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Supreme court lifts order blocking Trump's mass federal layoffs
The supreme court has cleared the way for Donald Trump’s administration to resume carrying out mass job cuts and the restructuring of agencies, key elements of his campaign to downsize and reshape the federal government.
The justices lifted San Francisco-based US district judge Susan Illston’s 22 May order that had blocked large-scale federal layoffs called “reductions in force” affecting potentially hundreds of thousands of jobs, while litigation in the case proceeds.
Workforce reductions were planned at the US departments of agriculture, commerce, health and human services, state, treasury, veterans affairs and more than a dozen other agencies.
Illston wrote in her ruling that Trump had exceeded his authority in ordering the downsizing, siding with a group of unions, non-profits and local governments that challenged the administration.
“As history demonstrates, the president may broadly restructure federal agencies only when authorized by Congress,” Illston wrote.
The judge blocked the agencies from carrying out mass layoffs and limited their ability to cut or overhaul federal programs. She also ordered the reinstatement of workers who had lost their jobs, though she delayed implementing this portion of her ruling while the appeals process plays out.
Illston’s ruling was the broadest of its kind against the government overhaul being pursued by Trump and Doge.
The San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals in a 2-1 ruling on 30 May denied the administration’s request to halt the judge’s ruling.
It said the administration had not shown that it would suffer an irreparable injury if the judge’s order remained in place and that the plaintiffs were likely to prevail in their lawsuit.
The ruling prompted the justice department’s 2 June emergency request to the supreme court to halt Illston’s order.
Controlling the personnel of federal agencies “lies at the heartland” of the president’s executive branch authority, the justice department said in its filing to the supreme court.
“The constitution does not erect a presumption against presidential control of agency staffing, and the president does not need special permission from Congress to exercise core Article II powers,” the filing said, referring to the constitution’s section delineating presidential authority.
The plaintiffs urged the supreme court to deny the request. Allowing the Trump administration to move forward with its “breakneck reorganization”, they wrote, would mean that “programs, offices and functions across the federal government will be abolished, agencies will be radically downsized from what Congress authorized, critical government services will be lost and hundreds of thousands of federal employees will lose their jobs”.
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It appears that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived at the White House for his closed-door meeting with Donald Trump.
A White House pool reporter says that Netanyahu’s motorcade has arrived, though press did not see Netanyahu enter the White House as he used a different entrance.
Travelers will soon be able to keep their shoes on while traversing US airport security, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem announced today, in a reversal of a nearly two decades old policy.
In a press conference at Reagan Airport today, Noem announced the new Transportation Security Administration policy, which she said she hoped would make travel to the United States easier ahead of the Olympics, World Cup and 250th anniversary of the country.
“The Golden Age of America is here,” she said. “We’re so excited that we can make the experience for those individuals traveling throughout our airports in the United States more hospitable.”
The TSA policy requiring travelers to remove their footwear dates back to 2006.
Donald Trump’s scheduled meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is starting later than the announced 4:30pm ET start time. We’ll bring you the top lines once it begins.
Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole member of the Supreme Court to dissent in the court’s recent ruling clearing the way for Donald Trump’s administration to resume mass job cuts and the restructuring of federal agencies.
In her dissent, Jackson criticized the court’s “enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture” and called the decision “hubristic and senseless.”
She warned that the administration’s actions “promises mass employee terminations, widespread cancellation of federal programs and services, and the dismantling of much of the Federal Government as Congress has created it.”
Marco Rubio is headed to Malaysia this week, the Washington Post reports. The trip will mark the secretary of state’s first visit to Asia, which comes as the White House has just announced steep tariffs on goods imported from many other Asian nations.
Yesterday, Donald Trump announced 25% tariffs on goods from Malaysia, and equal or higher tariffs on goods from Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Myanmar.
Relatedly, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, told CNBC today that US officials will meet with their Chinese counterparts to discuss trade between the two countries next month.
Supreme court lifts order blocking Trump's mass federal layoffs
The supreme court has cleared the way for Donald Trump’s administration to resume carrying out mass job cuts and the restructuring of agencies, key elements of his campaign to downsize and reshape the federal government.
The justices lifted San Francisco-based US district judge Susan Illston’s 22 May order that had blocked large-scale federal layoffs called “reductions in force” affecting potentially hundreds of thousands of jobs, while litigation in the case proceeds.
Workforce reductions were planned at the US departments of agriculture, commerce, health and human services, state, treasury, veterans affairs and more than a dozen other agencies.
Illston wrote in her ruling that Trump had exceeded his authority in ordering the downsizing, siding with a group of unions, non-profits and local governments that challenged the administration.
“As history demonstrates, the president may broadly restructure federal agencies only when authorized by Congress,” Illston wrote.
The judge blocked the agencies from carrying out mass layoffs and limited their ability to cut or overhaul federal programs. She also ordered the reinstatement of workers who had lost their jobs, though she delayed implementing this portion of her ruling while the appeals process plays out.
Illston’s ruling was the broadest of its kind against the government overhaul being pursued by Trump and Doge.
The San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals in a 2-1 ruling on 30 May denied the administration’s request to halt the judge’s ruling.
It said the administration had not shown that it would suffer an irreparable injury if the judge’s order remained in place and that the plaintiffs were likely to prevail in their lawsuit.
The ruling prompted the justice department’s 2 June emergency request to the supreme court to halt Illston’s order.
Controlling the personnel of federal agencies “lies at the heartland” of the president’s executive branch authority, the justice department said in its filing to the supreme court.
“The constitution does not erect a presumption against presidential control of agency staffing, and the president does not need special permission from Congress to exercise core Article II powers,” the filing said, referring to the constitution’s section delineating presidential authority.
The plaintiffs urged the supreme court to deny the request. Allowing the Trump administration to move forward with its “breakneck reorganization”, they wrote, would mean that “programs, offices and functions across the federal government will be abolished, agencies will be radically downsized from what Congress authorized, critical government services will be lost and hundreds of thousands of federal employees will lose their jobs”.
Trump says he will meet again with Netanyahu this evening
Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet again on Tuesday evening to discuss Gaza, a day after they met for hours while officials conducted indirect negotiations on a US-brokered ceasefire.
Trump and Netanyahu dined together on Monday at the White House during the Israeli leader’s third US visit since the president began his second term on 20 January.
Netanyahu spent much of Tuesday at the Capitol, telling reporters after a meeting with House speaker Mike Johnson that while he did not think Israel’s campaign in the Palestinian territory was done, negotiators are “certainly working” on a ceasefire.
“We have still to finish the job in Gaza, release all our hostages, eliminate and destroy Hamas’ military and government capabilities,” Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu’s plan to return to the White House at 4.30pm ET pushed back his meeting with Senate leaders to Wednesday.
Shortly after Netanyahu spoke, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff said he hoped to reach a temporary ceasefire agreement this week.
“We are hopeful that by the end of this week, we’ll have an agreement that will bring us into a 60-day ceasefire. Ten live hostages will be released. Nine deceased will be released,” Witkoff told reporters at a meeting of Trump’s cabinet earlier.
In his remarks to reporters at Congress, Netanyahu praised Trump, saying there has never been closer coordination between the US and Israel in his country’s history.
Pentagon provided $2.4tn to private arms firms to ‘fund war and weapons’, report finds
Andrew Roth
A new study of defense department spending previewed exclusively to the Guardian shows that most of the Pentagon’s discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 has gone to outside military contractors, providing a $2.4tn boon in public funds to private firms in what was described as a “continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing”.
The report from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Costs of War program at Brown University said that the Trump administration’s new Pentagon budget will push annual US military spending past the $1tn mark.
That will deliver a projected windfall of more than half a trillion dollars that will be shared among top arms firms such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon as well as a growing military tech sector with close allies in the administration such as JD Vance, the report said.
The report is compiled of statistics of Pentagon spending and contracts from 2020 to 2024, during which time the top five Pentagon contractors (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman) received $771bn in contract awards. Overall, private firms received approximately 54% of the department’s discretionary spending of $4.4tn over that period.
Taking into account supplemental funding for the Pentagon passed by Congress under Trump’s flagship sweeping tax and spending bill, the report said, the US military budget will have nearly doubled this century, increasing 99% since 2000.
“The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in September 2021 did not result in a peace dividend,” the authors of the report wrote. “Instead, President Biden requested, and Congress authorized, even higher annual budgets for the Pentagon, and President Trump is continuing that same trajectory of escalating military budgets.”
That contradicts early indications from Trump in February that he could cut military spending in half, adding that he would tell China and Russia that “there’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1tn on the military … and I’m going to say we can spend this on other things”. Instead, the spending bill pushed by Trump through Congress included a $157bn spending boost for the Pentagon.
Migrants deported from US to El Salvador prison remain under US control, Salvadorian officials tell UN
The government of El Salvador has acknowledged to United Nations investigators that the Trump administration maintains control of the Venezuelan men who were deported from the US to a notorious Salvadoran prison, contradicting past public statements by officials from both countries.
The revelation was contained in court filings on Monday by lawyers for more than 100 migrants who are seeking to challenge their deportations to El Salvador’s mega-prison known as Cecot.
“In this context, the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities,” Salvadorian officials wrote in response to queries from the unit of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The UN group has been looking into the fate of the men who were sent to El Salvador from the US in mid-March, even after a federal judge had ordered the planes that were carrying them to be turned around.
The Trump administration has argued that it is powerless to return the men, as they are beyond the reach of US courts and no longer have access to due process rights or other US constitutional guarantees.
But lawyers for the migrants said the UN report shows otherwise. American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Lee Gelernt said in an email:
El Salvador has confirmed what we and everyone else understood: it is the United States that controls what happens to the Venezuelans languishing at Cecot. Remarkably the US government didn’t provide this information to us or the court.
Skye Perryman, CEO and president of Democracy Forward, said the documents show “that the administration has not been honest with the court or the American people”. The ACLU and Democracy Forward are both representing the migrants.
A justice department spokesperson declined to comment. White House and homeland security department officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Associated Press.
The US education secretary, Linda McMahon, yesterday threatened the state of California with legal action after the state refused to ban transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports as demanded by the Trump administration.
“@CAgovernor, you’ll be hearing from @AGPamBondi,” McMahon wrote on X, using the handles for California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the US attorney general, Pam Bondi.
McMahon’s statement was the latest salvo in the culture wars over transgender youth and ratchets up the personal rivalry between Trump and Newsom. Trump has made reversing advances in transgender rights a priority since returning to office on 20 January, while California law has allowed student athletes to participate in sports in alignment with their gender identity since 2013.
The justice department declined to comment and the education department did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for clarification on the meaning of McMahon’s comment.
California’s state education department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Newsom’s office and the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), the governing body for high school sports, declined to comment.
The US education department issued a statement in June declaring California in violation of the Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IV, the education law banning sex-based discrimination, and demanding the state alter its policy. The state rejected the federal government’s directive, and in June filed a pre-enforcement lawsuit against the US justice department in anticipation of legal action.
With controversy brewing ahead of the state high school track and field championship in June, the CIF allowed girls displaced from the finals by a transgender athlete to also be granted space to compete. The CIF also allowed girls to appear on the winners’ podium if they would have won a medal without a transgender athlete competing.
As a result, the CIF crowned two champions in the girls’ high jump and triple jump after transgender girl AB Hernandez won both events.
Trump again floats federal takeover of Washington, DC
During his cabinet meeting, Donald Trump also suggested his administration was looking into taking over governance of Washington DC.
Trump said his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was in close touch with the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, a Democrat.
It is not the first time the president floated a federal takeover of the city, home to the White House, Congress and the supreme court.
Trump told reporters in February: “I think we should take over Washington DC – make it safe. I think that we should govern District of Columbia.”
Under home rule, Congress already vets all laws in the city and federal lawmakers can overturn some of them. However, it would take an act of Congress to make federal rule a reality.
Both houses would have to vote to repeal the 1973 Home Rule Act. It would be a controversial move and unlikely to make it through.
Donald Trump said he would announce a 50% tariff on imported copper on Tuesday. The Trump administration announced a so-called Section 232 investigation into US imports of the red metal in February.
Trump had ordered the investigation into possible tariffs on copper imports to rebuild US production of a metal critical to electric vehicles, military hardware, semiconductors and a wide range of consumer goods.
Trump signed an order directing the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, to start a new national security investigation under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the same law that Trump used in his first term to impose 25% global tariffs on steel and aluminum.
A White House official said any potential tariff rate would be determined by the investigation, adding that Trump preferred tariffs over quotas.
The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, said first responders in Texas are “still looking for a lot of little girls” who remain missing after a devastating flood in Texas.
Noem described the scene in Texas as Trump met with his cabinet at the White House on Tuesday.
Noem visited Camp Mystic in Kerrville on Saturday after the catastrophic flood on Friday.
You can read our Texas live coverage here:
Trump's Middle East envoy says 60-day Gaza ceasefire could be finalized by end of week
A temporary ceasefire agreement in Gaza could be finalized by the end of the week, Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, said at the cabinet meeting.
Witkoff added that proximity talks had reduced outstanding issues from “four issues … to one”.
“We are hopeful that by the end of this week, we will have an agreement that will bring us into a 60-day ceasefire,” Witkoff said. “Ten live hostages will be released. Nine deceased will be released.”
Trump added that he would meet with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, later to discuss Gaza “almost exclusively”, describing the situation as “a tragedy” while claiming that the prime minister has been “very unfairly treated” because of his corruption trial.
“He’s been very unfairly treated. I think what they’ve done to him in Israel is very unfair. Having to do with this trial, he’s a wartime prime minister, had an unbelievable outcome, and I think he’s been treated very unfairly,” Trump said of Netanyahu.
