Politics

Trump’s Moves to Upend Federal Bureaucracy Touch Off Fear and Confusion

Published

1 day ago

January 25, 2025

Trump’s Moves to Upend Federal Bureaucracy Touch Off Fear and Confusion

An Education Department employee was attending a funeral this week when she got the call: She was being placed on administrative leave because she works on projects that connect Black students, among others, to federal government programs.

A disabled veteran employed at the Department of Veterans Affairs grew emotional when he heard about the rescinding of telework options, unsure whether it would mean the end of his job taking care of fellow soldiers.

A Federal Trade Commission employee was so anxious that he told family members not to talk about politics on unencrypted lines. Across government agencies, workers eyed one another nervously, wondering whether a colleague would report them, accusing them of resisting the new administration’s move to end certain programs.

President Trump’s rapid push to overhaul the federal bureaucracy in his first days in office has been met with a mix of fear, fury and confusion throughout the work force.

Dozens of employees across the government, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of worries of retribution, described agencies gripped with uncertainty about how to implement the new policies and workers frantically trying to assess the impact on their careers and families. As the nation’s largest employer, the upheaval in the federal government could reverberate in communities throughout the country.

Starting on Inauguration Day, the orders and memos came down one after the other, many crafted in the pugnacious tone of a campaign speech: the shuttering of “Radical and Wasteful” diversity programs in federal agencies; the stripping of civil service protections from a share of the federal work force; the end to remote work, which, one administration memo claimed, had left federal office buildings “mostly empty” and rendered downtown Washington “a national embarrassment.”

All new hiring was frozen, job offers were rescinded, scientific meetings were canceled and federal health officials were temporarily barred from communicating with the public, a directive that some understood as so broad that it even extended to making outside purchase orders for lab supplies.

For the more than two million federal workers, roughly four-fifths of whom live outside the Washington area, change is inevitable whenever a new administration takes over. But few had expected it to come at this speed and scale.

“They are being upended in the most brutal and traumatic way imaginable,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that works to promote excellence and best practices in the federal government. Mr. Stier said he had deep concerns about the consequences of Mr. Trump’s swift changes on the ability of the country to face a range of threats, from terrorism to pandemics.

An ambition to change things is reasonable, he said. But “the speed is unnecessary and destructive,” he added.

Federal employees looked to their supervisors for guidance, but said they often had none to give, as they tried to interpret brief orders and memos with few specifics. For example, the return-to-office memo said employees with a disability could be exempt, but it was unclear what kind of disability might qualify. Some managers said they knew nothing beyond what was in the news. Adding to the panic were remarks by the president himself, who suggested on Friday that he might consider shuttering the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which employs 20,000 workers around the country.

A spokesperson from the Office of Personnel Management defended the actions in a statement, calling them “exciting steps to build a federal work force based on merit, excellence and accomplishment, so we can have a government that serves the public effectively and efficiently.”

“We have already saved millions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars that are no longer directed to DEIA programs that wasted millions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars and discriminated against federal workers,” the statement said, referring to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility efforts.

Donald F. Kettl, an emeritus professor at the University of Maryland who studies the civil service, said there was widespread consensus among experts that the civil service is in need of changes.

“It’s too hard to hire, it’s too tough to fire, and there’s too little match between the civil service system and the capacity government needs to handle 21st-century challenges,” Dr. Kettl said.

But he said that many of the Trump administration’s proposed changes would be counterproductive. “They’re focused much more on shifting the balance of power than they are on improving the results of government,” he said.

Inside federal offices, the mood has been tense and anticipatory. One employee at the Homeland Security Department said the staff felt at risk of being fired at any moment. At the Commerce Department, employees were terrified whenever a meeting was called, one worker said.

The isolation is deepened, some federal employees said, by the fact that most of their fellow Americans see the federal government as bloated and inefficient. Some said that reform, if it were well thought-out, would be healthy and welcome. But many noted that they had accepted significant pay cuts to work for the government because they believe in public service — issuing Social Security checks, keeping air travel safe and inspecting food, among other roles.

“The reality is that the American economy needs my agency’s work,” said Colin Smalley, a geologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the president of his local of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. “We keep construction projects going, ports and waterways open, power grids functioning, and we protect communities from natural disasters and help affected communities recover. Hurting our mission hurts the public.”

Compounding the anxiety was a directive from the Office of Personnel Management instructing agency heads to turn over by Jan. 24 names of those who were still in their probationary period, typically within one or two years of their hiring.

The directive noted that such employees “can be terminated during that period without triggering appeal rights,” and that managers should determine whether they should be retained, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times.

Jacqueline Simon, the policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, which has about 300,000 active members across dozens of agencies, said that attempts to terminate federal employees still in their probationary periods could have damaging effects on government services.

For example, she said, employees of the Food Safety and Inspection Service, who work in meat and poultry plants to prevent diseased animals and other contaminants from entering the food supply, frequently leave within a year because the job is so depleting.

“It’s not a job you stay in long,” Ms. Simon said, calling the work “dirty and dangerous.” If the Trump administration were to remove everyone in the service who was still on probation, she added, there would be a severe shortage of inspectors at meat processing plants.

An attorney at a federal enforcement agency said he works on a team of more than a dozen lawyers, more than half of whom are still in their probationary period. If the team were to lose all of its members still on probation, the attorney said, it would be “catastrophic” for the team’s ability to shoulder its law enforcement responsibilities.

One of the most sweeping changes made by Mr. Trump in his first week was to order federal workers back to the office full time by later next month, ending years of a flexible telecommuting policy, which in many offices dated to well before the pandemic. For some who want to keep working for the government, this could mean selling homes, changing children’s schools and moving hundreds of miles in a matter of weeks. New mothers are debating whether they will be able to return from maternity leave, and couples have been forced to choose who gets to keep their current jobs.

Many offices do not currently have enough room for all of the employees to come back. This, some contend, is the whole point. Shortly after the November election, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the men tapped by Mr. Trump to remake the government, wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”

“I think we know where it looks like he’s trying to go, which is to force people to quit,” said Representative Glenn F. Ivey of Maryland, a Democrat whose district is home to tens of thousands of federal workers. “They’re going to try and force a lot of federal employees out of work, and then replace them with political loyalists.”

The administration’s efforts are already being challenged in court by unions and other groups, who argue, among other things, that the lifting of civil service protections runs afoul of laws governing federal workers.

Among the first to feel the direct impact of the president’s new policies were employees working on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and programming. Mr. Trump ordered the immediate shutdown of all such offices, with their staff placed on administrative leave by Wednesday at 5 p.m. Agencies were ordered to draw up plans to lay them off by Jan. 31. The administration also threatened employees with “adverse consequences” if they failed to report on colleagues who defy the orders within 10 days, setting up a special email account for such reports.

The Education Department employee who was placed on leave while she was at a funeral said she had worked on an acclaimed program connecting students with scholarships and industry leaders, and helped Black people tap into government programs they often did not know existed. In various communications, the Trump administration has called such efforts “harmful” and “wasteful.”

“I guess if that’s harmful, then I’m proud of providing that harm — empowering the community to be better because we are brilliant,” she said. “We just don’t have the access to generational wealth and nepotism that they have, so we have to teach people how to make it for themselves.”

In a work force that is nearly 20 percent Black, many employees said there could be another consequence of the moves: making the federal government whiter and less diverse.

By the end of the week, some employees said wearily that they did not know how long they could hang on. Many described conditions as reminiscent of the McCarthy era, and were despondent to see how quickly their office’s leaders acquiesced.

At the Department of Labor, staff members watched a colleague who had been recently hired to a civil service position be escorted out because she was a former political appointee. One employee said her manager required her to scrub the website not only of the words “diversity, equity and inclusion,” as the executive order required, but also of references to “underserved” and “marginalized communities.” Afterward, she said, she went into a closet, called her mother and wept.

On Tuesday morning, Moriah Lee, an analyst at NASA, joined a virtual town hall to learn what all the orders would mean for her small team, which monitors and audits projects in the space program. The acting supervisors, people she had known personally for years, made it clear to everyone that they were not inclined to show flexibility, she said.

Gone was the weekly speaker series that had been organized under the diversity program, which had brought in deaf people, combat veterans and others to share their experiences. Gone was her ability to live in Nashville and go twice a month to an office two hours away in Huntsville, Ala.

After the meeting, she and her colleagues went back to their jobs. They were rattled, she said, but not afraid. “The people who are acting most in fear are the ones in authority,” she said.

But the change to remote work, combined with the other directives, was just too much for her. And so Ms. Lee sent in her notice: Nearly six years after she began working for the federal government, she was resigning.

Kate Kelly, Hamed Aleaziz and Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Washington.

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Politics

In 2024 Elections, Most Races Were Over Before They Started

Published

9 hours ago

January 26, 2025

Press Room

In 2024 Elections, Most Races Were Over Before They Started

Competition is an endangered species in legislative elections.

A New York Times analysis of the nearly 6,000 congressional and state legislative elections in November shows just how few races were true races. Nearly all either were dominated by an incumbent or played out in a district drawn to favor one party overwhelmingly. The result was a blizzard of blowouts, even in a country that is narrowly divided on politics.

Just 8 percent of congressional races (36 of 435) and 7 percent of state legislative races (400 of 5,465) were decided by fewer than five percentage points, according to The Times’s analysis.

Consequences from the death of competition are readily apparent. Roughly 90 percent of races are now decided not by general-election voters in November but by the partisans who tend to vote in primaries months earlier. That favors candidates who appeal to ideological voters and lawmakers who are less likely to compromise. It exacerbates the polarization that has led to deadlock in Congress and in statehouses.

“Because of partisan and racial gerrymandering, you end up with these skewed results and legislative bodies that don’t necessarily reflect the political makeup of either the states or, writ large, the House of Representatives representing the political desires of the American people,” said Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general in the Obama administration who, as chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, has criticized the mapmaking process and at times even called out his own party’s redistricting practices.

In 2020, the last time that once-a-decade national exercise took place, both parties largely followed a similar strategy. Their maps typically made districts safer by stocking them with voters from one party, rather than breaking them up in an effort to pick up seats. Republicans, as the party in control of the process in more states, drew more of these slanted districts than Democrats.

Other factors have contributed to vanishing competition, including demographic shifts and “political sorting” — the tendency of like-minded citizens to live in the same community. But the role of redistricting is evident when zooming in on a single state.

Take, for example, Texas, where in 2020, before redistricting, 10 of 38 congressional races were decided by 10 percentage points or fewer. In 2024, just two races were. In five races last year, Democrats did not even run a candidate, ceding the seat to Republicans. One Democrat ran unopposed.

In state legislatures, where lawmakers are drawing maps for their own districts, safe seats abound.

There are 181 state legislative seats in Texas, with 31 senators and 150 representatives. In 2024, just four of those elections — three in the Statehouse and one in the State Senate — were decided by five points or fewer, according to The Times’s analysis.

“Legislatures draw maps in most places, and the reality is, a big concern for members who have to pass these bills is: ‘What happens to my district?’” said Michael Li, a senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Very few members are willing to say, ‘Oh, gosh, I should have a more competitive district.’ So there is an inherent conflict of interest in the way that we draw districts.”

Adam Kincaid, the director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said that making seats safer was always the goal.

“We made no bones about the fact that we’re going to shore up incumbents, and where we had opportunities to go on offense, we were going to do that,” Mr. Kincaid said. “So what that means is bringing a whole lot of Republican seats that were otherwise in jeopardy off the board.”

The Power of a Map

While it is easy to focus on the candidates, the money, the message or the economy, increasingly it is the maps that determine the outcome. In North Carolina, they may have decided control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Only one of the state’s 14 congressional districts was decided by fewer than five points. A Republican won the state’s next closest race — by 14 points.

In 2022, the State Supreme Court ordered a more competitive map, but it was tossed out after midterm elections shook up the balance of the court. The replacement, which was drawn by the Republican-led Legislature, gave three Democratic seats to the G.O.P. while making nearly every district safer for the party that held it.

It is impossible to know how elections held under the first map would have turned out. But, according to Justin Levitt, a redistricting law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, “had every seat stayed the same as in 2022, those three seats would have made the difference, and Democrats would have had a one-seat majority” in Congress.

Of course, North Carolina played a pivotal role because the margin in the House was so small. Gerrymanders nudge the political balance in every election, but the 2024 vote was the rare occasion in which they were decisive.

North Carolina’s role in the 2024 House elections follows a historic U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2019 — involving partisan congressional maps in North Carolina — in which the court called partisan gerrymanders a political problem outside federal courts’ jurisdiction.

Even though those maps were “blatant examples of partisanship driving districting decisions,” the majority wrote, “state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply.”

Almost unnoticed, other battles over slanted congressional maps that could affect the 2026 elections are crawling though state and federal courts — in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina (again), South Carolina, Texas and Utah.

Of all those lawsuits, the one most likely to affect the next House elections appears to be in Utah, where Salt Lake City, the state’s liberal hub, was carved into four districts to water down the impact of Democratic voters on House races.

Democrats appear likely to pick up a single House seat from that litigation, which faces a crucial court hearing on Friday.

Nationwide Decline

North Carolina is hardly an outlier.

In Illinois, a state dominated by Democrats, no congressional election was within a five-point margin, and just two were within 10 points. In Maryland, just one district was within a five-point margin.

Georgia did not have a single congressional district within a 10-point margin, out of 14 seats. The state’s closest race was the 13-point victory by Representative Sanford Bishop, a Democrat, in the Second Congressional District.

At the state legislative level, the numbers were even starker.

In Georgia, just five of the 236 state legislative seats, or 2 percent, were decided by five points or fewer, and more than half of the races were uncontested. In Florida, 10 of the 160 state legislative races were within a five-point margin.

With so few general elections to worry about, tribalism can take over in legislatures, leaving many elected officials to worry only about primary challenges, often from their party’s fringes. In the modern climate of political polarization, the lack of competitive districts not only removes an incentive to work with the other party but actively deters doing so.

“As competitive districts dwindle, so do incentives to compromise,” said Steve Israel, a former Democratic congressman from New York and the former chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “I remember campaigning on bipartisanship in a very moderate district in my first election in 2000. By the time I left in 2017, talking about crossing the aisle was like announcing a walk to my own firing squad.”

Politics

Inside the Oval Office: What Biden décor did Trump ditch?

Published

10 hours ago

January 26, 2025

Press Room

Inside the Oval Office: What Biden décor did Trump ditch?

When a new president moves into the White House, they have free rein to redecorate as they see fit.

As President Donald Trump participated in inaugural ceremonies on Monday, dozens of staffers worked furiously at the White House to move former President Biden’s personal items out and Trump’s in.

Some of the decor seen in the Oval Office belongs to the president – such as the family photos both Biden and Trump displayed behind the Resolute Desk. But other items, like portraits of former presidents, the tables, chairs and curios belong to the White House Collection and are selected by the president to be featured during their term.

The look of the Oval Office, from the carpet to curtains and artwork on the walls, is entirely the president’s choice. Here’s a look at what Trump has kept and what he’s ditched from his predecessor:

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Kept: The Resolute Desk

Executive Orders regarding trade lay on the Resolute desk in the Oval Office of the White House on March 31, 2017, in Washington, D.C. (Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

All but three U.S. presidents since 1880 – LBJ, Nixon and Ford – have used the famous desk that was gifted to President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria that year. Trump used it in his first term, as did Biden, and Trump was pictured signing a flurry of executive actions at the desk on his first day in office on Monday.

Removed: President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s portrait

Biden sits with mask on in the Oval Office

President Joe Biden sits underneath a portrait of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt while meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office at the White House on Sept. 1, 2021, in Washington, D.C. This was the two leaders’ first face-to-face meeting and the first by a Ukrainian leader in more than four years. (Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)

When Biden assumed office, he hung a large portrait of progressive hero FDR over the fireplace, which became the focus of the room. Biden’s intent was to honor Roosevelt, who guided the nation through the Great Depression and World War II, as the U.S. faced another crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic.

FOX EXCLUSIVE: TRUMP SHARES LETTER BIDEN LEFT FOR HIM

Trump has removed the portrait and replaced it with one of President George Washington, which hung in the Oval Office during Trump’s first term, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Kept: Bust of Martin Luther King Jr.

A bust of Martin Luther King Jr. is featured in the Oval Office

A sculpted bust of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., adorns a table for an early preview of the redesigned Oval Office awaiting President Joseph Biden at the White House in Washington, DC. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

A bust of civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr. displayed by both Trump and Biden will remain in the Oval Office for Trump’s second term, according to the Journal.

Swapped: Family photos

President Trump sits at the Resolute Desk with family photos behind him.

President Donald Trump after signing executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Thurs., Jan. 23, 2025. (Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A collection of Trump family photos now sits on a small table behind the Resolute desk. Among them is a picture of the president’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, and a portrait of his father, Fred Trump. Also displayed are a photo of Trump’s eldest three children in formal evening wear; a photo of Trump with his daughter Ivanka when she was a girl; and a photo of Trump with first lady Melania Trump when their son Barron was a baby.

WHY TRUMP’S HOLDING WEEKEND RALLY IN LAS VEGAS LESS THAN A WEEK INTO NEW ADMIN

Biden family photos were previously arranged on this table, including one of his adult children, Beau, Hunter and Ashley Biden.

Kept: Benjamin Franklin portrait

Trump aides Natalie Harp and Stephen Cheung listen as President Trump signs executive orders in the White House.

Natalie Harp, an aide to U.S. President Donald Trump, and White House Communications Director Steven Cheung (R) listen as President Trump signs a series of executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on Jan. 23, 2025, in Washington, D.C. A portrait of Benjamin Franklin hangs on the wall in the background. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

A portrait of Benjamin Franklin that Biden added to the Oval Office to signify his focus on science will remain there during Trump’s term, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Removed: Robert F. Kennedy bust

A bust of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sits behind President Biden in the White House

Robert F. Kennedy Bust behind President Joe Biden during a meeting with Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Petr Fiala in the Oval Office of the White House on Monday April 15, 2024 (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Trump has swapped out a bust of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that Biden placed near the fireplace in favor of a sculpture of President Andrew Jackson called, “The Bronco Buster,” by Frederic Remington. The Jackson sculpture also featured in the Oval Office during Trump’s first term, according to the Journal.

Returned: Winston Churchill bust

British Prime Minister Theresa May and President Donald Trump pose by Winston Churchill bust in Oval Office

British Prime Minister Theresa May (L) and President Donald Trump meet beside a bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the Oval Office of the White House on Jan. 27, 2017 in Washington, D.C. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

A bust of Winston Churchill that Biden had removed is back at Trump’s direction. The bronze bust by British American artist Jacob Epstein has been the focus of past controversy. Then-London Mayor Boris Johnson had claimed that President Obama removed the bust upon taking office in 2009 – but the White House refuted that claim in 2012, observing that the bust had been placed just outside the Oval Office in the White House’s Treaty Room.

Returned: Andrew Jackson portrait

President Donald Trump speaks from the Resolute Desk with a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the background

President Donald Trump speaks to the media after signing executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C, on Jan. 23, 2025. (ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)

A new painting of President Andrew Jackson provided by the White House art collection features prominently in Trump’s Oval Office, according to WSJ. Trump has long admired the nation’s seventh president, a populist and disruptive figure whose election Trump once said “shook the establishment like an earthquake” – not unlike his own victories.

Returned: U.S. military flags

President Trump signs executive orders while taking questions from the press.

President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., US, on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. Flags representing different branches of the U.S. military are seen in the background. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Trump is one again prominently featuring flags representing each branch of the armed services in the Oval Office.

Chris Pandolfo is a breaking news reporter for Fox News Digital. Send tips to chris.pandolfo@fox.com and follow him on Twitter @ChrisCPandolfo.

Politics

Trump talks 'free speech' while moving to muzzle those he disagrees with

Published

10 hours ago

January 26, 2025

Press Room

Trump talks 'free speech' while moving to muzzle those he disagrees with

In one of his first acts in office, President Trump issued an executive order promising to end government censorship and restore free speech.

The order accused the outgoing Biden administration of harassing social media companies and violating the rights of average Americans “under the guise” of combating disinformation online, and said federal resources would no longer be used to “unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”

The order echoed a recurring theme from Trump’s campaign — that liberals across the federal government are censoring conservative voices to advance their own “woke” agenda — and immediately resonated with his followers.

“This order is a critical step to ensure the government cannot dictate what speech is permissible or weaponize private entities to enforce censorship,” said Mark Trammell of the Center for American Liberty, a conservative rights group founded by California attorney Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

However, many others said they found Trump’s order absurd — both because of his long track record of attacking speech he doesn’t like, and because of his new administration’s simultaneous efforts to muzzle people it disagrees with, including journalists, federal health officials, teachers, diplomats, climate scientists and the LGBTQ+ community.

“Let’s not be naive,” said Hadar Harris, the Washington managing director of PEN America, which has advocated for free speech in the U.S. for more than a century. “While some of President Trump’s flurry of executive orders pay lip service to free speech, in reality they frame a frontal assault against it, dictating the terms of allowable expression and identities, demanding political loyalty from civil servants, and threatening retaliation against dissent in ways that could cast a broad chill on free expression well beyond the halls of government.”

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said Trump’s claiming to be a free speech champion while attacking the media and harshly restricting how longtime civil servants can communicate with the public — including in critical areas such as public health — was “ironic and hypocritical.”

“It’s classic Trump administration,” Bonta said. “It’s their rhetoric versus their actions, and you have to look at their actions.”

Limiting communication

Both at home and abroad, the Trump administration has ordered federal employees and diplomats to cease communications on a range of issues, including “diversity, equity and inclusion,” “environmental justice” and “gender ideology.”

It ordered Department of Defense officials to stop posting information on official social media accounts unless it is about the southern border, and health and other federal experts to limit communications even on critical public safety issues such as the spread of bird flu — which California officials have declared an emergency.

Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a public health professor and infectious-disease expert at USC, said he was alarmed Thursday when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention withdrew from a planned bird flu discussion with the Infectious Disease Society of America. Klausner said their pulling out was “a big loss for our ability to understand what’s going on” nationally.

Klausner said past administrations have given health leaders new orders — to curtail spending, shift priorities — but never such directives to halt so many critical communications at once. He called it “extremely concerning.”

Trump also has ordered a sweeping crackdown on federal communications about the LGBTQ+ community — removing LGBTQ+ resource materials from government websites and placing new restrictions on how federal employees can discuss or speak to LGBTQ+ people — or even use words such as “sex” or “gender.”

He has threatened similar restrictions on public school teachers and administrators, and ordered that LGBTQ+ Americans may no longer identify as transgender on passports and other documents.

Jenny Pizer, chief legal officer for the LGBTQ+ legal advocacy group Lambda Legal, said Trump’s orders are “the antithesis of free speech” and a clear government attempt to “silence people, to chill speech” — which is illegal.

She pointed to new rules barring federal employees, contractors and materials from referencing gender identity or fluidity. “Those concepts are being censored, and the language with which one articulates the concepts is being censored,” she said.

Lambda Legal has fought such efforts before. When Trump in 2020 issued an executive order barring federal grantees conducting workplace diversity training from referencing topics such as implicit bias or critical race theory — calling them “divisive concepts” — Lambda Legal and others sued and won an injunction blocking the order.

Trump has also kept up his criticism of the news media, calling journalists the “enemy of the people.” He is suing various media organizations — including the board of the Pulitzer Prizes and the Des Moines Register and its parent company, Gannett — over journalism he claims was libelous or unfair. The outlets have defended their work.

Katherine Jacobsen, U.S. program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, said journalists would welcome an honest effort to bolster free speech protections across the political spectrum, but Trump’s order isn’t that.

“What we’ve seen in this post-election period — and even before the election kicked off, in his last presidency — is that he hasn’t really been willing to support free speech when it counters his narrative,” Jacobsen said.

Online debate

At the core of Trump’s censorship order is his claim that the Biden administration “trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech,” including by “exerting substantial coercive pressure” on online platforms.

It is not a new argument.

After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and multiple investigations into efforts by foreign adversaries to spread disinformation and sow distrust in the American political system, social media companies promised to crack down — including by suspending thousands of accounts. Under the Biden administration, officials kept up pressure on those platforms to take down posts the administration deemed false and dangerous, including about U.S. election integrity but also the COVID-19 pandemic.

Those efforts increasingly rankled Republicans and eventually Republican states sued, accusing the Biden administration of illegally coercing the platforms to erase conservative content.

Experts say claims of liberal bias on social platforms are generally overblown, and point to thriving conservative communities online as proof. However, surveys have shown that many conservatives believe that bias exists. And Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, recently lent credence to the claims by complaining publicly and to Congress about pressure his company received from the Biden administration to remove or limit the spread of certain content, including satirical content about COVID-19.

Lawyers for the Biden administration have said there is a difference between legitimate persuasion and inappropriate coercion, and that communication channels between government and social media companies had to remain open for public safety reasons. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Biden administration in June, finding the states had no standing to sue. Litigation around the issue persists.

In the meantime, tech leaders were shifting away from moderation — and toward Trump.

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, purchased the social media platform X — then Twitter — in October 2022 on a promise to make it more free. He has described himself as a “free speech absolutist” and said Twitter wasn’t living up to its potential as a “platform for free speech” — which he said he would fix by loosening content restrictions.

Since then, Musk has joined Trump’s inner circle, spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help reelect Trump and Republicans in Congress, and been appointed by Trump to lead a new agency called the “Department of Government Efficiency,” raising all sorts of questions about conflicts given contracts Musk — also chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla — holds with the federal government.

Critics have also questioned Musk’s commitment to free speech. He has kicked journalists covering him off X and amplified conservative talking points on the platform. In September, X disclosed it had suspended nearly 5.3 million accounts in the first half of last year, compared with 1.6 million accounts it suspended in the first half of 2022.

Earlier this month, Zuckerberg of Meta — which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — announced his company had allowed for “too much censorship” and would be getting rid of fact-checkers, reducing content restrictions and serving up more political content.

Zuckerberg then went on the popular Joe Rogan podcast, where he said corporate America had been “neutered” and “emasculated” and complained bitterly about Biden administration officials calling Meta team members to demand they take down certain content — while “threatening repercussions if we don’t.”

A host of other tech leaders in addition to Musk and Zuckerberg — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the chief executives of Apple, Google and TikTok — were on hand for Trump’s inauguration. Many also donated to the events.

Trammell, of the Center for American Liberty, said the Biden administration violated the rights of average Americans with such actions, and that Trump’s order “reaffirms America’s commitment to free expression.” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who as chair of the House Judiciary Committee has overseen investigations into social media bias, noted the anti-censorship order, among others, in a post on X, writing, “Common sense is back!”

Harris, of PEN America, said her organization agrees that “government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society,” as Trump’s order states, and that the government must “take care” in how it addresses things like disinformation on social media platforms “so as not to infringe on free speech.”

However, the government “should be able to communicate and engage in information sharing with tech companies when disinformation is swirling online during a natural disaster, pandemic, foreign interference in an election, or other moment of heightened tension and risks to the public,” Harris said.

While purporting to defend speech already protected by the 1st Amendment, Trump’s order would make such necessary communication “impossible” and “limit the government’s ability to address disinformation at all,” Harris said — “giving disinformation free reign.”

Speaking out

Kate Oakley, senior director of legal policy at the pro-LGBTQ+ Human Rights Campaign, said while there are some legitimate restrictions on free speech — you can’t scream ‘fire!” in a crowded theater, for example — the Constitution already protects American citizens from the sort of government censorship that Trump purports to target with his order.

It also protects them from some of the things Trump’s other orders would usher in if implemented, she said.

“What he wants to do is make sure that speech or beliefs that are critical of him have less opportunity to be expressed, that speech or beliefs that are praising him have more ability to be out there, and to the extent that people are saying, doing, believing, reading things that he doesn’t approve of, he would like to shut that down and is taking actions to do so,” Oakley said.

But “our government does not get to tell us those things,” Oakley said, and groups such as hers are going to be using their voice to argue that point vociferously — including, if necessary, in court.

Bonta, California’s attorney general, said Trump is a “seasoned salesman” when it comes to saying one thing and doing another, but California will not be fooled and will also be calling out Trump’s anti-free speech actions and those that threaten public safety.

Pizer, of Lambda Legal, said legal intervention from groups like hers may not come immediately, as some of the orders are “still amorphous or theoretical enough that we can’t see what the effect will be.” But they are watching closely, she said, and already see the pain.

“The reality,” she said, “is that lovely, wonderful people who never did anything to hurt anybody are going to be suffering along the way as we try to shut this stuff down as fast as we can.”

Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Washington contributed to this report.