Trump asks Supreme Court to allow immediate firing of 29 transgender military service members
The United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. (STOCK PHOTO/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Calling it a matter of “exceptional importance,” the Trump administration has filed an urgent appeal with the Supreme Court seeking the immediate removal of 29 active-duty service members who are transgender even before their case challenging the Pentagon ban goes to trial in January.
Several courts have found that the ban was likely rooted in animus and violates servicemembers constitutional rights to due process and equal protection – a conclusion the government strongly disputes.
While the justices last year gave Trump the green light to move forward broadly with a ban on service members who have a history of gender dysphoria, federal judges in a separate case, U.S. v. Talbott, last June blocked the military from discharging more than two dozen individual plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit challenging the policy.
Solicitor General John Sauer called the ruling allowing those plaintiffs to remain in their positions “gravely erroneous.”
“The authority of the U.S. military to determine who may serve in the Nation’s armed forces is a matter of exceptional importance,” Sauer wrote in the government’s petition. “Whether the Constitution prohibits the military from exercising that authority by adopting a policy like the one here is a recurring issue, which has arisen before and will likely arise again absent this Court’s review. The Court should thus take this opportunity to address the constitutionality of the [Department of Defense Secretary] Hegseth policy and reverse the decision below, whose reasoning cannot be squared with this Court’s precedents or deference to the military.”
The justices will consider this fall whether to hear the case at this early stage, before any final ruling on the merits by a lower court.
In the meantime, the 29 plaintiffs – who are active-duty, reservists, National Guard members and a person seeking to enlist – will remain in the force.
“As the Trump administration’s own attorneys admitted, these are qualified individuals who are meeting all military standards,” said Jennifer Levi, an attorney representing the transgender service members with the LGBTQ legal advocacy group GLAD Law. “There is no reason to waste millions of taxpayer dollars to kick out thousands of highly trained, skilled and decorated troops based on nothing but hostility and this administration’s political whims.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy Dr. Heidi Overton attend an executive order in the Oval Office at the White House, August 10, 2026 in Washington. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he has nominated White House Domestic Policy Council Deputy Director Heidi Overton to be the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
“Dr. Heidi has been a ROCKSTAR in my Administration, where she has worked directly with Secretary Kennedy, Dr. Oz, and team, to deliver on the MOST TRANSFORMATIVE Health Agenda in History,” Trump said in a social media post, adding that he wants her “leadership at the FDA now to ensure that the U.S. remains the WORLD LEADER for Scientific Discovery and CURES.”
Overton has been Trump’s deputy assistant during his second term, advising him on health policies, including lowering prescription drug prices. Overton has stood alongside Trump for several major health announcements at the White House, including his executive order signing on childhood vaccines earlier this month.
She has espoused anti-abortion views and supported reductions to the childhood immunization schedule, touting the use of “gold-standard science” and restoring vaccination authority to parents while at that executive order signing.
Overton is a physician who holds a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. Prior to that role, she was vice chair of the America First Policy Institute’s (AFPI) Center for a Healthy America, where Overton was also the chief policy officer, a nonprofit that aims to advance policies that it says put the American people first. AFPI was run by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins before Rollins was tapped to join the president’s Cabinet. Several Trump administration officials held positions there before he was reelected, including Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
The FDA is one of several agencies under the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy expressed his support for Overton on Wednesday, calling her the “best person for the job.”
“Heidi brings exceptional judgment, professionalism, discipline, and an unwavering commitment to the American people,” Kennedy wrote in a social media post. “I have seen her challenge assumptions, demand excellence, and turn bold ideas into meaningful results.”
The FDA commissioner position requires Senate confirmation. During confirmation hearings, Overton is expected to face questions that will test her loyalty to the president, similar to previous confirmation hearings for Trump administration health leaders.
If confirmed, Overton is expected to continue to support the president’s health agenda.
“She’s gonna stay in line because she’s tested,” a source familiar told ABC News. “She’s a loyalist to the president. That’s kind of his thinking behind all of this — to keep loyalists in these top jobs.”
The job is one of the nation’s top health posts and has remained without permanent leadership amid the foodborne illness outbreaks of cyclospora and salmonella.
A senior administration official told ABC News that acting commissioner Kyle Diamantas was offered the full-time job several times and declined. Diamantas, who has been leading the investigation into the health outbreaks, has been touted as the driving force behind the administration’s food policy and stressed that America’s food supply is safe despite consumers’ health concerns.
Overton will ultimately be replacing former FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, who resigned in May amid clashes with the White House over pressure from Trump to authorize fruit-flavored vapes. FDA employees, who previously spoke to ABC News on the condition of anonymity, said that they were concerned about the future of the agency’s leadership after Makary’s exit. They said the angst stems from a rollercoaster-like experience, including witnessing 20% of the FDA’s staff being reduced during the president’s second term.
U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche on ABC’s “This Week.” (ABC News)
(WASHINGTON) — Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sunday addressed the Trump administration’s decision to ban three mainstream news outlets from accessing the White House, saying that President Donald Trump had not “denied access” to the organizations and asserting that it is a “privilege … not a right” to be at the White House.
“The president hasn’t denied access. That’s not the right way to describe it. This is — what the president has said is that he is sick and tired of certain media outlets just refusing to report accurate news,” Blanche said in an exclusive interview with “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz. “There’s still obviously litigation going on, but the important thing, Martha, is to know that … being in the White House is a privilege. It’s not a right.”
In the early hours Thursday, Judge Timothy Kelly issued a temporary restraining order that required the White House to temporarily restore credentials of journalists working for CNN, MS NOW and Politico. Kelly said in his ruling that he believed the outlets cleared the “high bar” required to grant a TRO.
Journalists were allowed back onto the White House grounds later Thursday and primary television pool coverage resumed Friday for the final day of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s official state visit. But on Saturday, there was no TV pool coverage for the president’s trip to a football game in Tennessee; CNN was scheduled to be network covering the president that day, but they said their access to Air Force One was blocked.
Blanche said it wasn’t unusual for a news outlet to not be allowed onto the president’s plane.
“The White House routinely decides who can go on Air Force One. This wasn’t a a one-time denial of CNN. There’s all kinds of times when certain reporters are not flying or are flying,” according to Blanche, who added, “it’s not unusual, and as a matter of fact, it’s common every time the president travels that he and his team decide which reporters get to travel with the president.”
Blanche claimed the three news outlets that were subject to the White House ban “refuse to report anything accurately,” which he said presented a “national security problem.”
“When you have complete misinformation coming out of the White House that affects our relationship with our foreign partners, that affects our relationship with our foreign enemies — and so this is just not about the fact that they’re refusing to report accurate news. It’s all about the information that the American people have a right to hear coming out of of our what should be respected media outlets.”
Judge Kelly, however, was skeptical in his TRO ruling that national security was the true reason for the ban.
“For one thing, nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns. Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ Plaintiffs from the White House — instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of Plaintiffs’ reporting,” Kelly wrote.
Hours after announcing the ban on social media, Trump was asked in the Oval Office if there was any “particular reason or particular story” that prompted it.
“No, no. It’s — it’s really just cumulative stories over the last two years. You get sick of it,” the president said.
On “This Week,” Blanche said he wouldn’t “get into what the judge says” because the litigation is ongoing, but added “our position has been clear from the beginning. What they say is exactly the issue when it comes to national security.”
When Raddatz pressed Blanche to provide specific examples of stories with which the White House has taken issue, Blanche declined to do so.
Artificial intelligence ‘vital to our national security’
On the issue of artificial intelligence, the attorney general echoed the president’s position on the technology, describing it as “so important and vital to our national security interests and to the success of this country that the United States lead in this space.”
Trump has said it’s critical that the U.S. continues to dominate the AI space, citing competition with China specifically.
“Whoever wins AI, WINS! We are leading now over China, and everyone else, and I’m going to keep it that way! I’m not going to stifle Growth, of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution, or the Internet, itself,” he posted on social media Monday.
Some AI company leaders are calling for an industry-wide slowdown amid growing concerns about how the rapid pace of development. Multiple incidents of AI agents acting autonomously have come to light in recent months, including instances where AI agents infiltrated outside companies without the agents’ parent companies’ awareness as it happened.
Last week, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that OpenAI agent “infiltrated” a government public health website earlier this summer. This weekend, OpenAI confirmed that its models interacted with U.S. government websites in unexpected ways, behavior the company discovered amid an ongoing review into its AI agents’ behaviors.
Blanche acknowledged that “there’s going to be adjustments that have to be made” around AI as the industry continues to develop, but he argued the companies themselves already have the ability to “adjust the technology” as needed.
“In the meantime, the answer is not to just try to all of a sudden try to regulate this in a way that will make us second or third place in the world as far as being being the leaders in this space,” Blanche said.
During his speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York Tuesday, Trump said of AI, “We’re going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice.”
Asked what that meant, Blanche said, “What it means is that we have a ton of laws — criminal laws, civil laws — that are already in place and on the books that allow us to charge individuals, to charge companies in the right circumstances when there’s crimes committed, and so the answer isn’t always more laws, more laws, more laws.”
“When there are crimes committed, we have a lot of tools already, and the federal Title 18 gives us a lot of a lot of ways to go after criminals and bad actors in the AI space and other spaces,” Blanche continued. “So when the president talks about about the fact that the Department of Justice and the FBI and [Homeland Security Investigations], they can go and arrest bad actors in this space, that’s what he means, and it’s true, and that’s what we’re doing.”
The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool along the National Mall on Tuesday, July 3, 2026 in Washington, D.C.Rushed work continues at the White House and across the nation’s capital in preparation for the country’s 250 anniversary on July 4. (Photo by Finn Gomez/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — pleaded not guilty through his attorney to the felony charge he faces for allegedly damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
