Politics
Judge Appears Skeptical of Claims That Musk Isn’t Driving DOGE
A federal judge said on Friday that it seemed “factually inaccurate” for the Trump administration to keep insisting that Elon Musk has no formal position in an operation that has led to mass firings of federal workers and the hobbling of the nation’s foreign aid agency.
The judge, Theodore D. Chuang of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, prodded government lawyers repeatedly for additional clarity on Mr. Musk’s role in a case that directly challenges the constitutionality of the task force known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or the U.S. DOGE Service.
Until this week, government officials had resisted answering inquiries as to who was formally in charge of the task force, except to say that it was not Mr. Musk. (Nor is Mr. Musk among its employees, the government said.) On Tuesday, a White House official said that Amy Gleason, a former health care investment executive, was serving as the acting administrator.
On Friday, Joshua E. Gardner, a lawyer in the Justice Department’s civil division, denied that Mr. Musk had any role with the Department of Government Efficiency. This despite Mr. Musk’s clearly driving its initiatives, including an email blasted out last weekend that attempted to require all federal employees to respond with a list of five accomplishments from the previous week. Although the email was sent by the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources arm, Mr. Musk said on Wednesday that he had suggested it and that the president had approved.
Judge Huang asked Mr. Gardner who had led the agency before Ms. Gleason was announced as acting administrator. Mr. Gardner said he had not asked, then immediately corrected himself, saying that he had asked but “was not able to get an answer” beyond that it was not Mr. Musk. The judge said he found it “very suspicious” that the government did not have an answer.
The three-hour hearing was the latest in a lawsuit filed in mid-February on behalf of 26 unnamed current and former employees or contractors of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The foreign aid agency, a particular target of Mr. Musk’s, has been rapidly dismantled in the months since Mr. Trump took office. In recent days, Trump administration appointees have fired hundreds of employees who help manage responses to urgent humanitarian crises around the world, leaving the agency’s future in turmoil.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs on Friday argued that Mr. Musk’s operation was inherently unconstitutional because he had not been appointed by the president nor approved by the Senate, as is required for high-level officials by the appointments clause of the Constitution.
Mr. Musk is “the most powerful principal officer currently in the government alongside the president, and one of the most powerful in our country’s history,” Norm Eisen, one of the lawyers, said.
He added that historically, no figure in the executive branch, not even the White House chief of staff who is the president’s top aide, has acted with as much authority as Mr. Musk. That meant that Mr. Musk’s actions in the case of U.S.A.I.D. — dispatching teams to shut down programs, cut off systems access to employees and contractors and comb through sensitive and confidential agency data — amounted to “a grave violation of the separation of powers,” Mr. Eisen said.
Mimi Marziani, Mr. Eisen’s co-counsel, further characterized Mr. Musk’s role as a “made-up position” leading a “made-up super-agency.”
Court filings in a torrent of lawsuits challenging Mr. Musk and his associates’ incursions on federal agencies have offered a crucial, though limited, window into the Department of Government Efficiency. As some of the only firsthand accounts, they have painted a picture of a tightly managed process in which small groups of government employees have swept in and out of agencies, grabbing up data in apparent pursuit of larger political goals.
Mr. Gardner argued that there had been no attempt by the Department of Government Efficiency to shut down U.S.A.I.D., but rather that it was undergoing “a reorganization in consultation with Congress.” He added that he did not believe the president had the power to totally shut down the agency.
Judge Chuang pushed back on that characterization, citing a letter to Congress from Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing he had taken over as acting administrator of U.S.A.I.D. and saying that the agency “may be abolished consistent with applicable law.”
“The wood chipper isn’t usually reorganization,” Judge Chuang retorted, seeming to reference a post on social media from Mr. Musk in early February in which he said, “We spent the weekend feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.”
“I don’t even know what that means, your honor,” Mr. Gardner replied.
Judge Chuang had granted a motion last week to move ahead with Friday’s hearing in order to consider whether to block Mr. Musk’s team from continuing to drive changes at the agency. The hearing came amid an extreme downsizing at the agency, as it moved to terminate thousands of contracts and grants, eliminating some 90 percent of U.S.A.I.D.’s work.
Earlier this week, a federal judge in Washington gave the agency a midnight deadline on Thursday to release payments to a raft of programs and organizations the agency has long funded. The administration also made an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, and on Wednesday night, Chief Justice John J. Roberts issued a temporary administrative stay.
On Friday, the plaintiffs asked Judge Chuang to block DOGE representatives from combing through U.S.A.I.D. data and systems, as a method of short-term relief. They said their clients, some of whom were stationed abroad, had suffered “physical and psychological harm,” had missed payments and were cut off from the agency’s systems and other “potentially lifesaving services” while awaiting further direction.
The judge declined to issue an immediate decision.
Politics
FBI arrests protester who threatened to kill ICE officer’s family at NJ detention center protest, Blanche says
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Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche on Friday said that a man who made death threats against a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer and his family at a protest in New Jersey Thursday night had been arrested.
The arrest came just hours after Blanche promised the protester, who was captured on video, would be found and arrested.
“That’s a federal crime,” Blanche said on Fox News’ “The Will Cain Show” on Thursday. “Not only threatening the ICE officer — but think about how disgusting this individual is by threatening his wife and his children with death.
In the video, the protester can be heard taunting the officer: “I will kill your whole f—ing family. Your whole f—ing family is dead. Your children and wife all dead. I have your face mother—er! All dead!”
ANTI-ICE AGITATOR SCREAMS ‘I’LL KILL YOUR WHOLE F- FAMILY’ DAY AFTER DEM GOV PRAISES ‘PEACEFUL PROTESTING’
Federal immigration officers clashed with protesters outside Delaney Hall in Newark, N.J., on Thursday. (Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu)
Blanche said the officer was just doing his job and “standing there.”
On Friday evening, Blanche wrote on X: Told you. @FBI just arrested the man who threatened to kill ICE officers and their families. FAFO.”
He has not yet been identified.
ANTI-ICE PROTESTERS CLASH WITH AGENTS OUTSIDE NEW JERSEY DETENTION CENTER AS GOV. SHERRILL DENIED ENTRY
The clash occurred Thursday evening outside of Newark’s Delaney Hall detention center where protesters were accused of biting, kicking and punching agents.
The protests were in their sixth night by Thursday. (Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu)
Agents responded by deploying pepper spray and beating back agitators as the protest continued into its sixth night.
Nine rioters were arrested during the clashes Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security told Fox News Digital.
ANTI-ICE AGITATORS THROW WOODEN PALLETS, MATTRESSES AT FEDERAL AGENTS DURING CHAOTIC NJ DETENTION CENTER CLASH
Approximately 100 protesters mobbed the area surrounding the detention center, chanting “F— ICE” and brandishing black umbrellas, gas masks and other gear to protect themselves from pepper spray and various anti-riot measures.
On Wednesday evening, DHS reported that approximately 100 anti-ICE protesters gathered around the Delaney Hall ICE facility. While rioters assaulted and threw objects at law enforcement, DHS said “local police refused to help our officers.” Six rioters were arrested Wednesday night for allegedly assaulting law enforcement officers.
ICE agents use chemical irritants during clashes with protestors outside the federal immigration center at Delaney Hall in Newark, N.J., on Thursday. (Adam Gray/Getty Images)
“We called local police, we called state police multiple times. Listen, I know the law enforcement there would love to respond, but because of Governor Sherrill’s behavior what the governor is doing, she’s not allowing public officers and state officers to respond,” Mullin said during a Thursday morning appearance on Fox & Friends.
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Demonstrations over conditions for detainees began Friday, May 22, after detainees penned an open letter claiming they were being denied access to medical care, being insufficiently fed and detained without due process.
DHS has denied those claims.
Fox News’ Charles Creitz and Robert McGreevy contributed to this report.
With California facing increasingly destructive wildfires, experts and officials have long urged the strategic removal of dense, flammable vegetation that can erupt into particularly destructive flames from a lightning bolt or the spark of a power line.
But after years of record investment by the state in such wildfire risk mitigation, two key money sources are drying up, potentially reducing the state’s annual budget for vegetation removal by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Wildfire resiliency advocates are warning that the loss of these funds will leave the state vulnerable to devastation, and are calling on California’s next governor to take that threat seriously.
Currently, California relies heavily on two funding sources for wildfire mitigation work: A state program that charges polluters for their emissions and a climate bond approved by voters in 2024.
Late Friday, however, state officials adopted a new structure for the emissions program, called cap-and-invest, that analysts say will likely reduce wildfire mitigation funding by $200 million per year. At the same time, the governor’s latest budget proposal puts the state on track to allocate the majority of the climate bond’s $1.5 billion in wildfire prevention money within just three years.
As a result, California could go from routinely pulling more than $600 million a year from these sources, to just $150 million, according to an estimate from the Wildfire Solutions Coalition — a group of more than 80 organizations representing conservationists, business owners, fire officials and tribal leaders.
The coalition is urging the state to find new sources of funding for the work.
“We have the scientists, we have the technicians, we have the advocates,” said Michelle Decker, who is on the coalition’s executive committee and serves as president and CEO of the Inland Empire Community Foundation. “We see this problem. We can get ahead of this problem. It is a revenue issue.”
California wildfires have become increasingly costly. The 2025 L.A. fires alone caused an estimated $250 billion in damage and economic loss. Insurance companies have already paid out $22.4 billion.
In attempt to reduce the risk of damage to communities and ecosystems, the state has employed a wide range of tactics. These includes fortifying homes against wildfires, replanting fire-ravaged forests and thinning out vegetation with prescribed burns, goat grazing and manual thinning with heavy machinery to reduce the intensity of potential fires.
Research suggests wildfire mitigation work pays off. A recent analysis of 285 fires in the western U.S. found that every dollar spent on landscape projects saved about $3.75 in wildfire damage.
But as funding from cap-and-invest and the climate bond dwindle, the state must increasingly turn to Cal Fire, which devotes only a small portion of its budget to mitigation work.
“This is not an issue that can be pushed off to a timeline based solely on politics,” said Steve Frisch, a founding member of the coalition and president of the Sierra Business Council. “Fire happens whether we want it to or not.”
After a series of destructive wildfires in Northern California and the 2017 Thomas fire in Southern California, the state legislature began to explicitly focus on funding wildfire mitigation.
In 2018, lawmakers directed $200 million per year of cap-and-invest funds to wildfire mitigation projects.
As the Woolsey fire in Southern California and the Camp fire in Paradise raged later that fall, Trump accused the state of “gross mismanagement” of forest lands and threatened to cut off federal funds unless it was corrected.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and the legislature, with a significant budget surplus, began earmarking even more funds, leading to a peak of $1.1 billion in wildfire mitigation investments during the 2021-2022 fiscal year.
After the surplus dwindled, the legislature opted in 2024 to put a $10-billion climate bond in front of voters — $1.5 billion of which was dedicated specifically for wildfire mitigation work.
Newsom has since pointed to this high state funding to call on the federal government to step up its own investments into forest management work.
The federal government manages 57% of all forests in the state. While the U.S. Forest Service spent $3.1 billion mitigating wildfire conditions in the state over the last few years, California spent $4.3 billion, according to the California Forest Resilience and Wildfire Task Force.
However, the state has already allocated about $600 million of the climate bond’s wildfire mitigation pot for the 2024-2025 and current fiscal years. The latest budget proposal would allocate more than $300 million for this upcoming fiscal year. While many advocates support allocating the money quickly, it leaves little for future years.
Once that money is spent, California has to pay off the $10 billion bond with interest. The result is an estimated price tag of $16 billion, paid in roughly $400 million increments every year, for 40 years, according to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office.
As for the cap-and-invest funds, a fraught months-long debate at the California Air Resources Board on how to extend the program beyond 2030 resulted in a compromise that will cut the revenue it generates in half, the Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates.
Since other projects get priority — including $1 billion every year for California’s high-speed rail project — the new proposal would “likely leave no funding” for the wildfire and forest resilience line item, the Legislative Analyst’s Office found.
Cal Fire still holds a modest annual budget for wildfire mitigation work. In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the agency had $500 million for forest management and fire prevention that was not directly tied to cap-and-invest or the bond — up from about $65 million two decades prior.
As for the federal government, independent analyses by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and NPR found that Forest Service wildfire mitigation work is on the decline amid federal staffing cuts. The Forest Service claims the decrease in work was primarily due to poor weather conditions for activities like prescribed burns and staff being occupied with firefighting.
Both the state and federal government’s investments pale in comparison to the spending of California’s investor-owned utilities. In 2025 alone, the utilities planned to spend more than $9.2 billion on preventing their equipment from sparking the next devastating wildfire, primarily funded by Californians’ electricity bills.
Times staff writer Hayley Smith contributed to this report.
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