Trump Administration Highlights: President Signs Order Aimed at Closing Education Dept. (2025)

Food banks are left in the lurch as some shipments are suspended.

Vince Hall, chief of government relations for Feeding America, a nationwide network of over 60,000 food pantries and other distributors, said that when he asked U.S.D.A. officials about the suspended shipments, he was told that the department was reviewing the food aid programs funded through the Commodity Credit Corporation.

It was unclear whether the review was related to the activities of Elon Musk’s DOGE team, which has sought to curtail spending across the government.

The halt to the funds, which was first reported by Politico, comes in addition to other recent cuts to federal food assistance. Earlier this month, the Agriculture Department halted two other programs that distributed food to banks and schools. Lawmakers are also mulling cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, which were used by about 42 million people in the 2023 fiscal year.

Food bank directors fear that an across-the-board contraction to federal food assistance could drive more people to food banks just as they are losing access to critical supplementary funds.

“This is perhaps the first moment in the history of food banking that we have seen record low unemployment and record high demand at food banks,” Mr. Hall said. “Any circumstance that would cause even a modest increase in demand at food distributions will result in a food crisis.”

Representatives of the Agriculture Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Hall said that Feeding America had struggled to get clear guidance from U.S.D.A. about how long the review will take, and whether the funds would ever be restored. Food banks have been left with little time to identify new funds and supplies, and with no assurance that the aid would ever be restored.

In the meantime, Mr. Hall added, rural communities would most likely feel the deepest immediate impact. Emergency food assistance programs, including those funded through the Commodity Credit Corporation, are “the food lifeline for rural America,” he explained, because they come with funding to improve food storage and distribution, which can be more challenging in rural areas.

The direct impact to communities across the country is likely to vary by state.

“It’s really hard to make up that volume that C.C.C. had been providing, especially at a time when the need is so great,” said Danny Faccinetti, vice president of Oregon Food Bank, which is expecting to lose access to 30 truckloads of food under the freeze.

Oregon’s food banks reported a 31 percent increase in use of their services in the 2024 fiscal year, which ended in June, compared with the year before. In late 2024, the funds in question made up 18 percent of all food aid they had distributed.

“It’s going to be a really, really big hit for certain areas,” Mr. Faccinetti continued, adding: “We’re already maximizing some of the donations that were available to us, so it would be difficult to make that up.”

In Maryland, food bank officials were notified that the U.S.D.A.’s freeze would deprive them of 12 truckloads of items like chicken, eggs, collard greens and blueberries. They are expecting to have four additional shipments frozen as well, for a total of almost $1.3 million in lost goods. But they seem relatively certain they will be able to weather the immediate impact of that cut without having to shortchange the approximately one million people who rely on their distribution centers.

In nearby Virginia, however, Eddie Oliver, the executive director of the Federation of Virginia Food Banks, said one food bank lost a scheduled shipment of seven loads of food, accounting for about a third of what the food bank was expecting this year through the Emergency Food Assistance Program.

“It’s going to be hard for us to replace that,” he said, noting the current economic climate. “Collectively, Virginia food banks are spending five times more money on food than we did in 2019, both because of higher food prices and greater demand at our pantries.”

Cynthia D. Kirkhart, the chief executive of Facing Hunger food bank, which manages about 250 pantries in West Virginia, put the losses her state is facing in more quantifiable terms.

“One thousand fifty cases of cheese; boned chicken by the can, 600 cases; fresh milk, 1,200 cases — all that stuff’s not coming,” she said.

In New Mexico, food bank officials are also doing some fast calculations in order to weather the unexpected suspension of federal assistance.

Food bank administrators there are bracing for missing 24 truckloads of food, including milk, cheese, cranberries and meats, that they had expected to receive between April and June. Officials are contemplating canceling contracts for future food purchases in order to free up funds needed immediately, according to Sonya Warwick, the communications director for Roadrunner Food Bank, part of the Feeding America network.

New Mexico’s network of food pantries includes several rural areas that are experiencing significant food insecurity, Ms. Warwick said, citing places like McKinley County, which includes tribal land and has a large Native American population, and where more than 30 percent of children are at risk of hunger.

While the state has allocated some extra funds for food aid, it is not enough to meet the growing need amid dwindling resources, Ms. Warwick added.

“None of us have crystal balls, but what we can do is encourage the community to get involved and get engaged,” she said.

If they cannot find resources through private donors, some food banks worry that they may need to cut back on the assistance they can offer the needy.

“Essentially, we had anticipated receiving many truckloads of U.S.D.A. food over the next few months,” said Cathy Kanefsky, the president and chief executive officer of the Food Bank of Delaware.

“Now it’s uncertain whether we will receive this food, meaning less meals we can provide to our neighbors,” she said, adding: “The effect on our neighbors could be devastating.”

Campbell Robertson, Chris Cameron and Linda Qiu contributed reporting from Washington.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

The senators’ action follows a similar letter sent by 17 members of the House of Representatives earlier this week also lamenting the decision to eliminate the partnership and expressing concerns for the fate of the database that researchers at Yale have maintained.

The Pentagon set up a briefing for Musk on plans for a potential war with China.

Hours after news of the planned meeting was published by The New York Times, Pentagon officials and President Trump denied that the session would be about military plans involving China. “China will not even be mentioned or discussed,” Mr. Trump said in a late-night social media post.

It was not clear if the briefing for Mr. Musk would go ahead as originally planned. But providing Mr. Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already extensive role as an adviser to Mr. Trump and leader of his effort to slash spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.

It would also bring into sharp relief the questions about Mr. Musk’s conflicts of interest as he ranges widely across the federal bureaucracy while continuing to run businesses that are major government contractors. In this case, Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, is a leading supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.

Pentagon war plans, known in military jargon as O-plans or operational plans, are among the military’s most closely guarded secrets. If a foreign country were to learn how the United States planned to fight a war against them, it could reinforce its defenses and address its weaknesses, making the plans far less likely to succeed.

The top-secret briefing that exists for the China war plan has about 20 to 30 slides that lay out how the United States would fight such a conflict. It covers the plan beginning with the indications and warning of a threat from China to various options on what Chinese targets to hit, over what time period, that would be presented to Mr. Trump for decisions, according to officials with knowledge of the plan.

A White House spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment about the purpose of the visit, how it came about, whether Mr. Trump was aware of it, and whether the visit raises questions of conflicts of interest. The White House has not said whether Mr. Trump signed a conflicts of interest waiver for Mr. Musk.

The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, initially did not respond to a similar email seeking comment about why Mr. Musk was to receive a briefing on the China war plan. Soon after The Times published this article on Thursday evening, Mr. Parnell gave a short statement: “The Defense Department is excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by Secretary Hegseth and is just visiting.”

About an hour later, Mr. Parnell posted a message on his X account: “This is 100% Fake News. Just brazenly & maliciously wrong. Elon Musk is a patriot. We are proud to have him at the Pentagon.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also commented on X late on Thursday, saying: “This is NOT a meeting about ‘top secret China war plans.’ It’s an informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies & smarter production. Gonna be great!”

Roughly 30 minutes after that social media post, The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Mr. Musk had been scheduled to be briefed on the war planning for China.

In his own post on social media early Friday, Mr. Musk said he looked forward to “the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT.”

Whatever the meeting will now be about, the planning reflected the extraordinary dual role played by Mr. Musk, who is both the world’s wealthiest man and has been given broad authority by Mr. Trump.

Mr. Musk has a security clearance, and Mr. Hegseth can determine who has a need to know about the plan.

Mr. Hegseth; Adm. Christopher W. Grady, the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, the head of the military’s Indo-Pacific Command, were set to present Mr. Musk with details on the U.S. plan to counter China in the event of military conflict between the two countries, the officials said.

The meeting had been set to be held not in Mr. Hegseth’s office — where an informal discussion about innovation would most likely take place — but in the Tank, a secure conference room in the Pentagon, typically used for high-level meetings of members of the Joint Chiefs, their senior staff and visiting combatant commanders.

Operational plans for major contingencies, like a war with China, are extremely difficult for people without extensive military planning experience to understand. The technical nature is why presidents are typically presented with the broad contours of a plan, rather than the actual details of documents. How many details Mr. Musk had wanted or expected to hear was unclear.

Mr. Hegseth received part of the China war plan briefing last week and another part on Wednesday, according to officials familiar with the plan.

It was unclear what the impetus was for providing Mr. Musk such a sensitive briefing. He is not in the military chain of command, nor is he an official adviser to Mr. Trump on military matters involving China.

But there is a possible reason Mr. Musk might have needed to know aspects of the war plan. If Mr. Musk and his team of cost cutters from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, want to trim the Pentagon budget in a responsible way, they may need to know what weapons systems the Pentagon plans to use in a fight with China.

Take aircraft carriers, for example. Cutting back on future aircraft carriers would save billions of dollars, money that could be spent on drones or other weaponry. But if the U.S. war strategy relies on using aircraft carriers in innovative ways that would surprise China, mothballing existing ships or stopping production on future ships could cripple that plan.

Planning for a war with China has dominated Pentagon thinking for decades, well before a possible confrontation with Beijing became more conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill. The United States has built its Air Forces, Navy and Space Forces — and even more recently its Marines and Army forces — with a possible fight against China in mind.

Critics have said the military has invested too much in big expensive systems like fighter jets or aircraft carriers and too little in midrange drones and coastal defenses. But for Mr. Musk to evaluate how to reorient Pentagon spending, he would want to know what the military intends to use and for what purpose.

Mr. Musk has already called for the Pentagon to stop buying certain high-priced items like F-35 fighter jets, manufactured by one of his space-launch competitors, Lockheed Martin, in a program that costs the Pentagon more than $12 billion a year.

Yet Mr. Musk’s extensive business interests make any access to strategic secrets about China a serious problem in the view of ethics experts. Officials have said revisions to the war plans against China have focused on upgrading the plans for defending against space warfare. China has developed a suite of weapons that can attack U.S. satellites.

Mr. Musk’s constellations of low-earth orbit Starlink satellites, which provide data and communications services from space, are considered more resilient than traditional satellites. But he could have an interest in learning about whether or not the United States could defend his satellites in a war with China.

Participating in a classified briefing on the China threat with some of the most senior Pentagon and U.S. military officials would be a tremendously valuable opportunity for any defense contractor seeking to sell services to the military.

Mr. Musk could gain insight into new tools that the Pentagon might need and that SpaceX, where he remains the chief executive, could sell.

Contractors working on relevant Pentagon projects generally do have access to certain limited war planning documents, but only once war plans are approved, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on defense strategy. Individual executives rarely if ever get exclusive access to top Pentagon officials for such a sensitive briefing, Mr. Harrison said.

“Musk at a war-planning briefing?” he said. “Giving the CEO of one defense company unique access seems like this could be grounds for a contract protest and is a real conflict of interest.”

Mr. Musk’s SpaceX is already being paid billions of dollars by the Pentagon and federal spy agencies to help the United States build new military satellite networks to try to confront rising military threats from China. SpaceX launches most of these military satellites for the Pentagon on its Falcon 9 rockets, which take off from launchpads SpaceX has set up at military bases in Florida and California.

The company separately has been paid hundreds of millions of dollars by the Pentagon that now relies heavily on SpaceX’s Starlink satellite communications network for military personnel to transmit data worldwide.

In 2024, SpaceX was granted about $1.6 billion in Air Force contracts. That does not include classified spending with SpaceX by the National Reconnaissance Office, which has hired the company to build it a new constellation of low-earth orbit satellites to spy on China, Russia and other threats.

Mr. Trump has already proposed that the United States build a new system the military is calling Golden Dome, a space-based missile defense system that recalls what President Ronald Reagan tried to deliver. (The so-called Star Wars system Mr. Reagan had in mind was never fully developed.)

Perceived missile threats from China — be it nuclear weapons or hypersonic missiles or cruise missiles — are a major factor that led Mr. Trump to sign an executive order recently instructing the Pentagon to start work on Golden Dome.

Even starting to plan and build the first components of the system will cost tens of billions of dollars, according to Pentagon officials, and most likely create large business opportunities for SpaceX, which already provides rocket launches, satellite structures, and space-based data communications systems, all of which will be required for Golden Dome.

Separately, Mr. Musk has been the focus of an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general over questions about his compliance with his top-secret security clearance.

The investigations started last year after some SpaceX employees complained to government agencies that Mr. Musk and others at SpaceX were not properly reporting contacts or conversations with foreign leaders.

Air Force officials, before the end of the Biden administration, started their own review, after Senate Democrats asked questions about Mr. Musk and asserted that he was not complying with security clearance requirements.

The Air Force, in fact, had denied a request by Mr. Musk for an even higher level of security clearance, known as Special Access Program, which is reserved for extremely sensitive classified programs, citing potential security risks associated with the billionaire.

In fact, SpaceX has become so valuable to the Pentagon that the Chinese government has said it considers the company to be an extension of the U.S. military.

“Starlink Militarization and Its Impact on Global Strategic Stability” was the headline of one publication released last year from China’s National University of Defense Technology, according to a translation of the paper prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Mr. Musk and Tesla, an electric vehicle company he controls, are heavily reliant on China, which houses one of the auto maker’s flagship factories in Shanghai. Unveiled in 2019, the state-of-the-art facility was built with special permission from the Chinese government, and now accounts for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries. Last year, the company said in financial filings that it had a $2.8 billion loan agreement with lenders in China for production expenditures.

In public, Mr. Musk has avoided criticizing Beijing and signaled his willingness to work with the Chinese Communist Party. In 2022, he wrote a column for the magazine of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s censorship agency, trumpeting his companies and their missions of improving humanity.

That same year, the billionaire told The Financial Times that China should be given some control over Taiwan by making a “special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable,” an assertion that angered politicians of the independent island. In that same interview, he also noted that Beijing sought assurances that he would not sell Starlink in China.

The following year at a tech conference, Mr. Musk called the democratic island “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China,” and compared the Taiwan-China situation to Hawaii and the United States.

On X, the social platform he owns, Mr. Musk has long used his account to praise China. He has said the country is “by far” the world leader in electric vehicles and solar power, and has commended its space program for being “far more advanced than people realize.” He has encouraged more people to visit the country, and posited openly about an “inevitable” Russia-China alliance.

Aaron Kessler contributed reporting.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Speaking to reporters at the White House, McMahon also said that many details of the planned shutdown had not been finalized. For example, it is unclear what would happen to the Office for Civil Rights, which investigates allegations of racial discrimination and antisemitism. Recent mass firings at the Department of Education had already gutted the Office of Civil Rights.

“The executive order did not specify what happens with any of the departments within Education,” McMahon said. “So we are looking at where best those those departments can be located.”

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

A big law firm reached a deal with Trump over an executive order.

It’s unclear how the money will be used to help the task force. The firm, Mr. Trump said, also agreed to conduct an audit to ensure its hiring practices are merit based “and will not adopt, use, or pursue any DEI policies.”

The deal materialized after the head of the firm, Brad Karp, went to the White House this week and had a face-to-face meeting with Mr. Trump to discuss a resolution. Members of the legal profession said in interviews that they were surprised by the deal, as it appears as if the firm — which is dominated by Democrats and has long prided itself in being at the forefront of the fight against the government for civil rights — was capitulating to Mr. Trump over an executive order that is likely illegal.

The agreement is a significant development in the retribution campaign Mr. Trump has opened against several top law firms that he sees as having supported efforts to help his opponents or unfairly prosecute him. And it is the latest demonstration of how Mr. Trump has used his power to extract concessions or public signs of support for his agenda from corporate leaders, news organizations and others since his election victory in November.

The White House said that Mr. Karp had acknowledged “wrongdoing” by one of the firm’s former partners, Mark F. Pomerantz. Mr. Pomerantz had tried to build a criminal case against Mr. Trump several years ago while working at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. It was not clear what wrongdoing Mr. Trump was referring to.

“The president is agreeing to this action in light of a meeting with Paul, Weiss Chairman, Brad Karp, during which Mr. Karp acknowledged the wrongdoing of former Paul, Weiss partner, Mark Pomerantz, the grave dangers of Weaponization, and the vital need to restore our System of Justice.”

In a statement, Mr. Pomerantz denied he had done anything wrong.

“I engaged in no wrongdoing by working as a prosecutor to uphold the rule of law,” Mr. Pomerantz said on Thursday evening.

Along with Mr. Pomerantz’s status as a former partner, the firm represented him as recently as 2023 in connection with efforts by congressional Republicans to question him as they sought to undermine charges brought against Mr. Trump by prosecutors in Manhattan.

Thursday’s deal applies only to the executive order against Paul, Weiss. It’s not clear what effect, if any, it will have on the orders targeting other firms or whether it will lead Mr. Trump to back off his stated intention to go after more of them.

Among the many accusations Mr. Trump and his allies have leveled at big law firms, like Paul, Weiss, is that they refused to represent conservative defendants like Mr. Trump because of their politics. In the meeting, Mr. Karp said that his firm — which has done legal work for Trump allies like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox — would represent clients no matter their political affiliations.

The firm has long prided itself on breaking barriers and standing up to the government on issues like civil rights. Its website trumpets how it was the first major New York City firm to have Jewish lawyers working alongside Gentiles, to hire a Black associate and to have a female partner.

Throughout the legal community, the firm is well known for having a stable of Democratic-leaning partners and has prominent former Obama administration officials in its ranks. Mr. Karp helped host a “Lawyers for Biden” fund-raiser for President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s re-election campaign in 2023 and one of its top lawyers oversaw then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s preparation for her debates with Mr. Trump.

As part of the agreement, the firm committed to working with the Trump administration on helping veterans, combating antisemitism, and on fairness in the justice system. In a statement posted on social media by Mr. Trump, Mr. Karp said he is looking forward “to an engaged and constructive relationship with the president and his administration.”

The deal on Thursday follows a series of moves by companies that found themselves at odds with Mr. Trump.

This year, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit Mr. Trump filed in 2021 over the suspension of his Facebook and Instagram accounts after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. In that case, most of the money went to Mr. Trump’s future presidential library.

ABC News agreed in December to to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit Mr. Trump brought, with the money also going to his presidential library fund.

Mr. Trump’s executive orders targeting top law firms introduced a new element to his retribution campaign. They have raised deep concerns among legal experts and threatened to pose serious financial problems for the firms, creating a chilling effect that has deterred them from taking on clients at odds with the Trump administration.

The first order targeted Covington & Burling, a large firm that had done legal work for Jack Smith, who as special counsel during the Biden administration had brought two federal indictments against Mr. Trump.

Last week, a federal judge in Washington ruled that a subsequent executive order Mr. Trump signed targeting the law firm Perkins Coie, which is also aligned with Democrats, was likely unconstitutional and issued a restraining order halting it.

But two days later, Mr. Trump signed a nearly identical executive order against Paul, Weiss. Mr. Trump said he was taking the action to punish the firm for its ties to a lawyer who had pushed for him to be indicted and another who had brought a lawsuit against Jan. 6 rioters. The order barred the firm’s lawyers from dealing with the federal government and raised the possibility that its clients would lose their government contracts.

Over the weekend, the leaders of the top law firms in New York and Washington were in constant contact as they tried to figure out how to respond. A range of possibilities were discussed. Amid those discussions, Paul, Weiss reached out to Bill Burck, the co-managing partner of the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP, to represent it.

Quinn Emanuel, one of the few large law firms that has done work for Mr. Trump’s company and top officials in his administration, prepared to represent Paul, Weiss in bringing a suit against the president. At the same time, Mr. Burck engaged in discussions with the White House to potentially broker a deal between Mr. Karp and Mr. Trump. On Wednesday, Mr. Karp and Mr. Trump met in the Oval Office to discuss the framework for an agreement.

In the day that followed, White House aides and Mr. Karp finalized the terms of the agreement.

According to two people familiar with the matter, the White House and Mr. Karp had reached an agreement on the wording of the statement. But despite that agreement, the wording of the statement changed, including a reference to the fact that the firm would “not adopt, use, or pursue any DEI policies.”

A spokesperson for Paul, Weiss did not respond to a message seeking comment on how the statement changed and Mr. Trump’s statement about how Mr. Karp had criticized Mr. Pomerantz.

Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting from New York.

White House says test scores haven’t improved since 1979. That’s not true.

This claim is far from true.

While it is true that reading scores for 13-year-olds are about the same as they were in the 1970s and math scores are only slightly better, this is because of recent, sharp declines that accelerated during the pandemic.

For most of the last half-century, American student achievement had been steadily climbing. This is best seen in long-term national data testing of 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds, which tracks performance over time.

From the 1970s to the early 2010s, students made particularly strong progress in math, which many experts believe is more influenced by what happens at school. Reading, which can be more influenced by students’ home lives, saw smaller gains.

By 2012, the share of 13-year-olds who could do complex math problems had nearly doubled to 34 percent, up from 18 percent in 1978. Students at this level can find averages, compute with fractions and solve the area of a rectangle.

There are a number of factors that experts say helped boost student achievement during this time frame, including the racial integration of public schools, which peaked in 1988. During the 2000s, a push for school accountability during the No Child Left Behind era also coincided with a rise in test scores.

The White House release also noted that school spending has also increased significantly. (Only about 10 percent of funding for K-12 schools comes from the federal government.)

There are intense debates about whether spending more money on schools helps achievement. But a wide body of research has shown that increases in money spent per pupil is associated with test score gains and increases in going to college. It matters how money is spent, however. Investments in low-income students and teacher quality are associated with greater improvements.

In arguing that education reform is needed, President Trump pointed out that United States is not a top performer internationally. This is true.

The United States routinely underperforms peer countries in math, though it does slightly better in reading.

While there are many reasons for that, one problem is the wide variety in both funding and outcomes seen across different states and districts.

Mr. Trump’s vision would further empower states, which could lead to even more variation. On Thursday, he vowed that states like Texas, Florida and Iowa would have “education that will be as good as Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, those top countries,” while other states, he said, would be “laggards” that his administration would seek to help.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

A judge bars Social Security officials from giving DOGE unredacted data.

While Judge Hollander blocked Social Security’s top officials — Leland Dudek and Michael Russo — and the agency’s employees from granting Mr. Musk’s team of engineers entry to their systems, her order focused only on documents, such as tax records, that would allow Mr. Musk’s team to analyze people at an individual level. The order stated that the agency could provide Mr. Musk’s team with redacted or anonymized data that facilitated broader analysis without running afoul of federal privacy laws.

In other lawsuits challenging Mr. Musk’s aggressive incursions into the Treasury and Education Departments, judges have issued similar orders barring officials there from handing over sensitive data. As President Trump has escalated efforts to deport students and other foreign nationals, including some with valid visas, lawyers have argued that agencies’ data systems could be used to aid a broader immigration crackdown.

In sworn statements, Treasury officials have insisted that they have not given sensitive tax data stored in their systems to the Department of Homeland Security.

As in other cases, lawyers for the government had argued that the risks of data being improperly disclosed were still speculative, since the groups that filed the suits had not shown clear evidence that Mr. Musk’s team’s access to Social Security data had led to identity theft or political retaliation. The lawyers also argued that letting Mr. Musk’s team audit the agency’s books did not amount to an unlawful “disclosure,” such as a leak that could result in identity theft.

But Judge Hollander said in a 137-page opinion accompanying the order that the intrusion into Social Security data was concerning enough to justify the two-week restraining order while the lawsuit continued. She said that retirees, when submitting their bank information and other financial data to the agency to receive common benefits, had a reasonable expectation that their records would not be used to inform a governmentwide effort to slash spending.

“The unrestricted access to PII that SSA provided to the DOGE Team, without specified need, and/or without adequate training, detail agreements, and/or background investigations of all DOGE Team members,” she wrote, using abbreviations for personally identifiable information and the Social Security Administration, “would be highly offensive to an objectively reasonable person.”

She added: “The expectation of privacy shared by plaintiffs’ members is objectively reasonable. It is almost self-evident that, in our society, PII, such as SSNs, medical information, and certain financial records, are regarded as private, sensitive, and confidential information.”

Judge Hollander’s order came roughly a month after a coalition of labor unions sued to stop Mr. Musk, who has called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, from targeting the agency’s data. Mr. Musk has also backed cuts to the agency’s call centers, and other changes that critics have warned could make customer support less accessible, and even make it easier for fraudsters to impersonate Social Security beneficiaries.

The order will expire in 14 days. Judge Hollander asked both sides to file motions by March 27 so she can schedule the next steps, such as extending the injunction that would keep Mr. Musk’s team barred from accessing the databases.

In deportations, Trump tied a gang to Venezuela’s government. Intelligence contradicts him.

The disclosure calls into question the credibility of Mr. Trump’s basis for invoking a rarely used wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to transfer a group of Venezuelans to a high-security prison in El Salvador last weekend, with no due process.

The intelligence community assessment concluded that the gang, Tren de Aragua, was not directed by Venezuela’s government or committing crimes in the United States on its orders, according to the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Analysts put that conclusion at a “moderate” confidence level, the officials said, because of a limited volume of available reporting about the gang. Most of the intelligence community, including the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, agreed with that assessment.

Only one agency, the F.B.I., partly dissented. It maintained the gang has a connection to the administration of Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, based on information the other agencies did not find credible.

“Multiple intelligence assessments are prepared on issues for a variety of reasons,” the White House said in a statement. “The president was well within his legal and constitutional authority to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to expel illegal foreign terrorists from our country.”

A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

Mr. Trump’s extraordinary use of wartime powers to advance his immigration crackdown has edged the administration closer to a constitutional clash with the judiciary. A judge in Washington is considering whether the administration violated his order blocking, for now, the expulsion of migrants under the law. The Justice Department denounced the order as infringing on Mr. Trump’s national security powers and asked an appeals court to overturn it.

The Alien Enemies Act empowers the executive branch to summarily remove foreign citizens whose government is in a declared war with the United States or is otherwise invading or engaged in a “predatory incursion” into American territory. The government last used the law in the internment and repatriation of Japanese, Italian and German citizens during and after World War II.

On its face, the law appears to require not just an invasion or incursion, but a link to the actions of a foreign government.

In his proclamation, Mr. Trump effectively summoned such a link into legal existence by saying that he had determined that Tren de Aragua was a proxy for the Venezuelan government and committing crimes in the United States at its direction because Mr. Maduro sought to destabilize the country.

“I make these findings using the full extent of my authority to conduct the nation’s foreign affairs under the Constitution,” Mr. Trump said.

But Mr. Trump’s key factual assertions contradicted the earlier intelligence assessment, the officials said. It concluded that the gang was not acting at the direction of the Maduro administration and that the two are instead hostile to each other, citing incidents in which Venezuelan security forces exchanged gunfire with gang members.

Because available information in the world of intelligence is often imperfect or incomplete, analysts assign levels of confidence to factual assertions and conclusions. Such caveats indicate that even if most or all the currently available evidence points in one direction, it remains possible that something else might turn up that would change their minds.

The overall conclusion was put at “moderate” confidence, and some supporting points put at “low” confidence, the officials said, because there was not as much reporting as analysts typically want to have “high” confidence. The United States has long scrutinized the government of Venezuela, but only recently has it begun to focus on Tren de Aragua, they said.

The assessment, according to one official, also portrayed the gang as lacking the resources and being too disorganized — with little in the way of any centralized command-and-control — to be able to carry out any government orders. And, the official said, the assessment says that while a handful of corrupt Venezuelan officials have ties to gang members, that does not amount to the gang’s being under the sway of the government as a whole.

The assessment, this official also said, asserts that when the State Department designated the gang as a foreign terrorist organization last month at Mr. Trump’s direction, a minister in the Maduro administration publicly praised the action. (The administration’s move broke with the practice of limiting “terrorism” designations to organizations that are clearly ideologically motivated.)

Federal courts typically defer to the executive branch’s factual declarations about what is happening and why, rather than probing for what may actually be going on. That is particularly the case in matters of national security and foreign policy.

But such deference is premised on the idea that officials are making determinations in good faith and drawing on executive branch resources like intelligence agencies to evaluate fast-moving and sometimes dangerous situations. Mr. Trump’s pattern of distorting the truth is testing that practice.

The administration’s insistence that all the men it sent to El Salvador are members of Tren de Aragua has also been challenged. In one court filing, an official acknowledged that many have no criminal records but said the dearth of details only underscored that “they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”

Lawyers for some of the migrants have collected statements from family members and others denying involvement in the gang. A lawyer for one detainee, for example, identified her client as a soccer player who had been tortured for participating in anti-Maduro protests and so fled to the United States to request asylum.

The lawyer said U.S. officials accused him of being a Tren de Aragua member based on a tattoo and on a hand gesture he made in a picture on social media. But, she said, the tattoo was a version of a soccer team logo, and the hand gesture was a common “rock ’n’ roll” symbol.

Mr. Trump’s proclamation cited scant evidence for his core finding that Tren de Aragua as an organization has been committing crimes to destabilize the United States “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.”

Its most concrete detail was that the gang had expanded from 2012 to 2017, when Tareck El Aissami served as governor of the region of Aragua, and in 2017 Mr. Maduro appointed him as vice president. But the proclamation omitted that Mr. Aissami is no longer part of the Maduro administration, which is prosecuting him on corruption charges.

On Saturday, as planeloads of Venezuelan migrants were being flown to El Salvador, Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, temporarily barred the administration from summarily removing people based on the Alien Enemies Act.

A former prosecutor, he was first appointed to the bench by a Republican president and elevated to his current role by a Democratic one. His decision to block the Trump administration’s deportations under the law has outraged the president and his allies, prompting Mr. Trump to call for his impeachment.

The administration has appealed to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The case is now before Judges Karen Henderson and Justin Walker, both Republican appointees, and Patricia Millett, a Democratic appointee.

Appeals courts typically reject challenges to temporary restraining orders. But the panel has ordered expedited briefings and scheduled arguments, suggesting it is considering deciding on the legal merits of Mr. Trump’s invocation of Alien Enemies Act powers.

Any ruling could turn in part on whether the judges accept Mr. Trump’s assertions about Tren de Aragua and its supposed ties to the Venezuelan government, as the administration has insisted.

The Justice Department wrote that “the determination of whether there has been an ‘invasion’ or ‘predatory incursion,’ whether an organization is sufficiently linked to a foreign nation or government, or whether national security interests have otherwise been engaged so as to implicate the A.E.A., is fundamentally a political question to be answered by the president.”

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

House Republicans want to impeach judges. Here’s how the process would work.

House Republicans, facing demands from Mr. Trump, could press the Judiciary Committee to at least explore the idea. But Democrats and some Republicans are certain to resist. And even if the House were to summon the necessary majority to impeach a judge, persuading the required 67 senators to convict and remove a judge over a ruling would be highly unlikely.

Here is how the process works, and a sense of how the politics of the issue could play out.

What power does the House have to impeach a federal judge?

The Constitution says that “civil officers” of the United States can be impeached for “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” some of which federal judges have previously been removed over.

But it is the more subjective high crimes and misdemeanors clause that impeachment advocates are pointing to as the basis for trying to remove James E. Boasberg, a veteran judge in the District of Columbia who temporarily blocked Mr. Trump’s plan for deportations under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law.

After Mr. Trump urged Judge Boasberg’s ouster, Representative Brandon Gill, a hard-right first-term Republican from Texas, filed articles of impeachment. Mr. Gill said the judge had used his position “to advance political gain while interfering with the president’s constitutional prerogatives and enforcement of the rule of law.”

Three other federal judges have also had articles of impeachment filed against them by House Republicans.

What would be the next steps in the House?

The Judiciary Committee would need to decide if articles of impeachment merited review by the panel. Representative Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who leads the panel, did not reject the idea of impeachment hearings in a recent appearance on CNN, saying “all options are on the table” with Judge Boasberg.

Mr. Jordan said the panel would take initial steps by convening hearings examining the breadth of judicial resistance to Mr. Trump’s actions in office so far. The impeachment of a federal judge would traditionally require an in-depth investigation and a hearing with an array of witnesses. Impeaching a judge would be decided by a majority vote on the House floor.

Would the Senate be required to act if the House impeached a judge?

Yes, the Senate would have to act on the articles of impeachment in some way. It could simply dismiss them, a move that would most likely infuriate the White House and House conservatives.

Unlike presidential impeachments, for which the full Senate conducts a trial, lawmakers can organize a smaller panel to hold the proceeding and make a recommendation to the full body. A conviction would require 67 votes, or two-thirds of the Senate.

With Republicans holding only 53 seats in the Senate, it would be difficult to convict a judge over what Democrats would see as a legal dispute and an abuse of the impeachment process.

What is the Senate’s view of the push for judicial impeachment?

Senior Republican senators have been much less enthusiastic than their House counterparts about pursuing impeachments over judicial rulings.

Two senior Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, told The New York Times in interviews recently that they were opposed to the idea, and said that appeals were the proper way to challenge judicial rulings.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who leads the panel, had been quiet on the issue, but said on Sunday on social media that the committee would be “taking action.” It was unclear what action he meant.

Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah and another member of the committee, has endorsed the possibility of impeachment.

But with conviction unlikely, Senate Republican leaders would not relish devoting much time to the issue, which would be a distraction from other legislative issues. It would also cause a difficult political vote for Senate Republicans who don’t view impeachment as warranted.

If the removal of a judge is so unlikely, why are Republicans making it an issue?

Mr. Trump and others around him have a long history of assailing judges who rule against his interests. Many legal observers say that the current impeachment campaign is an attempt to cow judges and discourage them from taking on the administration while they face heightened security threats.

The push to impeach also keeps the public’s focus on the Trump administration’s efforts to deliver on the president’s campaign promises, such as mass deportations. It shows that Mr. Trump is forging ahead despite resistance from the judicial branch.

How many federal judges have been impeached?

Fifteen federal judges have been impeached, the first in 1803. Eight have been convicted and removed, mainly for serious criminal acts such as bribery and conflicts of interest.

As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. suggested in an unusual rebuke of Mr. Trump and others calling for impeachments, there has been an accepted view in the United States for two centuries that disagreement over decisions is not grounds for impeachment.

The last judicial impeachment was of Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr. of Louisiana in 2010, on charges of bribery and perjury. He was convicted and removed. One impeached and convicted federal judge, Alcee L. Hastings of Florida, was later elected to the House of Representatives.

If the removal of judges targeted for impeachment is unlikely, could other legislative approaches arise from the debate?

Yes. In his CNN interview, Mr. Jordan noted that other legislative remedies could emerge. He noted that his panel recently approved legislation that would prevent district court judges from issuing orders that extend beyond their jurisdiction. Mr. Jordan said that he hoped for a floor vote on the bill.

Others have pushed for restricting the ability of those going to court from so-called judge shopping, or the practice of steering cases to sympathetic judges in friendly jurisdictions. And some lawmakers have suggested that because Congress established the federal courts below the Supreme Court, it could abolish some districts.

Democrats and some Republicans would see those acts as gross violations of the constitutional separation of powers. Any legislation restricting the courts would have to clear a filibuster in the Senate, where Democrats could block it.

Before the judge’s ruling, the government had argued that it should not have to comply with the request because, among other reasons, it estimated that it would take around three years to produce all the documents at a standard pace. The court has directed both sides to propose a timeline for expedited processing.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

What happens to student loans if the Education Department closes?

But they are not about to let debtors off the hook. Those states, after all, are not banks, and the Education Department is a big bank in all but name. It lends tens of billions of dollars to students and parents each year and oversees the collection of roughly $1.6 trillion in outstanding loans for over 40 million borrowers.

The debt-ridden federal government isn’t going to give up that money. So if the Education Department closed, another federal entity would take the loan system over. In the short term, any agency inheriting the loan portfolio would need to keep the servicers that collect and track payments.

What else might change? Here are some possible answers.

Can the president shut down the Education Department with an executive order?

Probably not. Congressional approval is needed to shut down a federal agency, as Ms. McMahon noted in her confirmation hearing.

“This is political theater, not serious public policy,” said Ted Mitchell, a former undersecretary of education who is now the president of the American Council on Education, a university membership group.

This could be true or largely so — unless the White House shuts the department down without congressional approval and tries to win the lawsuits that would most likely ensue. Mr. Trump signaled Thursday that he may also ask Congress to act.

What if a shutdown happens anyway — whether via a vote in Congress, a court ruling or some other way?

Some other federal entity will need to take over debt issuance and collection. Mr. Trump announced Friday that student loans will move under the Small Business Administration.

Education Department employees could change departments in order to preserve institutional memory on how to run the often complex loan programs and interpret their terms.

Just how messy could any transfer of my loans end up being?

Pretty messy. The debt repayment system is complicated, with highly technical rules and repayment plans and many student loan servicers tracking and collecting payments. Borrowers should always maintain records of their loans and all previous payments.

Could disbursements of new loans be delayed?

It’s possible. Presumably, any new overseer would aim to make the transition orderly and schedule the handover during a part of the year when not many people were getting new loans.

On March 11, the Education Department sent layoff notices to over 1,000 employees as part of its effort to reduce its work force by half (including people who have already left since Mr. Trump’s inauguration).

While those layoffs are the subject of lawsuits, other employees with relevant student loan expertise may have already left or will walk out under their own volition. It could be difficult for borrowers to get a speedy resolution to many complicated issues for an indefinite period to come.

“Claiming that eliminating half the department won’t affect its services — without any clear plan to redistribute the workload — is, at best, naïve and, at worst, deliberately misleading,” said Beth Maglione, the interim president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “It also raises serious concerns about how billions of dollars in federal student aid will continue to be disbursed to students without interruption.”

Should I keep making my student loan payments?

Yes.

My loans have been on pause. What now?

Read every communication from your loan servicer carefully, and follow instructions to the letter. Check your spam folders frequently, and double check to make sure the servicer has your correct paper mail address. If your servicer is no longer going to administer your debt, it should let you know months before any switch.

Will I be able to take out federal loans in the future?

If the Education Department closes, some other department or entity could become the lender.

Republicans have made it a long-term goal to have private companies handle student lending, with the federal government as a kind of guarantor backstopping the debt.

What will happen to popular programs like income-driven repayment, Public Service Loan Forgiveness and Pell Grants?

All of these programs exist because of laws.

“We certainly should honor those programs,” Ms. McMahon said of Public Service Loan Forgiveness during her confirmation hearing. She also promised to maintain Pell grants and said she supported their expansion.

So presumably some governmental entity would continue to oversee each of them. But Congress may well try to alter or end any one of them.

What other changes might come?

Mr. Trump issued an executive order in an attempt to prevent borrowers enrolled in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program from having their loans canceled if they work for organizations disfavored by his administration.

This would include any entities supporting terrorism, “engaging in violence for the purpose of obstructing or influencing federal government policy,” child abuse “including the chemical or surgical castration or mutilation of children,” employers “engaging in a pattern of aiding and abetting illegal discrimination” and those that are violating state tort laws “including laws against trespassing, disorderly conduct, public nuisance, vandalism and obstruction of highways.”

Anything this sweeping is certain to trigger lawsuits. It is not clear how soon the Education Department will attempt to put any of it in place.

Allies of Elon Musk, who embedded themselves at Education Department headquarters soon after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, have also discussed using software-enabled chatbots to replace workers who help answer questions for parents and borrowers.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Trump signs an order aimed at eliminating the education dept.

“We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Mr. Trump said.

The department, which manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and supports programs for students with disabilities, was created by an act of Congress. That means, according to Article I of the Constitution, that only Congress can shut it down. That clear delineation of power, a fundamental component of democracy from the inception of the United States, underscores why no other modern president has tried to unilaterally shutter a federal department.

But Mr. Trump has already taken significant steps that have limited the agency’s operations and authority. Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, his administration has slashed the department’s work force by more than half and eliminated $600 million in grants. The job cuts hit particularly hard at the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which enforces the country’s guarantee that all students have an equal opportunity to an education.

Mr. Trump’s order contains potentially contradictory guidance for Ms. McMahon. On the one hand, the order directs her to facilitate the elimination of the agency. On the other, she is also mandated to rigorously comply with federal law. The order offers no guidance on how to square those two points.

Mr. Trump said Thursday that the department would continue to provide critical functions that are required by law, such as the administration of federal student aid, including loans and grants, as well as funding for special education and districts with high levels of student poverty. The department would also continue civil rights enforcement, White House officials said.

Mr. Trump called those programs “useful functions,” and said they’re going to be “preserved in full.” He added that some functions would be “redistributed to various other agencies and departments that will take very good care of them.”

Higher education leaders and advocacy groups immediately condemned the executive order.

“This is political theater, not serious public policy,” said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, an association that includes many colleges and universities in its membership. “To dismantle any cabinet-level federal agency requires congressional approval, and we urge lawmakers to reject misleading rhetoric in favor of what is in the best interests of students and their families.”

Lawyers for supporters of the Education Department anticipated they would challenge Mr. Trump’s order by arguing that the administration had violated the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine and the clause requiring the president to take care that federal laws are faithfully executed.

These lawyers, who requested anonymity to describe private deliberations about impending litigation, have also discussed the possibility of using a Supreme Court ruling from June 2024 to block Mr. Trump’s action. That ruling, 6 to 3 with all the conservative justices in the majority,swept aside a long-established precedentby limiting the executive branch’s ability to interpret statutes and transferring power to Congress and the courts.

“See you in court,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the trade union for educators. Her group is among those that intend to sue.

While many conservatives support Mr. Trump’s desire to close the agency, the order presents a predicament for congressional Republicans, who must balance their eagerness to please Mr. Trump and their constituents’ wishes. Public opinion polls for the past two months have consistently shown nearly two-thirds of voters oppose closing the department.

While local education departments primarily control how their schools are run already, the federal department has been influential in setting academic standards, guiding schools through regulatory compliance and interpreting civil rights laws.

Mr. Trump told the audience, which included several Republican governors, that the order’s goal was to “return our students to the states.”

“Democrats want federal bureaucrats to control your child’s school,” Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said Thursday on social media. “Republicans want to give parents the choice to do what’s best for their children.”

Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who chairs the chamber’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he would submit legislation to eliminate the Education Department.

“I agree with President Trump that the Department of Education has failed its mission,” Mr. Cassidy said in a statement. “Since the department can only be shut down with congressional approval, I will support the president’s goals by submitting legislation to accomplish this as soon as possible.”

In remarks before signing the order, Mr. Trump signaled he might press lawmakers to move on the issue, adding that he hoped Democrats would join Republicans in supporting the department’s elimination.

But any Democratic support appears unlikely. And in the last session of Congress, one-fourth of House Republicans voted against a measure that would have eliminated the agency.

“I hope they’re going to be voting for it,” Mr. Trump said, “because ultimately it may come before them.”

Mr. Trump’s plans to gut the department have drawn fierce criticism from Democrats and education advocacy groups who say that the measure — even if largely symbolic — signals the federal government’s retreat from its duties of protecting and serving the most vulnerable students.

“Let’s be clear: Before federal oversight, millions of children — particularly those with disabilities and those from our most vulnerable communities — were denied the opportunities they deserved,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union.

Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who is the ranking member of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, urged his Republican colleagues to join him in opposing the changes in the order.

Mr. Trump, he said, was “implementing his own philosophy on education which can be summed up in his own words, ‘I love the poorly educated,’” Mr. Scott said in a statement, referring to a remark Mr. Trump made in 2016.

Mr. Trump has gone further than any president in seeking to overhaul what Republican administrations have long bemoaned as a bloated bureaucracy. Mr. Trump’s order also amplifies an argument that stagnant student test scores demonstrate that billions in federal spending have not yielded results.

“The status quo has very clearly failed American children and done little more than line the pockets of bureaucrats and activists,” Nicole Neily, president and founder of Parents Defending Education, said.

While it is true that reading scores for 13-year-olds are about the same as they were in the 1970s and math scores are only slightly better, this is because of recent, sharp declines that accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic.

Under the Biden administration, the department was fiercely criticized as being overly deferential to teachers’ unions and overreaching on certain issues, such as student loan forgiveness and its interpretations of civil rights laws on behalf of transgender students.

Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think-tank, said that he believes both the right and the left exaggerate the department’s influence, but that the order does little to address the issues like overreach and red tape that drove the movement to rein in the department.

“We’re going to have this whole huge national debate and not solve the practical problems along the way,” he said. “Because we’re so focused on the 30,000-foot conversation that we’re not changing, that we’re not fixing, the stuff that’s actually making life tougher for educators and parents.”

Sarah Mervosh contributed reporting.

Bondi trumpets weeks-old arrests for Tesla attacks.

Two of the three arrests, in fact, happened weeks ago, and the other happened one week ago. But Ms. Bondi’s statement underscored the extent to which the administration has publicly defended and embraced Mr. Musk, one of President Trump’s chief allies and the billionaire leading efforts to slash the federal bureaucracy.

Ms. Bondi has called such destruction at company dealerships a form of domestic terrorism. Her assessment roughly corresponds to how federal law enforcement officials have characterized attacks by animal rights activists on testing laboratories as a niche form of terrorism.

But Ms. Bondi has also gone further, suggesting that these are not isolated attacks by like-minded people but rather part of a larger plot by people “operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.”

The announcement did not identify the individuals or the charges they faced, but law enforcement officials have said they were: Adam Lansky in Salem, Ore., who was charged by federal authorities two weeks ago; Lucy Nelson, who was arrested in February in Loveland, Colo.; and Daniel Clarke-Pounder in Charleston, S.C., who was charged a week ago.

The individuals have been charged with arson or attempted arson that affects interstate commerce.

Over the last few weeks, several acts of vandalism and arson have been committed against Tesla property. Law enforcement officials said none have caused serious injuries.

The attacks have coincided with Mr. Musk’s efforts to drastically shrink the federal government, firing tens of thousands of federal employees and shutting down entire agencies.