Judge blocks Trump administration from requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote
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(WASHINGTON) — Donald Trump’s unilateral effort to reshape election processes is an attempt to “short-circuit Congress’s deliberative process by executive order,” a federal judge in Washington, D.C. wrote Thursday afternoon.
In a 120-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly blocked the Trump administration from requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and ordering that election officials “assess” the citizenship of anyone who receives public assistance before allowing them to register. She also barred the Election Assistance Commission from withholding federal funding from states that did not comply with the order.
“Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States—not the President—with the authority to regulate federal elections,” she wrote. “No statutory delegation of authority to the Executive Branch permits the President to short-circuit Congress’s deliberative process by executive order.”
After Trump issued an executive order last month “preserving and protecting the integrity of American elections,” three separate lawsuits were filed in the D.C. federal court to challenge the policy, including lawsuits filed by the Democratic National Committee (with New York Sen. Charles Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries), the League of United Latin American Citizens and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
“These consolidated cases are about the separation of powers,” Judge Kollar-Kotelly wrote.
She concluded that Trump’s unilateral effort to reshape elections exceeds his own authority, noting that the Department of Justice “offered almost no defense of the President’s order.”
If Trump wishes to reform election processes, she wrote, Congress would be the appropriate branch to do so, adding Congress is “currently debating legislation that would effect many of the changes the President purports to order.”
Fired CFPB employee, Elizabeth Aniskevich says they were ‘tossed on the streets’ with no info, haven’t been able to get forms for unemployment; ABC News
(WASHINGTON) — For many, a federal government job was a marker of stability or a way to serve the country, in some cases a “dream” job.
But a week after the Trump administration started to hack away at government agencies, many employees who were cut are left fearing for their future and in the dark about their next steps.
Days after they’d been let go, employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s hadn’t received the paperwork they needed to file for unemployment, said Elizabeth Aniskevich, who was a litigation counsel for the agency before she was told her job was eliminated.
“It’s really been a total roller coaster of emotions,” she said. “I will say the solidarity among those of us who have been terminated has been amazing, but we can barely get information.”
Aniskevich was fired with 70 other employees who were still in their probationary period. Many of them are keeping in touch through a group chat.
“We have not received forms that are requested to file for unemployment,” she said. “We have no real understanding of when our health insurance terminates,” she said. “We just have no information. We were just basically tossed out on the streets, and so that has been angering and heartbreaking, and our pay stopped the day we got the termination letter, so we’re all without a paycheck as of Tuesday.”
“I think the main question is, ‘What are we going to do?’” she said.
“I’m a single person in my house. I’m responsible for my insurance and for my mortgage, and I worked really hard to buy this house on my own after putting myself through law school, and I don’t know how I’m going to continue to make mortgage payments very far into the future,” she said.
Aniskevich said she chose to work for the CFPB because she was raised in a military family that believed in service.
“My dad was in the military for 27 years, and he really instilled in me a commitment to this country and to public service,” she said.
Katie Butler, a Department of Education lawyer, knew her days with the agency were numbered.
“Ever since the start of the Trump administration, we knew there would be a cut in federal employees,” she said.
She and her colleagues also knew that the first people to go would be probationary employees with less protection.
And while she expected to be terminated, certainty came with the “Fork in the Road” notice, an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that introduced a new program called “deferred resignation, that allowed them to continue to work until Sept. 30. Around 75,000 federal employees took the buyout, according to the White House.
Butler is also an adjunct professor at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania, where she earned her law degree.
She says she was teaching a class when she got the Fork in the Road notice and didn’t see it immediately. The next day, she got a termination letter.
Her supervisors asked, “Did you get a termination notice, because we don’t know who got one.”
Butler doesn’t hold her abrupt termination against them.
“I don’t think this is coming from them, they are doing their best, but this is not the way you run the federal government system.”
Butler and her colleagues were told they could appeal through the Merit Systems Protection Board but she says she knows the decision would be hard to appeal.
The loss of her job has also hit her financially — she had just bought a house in June that she’s been remodeling and also has student debt of around $140,000.
Butler began working for the federal government “right out of college.”
She worked for the National Park Service and at the Bureau of Labor Statistics before getting into law school. In September 2024, she joined the Department of Education, where she had to complete a new probationary period despite having previously established career status.
She says the job she lost was “one of the exact jobs I went to law school for.”
“Career-wise, this is a big detour from what I expected,” she said. “I went to law school because I planned to work long-term as a public servant.”
Given what she calls “the somewhat disrespectful and unthoughtful way this is being handled,” Butler says she will take a detour away from the federal government.
“It’s honestly just really disappointing, from like a personal standpoint.”
Her plan is to go into general litigation at a mid-size to large law firm or a solicitor’s office. She has also considered local government work, given her experience.
She may go to work for a city. Even now, she is “still dedicated to doing good as a civil servant but not under the present circumstances.”
Victoria DeLano, who was an equal opportunity specialist in the education department’s Office for Civil Rights based in Birmingham, Alabama, said she was outraged when she received notice that she had lost her job last week.
“I think that the work that the Office for Civil Rights does is absolutely instrumental to children in my state,” she said.
“When you take out of the equation a fully staffed Office for Civil Rights, you’re taking away an avenue to resolution and an avenue to law enforcement, a really important avenue to law enforcement.”
“These students have no one else,” she said. They can still file complaints with OCR. Please understand OCR is understaffed at best, and OCR right now does not have external communication with you all. So I don’t know where they turn,” she added.
DeLano also called her position a “dream job.”
“It’s something that I’m extraordinarily passionate about because I believe with my history working with students with disabilities,” she said. “So I jumped at the chance to take this job, and absolutely loved it.”
She is concerned that the Trump administration has no clear plan to shrink the federal government, nor is it considering students with disabilities.
“This dismantling of our government right now is just being done with a sledgehammer without thought of what are the implications be to the individuals who are serviced by these agencies,” she said.
That sentiment is echoed by Butler.
“It takes a while to build a government system, but when [you] tear it down this quickly, it can cause a lot of damage,” she said. “The progress feels slow. This could take 100 years for us to rebuild.”
(NEW YORK) — In this first episode of a new podcast published Thursday, California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, an LGBTQ ally, broke with his party, saying that transgender athletes playing in female sports is “deeply unfair.”
“I think it’s an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness. It’s deeply unfair,” Newsom said on his podcast, “This is Gavin Newsom.”
Newsom’s comments came during a conversation with conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who leads conservative group Turning Point USA and played a critical role in garnering youth support for President Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
Newsom, sometimes viewed as a 2028 presidential hopeful, also agreed that the political ad that hurt former Vice President Kamala Harris the most in her presidential campaign was her previous support for providing taxpayer-funded gender transition-related medical care for detained immigrants and federal prisoners. Trump’s campaign had played back her remarks in a widely-circulated ad.
“She didn’t even react to it, which was even more devastating,” Newsom said.
Newsom also pointed to his own work in expanding LGBTQ rights, while referencing current law in the state of California that allows transgender athletes to participate in school sports that reflect the gender they identify with.
Newsom himself was a trailblazer in expanding LGBTQ rights: in 2004, as mayor of San Francisco, he allowed same-sex marriages to proceed even though they were not yet allowed nationwide.
He referenced that moment while discussing his alignment with Kirk’s views on transgender athletes in women’s sports.
“I’ve been a leader in the LGBTQ places, as, you know, back in 2004 [I] was marrying same sex couples. And I know we have [a] difference [of] opinion on marriage equality, and so I’ve been at this for years and years, I take a backseat to no one,” Newsom said, before discussing how he heard people talking about transgender athletes.
On the podcast, Newsom also called for compassion toward transgender individuals, even while discussing the sports issue: “There’s also humility and grace. You know, that, these poor people are more likely to commit suicide, have anxiety and depression, and the way that people talk down to vulnerable communities is an issue that I have a hard time with as well.”
LGBTQ rights groups criticized Newsom’s remarks, saying that they came amid national backlash to transgender individuals and their rights.
The Human Rights Campaign, a major national LGBTQ rights advocacy and lobbying group, said in a statement shared on social media that with discussions nationwide in legislatures about restricting same-sex marriage or transgender rights, “this is not a moment to sit politely in the face of authoritarian bullies or throw people under the bus for political posturing.”
“Singling out trans kids to score political points is never going to help someone pay their rent, keep Medicaid or get a job, but it will make it seem like Gov. Newsom believes our civil rights are up for grabs,” the organization wrote. “Californians – and ALL Americans – need leaders who have courage in their convictions, and who will show up for them, in the faces of people who want to see us all back in the closet.”
The organization also pointed to a 2013 law in California that allowed students to be part of sport teams matching their own gender identity. The American Civil Liberties Union praised the law in 2013 as “ensuring transgender youth have the opportunity to fully participate and succeed in schools across the state.”
Newsom briefly referenced the law in his discussion with Kirk, highlighting that it was passed before he became governor.
Two members of the California state legislature, Assemblymember Chris Ward and state Sen. Caroline Menjivar, released a statement through the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus criticizing Newsom’s remarks as well, saying they were “profoundly sickened and frustrated” by what he said.
“Sometimes Gavin Newsom goes for the Profile in Courage, sometimes not,” they wrote. “We woke up profoundly sickened and frustrated by these remarks. All students deserve the academic and health benefits of sports activity, and until Donald Trump began obsessing about it, playing on a team consistent with one’s gender has not been a problem since the standard was passed in 2013.”
Newsom’s remarks came just a month after Trump signed an executive order intending on banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports. The White House has said the action is meant to protect women in sports from harm and from facing opponents who they say have an unfair advantage.
LGBTQ advocacy groups have criticized the administration’s action and general rhetoric as discriminatory and as having razor-sharp focus on issues of transgender rights to the exclusion of economic and other issues.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to expand the mining and use of coal in the U.S., calling it “beautiful, clean coal.”
During a ceremony at the White House, surrounded by hard-hat-clad coal miners, Trump signed the “Unleashing American Energy” executive order that follows the president’s recent promises to oversee a boost of coal production in the U.S.
The action directs the Interior Department to facilitate coal leases for millions of acres of public lands. Trump’s order also directs the Energy Department and other agencies to research if coal can be used to supply electricity for artificial intelligence data centers.
The comments Tuesday follow plans announced last month for a sweeping rollback of longstanding regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency — which the Trump administration has called the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”
Several of the 31 actions announced by the agency in March targeted prior regulations meant to restrict emissions and pollution related to the use of coal. Chief among these was the announcement to “reconsider” President Joe Biden’s “Clean Power Plan 2.0,” which was a group of regulations targeting coal and natural gas power plants announced last year.
The “Clean Power Plan 2.0” tightened the emissions standards for coal-fired power plants for toxic metals like mercury and forced plants to control and clean coal ash released during their operations. But during his campaign, Trump spoke favorably about using more coal to power America’s energy needs.
Coal is an abundant, energy-dense resource with a higher concentration in the U.S. than any other country in the world, but it is also a fossil fuel and creates carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) when burned, which contributes to global warming and human-amplified climate change. Coal emissions can also lead to health issues, including respiratory illness, lung disease, acid rain, smog, and neurological and developmental damage.
While coal-fired electricity has become “cleaner than ever,” according to the U.S. Department of Energy, the fossil fuel is still responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions and environment-polluting coal ash. So “clean coal” is a bit of a misnomer, sometimes referring to types of technology used to physically clean coal before it is burned or capture carbon related to its burning, according to Michelle Solomon, senior policy analyst at Energy Innovation.
“Burning coal could never be technically considered clean regardless of the treatment applied to it before combustion – it will always emit the largest concentration of greenhouse gases of any fossil fuel, and soil and water pollution from coal and coal ash (what’s left after it’s burned) will never go away,” Solomon said. “Even the best technologies that reduce air pollutants like sulfur and nitrogen oxides still allow many of these to get through.”
These technologies are also not widely used in the U.S. According to a December 2023 report from the Congressional Budget Office, 15 carbon capture and storage facilities are operating in the United States. And none of them are being used at coal-burning power plants. The CBO also found that the 15 facilities can capture “0.4% of percent of the United States’ total annual emissions of CO2.”
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the most significant factor in recent reductions of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. has been the decline in coal usage. In 2022, coal-fired electricity generation was largely replaced by other sources, primarily natural gas and renewables. As the production of cleaner alternatives continues to grow, the reliance on coal to meet the country’s energy needs continues to diminish.
ABC News’ Climate Unit contributed to this report.
