President Donald Trump's budget request, released on May 2, 2025, proposes slashing $21 billion in unspent funds from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law for renewable energy, electric vehicle charging infrastructure and other efforts to cut climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions.  Shown are solar panels and wind turbines. (Photo by Marga Buschbell-Steeger/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump’s budget request for the next fiscal year proposes deep cuts to renewable energy programs and other climate spending as the administration seeks to shift U.S. energy production to encourage more fossil fuels and push the focus away from reducing climate change.

The budget proposes slashing $21 billion in unspent funds from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law for renewable energy, electric vehicle charging infrastructure and other efforts to cut climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions. The request also targets climate research spending and initiatives meant to promote diversity.

“President Trump is committed to eliminating funding for the globalist climate agenda while unleashing American energy production,” a White House fact sheet on climate and environment spending said. The budget “eliminates funding for the Green New Scam.”

The president’s budget request is a wish list for Congress, which controls federal spending, to consider. Even with both chambers of Congress controlled by Republicans who have shown an unusual willingness to follow Trump’s lead on a host of policies, it is best understood as a starting point for negotiations between the branches of government and a representation of the administration’s priorities.

A White House official speaking on background Friday, though, said the Trump administration is exploring ways to exert more control over the federal spending process, including by potentially refusing to spend funds appropriated by lawmakers.

The first budget request of Trump’s second term calls on Congress to cut non-defense accounts by $163 billion to $557 billion, while keeping defense funding flat at $893 billion.

‘Political talking points’

The proposal drew criticism for a focus on culture-war buzzwords, even from groups that are not always inclined to support environment and climate spending.

The request “is long on rhetoric and short on details,” Steve Ellis, president of the nonpartisan budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense, said in a statement.

“This year’s version leans heavily on political talking points—taking aim at so-called ‘woke’ programs and the ‘Green New Scam,’ while proposing a massive Pentagon spending hike to pay for wasteful fantasies like the Golden Dome and diverting military resources to immigration enforcement missions.”

Renewable energy

The administration proposal would roll back funding Trump’s predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden, championed for renewable energy.

It would cancel more than $15 billion from the 2021 infrastructure law “purposed for unreliable renewable energy, removing carbon dioxide from the air, and other costly technologies that burden ratepayers and consumers,” according to the White House fact sheet.

It would also eliminate $6 billion for building electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

“EV chargers should be built just like gas stations: with private sector resources disciplined by market forces,” the fact sheet said.

And it would decrease spending on the Energy Department’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy program, which helps private-sector projects secure financing and conducts research on low-carbon energy sources, by $2.5 billion.

In a statement, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations subcommittee that writes the bill funding energy programs, slammed the cuts to renewable energy programs, saying they would cost consumers and hurt a growing domestic industry.

“The Trump Administration’s proposal to slash $20 Billion from the Department of Energy’s programs — particularly a devastating 74% cut to Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy — is shortsighted and dangerous,” the longtime Ohio lawmaker said. “By gutting clean energy investments, this budget threatens to raise energy prices for consumers, increase our reliance on foreign energy, and stifle American competitiveness. … We must defend the programs that power America’s future — cleaner, cheaper, and made right here at home.”

Diversity

Throughout the request, the administration targets programs out of line with Trump’s ideology on social issues, including those meant to promote diversity.

For energy and environment programs, that includes spending on environmental justice initiatives, which target pollution and climate effects in majority-minority and low-income communities, and organizations “that advance the radical climate agenda,” according to the fact sheet.

Research and grant funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would be particularly hard hit by the proposal, which would terminate “a variety of climate-dominated research programs that are not aligned with Administration policy of ending ‘Green New Deal’ initiatives, saving taxpayers $1.3 billion.”

The budget also proposes eliminating $100 million from a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fund dedicated to environmental justice. That funding “enabled a witch hunt against private industry” and “gave taxpayer dollars to political cronies who exploited the program’s racial preferencing policies to advance an anti-oil and gas crusade,” according to the White House.

National Park Service targeted

The budget also proposes cutting $900 million from National Park Service operations, which the administration said would come from defunding smaller sites while “supporting many national treasures.”

The document indicates the administration would prefer to leave responsibility for smaller sites currently under NPS management to states and refocus the federal government on the major parks that attract nationwide and international tourists.

“There is an urgent need to streamline staffing and transfer certain properties to State-level management to ensure the long-term health and sustainment of the National Park system,” according to a budget spreadsheet highlighting major line items in the request.

Despite laws in recent years to boost spending for maintenance at parks, the National Park Service faces a $23.3 billion deferred maintenance backlog, according to a July 2024 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

The proposed NPS cut represents the largest single funding change – either positive or negative – of any line item under the Department of Interior, which would receive a funding decrease of more than $5 billion, about 30%, under the proposal.

Jennifer Shutt contributed to this report.

A U.S. Border Patrol official vehicle  is shown parked near the border. (Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Judiciary Republicans Wednesday worked in committee on a portion of a major legislative package that would help fund President Donald Trump’s plans to conduct mass deportations of people living in the United States without permanent legal status.

The Judiciary panel’s $81 billion share of the “one, big beautiful” bill the president has requested of Congress would provide $45 billion for immigration detention centers, $8 billion to hire thousands of immigration enforcement officers and more than $14 billion for deportations, among other things.

The border security and immigration funds are part of a massive package that wraps together White House priorities including tax cuts and defense spending boosts. Republicans are pushing the deal through using a special procedure known as reconciliation that will allow the Senate GOP to skirt its usual 60-vote threshold when that chamber acts.

House Republicans returning from a two-week recess kicked off their work on reconciliation Tuesday, approving three of 11 bills out of committees on Armed Services, Education and Workforce and Homeland Security.

On Wednesday, lawmakers continued work on the various sections of the reconciliation bill with markups — which means a bill is debated and potentially amended or rewritten — in the Financial Services, Judiciary, Transportation and Infrastructure and Oversight and Government Reform committees.

House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana said Republicans will spend the rest of this week and next debating the 11 separate bills in committees. Committees when they finish their measures will send them to the House Budget Committee, which is expected to bundle them together prior to a floor vote.

The Judiciary panel’s 116-page bill vastly overhauls U.S. asylum laws. It would, for example, create a fee structure for asylum seekers that would set a minimum cost for an application at no less than $1,000. Applications now are free.

“These and other resources and fees in this reconciliation bill will ensure the Trump administration has the adequate resources to enforce the immigration laws in a fiscally responsible way,” GOP Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio said.

The bill would establish a $1,000 fee for immigrants granted temporary protected status, which would mean they would have work authorizations and deportation protections.

It would also require sponsors to pay $3,500 to take in an unaccompanied minor who crosses the border without a legal status. Typically, unaccompanied minors are released to sponsors who are family members living in the United States.

The bill would also require immigrants without permanent legal status to pay a $550 fee for work permits every six months.

The top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, slammed the bill as targeting immigrants.

“Every day, this administration uses immigration enforcement as a template to erode constitutional rights and liberties,” he said.

A final committee vote was expected Wednesday night.

‘A giveaway to ICE’

The Judiciary bill directs half of the fees collected from asylum seekers to go toward the agency that handles U.S. immigration courts, but Democrats criticized the provisions as creating a barrier for asylum seekers.

“The so-called immigration fees that are in this bill are really fines and nothing but a cruel attempt to make immigrating to this country impossible,” Washington Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal said.

Democratic Rep. Chuy Garcia of Illinois, said the bill would not only “gut asylum” but would significantly increase funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention.

Funding for ICE detention this fiscal year is roughly $3.4 billion, but the Judiciary bill would sharply increase that to $45 billion.

Garcia called the increase a “a giveaway to ICE, a rogue agency that’s terrorizing communities and clamping (down) on civil liberties and the Constitution itself, because they’ve been directed to do so by this president.”

House Republicans have also included language that would move the Federal Trade Commission into the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, a move Democrats argued would kneecap the FTC’s regulatory authority.

“You’re trying to shutter the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, making it harder for us to enforce our antitrust laws,” Democratic Rep. Becca Balint of Vermont said.

Consumer protections to take a hit

Lawmakers on the House Committee on Financial Services met in a lengthy, and at times tense, session to finalize legislation to cut “no less than” $1 billion from government programs and services under the panel’s jurisdiction, according to the budget resolution Congress approved in April.

Funds in the crosshairs include those previously authorized for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and grants provided under the Biden administration-era Inflation Reduction Act for homeowners to improve energy efficiency.

Chair French Hill said the committee “will do its part to reduce the deficit and decrease direct spending, so that Congress can enact pro-growth tax policies.”

“And remember, today, we are here with one purpose, to do our part to put our nation back on a responsible fiscal trajectory,” the Arkansas Republican said.

Democrats introduced dozens of amendments during the hourslong session to block cuts to community block grants and programs protecting consumers, including veterans, from illegal credit and lending practices.

Ranking member Maxine Waters said committee Republicans’ plans to cut the CFPB by 70% “is ridiculous.”

“The bureau has saved American consumers $21 billion by returning to them funds that big banks and predatory lenders swindled out of them,” said Waters, a California Democrat.

Congress created the CFPB in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, when subprime mortgage lending cascaded into bank failures and home and job losses.

Republicans opposed amendment after amendment.

Rep. María Salazar of Florida tossed a copy of one of Waters’ lengthy amendments straight into a trash can after a staffer handed it to her. Michigan’s Rep. Bill Huizenga held up proceedings for several minutes when he accused Waters of breaking the rules by not distributing enough paper copies of her amendment.

“We cannot allow our government to continue spending money like there are no consequences,” GOP Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska said in response to several Democratic amendments.

A final committee vote was expected Wednesday night.

Transportation section adds fees on electric vehicles

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee also approved, by a party line 36-30 vote, reconciliation instructions that would cut $10 billion from the federal deficit while boosting spending for the U.S. Coast Guard and the air traffic control system.

Like other portions of the larger reconciliation package, the transportation committee’s instructions would add funding for national security and border enforcement, through the Coast Guard funding, while cutting money from programs favored by Democrats, including climate programs and any spending that could be construed as race-conscious.

The bill would provide $21.2 billion for the Coast Guard and $12.5 billion for air traffic control systems. It would raise money through a $250 annual fee on electric vehicles and a $100 annual fee on hybrids, while also cutting $4.6 billion from climate programs created in Democrats’ 2022 reconciliation package.

Chairman Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican, said the measure included priorities for members of both parties, as well as business and labor interests.

“We all want to invest in our Coast Guard,” he said. “We all want to rebuild our air traffic control system and finally address the broken Highway Trust Fund. We have held countless hearings on all of these topics, both recently and, frankly, for years. And now members have the opportunity to actually act.”

Democrats on the panel complained that the reconciliation package was a partisan exercise and a departure from the panel’s normally congenial approach to business. They introduced dozens of amendments over the daylong committee meeting seeking to add funding for various programs. None were adopted.

“The larger Republican reconciliation package will add more than $15 trillion in new debt, gives away $7 trillion in deficit-financed tax cuts to the wealthy and slashes access to health care and food assistance for families,” ranking Democrat Rick Larsen of Washington said. “Given that, I think we’re going to have to vote no on the bill before us.”

The vehicle fees, which would be deposited into the Highway Trust Fund that sends highway and transit money to states, created a partisan divide Wednesday.

Federal gas taxes provide the lion’s share of deposits to the fund and Republicans argued that, because drivers of electric vehicles pay no gas taxes and hybrid drivers pay less than those who drive gas-powered cars, the provision would make the contributions fairer.

Republicans scrapped a proposed $20 annual fee on gas-powered cars, which Graves said was meant to “start a conversation” on the solvency of the Highway Trust Fund. But the provision “became a political distraction that no longer centered around seriously addressing the problem,” he said.

Pennsylvania Democrat Chris Deluzio criticized the vehicle fees, noting Republicans were pursuing additional revenue opportunities to offset losses from tax cuts.

“I don’t know when you guys became the tax-and-spend liberals,” Deluzio told his Republican colleagues. “But I guess the taxing of car owners so you can pay for tax giveaways to billionaires is your new strategy. Good luck with that.”

Federal employee benefits targeted

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform voted nearly along party lines, 22-21, to send its portion of the reconciliation package to the Budget Committee, with Ohio Republican Rep. Mike Turner joining Democrats in opposition.

Turner was the first GOP lawmaker to cast a committee vote against reconciliation instructions this year.

The legislation hits at federal employee benefits and comes as the Trump administration continues to overhaul the federal workforce.

Part of the bill would raise federal employees’ required retirement contribution to a rate of 4.4% of their salary and eliminate an additional retirement annuity payment for federal employees who retire before the age of 62, while cutting more than $50 billion from the federal deficit.

At his committee’s markup, Chairman James Comer said the legislation “advances important budgetary reforms that will save taxpayers money.”

The Kentucky Republican acknowledged that the chief investigative committee in the U.S. House has “very limited jurisdiction to help reduce the federal budget deficit,” noting that the panel is “empowered to pursue civil service reforms, including federal employee benefits and reining in the influence of partisan and unaccountable government employee unions.”

But Democrats on the panel blasted the committee’s portion of the reconciliation package, saying the bill chips away at federal employees’ protections.

Rep. Stephen Lynch, the top Democrat on the panel, said congressional Republicans instructed the panel to target the federal workforce with roughly $50 billion in funding cuts “regardless of the impact on hard-working, loyal federal employees and their critical services that they provide to the American people.”

The Massachusetts Democrat said the bill “threatens to further undermine the federal workforce by reducing the take-home pay, the benefits and workforce protections of 2.4 million federal employees, most of whom are middle-class Americans and a third of whom are military veterans.”

Ohio’s Turner, who voted against the legislation because of the provision reducing pension benefits, said he supported the overall reconciliation package and hoped the pension measure would be stripped before a floor vote.

Turner said “making changes to pension retirement benefits in the middle of someone’s employment is wrong.” 

Demonstrators holds signs as a motorist passes with flags supporting President Donald Trump during an April 5, 2025, protest in Columbia, South Carolina. Protestors organized nationwide demonstrations against Trump administration policies and Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Tuesday marked the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s second term, a period filled almost daily with executive orders seeking to expand presidential power, court challenges to block those orders and economic anxiety that undermines his promised prosperity.

Trump has taken decisive actions that have polarized the electorate. He’s used obscure authorities to increase deportations, upended longstanding trade policy with record-high tariffs, made drastic cuts to the federal workforce and ordered the closure of the Education Department.

Those moves have garnered mixed results and led to legal challenges.

The approach to immigration enforcement has yielded lower numbers of unauthorized border crossings compared to last year. But the immigration crackdown has barreled the country toward a constitutional crisis through various clashes with the judiciary branch.

Those nearing retirement have watched their savings shrink as Trump’s blunt application of tariffs, which he promises will replace income taxes, roils markets. Administration officials have promised the short-term tariff pain will benefit the country in the long term.

And White House advisor and top campaign donor Elon Musk’s efforts at government efficiency have resulted in eliminations of wide swaths of government jobs. That includes about half of the Education Department workforce so far, though Trump has signed an executive order to eliminate the department.

The controversial moves appear unpopular, as Americans delivered record low approval ratings for a president so early in his term. Polls spearheaded by Fox News, NPR, Gallup and numerous others yield overall disapproval of Trump’s job performance.

Deportation push tests legal boundaries

Immigration was Trump’s signature issue on the campaign trail and his first 100 days were marked by a crackdown carried out against people with a range of immigration statuses and at least three U.S. citizen children. The aggressive push has led to clashes with the judiciary branch.

A burst of Inauguration Day executive orders Trump signed upon his return to office included some hardline immigration policies he’d promised.

On day one, he declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border that enabled his deployment two days later of 1,500 troops to help border enforcement.

He sought to end birthright citizenship and ended several forms of legal immigration, including humanitarian parole for people from certain countries, and suspended refugee resettlement services.

District courts blocked the birthright citizenship and refugee resettlement measures and an appeals court has upheld those interpretations. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in May on birthright citizenship.

Trump’s record on immigration is a clear example of his desire to expand executive power, said Ahilan Arulanantham, a co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law.

“It’s an attempt to expand the government’s powers far beyond anything that we have seen before in this realm,” he said.

Unprecedented authorities

The administration has taken a series of actions considered nearly unprecedented to conduct mass deportations.

On March 8, immigration authorities detained Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident who helped organize Palestinian protests at Columbia University.

Authorities never accused Khalil of committing a crime, but sought to revoke his green card under a Cold War-era provision that allows the secretary of State to remove lawful permanent residents if the secretary deems their presence has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Similar arrests followed at universities across the country.

In mid-March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport two planeloads of people his administration said belonged to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

It was only the fourth time the law was invoked and the first outside of wartime. The first flights left U.S. soil en route to a mega-prison in El Salvador on Saturday, March 15, amid a hearing on the legality of using the law in peacetime.

When a federal judge entered an oral order to turn the flights around, the administration refused, arguing the oral order was not valid. The administration also ignored a subsequent written order demanding the return of the flights, later arguing the flights were outside U.S. airspace at that time and impossible to order returned.

Administration officials mocked the court order on social media.

The Supreme Court on April 7 allowed for the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport suspected gang members of Tren de Aragua. However, the justices unanimously agreed that those removed under the wartime law needed to have due process and have a hearing to challenge their removal.

Abrego Garcia

A third March 15 flight carried a man who was mistakenly deported in an episode that has gained a national spotlight.

Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a native of El Salvador, had a final order of removal, but was granted deportation protections by an immigration judge because of the threat he would be harmed by gangs if he were returned to his home country. Despite the protective order, he was deported to the notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT prison.

After his family sued over his deportation, the administration admitted he’d been removed through an “administrative error,” but stood by its decision.

The administration argued it had no power to compel the El Salvador government to release Abrego Garcia, despite a possibly illegal $6 million agreement with the country to detain the roughly 300 men.

A Maryland federal court and an appeals court ruled the administration must repatriate Abrego Garcia, whose wife and 5-year-old son are U.S. citizens, and the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Trump administration must “facilitate” his return, but stopped short of requiring it.

The administration has done little to indicate it is complying with that order, earning a rebuke from a conservative judge on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“The Supreme Court’s decision does not … allow the government to do essentially nothing,” Circuit Court Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote.  “‘Facilitate’ is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear.”

The administration’s relationship with the courts — delaying compliance with orders and showing a clear distaste for doing so — has led to the brink of a constitutional crisis, Arulanantham said.

“They’re playing footsy with disregarding court orders,” he said. “On the one hand, they’re not just complying. If they were complying, Abrego Garcia would be here now.”

But the administration has also not flagrantly refused to comply, Arulanantham added. “They’re sort of testing the bounds.”

Tariffs prompted market drop

Trump’s first 100 days spiraled into economic uncertainty as he ramped up tariffs on allies and trading partners. In early April, the president declared foreign trade a national emergency and shocked economies around the world with costly import taxes.

Following a week of market upheaval, Trump paused for 90 days what he had billed as “reciprocal” tariffs and left a universal 10% levy on nearly all countries, except China, which received a bruising 125%.

Some products, including pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, lumber and copper, remain exempt for now, though the administration is eyeing the possibilities of tariffs on those goods.

The administration now contends it will strike trade deals with some 90 foreign governments over the pause, set to expire in July.

Meanwhile, an all-out trade war rages with China after Trump hiked tariffs on the world’s no. 2 economy even further to 145%. China responded with 125% tariffs on U.S. goods. The two economies share a massive trading relationship, both in the top three for each other’s imports and exports.

‘Chaotic’ strategy

Inu Manak, fellow for trade policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, summed up Trump’s first 100 days as “chaotic.”

“We haven’t seen anything like this in our U.S. history in terms of how trade policy is being handled. It’s very ad hoc,” Manak said.

“U.S. businesses can’t figure out what to do. And even for the large companies, it’s hard for them to know some of the long-term trajectories of where this was going to go,” Manak said.

Shortly after his second term began, Trump declared a national emergency over illicit fentanyl entering the U.S. — an unprecedented move to trigger import taxes — and began escalating tariffs on Chinese goods, as well as up to 25% on certain products crossing the borders from Canada and Mexico.

Trump hiked existing tariffs on steel and aluminum in mid-March under trade provisions meant to protect domestic production and national security, followed by 25% levies on foreign cars and auto parts — though Trump signed two executive orders Tuesday to grant some tariff relief to carmakers. 

The import taxes have alarmed investors, small businesses and American consumers following the 2024 presidential campaign when Trump made lowering prices a major tenet of his platform.

The latest University of Michigan survey of consumers — a staple indicator for economists — reported consumer outlook on personal finances and business conditions took a nosedive in April. Expectations dropped 32% since January, the largest three-month percentage decline since the 1990 recession, according to the analysis. 

Manak said Trump’s tariffs are “really at odds with” with the administration’s objectives of helping U.S. manufacturers and cutting costs for Americans.

“The U.S. now has the highest tariff rates in the world,” she said. “That’s going to hurt both consuming industries that import products to make things, and then consumers as well. We’re starting to see notifications coming out on layoffs, and some small businesses considering closing up shop already. And the tariffs haven’t been in place for that long.”

Rhett Buttle, of Small Business for America’s Future, said the policies are “causing real damage in terms of not just planning, but in terms of day-to-day operations.”

Buttle, a senior advisor for the advocacy group that claims 85,000 small business members, said even if Trump begins to strike deals with other countries, entrepreneurs will likely be on edge for months to come.

“It’s that uncertainty that makes business owners not want to hire or not want to grow,” Buttle said. “So it’s like, ‘Okay, we got through this mess, but why would I hire a person if I don’t know if I’m gonna wake up in two weeks and there’s gonna be another announcement?’”

Support dropping

Trillions were erased from the U.S. stock market after “Liberation Day” — the White House’s term for the start of its global tariff policy. The S&P 500 index, which tracks the performance of the 500 largest U.S. companies, is overall down 8.5% since Trump’s inauguration, according to The Wall Street Journal’s analysis.

Numerous recent polls showed flagging support for Trump’s economic policies.

In a poll released Monday, Gallup found 89% of Americans believe tariffs will result in increasing prices. And a majority of Americans are concerned about an economic recession and increasing costs of groceries and other goods, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey between April 17 and April 22.

The Pew Research Center similarly found a growing gloomy outlook among U.S. adults from April 7 to April 13. Results showed a majority of Americans — 59% across race, age and income levels — disapproved of Trump’s approach to tariffs. But when broken down by party, the survey showed a majority of Democrats disapprove while the majority of Republicans approve of the tariff policy.

American households are poised to lose up to $2,600 annually if tariffs remain in place and U.S. fiscal policy doesn’t change, according to the Yale Budget Lab. Analyses show low-income households will be disproportionately affected.

“If these tariffs stay in place, some folks are going to benefit, but a lot of people are going to get hurt,” Manak said.

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

Government spending

Trump began his second term with a flurry of action on government spending, challenging the balance of power between the president and Congress.

Efforts to unilaterally cancel funding already approved by lawmakers, who hold the authority to spend federal dollars under the Constitution, led to confusion and frustration from both Democrats and Republicans, especially after the U.S. DOGE Service froze allocations on programs that have long elicited bipartisan support.

Many of the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back appropriations are subject to injunctions from federal courts, blocking the cuts from moving forward while the lawsuits advance through the judicial system.

Kevin Kosar, senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said Trump’s actions on spending so far have sought to expand the bounds of presidential authority.

“We’ve never seen a president in modern times who’s been this aggressive in trying to seize control of the power of the purse,” he said. “To just say, ‘I’m not going to fund this agency, like USAID, despite money being appropriated for it. And we’re going to walk over and take their plaque off their wall and lock their doors.’ This is new.”

Many of Trump’s actions so far indicate to Kosar that the administration expects a change to the balance of power following next year’s midterm elections, when the president’s party historically loses control of at least one chamber of Congress.

“It feels to me that the first 100 days are in large part predicated on an assumption that they may only have two years of unified Republican control of the House of Representatives, the Senate and the presidency,” he said. “We know the margins in the House are quite narrow, and the heavy use of executive actions and the simple defunding of various government contracts and agencies all through executive action, just tell me that the administration feels like they have to get everything done as fast as they possibly can, because the time is short.”

Kosar said he’s watching to see if Trump works with Republicans in Congress, while they still have unified control, to codify his executive orders into law — something he didn’t do with many of the unilateral actions he took during his first term.

“He just did executive actions, which, of course, (President Joe) Biden just undid,” he said. “And I’m just wondering: Are we going to see this movie all over again? Or is he going to actually partner with Congress on these various policy matters and pass statutes so that they stick?”

Zachary Peskowitz, associate professor of political science at Emory University, said Trump has been much more “assertive” during the last 100 days than during the first few months of 2017.

DOGE ‘winding down’

U.S. DOGE Service and Musk hit the ground running, though their actions have fallen short of the goals he set, and appear to be sunsetting with the billionaire turning his attention back toward his businesses.

“I think the big bang is winding down. They did a lot of things early on. It’s not clear how many of them are going to stick, what the consequences are,” Peskowitz said. “And I think, big picture, in terms of federal spending, the amounts of money that may have been saved or not are pretty small.”

Democrats in Congress released a tracker Tuesday listing which accounts the Trump administration has frozen or canceled to the tune of more than $430 billion.

But Trump has just gotten started.

The administration plans to submit its first budget request to Congress in the coming days, a step that’s typically taken in early February, though it happens a couple months behind schedule during a president’s first year.

That massive tax-and-spending proposal will begin the classic tug-of-war between Congress, which will draft the dozen annual appropriations bills, and Trump, who has shown a willingness to act unilaterally when he doesn’t get his way.

Trump and lawmakers must agree to some sort of government funding bill before the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1, otherwise a partial government shutdown would begin. And unlike the reconciliation package that Republicans can enact all on their own, funding bills require some Democratic support to move past the Senate’s 60-vote cloture threshold.

Eliminating the Education Department

Researchers and advocates predicted even more changes to the federal role in education, underscoring anti-diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and a continued ideological battle with higher education that have marked Trump’s approach to education policy in his first 100 days.

In a torrent of education-related decisions, Trump and his administration have tried to dismantle the Education Department via an executive order, slashed more than 1,300 employees at the department, threatened to revoke funds for schools that use DEI practices and cracked down on “woke” higher education.

The Trump administration has taken drastic steps to revoke federal funding for a number of elite universities in an attempt to make the institutions align more with them ideologically.

Rachel Perera, a governance studies fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, cited “brazen lawlessness” when reflecting on Trump’s approach to higher education in his second term.

“The ways that they’re trying to withhold funding from universities are very clearly in violation of federal law and the processes mandated by civil rights law in terms of ensuring that institutions are offered due process in assessing whether violations have taken place,” Perera said. “There’s not even a pretense of pretending to investigate some of these institutions before taking really dramatic action.”

Whether the administration’s approach continues or not depends on court action, she added.

“I think what the next three years might look like is really going to depend on how some of these lawsuits play out,” Perera said, referencing some of the major legal battles involving the Trump administration. 

Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at the nonprofit policy and advocacy group EdTrust, said “much of what this administration has done has been overreach.” He pointed to the Education Department’s letter threatening to yank federal funds for schools that use race-conscious practices across aspects of student life as one example.

Del Pilar, who was previously deputy secretary of postsecondary and higher education for the state of Pennsylvania, said the administration is “going to take any opportunity to grab at power that advances their ideology.”

Meanwhile, Perera said the consequences of the department implementing a reduction in force plan in March “have yet to be felt.”

“I think we will start to see really the material consequences of the reduced staffing capacity in the coming years, in terms of how programs are administered, in terms of how funding is moving out the building, in terms of auditing, making sure funding is going to the right groups of students that Congress intended for the money to go to, whether big data collection efforts that are congressionally mandated are being carried out in timely and effective ways,” she said.

“All of that remains to be seen.”

Ariana Figueroa contributed to this report. 

A U.S. Border Patrol official vehicle  is shown parked near the border. (Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Judiciary Republicans Wednesday worked in committee on a portion of a major legislative package that would help fund President Donald Trump’s plans to conduct mass deportations of people living in the United States without permanent legal status.

The Judiciary panel’s $81 billion share of the “one, big beautiful” bill the president has requested of Congress would provide $45 billion for immigration detention centers, $8 billion to hire thousands of immigration enforcement officers and more than $14 billion for deportations, among other things.

The border security and immigration funds are part of a massive package that wraps together White House priorities including tax cuts and defense spending boosts. Republicans are pushing the deal through using a special procedure known as reconciliation that will allow the Senate GOP to skirt its usual 60-vote threshold when that chamber acts.

House Republicans returning from a two-week recess kicked off their work on reconciliation Tuesday, approving three of 11 bills out of committees on Armed Services, Education and Workforce and Homeland Security.

On Wednesday, lawmakers continued work on the various sections of the reconciliation bill with markups — which means a bill is debated and potentially amended or rewritten — in the Financial Services, Judiciary, Transportation and Infrastructure and Oversight and Government Reform committees.

House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana said Republicans will spend the rest of this week and next debating the 11 separate bills in committees. Committees when they finish their measures will send them to the House Budget Committee, which is expected to bundle them together prior to a floor vote.

The Judiciary panel’s 116-page bill vastly overhauls U.S. asylum laws. It would, for example, create a fee structure for asylum seekers that would set a minimum cost for an application at no less than $1,000. Applications now are free.

“These and other resources and fees in this reconciliation bill will ensure the Trump administration has the adequate resources to enforce the immigration laws in a fiscally responsible way,” GOP Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio said.

The bill would establish a $1,000 fee for immigrants granted temporary protected status, which would mean they would have work authorizations and deportation protections.

It would also require sponsors to pay $3,500 to take in an unaccompanied minor who crosses the border without a legal status. Typically, unaccompanied minors are released to sponsors who are family members living in the United States.

The bill would also require immigrants without permanent legal status to pay a $550 fee for work permits every six months.

The top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, slammed the bill as targeting immigrants.

“Every day, this administration uses immigration enforcement as a template to erode constitutional rights and liberties,” he said.

A final committee vote was expected Wednesday night.

‘A giveaway to ICE’

The Judiciary bill directs half of the fees collected from asylum seekers to go toward the agency that handles U.S. immigration courts, but Democrats criticized the provisions as creating a barrier for asylum seekers.

“The so-called immigration fees that are in this bill are really fines and nothing but a cruel attempt to make immigrating to this country impossible,” Washington Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal said.

Democratic Rep. Chuy Garcia of Illinois, said the bill would not only “gut asylum” but would significantly increase funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention.

Funding for ICE detention this fiscal year is roughly $3.4 billion, but the Judiciary bill would sharply increase that to $45 billion.

Garcia called the increase a “a giveaway to ICE, a rogue agency that’s terrorizing communities and clamping (down) on civil liberties and the Constitution itself, because they’ve been directed to do so by this president.”

House Republicans have also included language that would move the Federal Trade Commission into the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, a move Democrats argued would kneecap the FTC’s regulatory authority.

“You’re trying to shutter the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, making it harder for us to enforce our antitrust laws,” Democratic Rep. Becca Balint of Vermont said.

Consumer protections to take a hit

Lawmakers on the House Committee on Financial Services met in a lengthy, and at times tense, session to finalize legislation to cut “no less than” $1 billion from government programs and services under the panel’s jurisdiction, according to the budget resolution Congress approved in April.

Funds in the crosshairs include those previously authorized for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and grants provided under the Biden administration-era Inflation Reduction Act for homeowners to improve energy efficiency.

Chair French Hill said the committee “will do its part to reduce the deficit and decrease direct spending, so that Congress can enact pro-growth tax policies.”

“And remember, today, we are here with one purpose, to do our part to put our nation back on a responsible fiscal trajectory,” the Arkansas Republican said.

Democrats introduced dozens of amendments during the hourslong session to block cuts to community block grants and programs protecting consumers, including veterans, from illegal credit and lending practices.

Ranking member Maxine Waters said committee Republicans’ plans to cut the CFPB by 70% “is ridiculous.”

“The bureau has saved American consumers $21 billion by returning to them funds that big banks and predatory lenders swindled out of them,” said Waters, a California Democrat.

Congress created the CFPB in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, when subprime mortgage lending cascaded into bank failures and home and job losses.

Republicans opposed amendment after amendment.

Rep. María Salazar of Florida tossed a copy of one of Waters’ lengthy amendments straight into a trash can after a staffer handed it to her. Michigan’s Rep. Bill Huizenga held up proceedings for several minutes when he accused Waters of breaking the rules by not distributing enough paper copies of her amendment.

“We cannot allow our government to continue spending money like there are no consequences,” GOP Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska said in response to several Democratic amendments.

A final committee vote was expected Wednesday night.

Transportation section adds fees on electric vehicles

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee also approved, by a party line 36-30 vote, reconciliation instructions that would cut $10 billion from the federal deficit while boosting spending for the U.S. Coast Guard and the air traffic control system.

Like other portions of the larger reconciliation package, the transportation committee’s instructions would add funding for national security and border enforcement, through the Coast Guard funding, while cutting money from programs favored by Democrats, including climate programs and any spending that could be construed as race-conscious.

The bill would provide $21.2 billion for the Coast Guard and $12.5 billion for air traffic control systems. It would raise money through a $250 annual fee on electric vehicles and a $100 annual fee on hybrids, while also cutting $4.6 billion from climate programs created in Democrats’ 2022 reconciliation package.

Chairman Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican, said the measure included priorities for members of both parties, as well as business and labor interests.

“We all want to invest in our Coast Guard,” he said. “We all want to rebuild our air traffic control system and finally address the broken Highway Trust Fund. We have held countless hearings on all of these topics, both recently and, frankly, for years. And now members have the opportunity to actually act.”

Democrats on the panel complained that the reconciliation package was a partisan exercise and a departure from the panel’s normally congenial approach to business. They introduced dozens of amendments over the daylong committee meeting seeking to add funding for various programs. None were adopted.

“The larger Republican reconciliation package will add more than $15 trillion in new debt, gives away $7 trillion in deficit-financed tax cuts to the wealthy and slashes access to health care and food assistance for families,” ranking Democrat Rick Larsen of Washington said. “Given that, I think we’re going to have to vote no on the bill before us.”

The vehicle fees, which would be deposited into the Highway Trust Fund that sends highway and transit money to states, created a partisan divide Wednesday.

Federal gas taxes provide the lion’s share of deposits to the fund and Republicans argued that, because drivers of electric vehicles pay no gas taxes and hybrid drivers pay less than those who drive gas-powered cars, the provision would make the contributions fairer.

Republicans scrapped a proposed $20 annual fee on gas-powered cars, which Graves said was meant to “start a conversation” on the solvency of the Highway Trust Fund. But the provision “became a political distraction that no longer centered around seriously addressing the problem,” he said.

Pennsylvania Democrat Chris Deluzio criticized the vehicle fees, noting Republicans were pursuing additional revenue opportunities to offset losses from tax cuts.

“I don’t know when you guys became the tax-and-spend liberals,” Deluzio told his Republican colleagues. “But I guess the taxing of car owners so you can pay for tax giveaways to billionaires is your new strategy. Good luck with that.”

Federal employee benefits targeted

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform voted nearly along party lines, 22-21, to send its portion of the reconciliation package to the Budget Committee, with Ohio Republican Rep. Mike Turner joining Democrats in opposition.

Turner was the first GOP lawmaker to cast a committee vote against reconciliation instructions this year.

The legislation hits at federal employee benefits and comes as the Trump administration continues to overhaul the federal workforce.

Part of the bill would raise federal employees’ required retirement contribution to a rate of 4.4% of their salary and eliminate an additional retirement annuity payment for federal employees who retire before the age of 62, while cutting more than $50 billion from the federal deficit.

At his committee’s markup, Chairman James Comer said the legislation “advances important budgetary reforms that will save taxpayers money.”

The Kentucky Republican acknowledged that the chief investigative committee in the U.S. House has “very limited jurisdiction to help reduce the federal budget deficit,” noting that the panel is “empowered to pursue civil service reforms, including federal employee benefits and reining in the influence of partisan and unaccountable government employee unions.”

But Democrats on the panel blasted the committee’s portion of the reconciliation package, saying the bill chips away at federal employees’ protections.

Rep. Stephen Lynch, the top Democrat on the panel, said congressional Republicans instructed the panel to target the federal workforce with roughly $50 billion in funding cuts “regardless of the impact on hard-working, loyal federal employees and their critical services that they provide to the American people.”

The Massachusetts Democrat said the bill “threatens to further undermine the federal workforce by reducing the take-home pay, the benefits and workforce protections of 2.4 million federal employees, most of whom are middle-class Americans and a third of whom are military veterans.”

Ohio’s Turner, who voted against the legislation because of the provision reducing pension benefits, said he supported the overall reconciliation package and hoped the pension measure would be stripped before a floor vote.

Turner said “making changes to pension retirement benefits in the middle of someone’s employment is wrong.” 

Demonstrators holds signs as a motorist passes with flags supporting President Donald Trump during an April 5, 2025, protest in Columbia, South Carolina. Protestors organized nationwide demonstrations against Trump administration policies and Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Tuesday marked the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s second term, a period filled almost daily with executive orders seeking to expand presidential power, court challenges to block those orders and economic anxiety that undermines his promised prosperity.

Trump has taken decisive actions that have polarized the electorate. He’s used obscure authorities to increase deportations, upended longstanding trade policy with record-high tariffs, made drastic cuts to the federal workforce and ordered the closure of the Education Department.

Those moves have garnered mixed results and led to legal challenges.

The approach to immigration enforcement has yielded lower numbers of unauthorized border crossings compared to last year. But the immigration crackdown has barreled the country toward a constitutional crisis through various clashes with the judiciary branch.

Those nearing retirement have watched their savings shrink as Trump’s blunt application of tariffs, which he promises will replace income taxes, roils markets. Administration officials have promised the short-term tariff pain will benefit the country in the long term.

And White House advisor and top campaign donor Elon Musk’s efforts at government efficiency have resulted in eliminations of wide swaths of government jobs. That includes about half of the Education Department workforce so far, though Trump has signed an executive order to eliminate the department.

The controversial moves appear unpopular, as Americans delivered record low approval ratings for a president so early in his term. Polls spearheaded by Fox News, NPR, Gallup and numerous others yield overall disapproval of Trump’s job performance.

Deportation push tests legal boundaries

Immigration was Trump’s signature issue on the campaign trail and his first 100 days were marked by a crackdown carried out against people with a range of immigration statuses and at least three U.S. citizen children. The aggressive push has led to clashes with the judiciary branch.

A burst of Inauguration Day executive orders Trump signed upon his return to office included some hardline immigration policies he’d promised.

On day one, he declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border that enabled his deployment two days later of 1,500 troops to help border enforcement.

He sought to end birthright citizenship and ended several forms of legal immigration, including humanitarian parole for people from certain countries, and suspended refugee resettlement services.

District courts blocked the birthright citizenship and refugee resettlement measures and an appeals court has upheld those interpretations. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in May on birthright citizenship.

Trump’s record on immigration is a clear example of his desire to expand executive power, said Ahilan Arulanantham, a co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law.

“It’s an attempt to expand the government’s powers far beyond anything that we have seen before in this realm,” he said.

Unprecedented authorities

The administration has taken a series of actions considered nearly unprecedented to conduct mass deportations.

On March 8, immigration authorities detained Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident who helped organize Palestinian protests at Columbia University.

Authorities never accused Khalil of committing a crime, but sought to revoke his green card under a Cold War-era provision that allows the secretary of State to remove lawful permanent residents if the secretary deems their presence has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Similar arrests followed at universities across the country.

In mid-March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport two planeloads of people his administration said belonged to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

It was only the fourth time the law was invoked and the first outside of wartime. The first flights left U.S. soil en route to a mega-prison in El Salvador on Saturday, March 15, amid a hearing on the legality of using the law in peacetime.

When a federal judge entered an oral order to turn the flights around, the administration refused, arguing the oral order was not valid. The administration also ignored a subsequent written order demanding the return of the flights, later arguing the flights were outside U.S. airspace at that time and impossible to order returned.

Administration officials mocked the court order on social media.

The Supreme Court on April 7 allowed for the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport suspected gang members of Tren de Aragua. However, the justices unanimously agreed that those removed under the wartime law needed to have due process and have a hearing to challenge their removal.

Abrego Garcia

A third March 15 flight carried a man who was mistakenly deported in an episode that has gained a national spotlight.

Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a native of El Salvador, had a final order of removal, but was granted deportation protections by an immigration judge because of the threat he would be harmed by gangs if he were returned to his home country. Despite the protective order, he was deported to the notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT prison.

After his family sued over his deportation, the administration admitted he’d been removed through an “administrative error,” but stood by its decision.

The administration argued it had no power to compel the El Salvador government to release Abrego Garcia, despite a possibly illegal $6 million agreement with the country to detain the roughly 300 men.

A Maryland federal court and an appeals court ruled the administration must repatriate Abrego Garcia, whose wife and 5-year-old son are U.S. citizens, and the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Trump administration must “facilitate” his return, but stopped short of requiring it.

The administration has done little to indicate it is complying with that order, earning a rebuke from a conservative judge on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“The Supreme Court’s decision does not … allow the government to do essentially nothing,” Circuit Court Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote.  “‘Facilitate’ is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear.”

The administration’s relationship with the courts — delaying compliance with orders and showing a clear distaste for doing so — has led to the brink of a constitutional crisis, Arulanantham said.

“They’re playing footsy with disregarding court orders,” he said. “On the one hand, they’re not just complying. If they were complying, Abrego Garcia would be here now.”

But the administration has also not flagrantly refused to comply, Arulanantham added. “They’re sort of testing the bounds.”

Tariffs prompted market drop

Trump’s first 100 days spiraled into economic uncertainty as he ramped up tariffs on allies and trading partners. In early April, the president declared foreign trade a national emergency and shocked economies around the world with costly import taxes.

Following a week of market upheaval, Trump paused for 90 days what he had billed as “reciprocal” tariffs and left a universal 10% levy on nearly all countries, except China, which received a bruising 125%.

Some products, including pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, lumber and copper, remain exempt for now, though the administration is eyeing the possibilities of tariffs on those goods.

The administration now contends it will strike trade deals with some 90 foreign governments over the pause, set to expire in July.

Meanwhile, an all-out trade war rages with China after Trump hiked tariffs on the world’s no. 2 economy even further to 145%. China responded with 125% tariffs on U.S. goods. The two economies share a massive trading relationship, both in the top three for each other’s imports and exports.

‘Chaotic’ strategy

Inu Manak, fellow for trade policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, summed up Trump’s first 100 days as “chaotic.”

“We haven’t seen anything like this in our U.S. history in terms of how trade policy is being handled. It’s very ad hoc,” Manak said.

“U.S. businesses can’t figure out what to do. And even for the large companies, it’s hard for them to know some of the long-term trajectories of where this was going to go,” Manak said.

Shortly after his second term began, Trump declared a national emergency over illicit fentanyl entering the U.S. — an unprecedented move to trigger import taxes — and began escalating tariffs on Chinese goods, as well as up to 25% on certain products crossing the borders from Canada and Mexico.

Trump hiked existing tariffs on steel and aluminum in mid-March under trade provisions meant to protect domestic production and national security, followed by 25% levies on foreign cars and auto parts — though Trump signed two executive orders Tuesday to grant some tariff relief to carmakers. 

The import taxes have alarmed investors, small businesses and American consumers following the 2024 presidential campaign when Trump made lowering prices a major tenet of his platform.

The latest University of Michigan survey of consumers — a staple indicator for economists — reported consumer outlook on personal finances and business conditions took a nosedive in April. Expectations dropped 32% since January, the largest three-month percentage decline since the 1990 recession, according to the analysis. 

Manak said Trump’s tariffs are “really at odds with” with the administration’s objectives of helping U.S. manufacturers and cutting costs for Americans.

“The U.S. now has the highest tariff rates in the world,” she said. “That’s going to hurt both consuming industries that import products to make things, and then consumers as well. We’re starting to see notifications coming out on layoffs, and some small businesses considering closing up shop already. And the tariffs haven’t been in place for that long.”

Rhett Buttle, of Small Business for America’s Future, said the policies are “causing real damage in terms of not just planning, but in terms of day-to-day operations.”

Buttle, a senior advisor for the advocacy group that claims 85,000 small business members, said even if Trump begins to strike deals with other countries, entrepreneurs will likely be on edge for months to come.

“It’s that uncertainty that makes business owners not want to hire or not want to grow,” Buttle said. “So it’s like, ‘Okay, we got through this mess, but why would I hire a person if I don’t know if I’m gonna wake up in two weeks and there’s gonna be another announcement?’”

Support dropping

Trillions were erased from the U.S. stock market after “Liberation Day” — the White House’s term for the start of its global tariff policy. The S&P 500 index, which tracks the performance of the 500 largest U.S. companies, is overall down 8.5% since Trump’s inauguration, according to The Wall Street Journal’s analysis.

Numerous recent polls showed flagging support for Trump’s economic policies.

In a poll released Monday, Gallup found 89% of Americans believe tariffs will result in increasing prices. And a majority of Americans are concerned about an economic recession and increasing costs of groceries and other goods, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey between April 17 and April 22.

The Pew Research Center similarly found a growing gloomy outlook among U.S. adults from April 7 to April 13. Results showed a majority of Americans — 59% across race, age and income levels — disapproved of Trump’s approach to tariffs. But when broken down by party, the survey showed a majority of Democrats disapprove while the majority of Republicans approve of the tariff policy.

American households are poised to lose up to $2,600 annually if tariffs remain in place and U.S. fiscal policy doesn’t change, according to the Yale Budget Lab. Analyses show low-income households will be disproportionately affected.

“If these tariffs stay in place, some folks are going to benefit, but a lot of people are going to get hurt,” Manak said.

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

Government spending

Trump began his second term with a flurry of action on government spending, challenging the balance of power between the president and Congress.

Efforts to unilaterally cancel funding already approved by lawmakers, who hold the authority to spend federal dollars under the Constitution, led to confusion and frustration from both Democrats and Republicans, especially after the U.S. DOGE Service froze allocations on programs that have long elicited bipartisan support.

Many of the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back appropriations are subject to injunctions from federal courts, blocking the cuts from moving forward while the lawsuits advance through the judicial system.

Kevin Kosar, senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said Trump’s actions on spending so far have sought to expand the bounds of presidential authority.

“We’ve never seen a president in modern times who’s been this aggressive in trying to seize control of the power of the purse,” he said. “To just say, ‘I’m not going to fund this agency, like USAID, despite money being appropriated for it. And we’re going to walk over and take their plaque off their wall and lock their doors.’ This is new.”

Many of Trump’s actions so far indicate to Kosar that the administration expects a change to the balance of power following next year’s midterm elections, when the president’s party historically loses control of at least one chamber of Congress.

“It feels to me that the first 100 days are in large part predicated on an assumption that they may only have two years of unified Republican control of the House of Representatives, the Senate and the presidency,” he said. “We know the margins in the House are quite narrow, and the heavy use of executive actions and the simple defunding of various government contracts and agencies all through executive action, just tell me that the administration feels like they have to get everything done as fast as they possibly can, because the time is short.”

Kosar said he’s watching to see if Trump works with Republicans in Congress, while they still have unified control, to codify his executive orders into law — something he didn’t do with many of the unilateral actions he took during his first term.

“He just did executive actions, which, of course, (President Joe) Biden just undid,” he said. “And I’m just wondering: Are we going to see this movie all over again? Or is he going to actually partner with Congress on these various policy matters and pass statutes so that they stick?”

Zachary Peskowitz, associate professor of political science at Emory University, said Trump has been much more “assertive” during the last 100 days than during the first few months of 2017.

DOGE ‘winding down’

U.S. DOGE Service and Musk hit the ground running, though their actions have fallen short of the goals he set, and appear to be sunsetting with the billionaire turning his attention back toward his businesses.

“I think the big bang is winding down. They did a lot of things early on. It’s not clear how many of them are going to stick, what the consequences are,” Peskowitz said. “And I think, big picture, in terms of federal spending, the amounts of money that may have been saved or not are pretty small.”

Democrats in Congress released a tracker Tuesday listing which accounts the Trump administration has frozen or canceled to the tune of more than $430 billion.

But Trump has just gotten started.

The administration plans to submit its first budget request to Congress in the coming days, a step that’s typically taken in early February, though it happens a couple months behind schedule during a president’s first year.

That massive tax-and-spending proposal will begin the classic tug-of-war between Congress, which will draft the dozen annual appropriations bills, and Trump, who has shown a willingness to act unilaterally when he doesn’t get his way.

Trump and lawmakers must agree to some sort of government funding bill before the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1, otherwise a partial government shutdown would begin. And unlike the reconciliation package that Republicans can enact all on their own, funding bills require some Democratic support to move past the Senate’s 60-vote cloture threshold.

Eliminating the Education Department

Researchers and advocates predicted even more changes to the federal role in education, underscoring anti-diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and a continued ideological battle with higher education that have marked Trump’s approach to education policy in his first 100 days.

In a torrent of education-related decisions, Trump and his administration have tried to dismantle the Education Department via an executive order, slashed more than 1,300 employees at the department, threatened to revoke funds for schools that use DEI practices and cracked down on “woke” higher education.

The Trump administration has taken drastic steps to revoke federal funding for a number of elite universities in an attempt to make the institutions align more with them ideologically.

Rachel Perera, a governance studies fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, cited “brazen lawlessness” when reflecting on Trump’s approach to higher education in his second term.

“The ways that they’re trying to withhold funding from universities are very clearly in violation of federal law and the processes mandated by civil rights law in terms of ensuring that institutions are offered due process in assessing whether violations have taken place,” Perera said. “There’s not even a pretense of pretending to investigate some of these institutions before taking really dramatic action.”

Whether the administration’s approach continues or not depends on court action, she added.

“I think what the next three years might look like is really going to depend on how some of these lawsuits play out,” Perera said, referencing some of the major legal battles involving the Trump administration. 

Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at the nonprofit policy and advocacy group EdTrust, said “much of what this administration has done has been overreach.” He pointed to the Education Department’s letter threatening to yank federal funds for schools that use race-conscious practices across aspects of student life as one example.

Del Pilar, who was previously deputy secretary of postsecondary and higher education for the state of Pennsylvania, said the administration is “going to take any opportunity to grab at power that advances their ideology.”

Meanwhile, Perera said the consequences of the department implementing a reduction in force plan in March “have yet to be felt.”

“I think we will start to see really the material consequences of the reduced staffing capacity in the coming years, in terms of how programs are administered, in terms of how funding is moving out the building, in terms of auditing, making sure funding is going to the right groups of students that Congress intended for the money to go to, whether big data collection efforts that are congressionally mandated are being carried out in timely and effective ways,” she said.

“All of that remains to be seen.”

Ariana Figueroa contributed to this report. 

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation hearing on Jan. 15, 2025. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — A handful of Democratic U.S. senators sounded the alarm Friday after federal agents arrested a Wisconsin judge on charges she obstructed immigration officials from detaining a man in her courtroom, saying the arrest marked a new low in President Donald Trump’s treatment of the law.

Some congressional Democrats framed the FBI’s Friday morning arrest of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan as a grave threat to the U.S. system of government, saying it was part of Trump’s effort to expand his own power and undermine the judiciary, with which the administration has become increasingly noncompliant.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer decried the judge’s arrest on social media late Friday afternoon as a “dangerous escalation.”

“There are no kings in America. Trump and (Attorney General Pam) Bondi can’t just decide to arrest sitting judges at will and threaten judges into submission,” wrote Schumer, a New York Democrat.

Trump administration officials, including Bondi, defended the arrest as legitimate. The FBI had been investigating Dugan after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers sought to detain an immigrant without legal authority to be in the country who was in her courtroom on a misdemeanor charge.

Bondi wrote on social media just after noon Eastern, “I can confirm that our @FBI agents just arrested Hannah Dugan — a county judge in Milwaukee — for allegedly helping an illegal alien avoid an arrest by @ICEgov. No one is above the law.”

Democrats object

Democrats in Washington who sounded their objections to the arrest Friday argued it subverted separation of powers.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, said Trump “continues to test the limits of our Constitution — this time by arresting a sitting judge for allegedly obstructing an immigration operation at the courthouse.”

In a statement, Durbin added that local courtrooms should be off limits to immigration enforcement agents.

“When immigration enforcement officials interfere with our criminal justice system, it undermines public safety, prevents victims and witnesses from coming forward, and often prevents those who committed crimes from facing justice in the United States,” Durbin wrote.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who represents Wisconsin, issued a statement shortly after news of the arrest, calling it “a gravely serious and drastic move.”

“In the United States we have a system of checks and balances and separation of powers for damn good reasons,” Baldwin said.

“The Trump Administration just arrested a sitting judge,” Arizona’s Ruben Gallego said in a social media post. “This is what happens in authoritarian countries. Stand up now — or lose the power to do so later. The administration must drop all charges and respect separation of powers.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who also sits on the Judiciary Committee, was more careful in his criticism but said Trump is “constantly challenging” separation of powers laid out in the Constitution.

“I don’t know what happened in Wisconsin, but amplifying this arrest as the Attorney General and FBI Director have done looks like part of a larger intimidation campaign against judges,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in a statement.

In a since-deleted post on Bluesky, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey accused Trump of “using immigrants to justify an all-out assault on our democracy and rule of law.

“After openly defying a Supreme Court order, calling for judges to be impeached, and bullying and belittling judges, today his FBI director took the extreme step of ordering a sitting judge arrested,” Booker wrote, referring to the high court’s order that the Trump administration “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is being held in El Salvador.

Spokespeople for Booker did not respond to a late Friday inquiry about why the post was taken down.

Trump officials back up arrest

Administration officials boasted online following the arrest.

FBI Director Kash Patel deleted a post on X in which he wrote Dugan  “intentionally misdirected federal agents away” from Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery.

Trump posted a screenshot on his social media site from the conservative activist account “Libs of TikTok” that featured a photo of Dugan and celebrated her arrest.

White House Border Czar Tom Homan said that Dugan crossed a line in her opposition to the administration’s agenda.

“People can choose to support illegal immigration and not assist ICE in removing criminal illegal aliens from our communities, BUT DON’T CROSS THAT LINE,” he wrote on X. “If you actively impede our enforcement efforts or if you knowingly harbor or conceal illegal aliens from ICE you will be prosecuted. These actions are felonies. More to come…”

Trump vs. courts

Trump and administration officials have publicly attacked judges online, including calling for the impeachment of District Judge James Boasberg for the District of Columbia after he ordered immigration officials to halt deportation flights to El Salvador.

The administration allowed the flights to reach Central America, and is now at risk of being held in criminal contempt of court as a legal fight plays out.

The president’s verbal attacks on Boasberg prompted a rare rebuke from U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in mid-March.

And the administration has seemingly refused to do anything to facilitate the return of Maryland resident Abrego Garcia from a notorious El Salvador mega-prison, despite a Supreme Court order.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation hearing on Jan. 15, 2025. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — A handful of Democratic U.S. senators sounded the alarm Friday after federal agents arrested a Wisconsin judge on charges she obstructed immigration officials from detaining a man in her courtroom, saying the arrest marked a new low in President Donald Trump’s treatment of the law.

Some congressional Democrats framed the FBI’s Friday morning arrest of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan as a grave threat to the U.S. system of government, saying it was part of Trump’s effort to expand his own power and undermine the judiciary, with which the administration has become increasingly noncompliant.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer decried the judge’s arrest on social media late Friday afternoon as a “dangerous escalation.”

“There are no kings in America. Trump and (Attorney General Pam) Bondi can’t just decide to arrest sitting judges at will and threaten judges into submission,” wrote Schumer, a New York Democrat.

Trump administration officials, including Bondi, defended the arrest as legitimate. The FBI had been investigating Dugan after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers sought to detain an immigrant without legal authority to be in the country who was in her courtroom on a misdemeanor charge.

Bondi wrote on social media just after noon Eastern, “I can confirm that our @FBI agents just arrested Hannah Dugan — a county judge in Milwaukee — for allegedly helping an illegal alien avoid an arrest by @ICEgov. No one is above the law.”

Democrats object

Democrats in Washington who sounded their objections to the arrest Friday argued it subverted separation of powers.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, said Trump “continues to test the limits of our Constitution — this time by arresting a sitting judge for allegedly obstructing an immigration operation at the courthouse.”

In a statement, Durbin added that local courtrooms should be off limits to immigration enforcement agents.

“When immigration enforcement officials interfere with our criminal justice system, it undermines public safety, prevents victims and witnesses from coming forward, and often prevents those who committed crimes from facing justice in the United States,” Durbin wrote.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who represents Wisconsin, issued a statement shortly after news of the arrest, calling it “a gravely serious and drastic move.”

“In the United States we have a system of checks and balances and separation of powers for damn good reasons,” Baldwin said.

“The Trump Administration just arrested a sitting judge,” Arizona’s Ruben Gallego said in a social media post. “This is what happens in authoritarian countries. Stand up now — or lose the power to do so later. The administration must drop all charges and respect separation of powers.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who also sits on the Judiciary Committee, was more careful in his criticism but said Trump is “constantly challenging” separation of powers laid out in the Constitution.

“I don’t know what happened in Wisconsin, but amplifying this arrest as the Attorney General and FBI Director have done looks like part of a larger intimidation campaign against judges,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in a statement.

In a since-deleted post on Bluesky, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey accused Trump of “using immigrants to justify an all-out assault on our democracy and rule of law.

“After openly defying a Supreme Court order, calling for judges to be impeached, and bullying and belittling judges, today his FBI director took the extreme step of ordering a sitting judge arrested,” Booker wrote, referring to the high court’s order that the Trump administration “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is being held in El Salvador.

Spokespeople for Booker did not respond to a late Friday inquiry about why the post was taken down.

Trump officials back up arrest

Administration officials boasted online following the arrest.

FBI Director Kash Patel deleted a post on X in which he wrote Dugan  “intentionally misdirected federal agents away” from Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery.

Trump posted a screenshot on his social media site from the conservative activist account “Libs of TikTok” that featured a photo of Dugan and celebrated her arrest.

White House Border Czar Tom Homan said that Dugan crossed a line in her opposition to the administration’s agenda.

“People can choose to support illegal immigration and not assist ICE in removing criminal illegal aliens from our communities, BUT DON’T CROSS THAT LINE,” he wrote on X. “If you actively impede our enforcement efforts or if you knowingly harbor or conceal illegal aliens from ICE you will be prosecuted. These actions are felonies. More to come…”

Trump vs. courts

Trump and administration officials have publicly attacked judges online, including calling for the impeachment of District Judge James Boasberg for the District of Columbia after he ordered immigration officials to halt deportation flights to El Salvador.

The administration allowed the flights to reach Central America, and is now at risk of being held in criminal contempt of court as a legal fight plays out.

The president’s verbal attacks on Boasberg prompted a rare rebuke from U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in mid-March.

And the administration has seemingly refused to do anything to facilitate the return of Maryland resident Abrego Garcia from a notorious El Salvador mega-prison, despite a Supreme Court order.

Deported migrants queue to receive an essential items bag during the arrival of a group of deported Salvadorans at Gerencia de Atención al Migrante on Feb. 12, 2025, in San Salvador, El Salvador. (Photo by Alex Peña/Getty Images)

Immigrant rights groups are cautioning migrants without legal status about the dangers of obeying the Department of Homeland Security’s directive to register with authorities, group leaders told reporters during a virtual press conference Tuesday.

Representatives from immigrant groups across the country said the requirement, which a federal judge upheld last week, is an enforcement tool for President Donald Trump’s administration and that following the directive to register could lead to unlawful detention and deportation.

Participants on the call did not explicitly say they were counseling migrants without legal status against complying with the directive, but said people affected should seek legal counsel first.

“This tool is to identify individuals for detention, deportation and to threaten with imprisonment if they do not comply,” Angelica Salas, the executive director of the advocacy group the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, said.

“These actions are abhorrent to the values of this country, and we will not stand silent to see cruelty as the official immigration policy of this administration. To our community, our message is that you’re not alone, you have rights, seek legal guidance, and you’re not obligated to provide information that can hurt you or your family.”

Under Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the administration has sent “innocent people” to detention facilities at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the notorious mega-prison in El Salvador known as Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, Salas said.

The administration has detained immigrants of all legal statuses without due process, and ignored court orders to reverse those actions. Advocates on the press call Tuesday said that defies the law.

Immigrants, even without legal status in the country, are “entitled to their day in immigration court,” Nicole Melaku, the executive director of National Partnership for New Americans, said.

The directive, which requires immigrants who have registered with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to always carry with them proof of their registration, would also lead to racial profiling of U.S. citizens, advocates have said.

No reported registrants

Salas said her organization, which is based in Southern California, does not know of anyone who has completed the registration.

The people who are required to register are unclear about whether it is in their interest to comply, and distrust of Trump – who campaigned on an anti-immigration platform and has routinely flouted due process for immigrants – is a major obstacle.

“We don’t have anybody who has – that we know – yet registered,” she said. “There’s a lot of confusion in our community as to whether to do this or not. What does it mean? What are the risks? And I also want to say that … everything that has come from this administration has actually been harmful, so people are taking that into account.”

Legal fight continuing

U.S. Judge Trevor Neil McFadden, whom Trump appointed to the federal bench in 2017, rejected advocacy groups’ attempt to block the directive, saying in an order last week that the groups hadn’t shown they’d been harmed by it.

But the legal fight against the directive will continue, George Escobar, the chief of programs and services at the immigrant services organization CASA, said.

In addition to a possible appeal of McFadden’s ruling, Escobar said his organizations would watch “very, very closely” how the administration conducts the operation, with special attention to racial profiling, and would not hesitate to bring court challenges.

“We will do everything possible to fight this,” he said. “This may be a show-me-your-papers type of situation where people may be racially profiled, stopped on the street just because they’re speaking in other languages, because they look like an immigrant, and has to be asked to show this registration compliance.”

Representatives for the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a message seeking comment Tuesday.

Voters cast their ballots at Fairmont Junior High in Boise during the Idaho primary on May 17, 2022. (Otto Kitsinger for Idaho Capital Sun)

The U.S. House passed a bill Thursday to require voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, approving a Republican priority over the objections of Democrats who said the bill would only create hurdles for eligible voters without actually improving fraud protection.

The 220-208 vote sent the measure to the U.S. Senate, where it faces an uphill road to overcome the chamber’s 60-vote requirement for most legislation. If enacted, the bill would require states, which are responsible for administering elections, to obtain from people registering to vote in federal elections documents that prove U.S. citizenship.

Acceptable documents under the act include any valid photo ID issued by the federal government, a state or tribe that shows the applicant’s place of birth was the United States, or a combination of a valid government-issued photo ID and another document proving citizenship such as a birth certificate or certificate of naturalization.

Four House Democrats – Jared Golden of Maine, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, Ed Case of Hawaii and Henry Cuellar of Texas – joined all Republicans present to vote in favor of the bill.

Supporters of the bill say it is needed to keep immigrants in the country without legal status from voting.

It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, though some local governments allow noncitizen residents to vote in local elections.

GOP priority

By tackling fraudulent voting and targeting immigrants in the country illegally, the bill addresses two planks of the Republican platform under President Donald Trump. Trump has consistently positioned himself as a hardliner on immigration and continues to voice the debunked claim that fraud caused his 2020 election loss.

During floor debate this week, the bill’s sponsor, Texas Republican Chip Roy, said the measure, titled the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act, responded to the message voters sent by electing Trump and Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress last year after inaction from Democratic President Joe Biden.

“Republicans are responding to an American people who are tired of the previous administration that was allowing illegals to come into our country, kill our citizens, vote in our elections, undermine our country,” Roy said. “And we are addressing their concerns and our colleagues on the other side of the aisle don’t want to address it.”

Hurdle for citizens

Democrats, though, said the measure was unnecessary to prevent the exceedingly rare cases of noncitizens voting in federal elections and would only make voting harder for citizens who are eligible, including married women who may have changed their name but have not updated their documents.

“I think the gentleman from Texas will be happy to learn that it already is the law that only American citizens can vote in federal elections,” Rep. Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, said following Roy’s remarks. “Our problem with the SAVE Act is that it is an attempt to make it more difficult for women in this country, women who are U.S. citizens, to be able to vote.”

At a virtual press conference Thursday, Democratic secretaries of state – the office in most states responsible for elections administration – highlighted the difficulties it could create for eligible voters.

“Losing your driver’s license or birth certificate, letting your passport expire or even getting married and taking your partner’s last name could all prevent a voter from making their voice heard in free and fair elections if the SAVE Act passes,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said. “Replacing just one of those documents – let alone multiple documents that would be needed to register – takes time and money that not every American has.

“Women who are citizens – who are eligible to vote – should not be stopped at the ballot box by (House Speaker) Mike Johnson and Donald Trump.”

The Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building pictured on Nov. 25, 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom) 

The U.S. Education Department has agreed to delay for nearly two weeks enforcement of a disputed directive seeking to ban diversity, equity and inclusion practices, according to a court filing Thursday in the case challenging the order.

The agreement between the department and the groups suing it over the order pauses enforcement until after April 24. According to the agreement, states and local education agencies until then cannot be investigated or asked to provide certification that they are not using DEI, a term for race- and gender-conscious practices, in admissions, programming, training, hiring or scholarships.

Education Department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said the department and the groups reached the agreement Monday.

An April 3 letter from the department demanded states and districts provide certifications they were complying with the order within 10 days or risk losing federal funding. That letter followed a February missive introducing the order.

The National Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union sued in New Hampshire federal court last month to block enforcement of the directive.

“This pause in enforcement provides immediate relief to schools across the country while the broader legal challenge continues,” the NEA said in a Thursday statement.

In a written statement, Biedermann said the extension was due to what the department saw as states’ efforts to comply with the order.

“The Department extended the certification requirement on Monday in response to states’ good-faith inquiries to ensure compliance,” Biedermann wrote. “Having voluntarily extended the deadline, commonsense would dictate the Department would not take enforcement action until the deadline had passed.”

Court battle

The groups asked the court to issue an emergency ruling to block enforcement of the department’s order while the case is ongoing.

The agreement effectively grants that request without a court order.

“No school district, state agency, or higher education institution will face investigation or penalties for failure to return the challenged certification that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts do not exist within their curriculums,” the NEA said.

The underlying lawsuit remains ongoing.

The suit challenges the department’s authority to impose restrictions on state K-12 curriculum and says the order limits academic freedom and restricts educators’ ability to teach.

Trump and DEI

President Donald Trump campaigned against progressive cultural positions, including how race, gender and sexuality are handled in public schools.

In the early months of his second presidency, the entire executive branch has moved to restrict DEI initiatives and education policy, which has long been a battleground for such issues, has been a focal point.

The administration has used antidiscrimination requirements to pursue restrictions on DEI initiatives in education, arguing that DEI discriminates against white students.

DEI programs “discriminate against one group of Americans to favor another based on identity characteristics in clear violation of Title VI,” Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting head of civil rights, said in an April 3 statement.

A Union Pacific train transports coal through Spanish Fork Canyon in Utah County, Utah. on Wednesday, July 31, 2024. President Donald Trump signed an order on April 8, 2025, aimed at boosting coal production. (Photo by Spenser Heaps/Utah News Dispatch)

An executive order President Donald Trump signed Tuesday to block state-level renewable-energy initiatives set off alarm bells among climate advocates.

But experts and state policy groups said constitutional protections will blunt any effect the order would have on state operations.

The order, one of four Trump signed Tuesday aiming to revitalize the coal industry, directs the U.S. Justice Department to investigate and block enforcement of state laws that restrict fossil fuel production. It specifically targets state and local policies involving climate change, environmental justice and carbon emissions reductions — popular among blue states.

By attempting to strip states of their own authority to make and enforce laws, the order violates basic constitutional principles and would likely be struck down in court, environmental law experts said Wednesday.

Brad Campbell, the president of the New England-based environmental advocacy group Conservation Law Foundation, said in an interview with States Newsroom the order does not cite any federal law or interest the administration is seeking to protect — though the order does mention interstate commerce and an objective to improve national security — revealing it is more about messaging than policymaking.

“This is political theater more than it is law,” Campbell said. “It completely disregards the understanding of federalism that has been in place for centuries and the language of the Constitution itself.”

While the order itself may be unlikely to withstand legal scrutiny, it signals the administration could make demands about climate policy that would have to be obeyed at risk of losing federal cash, advocates said.

Trump officials already have shown an eagerness in their first months for using federal funding as leverage with states, universities and other institutions that are outside the federal government’s control.

In a statement, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said Wednesday the order would protect against states assuming the power to regulate international issues like climate change.

“The President is right to ensure that Americans in both red and blue states are not beholden to State overreach stifling American energy that are unconstitutional or contradict federal law,” she said.

Climate action ‘irreconcilable’ with Trump agenda

The order includes a lengthy preamble attempting to justify federal involvement in state and local policymaking, while also noting that state policies focusing on emissions reductions and climate protections are at odds with Trump’s goals.

“These State laws and policies try to dictate interstate and international disputes over air, water, and natural resources; unduly discriminate against out-of-State businesses; contravene the equality of States; and retroactively impose arbitrary and excessive fines without legitimate justification,” the order’s opening section reads.

“These State laws and policies are fundamentally irreconcilable with my Administration’s objective to unleash American energy.  They should not stand.”

At the Tuesday signing ceremony for the order and three others on coal production, White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf told the president that states promoting renewable sources of energy were a major part of the coal industry’s decline.

“One of the biggest problems we have in this space is Democrat states, radical leftist states, enacting policies and enacting an agenda that discriminates against coal, against secure sources of energy,” Scharf said.

The order, though, does little to change the market and technological forces that have led to the coal industry’s decline, Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, the executive director of the environmental group Western Environmental Law Center, said Wednesday.

“I just don’t see how the order … is going to do anything but create confusion and uncertainties for communities that are transitioning away from coal right now,” he said.

“In many respects, it does an injustice to those communities by giving them a false sense of hope that somehow coal mines and coal-fired power plants are suddenly going to be resurrected from the dead or be pushed well beyond their economic and technological lifespan.”

States undeterred

Environmental lawyers and climate advocates said the order does not change the constitutional structure of the U.S. government that empowers states to set their own laws.

Casey Katims, the executive director of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of 24 governors seeking to prioritize state-focused climate policy, said the group’s members would not be moved by the order.

“The reality is that states continue to enjoy broad, independent constitutional authority to advance solutions to meet the needs of communities, businesses and workers,” Katims said in a Wednesday interview. “The president cannot change the Constitution by fiat.”

The group’s co-chairs, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, both Democrats, said in a Tuesday statement the administration had no power to block state authority and the coalition would be undeterred by the order.

“The federal government cannot unilaterally strip states’ independent constitutional authority,” they said. “We are a nation of states — and laws — and we will not be deterred.”

If the Justice Department, under Attorney General Pam Bondi, sues to stop enforcement of state laws, courts would likely reinforce states’ well-understood power to govern themselves, Campbell said.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a conservative supermajority that includes three members appointed by Trump and has shown deference to even the most controversial actions of his second presidency, would move to restrain that federal power, Campbell predicted.

“I think the notion that the president can stop enforcement of state laws that don’t align with his political program will be too much of an overreach even for this very Trump-friendly Supreme Court majority,” he said.

Further, he said, even Republican governors, whose party has traditionally advocated for increased states’ rights in relation to the federal government, might object to the intrusion of the executive branch into state policymaking. Allowing action under the order would set a precedent for a future Democratic president to meddle in Republican states, he said.

Federal funding

The lack of legal authority to directly block enforcement of state laws may not keep the Trump administration from exercising power in another way: withholding federal funds from uncooperative states.

The order signals the administration, which has been bold in asserting a power to deny congressionally appropriated funding, could target states over climate policy, Schlenker-Goodrich said.

“Do they have a legal basis? Not really,” he said. “Can they use political weapons, in particular relative to funding, against states that are stepping up on climate action? That is very much a possibility. That is the direction you will see the White House going.”

A group of coal miners watch as President Donald Trump speaks at the White House shortly before signing executive orders on the coal industry on April 8, 2025. (White House livestream)

President Donald Trump signed four executive orders Tuesday aiming to invigorate the U.S. coal industry.

In wide-ranging comments in front of a phalanx of coal miners at the White House, Trump said the orders would revitalize an industry pushed to the brink by Democratic policies that encourage renewable energy.

“This is a very important day to me, because we’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned, despite the fact that it was just about the best, certainly the best in terms of power, real power,” Trump said.

The orders:

• End a moratorium on leasing federal lands for coal mining;
• Remove Biden administration environmental regulations that Trump said slow approvals of new mining projects;
• Prioritize grid security and reliability; and
• Direct the U.S. Justice Department to block states from enforcing their own regulations on coal.

Two of the orders cite increased energy demand for the power-intensive task of artificial intelligence data processing as the rationale for increasing coal production.

Reopening plans for mines in Montana, Wyoming

A press release from the Interior Department, which oversees resource management on public lands, added that one of the orders reopens plans to build mines in Montana and Wyoming, removes regulatory burdens on coal production and lowers royalty rates coal companies owe for production on federal lands.

Environmental groups cautioned against a renewed federal investment in coal and took particular exception to the provision allowing the federal government to undermine state efforts to move away from the sector.

“Reviving or extending coal to power data centers would force working families to subsidize polluting coal on behalf of Big Tech billionaires and despoil our nation’s public lands,” Tyson Slocum, the energy policy director for the liberal advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement. “States planning to move to cleaner, cheaper energy sources could be forced to keep old coal plants up and running for years, forcing nearby residents to breathe dirty air and harming the climate.”

In a line that appeared ad-libbed, Trump also promised the orders could not be reversed by a future president.

“We’re going to give a guarantee that the business will not be terminated by the ups and downs of the world of politics,” he said. “We’re going to give a guarantee that it’s not going to happen, so that if somebody comes in, they cannot change it at a whim.”

Trump said he’d thought of the idea “about 15 minutes before” getting on stage at the White House.

‘Beautiful, clean coal’

Trump cast the move as a direct rebuke to his Democratic predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and said it was in service of restoring working-class jobs in states like West Virginia.

“We’re ending Joe Biden’s war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all. And it wasn’t just Biden, it was Obama and others, but we’re doing the exact opposite… We’re going to put the miners back to work.”

A 2024 Biden rule to raise emissions standards on coal plants was unworkable, one of the orders, which reversed the Biden rule, said.

“The Rule requires compliance with standards premised on the application of emissions-control technologies that do not yet exist in a commercially viable form,” the order said. “The Rule therefore raises the unacceptable risk of the shutdown of many coal-fired power plants, eliminating thousands of jobs, placing our electrical grid at risk, and threatening broader, harmful economic and energy security effects.”

With both U.S. senators from West Virginia, Republicans Shelley Moore Capito and Jim Justice, on hand, Trump said the state’s workers rejected Democrats’ vision of transitioning away from their mining identity.

“One thing I learned about the coal miners is that’s what they want to do,” he said. “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue in a different kind of a job, but they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal. That’s what they love to do.”

Environmental groups slam orders

Even before the orders were signed, environmental advocacy groups panned them as a giveaway to the industry and a reckless move away from attention to the climate crisis.

“Trump’s coal orders take his worship of dirty fossil fuels to a gross and disturbingly reckless new level,” Jason Rylander, the legal director of the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said in a written statement. “This is yet another assault on efforts to preserve a livable climate.”

Lena Moffitt, the executive director of environmental group Evergreen Action, said true energy reliability would come from renewable sources.

“Coal is toxic and outdated,” Mofitt said in a statement. “It poisons our air and water, jacks up household energy bills, and is deadly for communities living under the shadow of its smokestacks. If Trump actually cared about meeting rising energy demand, he’d invest in affordable, clean power—not drag us backward to prop up a dying industry.”

Immigration and tariffs

Trump spoke for about 45 minutes and touched on issues beyond energy policy, including his recently enacted tariffs that have rocked world financial markets and the case of a Maryland man erroneously swept up in a deportation operation.

Trump promoted his aggressive immigration policy and referenced the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a man who the administration has admitted was mistakenly deported from Maryland to his native El Salvador despite being granted legal protection to remain in the United States.

The administration sent planeloads of Venezuelan nationals to an El Salvador mega-prison last month, accusing them of being members of the gang Tren de Aragua.

Without naming Abrego Garcia, Trump referenced a man sent to El Salvador who was not a member of the Venezuelan gang, but said he was a member of a different Latin American gang. The government has produced no evidence to suggest Abrego Garcia is a gang member.

On tariffs, Trump said the taxes on imported goods were already bringing in billions of dollars daily in new federal revenue and were critical to protect U.S. industries.

“We’ve been ripped off and abused by countries for many years with the tariff situation,” he said. “They’ve used tariffs against us. We didn’t use tariffs against them in any way, but we just didn’t use them of any monumental proportion. And so we are doing it now.”

He did not respond to a shouted question about Republican unease with the worldwide tariffs at the close of the White House event.

Deported migrants queue to receive an essential items bag during the arrival of a group of deported Salvadorans at Gerencia de Atención al Migrante on Feb. 12, 2025, in San Salvador, El Salvador. (Photo by Alex Peña/Getty Images)

Immigrant rights groups are cautioning migrants without legal status about the dangers of obeying the Department of Homeland Security’s directive to register with authorities, group leaders told reporters during a virtual press conference Tuesday.

Representatives from immigrant groups across the country said the requirement, which a federal judge upheld last week, is an enforcement tool for President Donald Trump’s administration and that following the directive to register could lead to unlawful detention and deportation.

Participants on the call did not explicitly say they were counseling migrants without legal status against complying with the directive, but said people affected should seek legal counsel first.

“This tool is to identify individuals for detention, deportation and to threaten with imprisonment if they do not comply,” Angelica Salas, the executive director of the advocacy group the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, said.

“These actions are abhorrent to the values of this country, and we will not stand silent to see cruelty as the official immigration policy of this administration. To our community, our message is that you’re not alone, you have rights, seek legal guidance, and you’re not obligated to provide information that can hurt you or your family.”

Under Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the administration has sent “innocent people” to detention facilities at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the notorious mega-prison in El Salvador known as Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, Salas said.

The administration has detained immigrants of all legal statuses without due process, and ignored court orders to reverse those actions. Advocates on the press call Tuesday said that defies the law.

Immigrants, even without legal status in the country, are “entitled to their day in immigration court,” Nicole Melaku, the executive director of National Partnership for New Americans, said.

The directive, which requires immigrants who have registered with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to always carry with them proof of their registration, would also lead to racial profiling of U.S. citizens, advocates have said.

No reported registrants

Salas said her organization, which is based in Southern California, does not know of anyone who has completed the registration.

The people who are required to register are unclear about whether it is in their interest to comply, and distrust of Trump – who campaigned on an anti-immigration platform and has routinely flouted due process for immigrants – is a major obstacle.

“We don’t have anybody who has – that we know – yet registered,” she said. “There’s a lot of confusion in our community as to whether to do this or not. What does it mean? What are the risks? And I also want to say that … everything that has come from this administration has actually been harmful, so people are taking that into account.”

Legal fight continuing

U.S. Judge Trevor Neil McFadden, whom Trump appointed to the federal bench in 2017, rejected advocacy groups’ attempt to block the directive, saying in an order last week that the groups hadn’t shown they’d been harmed by it.

But the legal fight against the directive will continue, George Escobar, the chief of programs and services at the immigrant services organization CASA, said.

In addition to a possible appeal of McFadden’s ruling, Escobar said his organizations would watch “very, very closely” how the administration conducts the operation, with special attention to racial profiling, and would not hesitate to bring court challenges.

“We will do everything possible to fight this,” he said. “This may be a show-me-your-papers type of situation where people may be racially profiled, stopped on the street just because they’re speaking in other languages, because they look like an immigrant, and has to be asked to show this registration compliance.”

Representatives for the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a message seeking comment Tuesday.

Voters cast their ballots at Fairmont Junior High in Boise during the Idaho primary on May 17, 2022. (Otto Kitsinger for Idaho Capital Sun)

The U.S. House passed a bill Thursday to require voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, approving a Republican priority over the objections of Democrats who said the bill would only create hurdles for eligible voters without actually improving fraud protection.

The 220-208 vote sent the measure to the U.S. Senate, where it faces an uphill road to overcome the chamber’s 60-vote requirement for most legislation. If enacted, the bill would require states, which are responsible for administering elections, to obtain from people registering to vote in federal elections documents that prove U.S. citizenship.

Acceptable documents under the act include any valid photo ID issued by the federal government, a state or tribe that shows the applicant’s place of birth was the United States, or a combination of a valid government-issued photo ID and another document proving citizenship such as a birth certificate or certificate of naturalization.

Four House Democrats – Jared Golden of Maine, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, Ed Case of Hawaii and Henry Cuellar of Texas – joined all Republicans present to vote in favor of the bill.

Supporters of the bill say it is needed to keep immigrants in the country without legal status from voting.

It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, though some local governments allow noncitizen residents to vote in local elections.

GOP priority

By tackling fraudulent voting and targeting immigrants in the country illegally, the bill addresses two planks of the Republican platform under President Donald Trump. Trump has consistently positioned himself as a hardliner on immigration and continues to voice the debunked claim that fraud caused his 2020 election loss.

During floor debate this week, the bill’s sponsor, Texas Republican Chip Roy, said the measure, titled the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act, responded to the message voters sent by electing Trump and Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress last year after inaction from Democratic President Joe Biden.

“Republicans are responding to an American people who are tired of the previous administration that was allowing illegals to come into our country, kill our citizens, vote in our elections, undermine our country,” Roy said. “And we are addressing their concerns and our colleagues on the other side of the aisle don’t want to address it.”

Hurdle for citizens

Democrats, though, said the measure was unnecessary to prevent the exceedingly rare cases of noncitizens voting in federal elections and would only make voting harder for citizens who are eligible, including married women who may have changed their name but have not updated their documents.

“I think the gentleman from Texas will be happy to learn that it already is the law that only American citizens can vote in federal elections,” Rep. Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, said following Roy’s remarks. “Our problem with the SAVE Act is that it is an attempt to make it more difficult for women in this country, women who are U.S. citizens, to be able to vote.”

At a virtual press conference Thursday, Democratic secretaries of state – the office in most states responsible for elections administration – highlighted the difficulties it could create for eligible voters.

“Losing your driver’s license or birth certificate, letting your passport expire or even getting married and taking your partner’s last name could all prevent a voter from making their voice heard in free and fair elections if the SAVE Act passes,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said. “Replacing just one of those documents – let alone multiple documents that would be needed to register – takes time and money that not every American has.

“Women who are citizens – who are eligible to vote – should not be stopped at the ballot box by (House Speaker) Mike Johnson and Donald Trump.”

The Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building pictured on Nov. 25, 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom) 

The U.S. Education Department has agreed to delay for nearly two weeks enforcement of a disputed directive seeking to ban diversity, equity and inclusion practices, according to a court filing Thursday in the case challenging the order.

The agreement between the department and the groups suing it over the order pauses enforcement until after April 24. According to the agreement, states and local education agencies until then cannot be investigated or asked to provide certification that they are not using DEI, a term for race- and gender-conscious practices, in admissions, programming, training, hiring or scholarships.

Education Department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said the department and the groups reached the agreement Monday.

An April 3 letter from the department demanded states and districts provide certifications they were complying with the order within 10 days or risk losing federal funding. That letter followed a February missive introducing the order.

The National Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union sued in New Hampshire federal court last month to block enforcement of the directive.

“This pause in enforcement provides immediate relief to schools across the country while the broader legal challenge continues,” the NEA said in a Thursday statement.

In a written statement, Biedermann said the extension was due to what the department saw as states’ efforts to comply with the order.

“The Department extended the certification requirement on Monday in response to states’ good-faith inquiries to ensure compliance,” Biedermann wrote. “Having voluntarily extended the deadline, commonsense would dictate the Department would not take enforcement action until the deadline had passed.”

Court battle

The groups asked the court to issue an emergency ruling to block enforcement of the department’s order while the case is ongoing.

The agreement effectively grants that request without a court order.

“No school district, state agency, or higher education institution will face investigation or penalties for failure to return the challenged certification that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts do not exist within their curriculums,” the NEA said.

The underlying lawsuit remains ongoing.

The suit challenges the department’s authority to impose restrictions on state K-12 curriculum and says the order limits academic freedom and restricts educators’ ability to teach.

Trump and DEI

President Donald Trump campaigned against progressive cultural positions, including how race, gender and sexuality are handled in public schools.

In the early months of his second presidency, the entire executive branch has moved to restrict DEI initiatives and education policy, which has long been a battleground for such issues, has been a focal point.

The administration has used antidiscrimination requirements to pursue restrictions on DEI initiatives in education, arguing that DEI discriminates against white students.

DEI programs “discriminate against one group of Americans to favor another based on identity characteristics in clear violation of Title VI,” Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting head of civil rights, said in an April 3 statement.

A Union Pacific train transports coal through Spanish Fork Canyon in Utah County, Utah. on Wednesday, July 31, 2024. President Donald Trump signed an order on April 8, 2025, aimed at boosting coal production. (Photo by Spenser Heaps/Utah News Dispatch)

An executive order President Donald Trump signed Tuesday to block state-level renewable-energy initiatives set off alarm bells among climate advocates.

But experts and state policy groups said constitutional protections will blunt any effect the order would have on state operations.

The order, one of four Trump signed Tuesday aiming to revitalize the coal industry, directs the U.S. Justice Department to investigate and block enforcement of state laws that restrict fossil fuel production. It specifically targets state and local policies involving climate change, environmental justice and carbon emissions reductions — popular among blue states.

By attempting to strip states of their own authority to make and enforce laws, the order violates basic constitutional principles and would likely be struck down in court, environmental law experts said Wednesday.

Brad Campbell, the president of the New England-based environmental advocacy group Conservation Law Foundation, said in an interview with States Newsroom the order does not cite any federal law or interest the administration is seeking to protect — though the order does mention interstate commerce and an objective to improve national security — revealing it is more about messaging than policymaking.

“This is political theater more than it is law,” Campbell said. “It completely disregards the understanding of federalism that has been in place for centuries and the language of the Constitution itself.”

While the order itself may be unlikely to withstand legal scrutiny, it signals the administration could make demands about climate policy that would have to be obeyed at risk of losing federal cash, advocates said.

Trump officials already have shown an eagerness in their first months for using federal funding as leverage with states, universities and other institutions that are outside the federal government’s control.

In a statement, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said Wednesday the order would protect against states assuming the power to regulate international issues like climate change.

“The President is right to ensure that Americans in both red and blue states are not beholden to State overreach stifling American energy that are unconstitutional or contradict federal law,” she said.

Climate action ‘irreconcilable’ with Trump agenda

The order includes a lengthy preamble attempting to justify federal involvement in state and local policymaking, while also noting that state policies focusing on emissions reductions and climate protections are at odds with Trump’s goals.

“These State laws and policies try to dictate interstate and international disputes over air, water, and natural resources; unduly discriminate against out-of-State businesses; contravene the equality of States; and retroactively impose arbitrary and excessive fines without legitimate justification,” the order’s opening section reads.

“These State laws and policies are fundamentally irreconcilable with my Administration’s objective to unleash American energy.  They should not stand.”

At the Tuesday signing ceremony for the order and three others on coal production, White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf told the president that states promoting renewable sources of energy were a major part of the coal industry’s decline.

“One of the biggest problems we have in this space is Democrat states, radical leftist states, enacting policies and enacting an agenda that discriminates against coal, against secure sources of energy,” Scharf said.

The order, though, does little to change the market and technological forces that have led to the coal industry’s decline, Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, the executive director of the environmental group Western Environmental Law Center, said Wednesday.

“I just don’t see how the order … is going to do anything but create confusion and uncertainties for communities that are transitioning away from coal right now,” he said.

“In many respects, it does an injustice to those communities by giving them a false sense of hope that somehow coal mines and coal-fired power plants are suddenly going to be resurrected from the dead or be pushed well beyond their economic and technological lifespan.”

States undeterred

Environmental lawyers and climate advocates said the order does not change the constitutional structure of the U.S. government that empowers states to set their own laws.

Casey Katims, the executive director of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of 24 governors seeking to prioritize state-focused climate policy, said the group’s members would not be moved by the order.

“The reality is that states continue to enjoy broad, independent constitutional authority to advance solutions to meet the needs of communities, businesses and workers,” Katims said in a Wednesday interview. “The president cannot change the Constitution by fiat.”

The group’s co-chairs, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, both Democrats, said in a Tuesday statement the administration had no power to block state authority and the coalition would be undeterred by the order.

“The federal government cannot unilaterally strip states’ independent constitutional authority,” they said. “We are a nation of states — and laws — and we will not be deterred.”

If the Justice Department, under Attorney General Pam Bondi, sues to stop enforcement of state laws, courts would likely reinforce states’ well-understood power to govern themselves, Campbell said.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a conservative supermajority that includes three members appointed by Trump and has shown deference to even the most controversial actions of his second presidency, would move to restrain that federal power, Campbell predicted.

“I think the notion that the president can stop enforcement of state laws that don’t align with his political program will be too much of an overreach even for this very Trump-friendly Supreme Court majority,” he said.

Further, he said, even Republican governors, whose party has traditionally advocated for increased states’ rights in relation to the federal government, might object to the intrusion of the executive branch into state policymaking. Allowing action under the order would set a precedent for a future Democratic president to meddle in Republican states, he said.

Federal funding

The lack of legal authority to directly block enforcement of state laws may not keep the Trump administration from exercising power in another way: withholding federal funds from uncooperative states.

The order signals the administration, which has been bold in asserting a power to deny congressionally appropriated funding, could target states over climate policy, Schlenker-Goodrich said.

“Do they have a legal basis? Not really,” he said. “Can they use political weapons, in particular relative to funding, against states that are stepping up on climate action? That is very much a possibility. That is the direction you will see the White House going.”

A group of coal miners watch as President Donald Trump speaks at the White House shortly before signing executive orders on the coal industry on April 8, 2025. (White House livestream)

President Donald Trump signed four executive orders Tuesday aiming to invigorate the U.S. coal industry.

In wide-ranging comments in front of a phalanx of coal miners at the White House, Trump said the orders would revitalize an industry pushed to the brink by Democratic policies that encourage renewable energy.

“This is a very important day to me, because we’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned, despite the fact that it was just about the best, certainly the best in terms of power, real power,” Trump said.

The orders:

• End a moratorium on leasing federal lands for coal mining;
• Remove Biden administration environmental regulations that Trump said slow approvals of new mining projects;
• Prioritize grid security and reliability; and
• Direct the U.S. Justice Department to block states from enforcing their own regulations on coal.

Two of the orders cite increased energy demand for the power-intensive task of artificial intelligence data processing as the rationale for increasing coal production.

Reopening plans for mines in Montana, Wyoming

A press release from the Interior Department, which oversees resource management on public lands, added that one of the orders reopens plans to build mines in Montana and Wyoming, removes regulatory burdens on coal production and lowers royalty rates coal companies owe for production on federal lands.

Environmental groups cautioned against a renewed federal investment in coal and took particular exception to the provision allowing the federal government to undermine state efforts to move away from the sector.

“Reviving or extending coal to power data centers would force working families to subsidize polluting coal on behalf of Big Tech billionaires and despoil our nation’s public lands,” Tyson Slocum, the energy policy director for the liberal advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement. “States planning to move to cleaner, cheaper energy sources could be forced to keep old coal plants up and running for years, forcing nearby residents to breathe dirty air and harming the climate.”

In a line that appeared ad-libbed, Trump also promised the orders could not be reversed by a future president.

“We’re going to give a guarantee that the business will not be terminated by the ups and downs of the world of politics,” he said. “We’re going to give a guarantee that it’s not going to happen, so that if somebody comes in, they cannot change it at a whim.”

Trump said he’d thought of the idea “about 15 minutes before” getting on stage at the White House.

‘Beautiful, clean coal’

Trump cast the move as a direct rebuke to his Democratic predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and said it was in service of restoring working-class jobs in states like West Virginia.

“We’re ending Joe Biden’s war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all. And it wasn’t just Biden, it was Obama and others, but we’re doing the exact opposite… We’re going to put the miners back to work.”

A 2024 Biden rule to raise emissions standards on coal plants was unworkable, one of the orders, which reversed the Biden rule, said.

“The Rule requires compliance with standards premised on the application of emissions-control technologies that do not yet exist in a commercially viable form,” the order said. “The Rule therefore raises the unacceptable risk of the shutdown of many coal-fired power plants, eliminating thousands of jobs, placing our electrical grid at risk, and threatening broader, harmful economic and energy security effects.”

With both U.S. senators from West Virginia, Republicans Shelley Moore Capito and Jim Justice, on hand, Trump said the state’s workers rejected Democrats’ vision of transitioning away from their mining identity.

“One thing I learned about the coal miners is that’s what they want to do,” he said. “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue in a different kind of a job, but they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal. That’s what they love to do.”

Environmental groups slam orders

Even before the orders were signed, environmental advocacy groups panned them as a giveaway to the industry and a reckless move away from attention to the climate crisis.

“Trump’s coal orders take his worship of dirty fossil fuels to a gross and disturbingly reckless new level,” Jason Rylander, the legal director of the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said in a written statement. “This is yet another assault on efforts to preserve a livable climate.”

Lena Moffitt, the executive director of environmental group Evergreen Action, said true energy reliability would come from renewable sources.

“Coal is toxic and outdated,” Mofitt said in a statement. “It poisons our air and water, jacks up household energy bills, and is deadly for communities living under the shadow of its smokestacks. If Trump actually cared about meeting rising energy demand, he’d invest in affordable, clean power—not drag us backward to prop up a dying industry.”

Immigration and tariffs

Trump spoke for about 45 minutes and touched on issues beyond energy policy, including his recently enacted tariffs that have rocked world financial markets and the case of a Maryland man erroneously swept up in a deportation operation.

Trump promoted his aggressive immigration policy and referenced the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a man who the administration has admitted was mistakenly deported from Maryland to his native El Salvador despite being granted legal protection to remain in the United States.

The administration sent planeloads of Venezuelan nationals to an El Salvador mega-prison last month, accusing them of being members of the gang Tren de Aragua.

Without naming Abrego Garcia, Trump referenced a man sent to El Salvador who was not a member of the Venezuelan gang, but said he was a member of a different Latin American gang. The government has produced no evidence to suggest Abrego Garcia is a gang member.

On tariffs, Trump said the taxes on imported goods were already bringing in billions of dollars daily in new federal revenue and were critical to protect U.S. industries.

“We’ve been ripped off and abused by countries for many years with the tariff situation,” he said. “They’ve used tariffs against us. We didn’t use tariffs against them in any way, but we just didn’t use them of any monumental proportion. And so we are doing it now.”

He did not respond to a shouted question about Republican unease with the worldwide tariffs at the close of the White House event.

The James H. Shannon Building on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. (Photo by  Lydia Polimeni, National Institutes of Health)

Sixteen states with Democratic attorneys general sued the National Institutes of Health on Friday, claiming the agency has purposefully delayed and disrupted medical research grant awards and terminated grants that had already been issued.

In an 82-page complaint that names Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and NIH Director Jayanta Bhattacharya as defendants, the attorneys general said since President Donald Trump retook office, NIH has delayed the review approvable process for grants that should have been awarded.

The agency has refused to pay for multi-year grants that were approved under previous administrations, citing disagreements over race and gender issues, the suit filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts says.

Massachusetts, California, Maryland, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin filed the suit.

NIH work ‘in jeopardy’

The attorneys general in those states praised the NIH as “the crown jewel” of health research that has fueled medical breakthroughs and spurred economic growth across the country.

“That critical work is now in jeopardy,” they wrote. “By law, NIH provides much of its support for scientific research and training in the form of grants to outside institutions. Since January, however, the current Administration has engaged in a concerted, and multi-pronged effort to disrupt NIH’s grants.”

Starting last month, NIH sent “hundreds of letters” to research institutions in the states canceling grants that had already been issued. The institutions were told the grants “no longer effectuate… agency priorities,” according to the complaint.

Those cancellations stem from three executive orders Trump signed on his first day back in office targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and recognition of transgender people. Agency leaders followed up with directives to pause related grants.

The letters to research institutions declare “the grant in question has been terminated because of some connection to ‘DEI,’ ‘transgender issues,’ “vaccine hesitancy,” or another topic disfavored by the current Administration,” the attorneys general wrote.

HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

Yet another legal battle

The department is also facing a suit from a wider group of Democratic states over the cancellation of other grants that were initially issued during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those states say the department overrode extensions of the grants and rescinded $11 billion in funding that has led to layoffs and work stoppages.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered those grants to be temporarily restored as the case unfolds.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. departs after testifying in a confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Jan. 30, 2025, in Washington, D.C.  (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

A federal judge in Rhode Island will grant a request from Democratic state officials to temporarily prevent President Donald Trump’s administration from cutting state health grants, the judge said at a Thursday afternoon hearing.

U.S. District Court Judge Mary McElroy said the 24 Democratic attorneys general and governors were likely to prevail on the merits of their case seeking to restore funding that the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services abruptly rescinded late last month.

““I’m going to grant the temporary restraining order. The balance of the equities are to maintaining the funding as it is,” McElroy said after brief arguments from attorneys representing a consortium of state governments and HHS. “The harm to the plaintiff states and the plaintiff agencies if we cease that … is clearly irreparable.”

HHS, under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., revoked $11 billion in grant funding to states beginning on March 24, the states wrote in a Tuesday filing requesting the court block the move.

McElroy indicated at least part of her decision was based on the broadness of the Trump administration’s argument.

The administration was hampered from fighting the case after receiving the states’ motion for a temporary restraining order and “4,000 pages of exhibits” mere days ago, Leslie Kane, who represented HHS, said.

“Given the time limitation … it really significantly limits any substantive argument I can make at this time,” Kane said. She still offered a general objection to the “extraordinary emergency relief” she said the states were seeking.

But McElroy, whom Trump appointed during his first presidency, ruled that the “voluminous” record provided by the states weighed in favor of granting the order.

“Given that the government really hasn’t had time to make any kind of objection except a broad objection, I don’t see how I can deny the temporary restraining order on the record that’s before the court, which, again: quite voluminous,” McElroy said.

States scrambling

The rescissions of grant funding in late March from COVID-19-era laws surprised state health departments and led to rapid layoffs and pauses in contract work while states scrambled to understand what other cuts they would need to make.

Sarah Rice, an assistant attorney general in Rhode Island who argued for the Democratic states, listed several effects already or soon to be felt by the states.

In Minnesota, 170 employees had already been laid off, with hundreds more at risk of job loss. Rhode Island employees with extensive training on vaccine storage might be laid off. Subcontractors in Wisconsin were told to pause their work, and Washington state may be unable to move substance abuse and mental health patients from a “high-acuity” treatment setting to community treatment, Rice said.

“These are just exemplars from the very many declarations that the state employees put together,” she said.

States had no advance warning their funding would be pulled, and were especially shocked by the reversal of funding because HHS had told them how to continue to use COVID-19 funding, Rice said.

“This was quite a surprising turn because HHS had prior issued guidance that instructed the states how to modify these programs to comply with the appropriations statutes after the public health emergency related to COVID-19 had ended,” Rice said.

The department had even granted states extensions for various grants as late as June 2027, Rice added.

The attorneys general of Colorado, Rhode Island, California, Minnesota, Washington, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon and Wisconsin and Govs. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania brought the case.

A NOAA NO-XP radar antenna prior to operations in VORTEX 2 in Norman, Oklahoma, on Oct. 5, 2010.  (Photo credit NOAA)

Democrats on the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee and a panel of experts on Wednesday blasted the Trump administration’s reduction to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget and workforce, citing consequences for everyday weather data, national security and affected industries.

Virtually every American interacts with NOAA’s weather data, which supplies forecasting services across the country.

The agency’s climate and oceanic research supports the U.S. Navy’s operations and even the commercial fishing industry – described during the forum as having “a love-hate relationship” with the agency – depends on NOAA to open and close fisheries, the lawmakers and experts said.

But those missions were imperiled in February by the firings of 7% of NOAA’s staff of scientists and others overseeing federal research and monitoring of weather and oceans, the group of Democrats said.

“These critical functions are being dismantled by the sweeping, indiscriminate layoffs of nonpartisan public servants and facility closures,” U.S. Rep. Seth Magaziner, a Rhode Island Democrat who led the forum, said.

The reductions in force at NOAA, which houses agencies including the National Weather Service, National Ocean Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, were part of across-the-board cuts to the federal workforce sought by President Donald Trump and billionaire White House adviser Elon Musk.

The group of Democrats, who met without involvement of the committee’s Republican majority, said the cuts would hurt a wide range of Americans who depend on the agency’s data collection and rulemaking.

Data collection and dissemination

One of NOAA’s core missions is collecting and publishing weather data across the country used in forecasting apps and other common sources of weather information.

“There is no weather forecast that’s produced in this country that isn’t dependent on NOAA, none” Mary Glackin, a former deputy under secretary for operations at the agency under presidents of both parties, said.

The availability of federal data made possible the creation of companies like Accuweather, which started by collecting data in a garage, Glackin said.

U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Jon White told the panel NOAA’s extensive forecasting data was also critical to naval operations, saying reductions in that data would hurt the military’s readiness, both shipping out of domestic stations and in potential conflict zones.

“Hurricane forecasting and typhoon forecasting rely on the data from NOAA, whether it’s satellite data,” White said. “Reductions in that data and that information provide critical threats to our military infrastructure. Ships that (start) out of Norfolk and San Diego rely on that information about upcoming storms, especially hurricanes on the East Coast. … It’s not just billions of dollars of ship damage: It’s lives that are at stake.”

Industry needs NOAA

Magaziner was the one who called the commercial fishing industry’s connection with NOAA “a love-hate relationship,” but he and witnesses noted that the agency oversees the most basic functions the industry needs to operate.

Sarah Schumann, a fisherman with operations in Rhode Island and Alaska, criticized President Joe Biden’s administration for allying too strongly with offshore wind developers, but said the new administration’s actions were also detrimental to the industry.

“These cuts will bog down the agency’s ability to serve the public for fishermen,” Schumann said. “Because of climate change, we desperately need faster, more nimble and more collaborative data collection and decision-making, and there is a very slim chance we’re going to get that with this.”

Trump’s slowdown of regulations – requiring federal agencies to withdraw 10 regulations for every one new regulation put into place – has also hampered commercial fishing operations.

Opening and closing fisheries for a season are done through NOAA rulemaking, environmental attorney Lizzie Lewis told the panel. Bluefin tuna fisheries were not closed on time and were overfished by 125% and fisheries in New England are unlikely to open on time, she said.

Efficiency?

The cuts, part of Musk’s initiative to make government more efficient, are not having their intended effect in streamlining government, Magaziner and others on the panel, including New Mexico’s Melanie Stansbury, said.

“The assertion that mass layoffs will somehow improve efficiency is not only misleading, it is outright dangerous,” Magaziner said. “Real people, real jobs and real lives are on the line. Without NOAA’s real-time data,  emergency responders are left without the critical information they need to respond to impending disasters like wildfires, hurricanes, floods and severe storms putting millions at risk.”

The layoffs also decimated morale at the agency and made attracting qualified young people to its public service mission more difficult, Lewis told the panel.

“We are losing an entire generation of scientists and leaders who can help this country,” Lewis said. “We can keep its people safe and can grow its economy. And that to me is the devastating human cost.”