtually all hospitals do.

The treatments at issue, often called gender-affirming care, include puberty-blocking medication, hormones and sometimes surgery.

In their lawsuit challenging the order filed this month, the families, who are represented by Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union, said hospitals immediately began canceling appointments for gender-affirming care in response to Trump’s order, leaving them without access to necessary treatments.

Families said they have had appointments canceled by Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., NYU Langone in New York, Boston Children’s Hospital and Children’s Hospital of Richmond in Virginia, which are not defendants in the lawsuit. Some hospitals have publicly confirmed that they have halted gender-affirming care.

The lawsuit alleges that Trump’s order discriminates against transgender people and goes beyond his authority as president. LGBT advocacy groups PFLAG and GLMA are also plaintiffs in the case.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has said in a letter to healthcare providers in New York that withholding services from transgender individuals based on their gender identity was discrimination under New York law.

Republicans in more than half of the 50 states have passed laws or policies that ban gender-affirming care for minors, some of which have been blocked or overturned by the courts. A challenge to Tennessee’s ban has been heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has yet to issue a ruling that could determine the legality of such bans nationwide.

The administration of former President Joe Biden, a Democrat, supported access to gender-affirming care for minors. It passed a rule banning discrimination against transgender people in healthcare, which was blocked by a judge last year.

(Reporting By Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler, Richard Chang and Alexia Garamfalvi)

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