After sitting on the case for months, a federal appeals court Friday shut down the contempt of court proceeding against the Trump administration in the original Alien Enemies Act case.
Continue reading “Appeals Court Clears Trump Admin of Contempt of Court in Alien Enemies Act Case”A New Round of Unlawful Purges Hits FBI
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The Retribution: FBI Edition
President Trump continues to decimate the senior ranks of the FBI with the unlawful firings of career agents, all of whom hold non-political career positions with civil service protections.
The ongoing purge of FBI personnel follows Trump’s repeated promises, made over years, to retaliate against the investigators who pursued criminal charges against him for his first-term misconduct. But the purges have expanded beyond those investigators to include officials who have refused to do the White House’s bidding in conducting the purges.
Among the latest casualties is former acting FBI director Brian Driscoll, who stood up to the Justice Department early in Trump’s second term as it tried, among other thing, to obtain the names of agents who had investigated Trump. To put a finer point on it, the Trump administration is forcing out the man it plucked from relative obscurity to serve as acting director until Kash Patel could be confirmed by the Senate (although it should be noted that the White House had originally intended to name Driscoll acting deputy director but mistakenly swapped his name with Robert Kissane’s and never corrected the error).
“I understand that you may have a lot of questions regarding why, for which I have no answers,” Driscoll said in a message to colleagues reported by the AP. “No cause has been articulated at this time.”
Other officials reportedly fired, effective as soon as today, included:
- Steven Jensen, an assistant director whom Patel put in charge of the Washington field office in April;
- Spencer Evans, who had already been demoted from his position running the Las Vegas field office;
- Walter Giardina, a former Marine who worked on Trump-related investigations, including the contempt of Congress case against Peter Navarro; and
- Christopher Meyer, who had worked on Trump investigations.
“None of the men appeared eligible to retire,” according to the NYT, which reported that Giardina’s wife died of cancer last month.
Using and Abusing the FBI
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said the FBI had agreed to his request to help track down Democratic state legislators who fled Texas to deny Republican lawmakers a quorum in their mid-decade redistricting scheme. The FBI has no obvious legal authority to track down state legislators who have committed no crimes, let alone force them to return from Illinois to Texas.
Florida Joins GOP Redistricting-palooza
Florida Republicans have begun the process of a mid-decade redistricting of their own as President Trump and the GOP go all out to preserve their narrow House majority.
Trump’s Sows Confusion With Census Post
President Trump’s social media post yesterday morning declaring that he was ordering a new census with a citizenship question included set off a day of confusion. Was Trump ordering a new unprecedented mid-decade census or was he re-upping his past failed bid to add a citizenship question, this time for the next census in 2030?
A day later, it’s still not clear.
The best reporting, like NPR’s, explicitly noted the confusion and that the administration was not responsive to efforts to clear it up:
The press office for the White House did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment.
In a statement, the Commerce Department said: “The Census Bureau will immediately adopt modern technology tools for use in the Census to better understand our robust Census data. We will accurately analyze the data to reflect the number of legal residents in the United States.”
The worst reporting danced around the uncertainty posed by an erratic president with itchy thumbs and his own social media platform.
Trump’s Birthright Citizenship EO Blocked Again
Since the Roberts Court used the birthright citizenship case to rewrite the law on universal injunctions, three different federal courts have used the class action workaround to block President Trump’s executive order nationwide, the WaPo notes:
The upshot is that the president is facing injunctions from more lower courts than he was before the Supreme Court’s ruling, and federal judges have demonstrated, at least for now, that they maintain significant authority to slow down the implementation of the administration’s most consequential policies.
The big test, of course, is still to come: Will appeals courts and ultimately the Supreme Court uphold the nationwide class action certifications? Stay tuned.
Only at TPM
TPM’s Josh Kovensky: HHS Has Revived a Failed Program to Scrape Americans’ Data and Track Autism, Senate Suggests
Good Read
Wired: “A string of previously undisclosed break-ins at Tennessee National Guard armories last fall marks the latest in a growing series of security breaches at military facilities across the United States, raising fresh concerns about the vulnerability of US armories to theft and intrusion. … At least some of the break-ins seem to point to potential insider help.”
Neo-Nazi Gets 20 Years for Power Grid Plot
Brandon Russell, a founding member of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division, was sentenced Thursday to the maximum possible of 20 years for his conviction plotting to attack Baltimore’s electrical grid, part of a rise in accelerationist extremism.
Sign of the Times
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Trump Promised to Eliminate Funding to Schools That Don’t Nix DEI Work—But Half of States Aren’t Complying
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
It’s been about six months since the U.S. Department of Education sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to all schools that receive federal funding, warning them that they could risk losing this money if they promote what the department calls “pervasive and repugnant” racial preferences.
The letter, among other things, reversed previous presidents’ positions on how diversity, equity and inclusion influences schools’ disciplinary measures. It advised schools to, within two weeks, begin to eliminate all discipline protocols rooted in DEI, on the grounds that this work is discriminatory against white students.
Trump also issued an executive order, “Reinstating Commonsense School Discipline Policy,” in April 2025, doubling down on the letter.
Trump’s letter and executive order exert an unusual level of influence over how schools can decide the best way to teach and, when necessary, discipline students. It also cuts against recognized research that Black, Latino and Native American students are disciplined more frequently and harshly than white and Asian students.
I am an educational scholar who has spent the past 13 years analyzing school discipline policy. While previous administrations have issued “Dear Colleague” letters to schools, Trump’s is the first that frames itself as though it were law – setting a potential new precedent for the executive branch to issue educational mandates without the approval of the judicial or congressional branches of government.
While all but two states have responded to Trump’s letter, about half of them have said they are not going to comply with its terms – despite the administration’s threat of cutting funding if they do not follow the guidance.
Understanding DEI in Education
Equity-oriented education, or diversity, equity and inclusion, refers to an ideology and programming that intend to ameliorate patterns of racial inequality. In the context of discipline in schools, DEI strategies could include teachers having conversations with children about their behavior, rather than immediately suspending them.
Research shows that these techniques can help reduce racial discipline gaps in academic achievement and disciplinary outcomes.
The Obama administration in 2014 recognized this research in its own “Dear Colleague” letter to schools. The administration advised schools to either reform their discipline practices toward nonpunitive alternatives to suspension or risk being investigated for discrimination.
The first Trump administration rescinded this letter in 2018.
Then, in 2023, the Biden administration released a document along the same lines as Obama’s letter.
Trump’s February 2025 letter grouped all of these recommendations under the banner of “DEI” and argued that such practices are discriminatory, privileging students of color over white and Asian students.
In his April executive order, Trump reiterated that if schools did not eliminate DEI, they would be out of compliance with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin,
Public school districts regularly have to issue a certificate of compliance to the government showing that their work is in line with Title VI.
While the Trump administration characterizes DEI as “smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline,” it does not define exactly what constitutes DEI programming.
This puts school districts at risk of losing funding if they maintain any initiatives related to racial equality.
Legal Concerns With Trump’s Directives
The executive office and members of Congress typically issue “Dear Colleague” letters, which are not legally binding, to advise schools and others on policy.
Yet Trump’s letter was written like a mandate and reinforced by an executive order, which is legally binding.
Some scholars are calling the letter an “overreach” of legal authority.
In the spring of 2025, I analyzed states’ responses to Trump’s letter and executive order.
Two states, Iowa and Tennessee, had not yet provided public responses.
Twenty-three states complied with the administration’s directive by signing the letter as of May 30. Some, like Oklahoma, not only certified the letter but also passed state laws banning DEI policies and programs.
The remaining 25 states refused to certify the letter, asserting that they already complied with Title VI and that their policies are not discriminatory.
In addition, 19 of those 25 states sued the Trump administration over the letter in April, culminating in a court injunction later that month that temporarily released states from having to comply with its demands.
I noticed that many states that refuted Trump’s letter used the same exact words in their responses, signaling a concerted effort to resist Trump’s directives. States that did not sign on to the letter but objected to its intent generally resisted on legal grounds, ethics or both.
A Legal Argument
Most states that rejected it grounded their refusal to sign Trump’s letter in federal law. They cited the Civil Rights Act and the Paperwork Reduction Act, which protects states from having to file redundant paperwork. Because these states already certified compliance with Title VI, this argument goes, they should not have to do so again under Trump’s directive.
Education commissioners from a few states, including Illinois and Minnesota, also cited specific language used by Betsy DeVos, Trump’s former education secretary in his first term, who supported DEI policies.
Charlene Russell-Tucker, the education commissioner for Connecticut, also pointed out that in order for the federal government to cancel DEI programming, it would have to first legally change the definition of Title VI.
States Resisting on Other Grounds
Some education officials also argued that their DEI work is ideologically necessary for providing supportive learning environments for all students.
Patrick Tutwiler, Massachusetts’ interim education commissioner, wrote in an April 16 letter, for example, that “Massachusetts will continue to promote diversity in our schools because we know it improves outcomes for all of our kids.”
Other officials displayed more subtle resistance. Randy Watson, Kansas’ education commissioner, for example, affirmed the state’s “commitment to comply with all Federal statutes,” including Title VI – but did not explicitly address Trump’s “Dear Colleague” letter.
Similarly, Kentucky informed the Department of Education of its compliance with federal law, while simultaneously encouraging local districts to continue diversity, equity and inclusion work.
Mississippi’s state department of education pointed out that school districts operate independently, so the state cannot force policies on them. However, Mississippi signaled compliance by citing a new state law banning DEI and confirmed that each of its individual school districts have already certified compliance with federal laws.
More Legal Pushback
It is not yet clear what might follow the April court injunction, which largely prevented the Department of Education from cutting federal funding to schools that continued their DEI-related programs and policies.
While the Trump administration has made major cuts to the Department of Education, it has not announced that states refusing to certify the letter will lose funding.
This is the first time an administration is issuing such a direct threat to withhold K-12 funding, placing schools in an unknown place, without a clear blueprint of how to move forward.
Give Me Two Minutes
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Vance Brings White House Backup to Indiana
Vice President JD Vance brought an entourage of White House officials with him to Indiana today for his meeting with Republican state officials there, whom he attempted to pressure to follow Texas’ lead and do the Trump administration’s bidding when it comes to the state’s congressional maps.
Continue reading “Vance Brings White House Backup to Indiana”HHS Has Revived a Failed Program to Scrape Americans’ Data and Track Autism, Senate Suggests
Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee released a report on the country’s federal labor, health, human services, and education agencies in which staffers buried a small note of concern.
It has to do with a case of duplication.
Continue reading “HHS Has Revived a Failed Program to Scrape Americans’ Data and Track Autism, Senate Suggests”How the Federal Union Could Break Apart
The term “constitutional crisis” gets used a lot these days. By a very fair definition we’ve been in one since January. A more apt and consequential meaning, however, is a crisis in which the legitimacy and continuation of the state rests in the balance or whether it fragments and degenerates into civil war, military rule or state disintegration. Today President Trump proposed something that, to my view, for the first time provides a path to such a crisis.
Continue reading “How the Federal Union Could Break Apart”Trump’s Attack on Data Has ‘Dangerous Trickle-Down Effect’ for America’s Most Vulnerable
President Donald Trump is going after the census again. In a Thursday post on his social media platform Truth Social, the president announced that he’d “instructed” the Commerce Department to redo the census based on the 2024 election results to ensure that “people who are in our country illegally” wouldn’t be counted.
Redistricting experts were quick to point out that such a move would be unconstitutional, as the census is required to be conducted every decade and include “all free persons.” (During Trump’s first term, the Supreme Court blocked the administration’s request to put a citizenship question on the census). But the announcement speaks to how Trump’s crusade against immigrants and other vulnerable groups threatens to fundamentally interfere with accurate data collection and reporting.
Much of Trump’s war on data has focused on what he derogatorily calls “woke” policy, or data related to race, gender, and ethnicity. He banned the use of that data in federal hiring, for example, as part of his administration’s broader effort to eliminate DEI programs outright.
Experts tell TPM that Trump’s data drain puts the most vulnerable Americans at risk, as changes in demographic data collection and reporting could mean less efficient public policy for immigrants, Black people and people of color, gender minorities, lower-income Americans, and other historically disadvantaged populations. Unknown problems can’t be fixed.
“The most dangerous trickle down effect of this,” said Abby André, director of a data-driven policy tracker called The Impact Project, “is less effective economic policy. And those most in need among us are always hit first.”
Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which tracks and recommends policy regarding the racial wealth gap, income inequity and unemployment. He said racial distinctions in economic data are important. While national unemployment is 4.2% according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statics report, unemployment for Black people reached 7.2% in July — the highest rate since a pandemic-era economic slowdown in October 2021. That stands in contrast to the unemployment for white people, which has held steady at around 3.7%.
“So the 4% number does not accurately represent unemployment across all communities,” Asante-Muhammad said. “Obviously those which have the most economic insecurity are those who will have the most negative effects by not having policy to assist them,” he continued.
Trump responded to the overall low jobs numbers in the July report by firing BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer.
When Trump and Elon Musk took a chainsaw to federal employment, slashing government jobs known for hiring Black people at a disproportionately higher rate than private industry, researchers waited to see if certain demographic groups would be hit hardest. The Office of Personnel Management maintained a database tracking the race and gender of federal employees. Until Trump came into office, officials took that database down, and republished it after deleting data on race and ethnicity.
Hayley Brown, a research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, listed the ways non-economic federal data has been compromised since Trump took office. There’s the plan to end an Environmental Protection Agency report collecting greenhouse gas data, a rollback of hospital reporting on COVID rates, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio redefining human rights “in a way limiting the amount of information we can get,” Brown said.
Trump’s deluge of anti-DEI executive orders, Brown continued, “is getting rid of variables like gender, race, and ethnicity, which means the data is less useful in general and it’s less able to accurately reflect the community that they’re serving.”
Former U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Santos told NPR in February that the bureau stopped collecting gender identity data on its National Crime Victimization Survey and a survey tracking sexual assault and harrassment in prisons to comply with one of Trump’s Inauguration Day executive orders. These changes came despite data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics showing trans people were 2.5 times more likely to be victims of violent crime. That report is still available on the bureau’s website.
While experts retain trust in the civil servants and statisticians still working for the federal government, some envisioned scenarios in which the Trump administration’s erasure of demographics like race and gender could inadvertently taint data.
“You can’t do modern polling,” said Richard Fry, a senior researcher and economist at Pew Research, “if you don’t have those federal benchmarks to tell you what the U.S. adult population looks like in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, who’s a citizen, who’s not a citizen… My polling colleagues heavily rely on that and so does every large scale polling outlet.”
Republican lawmakers have in the past openly expressed a desire to cut data about populations with the worst outcomes. When addressing Louisiana’s maternal mortality rate — the fourth worst in the nation — Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) in 2022 said one could simply ignore Black women’s outcomes to improve maternal mortality rate.
“[I]f you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear,” Cassidy told Politico.
The Trump administration’s assault on information and the civil servants who provide it threatens to have long-term impacts that are difficult to undo, said Paul Schroeder, a statistician and executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics.
“There’s really real world consequences of attempting to mess with these data that it’s going to be hard to recover from,” said Schroeder. “This is really a grave error on the Trump administration’s part and I wish it would not have occurred.”
Scenes From Post-Law DC: Cory Mills Sex Tape Threats Edition
We’ve got more from Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL), the avatar of post-law Washington DC, where they let you do it if you’re a Republican.
Remember all the way back in February DC police were called to Mills’ apartment over an alleged assault of a woman who was not his wife. (Mills’ wife lives back in his home district. She’s a kind of Schrodinger’s Wife, but we’ll get back to that.) Subsequent news confirmed that the woman was Mills’ DC girlfriend, and when we last checked in on this story a couple weeks ago she still appeared to be his girlfriend, notwithstanding the alleged assault. (She soon recanted her accusation after the incident.) DC law being under the management of Jan. 6 attorney Ed Martin at the time meant Mills skated on that incident, though there was some question of whether the DC police might also have botched the initial arrest and investigation in ways that might have made prosecution difficult even if Republicans were still required to follow the law in DC.
Then three weeks ago we learned that Mills was in the process of being evicted from his $21,000-a-month DC apartment, which he appeared to stop paying rent on right after the alleged assault.
Continue reading “Scenes From Post-Law DC: Cory Mills Sex Tape Threats Edition”The Long, Hot Summer of Trump II Depredations
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
A Snapshot of America in the Summer of 2025
I returned last night from a weeklong trip paddling down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. No phone signal. No news. No real contact with the outside world.
As I flew home yesterday and started trying to catch up on what I’d missed, I was quickly overwhelmed — as we all have been all year long — not just by the volume of news but by the peculiar dynamics (I’m still not sure I understand the Sydney Sweeney thing) and the distorted information ecosystem of the Trump era.
So if you’ll indulge me this morning, I’m going to offer a few snapshots of the current moment that caught the eye of someone who managed to escape the news cycle completely for a week. Distance from it restored me in some ways, but not necessarily in the ways I had expected.
I had hoped a week of marveling at geological time scales would make me more prone to see Donald Trump as a passing fad in the larger sweep of our political history. But I came back instead a bit more sensitive to how far we’ve fallen in such a short time.
WTF Is THIS?
Bringing Back Confederate Memorials
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the reinstallation of a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery that had been removed in 2023.
‘Defend Your Culture’
The Department of Homeland Security’s new recruitment push — dubbed “Defend the Homeland” — includes the nationalistic blood and soil call to “defend your culture!”
Quote of the Day
“It’s difficult to overstate how dangerous this moment is. Using the machinery of criminal justice to pursue manufactured charges against political predecessors is the stuff of strongmen and collapsing democracies. … It corrodes trust in democratic transitions, chills dissent, and redefines political opposition as criminal subversion.”–Harry Litman, on Attorney General Pam Bondi ordering a grand jury investigation into former President Obama and officials in his administration
EXCLUSIVE
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard overrode CIA officials’ concerns to release a classified House GOP report that challenged the intel community’s assessment of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, the WaPo reports.
Census Citizenship Question Redux
A lot to unpack here, but for now suffice to say that President Trump is making another bid to exclude non-citizens from the census for apportioning House seats and Electoral College votes, after the courts blocked the ham-handed effort of his first term:
Good Read
Thomas Zimmer attempts to answer the difficult question of why right-wing ascendancy in America is happening now.
Trump’s Attack on Higher Ed: UC Edition
The University of California System is entering into talks with the Trump administration to try to restore half a billion dollars in federal research funding for UCLA that was suspended over trumped-up allegations that it fostered anti-semitism on campus during pro-Palestinian protests last year.
Trump Strips Federal Workers of Union Protections
The Department of Veterans Affairs became the first federal agency to purport to begin terminating union contracts, which effect some 400,000 workers, despite arguing in court that it would refrain from doing so.
UPDATE: TPM Journalism Fund
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Speaking of Paddling …
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers increased the normal water releases from a dam on the Little Miami River in southwestern Ohio this month to accommodate a canoe trip by Vice President JD Vance that coincided with his 41st birthday, The Guardian reports. In the Guardian piece, there is a tension over whether the extra water was used to make the river more navigable for Vance’s Secret Service detail or to create a more ideal water level for the vice president’s personal recreation.
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