Trump admin asks Supreme Court to block reinstatement of fired probationary employees
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(WASHINGTON) — The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court for an emergency stay of a district court judge’s order that 16,000 terminated federal probationary employees across six agencies and departments be immediately reinstated.
The request is the latest challenge to a nationwide preliminary injunction issued by a federal district court judge in response to Trump’s executive actions reshaping the government.
Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris argues in the filing that the labor unions and nonprofit groups that challenged the mass firings lack standing, saying they have “hijacked the employment relationship between the federal government and its workforce.”
She claims the judge’s order also violates separation of powers.
“This Court should not allow a single district court to erase Congress’s handiwork and seize control over reviewing federal personnel decisions — much less do so by vastly exceeding the limits on the scope of its equitable authority and ordering reinstatements en masse,” Harris wrote.
Harris said the executive Office of Special Counsel and the Merit Systems Protection Board are the proper venues for plaintiffs challenging their terminations.
The Supreme Court is already weighing the administration’s request for emergency relief in three cases over Trump’s executive order ending Birthright Citizenship.
Disputes over the Alien Enemies Act and over the dissolution of U.S. Agency for International Development and freezing of aid payouts are also likely bound for the high court in the coming weeks and months.
(WASHINGTON) — Nearly 2,000 scientists, engineers and researchers penned an open letter this week to President Donald Trump’s administration, calling for a stop to its “assault” on science.
The letter was signed by elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a congressional chartered organization that provides independent analysis and helps inform public policy decisions.
The group made clear the signatories are expressing their own views and not those of the National Academies or their home institutions.
“We are speaking out as individuals. We see real danger in this moment,” the letter said, in part. “We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry. We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.”
“We call on the administration to cease its wholesale assault on U.S. science, and we urge the public to join this call,” the letter continued.
The group called out the Trump administration for actions including the ending funding for research, firing scientists and removing public access to data.
Recently, several active research grants related to studies involving LGBTQ+ issues, as well as gender identity and diversity, equity and inclusion, were canceled at the National Institutes of Health. According to termination letters sent to researchers at various universities that were reviewed by ABC News, the projects were canceled because they did not serve the “priorities” of the current administration.
Additionally, earlier this year staff were laid off across the Department of Health and Human Services as part of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency effort to shrink the size of the federal government.
Earlier this month, HHS also appeared to have taken down a webpage from the Office of the Surgeon General that included an advisory on gun violence. In a statement to ABC News, the HHS said that the department “and the Office of the Surgeon General are complying with President Trump’s Executive Order on Protecting Second Amendment Rights.”
The White House did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment on the letter.
“If our country’s research enterprise is dismantled, we will lose our scientific edge,” the letter goes on. “Other countries will lead the development of novel disease treatments, clean energy sources, and the new technologies of the future. Their populations will be healthier, and their economies will surpass us in business, defense, intelligence gathering, and monitoring our planet’s health. The damage to our nation’s scientific enterprise could take decades to reverse.”
The letter comes as layoffs begin at HHS, including at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration.
Up to 10,000 people are expected to lose their jobs in this round of layoffs, an amount that could significantly alter the department’s roles and abilities. That’s in addition to the nearly 10,000 who have already left the agency in the last few months through buyout offers or early retirements.
ABC News’ Hannah Demissie, Cheyenne Haslett and Etic Strauss contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Ahead of expected talks between the United States and Iran over the weekend, the State Department pushed back on the idea that the discussion would be a negotiation over Tehran’s nuclear program.
“This is a meeting that’s happening, right? On Saturday, there’s a meeting. There’s no negotiations,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters on Tuesday.
“This is a dynamic where the president has made very clear and certainly the secretary has made very clear that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon,” she said. “It’s touching base, yes. Again, it’s not a negotiation. It’s a meeting.”
However, Bruce and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt both emphasized that President Donald Trump is seeking to cut a deal with Tehran.
“When it comes to Iran, the president has reimposed crippling sanctions on the Iranian regime, and he’s made it very clear to Iran they have a choice to make: You can strike a deal with the president, you can negotiate, or there will be hell to pay,” Leavitt said.
Bruce confirmed that Steve Witkoff, the special envoy to the Middle East, will represent the Trump administration during the session. But beyond that, both the White House and the State Department have been tight-lipped concerning details about the planned talks, which Trump announced during an Oval Office meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday.
Trump also asserted that the U.S. was already conducting direct diplomacy with Iran for the first time since 2018, when he exited an Obama-era nuclear deal with the country.
“We’re having direct talks with Iran, and they’ve started. It’ll go on Saturday. We have a very big meeting, and we’ll see what can happen,” Trump said.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi later posted on X that the meeting Trump referenced would take place in Oman and that talks would be “indirect high-level talks.”
“It is as much an opportunity as it is a test,” Araghchi said.
On Tuesday, the White House and the State Department stood by the president’s initial description of the forthcoming conversations and rejected Iran’s characterization of the talks as indirect.
“That’s nice for the Iranians,” Bruce said of Araghchi’s comments. “I would refer back to the president of the United States, President Donald John Trump.”
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump is taking aim at one of his predecessor’s final acts in office: preemptive pardons for members of the House Jan. 6 select committee.
In a late-night social media post, Trump claimed without evidence President Joe Biden used an autopen to sign the pardons and so he considered them “hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT.”
Trump, who made retribution against his perceived political enemies a focal point of his 2024 campaign, said the committee members should “fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level” despite no findings of wrongdoing.
Despite his claims, legal experts told ABC News that Trump does not have the power to overturn Biden’s actions.
A president’s clemency power is vested in Article II of the Constitution and is “broad and virtually unlimited,” said Jeffrey Crouch, an assistant professor at American University and expert on presidential pardons.
Its few restrictions include that it can only apply to federal offenses and can’t interfere with the impeachment powers of Congress.
In 1929, a memo by the solicitor general to the attorney general on pardons held that “neither the Constitution nor any statute prescribes the method by which Executive clemency shall be exercised or evidenced.”
“It is wholly a matter for the President to decide, as a practical question of administrative policy,” the department said. “Nobody but the President can exercise the power, but the power having been exercised the method of making a record and evidence thereof is a mere detail which he can prescribe in accordance with what he deems to be the practical necessities and proprieties of the situation.”
The memo was cited in a federal appeals court ruling just last year that said pardons don’t necessarily have to be in writing.
And while autopens (mechanical devices used to automatically add a signature to a document) have come under scrutiny in the past, the Justice Department as recently as 2005 determined they were constitutional and could be used for a president to sign a bill into law in a study commissioned by then-President George W. Bush.
Former President Barack Obama used an autopen to extend the Patriot Act, avert a fiscal crisis and more during his administration. Other presidents, including Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy, are also documented as having used the device or one similar.
“If the autopen is illegal, then many of the actions and regulations that presidents have done for the past four or five decades are null and void. It’s a ridiculous argument,” said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
“There is nothing in the Constitution that requires that a pardon must be signed without an autopen. Obviously, that is a 20th century invention, and earlier presidents had no access to such technology. Nonetheless, Trump has zero authority to undo a Biden pardon, just as the next president has no authority to undo Trump’s pardons,” said Michael Gerhardt, a constitutional law expert at the University of North Carolina.
ABC News has inquired with Biden’s team and the current White House to learn more about their autopen usage but has not received comment.
Aboard Air Force One late Sunday, Trump was asked if any executive order or action from Biden that included an autopen would be considered null.
“It’s not my decision, that’ll be up to a court,” Trump responded, “but I would say that they’re null and void because I’m sure Biden didn’t have any idea that it was taking place, and somebody was using an autopen to sign off and to give pardons.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also suggested, without evidence, that Biden was unaware of his signature being affixed to the pardons.
“Was his legal signature used without his consent or knowledge?” Leavitt said during Monday’s briefing.
Asked specifically if attorneys at the White House told Trump he has the legal authority to undo a pardon because it was signed by autopen, Leavitt said Trump was just “begging the question that I think a lot of journalists in this room should be asking.”
Biden issued the eleventh-hour pardons just hours before Trump’s inauguration. He spoke several times in his final media interviews about how he was considering such an option for people he feared could be targeted in the next administration, such as Liz Cheney or Anthony Fauci.
What would happen if Trump tried to ignore or challenge Biden’s action?
“It could open a Pandora’s box if a sitting president tried to undo a pardon by one of their predecessors. The better rule would be that pardons — whether perceived as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ decisions — should be final,” said Crouch.
ABC News’ Molly Nagle and Nicholas Kerr contributed to this report.
