Yesterday the National Institutes of Health under the Trump administration announced a new policy that will dramatically change the way the United States funds medical research. Now, when a researcher working at a university receives a federal grant for research, that money includes funds to maintain equipment and facilities and to pay support staff that keep labs functioning. That indirect funding is built into university budgets for funding expensive research labs, and last year reached about 26% of the grant money distributed. Going forward, the administration says it will cap the permitted amount of indirect funding at 15%.
NIH is the nation’s primary agency for research in medicine, health, and behavior. NIH grants are fiercely competitive; only about 20% of applications succeed. When a researcher applies for one, their proposal is evaluated first by a panel of their scholarly peers and then, if it passes that level, an advisory council, which might ask for more information before awarding a grant. Once awarded and accepted, an NIH grant carries strict requirements for reporting and auditing, as well as record retention.
In 2023, NIH distributed about $35 billion through about 50,000 grants to over 300,000 researchers at universities, medical schools, and other research institutions. Every dollar of NIH funding generated about $2.46 in economic activity. For every $100 million of funding, research supported by NIH generates 76 patents, which produce 20% more economic value than other U.S. patents and create opportunities for about $600 million in future research and development.
As Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times explained, the authors of Project 2025 called for the cuts outlined in the new policy, claiming those cuts would “reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.” Dr. David A. Baltrus of the University of Arizona told Jewett and Stolberg that the new policy is “going to destroy research universities in the short term, and I don’t know after that. They rely on the money. They budget for the money. The universities were making decisions expecting the money to be there.”
Although Baltrus works in agricultural research, focusing on keeping E. coli bacteria out of crops like sprouts and lettuce, cancer research is the top area in which NIH grants are awarded.
Anthropologist Erin Kane figured out what the new NIH policy would mean for states by looking at institutions that received more than $10 million in grants in 2024 and figuring out what percentage of their indirect costs would not be eligible for grant money under the new formula. Six schools in New York won $2.4 billion, including $953 million for indirect costs. The new indirect rate would allow only $220 million for overhead, a loss of $723 million.
States across the country will experience significant losses. Eight Florida schools received about $673 million, $231 million for indirect costs. The new indirect rate would limit that funding to $66 million, a loss of $165 million. Six schools in Ohio received a total of about $700 million; they would lose $194 million. Four schools in Missouri received a total of about $830 million; they would lose $212 million.
Lawmakers from Republican-dominated states are now acknowledging what those of us who study the federal budget have pointed out for decades: the same Republican-dominated states that complain bitterly about the government’s tax policies are also the same states that take most federal tax money. Dana Nickel of Politico reported yesterday that Republican leaders in the states claim to be enthusiastic about the cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency but are mobilizing to make sure those cuts won’t hurt their own state programs that depend on federal money. Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt told Nickel that governors can provide advice about what cuts will be most effective. “Instead of just across the board cutting, we thought, man, they need some help from the governors to say, ‘We can be more efficient in this area or this area, or if you allow block grants in this area, you can reduce our expenditures by 10 percent.’ And so that’s our goal.”
Yesterday, Tim Carpenter of the Kansas Reflector reported that Senator Jerry Moran (R-KS) is concerned about the Trump administration’s freeze on food distributions through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID buys about $2 billion in U.S. agricultural products a year, and farmers are already struggling with rising costs, low prices, and concern with tariffs.
Their spokespeople urge the continuation of USAID: the senior director of government affairs at the American Farm Bureau Federation said that “USAID plays a critical role in reducing hunger around the world while sourcing markets for the surplus foods America’s farmers and ranchers grow.” Moran added: “Food stability is essential to political stability, and our food aid programs help feed the hungry, bolster our national security and provide an important market for our farmers, especially when commodity prices are low.”
Meanwhile, federal employees are telling the stories of the work they’ve done for the country. Yesterday, a public letter whose author claimed to be an employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation whose job is at risk in Trump’s purge of the agency wrote an amalgamation of the FBI agents being purged: “I am the coach of your child’s soccer team,” the letter read. “I sit next to you on occasion in religious devotion. I am a member of the PTA. With friends, you celebrated my birthday. I collected your mail and took out your trash while you were away from home. I played a round of golf with you. I am a veteran. I am the average neighbor in your community.”
But there is another side to that person, the author wrote. “I orchestrated a clandestine operation to secure the release of an allied soldier held captive by the Taliban. I prevented an ISIS terrorist from boarding a commercial aircraft. I spent 3 months listening to phone intercepts in real time to gather evidence needed to dismantle a violent drug gang. I recruited a source to provide critical intelligence on Russian military activities in Africa. I rescued a citizen being tortured to near death by members of an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang. I interceded and stopped a juvenile planning to conduct a school shooting. I spent multiple years monitoring the activities of deep cover foreign intelligence officers, leading to their arrest and deportation. I endured extensive hardship to infiltrate a global child trafficking organization. I have been shot in the line of duty.”
“[W]hen I am gone,” they wrote, “who will do the quiet work that is behind the facade of your average neighbor?”
Less publicly, Joseph Grzymkowski expressed on Facebook his pride in 38 years of service “with utmost dedication, integrity, and passion. I was not waste, fraud, and abuse,” he wrote. “Nor was I the “Deep State.... We are the faces of your Government: ordinary and diverse Americans, your friends and neighbors, working behind the scenes in the interest of the people we serve. We are not the enemy.”
Wth his statement, Grzymkowski posted a magazine clipping from 1996, when he was a Marine Analyst working in the Marine Navigation Department for the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), located in Bethesda, Maryland—now known as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in Springfield, Virginia. That office provides maritime intelligence for navigation, international obligations, and joint military operations.
On January 6, 1996, a historic blizzard dumped snowfalls of 19 to 31 inches on the East Coast. Stranded alone in the station when his relief couldn’t get through the snow to work, Grzymkowsky stayed at the radio. “I realized there were mariners who needed navigation safety messages delivered, and I wasn’t about to jeopardize the safety of life or cargo at sea simply because we were experiencing a blizzard,” he told a journalist. “One doesn’t leave a watch on a ship until properly relieved, and I felt my responsibility at the watch desk as keenly as I would have felt my responsibility for the navigation on the bridge of a ship.”
For 33 hours, he stayed at his desk and sent out navigation safety messages. “I had a job to do and I did it,” he recalled. “There were ships at sea relying on me, and I wasn’t going to let them down. It’s nothing that any other member of this department wouldn’t do.”
Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s newly installed acting head of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, announced on Saturday he had cut off the agency’s budget and reportedly instructed staff to suspend all activities including the supervision of companies overseen by the agency.
Reuters and NBC News reported that Vought wrote a memo to employees saying he had taken on the role of acting head of the agency, an independent watchdog that was founded in 2011 as an arm of the Federal Reserve to promote fairness in the financial sector.
Vought, who was confirmed on a party line vote last week to lead the office of management and budget, also announced on Saturday evening on Elon Musk’s social media platform X that he was zeroing out the CFPB’s funding for the next fiscal quarter, saying the more than $700m in cash on hand was sufficient.
In his Saturday missive, Vought ordered staff to “cease all supervision and examination activity”, going a step further than a directive issued last week by the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, whom Trump had briefly put in charge after firing Rohit Chopra.
The CFPB, which Congress created in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, supervises consumer-facing financial companies like banks, title lenders, mortgage originators and cash transfer services to prevent unfair, deceptive and abusive practices and other predatory conduct.
Vought’s order leaves much of that business activity without federal government oversight.
The weekend moves continued a lighting advance by Trump and billionaire Elon Musk to remake the federal government that drew protests from agency workers on Saturday morning and condemnation from top Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Musk, whose platform X is seeking to enter the consumer financial marketplace, has said in the past he would “delete” the agency responsible for consumer protection. Representatives of his “department of government efficiency” have been granted administrative-level access to all of the agency’s IT systems, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Union officials said on Friday that Musk was effectively seeking to seize control of his own regulator.
In a statement, Dennis Kelleher, head of Better Markets, which advocates for stricter government oversight of the financial sector, accused Trump of throwing his own voters “to the financial wolves.
“This latest attempt to kill the consumer bureau is another slap in the face for all Americans who depend on basic financial products and services, but especially for those in the multi-racial working-class coalition of Americans that helped elect President Trump,” Kelleher said.
Less than three weeks into the new administration, courts are already considering challenges to Trump's declaration that the federal government will only recognize two genders, the Department of Homeland Security's departure from a decades-old policy that encouraged Immigration and Customs Enforcement to avoid places of worship and the "Fork Directive" email offering federal employees the option to resign in exchange for full pay and benefits through September.
At the center of these challenges is the question of whether the president's actions are directing federal agencies to violate a key standard established nearly 80 years ago in a law known as the Administrative Procedure Act.
The law was drawn up as a way to protect against agency overreach and actions that might be deemed "arbitrary and capricious." Groups are using it to challenge presidential policies by targeting the administrative agencies tasked with carrying out Trump's will.
Ever since President Trump took office, his appointees have directed federal agencies to draft regulations meant to delay or reverse policies of the Obama administration.
Nearly all the proposals have been tripped up by the same arcane 1946 law governing administrative policies. Just last week, two signature administration actions — to add a question about citizenship status to the 2020 census, and to allow employers to avoid covering birth control for their workers if they object to it — have been stymied by rulings under the law.
That law, the Administrative Procedure Act, was written to make sure that the executive branch followed some basic steps when it wanted to change policies. Over time, courts have given it additional teeth by requiring regulators to follow certain processes and conduct certain analyses before making changes. The Trump administration appears to have repeatedly failed to hew to those standards.
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The law gives federal agencies a lot of latitude to write regulations, but it says that major actions have to follow certain steps. For big changes, agencies are supposed to go through what’s called “notice and comment”: They must issue a proposal, let the public respond with ideas, then incorporate feedback into a final version.
A lot of the losses came because the administration skipped those steps, instead announcing that it would pause or reverse pending rules — or that some emergency conditions justified an instant regulatory change. An earlier version of the contraceptive rule, and several environmental rules, including a suspension of Obama-era methane standards, were attempted without notice and comment.
But even some Trump policies that have followed the usual regulatory steps have been found to run afoul of the law’s standards for administrative process. The law says that the executive branch should be allowed to interpret the law as long as its decisions aren’t “arbitrary” and “capricious.”
“It’s a core protection against arbitrary governance,” said Gillian Metzger, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies administrative law.
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The rule-making sloppiness may reflect the president’s enthusiasm for deregulation, and the distrust of agency staff by many of his political appointees.
“It’s hard to understand as anything but a combination of haste and ineptitude,” said Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan, who worked in the Obama administration Justice Department defending its regulations.
Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration at least 63 times over the past two years, an extraordinary record of legal defeat that has stymied large parts of the president’s agenda on the environment, immigration and other matters.
In case after case, judges have rebuked Trump officials for failing to follow the most basic rules of governance for shifting policy, including providing legitimate explanations supported by facts and, where required, public input.
Many of the cases are in early stages and subject to reversal. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court permitted a version of President Trump’s ban on travelers from certain predominantly Muslim nations to take effect after lower-court judges blocked the travel ban as discriminatory.
But whether or not the administration ultimately prevails, the rulings so far paint a remarkable portrait of a government rushing to implement sweeping changes in policy without regard for long-standing rules against arbitrary and capricious behavior.
“What they have consistently been doing is short-circuiting the process,” said Georgetown Law School’s William W. Buzbee, an expert on administrative law who has studied Trump’s record. In the regulatory cases, Buzbee said, “They don’t even come close” to explaining their actions, “making it very easy for the courts to reject them because they’re not doing their homework.”
Two-thirds of the cases accuse the Trump administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a nearly 73-year-old law that forms the primary bulwark against arbitrary rule. The normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent, according to analysts and studies. But as of mid-January, a database maintained by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law shows Trump’s win rate at about 6 percent.
Seth Jaffe,a Boston-based environmental lawyer who represents corporations and had been looking forward to deregulation, said the administration has failed to deliver.
“I’ve spent 30 years in the private sector complaining about the excesses of environmental regulation,” Jaffe said, but “this administration has given regulatory reform a bad name.”
Some errors are so basic that Jaffe said he has to wonder whether agency officials are more interested in announcing policy shifts than in actually implementing them. “It’s not just that they’re losing. But they’re being so nuts about it,” he said, adding that the losses in court have “set regulatory reform back for a period of time.”
On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “protecting Second Amendment rights.” The order calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine all gun regulations in the U.S. to make sure they don’t infringe on any citizen’s right to bear arms. The executive order says that the Second Amendment “is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”
In fact, it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.
The United States Constitution that establishes the framework for our democratic government sets out how the American people will write the laws that govern us. We elect members to a Congress, which consists of the House of Representatives and the Senate. That congress of our representatives holds “all legislative powers”; that is, Congress alone has the right to make laws. It alone has the power to levy taxes on the American people, borrow money, regulate commerce, coin money, declare war, “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper.”
After Congress writes, debates, and passes a measure, the Constitution establishes that it goes to the president, who is also elected, through “electors,” by the people. The president can either sign a measure into law or veto it, returning it to Congress where members can either repass it over his veto or rewrite it. But once a law is on the books, the president must enforce it. The men who framed the Constitution wrote that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” When President Richard Nixon tried to alter laws passed by Congress by withholding the funding Congress had appropriated to put them into effect, Congress shut that down quickly, passing a law explicitly making such “impoundment” illegal.
Since the Supreme Court’s 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, the federal courts have taken on the duty of “judicial review,” the process of determining whether a law falls within the rules of the Constitution.
Right now, the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. They have the power to change any laws they want to change according to the formula Americans have used since 1789 when the Constitution went into effect.
But they are not doing that. Instead, officials in the Trump administration, as well as billionaire Elon Musk— who put $290 million into electing Trump and Republicans, and whose actual role in the government remains unclear— are making unilateral changes to programs established by Congress. Through executive orders and announcements from Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” they have sidelined Congress, and Republicans are largely mum about the seizure of their power.
Now MAGA Republicans are trying to neuter the judiciary.
After yet another federal judge stopped the Musk/Trump onslaught by temporarily blocking Musk and his team from accessing Americans’ records from Treasury Department computers, MAGA Republicans attacked judges. “Outrageous,” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) posted, spreading the lie that the judge barred the Secretary of the Treasury from accessing the information, although in fact he temporarily barred Treasury Secretary Bessent from granting access to others. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said the decision had “the feel of…a judicial” coup. Right-wing legal scholar Adrian Vermeule called it “[j]udicial interference with legitimate acts of state.”
Vice President J.D. Vance, who would take over the office of the presidency if the 78-year-old Trump can no longer perform the duties of the office, posted: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
As legal scholar Steve Vladeck noted: “Just to say the quiet part out loud, the point of having unelected judges in a democracy is so that *whether* acts of state are ‘legitimate’ can be decided by someone other than the people who are undertaking them. Vermeule knows this, of course. So does Vance.” Of Vance’s statement, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice added: “this is the sort of thing you post when you’re ramping up to defying lawful court orders.”
The Republicans have the power to make the changes they want through the exercise of their constitutional power, but they are not doing so. This seems in part because Trump and his MAGA supporters want to establish the idea that the president cannot be checked. And this dovetails with the fact they are fully aware that most Americans oppose their plans. Voters were so opposed to the plan outlined in Project 2025—the plan now in operation—that Trump ran from it during the campaign. Popular support for Musk’s participation in the government has plummeted as well. A poll from The Economist/YouGov released February 5 says that only 13% of adult Americans want him to have “a lot” of influence, while 96% of respondents said that jobs and the economy were important to them and 41% said they thought the economy was getting worse.
Trump’s MAGA Republicans know they cannot get the extreme changes they wanted through Congress, so they are, instead, dictating them. And Musk began his focus at the Treasury, establishing control over the payment system that manages the money American taxpayers pay to our government.
Musk and MAGA officials claim they are combating waste and fraud, but in fact, when Judge Carl Nichols stopped Trump from shutting down USAID, he specifically said that government lawyers had offered no support for that argument in court. Indeed, the U.S. government already has the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, nonpartisan agency that audits, evaluates and investigates government programs for Congress. In 2023 the GAO returned about $84 for every $1 invested in it, in addition to suggesting improvements across the government.
Until Trump fired 18 of them when he took office, major departments also had their own independent inspectors general, charged with preventing and detecting fraud, waste, abuse, misconduct, and mismanagement in the government and promoting economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in government operations and programs.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation also investigates corruption, including that committed by healthcare providers.
According to Musk’s own Grok artificial intelligence tool on X, the investigative departments of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as USAID, have all launched investigations into the practices and violations of Elon Musk’s companies.
But Trump has been gutting congressional oversight, apparently wanting to make sure that no one can oversee the president. Rather than rooting out waste and corruption in the government, Musk and his ilk have launched a hostile takeover to turn the United States of America into a business that will return huge profits to those leaders who, in the process of moving fast and breaking things, are placing themselves at the center of the lives of 332 million people. Breaking into the U.S. Treasury payment system puts Musk and his DOGE team at the head of the country’s nerve center.
The vision they are enacting rips predictability, as well as economic security, away from farmers, who are already protesting the loss of their markets with the attempted destruction of USAID. It hurts the states—especially Republican-dominated states—that depend on funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Education. Their vision excludes consumers, who are set to lose the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as protections put in place by President Joe Biden. Their vision takes away protections for racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities, as well as from women, and kills funding for the programs that protect all of us, such as cancer research and hospitals.
Musk and Trump appear to be concentrating the extraordinary wealth of the American people, along with the power that wealth brings, into their own hands, for their own ends. Trump has championed further tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while Musk seems to want to make sure his companies, especially SpaceX, win as many government contracts as possible to fund his plan to colonize Mars.
But the mission of the United States of America is not, and has never been, to return huge profits to a few leaders.
The mission of the United States of America is stated in the Constitution. It is a government designed by “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Far from being designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a single man, it was formed to do the opposite: spread wealth and power throughout the country’s citizenry and enable them to protect their rights by voting for those who would represent them in Congress and the presidency, then holding them accountable at the ballot box.
The people who think that bearing arms is central to maintaining American rights are the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election by storming the United States Capitol because they do not command the votes to put their policies in place through the exercise of law outlined in the U.S. Constitution.
Donald Trump’s proposed “land grabs” mean the US is no longer perceived as “an anchor of stability, but rather a risk to be hedged against”, the organisers of the Munich Security Conference have said in their pre-summit report.
The report, which takes as its theme the shift from a US-led, unipolar post-cold war era towards a multipolar world in which no single ideological outlook dominates, will form the backdrop to this year’s conference.
Since his inauguration, the US president has mooted acquiring land for the US in Greenland and Panama, and suggested Canada could be a 51st US state. The signals from Washington increasingly indicate that the US no longer wants to be the guardian of the liberal international order, but it is far from clear which other countries may be willing and able to provide much-needed global public goods.
The report’s authors suggest a US withdrawal from a global leadership role has implications beyond issues of war and peace: “Without global leadership of the kind provided by the United States for the past several decades, it is hard to imagine the international community providing global public goods like freedom of navigation or tackling even some of the many grave threats confronting humanity.”
The authors also say the US president’s effort to assert a new form of US primary will be undermined by the “multipolarisation” trend. Their report includes survey data showing the trend is more likely to be welcomed as a force for good in countries such as Brazil, India, South Africa and China.
The conference, which opens on Friday, is seen as the most important forum for discussions between international security policy decision-makers. It will include the first meetings between a Trump delegation, led by the US vice-president, JD Vance, and European political and military figures since Trump’s inauguration.
Vance will be accompanied by the US defence secretary, Peter Hegseth, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the US special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg. They are likely to be asked about a future US leadership role and their proposed terms for a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. Kellogg has denied reports he is planning to unveil a completed peace plan to the conference.
European leaders will press Vance to do more to weaken Vladimir Putin before any negotiations, and will ask whether the US – either via Nato or independently – is prepared to provide badly needed backup to a possible European-led stabilisation force inside Ukraine after a ceasefire.
The conference coincides with Trump’s threat to place unspecified “reciprocal tariffs” on the EU.
The MSC report predicts a world in which “a greater number of states are vying for influence”, meaning “the future order may be much messier”.
It says: “We may be living in a world where multiple orders coexist or compete and where little is left of near-universal rules, principles, and patterns of cooperation. In such a ‘multi-order’ or ‘multiplex’ world, the liberal order may not necessarily disappear. But its reach will increasingly be restricted to the west, or what is left of it.”
The authors also warn that Russia is not just interested in neutralising Ukraine as a military threat, but is working towards a Russian-led Eurasian order, as outlined in the new security treaties Moscow proposed to the US and Nato in late 2021.
They implicitly urge Trump to realise the possibility and wider ramifications of a defeat for Putin. “Faced with economic uncertainty, imperial overstretch, and a highly attritional war, it is uncertain if Russia can continue its imperialist endeavours,” they write. “This will in part depend on the international community, which has to decide whether it will give Russia space to do so or instead pressure it into respecting the rules based international order.”
US efforts to hamstring China are likely to intensify – but Beijing could also benefit from US withdrawal from international commitments or Washington’s alienation of longstanding partners. The survey, for instance, shows that in every G7 country the risk represented by the US has increased more than the perceived risk posed by Russia. The environment, including extreme weather events, is perceived as a greater risk in every country surveyed except the UK and Germany.
The authors say peaceful coexistence between the new different orders “is rather unlikely, given that it is far from clear whether the major ordering poles can agree on at least some rules, principles, and structures of cooperation to manage inter-order relations”.
Rubio seemed to embrace the prospect of a more multipolar world while giving evidence to the Senate foreign relations committee last month. “It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power,” he said. “That was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the cold war, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.”
I'm sick of the NCAA and some of these other organizations playing dictator. There is no dictatorship here other than Donald Trump saying, ‘This is not gonna happen.' source
A federal judge on Monday said the White House has defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, marking the first time a judge has expressly declared that the Trump White House was disobeying a judicial mandate.
The ruling by Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island federal court ordered Trump administration officials to comply with what he called “the plain text” of an edict he issued last month.
Judge McConnell’s ruling marked a step toward what could quickly evolve into a high-stakes showdown between the executive and judicial branches, a day after a social media post by Vice President JD Vance claimed that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” elevating the chance that the White House could provoke a constitutional crisis.
Already, more than 40 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration, challenging Mr. Trump’s brazen moves, which have included revoking birthright citizenship and giving Elon Musk’s teams access to sensitive Treasury Department payment systems. Judges have already ruled that many of these executive actions may violate existing statutes.
Both Judge McConnell and a federal judge in Washington, D.C., had previously ordered the White House to unfreeze federal funds locked up by a memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget that demanded that billions of dollars in federal grants be held back until they were determined to comply with President Trump’s priorities, including with ideological litmus tests.
On Friday, 22 Democratic attorneys general went to Judge McConnell to accuse the White House of failing to comply with his earlier order. The Justice Department responded in a filing on Sunday that money for clean energy projects as well as transportation infrastructure allocated to states by the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill was exempt from the initial order, because it had been paused under a different memo than the one that prompted the lawsuit.
Judge McConnell’s ruling on Monday explicitly rejected that argument.
His initial order, he wrote, was “clear and unambiguous, and there are no impediments to the Defendants’ compliance with” it.
The judge granted the attorneys generals’ request for a “motion for enforcement” — essentially a nudge. It did not find that the Trump administration was in contempt of court or specify any penalties for failing to comply.
However, the judge was straightforward in his finding that an initial temporary restraining order that he issued Jan. 29 was not being followed.
“These pauses in funding violate the plain text of the T.R.O.,” Judge McConnell wrote. That earlier ruling ordered the administration not to “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate” money that had already been allocated by Congress to the states to pay for Medicaid, school lunches, low-income housing subsidies and other essential services.
The White House fired back almost immediately, predicting an eventual victory.
“Each executive order will hold up in court because every action of the Trump-Vance administration is completely lawful,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman. “Any legal challenge against it is nothing more than an attempt to undermine the will of the American people.”
Quote:Hang on, folks, could get a little bumpy...
US president also says he wants a return on US aid given to Ukraine such as rare minerals, in interview with Fox News
US president Donald Trump has floated the idea that Ukraine “may be Russian someday”, as his vice-president JD Vance gears up to meet Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy later this week.
Pushing for an end to the nearly three-year war with Russia, Trump discussed the conflict in an interview with broadcaster Fox News that aired on Monday.
“They may make a deal, they may not make a deal. They may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday,” he said.
Trump also emphasised reaping a return on investment with US aid to Ukraine, suggesting a trade for Kyiv’s natural resources, such as rare minerals.
“We are going to have all this money in there, and I say I want it back. And I told them that I want the equivalent, like $500bn worth of rare earth,” Trump said. “And they have essentially agreed to do that, so at least we don’t feel stupid.”
Trump also confirmed on Monday that he will soon dispatch to Ukraine his special envoy Keith Kellogg, who is tasked with drawing up a proposal to halt the fighting.
Trump is pressing for a swift end to the conflict, while Zelenskyy is calling for tough security guarantees from Washington as part of any deal with Russia.
Kyiv fears that any settlement that does not include hard military commitments – such as Nato membership or the deployment of peacekeeping troops – will just allow the Kremlin time to regroup and rearm for a fresh attack.
Zelenskyy’s spokesperson Sergiy Nikiforov told Agence France-Presse the Ukrainian president would meet with Vance this Friday on the sidelines of the Munich security conference.
A source in Zelenskyy’s office said Kellogg would arrive in Ukraine on 20 February, without detailing where in the country he would visit.
His trip would come just days before the three-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion on 24 February.
Zelenskyy called on Monday for “real peace and effective security guarantees” for Ukraine.
“Security of people, security of our state, security of economic relations and, of course, our resource sustainability: not only for Ukraine, but for the entire free world,” he said.
“All of this is being decided now,” Zelenskyy added in a video address published on social media.
Trump has said he wants to broker an end to the war but has not outlined a detailed proposal to bring the two sides to the negotiating table.
Both Zelenskyy and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, have previously ruled out direct talks with each other, and there appears to be little ground where the two could strike a deal.
Putin is demanding that Ukraine withdraw from swathes of its south and east that Kyiv still has control over, and considers closer ties between Ukraine and Nato inadmissible.
Zelenskyy has, meanwhile, rejected any territorial concessions to Moscow, though he has acknowledged that Ukraine might have to rely on diplomatic means to secure the return of some territory.
Russia says it has annexed five regions of Ukraine – Crimea in 2014 and then Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia in 2022 – though it does not have full control over them.
Zelenskyy said on Monday a meeting with Trump was being arranged though a date had not yet been fixed, while Trump said last week he would “probably” meet Zelenskyy in the coming days, but ruled out personally travelling to Kyiv.
The New York Post reported on Saturday that Trump had told the publication he had spoken on the phone to Putin to discuss bringing an end to the conflict in Ukraine, saying the Russian leader had told him he “wants to see people stop dying”.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov declined to confirm or deny the call.
Organisers of the closely followed Munich security conference had confirmed earlier on Monday that Zelenskyy would attend the 14-16 February summit.
The US delegation is set to include the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, as well as Kellogg and Vance, conference chair Christoph Heusgen said in Berlin.
There would be no representatives of the Russian government present, Heusgen said.
As soon as President Donald Trump took office, his administration froze great swaths of government funding, apparently to test the theory popular with Project 2025 authors that the 1974 law forbidding the president from “impounding” money Congress had appropriated was unconstitutional. The loss of funding has hurt Americans across the country. Today, Daniel Wu, Gaya Gupta, and Anumita Kaur of the Washington Post reported that farmers who had signed contracts with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to improve infrastructure and who had paid up front to put in fences, plant different crops, and install renewable energy systems with the promise the government would provide financial assistance are now left holding the bag.
With Republicans in Congress largely mum about this and other power grabs by the administration, the courts are holding the line. Chief Judge John McConnell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island today found that the Trump administration has refused to disburse federal funding despite the court’s “clear and unambiguous” temporary restraining order saying it must do so. McConnell said the administration “must immediately restore frozen funding” and clear any hurdles to that funding until the court hears arguments about the case. This includes the monies withheld from the farmers.
This evening, Massachusetts U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley blocked the Trump appointees at the National Institutes of Health from implementing the rate change they wanted to apply to NIH grants. But, as legal analyst Joyce White Vance notes, the only relief sought is for the twenty-two Democratic-led states that have sued, keeping Republican-dominated states from freeloading on their Democratic counterparts. As Josh Marshall noted today in Talking Points Memo, it appears a pattern is emerging in which Democratic-led states are suing the administration while officials from Republican-led states, which are even harder hit by Trump’s cuts than their Democratic-led counterparts, are asking Trump directly for help or exceptions.
As soon as he took office, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who was a key author of Project 2025 and who is also acting as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, announced he was shuttering the agency. That closure was a recommendation of Project 2025, which called the consumer protection agency “a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist nonprofits.” Immediately, the National Treasury Employees Union sued him, saying that Vought’s directive to employees to stop working “reflects an unlawful attempt to thwart Congress’s decision to create the CFPB to protect American consumers.”
MAGA loyalists, particularly Vice President J.D. Vance, have begun to suggest they will not abide by the rule of law, but before Trump and Vance took office, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts called out Vance’s hints that he would be willing to defy the rulings of federal courts as “dangerous suggestions” that “must be soundly rejected.”
Today the American Bar Association took a stand against the Trump administration’s “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself” as it attacks the Constitution and tries to dismantle departments and agencies created by Congress “without seeking the required congressional approval to change the law.”
“The American Bar Association supports the rule of law,” president of the organization William R. Bay said in a statement. “That means holding governments, including our own, accountable.” He cheered on the courts that “are treating these cases with the urgency they require.”
“[R]efusing to spend money appropriated by Congress under the euphemism of a pause is a violation of the rule of law and suggests that the executive branch can overrule the other two co-equal branches of government,” Bay wrote. “This is contrary to the constitutional framework and not the way our democracy works. The money appropriated by Congress must be spent in accordance with what Congress has said. It cannot be changed or paused because a newly elected administration desires it. Our elected representatives know this. The lawyers of this country know this. It must stop.”
He called on “elected representatives to stand with us and to insist upon adherence to the rule of law…. The administration cannot choose which law it will follow or ignore. These are not partisan or political issues. These are rule of law and process issues. We cannot afford to remain silent…. We urge every attorney to join us and insist that our government, a government of the people, follow the law.”
Today, five former Treasury secretaries wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that also reinforced the legal lines of our constitutional system, warning that “our democracy is under siege.” Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers, who served under President Bill Clinton; Timothy F. Geithner and Jacob J. Lew, who served under President Barack Obama; and Janet L. Yellen, who served under President Joe Biden, spoke up about the violation of the United States Treasury’s nonpartisan payment system by political actors working in Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”
That DOGE team “lack training and experience to handle private, personal data,” they note, “like Social Security numbers and bank account information.” Their involvement risks exposing highly sensitive information and even risks the failure of critical infrastructure as they muck around with computer codes. The former Treasury secretaries noted that on Saturday morning, a federal judge had temporarily stopped those DOGE workers from accessing the department’s payment and data systems, warning that that access could cause “irreparable harm.”
“While significant data privacy, cybersecurity and national security threats are gravely concerning,” the former secretaries wrote, “the constitutional issues are perhaps even more alarming.” The executive branch must respect that Congress controls the nation’s money, they wrote, reiterating the key principle outlined in the Constitution: “The legislative branch has the sole authority to pass laws that determine where and how federal dollars should be spent.”
The Treasury Department cannot decide “which promises of federal funding made by Congress it will keep, and which it will not,” the letter read. “The Trump administration may seek to change the law and alter what spending Congress appropriates, as administrations before it have done as well. And should the law change, it will be the role of the executive branch to execute those changes. But it is not for the Treasury Department or the administration to decide which of our congressionally approved commitments to fulfill and which to cast aside.”
That warning appears as Trump indicates that he is willing to undermine the credit of the United States. Yesterday, on Air Force One, he told reporters that the members of the administration trying to find wasteful spending have suggested that they have found fraud in Treasury bonds and that the United States might “have less debt than we thought.” The suggestion that the U.S. might not honor its debt is a direct attack on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which says that “[t]he validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” That amendment was written under similar circumstances, when former Confederates sought to avoid debt payments and undermine the power of the federal government.
Lauren Thomas, Ben Drummett, and Chip Cutter of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that “for CEOs and bankers, the Trump euphoria is fading fast.” Consumers are losing confidence in the economy, and observers expect inflation, while business leaders find that trying to navigate Trump’s on-again-off-again tariffs is taking all their attention.
Meanwhile, Trump has continued his purge of government employees he considers insufficiently loyal to him. On Friday he tried to get rid of Ellen Weintraub of the Federal Elections Commission, who contended that her removal was illegal. He also fired Colleen Shogan, the Archivist of the United States, head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the government agency that handles presidential records. The archivist is the official responsible for receiving and validating the certified electoral ballots for presidential elections—a process Trump’s people tried to corrupt after he lost the 2020 presidential election.
It was NARA that first discovered Trump’s retention of classified documents and demanded their return, although Shogan was not the archivist in charge at the time.
The courts happened to weigh in on the case of the retained classified documents today, when U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that the FBI must search its records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from journalist Jason Leopold after Leopold learned that Trump had allegedly flushed presidential records down the toilet when he was president, and later brought classified documents to Florida. The judge noted that the Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. United States that the president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties and is “at least presumptive[ly] immune from criminal prosecution for…acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility” means that there is no reason to hold back information to shield him from prosecution. Indeed, Howell notes, that decision means that the FOIA request is now the only way for the American public to “know what its government is up to.”
Howell highlighted that the three Supreme Court justices who dissented from the Trump v. United States decision described it as “mak[ing] a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.” In a footnote, Howell also called attention to the fact that presumptive immunity for the president does not “extend to those who aid, abet and execute criminal acts on behalf of a criminally immune president. The excuse offered after World War II by enablers of the fascist Nazi regime of ‘just following orders’ has long been rejected in this country’s jurisprudence.”
Today, Trump fired David Huitema, director of the Office of Government Ethics, the department that oversees political appointments and helps nominees avoid conflicts of interest.
On Friday, Trump fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, U.S. Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger. That office enforces federal whistleblower laws as well as the law that prohibits federal employees from engaging in most political activity: the Hatch Act. Congress provided that the special counsel can be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” and today Dellinger sued, calling his removal illegal.
Tonight, Judge Amy Berman Jackson blocked Dellinger’s firing through Thursday as she hears arguments in the case.
Confirmation of snub comes after JD Vance criticises Europe’s ‘excessive regulation’ of technology
The US and the UK have refused to sign the Paris AI summit’s declaration on “inclusive and sustainable” artificial intelligence, in a blow to hopes for a concerted approach to developing and regulating the technology.
The two countries did not immediately explain their reasons for not adding their names to a document backed by 60 signatories on Tuesday, including China, India, Japan, Australia and Canada.
The UK prime minister’s official spokesperson said France was one of the UK’s closest partners in AI, but the government would “only ever sign up to initiatives that are in UK national interests”.
But they added that the UK had signed up to the summit’s Coalition for Sustainable AI and had backed a statement on cybersecurity.
Asked if the UK had declined to sign up because the US had refused to do so, the spokesperson said they were “not aware of the US reasons or position” on the declaration.
Confirmation of the snub came soon after the US vice-president, JD Vance, took to the stage at the Grand Palais to criticise Europe’s “excessive regulation” of technology and warn against co-operating with China, in a hard-hitting speech.
The communique states that some of the priorities are “ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy, taking into account international frameworks for all” and “making AI sustainable for people and the planet”.
The Élysée Palace said more countries might sign the declaration in the hours after the event.
Vance’s speech, in front of leaders including the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, indicated dissatisfaction with the global approach to regulating and developing the technology. Keir Starmer, did not attend the summit.
Vance, in his first trip abroad as US vice-president, issued a caution against the EU’s regulatory approach, stating that “excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry”.
Speaking in front of the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, Vance added: “We need international regulatory regimes that fosters the creation of AI technology rather than strangles it, and we need our European friends, in particular, to look to this new frontier with optimism rather than trepidation.”
Two other EU regulatory measures, the Digital Services Act and GDPR, also received passing criticism from Vance. Singling out the DSA, which regulates social media, the vice-president said: “It is one thing to prevent a predator from preying on a child on the internet. And it is something quite different to prevent a grown man or woman from accessing an opinion that the government thinks is misinformation.”
Vance also referred to the risks of partnering with “authoritarian” regimes, a pointed allusion to China. Referring to exports of CCTV and 5G equipment – key Chinese tech products – by authoritarian governments, he said there was a cost: “Partnering with such regimes, it never pays off in the long term.”
As the Chinese vice-premier, Zhang Guoqing, sat yards away Vance added: “Some of us in this room have learned from experience partnering with them means chaining your nation to an authoritarian master that seeks to infiltrate, dig in and seize your information infrastructure. Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”
Vance started his speech by cautioning against an excessive focus on AI safety, in an apparent criticism of the first global AI summit in the UK in 2023, which was badged as the AI Safety Summit. The vice-president indicated that the Bletchley Park meeting was too cautious, referring to gatherings about cutting-edge technology that can be “too self-conscious, too risk averse”.
Vance, who left the meeting before the group photo at the end, finished his speech by referring to a sword held by Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman who served during the American war of independence.
The vice-president said he was given the opportunity to hold the sword during a tour of Paris on Monday night and it made him think about “the beautiful civilisation” that France and the US had built together with weapons such as the sabre.
Sabres, he said, “are dangerous in the wrong hands, but are incredible tools for liberty and prosperity in right hands”. He added: “If we choose the wrong approach on other things that could be conceived of as dangerous, things like AI, and choose to hold ourselves back, it will alter not only our GDP or the stock market, but the very future of the project that Lafayette and the American founders set off to create.”
President Trump’s proposal for the United States to take over Gaza and remove some two million Palestinians who live there would unquestionably be a severe violation of international law, experts say. As further details of his proposal emerge, the list of potential violations becomes even clearer.
In a Fox News interview on Monday, Mr. Trump said that under his plan, Gaza’s Palestinians would not be allowed to return to the territory, a violation in its own right of an important principle of international law, as well as a component of other international crimes.
His latest comments undermine his aides’ attempts to walk back his initial proposal by claiming he was actually suggesting a temporary, voluntary evacuation of Gaza’s population — a scenario that could have been legally defensible.
“Trump is just casually making major international crimes into policy proposals,” said Janina Dill, the co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. “He just normalizes violating, or proposing to violate, the absolute bedrock principles of international law.”
Forced deportation
The forced deportation or transfer of a civilian population is a violation of international humanitarian law, a war crime and a crime against humanity.
The prohibition has been a part of the law of war since the Lieber Code, a set of rules on the conduct of hostilities that dates back to the U.S. Civil War. Forced deportation is also prohibited by multiple provisions of the Geneva Conventions, which the United States has ratified, and the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II defined it as a war crime.
The Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court lists forcible population transfers as both a war crime and a crime against humanity. And if the displacement targets a particular group based on their ethnic, religious or national identity, then it is also persecution — an additional crime.
(Because the International Criminal Court recognizes a state of Palestine as a party to the court, it has jurisdiction over those crimes if they take place within Gaza. That is true even if they are committed by citizens of the United States, which has never adopted the Rome Statute and so is not a member of the court.)
When Mr. Trump was asked during a Feb. 4 news conference how much of Gaza’s population he wanted to move, he said, “all of them,” adding, “I would think that they would be thrilled.” When he was pressed on whether he would force them to go if they did not want to, he said, “I don’t think they’re going to tell me no.”
U.S. allies and foes around the world, including France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Turkey, Russia, and China, immediately and unequivocally condemned Mr. Trump’s proposal. “In the search for solutions, we must not make the problem worse,” said António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general. “It is vital to stay true to the bedrock of international law. It is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing.”
The right to return
Mr. Trump’s response to Fox News, saying that he did not plan to allow Gaza’s population to return, nullifies what otherwise might have been the strongest legal defense of his plan: It is legal under the laws of war to temporarily evacuate civilians for their own safety.
Even with a cease-fire in place, Gaza remains extremely dangerous to civilians because of unexploded bombs, many of them hidden beneath rubble or underground, as well as catastrophic damage to civilian necessities like shelter, water, and power.
However, Mr. Trump made clear on Tuesday that he does not intend to allow the Gazan population to return, even after those dangers have been cleared and the territory is once again safe, which would mean his plan could not be legally justified as a temporary safety measure.
The “right of return,” the principle that all people have the right to enter their own country, is enshrined in multiple treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the United States has signed and ratified.
That principle has also been one of the most contentious issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israel has refused to allow the return of the approximately 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced out during the 1948 war that followed the creation of an independent Jewish state — a mass displacement that the Palestinians refer to as the “nakba,” or catastrophe.
The question of whether those refugees and their descendants, now numbering in the millions, will be permitted to return to the territory that is now Israel has been one of the thorniest points of negotiation in the decades of peace talks that have sought to resolve the conflict.
In addition, right-wing Israelis have waged a decades-long effort to build settlements within the West Bank and Gaza in order to lay claim to that land as part of Israel rather than a future Palestinian state.
Seizure of territory
On Sunday, Mr. Trump reiterated his proposal for the United States to take over Gaza, telling reporters on Air Force One that the strip of land was “a big real estate site” that the United States was “going to own.”
It would be a severe violation of international law for the United States to permanently take over the territory of Gaza. The prohibition against a nation forcibly annexing territory is one of the most important and foundational principles of international law.
“There’s a clear rule,” said Marko Milanovic, a professor of international law at the University of Reading in England. “You cannot conquer someone else’s territory.”
It is rare for states to violate that rule. When they have, as in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they have tended to claim at least some pretense of legality. Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that the invasion was necessary to protect the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine from genocide by the Ukrainian government. Although that assertion was false, it paid lip service to the deeper principle that annexation for its own sake would be illegal.
In the case of Gaza, the specifics of that violation would depend partly on whether Palestine is considered a state, said Marko Milanovic, a professor of international law at the University of Reading in England. The United Nations recognizes Palestine as a permanent observer state, and 146 out of 193 U.N. member states recognize Palestinian statehood, but the United States and Israel do not.
But even if Gaza is not considered part of a state, U.S. annexation of the territory would still violate the civilian population’s right to self-determination. The International Court of Justice has ruled twice that the Palestinian people are entitled to that right within Gaza.
“If you take it without their consent, you’re violating their right to self-determination,” Professor Milanovic said. “There’s really no doubt about that.”
The role of international law
Mr. Trump seemed unconcerned with how his proposal might be viewed by the institutions that underpin the international legal system, and he has shown disdain for those institutions.
Last week, he announced sanctions against the International Criminal Court. On Tuesday, he signed an executive order calling for a general review of U.S. funding for and involvement in the United Nations, raising questions about the U.S. commitment to that global body. He also withdrew the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Even if Mr. Trump’s Gaza plan ultimately does not move forward, his attitude toward international law could have serious consequences for U.S. interests around the world.
By appearing to disregard the value of those rules, Mr. Trump could send a message that he is not strongly committed to defending them in other contexts, such as a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Professor Dill said.
“If we live in a world where conquest is normalized and the legal rule is simply set aside, we live in a completely different world, in a world that’s incredibly dangerous also for Americans,” she said.
