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What Does a Shutdown Have to Do With the Budget or Elon Musk? Here’s a Guide.

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What Does a Shutdown Have to Do With the Budget or Elon Musk? Here’s a Guide.

Republicans in government are hard at work refashioning federal spending through three major efforts, proceeding along parallel tracks. They may seem to be all the same story — and they do relate to each other — but they each have their own goals, deadlines and constraints. Here, a guide to all three.

  • Potential changes: The bill would fund a portion of the budget — hundreds of billions of dollars — for the rest of the fiscal year.

  • Deadline: Saturday at 12:01 a.m.

  • Status: A House vote is scheduled for Tuesday.

If Congress doesn’t pass a bill to fund ongoing government programs by the end of Friday, there could be a shutdown.

Congress is supposed to pass yearlong spending bills before a fiscal year begins, through a process known as regular appropriations. That process often breaks down, so Congress frequently passes shorter-term spending bills every few months instead to keep the government funded. The latest such “continuing resolution” expires this week, and a new one, which would fund the government through the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, is on the table.

The appropriations process deals with only a portion of all federal spending — often called discretionary. It doesn’t affect “mandatory” programs like Social Security, which pay out benefits on a kind of autopilot, based on a formula. The resolution is also subject to a filibuster in the Senate, which means that at least seven Democrats will need to vote for it even if every Senate Republican supports it.

The current bill mostly allows the government to spend the same amount on most government agencies it has been spending all year, with a few key exceptions, including cuts to programs earmarked by lawmakers for their home districts, and an increase in military spending. Compared with last year’s funding, it reduces the amount allowed by around $7 billion — roughly 0.1 percent of the estimated $7 trillion in annual government spending.

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  • Potential changes: Trillions of dollars in changes to both tax revenue and spending, over 10 years.

  • Deadline: Oct. 1, or the process must start over.

  • Status: The budget resolution passed the House. The timing of next steps is unclear.

The House adopted a budget outline for what the government should spend and raise over the next decade. That budget is the very first part of a process that could help Republicans cut taxes and reshape large government programs. Republicans have chosen this route, known as reconciliation, so they can pass their policies without needing any Democratic votes in the Senate.

The reconciliation process still has many steps left to go. Republicans in the Senate would need to adopt a matching budget resolution, and many have expressed reservations about the House approach (the Senate has passed its own, smaller budget plan). Then both chambers will have to write and pass legislation that carries out the cuts and increases in spending outlined in the budget.

By design, budget reconciliation mostly addresses the parts of federal spending that are not part of the appropriations process. This includes mandatory programs like Medicare, Medicaid, food assistance, student loans and farm aid that get automatically funded unless Congress makes changes to their structure.

The budget adopted by the House would also allow tax cuts of around $4.5 trillion over a decade, partly offset by around $2 trillion in spending reductions. It also includes a few spending increases, for the military and border security. The combination could increase deficits by an estimated $3.4 trillion, including interest on federal debt.

Because the budget process affects a decade at a time, the numbers above are 10-year changes. That’s part of why they are so much larger than the numbers used to describe the continuing resolution, which covers only about half a year’s worth of spending.

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  • Potential changes: The stated goal is to cut around 15 percent of next year’s budget.

  • Deadline: That fiscal year ends in October 2027.

  • Status: The cuts from Mr. Musk’s team are continuing, with new layoffs and contract cancellations announced this week.

Mr. Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, is leading his own effort to trim government spending, and it’s unclear exactly how it will come to intersect with the work of Congress. He has pledged to use a team called the Department of Government Efficiency to reduce federal spending by $1 trillion in the next fiscal year, an ambitious target that would be hard to achieve without legislation.

So far, Mr. Musk’s team has been directing agencies to fire workers and cancel government contracts, grants and leases. The majority of those changes affect the discretionary part of the budget — the smaller portion of government spending that Congress is also trying to address this week.

Mr. Musk and Congress seem to be clashing. The current continuing resolution mostly leaves agencies funded at their current level, and does not take account of the changes by Mr. Musk’s group. But there has been some discussion about codifying some of Mr. Musk’s cuts using a process called rescission.

The effort by his team has also mostly ignored the military, which makes up more than half of discretionary spending.

Some of the group’s changes could affect federal revenues, too. His team is enacting large staff reductions at the Internal Revenue Service, which collects taxes and investigates tax fraud. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a smaller I.R.S. staff generally means fewer taxes are collected.

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  • Potential changes: Without legislation, the U.S. could fail to pay its obligations and default.

  • Deadline: Sometime this summer.

  • Status: The Treasury Department is already using “extraordinary measures” to prevent a default for as long as possible.

As federal debt rises, Congress has to periodically pass legislation that allows the Treasury Department to keep issuing bonds. It’s unclear when the country will run out of options to prevent a default, but many budget experts believe it will be as soon as this summer.

If Congress fails to increase the debt limit, the country will begin defaulting on its debt, an action likely to have negative and cascading consequences for the U.S. economy. Payments to Social Security beneficiaries, medical providers and government workers could stop.

House Republicans have folded this increase in borrowing authority into their big budget bill. But if the reconciliation process isn’t finished in time, Congress may have to pass an increase to the debt limit some other way.

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DHS shutdown breakthrough comes at cost for Republicans as funding fights nears end

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DHS shutdown breakthrough comes at cost for Republicans as funding fights nears end

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Congress is one step closer to ending the Homeland Security shutdown after the Senate advanced a new, last-minute deal, but it came at the price of Republicans ceding ground, temporarily, to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

The Senate unanimously advanced a deal to reopen most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the wee hours of Friday morning, 42 days into the shutdown that was spurred by the Trump administration’s immigration operations in Minnesota.

It was an agreement that largely gave Schumer and Senate Democrats what they wanted — no funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and parts of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). But it lacked the stringent reforms they desired, like requiring judicial warrants or requiring agents to unmask.

SCHUMER, DEMS BLOCK DHS FUNDING AGAIN, TRUMP INTERVENES TO PAY TSA AGENTS

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Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said that Republicans had made what was likely their “final” offer to Democrats to reopen DHS.  (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

While the deal mirrors previous attempts by Democrats to pass similar legislation that carved out immigration funding, Thune argued that Democrats are still walking away empty-handed in the policy fight over immigration enforcement. 

“We’ve been trying for weeks to fund the whole thing,” Thune said. “And, I mean, in the end, this is what they were willing to agree to. But again, it’s different that it has zero reforms in it. I mean, they got no reforms on DHS, which they could have had if they had been willing to work with us a little bit on that.”

Schumer said that if Republicans hadn’t blocked their initial attempts, “this could have been done three weeks ago.”

“This is exactly what we wanted,” Schumer said. “This is what we asked for, and I’m very proud of my caucus. My caucus held the line.”

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The DHS funding deal now heads to the House, where Republicans aren’t enthusiastic about not funding key components of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown agenda.

The latest plan came after Senate Democrats blocked a seventh attempt to reopen DHS, after back-and-forth talks throughout the day on Thursday appeared to yield little progress toward a resolution. Trump also announced his intent to sign an order that would pay Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents as major airports are rocked with staggering lines and eye-popping wait times amid the shutdown. 

DEMS BLOCK DHS FUNDING AFTER GOP REJECTS THEIR COUNTER, THUNE SAYS SCHUMER ‘GOING IN CIRCLES’

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Democrats rejected Republicans latest deal to reopen DHS, and have promised a counteroffer with reforms in return.  (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

While a further concession to Democrats, in part, the underlying argument Republicans have made all along is that if Schumer and his caucus wanted reforms, they would have to agree to fund immigration enforcement.

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And ICE and CBP are still flush with roughly $75 billion in cash from Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” giving the agencies a buffer for a time.

“The good news is we anticipated this a year ago. I mean, one of the reasons we front loaded, pre-loaded up the ‘one big, beautiful bill’ with advanced funding for Homeland Security was because we anticipated this was likely going to happen, and it did,” Thune said. “I still think it’s unfortunate. The Dems wanted reforms. We tried to work with them on reforms. They ended up getting no reforms.”

The same process used to pass that colossal legislative package will likely be turned to again fund immigration enforcement.

DHS DEAL IN LIMBO AS DEMOCRATS DEMAND TOUGHER ICE CRACKDOWN DESPITE GOP COMPROMISE

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer’s badge and gear.  (Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

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Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., envisions funding ICE and CBP for several years.

“Democrats are trying to shut down ICE funding for the remainder of the fiscal year — ultimately they won’t be successful,” Schmitt said on X. “In response, I’ll be pushing to lock in funding for deportation operations and salaries for a decade.”

Doing so could be difficult, still, given that Republicans want to dump several other priorities into the mix, including portions of the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act and funding for the Iran war.

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And some Republicans are already couching expectations on what can and can’t be accomplished in the party-line process, given that anything in the bill has to pass muster with strict rules in the Senate.

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“I think we have to set our sights a little bit lower on this reconciliation bill,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., told Fox News Digital. “It’s got to be targeted to fund ICE for 10 years, I think that’s the number one thing to us.”

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Bill Maher on getting the Mark Twain Prize for humor: ‘Like an Emmy, except I win’

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Bill Maher on getting the Mark Twain Prize for humor: ‘Like an Emmy, except I win’

It’s like that time Pinocchio became a real boy: News that was labeled “fake” last week is real today, per the Kennedy Center, and Bill Maher will indeed be the 27th person to receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

The White House strongly dissed the Atlantic’s reporting (followed by unreporting) last week that Maher was the next in line for the 2026 prize that Conan O’Brien got last year and Kevin Hart picked up the year before that. The Twain honor has been bestowed on comics almost annually since 1998 by the Kennedy Center, a “tired, broken, and dilapidated” building that President Trump slapped his own name on in December and plans to close for two years’ worth of renovations starting July 4 — hence the response from White House flacks.

“Literally FAKE NEWS,” said Steven Cheung, White House director of communications, on his official X account reacting Friday to the Atlantic story. Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, said in a statement to the publication, “This is fake news. Bill Maher will NOT be getting this award.”

But People reported Thursday that although the Atlantic’s news was deemed “fake” at the time, according to word from a White House official, the situation had “evolved” in the six days since then.

You say tomato, I say to-mah-to? At any rate, Bill’s getting the Twain, given previously to comedic luminaries including Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels, Tina Fey and Dave Chappelle.

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Maher had no response on social media, perhaps reserving his reaction for the upcoming “Real Time With Bill Maher” episode due out Friday on HBO or his next “Club Random” podcast. But he did issue a dryly amusing statement Thursday in a Kennedy Center news release, saying, “Thank you to the Mark Twain people: I just had the award explained to me, and apparently it’s like an Emmy, except I win.”

(Maher’s show has been nominated for Emmy Awards 22 times, from 2004 through 2024, including 13 nods for variety series and the rest for writing, directing and personal performance. It has won exactly zero of those times. Even Susan Lucci only had to wait through 18 Daytime Emmy nominations before she finally won on the 19th — and proceeded to lose out on two more.)

The comic’s statement continued: “I’d just like to say that it is indeed humbling to get anything named for a man who’s been thrown out of as many school libraries as Mark Twain.”

“For nearly three decades, the Mark Twain Prize has celebrated some of the greatest minds in comedy,” Roma Daravi, vice president of public relations for the Kennedy Center, said in a statement of her own. “For even longer, Bill has been influencing American discourse — one politically incorrect joke at a time.”

Maher, a self-described liberal who has no love for the Republican Party, found himself in strange-new-respect territory among conservatives in recent years after he started slamming far-left ideology as ruthlessly as he slammed the far right. Then last spring he accepted an invitation for dinner with Trump at the White House, and many heads exploded.

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“OK, as you know, 12 days ago, I had dinner with President Trump, a dinner that was set up by my friend Kid Rock because we share a belief that there’s got to be something better than hurling insults from 3,000 miles away,” said Maher, who lives on the West Coast, on the April 11, 2025, episode of “Real Time.”

“And let me first say that to all the people who treated this like it was some kind of summit meeting, you’re ridiculous. Like I was going to sign a treaty or something. I have — I have no power. I’m a f— comedian, and he’s the most powerful leader in the world. I’m not the leader of anything except maybe a contingent of centrist-minded people who think there’s got to be a better way of running this country than hating each other every minute.”

Maher said he brought with him to the dinner a list of almost five dozen epithets the president had hurled his way over the years, intending to ask Trump to sign it for him. Which the president did. And after sharing some anecdotes from the visit, including some snappy retorts, Maher told his audience that Trump was “much more self-aware than he lets on in public.”

“I never felt I had to walk on eggshells around him. And honestly, I voted for Clinton and Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk with Donald Trump. That’s just how it went down. Make of it what you will.”

The Mark Twain Prize will be given to Maher at a gala set for June 28, with Netflix streaming the event at a later date, yet to be determined.

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Where Trump Has Installed 2020 Election Deniers in Government

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Where Trump Has Installed 2020 Election Deniers in Government

When President Trump sought to overturn his loss in the 2020 election and remain in power, resistance from within his own government helped to stop him.

Top Justice Department officials rejected his specious claims that the vote had been marred by widespread fraud. Senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security refused to go along with his outlandish efforts to seize voting machines. Cybersecurity experts praised the count as secure, and the intelligence community sidestepped his requests to declare that foreign nations had interfered in the results.

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But Mr. Trump’s second term looks very different. The president has filled his administration with people who are sympathetic to his baseless claims that the presidential race more than five years ago was stolen.

These officials have been put into positions across the federal government, at the White House and in agencies where they could play a role in undermining the midterm elections and the 2028 presidential cycle.

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At the same time, Mr. Trump has maintained allies in Congress and in state governments who could wield significant power over the process of counting votes and the seating of members of the House.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, sidestepped questions about Mr. Trump’s personnel decisions and instead asserted that he was “committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections.” She pointed to the president’s efforts to have Congress pass legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo identification to vote, prohibit mail-in ballots and bar the practice of ballot harvesting — having one person turn in mail ballots for several others.

“The vast majority of Americans support President Trump’s common-sense election integrity agenda,” Ms. Jackson said.

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Officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that the agencies were focused on keeping elections safe and secure, and were working to carry out the president’s policies on elections. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

With Mr. Trump consistently seeking to sow doubts about the integrity of elections, the number of election deniers he has installed across the administration means he would face fewer checks on any efforts to undermine an outcome he did not like, and could more easily amplify baseless claims of fraud.

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Here is a look at some of the key players.

The White House has no formal or legal role to play in administering elections, but Mr. Trump recently created a presidentially appointed position to oversee election integrity and security.

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That job has largely been involved in investigating the 2020 election.

What happened in 2020

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Mr. Trump has always been the government’s most avid promoter of false claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him. And in 2020, he routinely used the force of the Oval Office — albeit unsuccessfully — to strong-arm state officials and federal appointees to act on his claims.

Kurt Olsen

Director of election security and integrity

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Mr. Olsen was central to opening a recent F.B.I. investigation that led to the search of a Fulton County, Ga., election office in January.

Prior support for claims of election fraud

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Mr. Olsen was a pro-Trump lawyer who in late 2020 contacted senior Justice Department officials on Mr. Trump’s behalf, pushing them to file a motion to nullify the election with the Supreme Court.

After 2020, he worked with Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and a longtime election denier, to bring many unsuccessful lawsuits challenging the results of other elections and the use of voting machines, based on debunked conspiracy theories. While representing Kari Lake, a former candidate for governor in Arizona, he was hit with sanctions for making false and misleading claims.

Ms. Lake, who tried to reverse her defeat in the 2022 race, has served as the effective head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. A judge ruled Ms. Lake’s appointment invalid, but the administration says she still works for the organization.

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Clay Parikh

Special government employee with a background in cybersecurity

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Mr. Parikh is working closely with Mr. Olsen to re-examine claims of fraud in the 2020 election, and was cited as a supposed expert in the F.B.I. affidavit supporting the search of Fulton County’s elections office.

Prior support for claims of election fraud

Mr. Parikh took part in Ms. Lake’s failed efforts to reverse her defeat in the 2022 Arizona governor’s race, and has served as a witness in other cases brought by Mr. Olsen challenging the use of voting machines.

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Office of the Director of National Intelligence

In his first term, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that gave the Office of the Director of National Intelligence the ability to make determinations about foreign interference in elections. Such declarations could allow the president to declare national emergencies surrounding elections.

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What happened in 2020

Several advisers to Mr. Trump tried to push the intelligence community to determine that foreign entities had meddled in the election, in an effort to justify a move to seize voting machines. The consensus opinion among intelligence agencies was ultimately that countries like China and Russia had not interfered in a significant way.

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John Ratcliffe, then the director of national intelligence, disagreed about China’s supposed role, but did not issue his dissent until Jan. 7, 2021, a day after the election had been certified.

Tulsi Gabbard

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Director of national intelligence

Ms. Gabbard is helping oversee the Trump administration’s effort to investigate supposed voting irregularities in Georgia, and was present at the F.B.I. search of the Fulton County elections office. Her office also recently seized voting machines in Puerto Rico, to examine them for vulnerability to hacking by foreign entities.

Prior support for claims of election fraud

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Unlike others Mr. Trump has installed in government, Ms. Gabbard did not have a history of supporting Mr. Trump’s claims of election fraud. She started to back such claims publicly as the director of national intelligence.

The Justice Department has the power to open investigations into allegations of fraud in elections, a move that could, if nothing else, undermine faith in the results of the upcoming midterms.

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What happened in 2020

After the 2020 election, Mr. Trump pressured the department to investigate his baseless claims that the voting had been marred by fraud. He wanted to use those inquiries to persuade state legislatures to refuse to certify his defeat.

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Attorney General William P. Barr rejected Mr. Trump’s claims that the count had been compromised, and refused suggestions from the president’s advisers to seize voting machines. Mr. Barr was replaced by Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy attorney general, in late December of that year. He similarly resisted Mr. Trump’s efforts.

Pam Bondi

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Attorney general

Last spring, the Justice Department began seeking detailed voter roll data from states, to compile a national voting database. Under Ms. Bondi, it has sued at least 29 states and territories in an attempt to force them to turn over data.

Prior support for claims of election fraud

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As a private lawyer, Ms. Bondi helped the Trump campaign seek to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania. She appeared at a news conference with the Trump ally Rudolph W. Giuliani, and falsely claimed that Mr. Trump had won Pennsylvania, even though not all of the ballots had been counted.

Ms. Bondi later served as the litigation chairwoman for the Trump-allied America First Policy Institute, which brought a series of lawsuits seeking to hinder ballot box access or disenfranchise groups of voters.

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Kash Patel

F.B.I. director

Mr. Patel is overseeing a criminal investigation into supposed irregularities in the 2020 presidential election that has so far led to the seizure of voting records at the Fulton County election center in Georgia, and the subpoenaing of records in Maricopa County, Ariz.

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Prior support for claims of election fraud

During his Senate confirmation hearing last year, Mr. Patel sidestepped questions about whether Mr. Trump had lost the 2020 election, responding only that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had been certified and sworn in as president.

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Last summer, Mr. Patel promoted an unsubstantiated theory on his social media account that thousands of fake driver’s licenses seized by customs officials in 2020 were part of a Chinese plot to throw the election that year to Mr. Biden.

Harmeet K. Dhillon

Assistant attorney general for civil rights

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Ms. Dhillon has led the Justice Department effort to obtain complete, unredacted voter roll lists from every state in the country, including suing more than half the states in an attempt to force them to turn over the data.

Prior support for claims of election fraud

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Ms. Dhillon advocated efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, and encouraged people to donate to his legal defense fund. Shortly after the election, she appeared on Fox Business urging Mr. Trump’s appointees on the Supreme Court to “step in and do something” to help him win the race.

She also served as a campaign lawyer for Ms. Lake and assisted her efforts to overturn her 2022 Arizona governor’s race loss.

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Eric Neff

Acting Chief, voting section

Mr. Neff leads the voting section at the Justice Department, which is supposed to enforce the civil provisions of the federal laws that protect the right to vote.

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Prior support for claims of election fraud

As a Los Angeles County prosecutor, Mr. Neff was placed on administrative leave in 2022 after basing a prosecution of the chief executive of the election management company Konnech on tips from a right-wing group, True the Vote, which has promoted conspiracy theories centered on election fraud.

Mr. Neff also served at one point as a lawyer for Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock chief executive, who advised the Trump administration to seize voting machines during the 2020 election.

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Christopher Gardner

Trial attorney, voting section

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Mr. Gardner is taking part in a Justice Department effort to secure voting records from Georgia officials.

Prior support for claims of election fraud

As a private lawyer, Mr. Gardner helped file a lawsuit seeking to prevent officials in Georgia from certifying the state’s 2020 election results. He also worked with other Trump-allied lawyers, including Kenneth Chesebro, John Eastman and Cleta Mitchell, to provide legal advice to a fake slate of electors in Georgia. Those electors claimed that Mr. Trump won the state even though Mr. Biden actually prevailed.

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Megan Frederick

Trial attorney

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Ms. Frederick participated in a Justice Department effort demanding voter rolls from officials in the District of Columbia.

Prior support for claims of election fraud

Ms. Frederick served as a lawyer representing the Trump campaign during the Dane County, Wis., recount in 2020, and took part in efforts to challenge more than 200,000 ballots in the state.

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She also worked as a leader of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, which is part of the election-denying Election Integrity Network, an umbrella organization run by Ms. Mitchell, a stalwart pro-Trump lawyer who tried to overturn his election loss.

Joseph Voiland

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Trial attorney, civil rights division

Mr. Voiland is active in the Justice Department’s efforts to gain access to Wisconsin’s voter registration list.

Prior support for claims of election fraud

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Mr. Voiland, a former Wisconsin county judge, served as a lawyer for Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign, and sought to have thousands of ballots in the state thrown out.

Sigal Chattah

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First assistant U.S. attorney in Nevada

Last July, Ms. Chattah pushed the F.B.I. to investigate claims that illegal immigrants in her state had cast ballots in the 2020 election, according to Reuters. After a federal judge ruled that she had been unlawfully appointed as interim U.S. attorney, the Justice Department put her in the role of first assistant and gave her a second title as special attorney.

Prior support for claims of election fraud

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Ms. Chattah joined the Republican National Committee in 2023 to advocate taking a more hard-line stance on elections, and to oust its chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, who was seen by Trump loyalists as not doing enough to help Mr. Trump overturn the election results in 2020.

Ms. Chattah was a defense lawyer for one of the people who served as a so-called fake elector in Nevada in 2020. She also sued unsuccessfully to stop a bill that made it illegal in Nevada to harass election officials.

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Jeanine Pirro

U.S. attorney in Washington

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Ms. Pirro oversees a key federal prosecutor’s office that handles many matters related to the administration of the government.

Prior support for claims of election fraud

After Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, Ms. Pirro, then a Fox News host, used her show to amplify false allegations that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had been used to rig the tally. Fox ultimately paid nearly $780 million to settle claims by Dominion that the network had defamed it through its coverage.

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Department of Homeland Security

The Department of Homeland Security oversees multiple departments that have critical roles in election security, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

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It has also been leading a review of election records, looking for proof of noncitizen voting. (It has not found much.)

What happened in 2020

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In the immediate aftermath of the election, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a statement saying that the election was “the most secure in American history.” It contradicted claims of interference and noted that there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

The statement drew the ire of Mr. Trump, who fired the agency’s director, Chris Krebs, days later.

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Markwayne Mullin

Secretary of Homeland Security

The Senate confirmed Mr. Mullin on March 23. During his confirmation hearing, he suggested that he supported the federal investigations into the 2020 election.

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Prior support for claims of election fraud

After the 2020 election, Mr. Mullin was one of the more prolific voices in Congress calling for further investigations into vote tallies. He signed a letter to Mr. Trump asking him to direct the attorney general to appoint a special counsel to investigate the 2020 election.

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Heather Honey

Deputy assistant secretary for election integrity

Ms. Honey has asserted that the Trump administration could declare a “national emergency” to justify dictating new election rules to state and local governments.

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Prior support for claims of election fraud

Ms. Honey repeatedly made claims of voting irregularities in Pennsylvania during the 2020 election, and was centrally involved in the recount of Arizona’s vote tally. She also served as a witness for Ms. Lake’s failed 2022 election challenge in Arizona in a case in which Mr. Olsen worked as a lawyer. She was a leader in Ms. Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network.

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Marci McCarthy

Director of public affairs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

The agency works to help secure election systems and assets like voting machines.

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Prior support for claims of election fraud

Ms. McCarthy also worked closely with Ms. Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network and helped place far-right activists on the local election board in DeKalb County, Ga. She was instrumental in forcing out a member of the Georgia State Election Board who voted against a rule to end mail voting.

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Gregg Phillips

Associate administrator of FEMA’s office of response and recovery

While the Federal Emergency Management Agency plays no formal role in assisting elections, its Homeland Security Grant Program has been used for cybersecurity and other election protections in the past, including in 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

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Prior support for claims of election fraud

After the 2016 election, Mr. Phillips claimed without evidence that millions of illegal immigrants had cast votes — an assertion later amplified by Mr. Trump. Leading up to the 2020 election, he worked with the right-wing group True the Vote to attack mail voting as fraudulent.

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He also served as the executive producer on the movie “2000 Mules,” a documentary by the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza that falsely claimed that a network of “mules” had illegally gathered large numbers of ballots to swing the 2020 election away from Mr. Trump.

David Harvilicz

Assistant secretary for cyber, infrastructure, risk and resilience policy

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Mr. Harvilicz oversees policies for maintaining the security of the country’s election infrastructure, including voting machines.

Prior support for claims of election fraud

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Mr. Harvilicz has done business with James Penrose, a former intelligence officer who took part in several efforts to seize voting machines after the 2020 election in an attempt to undermine Mr. Trump’s defeat in the race, according to ProPublica. He has also called for doing away with voting machines, and has questioned victories of Democratic candidates.

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