Judge poised to block limitations on transgender service members
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(WASHINGTON) — A federal judge appears poised to block the Trump administration if the Department of Defense attempts to place limitations on or ban transgender service members.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes is still hearing arguments Tuesday in the case but signaled deep skepticism with the claim that transgender service members lessen the military’s lethality or readiness.
“You and I both agree that the greatest fighting force that world history has ever seen is not going to be impacted in any way by less than 1% of the soldiers using a different pronoun than others might want to call them. Would you agree with that?” Judge Reyes asked during a hearing this morning.
“No, Your Honor, I’m not. I can’t agree with that,” a lawyer for the Department of Justice responded.
At issue is Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order that directed the DOD to update its guidance “regarding trans-identifying medical standards for military service and to rescind guidance inconsistent with military readiness.” While the Department of Defense has not issued final guidance on transgender service members, the order led to a pause in gender affirming care for service members and is expected to lead to a significant curtailment of transgender service members based on “readiness and lethality.”
With the DOD policy expected to be finalized over the coming week, Reyes said she would hold off on issuing an order but had largely made up her mind about the legality of the order, at one point remarking that “smarter people on the D.C. Circuit would have to tell me I’m wrong” about the policy. She added that the central premise of the executive order — that only two genders exist — is “not biologically correct.”
Reyes also raised concerns about the wording of the executive order, which she criticized for being intentionally imprecise and a pretext for a ban on transgender soldiers.
“If we had President Trump here right now, and I said to him, ‘Is this a transgender ban?’ What do you think he would say?” Reyes asked.
“I have no idea, Your Honor,” said DOJ attorney Jason Lynch.
“I do. He would say, ‘Of course it is.’ Because he calls it a transgender ban, because all the language in it is indicative,” Reyes said.
The judge — who began the hearing by noting that every service member regardless of their gender ideology “deserves our gratitude” — also spent a portion of the hearing questioning Lynch about the group of transgender soldiers who filed the lawsuit.
“If you were in a foxhole, you wouldn’t care about these individuals’ gender ideology, right? You would just be happy that someone with that experience and that bravery and that honorable service to the country was sitting right next to you. Right?” Reyes asked.
“Don’t want to testify as a witness, Your Honor, or offer my personal views of hypothetical,” Lynch responded before conceding, “If I were in a foxhole, I doubt that the gender identity would be a primary concern.”
Reyes also pushed the lawyer for the Department of Justice — who she later commended for arguing his case well — to admit that the transgender soldiers made the country “safer.”
“Are they honorable, truthful, and disciplined?” Reyes asked. “As far as I know, among them, they have over 60 years of military service.”
“That’s correct,” Lynch said.
“And you would agree that together, the plaintiffs have made America safer?” Reyes asked.
(LANSING, Mich.) — Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg announced Thursday morning that he will not run for U.S. Senate or governor in the state of Michigan, potentially clearing the way to possibly mount a run for president in 2028.
“I care deeply about who Michigan will elect as Governor and send to the U.S. Senate next year, but I have decided against competing in either race,” Buttigieg wrote on X. “I remain enthusiastic about helping candidates who share our values – and who understand that in this moment, leadership means not only opposing today’s cruel chaos, but also presenting a vision of a better alternative.”
Buttigieg’s announcement comes as Democrats grapple both with being locked out of power in Washington and the prospect of defending multiple key Senate seats in the 2026 midterms.
Buttigieg was expected to potentially announce a run for the seat being vacated by incumbent Sen. Gary Peters, who announced in January that he would not run for reelection.
(WASHINGTON) — The website of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency provided its third weekly update of federal government cost-cutting Sunday night, claiming total government savings of $105 billion, up from the $65 billion it claimed in last week’s update — but the figure remains unverifiable as the site still says it’s posted only a fraction of the receipts supporting this total.
In its latest update to its “Savings” page, DOGE continued to update — and in some cases delete — contracts that it had previously listed as having saved up to billions of dollars in federal funds, after media outlets, experts and others publicly questioned details of the contracts.
In all, DOGE listed a total of 2,334 canceled contracts on its latest “Wall of Receipts,” with the savings from those contracts amounting to $8.8 billion.
The amount is actually lower than the $9.6 billion in claimed savings from 2,299 contracts posted on its “Wall of Receipts” last week, reflecting the difficulty in pinpointing exactly what DOGE is cutting and by how much.
Similar to last week, DOGE claims in this week’s update that the $105 billion figure is based on a “combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”
The site, however, only provides receipts for a fraction of that number. In addition to the $8.8 billion alleged savings in canceled contracts, the new data on the site lists $660 million worth of real estate leases under the GSA that were canceled, and, for the first time, it lists federal government grants that have been terminated, totaling $10.3 billion.
Among the contracts that have been deleted from DOGE’s latest “Wall of Receipts” is the biggest contract it had listed as having canceled last week: a seven-year blanket purchase agreement from the IRS with $1.9 billion cap for “IT strategy and modernization.”
The website removed this contract from its “Wall of Receipts” after the vendor, financial management and IT company Centennial Technologies, told the New York Times last month that the contract was actually canceled last fall, under the Biden administration.
The previous week, DOGE had to revise down its largest claimed savings contract from $8 billion to $8 million after the contract’s vendor explained that the $8 billion listed on it procurement record was likely a clerical error.
Another contract that was removed from DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” in the latest updated was a five-year $150 million USAID contract under the Asia Futures Activity initiative, aimed at serving the USAID’s Asia Bureau to solve “interconnected challenges of economic growth, democratic governance, and resilience in the face of increasing health, climate, and food security threats.”
Representatives for the Cadmus Group, which had received that contract, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
DOGE also deleted from its latest “Wall of Receipts” what appeared to be a $149 million National Institute of Health contract awarded to software company Advanced Automation Technologies.
Last week, the DOGE website listing that contract linked to a different NIH contract for leasing and maintaining refrigerated gas tanks. An NIH contract with Advanced Automation Technologies that shares the same contract ID is capped at just $1.4 million — not the $149 million figure that had been listed by DOGE.
Other terminated contracts listed in this week’s data include a USAID contract for the Ukraine Confidence Building Initiative with a $256 million ceiling, from which DOGE claims to have saved $170 million that has yet to be obligated to the contractor.
Another newly listed canceled contract is the USAID’s Global Health Training, Advisory, and Support Contract program, a multi-year program that started in 2021 and was capped at $682 million through 2029. DOGE claims to have saved $284 million by terminating this program.
The single biggest contract listed this week is a seven-year IT services contract from the USAID to the vendor Salient CRGT Inc., with a $597 million ceiling.
Similar to last week’s data, DOGE now lists more than 940 contracts where contract obligations have already been fully delivered — meaning that 40% of the contracts they claim to have terminated will not actually result in saving any money.
Asked about contracts that list $0 in savings last week, a White House official told ABC News that they’re using a conservative methodology of calculating savings because they subtract the contracts’ obligated dollars from the ceiling amounts. However, for many contracts the ceiling dollars are much higher than what is actually expected to be spent.
For the $10.3 billion in federal grants the sites says it’s terminated, DOGE lists each of the 3,389 grants with the name of the awarding agency and the amount of each grant, but does not lists the grant’s name or purpose.
So far, much of the claimed savings from these grants have come from the USAID — totaling $8.7 billion — followed by $1.1 billion from the State Department, $472 million from the Education Department and $61 million from the EPA.
DOGE has also updated its list of real estate leases that have been terminated, totaling $660 million. But much of the data is now missing information regarding which agency the leases were under, whereas the site previously listed leases from across more than 40 agencies.
The current data shows $143 million worth of real estate leases under the GSA that were terminated, and the rest of the terminated leases– totaling $516 million — do not list their agencies.
DOGE said last week that it would begin updating its website twice a week, but the current update, like the first two, came after a week.
(WASHINGTON) — Calling it the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history,” the Environmental Protection Agency rolled out sweeping moves Wednesday aimed at walking back environmental protections and eliminating a host of climate change regulations, some decades in the making.
Taken together, the agency’s actions indicate a wholesale reorientation of the agency away from government support of renewable energy, carbon reduction programs and air, water and soil regulations while threatening to gut the government’s past scientific findings at the core of most climate regulations.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin rolled out over two dozen policy announcements, through a series of press releases and public statements. The list of proposed changes includes rolling back emission regulations on coal, oil and gas production and a promise to work across the federal agencies to reevaluate the government finding that determined that greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide and methane, not only heat the planet but are a threat to public health.
“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more,” Zeldin wrote in a statement on EPA’s website.
The backlash from the environmental community was swift.
“If they get their way, they will wreck our air, our water, burn down our homes, and hand future generations an unlivable climate. From moms in the 1970s who wanted their kids to be able to play outside without getting asthma to young people in the 2020s who went on hunger strike to force Congress to pass a climate bill, generations of Americans have fought and sacrificed for these regulations,” the youth-led climate advocacy group Sunrise Movement wrote in response.
“Corporate polluters are celebrating today because Trump’s EPA just handed them a free pass to spew unlimited climate pollution, consequences be damned. The Biden administration put the first-ever carbon limits on dirty coal and gas plants, cutting toxic air pollution, saving lives, and avoiding $270 billion in climate damages. Rolling back these protections is a direct attack on the communities that have been forced to breathe toxic air from polluting plants for decades,” climate advocacy organization Evergreen Action Senior Power Sector Policy Lead Charles Harper wrote in a statement.
Changes to the rules and regulations announced Wednesday will still have to go through the federal regulatory process and will likely have to stand up to numerous court challenges from environmental groups. However, today’s flurry of actions makes good on the president’s campaign promises to gut many of the long-established rules and regulations initially created to protect our water, air, soil and human health.
Endangerment finding
One of the most significant announcements was that the EPA would engage in the”formal reconsideration” of the agency’s endangerment finding.
In 2009, the EPA issued an “endangerment finding” determining that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and others, pose a danger to public health and the environment. This ruling, prompted by the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, gave the EPA the legal authority to regulate these emissions under the Clean Air Act (CAA).
This finding represents the legal underpinning for many regulations concerning greenhouse gas emissions, including emissions standards for vehicles, power plants and oil and gas production — all of which Zeldin said the agency would also reevaluate as it reconsiders the finding.
If the Trump Administration decides the endangerment finding is no longer applicable and that determination survives court challenges, 16 years’ worth of emissions regulations, including those enacted under President Biden, could be jeopardized.
Vehicle emissions standards
Zeldin also took aim at Biden-era vehicle standards, saying the EPA would terminate the tailpipe emissions regulations announced by the previous administration last year.
While the Trump Administration has repeatedly referred to these standards as an EV “mandate”, there was no such mandate put in place by the Biden administration.
The Biden Environmental Protection Agency implemented tailpipe emissions standards last March that established an average of allowed emissions across a vehicle manufacturer’s entire fleet of offered vehicles. The standards would have only impacted cars from model years 2027 to 2032 and allowed for a range of usable technologies, including fully electric cars, hybrids and improved internal combustion engines. These standards applied to light and medium-duty vehicles. A separate set of standards were released for heavy-duty vehicles.
As Zeldin’s EPA announced reconsideration of these standards, it released a statement saying, the regulations imposed, “$700 billion in regulatory and compliance costs,” alleging they took away, “Americans’ ability to choose a safe and affordable car for their family and increases the cost of living on all products that trucks deliver.”
Impacts on coal
Another of the policies being reconsidered is the “Clean Power Plan 2.0,” which targets emissions from coal and natural gas power plants.
At the time, the agency claimed the new regulations would represent a massive reduction in pollution and save hundreds of billions of dollars in climate and public health costs as it would force power plants to control 90% of their carbon pollution through methods like carbon capture and tightened the emissions standards for toxic metals like mercury that are released from coal-fired plants.
In one of many press releases sent on Wednesday, the EPA called the rules “overreaching” and “an attempt to shut down affordable and reliable electricity generation in the United States, raising prices for American families, and increasing the country’s reliance on foreign forms of energy.”
Social cost of carbon
Also among the 31 actions announced by the agency is a revisiting of the “social cost of carbon,” with Zeldin saying the previous administration used the metric to “advance their climate agenda in a way that imposed major costs.”
In 2010, the EPA under then-President Barack Obama released its first estimate for what it called the “social cost of carbon,” or SC-CO2. This metric meant to capture in dollars the long-term damage created by carbon dioxide emissions each year.
It estimated, in effect, the cost of damages related to climate change, including changes in agricultural productivity, human health, property damages from added flood risk, changes in energy costs and other considerations.
The Biden Administration later updated the estimate process to include consideration of additional factors, leading to an increase in the national SC-CO2. In December 2023, the Biden EPA updated the metric at a dramatically higher rate — $190 per ton of carbon, compared to the administration’s earlier estimate of $51 per ton.
“To Power the Great American Comeback, we are fully committed to removing regulations holding back the U.S.,” Zeldin said in the announcement.
