August 6, 2025. Welcome to Federalgovchanges Webpage! This Webpage will serve as an ongoing documentation of the changes made to U.S. federal government Web sites, as of January 20, 2025.
The content was originally added to my U.S. Federal Government & Other National Statistics Sites webpage, which included links to various federal government webpages with data that I thought would be useful for Public Health and other related-field professionals.
When resources started to be removed, I started posting these changes on LinkedIn and BlueSky, so people would know what was no longer available. And, then other changes started happening, and I decided to document these changes on the Govstats.htm page noted above.
9/4/2025 - If there wasn't a felon in the White House, taxpayer money wouldn't be wasted on contesting all the laws he is breaking and all the illegal actions he has been taking, like denying people of their rights (due process). [https://bsky.app/profile/bettycjung.bsky.social/post/3lxz3rxvrls2z]
February 2025 - U.S. Federal Government Public Health Data Issues
Historical Negationism: This involves denying the veracity of facts or manipulating data to promote a false narrative, often seen in the denial of genocides.
Dishonesty and Distortion: Intentionally misrepresenting the historical record to fit a particular ideology or political agenda is a misuse of history.
"Whitewashing": This occurs when negative aspects of history are minimized or ignored to make the past seem more palatable or to protect certain beliefs or groups, as noted in Quora.
Lack of Integrity: When sources are misrepresented, evidence is ignored, or conclusions are predetermined to serve an agenda rather than the pursuit of truth, the historical process is corrupted.
The Key Distinction
The difference lies in integrity and intent. Honest historical revision is a core academic practice, similar to applying the scientific method to our understanding of the world. Dishonest or propagandistic "revisionism," however, is a form of manipulation that distorts the past and harms efforts to understand it accurately.
ELIMINATING 10 REGULATIONS FOR EACH NEW REGULATION ISSUED: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order to unleash prosperity through deregulation.
The Order requires that whenever an agency promulgates a new rule, regulation, or guidance, it must identify at least 10 existing rules, regulations, or guidance documents to be repealed.
The Director of the Office of Management and Budget will ensure standardized measurement and estimation of regulatory costs.
It requires that for fiscal year 2025, the total incremental cost of all new regulations, including repealed regulations, be significantly less than zero.
February, 2025
This section archives my 2/7/2025. 2/14/2025, 2/21/2025, 2/28/2025, 3/7/2025 LinkedIn postings regarding issues arising from Trump's administration's changes to Public Health data and information on federal government web sites.
February 7, 2025
Decimation of U.S. Public Health and federal government data during this current administration.
According to the New York Times, More than 8,000 web pages across more than a dozen U.S. government websites have been taken down.
On February 2, 2025, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported the takedown of many public health data and informational sources:
No longer available on federal government Web sites:
CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS),
CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS)
CDC AtlasPlus
CDC HIV surveillance reports
PEPFAR Data Dashboards
Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) databases
entire website for USAID
foreignassistance.gov
Area Health Resource Files
Social Vulnerability Index
Environmental Justice Index
Health Disparities Among LQBTQ Youth,
Interim Clinical Considerations for Use of Vaccine for Mpox Prevention,
Fast Facts: HIV and Transgender People.
There are many more, see the KFF link below for full description. These resources may return, but there is no guarantee the data will be the same as before the pause as extensive revisions and editing are taking place to existing sources to comply with political changes that are not necessarily fact-based.
Dr. Katelyn Jetelina February 4, 2025 "Your Local Epidemiologist" newsletter:
After pushback, limited updates resumed:
Allowed: H5N1 data, select partner updates on Ebola, weekly high-level respiratory illness updates, and FDA food recalls (though not actively communicated).
Restricted: MMWR publication halted for the first time in 70 years, no routine disease surveillance updates (e.g., FluView), outbreak dashboards (measles, tuberculosis) frozen, and CDC staff barred from communicating with WHO or state health departments.
Scientists remain in limbo - unsure of who they can talk to, what they can say, or who is in charge. This lack of clarity is dangerous, especially during emerging threats.
February 14, 2025
Part 1: Archived sources of federal government data and eliminated webpages.
According to my 2/7/2025 posting, I tried to give an overview of the federal government's information disarray that is impacting Public Health. While some HHS, CDC and FDA webpages have been reposted, per 2/11/2025 court order, the People's CDC Report newsletter notes:
The January 21 pause on public health communications has not yet been formally lifted. We can only expect that the administration is sanitizing and altering reports, censoring scientific consensus.
During the past couple of weeks I have been searching for other ways to access missing federal government webpages and uncovered other sources that may be useful for your work. Too much information for one posting, I have split the resources into two postings:
Part 1 posting (this week) includes alternative sources of federal government data and eliminated Webpages.
Part 2 posting (~next week): Specific public health program sources; new sources of health and public health data that you may find useful to support our data needs and analyses.
Here is what I have found:
GOOD NEWS
Internet Archive , a non-profit library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, websites, and more has a section of archived CDC datasets, documents, etc., uploaded before January 28th, 2025
End of Term Web Archive (to the end of the Biden Administration)
All U.S. federal government websites are already archived by the End of Term Web Archive
Official website
February 21, 2025
Part 2: Sources of useful health and public health data
Note: 2/7, 2/14, 2/21 postings - permanent home on my U.S. Federal Government & Other National Statistics Sites webpage. Should be ready by 2/28/2025, at: https://www.bettycjung.net/Govstats.htm
Dr. Katelyn Jetelina: Data are back up on CDC website but with a banner
Doctors For America sued the administration after removing important health data and guidance from government health websites. The judge ruled in favor.
Can we trust this data? I know columns were being rearranged and variables being renamed. It's possible data was messed up-either by accident or on purpose. Confirmation analysis needed to ensure the data integrity.
USAspending.gov USAspending is official open data source of federal spending: Contracts, grants, & loans.
County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHR&R) Summary data related to health, free & public.
2024 Measures
Health Data The annual data release provides a revealing snapshot of how health is influenced by where we live, learn, work, and play. The snapshots provide communities a starting point to investigate where to make change.
Data & Documentation Find national statistics, state-level data and technical documentation including changes to our measures, guidelines for comparing data across states, information about data years and sources and more.
Harvard Dataverse Academic free, online repository. Researchers can use site to share & upload data & access what other researchers shared
Internet Archive collection page https://archive.org/details/EndofTermWebCrawls - cut and paste the URL to access if the direct link doesn't work.
February 28, 2025 Federal government climate change and transgender data have been compromised
CDC will stop processing transgender data
The CDC will no longer process transgender identity data to comply with Trump's executive orders. This will likely affect federal health surveillance systems: National HIV Behavioral Surveillance Among Transgender Women; Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. There is a major dearth of data on trans and nonbinary people in U.S.
USDA removed climate change data and online tools
A filed lawsuit regarding USDA Web site removal of climate change information. USDA's decision to purge climate change info from its websites harms organic farmers.
Trump repeatedly called climate change a "hoax" and abandoned US efforts to limit the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels causing climate change. There is overwhelming scientific consensus pollution from fossil fuels raise global average temperatures and driving more extreme weather.
Two online tools are no longer available
"Climate Risk Viewer" used to show impacts of climate change on rivers and water sheds, and how that might affect future water supplies.
"Farmer Helpline" to access funding for "climate-smart farming," loan program that supports reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
USDA's removal of all these resources violate 3 federal laws: Information Act (FOIA) that gives public the right to access key records from any federal agency, the Paperwork Reduction Act stipulating adequate notice before changing access to information, and Administrative Procedure Act that governs the way federal agencies develop regulations.
This posting will be added to https://www.bettycjung.net/Govstats.htm which now includes the previous 3 postings about changes to public health and related data on federal government websites.
This will be my final weekly update about the changes to the availability of public health and health-related data of federal government websites, not because the changes have stopped, but because they will probably continue. So, I will, however, note changes at https://www.bettycjung.net/Govstats.htm
Sad to say, many sources have been compromised, and I am not sure how reliable the available data are. Email me at: bcjungmph@yahoo.com with suggested sources and data verification studies, and I will add them to the more permanent location on the govstats page. Thanks.
IRS's Internal Revenue Manual is missing pages
Internal Revenue Manual, which outlines its policies and procedures, which could prevent taxpayers from fully complying with their fine obligations.
Michael Kaercher, Deputy Director of the Tax Law Center at NYU Law notes that changes will not simply affect this tax season, but could have long-term effects on the work of the tax agency.
National Law Enforcement Accountability Database gone
The National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), a centralized repository of official records documenting instances of misconduct and commendations for federal law enforcement officers, was established under Executive Order 14074 and was deactivated by President Trump on January 20, 2025.
The Trump administration decommissioned the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, which documented law enforcement misconduct across the country, according to the Citizens for Ethics.org, violates federal recordkeeping law.
Read NY Times editorial: The MAGA war on speech
Officials in Washington have spent the past month stripping federal websites of any hint of undesirable words and thoughts, disciplining news organizations that refuse to parrot the president's language and threatening to punish those who have voiced criticism of investigations and prosecutions.
More than 8,000 federal websites, in fact, have been taken down or altered to remove concepts derided by the MAGA movement. These include thousands of pages about vaccine research and S.T.D. prevention guidelines, efforts to prevent hate crimes, prevention of racial discrimination in drug trials and disbursement of federal grants and details of environmental policies to slow climate change.
As we have been following since the beginning of Trump's second term, websites across the entire federal government have been altered and taken offline under this administration's war on science, health, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Critical information promoting vaccines, HIV care, reproductive health options including abortion, and trans and gender confirmation healthcare have been purged from the CDC's live website under Trump. Disease surveillance data about bird flu and other concerns have either been delayed or have stopped being updated entirely. Some deleted pages across the government have at least temporarily been restored thanks to a court order, but the Trump administration has added a note rejecting "gender ideology" to some of them.
Restored CDC isn't going to have continuous updates on this type of healthcare and disease guidance, but it has brought back all of the critical data that was purged in an easy to use, easy to navigate, and fast website. Other critical archiving projects, including the End of Term Archive, have saved government websites more broadly, but many website archives are slow to use and difficult to navigate because things like interactive elements and internal linking can sometimes be wonky. Some archives require users to download files to navigate them on their own computers, for example. Archives on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine are a great public service, but depending on the snapshot, they can be slow to load and some elements may be broken. Using RestoredCDC.org, meanwhile, is like using any other website, and the team hopes that the pages will be indexed by Google so they will be easily discoverable on search engines.
"Therefore, we will re-build the links between the pages, to create a site that can be navigated the same way as the pre-January 21, 2025 CDC site," they wrote. "The only changes we will make on these pages is to add a header that indicates that this site is not a CDC website. Because of the complex navigation between pages, we will also include a button to report problems in this header. Our goal is to provide a mirror site that provides the same information and user experience as the previous CDC website."
"Our goal is to provide a resource that includes the information and data previously available," the team wrote. "We are committed to providing the previously available webpages and data, from before the potential tampering occurred. Our approach is to be as transparent as possible about our process. We plan to gather archival data and then remove CDC logos and branding, using GitHub to host our code to create the site."
The purge could delete as many as 100,000 images or posts in total, when considering social media pages and other websites that are also being culled for DEI content.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given the military until Wednesday to remove content that highlights diversity efforts in its ranks following President Donald Trump's executive order ending those programs across the federal government.
The vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women and minorities, including notable milestones made in the military. And it also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months - such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women.
In some cases, photos seemed to be flagged for removal simply because their file included the word "gay," including service members with that last name and an image of the B-29 aircraft Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.
He noted that Hegseth has declared that "DEI is dead" and that efforts to put one group ahead of another through DEI programs erodes camaraderie and threatens mission execution.
The shred and burn initiative may violate federal law. The American Foreign Service Association, a union that represents diplomats, warned that the destruction of documents may violate the Federal Records Act, which requires agencies to abide by certain document retention requirements. Under the law, printed documents are required to be saved in a digital format before being destroyed-and it's not clear that there has been any effort to digitize the documents that are getting put through the shredder or into the burn bags.
USAID isn't alone in its apparent efforts to obfuscate access to documents. DOGE, which is responsible in large part for gutting USAID, has been trying to operate in secrecy as much as possible. Elon Musk has thrown hissy fits over members of his staff being named in public-a thing that would be standard for basically any other government agency. And for the entirety of its operation thus far, DOGE has ignored Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by claiming that it is immune from the process by arguing that it is a 'presidential records entity' that serves as a shield against public disclosure.
The DoD has purged 26,000 images from its public database as part of a "digital content refresh." The photo purge is the result of Donald Trump's executive order ordering the end of "radical and wasteful government DEI programs." After Trump signed the order, the Pentagon announced the purge of woke images from its databases and started removing stuff from the internet.
The goal, it said, was to take down all DEI-related imagery and articles on its various websites as part of a "digital content refresh" that more closely aligns with the Trump administration and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseht's views of the American military.The purge has been slipshod and imprecise. It's unclear why this picture of The Enola Gay was removed from an Air Force page, but I would guess it's because the URL ends in "deiatomic-exposure" and triggered an automatic system looking for the letters "DEI." As with so many other things in the Trump administration, the facts are slippery and seem to change moment to moment.
But the Pentagon has still removed a lot of content, mostly related to Black and female servicemembers and various diversity and inclusion initiatives. A 15-year-old article on the Air Force website about an all-female crew of AF support staff is gone. A lecture from a Tuskegee Airman about integration is gone. Photos of a multicultural celebration at a Marine Corps base are gone. The disappeared content is overwhelmingly stuff that featured women and non-white service members.
Much of the world, including U.S. citizens, view the American military as a group of bullies and thugs. The Pentagon has worked hard to shift that perception. The images and videos it is scrubbing from the internet are part of a concerted campaign to show America and the world that it was more than just killers. Trump and Hegseth have decided that's all the Pentagon is and all it can ever be.
A fake CDC page went up then down this weekend (Stat Morning Rounds. March 24, 2025)
A website looking just like one run by the CDC, but featuring anti-vaccine propaganda, seemed to have been launched on Friday by a group formerly run by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The brazenness of the move was stunning, with the website using the CDC's official logo, as well as the same font, color scheme, and page layout as used by the agency's website. Anyone who stumbled across the faux page could have been forgiven for thinking the page was legitimate and left puzzled by the questions it raised about the safety of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, the chief target of vaccine opponents.
By Saturday evening, the site was dark. The New York Times reported that Kennedy had instructed the Children's Health Defense, which appeared to be responsible, to take it down. But questions remain about why the organization, which has not publicly claimed credit for the work, went to the effort involved in mounting the page, and why it appeared to think it could use the trademarks of a government agency. The Internet Archive captured images of the page on Friday and Saturday. - Helen Branswell
Significantly, the December 2024 organic pet food rule assured pet owners that slaughter by-products (used in organic pet foods) were sourced from inspected and passed animals. Quoting USDA:
"The term organic slaughter by-products refers to the parts of organic animals that humans do not typically eat, such as offal, gristle, and bone. It does not refer to substandard animal products from diseased animals, uninspected animals, condemned animals, or animals deemed unfit for human consumption."
The USDA itself admitted that the rules approved in December 2024 resolved "problems by, first, establishing that organic pet food is regulated as a processed product rather than as livestock feed."
But, if these regulations are cut – organic pet food will again be faced with problems. Organic pet food will return to being regulated as livestock feed.
If these regulations are cut, there would be nothing in place to prevent an organic feed grade pet food from sourcing "substandard animal products from diseased animals, uninspected animals, condemned animals, or animals deemed unfit for human consumption."
Until the recent changes, VA hospitals' bylaws said that medical staff could not discriminate against patients "on the basis of race, age, color, sex, religion, national origin, politics, marital status or disability in any employment matter". Now, several of those items - including "national origin," "politics" and "marital status" - have been removed from that list.
Similarly, the bylaw on "decisions regarding medical staff membership" no longer forbids VA hospitals from discriminating against candidates for staff positions based on national origin, sexual orientation, marital status, membership in a labor organization or "lawful political party affiliation".
The CDC Data Project was developed by Fired But Fighting, a network of former CDC employees, to summarize publicly available federal agency and budget data to show the impact of the proposed FY26 budget on efforts to help Americans live safer, healthier and longer lives. Take a moment to review the site, educate yourself on the budget cuts proposed to public health and share this with your contacts. This is a great resource for advocacy to support public health. (APHA)
TEC Briefs
TEC Briefs are focused, actionable documents that synthesize critical information on time-sensitive public health topics. They deliver multidisciplinary perspectives to public health leaders when rapid, evidence-based decision-making is essential. 6/2025
Fifth National Climate Assessment 2023 7/1/2025. The NOAA IR serves as an archival repository of NOAA-published products including scientific findings, journal articles, guidelines, recommendations, or other information authored or co-authored by NOAA or funded partners. As a repository, the NOAA IR retains documents in their original published format to ensure public access to scientific information.
August 4, 2025
Graphic source: https://www.statista.com/chart/34931/difference-between-preliminary-and-final-data-for-additions-losses-to-nonfarm-payroll-employment/?lid=d8s00pudgiuo
August 4, 2025
Graphic source:https://www.statista.com/chart/34932/experts-on-the-quality-of-official-us-economic-statistics/?lid=mm9pbu20sngk&utm_source=braze
Tuesday, August 05, 2025
How Trump is reshaping government data
Meteorological data collected by some weather balloons has been halted. Statistics for HIV among transgender people were scrubbed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website. And basic public figures, like how many people work for the federal government, have been frozen or delayed for months.
Across the federal government, President Donald Trump has been wielding his influence over data used by researchers, economists and scientists, an effort that was playing out largely behind the scenes until he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
US Constitution Annotated As of August 6, 2025, before the proposed deletion of Section 9 (Habeus Corpus) and Section 10 (Congress and tariffs)
Notation on top of webpage about data issues
Krassenstein - Before removal of Sections 9 and 10
Federal Judge, Warning of 'Existential Threat' to Democracy, Resigns. New York Times, November 10, 2025
Judge Mark L. Wolf, writing in The Atlantic, said he was stepping down to speak out against the "assault on the rule of law" by President Trump, whom he accused of "targeting his adversaries."
The shutdown is set to end, and many Democrats are angry. New York Times, November 10, 2025
The 40-day logjam finally broke last night when eight senators in the Democratic caucus split with the party to strike a deal with Republicans. Their plan would reverse federal layoffs and ensure retroactive pay for furloughed workers, but it did not include Democrats’ central demand — the extension of Obamacare subsidies that are slated to expire at the end of the year.
In response, Democrats from nearly every ideological corner rebuked the reopening plan, which left them all but powerless in negotiations over health tax credits and other issues. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, described the deal as inadequate; Bernie Sanders called it a “policy and political disaster”; and even Stefany Shaheen, a congressional candidate whose mother was one of the Democrats who defected, criticized the plan.
The housing finance director fired internal watchdogs. Washington Post, November 10, 2025.
What happened: Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, who also oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, fired watchdogs at Fannie Mae last month.
Why it matters: The watchdogs were looking into a high-ranking company officer who is close to Pulte.
Trump proposed direct tariff payments to Americans. Washington Post, November 11, 2025
What he said: "People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS!" he wrote on Truth Social, adding that everyone but "high income people" would get a $2,000 dividend as a result of his policy.
It's unlikely: The U.S. has collected $174 billion in tariff revenue, but Trump’s rebate plan could cost nearly $300 billion. Meanwhile, small businesses dependent on imports, like coffee shops, are struggling.
Trump floated the idea of a 50-year mortgage. Washington Post, November 11, 2025
Why? One person close to the White House said the notion came after Democrats swept last week's elections, in part on messaging around affordability.
Would it save buyers money? Monthly payments would be lower, with a longer mortgage timeline. But buyers would pay much more interest over two extra decades - we crunched some numbers.
How two top FDA officials are quietly upending vaccine regulations. STAT, Morning Rounds, November 12, 2025.
The FDA has limited access to Covid-19 vaccines in a number of ways this year. And while many observers point to Kennedy as the source behind these changes, two leaders at the agency are driving plans to reshape vaccine regulation far beyond Covid-19.
Special assistant and clinical advisor Tracy Beth Høeg and vaccine center director Vinay Prasad. The two have seized control from career scientists who run the FDA's vaccine surveillance programs, changing procedures rapidly with little staff input. "Why don't you want people that have been doing this all their life to weigh in?" said Kathryn Edwards, a former advisory committee member and vaccinologist.
Høeg and Prasad are working on making it harder for doctors to offer different vaccines at the same time, and are unilaterally changing study designs to try and pick up more adverse events from vaccines. In September, Høeg suggested a label change that would make it prohibitively difficult for young men to receive Covid shots, based on thin evidence. She backed down after staff pushed back.
3 takeaways from the new Epstein emails mentioning Trump CNN, November 12, 2025
To recap what we already knew: Trump in 2002 referred to how Epstein liked women "on the younger side." A Florida businessman said in a 2019 interview that he raised concerns with Trump about Epstein "going after younger girls" at a 1992 "calendar girl" event. Trump adviser Roger Stone in a 2016 book quoted Trump talking about how Epstein's "swimming pool was full of beautiful young girls" and joking that it was nice of Epstein to "let the neighborhood kids use his pool."
Trump said he didn't "know really why" Maxwell was recruiting people. (Maxwell has denied recruiting people.) But Giuffre was a minor. To the extent Trump was aware of the particulars of the situation = and was aware of Epstein's taste for young females - that would seem to raise red flags.
"It makes us ask if he was aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's criminal actions," Giuffre's two brothers and her sisters-in-law said. (https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/31/politics/trump-ghislaine-maxwell-clemency-giuffre)
If Trump actually spent time with Giuffre, as Epstein's email seems to say, it would not only raise questions about why. It would also make Trump's handling of the situation appear even more bizarre. The emails undercut Maxwell’s attempts to distance Trump from Epstein. And sure enough, Maxwell said things that were helpful to the president. She basically said she had no knowledge of any Trump wrongdoing and downplayed his relationship with Epstein. The new emails call her claims into question.
Actual Emails
After Trump Split, Epstein Said He Could 'Take Him Down' New York Times, November 12, 2025.
Jeffrey Epstein cast himself as a Trump insider and wanted to leverage potentially damaging information about the president and his business dealings, according to emails with associates.
BREAKING: Republicans Break From Trump as More Bombshell Epstein Documents Released. I have analyzed much of the 23,000 documents. All I can say is one word: wow. The Parnas Perspective. November 12, 2025
The political ground is already shifting. In just the last few hours, Republicans have begun breaking from Donald Trump in ways we have not seen before. Three have publicly said they will vote to support the Epstein Files discharge petition when it reaches the House floor: Warren Davidson, Eli Crane, and Don Bacon.
The stakes are simple: either we believe that no one is above the law, or we don’t. The new Epstein files make that choice unavoidable. It is time to bring the full record into the light-no exceptions, no sacred cows, and no more delays.
The U.S. is expected to significantly cut housing grants
The Trump administration has developed plans for the most consequential shift in homelessness policy in a generation. New York Times, November 13, 2025.
According to a confidential plan reviewed by The Times, the U.S. would slash its main source of support for homelessness - $3.5 billion in long-term housing programs for disabled recipients - and redirect most of it to programs that prioritize work and drug treatment, and that help the police dismantle encampments.
The Trump administration said obesity can be a reason to deny visas. Washington Post, Tracking Trump, November 13, 2025.
What happened: Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed visa officers to consider chronic health conditions, including obesity, when evaluating visa applications.
Why: A White House spokeswoman said that the State Department has the authority to deny visas for those "who would pose a financial burden to taxpayers."
Transgender veterans sued the Trump administration. Washington Post, Tracking Trump. November 13, 2025
The suit: A group of 17 transgender Air Force veterans sued the Trump administration Monday, alleging they have been unlawfully denied early retirement benefits.
Background: In January, Trump issued an executive order barring transgender members from the military. Also: In August, the Air Force decided to deny transgender members the option of early retirement with benefits, prompting the suit.
The Agriculture Dept. plans to fire a worker who warned about SNAP funds. Washington Post, Tracking Trump. November 13, 2025
What to know: The Agriculture Department is preparing to fire Ellen Mei, a furloughed staffer who told MSNBC that the shutdown could hurt Americans' access to food aid.
Why: USDA informed Mei that she had discussed USDA programs and funding "without prior approval," though the information she shared was publicly available at the time.
HHS email to employees: "The Democrat-led shutdown is over" CNN, November 13, 2025
It's the latest in a series of highly unusual steps from the Trump administration throughout the funding stalemate to use the federal government and its employees to promote political messaging related to the shutdown. As CNN previously reported, in one instance, multiple furloughed workers from the Department of Education had out-of-office messages blaming Democrats for the shutdown automatically sent from their email accounts without their consent or knowledge. Federal workers at other agencies, meanwhile, said they were provided with suggested partisan language to include in their own out-of-office email notices.
Over the more than month-long closure, messages appeared on several agency webpages blaming Democratic senators for Congress' failure to agree to extend funding at the start of the fiscal year. These actions raised concerns about the Hatch Act, which states that federal government officials and employees are required to perform their duties in a nonpartisan manner.
The federal law is intended to "protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace," according to the Office of the Special Counsel.
Epstein emails say Trump 'knew about the girls'; new House Democrat pledges file release Reuters.com, Updated November 13, 2025
Democrats release emails from Epstein, including one in which he said Trump 'knew about the girls'; Trump says disclosure attempt to divert attention from shutdown; Democrats say emails raise new questions about relationship between Trump and Epstein; House to vote next week on releasing more files.
She criticized President Trump during the shutdown. Now she's been put on leave NPR.org November 14, 2025
Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institutes of Health, says she has been put on paid leave following the end of the government shutdown. "I was not given a reason for being put on leave, but I strongly suspect it is because I have been speaking up in my personal capacity about the harms that I have been witnessing inside the National Institutes of Health." She is among a number of federal employees who have been openly critical of the Trump administration, both before and during the 43-day shutdown.
The Trump administration was politicizing research and canceling studies, putting the health of participants at risk. Norton said she believed the Trump administration's deep funding and staffing cuts have created a situation inside NIH that is far worse than the public realizes. "I feel like I have this front row seat to the destruction of our democracy," she said. "We are seeing it in real time with a president who is asking us to do things that are illegal and harmful to the American public."
"I didn't leak secrets or share anything confidential," said Ellen Mei. "I told the truth about what's happening to hungry families and the people who serve them. I took an oath to serve the public - not to stay quiet while our government turns its back on the American people."
Norton says she believes federal workers not only have a right but an obligation to speak publicly on matters of the public interest. She points to a 1968 Supreme Court decision that found public employees can speak on matters of public concern as long as the speech doesn't disrupt government operations. She knows federal employees also have whistleblower rights.
"Allowing civil servants to put up a red flag when we're seeing a problem is critical to maintaining our democracy," she told NPR in October. "These civil service protections aren't really about protecting me as a federal worker. They're about protecting our country."
"I was never under the impression that my rights would be respected," she said. "I also recognized… that if you don't assert your rights because you're afraid or because you're demoralized or for whatever reason, then you've already given them up. You've let them be taken away. And I was determined not to do that."
Trump asked the Justice Dept. to investigate Epstein's ties to Bill Clinton. Washington Post, Tracking Trump. November 14, 2025
New: Attorney General Pam Bondi said she's appointed a prosecutor to investigate Jeffrey Epstein's ties to Bill Clinton and other prominent Americans after President Donald Trump called for a probe.
Who else: Trump named Lawrence H. Summers, who served as treasury secretary under Clinton, and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, and said "many other people and institutions" will be included.
The State Department erased 15 pages of nuclear history. Washington Post, Tracking Trump, November 14, 2025.
What happened: Fifteen pages on the risk of nuclear war sparked by a 1983 NATO exercise were removed from the State Department's online history of the Reagan administration.
Context: The State Department is required by law to maintain "thorough, accurate, and reliable" histories of U.S. foreign policy.
Why: A brief notation in the spot says the 15 pages have been redacted, a first for a State Department history publication.
President Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate ties between Jeffrey Epstein and prominent Democrats, in apparent retaliation for the release of emails linking Trump and Epstein. New York Times, November 15, 2025.
Top News. Justice Department to Investigate Epstein Ties, but Not to Trump. New York Times, November 15, 2025.
President Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate the dealings of Democrats with Jeffrey Epstein, after a week in which his own relationship with the convicted sex offender was in the spotlight.
U.S. Judge Orders Trump Not to Threaten University of California's Funding An extraordinary rebuke to the federal government's campaign against elite schools, the ruling could upend settlement talks with the university system. New York Times, November 15, 2025
US Justice Department heeds Trump's demand to probe Epstein ties with Democrats Reuters.com November 15, 2025
The Epstein scandal has been a political thorn in Trump's side for months, partly because he amplified conspiracy theories about Epstein to his own supporters. Many Trump voters believe Bondi and other Trump officials have covered up Epstein’s ties to powerful figures and obscured details surrounding his death by suicide in a Manhattan jail in 2019.
Trump has harnessed the Justice Department to target other perceived political enemies, notably former FBI Director James Comey and New York State Attorney General Letitia James, both of whom were charged after Trump replaced the prosecutor leading the cases.
Legal experts say Trump's demands could undermine the criminal cases that emerge from those probes, as judges can dismiss cases found to be motivated by "vindictive prosecution" - which both Comey and James have raised, though judges have not yet ruled on their requests to dismiss the cases.
Patrick J. Cotter, a former federal prosecutor, said it was "outrageously inappropriate" for Trump to order the department to investigate individual citizens, adding, "That's not how it's supposed to work."
Clinton's deputy chief of staff, Angel Urena, said on X, "These emails prove Bill Clinton did nothing and knew nothing. The rest is noise meant to distract from election losses, backfiring shutdowns, and who knows what else." Just four in 10 Republicans in an October Reuters/Ipsos poll said they approved of Trump's handling of the Epstein files, well below the nine in 10 who approve of his overall performance in the White House.
A chaotic year. Chaos at the Justice Department. New York Times, November 17, 2025
President Trump's second term has been difficult for the nation's most powerful law enforcement agency.
The administration has taken away safeguards that protected the agency from political influence. Trump officials have directed criminal investigations that would usually have nothing to do with the White House. They've ignored ethics rules and told attorneys to drop cases. They've fired hundreds of career attorneys. Thousands more have resigned. The department's culture of independence and impartiality has shattered.
Attorneys at the Justice Department are generally nonpartisan career public servants: backstagers rather than stars. They rarely speak to the press. They're also fearful of the Trump administration's crackdown on leaks - and leakers. One said attorneys in the agency had sound machines at their desks because they were convinced people were listening to them. 'The way we did investigations drastically changed.'
Lawyers in the department's Civil Rights Division were told in March to investigate schools in the University of California system for antisemitism and employment discrimination. Multiple teams went to Berkeley, U.C.L.A., U.C. Davis and U.C.S.F. The only school, it became clear, where there might be a violation was U.C.L.A. One colleague said, "We have to feed something to the wolves." The team concluded that the complaint process at the school was broken. Some professors we interviewed really did suffer on campus. They were harassed by groups of students.
But the D.O.J. demand letter to U.C.L.A. asked for $1 billion in damages. We thought, $1 billion? They are making that up out of thin air. There is no way the damages we found added up to anything like that amount. 'Our job was to find the facts that would fit the narrative that the administration already had.'
In March, Trump issued an executive order punishing elite law firms that had performed legal work for Democrats or helped investigate the president's ties to Russia and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The order accused the law firm Perkins Coie of "dishonest and dangerous activity" and racial discrimination. Trump directed federal agencies to terminate the firm's government contracts. Dena Robinson, a lawyer in the Civil Rights Division, recalled: The idea of the investigation was that Perkins Coie supposedly engaged in illegal discrimination against white men. But Perkins Coie is an extremely white firm - only 3 percent of the partners are Black. When my colleague pointed that out, the leadership didn't care. They'd already reached their conclusion. They continued instructing my colleague to just find the evidence for it.
'It was strongly suggested to me that Mel Gibson is someone who had a personal relationship with the president.' In March, Liz Oyer, then the pardon attorney at the Justice Department, was fired after she declined to recommend restoring gun rights to the actor Mel Gibson, who was convicted of a misdemeanor domestic-violence charge in 2011. She told Emily and Rachel: Mel Gibson has a history of domestic violence, and I'm well aware from my experience and training that it is very dangerous for a person with a domestic-violence history to possess a firearm. As attorney general, Bondi has the power to restore rights without my blessing. My recommendation was sought, I believe, to give a veneer of legitimacy to what was actually a political favor for a friend of the president. 'It's unprecedented to shift resources away from national security to this degree.'
In May, F.B.I. officials ordered field offices to devote a third of their time to immigration enforcement. That meant pulling back on important investigations. A prosecutor in the D.C. metro area said: Virginia and D.C. have the most important offices for counterterrorism and espionage. We get cases from the Middle East, long and complex investigations of terrorist threats from abroad and also domestically. In the Eastern District, there were 12 to 14 lawyers in the national security unit and now there are four, with no deputy or chief. In D.C., the national security unit is down about 50 percent. I was recently on the floor where F.B.I. agents work on domestic terrorism and it was completely hollowed out.
'They didn't want to return gifts, they didn't want to not accept gifts, whatever the source.' In July, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, fired the Justice Department's top ethics adviser, Joseph Tirrell. He told Emily and Rachel about briefing Bondi on the rules about accepting gifts as a federal employee and said that disagreements over ethics rules became a "recurring theme" with her office:
We got a request about some cigars from Conor McGregor and a soccer ball from FIFA. And I felt like I really had to go to the mattress to convince the A.G.'s office: You can pay for the item or you can return the item or you can throw the item away. There's no other way to do this.
FEMA is in limbo. New York Times, November 17, 2025.
David Richardson, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, resigned today after six months on the job. The next leader of FEMA, Karen Evans, lacks experience in emergency management, which is a legal requirement to lead the agency. The moves highlighted a fact that has worried FEMA employees for months: The agency's future is unclear. Trump suggested earlier this year that he wanted to eliminate the agency, and Richardson's predecessor was pushed out a day after arguing that FEMA was vital. More recently, the president has indicated that he wants the agency to be overhauled to shift more responsibility for disaster response to the states.
Already, about a third of FEMA's work force - roughly 2,000 employees - have left since Trump took office. And Evans, who is set to take over the agency on Dec. 1, has played a central role in the Trump administration's efforts to cut costs there. In the coming weeks, the administration is expected to release a report on its plans for FEMA.
Statistica, November 17, 2025
The U.S. plans to reduce protections for wetlands. New York Times November 17, 2025
The Trump administration announced a plan to significantly restrict the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to limit pollution in wetlands, rivers and other bodies of water. The proposal would strip protections from bodies of water that are not "relatively permanent," potentially affecting as much as 85 percent of wetlands nationwide.
A judge said the Department of Justice committed potential misconduct in the Comey case. Washington Post, Tracking Trump, November 17, 2025.
Today: U.S. Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick criticized the prosecution of former FBI director James B. Comey, accusing the Justice Department of potential misconduct.
More: Fitzpatrick ordered federal prosecutors to turn over the full transcripts and audio of the grand jury proceedings in the case.
Congress acts swiftly to force release of Epstein files, and Trump agrees to sign bill AP News, November 18, 2025
Both the House and Senate acted decisively Tuesday to pass a bill to force the Justice Department to publicly release its files on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a remarkable display of approval for an effort that had struggled for months to overcome opposition from President Donald Trump and Republican leadership.
But both Trump and Johnson failed to prevent the vote. The president in recent days bowed to political reality, saying he would sign the bill. And just hours after the House vote, senators agreed to approve it unanimously, skipping a formal roll call.
The decisive, bipartisan work in Congress Tuesday further showed the pressure mounting on lawmakers and the Trump administration to meet long-held demands that the Justice Department release its case files on Epstein, a well-connected financier who killed himself in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial in 2019 on charges he sexually abused and trafficked underage girls.
The bill forces the release within 30 days of all files and communications related to Epstein, as well as any information about the investigation into his death in federal prison. It would allow the Justice Department to redact information about Epstein's victims or continuing federal investigations, but not information due to "embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity."
Meanwhile, the bipartisan pair who sponsored the bill, Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., warned senators against doing anything that would "muck it up," saying they would face the same public uproar that forced both Trump and Johnson to back down.
"This is about giving the American people the transparency they've been crying for," said Schumer, D-N.Y. "This is about holding accountable all the people in Jeffrey Epstein's circle who raped, groom, targeted and enabled the abuse of hundreds of girls for years and years."
A prosecutor's admission could cripple the case against Comey. New York Times, November 19, 2025
Lindsey Halligan - the lawyer who was handpicked by Trump to prosecute James Comey, the former F.B.I. director - told a federal judge today that she had never shown the final version of the indictment of Comey to a full grand jury.
The admission seemed to stun the judge, who grilled Halligan and one of her subordinates about irregularities in the case, which is the first criminal case of Halligan's career. Grand jurors have to vote on indictments to approve them, and the development could give the courts reason to dismiss the case.
The Interior Dept. proposed rolling back protections for endangered species. Washington Post, Tracking Trump. November 19, 2025.
What to know: The Trump administration today announced plans to roll back parts of the Endangered Species Act, which protects, among other species, the bald eagle.
The changes: One proposal would eliminate many protections for threatened species and create tailored protections for each one.
Why: Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the change will end "regulatory overreach." Critics say it will put more species at increased risk of extinction.
After Donald Trump's Attack On Correspondent Mary Bruce, White House Goes After ABC Again With "Fake News" Press Release Yahoo! News, November 19, 2025
A day after President Donald Trump blew up at ABC News correspondent Mary Bruce and called for the network to lose its broadcast license, the White House amped up its attacks, sending out a press release on claiming that the network is "a Democrat spin operation masquerading as a broadcast network."
But it underscores Trump's anger at Bruce for merely asking his guest at the White House, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, about the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. She later asked the president about the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Then, Trump chided Bruce for asking a "horrible," "insubordinate" and "just a terrible question." Trump said to her, "You're all psyched up. Somebody psyched you over at ABC and they're going to psych it. You're a terrible person and a terrible reporter."
The network has issued no statement defending Bruce, even though a host of her colleagues and journalism groups have. "It is a little surreal, and Robin, thank you for that, but it is also, just our job," Bruce said. The network and The Walt Disney Co. have grappled with how to respond to Trump, who has threatened to use his regulatory power to go after reporting he doesn’t like or, in the case of Bruce, even questions that displease him.
In December, before Trump returned to office, ABC settled a lawsuit he brought against the network for $16 million. Trump sued after Stephanopoulos stated on This Week that "juries have found" the then-former president "liable for rape." In fact, a jury found Trump was liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.
The judge in Carroll's case, Lewis Kaplan, wrote in a later ruling, "The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was 'raped' within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump 'raped' her as many people commonly understand the word 'rape.' Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that."
RFK Jr.'s CDC fills its autism webpage with anti-vaxxer talking points. A newly updated webpage on the CDC's site shocked insiders and outsiders alike. Inside Medicine. November 20, 2025
The CDC's page on vaccines and autism is now filled with anti-vaxxer talking points. The first thing you'd notice if you opened the page might be the innocuous header text that precedes the main body of the page. That reads, "Vaccines do not cause Autism*". The problem is the asterisk-and everything else on the page.
The asterisk reads: *The header "Vaccines do not cause autism" has not been removed due to an agreement with the chair of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that it would remain on the CDC website. -The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, November 19, 2025.
Senator HELP Committee chair Bill Cassidy extracted a promise from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during his confirmation process that included a stipulation regarding the precise language of the header text for this webpage. Virtually everything else on the page is an anti-vaxxer's dream.
"This distortion of science under the CDC moniker is the reason I resigned with my colleagues," Daskalakis said, referring to simultaneous resignations of Dr. Debra Houry, Dr. Daniel Jernigan, and himself (commonly known as "The Three D's") which occurred with the firing of CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez in late August, after she valiantly refused to reflexively rubberstamp Kennedy's anti-vaccine directives.
Dr. Marc Veldhoen, a prominent immunologist in Portugal, said, "The CDC pages have now been hijacked for state-sponsored disinformation. It is terrible to see this happening. This is ideology, unscientific, over facts, data and the scientific method."
"The CDC cannot be trusted as a source. It is a weapon." -former Director of the CDC's National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis.
American Academy of PediatricsAmerican Academy of Pediatrics November 21, 2025.
The AAP and more than 40 organizations representing autistic individuals, their families, medical professionals and public health workers, are alarmed that the CDC is promoting the outdated, disproven idea that vaccines cause autism. Medical researchers across the globe have spent more than 25 years thoroughly studying this claim. All have come to the same conclusion: Vaccines are not linked to autism.
Together, we're calling on the CDC to return to its long history of promoting evidence-based information to protect Americans' health.
Statement from Leading Medical, Health and Patient Advocacy Groups on CDC Autism Website Changes
One of CDC's final blows. And what it means for you.
Where to find trusted health information now? Your Local Epidemiologist, November 21, 2025
At this time, I suggest the general public avoid the CDC website.
If you do go to the CDC website, avoid anything on vaccines, reproductive health, environmental science, or health equity.
Data systems are still largely under the control of states and CDC scientists. Flu and wastewater data, for example, are good to go.
Find trustworthy navigators outside the federal government, such as AAP, ACOG, and healthychildren.org, as well as many credible scientific communicators.
The Coast Guard reversed its posture on swastikas and other hate symbols Washington Post, Tracking Trump, November 21, 2025.
New: The Coast Guard announced last night that swastikas and nooses will remain prohibited hate symbols after facing backlash for plans to reclassify the hate symbols.
Previously: The reversal came just hours after The Post reported on new Coast Guard guidance that swastikas and nooses were “potentially divisive” rather than hate symbols.
The White House defended Trump after he called a female reporter "piggy." Washington Post, Tracking Trump, November 21, 2025
The defense: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt brushed off the backlash, saying Thursday that the insult was an example of the "frankness" that she said America likes about Trump.
A trend: Trump's history of using demeaning language to describe women has been a point of criticism for the president throughout his career.
Judge dismisses Comey, James indictments after finding that prosecutor was illegally appointed APnews, November 24, 2025
A federal judge on Monday dismissed the criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, concluding that the prosecutor who brought the charges at President Donald Trump's urging was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.
The rulings from U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie halt at least for now a pair of prosecutions that had targeted two of the president's most high-profile political opponents and amount to a stunning rebuke of the Trump administration's legal maneuvering to install an inexperienced and loyalist prosecutor willing to file cases.
The orders do not concern the substance of the allegations against Comey or James but instead deal with the unconventional manner in which the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, was named to her position as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Defense lawyers said the Trump administration had no legal authority to make the appointment. In a pair of similar rulings, Currie agreed and said the invalid appointment required the dismissal of the cases.
"All actions flowing from Ms. Halligan's defective appointment," including securing and signing the indictments, "were unlawful exercises of executive power and are hereby set aside," she wrote. Halligan, the judge said, has been serving unlawfully in the role since September 22, the day she was sworn in by Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The challenges to Halligan's appointment are just one facet of a multiprong assault on the indictments by Comey and James, who have each filed multiple motions to dismiss the cases that have not yet been resolved. Both have separately asserted that the prosecutions were vindictive and emblematic of a weaponized Justice Department. Comey's lawyers last week seized on a judge’s findings of grand jury irregularities and missteps by Halligan in moving to get his case tossed out, and James has cited "outrageous government conduct."
After Siebert resigned after having served more than 120 days in the role, defense lawyers argued, the judges of the federal court district should have had exclusive say over who got to fill the vacancy. They said the law does not permit the Justice Department to make successive appointments as an end-run around the courts and the Senate confirmation process. Currie agreed.
"The 120-day clock began running with Mr. Siebert's appointment on January 21, 2025. When that clock expired on May 21, 2025, so too did the Attorney General's appointment authority," Currie wrote. "Consequently, I conclude that the Attorney General's attempt to install Ms. Halligan as Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was invalid and that Ms. Halligan has been unlawfully serving in that role since September 22, 2025.
Though the defendants had asked for the cases to be dismissed with prejudice, meaning the Justice Department would be barred from bringing them again, the judge instead dismissed them without prejudice. The Justice Department did not immediately comment on next steps, but it is likely to appeal.
Furious over that investigation, Trump fired Comey in May 2017 and the two officials have verbally sparred in the years since.
Notable New York Times, November 25, 2025.
Trump's broken promise to confront corporate power. "The Trump administration is decimating the federal agencies that police corporations and protect workers and consumers." - The editorial board
A vaccine skeptic was quietly hired as a top C.D.C. leader. New York Times, November 25, 2025.
Ralph Abraham, who as Louisiana's surgeon general ordered the state health department to stop promoting vaccinations, is now the second in command at the C.D.C. His appointment was never announced. Abraham has called the Covid vaccines "dangerous" and instead promoted discredited treatments like ivermectin.
The FBI requested interviews with the lawmakers Trump accused of sedition. Washington Post, Tracking Trump. November 25, 2025
The latest: The FBI requested interviews with the Democratic members of Congress who made a video reminding military members of their duty to ignore illegal orders.
More: President Donald Trump called for the lawmakers to be arrested and charged with sedition "punishable by DEATH."
Yesterday: The Pentagon opened an investigation into one of the lawmakers, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), who, as a retired military officer, is subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
An vaccine-skeptic Louisiana official was appointed to the No. 2 CDC post. Washington Post, Tracking Trump. November 25, 2025.
What to know: Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham was hired to be the CDC's principal deputy director, effectively putting him in charge of the director-less agency.
More: Abraham ordered the Louisiana health department to stop promoting mass vaccinations last winter - while the state was in the midst of a surge in flu cases.
Related: The White House fired Trump's initial pick to lead the CDC, Susan Monarez, after she clashed with Trump officials over her support for vaccine recommendations.
Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com X. November 25, 2025
The CDC has turned off its vaccine search tool. The vaccines.gov site now gives an error when you enter a valid zip code. They also removed text saying “Vaccines can help you stay healthy” and added a banner saying the site is being updated.
Trump's campaign of retribution: At least 470 targets and counting Reuters.com November 26, 2025
A tally by Reuters reveals the scale: At least 470 people, organizations and institutions have been targeted for retribution since Trump took office - an average of more than one a day. Some were singled out for punishment; others swept up in broader purges of perceived enemies. The count excludes foreign individuals, institutions and governments, as well as federal employees dismissed as part of force reductions.
The Trump vengeance campaign fuses personal vendettas with a drive for cultural and political dominance, Reuters found. His administration has wielded executive power to punish perceived foes - firing prosecutors who investigated his bid to overturn the 2020 election, ordering punishments of media organizations seen as hostile, penalizing law firms tied to opponents, and sidelining civil servants who question his policies. Many of those actions face legal challenges.
At the same time, Trump and his appointees have used the government to enforce ideology: ousting military leaders deemed "woke," slashing funds for cultural institutions held to be divisive, and freezing research grants to universities that embraced diversity initiatives.
Members of the first group -at least 247 individuals and entities - were singled out by name, either publicly by Trump and his appointees or later in government memos, legal filings or other records. To qualify, acts had to be aimed at specific individuals or entities, with evidence of intent to punish.
Another 224 people were caught up in broader retribution efforts - not named individually but ensnared in crackdowns on groups of perceived opponents. Nearly 100 of them were prosecutors and FBI agents fired or forced to retire for working on cases tied to Trump or his allies, or because they were deemed "woke." This includes 16 FBI agents who kneeled at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. The rest were civil servants, most of them suspended for publicly opposing administration policies or resisting directives on health, environmental and science issues.
The retribution took three distinct forms. Most common were punitive acts, such as firings, suspensions, investigations and the revocation of security clearances. Reuters found at least 462 such cases, including the dismissal of at least 128 federal workers and officials who had probed, challenged or otherwise bucked Trump or his administration.
The second form was threats. Trump and his administration targeted at least 46 individuals, businesses and other entities with threats of investigations or penalties, including freezing federal funds for Democratic-led cities such as New York and Chicago.Trump openly discussed firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for resisting interest rate cuts, for instance. Last week, he threatened to have six Democratic members of Congress tried for sedition - a crime he said is "punishable by DEATH" - after the lawmakers reminded military personnel they can refuse "illegal orders." This week, the Defense Department threatened to court-martial one of them, U.S. Senator Mark Kelly, a former Naval officer.
The third form was coercion. In at least a dozen cases, organizations such as law firms and universities signed agreements with the government to roll back diversity initiatives or other policies after facing administration threats of punishment, such as security clearance revocations and loss of federal funding and contracts. Trump's White House has issued at least 36 orders, decrees and directives, targeting at least 100 individuals and entities with punitive actions, according to the Reuters analysis.
Yet the scale and systematic nature of Trump's effort to punish perceived enemies marks a sharp break from long-standing norms in U.S. governance, according to 13 political scientists and legal scholars interviewed by Reuters. Some historians say the closest modern parallel, though inexact, is the late President Richard Nixon's quest for vengeance against political enemies. Since May, for instance, dozens of officials from multiple federal agencies have been meeting as part of a task force formed to advance Trump's retribution drive against perceived enemies, Reuters previously reported.
"The main aim is concentration of power and destruction of all checks against power," said Daron Acemoglu, Nobel laureate in economics and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which faces an ongoing federal investigation for embracing diversity and equity programs. "Retribution is just one of the tools."
Dozens of Trump's targets have challenged their punishments as illegal. Fired and suspended civil servants have filed administrative appeals or legal challenges claiming wrongful termination. Some law firms have gone to court claiming the administration exceeded its legal authority by restricting their ability to work on classified contracts or interact with federal agencies. Most of those challenges remain unresolved.
Trump Administration Will Raise Prices for Foreign Tourists at National Parks @nytimes.com Novmber 26, 2025.
The price increases comes as more and more international travelers are choosing to stay away from the United States and amid turmoil at the National Park Service.
The Church of Disease Chronicity and Proliferation
Preventable disease is RFK, Jr's religion so I'm calling for a crusade Rasmussen Retorts, November 26, 2025.
Yesterday, the US government advised federal employees that they were not going to acknowledge World AIDS Day on December 1st. They had better not spend a single taxpayer penny on it or publicly promote it, and if they go to any events, they had better not say a word about it there, either.
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) is the end-stage of HIV disease, so in my book it qualifies as one of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) priority chronic diseases. HIV infection has a known impact on mitochondrial function and metabolism, which he and all his functional medicine cronies are frequently concerned about. You can reduce AIDS cases by reducing the prevalence of the chronic infection that causes it, so this should be a top MAHA priority. Why doesn't Kennedy want to even acknowledge that AIDS is a preventable disease that the US department he runs has made incredible progress against? Why doesn't he want to prevent other diseases or even allow HHS employees to talk about them?
Because he doesn't want to prevent diseases, whether they are chronic or acute. More disease means less opposition to his agenda. More disease means a much larger market for the supplements and miracle cures he and his friends are selling. More disease means there will always be a need for MAHA. More disease means more death, and the body count will be the achievement by which Kennedy's legacy is measured.
The MAHA movement is growing because its leadership relentlessly lies about science and health to convert new followers to their beliefs. As much as we need to do a better job reaching the public, we need to stop tolerating dishonesty and anti-vax proselytizing from the officials who are attempting to systematically dismantle public health.
The fact is that under Kennedy’s leadership, HHS has done nothing to address the HIV epidemic in the US either. They have cut grants and programs for HIV research, data collection, and community outreach, altered government websites, and demoted or fired senior officials overseeing HIV research in the US. Kennedy has effectively made it much more difficult to prevent both HIV and AIDS for millions of people at home and around the world. He has also destroyed pathways to new methods for preventing HIV completely.
There is no vaccine for HIV. Although anti-retroviral drugs work very well to prevent transmission and to control disease progression, they can select for drug resistant HIV variants and do not offer lifetime protection. An HIV vaccine that prevented transmission would obviate the need for PrEP drugs. A therapeutic vaccine for HIV might keep viral loads so low that it would prevent transmission in an HIV-positive vaccinated host, while also preventing progression to AIDS. Vaccines could end the ongoing HIV pandemic for good.
If you believe that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, and that AIDS is instead caused by lifestyle choices like being gay, having sex or using drugs for fun, eating a bad diet, or not getting enough sleep, then you might think it’s a matter of personal responsibility rather than one of public health. You might even feel unbothered about denying lifesaving medication to people on the basis of the inferior moral character and reckless behavior that supposedly causes them such bad health.
Trump's Response to Shooting Shows Intensified Anti-Migrant Stance. The president is furiously demanding limits on migration and attacking ethnic groups as he steps up his efforts to equate immigration with crime and economic distress New York Times, November 28, 2025
The shooting of two National Guard members and President Trump's response insures that immigration will remain at the center of American politics heading into the 2026 midterm election cycle. The shooting of two National Guard members by a gunman identified by the authorities as an Afghan national has set off an especially intense level of fury in President Trump and a new push to step up his anti-immigration policies. In a series of statements in the two days since the shooting on a Washington street corner just blocks from the White House, Mr. Trump has cast the attack as exactly what he has warned about and made clear that he intended to use it to pursue an even more maximalist version of his agenda.
In social media posts near midnight on Thanksgiving, he vowed to "permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries" and threatened to strip U.S. citizenship from naturalized migrants "who undermine domestic tranquillity." He threatened to "end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country" and deport foreigners deemed to be "non-compatible with Western Civilization."
On Friday, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a statement that his agency had "halted all asylum decisions until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible." On the same day, the State Department announced that it was halting visas for Afghans, including those who had helped the United States during the war in their country.
The Forgotten Nuclear Weapon Tests That Trump May Seek to Revive. New York Times, November 29, 2025.
Hydronuclear experiments, barred globally since the 1990s, may lie behind President Trump's call last month for the United States to resume its testing of nuclear bombs.
President Trump's surprise announcement last month that the United States would resume its testing of nuclear arms produced a blur of condemnations and contradictory statements. Lost in the uproar, some nuclear experts say, is a forgotten type of atomic testing. It produces no mushroom clouds and poses little radioactive risk to the public. But it can reframe the recent debate. Advocates of the blasts say they can provide valuable data for helping ensure the reliability of existing weapons. But many proponents of arms control warn that the small tests would break the three-decade taboo on the explosive testing of nuclear warheads and would reignite a global arms race.
White House launches website to excoriate media for 'biased' stories. Trump administration lists reporting it objects to in latest escalation of attacks on US journalism The Guardian, November 29, 2025
The online page also features an "Offender Hall of Shame", which includes the Washington Post, CBS News, CNN and MSNBC (now known as MS Now). Visitors can browse a searchable database of articles, along with the names of the journalists who wrote them. Each story is categorized under labels such as "bias", "malpractice" or "left wing lunacy".
Beyond those singled out as weekly offenders, the White House page also lists the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Politico and Axios among the long list of outlets it accuses of bias or misinformation.
The launch of the webpage is the latest escalation in Trump's long-running attacks on the media. It follows lawsuits against the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, legal settlements with ABC and CBS, and his repeated references to major news outlets as the "enemy of the people".
In recent weeks, Trump has also intensified his personal attacks on female journalists. Earlier this month, he referred to a Bloomberg News correspondent as a "piggy" during a clash onboard Air Force One after the president was questioned about the Epstein files.
Gutting of key US watchdog could pave way for grave immigration abuses, experts warn
Former oversight officials alarmed by dismantling of DHS system that oversees complaints about civil rights harms. The Guardian. November 30, 2025
Former federal oversight officials have sounded the alarm at the rapid dismantling of guardrails against human rights failures - at the same time as the government pushes aggressive immigration enforcement operations.
A group of fired watchdogs has filed a whistleblower complaint to Congress through the Government Accountability Project (GAP), and a coalition of human rights organizations sued the administration, demanding the employees be reinstated. There is deepening concern that a system of oversight that was already weak is now hanging by a thread, even as criticism surges over treatment of detainees in the ballooning immigration jail network.
Congress originally tasked the three offices, including CRCL, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO) and the Office of Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman (CIS), with oversight at DHS. The watchdog bodies process complaints, initiate investigations and provide guidance to DHS agencies in various areas of interest.
In recent months, the former DHS officials who have filed the whistleblower complaint have watched as the Trump administration has targeted political adversaries, expelled immigrants to a foreign prison, allowed officials to arrest immigrants at court appearances, encouraged officers to wear face coverings during arrests and targeted people who have lived in the US for years and have no criminal record.
"They don't care about civil rights concerns," one former watchdog said about the Trump administration. "That's why they fired us all. They just don't care about the civil rights of immigrants. Even when we were there, they didn't want to hear what we had to say - they didn't want to let us do our jobs."
A coalition of immigrant rights organizations sued the administration in Washington, declaring the cuts illegal and demanding all oversight employees be reinstated.According to a declaration filed by a top DHS official, nearly every single employee from the offices was fired, including 147 employees at the CRCL, 118 at the OIDO and 46 at CIS. The Trump administration wants "no oversight into what they are doing," said Enriquez from RFK Human Rights.
But the Trump administration in February removed all of the CRCL's public records from its website. (The Project on Government Oversight, an independent watchdog, later published the majority of the CRCL public records after they were scrubbed by the DHS). "It's a real breakdown in the rule of law. It's really concerning," said one former CRCL official. "It's very upsetting."
DHS Removed 100+ Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Records Pogo.org April 21, 2025 POGO is making available over 160 investigative memos documenting alleged abuses and problems across the Department of Homeland Security.
In February, without any public announcement, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) removed from its website the vast majority of investigative records by the department's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), an internal watchdog. Most of those records include recommendations "aimed at addressing any civil rights or civil liberties concerns" identified by CRCL's investigations, according to the online repository where those records could previously be found. Those probes "involve a range of alleged abuses, including violation of rights while in immigration detention." The records stretch from October 2014 through December 2024, spanning the Obama, Biden, and first Trump administrations.
The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) saved the web addresses for many of these records, which were backed up by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, and has recreated CRCL's repository below with over 160 CRCL memos and other related documents.
December, 2025
Fired worker sues government in a case that could upend civil rights laws NPR. December 1, 2025
"This is a case in which the President of the United States has asserted a constitutional right to discriminate against federal employees," wrote her lawyer, Nathaniel Zelinsky, of the Washington Litigation Group. "If the government prevails in transforming the law, it will eviscerate the professional, non-partisan civil service as we know it."
Federal workers on probationary status have fewer rights to contest their firing than other civil servants do, but they are still covered by constitutional protections barring retaliation for their political speech; and by civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, sex and national origin.
"According to the final agency decision, the President may now fire female federal workers like Ms. Nemer — because of their sex — and the law would have nothing to say about it," according to the new lawsuit. "According to the final agency decision, the President can now fire federal workers born to immigrant parents with dual citizenship like Ms. Nemer — because of their national origin — and they would have no recourse. And under the same logic, the President can fire federal workers like Ms. Nemer — because of their political activities and affiliations — and the courts would be powerless to act."
Alina Habba Is Serving Unlawfully as U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, Appeals Court Says.The New York Times, Dec. 1, 2025
The ruling deals a blow to the Trump administration and most likely sets up a showdown at the Supreme Court.
What the U.S. silence on World AIDS Day means. STAT News, December 1, 2025
The WHO declared the first day of December to be World AIDS Day in 1988, and the U.S. has commemorated the occasion every year since — except this year. As journalist Emily Bass first reported last week, the U.S. government instructed federal agencies and programs not to observe the day, nor put any government funds toward commemorative events or activities.
But studies estimate that the Trump administration's cutbacks to foreign aid could result in an additional 10 million HIV infections and 3 million additional deaths from AIDS over the next five years. As Fauci and Folkers wrote: "History will judge us harshly should we squander this opportunity."
Trump paused immigration from 19 countries. Washington Post, Tracking Trump. December 3, 2025
Yesterday: The Trump administration paused all immigration applications from countries it said are high risk, citing the shooting of two National Guard members last week.
The 19: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.
Trump continues to mislead the American people about Jeffrey Epstein. "Congress should be ready to defy Mr. Trump on this subject again and investigate the Justice Department's handling of the release." - The editorial board, New York Times, December 3, 2025.
A new target. New York Times, December 3, 2025
He has also escalated his rhetoric. Although the suspect in Washington is Afghan, he has fixated on another group since the shooting: Somali immigrants. Yesterday, Trump called them "garbage" that he doesn't want in the country. It was an outburst that was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry, even compared to other statements he has made in his long history of insulting people from African countries. Trump continued his tirade, saying Somalis "do nothing but bitch," and Vice President JD Vance banged the table in encouragement. He directed ICE agents to target Somali immigrants in Minnesota.
New York Times Sues Pentagon Over First Amendment Rights. New York Times, December 4, 2025
The company said in a lawsuit that the Defense Department's new reporting restrictions infringed on the constitutional rights of journalists.
A report on 'Signalgate' contradicts Hegseth's claim of 'exoneration.' Washington Post, Tracking Trump. December 4, 2025.
The report: The Pentagon's top watchdog reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth "created a risk of operational security" by sharing operational information in a Signal chat.
A refresher: Hegseth shared advance details about a bombing operation in Yemen in an unclassified app group chat that inadvertently included a journalist.
More: Hegseth, whom the watchdog report also said used his unclassified personal device to relay the information, had claimed he was exonerated by the report.
Supreme Court appears poised to rule for Trump on independent agency firings. Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has fired multiple members of agencies that Congress set up to be insulated from political pressures. NBC News, December 8, 2025.
The Supreme Court on Monday appeared poised to side with President Donald Trump and allow him to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission without cause, a provocative move aimed at upending the long-standing concept of independent federal agencies.
In a significant case on the structure of the federal government, the conservative-majority court heard oral arguments on whether Trump had the authority to fire Rebecca Kelly Slaughter notwithstanding a law enacted by Congress to insulate the agency from political pressures.
The 1914 law that set up the FTC says members can be removed only for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has already signaled, with strong opposition from the three liberal justices, that Trump is likely to win the case by allowing Slaughter, a Democrat, to be removed from office while the litigation continues. In ruling for Trump, the court could overturn a 1935 Supreme Court ruling called Humphrey's Executor v. United States, which upheld those restrictions on the president’s power to fire FTC members.
"You're asking us to destroy the structure of government and to take away from Congress its ability to protect its idea that the government is better structured with some agencies that are independent," said Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Trump fired Slaughter and the commission's other Democratic appointee in March. The FTC, which is responsible for consumer protection and antitrust enforcement, currently has just two of five commissioners, both Republican-appointed.
Government bodies set up by Congress to be independent of the president have been a particular focus of the Trump administration. Many of those agencies wield considerable regulatory power and have long been loathed by business interests.
Trump has fired, without cause, members not just of the FTC but also many other agencies that have power over vital health, safety, labor and environmental issues, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Surface Transportation Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The administration has also gone further afield, asserting the power to fire officials in bodies set up by Congress that are not under the executive branch, including the Library of Congress.
The EPA removed references to climate change from its website. Washington Post, Tracking Trump, December 9, 2025.
New: The Environmental Protection Agency removed references to human-caused climate change from its website, which now only references climate change from natural sources.
Why: An EPA spokesperson said the organization is no longer focused on "left-wing political agendas” from “the climate cult."
First Thing: US civic health rating downgraded after year of 'restrictive' Trump actions
Civicus, a nonprofit that monitors global civic freedoms, moved the US from the 'narrowed' to 'obstructed' category The Guardian, December 9, 2025.
In a report released today, Civicus, a nonprofit that monitors civic freedoms in 198 countries, placed the US in its "obstructed" category. The group cited a "sharp deterioration of fundamental freedoms in the country following a year of sweeping executive actions, restrictive laws and aggressive crackdowns on free speech and dissent".
The shift comes just months after Civicus's July assessment, which rated the US as "narrowed" - one step above "obstructed". Civicus assigns each country a score based on civic space conditions, using five classifications: "open", "narrowed", "obstructed", "repressed" and "closed".
What does it mean by "obstructed"? Countries where civic space is heavily contested - where civil society organizations still exist but state authorities undermine them, including through illegal surveillance, bureaucratic harassment and demeaning public statements.
At State Dept., a Typeface Falls Victim in the War Against Woke. New York Times, December 9, 2025.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the Biden-era move to the sans serif typeface "wasteful," casting the return to Times New Roman as part of a push to stamp out diversity efforts.
An election denier was tapped to lead FEMA. Washington Post, Tracking Trump, December 10, 2025.
What to know: Gregg Phillips, a self-described "very vocal opponent of FEMA," will start as administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Office of Response and Recovery on Monday.
More: Phillips is a proponent of baseless claims that there was widespread fraud in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Sen. King warns of Trump administration "whitewashing: history Asian American News, December 12, 2025
During an Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing, Senator King, also the co-chair of the National Parks Subcommittee, announced that the Park Service needs to acknowledge the entirety of American history, both the good and the bad.
"Our history is a country of 250 years," the senator said in his opening remarks, according to National Parks Traveler. "We have had triumphs. We have had great, prideful moments. We have had accomplishments, heroism, a lot to be proud of, relish, and learn about."
"But we also have some dark parts of our history. Like any history. We are not too excited about those, but they have to be addressed. Slavery, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, segregation, the treatment of Native Americans in our history. Those are things we can't avoid - we can't forget - and we don't want to forget." This comes after months of attempts by the Trump administration to remove signs from national parks and historic sites that address topics like slavery and Japanese American incarceration.
Just last week, the administration announced that Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth would no longer be free-entry days into the park. Instead, President Trump's birthday would be a free-entry day. "I'm worried and concerned about the effort to whitewash our history — to rewrite history within the National Park system," King emphasized, according to Native News Online.
"This does not contribute to our citizens’ understanding of their history and appreciation of their history. It doesn't change the history. It doesn’t change what happened. It only changes our citizens’ understanding of those things. This is what happens under authoritarian governments."
Trump attacks on political opponents spur a surge of threats, NBC News review finds. In recent weeks, nearly two dozen elected officials on both sides of the aisle said they were targeted after getting caught in the president's crosshairs. NBC News, December 13, 2025
Three of the members of Congress that Trump accused of sedition, meanwhile, have filed complaints against him with the U.S. Capitol Police. The Capitol Police declined to comment on the complaints, saying in a statement, "For safety reasons, we cannot discuss any potential investigations."
Criminally charged threats and attacks against members of Congress jumped more than 600% during Trump's first term compared to President Barack Obama's second term - 148 in the Trump years compared to 21 during the later Obama years, according to a study by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), a nonpartisan research center at the University of Chicago.
Americans are broadly trending toward seeing overheated rhetoric as a factor in episodes of political violence, as opposed to just seeing those incidents as the acts of individual disturbed perpetrators. Law enforcement has not identified the sources of the new wave of threats, but many of Trump’s targets say the president provoked them with over-the-top accusations of criminality on the part of Democrats and betrayal on the part of his fellow Republicans.
"We've had hundreds and hundreds, if not, you know, closer to 1,000 threats come in to our phones, our emails - all our Senate systems," she added.Houlahan said in a Nov. 20 phone interview with NBC News, "The president of the United States threatened a member of Congress with their life and now I have to worry about my life and about those around me."
Pape said that it's "to be expected” that the type of language Trump uses could encourage violence. "He routinely uses metaphors and characterizations that we know from decades of studies encourages support for political violence. That's been true for years now," he said. "Dehumanizing people with the word garbage or the word traitor - with the idea of 'they deserve death,' it lowers the threshold for supporting violence against the target."
What makes his "continuing pervasive use of morally disengaging metaphors" even more dangerous, Pape said, is his "extreme popularity."
In the following weeks, a total of at least 12 Republican state senators — in addition to Braun and a member of the state House - were targeted with threats and swatting attacks. "These kinds of threats of violence are never acceptable, and I wholeheartedly condemn them," Yocum said in a statement.
Colorado Officials Reject Trump's 'Pardon' of a Convicted Election Denier. New York Times, December 14, 2025
The president's stated intention to pardon Tina Peters, jailed for tampering with election machines in 2020, has set off a legal fight over the extent of Mr. Trump's pardon powers.
Veterans Affairs plans to eliminate up to 35,000 health care positions. Washington Post, Tracking Trump, December 15, 2025.
Exclusive: The Department of Veterans Affairs plans to cancel thousands of health care positions, many of which are unfilled, in the Veterans Health Administration.
More: The cuts could affect 35,000 health care positions. The agency has already lost almost 30,000 employees this year thanks to reorganization efforts.
Trump attacked director Rob Reiner, who died yesterday. Washington Post, December 15, 2025.
What happened: Trump responded to the death yesterday of Rob Reiner by suggesting Reiner and the Hollywood icon and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, died because he was anti-Trump.
Backlash: Trump was criticized by figures across the political spectrum, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), who said the situation was "not about politics or political enemies," and called for empathy.
The Coast Guard enacted a policy deeming swastikas 'potentially divisive.' Washington Post, Tracking Trump, December 16, 2025.
Update: The Coast Guard implemented a workplace policy downgrading swastikas and nooses from hate symbols to "potentially divisive."
Reversal: After The Post’s initial reporting of the planned policy change, the Coast Guard’s acting commandant ordered that they remain prohibited hate symbols.
The labor market lost 41,000 jobs across October and November. Washington Post, Tracking Trump, December 16, 2025.
The report: A delayed jobs report from the Labor Department revealed the unemployment rate increased to 4.6 percent after the market lost 41,000 jobs across October and November.
Also: Job creation from August was revised down, showing the market lost 22,000 more jobs than initially reported, bringing the total August loss to 26,000.
The Trump administration is dismantling a key climate research center. Washington Post, December 17, 2025
Which facility? The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., one of the world’s preeminent research institutions, which was founded in 1960. Officials cited concerns over "climate alarmism."
Related: The Trump administration this week admitted to targeting blue states for energy grant cuts. Also, the EPA spent $86.5 million this year to pay employees put on leave.
Trump expanded a list of countries subject to a full travel ban, prohibiting citizens from an additional seven countries, including Syria, from entering the United States. Trump’s latest travel ban blocks citizens from Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan, Syria, Laos, Sierra Leone, and holders of Palestinian Authority documents. Reuters, December 17, 2025.
The Kennedy Center board voted to rename it the "Trump-Kennedy Center." Washington Post, December 18, 2025.
Today: The board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted to rename the center after President Donald Trump, the White House said.
More: It's unclear whether the board has the authority to rename the center. Earlier this year, Trump fired the board members he hadn’t appointed and replaced them with loyalists who then elected him chair.
A judge ordered Trump to lift limits on lawmaker visits to ICE facilities. Washington Post, December 18, 2025.
Yesterday: District Judge Jia M. Cobb ruled that the Trump administration exceeded its "statutory authority" in stopping unannounced visits to immigration facilities by lawmakers.
Background: Twelve House Democrats sued the administration in July, alleging that the restrictions prevented them from carrying out oversight.
Latest batch of Epstein files focuses on Bill Clinton. Reuters, December 20, 2025.
Redacted: The absence of references to Donald Trump was notable given that pictures and documents related to him have appeared in previous Epstein releases for years. The documents, released by the Justice Dept. under a congressional mandate, were heavily redacted, with several files of 100 pages or more entirely blacked out.
Their fault: Trump told an audience in North Carolina that his handling of the economy is sound and that any problems people are experiencing are because of the Democrats. Not everybody sees it that way. And some historians and analysts say his once unshakeable hold on Republicans is slipping. Unprecedented errors are eroding the Justice Dept.’s credibility. Is Trump’s appointee at the Federal Housing Finance Agency abusing his authority by targeting Democrats? Some say yes.
Epstein Victims Upset About Lack of Transparency in Newly Released Files. New York Times, December 20, 2025.
Several victims said they were frustrated by the heavy redactions of photos and documents that the Justice Department released on Friday.
R.F.K. Jr. Likely to Swap U.S. Childhood Vaccine Schedule for Denmark’s. New York Times, Dececember 20, 2025.
The shift would mean fewer shots recommended for children. But a Danish health official found the idea baffling, saying the United States was getting "crazier and crazier in public health."
At least 16 files have disappeared from the DOJ webpage for documents related to Jeffrey Epstein AP News, December 20, 2025
At least 16 files disappeared from the Justice Department’s public webpage for documents related to Jeffrey Epstein - including a photograph showing President Donald Trump — less than a day after they were posted, with no explanation from the government and no notice to the public.
The missing files, which were available Friday and no longer accessible by Saturday, included images of paintings depicting nude women, and one showing a series of photographs along a credenza and in drawers. In that image, inside a drawer among other photos, was a photograph of Trump, alongside Epstein, Melania Trump and Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
The Justice Department didn’t answer questions Saturday about why the files disappeared but said in a post on X that "photos and other materials will continue being reviewed and redacted consistent with the law in an abundance of caution as we receive additional information."
Online, the unexplained missing files fueled speculation about what was taken down and why the public was not notified, compounding long-standing intrigue about Epstein and the powerful figures who surrounded him. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee pointed to the missing image featuring a Trump photo in a post on X, writing: "What else is being covered up? We need transparency for the American public."
The episode deepened concerns that had already emerged from the Justice Department’s much-anticipated document release. The tens of thousands of pages made public offered little new insight into Epstein’s crimes or the prosecutorial decisions that allowed him to avoid serious federal charges for years, while omitting some of the most closely watched materials, including FBI interviews with victims and internal Justice Department memos on charging decisions.
Some of the most consequential records expected about Epstein are nowhere to be found in the Justice Department’s initial disclosures, which span tens of thousands of pages.
Missing are FBI interviews with survivors and internal Justice Department memos examining charging decisions - records that could have helped explain how investigators viewed the case and why Epstein was allowed in 2008 to plead guilty to a relatively minor state-level prostitution charge.
"I feel like again the DOJ, the justice system is failing us," said Marina Lacerda, who alleges Epstein started sexually abusing her at his New York City mansion when she was 14.
A 119-page document marked "Grand Jury-NY," likely from one of the federal sex trafficking investigations that led to the charges against Epstein in 2019 or Maxwell in 2021, was entirely blacked out.
Transcripts of grand jury proceedings, released publicly for the first time, included testimony from FBI agents who described interviews they had with several girls and young women who described being paid to perform sex acts for Epstein. The youngest was 14 and in ninth grade.
"For every girl that I brought to the table he would give me $200," she said. They were mostly people she knew from high school, she said. "I also told them that if they are under age, just lie about it and tell him that you are 18."
Administration News, New York Times, December 22, 2025.
Trump also appointed as a special envoy to Greenland Jeff Landry, the governor of Louisiana, who said the "volunteer position" was to "make Greenland a part of the U.S."
The union representing foreign service officers at the State Department said a number of ambassadors appointed during the Biden administration have been ordered to leave their posts by mid-January, 2026.
How Trump donors benefit from his presidency. New York Times, December 22, 2025.
Since the 2024 election, Trump and his allies have raised nearly $2 billion for his favored political causes and passion projects. The identities of the donors have not been publicly disclosed, and are not required to be.
A Times investigation sheds light on them. Reporters traced half a billion dollars’ worth of the haul to 346 people who each gave at least $250,000. More than half have benefited from, or are in industries that have benefited from, actions taken by the president and his administration, including regulatory changes, pardons and dropped legal cases.
Two hours before airtime Sunday, CBS announced that the story where correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi spoke to deportees who had been sent to El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison, would not be a part of the show. Weiss, the Free Press founder named CBS News editor-in-chief in October, said it was her decision.
The dispute puts one of journalism's most respected brands - and a frequent target of President Donald Trump - back in the spotlight and amplifies questions about whether Weiss' appointment was a signal that CBS News was headed in a more Trump-friendly direction.
Alfonsi, in an email sent to fellow "60 Minutes" correspondents said the story was factually correct and had been cleared by CBS lawyers and its standards division. But the Trump administration had refused to comment for the story, and Weiss wanted a greater effort made to get their point of view.
"In my view, pulling it now after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one," Alfonsi wrote in the email. "Government silence is a statement, not a VETO," Alfonsi wrote. "Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story. If the administration's refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a 'kill switch' for any reporting they find inconvenient."
Speaking Monday at the daily CBS News internal editorial call, Weiss was clearly angered by Alfonsi's memo. A transcript of Weiss’ message was provided by CBS News. "The only newsroom I’m interested in running is one in which we are able to have contentious disagreements about the thorniest editorial matters with respect and, crucially, where we assume the best intent of our colleagues," Weiss said. "Anything else is completely unacceptable."
Trump has been sharply critical of "60 Minutes." He refused to grant the show an interview prior to last fall’s election, then sued the network over how it handled an interview with election opponent Kamala Harris. CBS' parent Paramount Global agreed to settle the lawsuit by paying Trump $16 million this past summer. More recently, Trump angrily reacted to correspondent Lesley Stahl's interview with Trump former ally turned critic Marjorie Taylor Greene.
"60 Minutes" was notably tough on Trump during the first months of his second term, particularly in stories done by correspondent Scott Pelley. In accepting an award from USC Annenberg earlier this month for his journalism, Pelley noted that the stories were aired last spring "with an absolute minimum of interference."
Pelley said that people at "60 Minutes" were concerned about what new ownership installed at Paramount this summer would mean for the broadcast. "It's early yet, but what I can tell you is we are doing the same kinds of stories with the same kind of rigor, and we have experienced no corporate interference of any kind," Pelley said then, according to deadline.com.
White House Invitees Are Asked About Donations to Trump’s Ballroom. New York Times, December 23, 2025.
Senator Richard Blumenthal is requesting information from an architect hired to oversee the ballroom design and people invited to a donor dinner with the president.
PUBLISHED ON THE WEB: August 6, 2025
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