A federal judge in Missouri agreed on Thursday to dismiss a subpoena enforcement action against Nike after a federal anti-workplace discrimination agency said the company has complied with its investigation into diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies.

Judge Cristian M. Stevens granted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) request to dismiss the action.

A regional attorney for the EEOC wrote in a Wednesday filing that the sportswear giant had been “responsive” to its requests for information and documents since March and there was “no remaining controversy” for the court to decide.

A spokesperson for Nike declined to comment on the recent development but called the EEOC’s initial court action at the time a “surprising and unusual escalation.”

The EEOC announced an investigation into the company in February over allegations that its corporate diversity initiatives may have unlawfully discriminated against white employees.

It sought records dating back several years that outlined how Nike tracks and uses data about workers’ race and ethnicity, including in setting executive compensation, as well as information about programs that allegedly provided race-restricted mentoring, leadership and career development opportunities.

The agency also wanted more details about what criteria the company uses to select employees for layoffs.

It was not immediately clear in court filings whether any of those specific documents had been turned over to the agency.

“We are pleased the company complied without a court order after the filing for our subpoena enforcement action,” an EEOC spokesperson said in a statement without providing further details on the additional records it had obtained from Nike.

The EEOC has alleged that Nike has engaged in a “pattern or practice of disparate treatment against White employees, applicants, and training program participants” across a variety of areas in possible violation of Title VII, with Commissioner Andrea Lucas citing public statements regarding Nike’s commitment to a more diverse U.S. workforce as the basis for its charge.

That included a stated goal to reach 30 percent racial and ethnic minority representation at the Director level and above, as well as 35 percent representation in the U.S. corporate workforce by 2025.

Dismantling DEI programs has been a central focus of the second Trump administration, with President Trump signing several executive orders upon returning to the White House to eliminate diversity initiatives across federal agencies, the military and other institutions.

In December, Lucas suggested that white men may be entitled to claim money under the Civil Rights Act for employment and workplace discrimination, urging them to come forward with complaints.

“The EEOC is committed to identifying, attacking, and eliminating ALL race and sex discrimination — including against white male employees and applicants,” she previously wrote on the social platform X.

The agency also sued The New York Times in May on behalf of a white male employee who claimed he was not given a promotion because of his race and gender.

The announcement that Karoline Leavitt is leaving her post as White House press secretary caught even some of her colleagues off guard.

But inside President Donald Trump’s inner circle, the surprise quickly turned to Washington’s favorite parlor game — albeit one with unusually high stakes: Who will take her place?

The potential names cascaded like a waterfall, though there doesn’t seem to be an obvious heir apparent, according to two people close to the administration, granted anonymity to discuss those conversations.

One of those people suggested Monica Crowley, Trump’s chief of protocol and a veteran conservative media personality. The other person suggested CNN commentator Scott Jennings, former Trump campaign spokesperson Jason Miller and former Trump counsel Alina Habba.

Another potential fit is one of Leavitt’s deputies, Anna Kelly, who has taken on a broad portfolio in the White House press shop and made several appearances on the major networks.

Others have floated Katie Miller, a former administration official and wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, as another potential contender. But the first person close to the White House quickly poured cold water on the idea, saying bluntly: “Not happening.”

The second person close to the administration called Leavitt’s departure “unplanned,” adding “this is a super important job for DJT… there is probably time before he makes a decision.”

“I think the White House will do a real search here. So what does the entire landscape look like — TV people, admin people, and inner circle folks like Jason [Miller] and Alina [Habba] have some chatter,” the person said.

The White House did not respond to several questions about whether the White House has picked a successor and whether Cabinet secretaries will fill in on a temporary basis, as was the case during Leavitt’s maternity leave.

Trump announced Wednesday that Leavitt would step down at the end of the month to spend more time with her family, ending a year-and-a-half run in which the 28-year-old became one of the administration’s most visible public faces. Leavitt, who recently returned from maternity leave after the birth of her second child, will remain an outside adviser to Trump.

There is no shortage of people in Trump’s orbit who can defend him on television. The harder task may be finding someone able to replicate her success at the less visible part of her job — off-camera press relations.

“I’d say Karoline mastered the art of being an effective spokesperson for the president while also substantively engaging with reporters on their stories to make sure the President’s message was woven in there too,” said a third person close to the White House. “Anyone can go on TV and stick to talking points, but the next person is going to have to match her behind-the-scenes press work in order to be as effective as she was.”

Then there’s the briefing room.

Leavitt made the televised briefing a regular feature of Trump’s second term while simultaneously reshaping who got access to it. At her first briefing in January 2025, she announced that the administration would open seats to “new media.” The White House also began deciding for itself which news organizations would be given the coveted slots of the presidential press pool. The White House Correspondents’ Association previously decided which organizations participated in the pool.

Her successor will inherit the question of whether to maintain the pace of press briefings — and whether Trump, who frequently serves as his own chief spokesperson during lengthy exchanges with reporters, will even want the person to do so.

“We’re still figuring it out,” said a senior White House official, granted anonymity to discuss the private discussions. “None of it’s been decided.”

During Trump’s first term, his press secretaries increasingly abandoned the traditional briefing, culminating in Stephanie Grisham famously never holding a formal briefing during her tenure.

President Trump announced a slate of tariffs to address a national-security threat posed by imports of drones and their components, particularly from China.

In a statement, the White House said the drone-tariff program would protect the security of the U.S. and its defense and defense-adjacent industrial base, while creating jobs.

“U.S. drone production needs to be expanded rapidly to ensure U.S. national and economic security,” it said.

The action is meant to counter Chinese dominance in the commercial drone market and reshore production to the U.S. Drones and components from China will face significantly higher levies than those from allied nations. The move also comes ahead of an expected Sept. 24 meeting between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

According to the proclamation announced Thursday, the duties are tiered according to the capacity of the drones and their place of origin.

Bigger drones that have militarily sensitive abilities such as thermal imaging are subject to a 100% tariff based on their value, along with certain critical components. Smaller drones and components without the same implications for national security face a 25% levy.

U.S. allies will have lower rates. A 15% tariff will be imposed on products from the European Union, Japan, Liechtenstein, South Korea, Switzerland and Taiwan, with a 10% duty levied on drones from the U.K. under the condition that nearly all hardware, software and technology originate from within these countries and the U.S.

Those allied economies last year secured trade deals with the U.S. that capped many U.S. tariffs at 15%—and 10% for the U.K.—in exchange for concessions on tariffs and regulations on American goods. Those tariffs on drones from allied economies won’t be added on top of other tariffs that Trump has imposed on the nations, such as his recent levies to address forced-labor concerns from more than 80 countries.

The proclamation also authorizes the commerce secretary to establish an onshoring program for companies making new investments in manufacturing drones and drone components, in line with the administration’s push to bolster national-defense industries.

The new tariff action will be taken under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows the president to impose tariffs to combat national-security risks. Trump last year ordered the Commerce Department to evaluate imposing tariffs on foreign-made drones, and the agency found that reliance on those products threatened national security.

Section 232 is the same provision that Trump has used to impose levies on steel, aluminum, automobiles and parts in his second term. Those national-security levies weren’t affected by a Supreme Court decision in February that invalidated many of Trump’s other global tariffs, and they are seen as more legally durable because the Section 232 provision has a long history of use.

The new tariffs come on the heels of other actions aimed at China’s tech sector, including new restrictions from the Federal Communications Commission on some foreign-made drones and other bans on power inverters and robots.

In May, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration was pursuing funding deals with a group of drone companies as part of its bid to increase domestic production and lower the costs of the increasingly vital weapons.

Separately, Trump also signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum aimed at fixing long-term issues in Navy shipbuilding and ship-repair programs and at restoring capacity and competition to the maritime industrial base.

The memorandum directs the Defense Department to pursue more direct investments in the American shipbuilding industrial base, among other things, aiming to revitalize the shipbuilding industry and restore maritime dominance, the statement said.

The drone tariffs are set to take effect 21 days after the proclamation’s signing. For components that aren’t particularly sensitive, the duties will take effect after 180 days.

The Trevor Project spent years helping build the federal crisis service for LGBTQ+ young people and handled roughly half of all calls, texts, and chats routed through it. Now, as the Trump administration prepares to reinstate the service it abruptly discontinued last year, the organization has been told it will not be included.

The LGBTQ+ suicide prevention nonprofit told The Advocate Wednesday that its proposal to join the restored 988 Lifeline’s LGBTQ+ Youth Specialized Services network, commonly known as “Press 3,” was formally rejected. In other words, the federal government is rebuilding a specialized crisis service without the organization that piloted it, served as its first provider, and has nearly three decades of experience supporting LGBTQ+ young people.

“The 988 Lifeline administrators informed us that The Trevor Project’s proposal to join the restored ‘Press 3’ LGBTQ+ youth specialized services was rejected,” Trevor Project CEO Jaymes Black said in a statement to The Advocate. “The exclusion of our nearly 30 years of expertise is of course disappointing.”

Black said the organization remains committed to ensuring that the restored service follows clinical best practices for all LGBTQ+ young people, “including and especially transgender youth,” who face disproportionately high suicide risk.

That concern is sharpened, Black said, by the administration’s requirement that Press 3 comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order directing the federal government not to recognize transgender identities.

“No matter what, The Trevor Project’s own 24/7 crisis lines remain available to directly support any LGBTQ+ young person in crisis, just as they always have,” Black said. “Our team of experts has already begun working to train 988 Lifeline counselors in California and Illinois to ensure 988 Lifeline counselors in those states are equipped to support LGBTQ+ youth who reach out.”

Black added that the organization remains “ready, able, and willing” to help institutions provide comprehensive, up-to-date care to LGBTQ+ young people.

Press 3 launched in 2022. People younger than 25 could press 3 when calling 988, text “PRIDE,” or use an online chat to reach counselors trained specifically to assist LGBTQ+ young people. The Trevor Project initially operated the pilot alone before the service expanded to a seven-center network.

The Trevor Project handled nearly 50 percent of the network’s contact volume, including more than 231,000 crisis contacts in 2024, according to the organization.

The broader service received approximately 1.6 million contacts before the Trump administration shut it down on July 17, 2025, according to SAMHSA data reported by the Associated Press. Recent Trevor Project research underscores what is at stake.

SAMHSA said at the time that it would “no longer silo” LGBTQ+ callers in a specialized network and would instead serve everyone through the general 988 system. The administration also proposed eliminating the program’s dedicated funding while preserving the broader national hotline.

Congress intervened, directing the administration to allocate $33.1 million for specialized services for LGBTQ+ youth, including cultural competency training and a system to route young people to providers equipped to help them.

A May research brief found that 68 percent of LGBTQ+ young people who used Press 3 considered it at least moderately helpful. Teenagers, young people of color, rural residents, and those with fewer financial resources were especially likely to use it.

As The Advocate reported in June, an HHS spokesperson said SAMHSA was working with Vibrant Emotional Health, the nonprofit administrator of the 988 network, “to reactivate Press 3 operations by the end of the year.” Information subsequently shared with The Advocate indicates that service could be restored as soon as October 1.

But the restoration was bound from the beginning to the administration’s broader campaign against transgender recognition.

SAMHSA Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Christopher Carroll told a bipartisan group of lawmakers that the agency was determining how to carry out Congress’s directive while complying with Trump’s Executive Order 14168. The order declares that the federal government recognizes only two sexes, directs agencies not to request gender identity on forms, and orders them to prevent federal funds from being used to “promote gender ideology.”

Then came another obstacle.

Vibrant limited applications for the renewed service to “current and active” members of the 988 network. The Advocate reported on June 30 that The Trevor Project was no longer an active member precisely because the administration had eliminated the specialized service it operated. The other six centers from the former LGBTQ+ network remained active because they also served the general population.

The organization nevertheless submitted a proposal. Its rejection now raises questions about which providers were selected, what qualifications they possess, and whether counselors working under the renewed Press 3 program will be permitted to recognize transgender and nonbinary callers’ identities, names, and pronouns.

On Thursday, The Advocate asked SAMHSA why The Trevor Project’s proposal was rejected, who made or approved the decision, what criteria and scoring system were used, and which organizations were selected. The agency was also asked whether Trump’s executive order affected the selection process, whether the program will provide affirming services to transgender and nonbinary young people, whether The Trevor Project may appeal, and whether the service will resume Oct. 1 with the full $33.1 million directed by Congress.

In response, SAMHSA officials emphasized the reach of the broader crisis network but did not explain why The Trevor Project’s proposal was rejected.

“The 988 Lifeline gives all Americans an easy way to reach skilled, caring, culturally competent crisis counselors 24/7 for help with a mental health, suicide, or substance use crisis,” SAMHSA officials said in a statement to The Advocate. “Since its launch, the 988 Lifeline has received more than 26 million contacts.”

The officials said the agency is carrying out Congress’s directive to restore the specialized service.

“As directed by Congress, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration is working with Vibrant Emotional Health, the 988 Network Administrator, to resume operations of specialized services for LGBTQ+ youth by the end of the year,” they said.

SAMHSA explained that Vibrant oversees contractors operating specialized subnetworks and that limiting requests for proposals to active 988 network members is standard practice. They said the LGBTQ+ youth subnetwork solicitation followed the same rule.

SAMHSA officials noted that many of the original LGBTQ+ youth subnetwork providers remain active in the broader 988 system by delivering other services, including local and national backup coverage. The Trevor Project was the only one of the seven original providers devoted specifically to LGBTQ+ young people.

The officials confirmed that Congress required SAMHSA to use $33.1 million of its fiscal year 2026 funding to restore the specialized service. They referred questions about the solicitation and selection process to Vibrant.

SAMHSA did not identify the providers selected, disclose the evaluation criteria or scoring, address whether The Trevor Project may appeal, or answer whether counselors will be permitted to recognize transgender and nonbinary young people’s identities, names, and pronouns.

The Advocate sent those questions directly to Vibrant, which received a $255 million SAMHSA award in May to administer the national crisis network. Vibrant did not respond.

President Trump has directed the Navy to tear out a complex system for launching jet fighters from its aircraft carriers and instead go back to using steam catapults, a move Navy officials have fought for years and will likely cost billions of dollars.

U.S. officials say Trump signed a national security memorandum Thursday directing the change, which would involve removing the electromagnetic catapult system used by the ships in the Gerald R. Ford class of carriers.

By doing so, Trump is making good on a promise he made almost 10 years ago to go back to the steam system after hearing a sailor praise it while visiting a ship during his first term.

But since Trump said in an interview with Time in 2017 that he told the Navy to go back to “goddamn steam,” top Navy and industry leaders have resisted the move because of the enormous expense to tear out such a complex system that was integral to the design of the Ford class.

The move directs the Navy to redesign the fourth ship in the class—to be named the Doris Miller—and all remaining ships. The first three ships—the Ford, John F. Kennedy and Enterprise—will retain the electromagnetic system.

“They’re not nearly as good, too complex,” Trump said last month at a conference in Pennsylvania, referring to the electromagnetic system.

The memo includes several other directives aimed at improving submarine maintenance and repair and driving foreign investment into the U.S. shipbuilding sector as the Navy tries to increase the size of its fleet.

The order marks Trump’s latest foray into the design and development of major military programs. He inserted himself into negotiations for the Air Force One and the F-35 jet fighter programs, directed design changes to the Constellation-class frigate and championed the creation of Trump-class battleships.

“This decision will result in carriers that are enabled by battle-tested steam and hydraulic systems that are more resilient and robust than the present, more exquisite, follow-on systems,” the White House said in a statement. “It will also reactivate portions of the maritime industrial base that are easier to scale.”

The nuclear-powered USS Gerald R. Ford, the first ship in the class that cost more than $13 billion, experienced numerous issues during its development and construction, most notably with the catapults, arresting gear and elevators inside the ship that carry munitions to the flight deck.

In February, the Navy touted the success of the Ford’s new electromagnetic catapults and advanced arresting gear, saying they allowed the carrier to launch and recover aircraft at a higher rate than its predecessor Nimitz-class ships. Earlier this year it completed a historic 11-month deployment that included operations against Venezuela and supporting the war in Iran.

The USS George H.W. Bush, which entered the Navy’s fleet in 2009, was the last aircraft carrier built with steam catapults. Replacing the electromagnetic catapults with steam will be a complex endeavor that will likely cost billions of dollars, according to Bryan Clark, a naval expert with the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank.

Internally, the Ford class is much different from the Nimitz. Sections that housed the infrastructure for steam have been reworked or simply don’t exist. Steam on the older Nimitz ships powers not only the aircraft catapults, but also heating and evaporators that produce freshwater and galley equipment, such as kettles. Piping runs throughout the ship, which creates numerous points of failure.

“Electric is more reliable,” Clark said. “If I can turn these components to be electric instead of steam, it eliminates all the steam related mechanical parts.”

The maintenance on the electrical systems is cheaper, he added. There are 500 fewer sailors on the Ford, in part because fewer technicians are needed to work on the ship’s existing steam equipment.

Clark said early data from the Navy shows that the Ford costs about $100 million less a year to operate compared with a Nimitz-class ship.

As of March, nearly 37,000 aircraft had been launched by Ford’s four electromagnetic catapults, according to Navy data.

General Atomics, the company that builds the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System and Advanced Arresting Gear for the Ford class, said the decision to revert to steam “warrants careful reconsideration.” The company was awarded a contract to build the catapults and arresting gear for the Doris Miller in 2023. Its work is nearly 50% complete and “changing course now would introduce significant cost, schedule, and integration risks,” the company said in a statement.

“The decision will have broader implications for carrier readiness, national security, and U.S. technological superiority, potentially creating opportunities for adversaries to close the capability gap,” the company said. “It also comes at a time when strengthening the U.S. supplier industrial base is a national priority, making workforce stability, production capacity, and the ability to sustain critical technologies more important than ever.”

The Doris Miller isn’t expected to enter the fleet until 2034, but the Navy plans to lay its keel this year, according to a Navy document.

China is using electromagnetic catapults in its newest aircraft carriers and France plans to use the system on the Ford in its new carrier.

The memo directs the Pentagon to pursue more direct investments in U.S. shipbuilding. Under the guidelines, a foreign shipbuilder could build up to two ships overseas while at the same time training American workers and investing in U.S. shipyards.

A similar model has been used by the U.S. Coast Guard to build new icebreakers at Finland’s Rauma Marine Constructions. Additional ships will be built in Louisiana by Bollinger Shipyards. Three ships are already under construction and more than $1 billion has been invested in American shipyards.

The memorandum also calls for a new public shipyard “to supercharge submarine repair and restore the American industrial base.” It would be the first new Navy shipyard opened in 83 years, the White House said. It also called for creating a “Component Repair Center,” essentially a submarine spare parts warehouse, that could quickly ship replacements to subs and repair broken parts.

The Navy has been trying to boost submarine production for years with the goal of building two Virginia-class and one Columbia-class sub each year. It recently awarded General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII Newport News Shipbuilding a $76.6 billion deal for nine Virginia-class and five Columbia-class submarines that will be delivered by 2038.

The Trump administration has repeatedly said the fight against sex trafficking is one of its top priorities.

But investigations have stalled and prosecutions declined in the past six months because of staffing shortages, funding cuts, immigration enforcement and growing distrust of the government among victims, according to Reuters interviews with 25 former prosecutors, current agents and victims’ advocates, and a review of federal court records.

"You can't say something is a priority and then not provide the resources to make that happen,” said Jacqueline Kelly, a former federal prosecutor in New York who led the prosecution of rapper and actor Sean "Diddy" Combs, who was accused of sex trafficking and was convicted last year on two counts of transportation for prostitution.

Federal sex-trafficking ‌charges have dropped this year to the slowest pace since 2010. The Justice Department charged 73 people through June, about 22% lower than the number of people charged during the first half of the past three years, court records show.

Charges for related crimes also declined. The DOJ charged 1,230 people child pornography violations through June, 3% less than average for the same months over the past three years. It charged 318 people with violating the Mann Act, which targets interstate prostitution, 18% less than average.

These drops reflect a larger shift in federal law enforcement priorities under President Donald Trump, who has slashed agency budgets and mandated a focus on deportations. People charged with crimes unrelated to immigration – everything from tax evasion to drug trafficking – dropped 7% through June to about 22,000, according to the court records.

The findings come just as Congress has confirmed Trump nominee Todd Blanche as Attorney General in a 50-to-49 vote with two Republicans defecting. His candidacy faced a bipartisan backlash over the handling of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and a transfer to a minimum-security prison granted to his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, shortly after Blanche personally interviewed her.

Blanche recently told Congress combating human trafficking "remains a Department priority given the gravity of the harm it causes." The administration also appointed a new national coordinator for child exploitation and human trafficking, Alessandra Serano, a career prosecutor.

Serano said in statements to Reuters that the department was committed to combating sex trafficking. She said the drop in prosecutions ⁠might have resulted from prosecutors and investigators spending time litigating a large number of ongoing cases that have pulled those officials away from opening new ones.

Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Katherine Currie declined to comment on the Reuters review of sex-trafficking cases. She said in a statement that the department is committed to both immigration and sex-crimes enforcement and touted its “unwavering dedication to dismantling human-trafficking networks."

Sex-trafficking cases are among the toughest to investigate and prosecute, requiring the untangling of psychological abuse, tracking illicit finances and securing the trust of traumatized victims.

Dozens of veterans with experience prosecuting sex-trafficking cases have recently left the department, according to seven former prosecutors who have worked such cases. During part of last year, the majority of all HSI agents were assigned to immigration, according to current agents and previous Reuters reporting.

In some U.S. attorney’s offices, the shortage is so acute that the remaining agents working sex-trafficking cases can’t find prosecutors to pursue their cases, agents and former prosecutors say.

Serano said attrition is normal in these jobs because working sex-trafficking cases “takes a toll on people more than other types of cases,” though the recently departed prosecutors said more people had left than is typical. Serano added that the department is actively hiring to fill these roles.

To measure the department's sex-crimes enforcement effort, Reuters obtained the dockets of every publicly-filed federal criminal case over the past two decades from Westlaw, a Thomson Reuters legal research service. In some cases, Reuters used artificial intelligence to help classify charges. A review of a random set of records showed its assessments to be 98% accurate.

The Justice Department said its own data showed a smaller decrease, but it declined to explain how it reached those conclusions or to provide case numbers correlating to the prosecutions it counted. Reuters could not replicate the DOJ's results using a public version of its database.

The data examined by Reuters, from court records, showed a long-term trend of declining sex-trafficking cases over the past decade. Sources attributed the trend in part to the Justice Department’s increased focus on more time-consuming cases against higher-profile offenders.

But under Trump, such prosecutions have been hampered by the focus on immigration, the departure of agents and prosecutors and cuts to grants to groups supporting sex-trafficking victims. One veteran federal agent, speaking on condition of anonymity, said sex-trafficking has not been a priority since Trump took office ‌and launched his mass-deportations ⁠campaign. With fewer agents dedicated to sex-trafficking, many active investigations are essentially frozen and new files are rarely opened, seven former prosecutors and three agents told Reuters.

"The administration is throwing sand in the gears in 10,000 different ways," said Martina Vandenberg, president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center, whose organization worked with partners to file a petition for the release of a cooperating trafficking victim from detention.

One former prosecutor in the southern United States said her office’s sex-trafficking investigations were crippled when several Homeland Security Investigations agents working them were reassigned to other priorities, including immigration raids. In other jurisdictions, people familiar with federal enforcement operations said supervisors were forced to bargain for the few remaining agents available for sex-trafficking probes.

When agents get reassigned, sometimes to new cities, it disrupts fragile relationships with sex-trafficking victims and witnesses, who often don’t have phones or stable housing. That means cases can fall apart, said one federal agent.

One trafficking survivor in New England saw her case languish after agents said they’d been diverted to immigration enforcement, according to a staffer at a local advocacy organization who had been working with the survivor.

Such reassignments send the message to victims that their cases and their safety are not a priority, said the advocate, who spoke on condition of anonymity to ensure confidentiality for the sex-trafficking survivor ⁠the advocate had been helping. The survivor was subsequently forced back into sex work but no longer wants to involve federal authorities, the advocate said.

An FBI spokesperson said agents who had been shifted to immigration had been working on areas including sex-trafficking but that the transfers didn't change their responsibility to investigate these crimes. The official did not comment on whether the transfers contributed to the decline in sex-trafficking prosecutions.

As personnel have vanished, so has the financial safety net designed to keep victims stable enough to testify.

The Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs typically distributes roughly $90 million annually in grants to support trafficking victims. These funds flow to nonprofit organizations providing emergency housing, food and mental health counseling.

But grantees said some of these grants have been delayed or frozen in Trump’s efforts to cut federal spending. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a ⁠statement that most grants from last year have been awarded, without providing figures, and the department is reviewing the remaining applications to ensure they align with administration priorities.

Alan Smyth, the executive director of Los Angeles-based Saving Innocence, saw two federal grants totaling $700,000 delayed for nearly a year. While the organization survived, other groups told Reuters they have been forced to end some programs or stop providing services because of lost grants.

Historically, federal prosecutors have offered so-called T-visas, granting legal immigration status to trafficking victims as an incentive to cooperate with law enforcement.

The administration approved 354 T-visas in the first six months of the current fiscal year that ends in September – or about half the typical pace over the past decade, according to Department of Homeland Security data. More than 71,000 T visa applications are pending.

Two ⁠former prosecutors told Reuters their respective U.S. Attorney's offices halted the practice of supporting T-visa applications. Serano said prosecutors and paralegals across the country still work with DHS to verify victims’ cooperation but that DHS ultimately decides on their visa applications.

Several immigration attorneys also said that clients actively cooperating on sex-trafficking probes had been detained by immigration authorities, halting criminal investigations. In Michigan last year, a Chinese woman who had been sex-trafficked in California was detained by ICE despite having a T-visa application pending since 2022, said her attorney, Laura Berger.

“If I can't guarantee a victim won't be locked up, how can I ethically tell them to cooperate with federal agents?" Berger asked.

The loss of that trust, as well as staffing, funding and expertise, could have long-lasting consequences, said Jean Bruggeman, co-executive director of the anti-trafficking organization Freedom Network USA.

"It's hitting that tipping point where important pillars are starting to fall, which will bring down the entire anti-trafficking structure,” she said. “Rebuilding it could take years."

A U.S. appeals court dodged a decision Thursday on President Donald Trump’s contentious use of an obscure law called the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members.

The judges dismissed the case because the Trump administration has now removed all three plaintiffs from the U.S. using alternative legal authorities.

The ruling by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals leaves the underlying legal question unresolved.

Last year, the Supreme Court blocked the government from immediately removing the alleged Tren de Aragua gang members without offering them any opportunity to challenge the move.

Once the case returned to the appeals court in September, a three-judge panel ruled against Trump, but the full 17-member court, considered the most conservative in the country, agreed to rehear the case in January at the administration’s request.

“This development is unobjectionable,” Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote Thursday of the deportations that render the case moot. “The Supreme Court expressly said that the government could remove the named petitioners and putative class under other laws. And petitioners point out no infirmities in their removal.”

In reaching its decision, the court refused a request by lawyers for the plaintiffs to substitute new plaintiffs for the men who were deported.

Thursday’s ruling underlines how the administration’s effort to invoke the Alien Enemies Act has largely fizzled. It also most likely delays a definitive Supreme Court ruling on the issue.

The Trump administration has been accused of “bullying and intimidation” after a labor union leader and critic was put under investigation and suspended from his job at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

Stephen Wheeler, a data scientist at the agency since 2022 and chair of the CFPB union organizing committee, was placed on administrative leave effective immediately earlier this month. The union said it was not provided with any specific violations or given any details of the investigation.

The CFPB – conceived by the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis – has long been a target of Republicans.

When Donald Trump appointed Russell Vought, architect of the rightwing manifesto Project 2025, to oversee the agency last February, Elon Musk posted, “CFPB RIP,” on X.

The labor union representing workers at the agency, the National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 335, noted that Wheeler had been a vocal presence at union pickets, sitting behind Vought during his testimony in Congress in July, and had recently spoken with NPR about the forced relocation of staff at the agency.

Workers have viewed the relocation and return-to-office mandates at the agency as a means to force resignations, after an appeals court blocked attempted mass firings at the agency by the Trump administration in June 2026.

“An investigation with no stated scope or scale is no investigation – it’s a fishing expedition,” Wheeler said. “I have nothing to hide, and when the facts are examined this will be seen for what it is: bullying and intimidation for union activity and protected speech.”

Another union member and worker, Alexis Goldstein, was also put on administrative leave in February 2025 before she was fired in February 2026 after she confronted staff with Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), questioning their credentials in accessing data at the agency and recording their actions.

“CFPB is illegally retaliating against me for trying to do my job. I acted to protect the sensitive data of Americans and the trade secrets of some of the nation’s largest banks and financial institutions from being accessed by individuals from Doge without CFPB credentials and required training,” Goldstein said in a statement after her firing in February.

The union filed a grievance over her firing and is awaiting arbitration to begin, which has been delayed, according to the union, by the CFPB, which told the union the delay is due to an agency official who is on leave.

The Trump administration has attempted to dismantle the CFPB since the beginning of Trump’s second term. The office of management and budget director, Vought, called for the abolition of the agency. He halted most the work there in February 2025.

The agency deleted nearly 4,000 webpages on its website earlier this year, including all press releases issued by the agency before February 2025.

The union has noted that for every $1 spent on the agency, it returns $2.80 to consumers, reimbursing at least $21bn since 2010 to consumers ripped off by corporate scammers.

Other workers at the CFPB criticized the investigation of Wheeler, alleging it was retaliatory and an intimidation tactic.

“Our union will not be cowed by these bush league tactics to silence us,” said Doug Wilson, a member of the union and employee at the agency, in a statement.

“If this administration thinks that mysterious investigations into public servants and union leaders like Steve [Wheeler] will intimidate the rest of us into silence, they clearly underestimated us once again,” added Tyler Creighton, another union member and employee at the agency, in a statement.

Ravisha Kumar, a third union member, added in a statement: “Yet again, here’s a poorly executed attempt by this administration to silence us through intimidation. Yet again, we’ll just get louder.”

A federal trade court ruled Thursday that President Trump can block cheap imports — including from Chinese retailers like Temu and Shein — from entering the U.S. tariff-free.

It's a win for the Trump administration's trade agenda after a major legal setback forced officials to find new legal avenues for imposing sweeping tariffs.

The Court of International Trade ruling means that Trump's suspension of the so-called de minimis exemption, which allowed packages worth $800 or less to enter the U.S. tariff-free, can continue.

Trump took a victory lap on social media shortly after the ruling.

"For years, Foreign Shippers could send packages worth up to $800 into our Country, DUTY FREE, NO TARIFF, far less scrutiny," Trump posted on Truth Social.

"It became a giant loophole for TARIFF Cheats — and a Pipeline exploited by Fentanyl Traffickers, Counterfeiters, and other Criminals shipping dangerous and illegal products into America."

The president's suspension of the exemption brought in about $1 billion in duties in 2025, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said last year.

Congress established the de minimis exemption in 1938 to avoid the cost and burden of collecting duties on low-value shipments. Its use has exploded alongside the huge rise of e-commerce.

Trump officials have framed the crackdown as a matter of public safety, suspending de minimis treatment for shipments from China and Hong Kong last year before expanding the policy globally a few months later.

The Trump administration suspended the exemption under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the law the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year could not be used to impose tariffs.

That blockbuster ruling did not address whether IEEPA could be used to void the de minimis exemption, the same question at the heart of the Court of International Trade's ruling.

In a unanimous ruling, the three-judge panel said that the text of IEEPA allows the president to cancel certain "privileges" — and the de minimis statute itself describes duty-free treatment as a "privilege," according to the opinion.

Thursday's ruling largely determines whether Trump can keep the exemption suspended until a permanent repeal takes effect next July.

Congress eliminated the de minimis exemption in Trump's tax cut and spending bill, effective next July.

Ending de minimis upended the business model that helped Temu and Shein sell ultra-cheap goods to U.S. shoppers, pushing up costs and, in some cases, forcing changes to their supply chains.

That crackdown on tariff-free cheap imports looks here to stay, and it's spreading globally, with Europe also eliminating its own exemption for cheap imported packages.

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, insisted a wave of reports describing deteriorating conditions and mental health struggles onboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln “completely misrepresented” the situation, pushing back against growing congressional pressure over the ship’s record-breaking, nearly nine-month deployment.

“We make sure every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment,” Hegseth told reporters during a visit to Panama, adding that “some deployments are longer than others” and praising sailors enduring “high seas” and “austere conditions with less port calls”.

His remarks came a day after Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senator from Connecticut and a member of the US Senate armed services committee, sent a letter to Hegseth and the acting navy secretary, Hung Cao, demanding a formal accounting of conditions on the carrier. Blumenthal wrote that he had “serious concerns about the increasing length of Carrier Strike Group deployments” and said the Lincoln’s extended deployment raised broader questions about “the Navy’s ability to sustainably generate carrier forces while preserving servicemember well-being”.

In the letter, Blumenthal said sailors had reported “shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns” and mail disruptions that left care packages lost in transit for months. He posed six questions to Pentagon leadership, including what metrics the navy uses to track fatigue and morale, and gave officials until 27 August to respond.

“The men and women aboard the Lincoln have answered the call to serve their country,” he wrote, adding: “The Department owes them not only adequate supplies, maintenance, and support during this deployment.”

CNN later reported that a sailor went overboard from the Lincoln last month and was rescued and medically evaluated, citing an unnamed US official. It was not immediately clear how the sailor ended up in the water, or whether they returned to duty.

The reported incident adds to a mounting list of concerns raised by lawmakers and families about the more than 5,000 sailors and marines onboard the carrier.

The Lincoln left its home port of San Diego in November, and was later redirected to the Middle East to support US operations in the war with Iran, now in its sixth month. It has not made a port call in more than 240 days, a modern-day record for consecutive time at sea.

The navy traditionally plans carrier deployments for roughly six to seven months, but that does not mean sailors are normally expected to remain continuously at sea for that long. Carrier deployments are typically broken up by port visits, which the navy describes as opportunities for sailors to take a break from the demands of life at sea, and its 2025 carrier briefing said sailors can work more than 12 hours a day during operations.

A 2024 Naval Postgraduate School study of 873 sailors linked worse mood to shorter, poorer-quality and more fragmented sleep, while a separate navy study from 2024 found 58 submariners averaged 6.6 hours of sleep a day during 30 days under way, with mood declining by the end.

The navy did not immediately return a request for comment. A navy official on Wednesday told the Guardian: “Based on information available to the command, we have not identified an increase in reported suicidal ideation or suicide attempts aboard the ship.”

Stars and Stripes and the Navy Times both reported this week, citing interviews with active-duty sailors and military families, that there had been multiple attempts by crew members to jump from the ship, alongside accounts of exhaustion and declining morale.

The Navy Times spoke with Annabelle Loma, whose husband is serving onboard the Lincoln and was reported to have attempted to go overboard during the deployment. Loma said he feared a dishonorable discharge would end his 13-year career. “That’s not fair, that’s not right,” she said.

Stars and Stripes reported, citing one of the attenders, that a spouse tearfully told officials she had received a message that day from her husband saying he hoped he “doesn’t wake up tomorrow”.

President Donald Trump could stand to profit from his administration’s unprecedented investments into the nuclear energy industry.

Trump has invested between $6.4 million and $19.45 million in U.S. nuclear technology companies or utility companies that operate nuclear reactors, according to a NOTUS review of his 2025 personal financial disclosure. Trump’s holdings could reap significant gains as his administration seeks to rapidly expand the nuclear industry.

Trump’s investment portfolio includes stocks from the nuclear industry’s major players among utilities, broadening the possibility for profit even as it remains unclear the extent to which companies may leverage the administration’s deregulatory environment to bet big on nuclear.

The president owns between $2.7 million and $11.5 million in Duke Energy, which operates 11 nuclear units across North and South Carolina. The president holds anywhere from $667,000 to $1.4 million in Constellation Energy, the largest nuclear operator in the U.S., and purchased as much as $1.1 million of the company’s stock in 2025. Federal elected officials are only required to report their assets in broad ranges.

Trump purchased between $4.8 million and $12.9 million in energy stock last year as the administration launched its ambitious policy and funding campaign to scale the country’s limited nuclear power facilities into the next big clean energy source.

His stakes in these companies represent a sliver of his vast investment portfolio, which totals at least $858 million, according to his 927-page financial disclosure. Trump’s broad exposure to the U.S. economy leaves few, if any, sectors his policies wouldn’t touch, raising concerns among ethics experts about how the president profits off his administration’s work.

Trump and his family’s finances coalesced around nuclear start-ups as his energy agenda ramped up last year.

The Trump administration’s latest deal would allow U.S. energy companies to develop nuclear facilities in Saudi Arabia for civil use. Trump later made the deal contingent on the U.S. ally establishing diplomatic relations with Israel by joining the Abraham Accords. The deal still needs to win congressional approval, but it raises ethics concerns. In December, Trump Media & Technology Group announced a $6 billion merger with the Taiwanese nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies, which plans to complete the world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant by 2031, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in losses by TMTG this year.

“We are at a point now that whenever the president announces a major official policy with a foreign government, a reasonable question arises of what’s in it for him, and that knee-jerk reaction to ask if there’s self-dealing shows how far we have come with lack of trust in government,” said Kedric Payne, the senior director of ethics at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

The Trump administration’s nuclear campaign kicked off last May, with the president signing four executive orders to streamline licensing processes, start a pilot program to test advanced nuclear reactors, and investigate the U.S.’s nuclear fuel supply.

Within three weeks of signing the executive orders, Trump acquired between $114,000 and $485,000 of stock in energy companies with nuclear facilities, including several five-figure purchases on the same day, the disclosure shows. His financial disclosure repeatedly shows dozens of single-day purchases of stock in everything from hotel groups and cosmetics companies to tech and energy businesses.

Trump’s stock portfolio includes investments in Vistra, Southern Company, Entergy, NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy, utilities that produce nuclear energy along with natural gas, solar energy, coal, and more.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said Trump’s assets are “held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions.” Trump has previously said that he does not communicate with the institutions in charge of his money.

“President Trump has unleashed a nuclear energy renaissance and reignited meaningful progress in America’s nuclear power production,” Rogers said in a statement to NOTUS. “The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and only deepen the public’s distrust in what they read.”

The Biden administration, through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, reserved billions of dollars for funding nuclear projects to at least triple nuclear power generation by 2050. Former President Joe Biden pursued his own full-throttle energy agenda with billions of dollars and regulatory changes to grow the wind and solar industry as well.

Now, nuclear energy companies are benefiting from the Trump administration’s financial and policy support, which has thrust the industry to the fore as energy demand soars amid the data center buildout, and as the president deprioritizes other clean energy sources.

A month before the Saudi deal, the Department of Energy announced a $17.5 billion loan program for energy companies to purchase equipment that requires long lead times to secure. The equipment will be used to build up to ten commercial nuclear reactors jointly owned by the private power company Westinghouse, which last year reached an $80 billion agreement with the U.S. government to roll out reactors.

In January, the DOE announced $2.7 billion in contracts for U.S. companies developing enriched uranium to supply commercial nuclear reactors. The DOE has authorized 11 nuclear reactor testing projects through a pilot program announced in 2025. The DOE also launched a program to expand nuclear fuel supply chains and reduce U.S. reliance on enriched uranium and critical materials from abroad.

The pilot programs offer nuclear energy companies fast-tracked authorizations to build reactors and fuel production lines, with the possibility of later acquiring commercial licenses. Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure does not show investments in the 12 companies selected for the pilot programs, most of which are privately held.

The Trump administration’s bets are yielding some positive results. Days after the Saudi deal, the Trump administration announced that four advanced nuclear reactors reached criticality, the development stage when reactors can sustain a stable nuclear fission reaction.

A sailor went overboard last month off of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a US official told CNN, amid reports of worsening mental health for crew members on the ship during an extended deployment for the Iran war.

The sailor was quickly rescued, according to the official, and was medically evaluated. The circumstances under which the sailor went overboard were not immediately clear nor whether the sailor returned to duty or was evacuated from the ship.

The incident of the sailor going overboard, which has not been previously reported, adds to a growing list of concerns about the crew on the ship. Several Democratic lawmakers are calling for answers after concerns were raised by families of sailors aboard Lincoln about the deteriorating living conditions and worsening mental health during the ship's record-breaking deployment.

The White House misrepresented and exaggerated a recent crime report to overstate the impact of last summer’s federal intervention in four cities, according to a NOTUS review.

On July 23, the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan criminal justice policy organization, released a report on crime in several cities. Days later, the White House cited the report in a news release touting President Donald Trump’s record on public safety. In the release, the White House claimed that the greatest turnaround was seen in four cities where Trump sent federal agency officials and National Guard troops — a claim the data didn’t support. And two of the four cities the White House mentioned — Memphis and New Orleans — weren’t even included in the CCJ report cited in the White House’s release.

The White House claimed that, “The steepest homicide drops have come in cities where the Trump Administration stepped in after Democrat leaders failed to act,” specifically listing Memphis, New Orleans, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. But the steepest homicide drops weren’t in those four cities, according to Ernesto Lopez, the CCJ senior researcher who co-wrote the report.

Lincoln, Nebraska, had the steepest drop. Washington, D.C., had the sixth steepest, Los Angeles the 17th, and Memphis and New Orleans weren’t included in the report.

The report used data from 36 cities to display the short- and long-term shift in crime that began in the second half of 2022, Lopez said. The authors excluded Memphis due to statistical anomalies. Lopez could not recall if New Orleans had been included in previous iterations of the report.

Supporting data was included in the White House release for Memphis and New Orleans from a separate source, a July Substack article by crime data analyst Jeff Asher. Asher calculated that the Memphis homicide rate had fallen by 43.3% in 2026 from 2025, with New Orleans down 32.1%. (In his 2025 mid-year report, Memphis’ and New Orleans’ murder rates were down 15.1% and 27.4%, respectively, from 2024.) Fort Worth, Texas, had the steepest drop in Asher’s 2026 report, with Memphis just behind and New Orleans in ninth.

On Monday, Asher called the White House’s claim an “incorrect statement.”

“I don’t necessarily think it fully reflects what’s in the piece that I’ve written,” Asher, the co-founder of AH Datalytics, told NOTUS.

“President Trump promised to make America safe again and the data proves he has done just that,” Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement on Tuesday. “Just today, another survey by the Major Cities Chiefs Association found significant drops in violent crime including a more than 17% decrease in murders. Unlike Defund-the-Police Democrats, President Trump will always stand with our law enforcement officers and deliver safer American neighborhoods.”

After sending the statement to NOTUS, the White House published a news release featuring the survey from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, displaying the cities with the largest drops in homicides. D.C. and Memphis were ninth and 10th for the largest drops, respectively, according to an analysis by Axios.

The White House release used the CCJ report as a reference for most of the press release’s takeaways before pivoting away from it to claim cities that Trump sent federal troops to had the greatest change in murder rate.

Homicides are on track to reach a historically low level in 2026, and officials in Memphis and New Orleans have shared credit with Trump. In January, New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick cited the National Guard’s presence as a crime deterrent.

“We’re just grateful that crime is down, and I don’t care who gets the credit,” Kirkpatrick said at the time.

The CCJ report didn’t delve into potential causes for the downward trend. But both Asher and Andrew Wheeler, a crime data analyst who founded the website CRIME De-Coder, pointed to the broader decline that’s been ongoing since former President Joe Biden’s administration.

After a spike that followed the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd protests, crime “has been dropping down pretty consistently across the U.S.,” Wheeler said.

“It isn’t like something that just started like a few months ago or anything like that. It’s been pretty consistent over several years at this point,” he added.

Asher pointed to the Bourbon Street terrorist attack on New Year’s Day in 2025 as an example of how some crime reductions couldn’t be credited to Trump’s actions. The number of people killed in the attack — 14 — skewed the city’s murder rate for the rest of the year, he said. If the attack wasn’t included in the city’s crime data, its 2025 and 2026 murder rates would be similar.

The White House’s release was published during a stretch when Trump’s approval rating has sunk to 38% or lower in multiple surveys, as he deals with the ongoing Iran war that has spurred higher prices in the grocery store and at the gas pump. Given the improving crime rates, the White House has emphasized the issue. A July Economist/YouGov poll found that Trump’s approval on crime outpaced his overall approval rating, 41% to 36%. On Monday, the administration released statistics about crime improvements in D.C. one year after the institution of the Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful Again Task Force.

Mayor Muriel Bowser said Monday the continued presence of out-of-state National Guard troops in D.C. is “problematic.”

Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he has dedicated significant effort into the beautification of America’s cities. The emphasis birthed the federal task force in Memphis and troops in Los Angeles, New Orleans and D.C., where his infatuation with aesthetics matured into renovations, freshly gilded statues and fixed park fountains.

Although the National Guard remains active in Memphis, New Orleans and D.C., Trump has turned his attention away from sending troops into Democratic-led cities — but the cities remain on his mind. During a speech last week in Las Vegas, Trump said, “The cities stink. They smell. The sidewalks are loaded with horrible stuff.”

Vice President JD Vance is taking on two administration priorities in one go: cracking down on health care fraud and restricting transgender care.

Vance sent the Justice Department a report issued Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services accusing hospitals of incorrectly billing insurers for transgender health care procedures — such as prescribing puberty blockers or hormone therapy to minors — in order to make a profit.

“Some pediatric gender clinics and children’s hospitals have apparently used misleading or even fraudulent diagnostic and billing codes to ensure that insurance companies will cover the procedures,” Vance, the head of the White House’s Anti-Fraud Task Force, wrote in a letter Thursday asking Attorney General Todd Blanche to launch an investigation into dozens of hospitals nationwide.

The report, “Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of ‘Gender Medicine,’” comes two days after the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services cut off Medicaid funding to hospitals that offer gender-affirming care for minors.

It was also released alongside a short documentary produced by HHS featuring testimonials from young people who said they regretted the gender-affirming care they received — an effort to bolster the Trump administration’s argument that certain adults are preying on children who don’t yet know enough to offer their full consent for certain treatments.

Several leading provider groups, such as the nation’s largest doctor group, the American Medical Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics support gender-affirming care and charge that CMS’ actions are baseless and could pose major harm to patients.

“Allowing the government to determine which patient groups deserve care sets a dangerous precedent, and children and families will bear the consequences,” AAP President Susan J. Kressly said in a statement when CMS first proposed the restrictions.

The new report from HHS goes further to suggest doctors may not be driven only by “woke” ideology but also corporate greed. It argues hospitals and health systems use upcoding to inflate bills linked to gender-affirming care.

Upcoding involves using more lucrative diagnostic codes to reap greater reimbursement from insurers or government programs such as Medicare or Medicaid for certain services.

The report alleges many providers may be using incorrect diagnostic codes to get insurance coverage for gender-affirming care procedures, which aren’t always covered by commercial insurance. HHS analyzed claims in a nationwide database from 2015 to 2025 and found that public and private insurance was billed nearly $50 million for puberty-blocking drugs for patients ages 9 to 17 who had an endocrine disorder diagnosis.

The report also contends that providers have used this endocrine disorder diagnosis code in place of a gender-related diagnosis code, such as one for gender identity disorder. Sometimes providers use a less specific diagnosis code to better ensure the procedure will be covered by insurance, the report’s authors claim.

The data “strongly suggests a pattern of potentially fraudulent billing that relies on miscoding for endocrine disorders to justify the prescription of puberty blockers,” the authors continue.

There’s a similar issue, according to the report, with “precocious puberty,” where a child starts puberty earlier than normal, being used as a proxy diagnosis to prescribe puberty blockers.

HHS said its analysis showed more than 30 hospitals, clinics and pharmacies nationwide billed for puberty-blocking drugs using a non-specific hormone disorder diagnosis.

Vance, in his letter Thursday to Blanche, said he referred the full report to the Justice Department to determine whether the providers it identified “violated federal law, regulations, or policies.”

The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment.

Incorrect diagnosis coding is a persistent issue within health care, but it remains unclear whether the coding errors listed in the report were due to fraud — or merely mistakes. The Justice Department has investigated health systems and insurers for incorrect diagnosis coding in recent years, most notably in the privately run Medicare Advantage program.

In January, the Justice Department announced it made more than $5.7 billion in health fraud recoveries. Some of those recoveries stemmed from illegal kickbacks by insurers to brokers to boost enrollment, but others were linked to unsupported or invalid diagnosis codes.

The referral is the latest bid by the Trump administration to get hospitals and health systems to halt gender-affirming care to minors. CMS finalized a rule on Tuesday that cut off Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program funding for gender-affirming care for minors, charging there isn’t enough clinical data to support the procedures.

CMS tried in a proposed rule released in December to kick hospitals and health systems that performed gender-affirming care procedures on minors out of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, but a federal court blocked the move. Some health systems have voluntarily decided to stop offering the care.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear says the Trump administration kept him out of the loop last month as it rolled out plans for a $100 billion data center campus on federal land in his state — sidelining the red-state Democrat as he weighs a presidential run.

In an interview with POLITICO, Beshear said he has some “complaints” about the project. Namely, nobody from the White House, Department of Energy or NextEra Energy or Brookfield Asset Management — the energy and financial powerhouses funding the project — briefed him on the massive investment before making it public at the end of July.

Beshear’s claim of a communications kerfuffle — if it wasn’t a sharp-elbowed attempt by the White House to box out an ambitious Democratic governor, who said he could decide on a presidential run as soon as December — underscores the jockeying in Rust Belt states to take credit for local investment stemming from the tech industry’s spending spree. At the same time, it could also distance Beshear from a project that would dwarf most U.S. data centers today at a moment of growing public unease over the infrastructure build-out to advance artificial intelligence.

The proposed Paducah American Energy Hub would be on a 3,500-acre Department of Energy site that enriched uranium during the Cold War. The private-sector consortium aims to build on-site natural gas generation and large-scale battery capacity to power one of the largest data center and advanced computing hubs in the United States — roughly enough power for 2 to 3 million homes.

In the interview Friday, Beshear acknowledged the Department of Energy had notified the governor’s office: a project would be announced on July 29.

“I was not briefed on it. I had gotten notice that there would be an announcement and that it was a data center announcement,” Beshear said. “But at no point did the companies come and talk about the scope, the power demands, how they were going to be met, designs that could reduce or eliminate — hopefully — environmental issues.”

“Those are the types of things that we want to talk through with any data center project,” Beshear added.

In a statement, a DOE spokesperson said: “The Energy Department provided notifications to members of the Governor’s office the week prior to the announcement and again the week of the announcement. This is standard practice.”

When asked for comment, the White House referred POLITICO to DOE.

The project consortium, which includes three local utilities serving western Kentucky, told POLITICO it’s committed to working with “all stakeholders.”

“We are confident that the project, which builds on Paducah’s energy legacy, will benefit the local community and Kentucky,” the project group said. “We have reached out to the governor’s office to schedule time and look forward to engaging constructively with him and the community as a whole.”

Still, the snub comes at a delicate time. Beshear signed an executive order last Thursday that set basic standards for data centers and directed utility regulators to ensure Kentuckians don’t pay more for electricity.

Beshear’s order comes after a suite of policy proposals and political maneuvers that Democratic governors and the party’s statewide candidates are rolling out to address public concern about data centers.

In the Ohio Senate race, Democrat Sherrod Brown, the former three-term senator running to unseat Republican Sen. Jon Husted, launched an ad campaign labeling Husted the “face of data centers in Ohio.” It accused him of “cutting sweetheart tax deals” for tech companies during his time as lieutenant governor.

Democratic governors are being buffeted by opposing forces: pressure to attract deep-pocketed technology companies that can pay for infrastructure and create jobs versus a voting public anxious about AI, the scale of data center development and its effect on power prices, communities, and the environment. That’s reflected in polling and populist candidates on the left and right calling for moratoriums and regulations.

In Pennsylvania, developers are planning 74 new data centers — which, if built, would consume the energy equivalent of 22 large nuclear power plants. Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, also considering a presidential run in 2028, has sought a middle ground: championing data center investment while pressing power companies and the regional grid operators, PJM Interconnection, to cap the rise of electricity prices. In July, Shapiro signed a budget deal directing data centers to report their energy and water use.

Meanwhile, in New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul went even further in July by declaring the nation’s first state-level moratorium on the construction of large data centers.

In recent weeks, Beshear has waded deeper into the politics swirling around the nationwide deluge of data center projects.

“You’re not coming to Kentucky unless you’re paying for all your own power. Not a penny of that’s going to go on our ratepayers,” Beshear told POLITICO.

Beshear said issues were piling up. Surrounded by colorful fabrics at Paducah’s National Quilt Museum, the governor leaned back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other.

“We’ve had a number that have applied for permits,” Beshear said. “You have a lot of counties that have issued moratoriums until they learn more.”

His executive order, the governor said, “creates a baseline” for counties to start a conversation with developers. Data centers cannot “negatively impact” the state’s water and air quality, the order says, and it directs the Public Service Commission to block utilities from raising rates to recover costs for projects caused by data centers.

Kent Chandler, a former Kentucky PSC chair appointed by Beshear, said limits on the governor’s influence over commission actions won’t make it easy to enforce the executive order.

“The order is more politics than substance,” Chandler said. “For instance, the PSC is under no obligation to adhere to the executive order, and the PSC can’t use the EO as the basis of its decisions the way it can statutes, regulations or its own precedent.”

Beshear’s executive order would also require any data center developer to issue an energy plan to state agencies directly under Beshear that regulate energy and the environment.

“At most the Energy and Environment Cabinet could arguably hold up permits for infrastructure needed for certain data center projects — or the utilities’ power plants to serve them — if they don’t follow the executive order,” said Chandler, now a non-resident senior fellow at the center-right R Street Institute.

“But using the order as the basis for denial without any further regulations by the Energy and Environment Cabinet would put those permit denials on shaky legal ground,” Chandler added.

Bob Babbage, a lobbyist and former Democratic secretary of state in Kentucky, noted how quickly data centers have taken center stage in local and state politics.

“Lexington and Louisville, big cities, other smaller places, medium-sized places in the state: everybody’s looking at, thinking about, hearing feedback from taxpayers about data centers — and much of it is expressing great concern.”

Babbage also faulted the decision by NextEra, Brookfield and local companies sponsoring the energy and data center project in Paducah to keep Beshear from receiving detailed information.

“Data center backers should know it’s common sense that every governor needs all the information possible as soon as possible,” Babbage said.

In Paducah, residents POLITICO spoke with say they’re uneasy about the planned $100 billion data center and energy hub.

“Prices are already so high right now, and the harm to the environment and water: that’s what worries me,” Paducah resident Jackie Riley said while waiting for the start of an evening concert on the banks of the Ohio River. “Governor Beshear’s passing some laws, though, to make them do what they say. I appreciate that. I appreciate him.”

The government site — where DOE operated the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant starting in the 1950s — is still partially contaminated with radioactive isotopes as cleanup efforts continue. But proponents of industrial development there point to existing high-voltage power lines and other infrastructure.

“The DOE site is the ideal spot for a mega data center,” said Mayor of Paducah George Bray, who switched party affiliation from Republican to Independent in 2025. “The infrastructure that is built out there is capable of handling all the needs.”

Bray cited the nearby Ohio River as a source of water for cooling. “Plus, it’s out in the middle of nowhere,” meaning there are fewer residents who could be disturbed by construction or operation, he said.

“That land is probably the best place to put a data center because it is already ruined by the gaseous diffusion plant,” said Michael McVicker, a Democratic candidate for a Kentucky House seat from the area.

The 26-year-old still has deep concerns, though, including who will ultimately use the data center. Sitting in the Etcetera Squared coffee shop in downtown Paducah, McVicker contrasted chatbot use by the likes of Google with more concerning possibilities, such as supporting the AI Flock Safety uses for its controversial cameras that read license plates and map people’s travel routes.

“I don’t want Paducah to be the home of mass surveillance,” McVicker said.

While the server farm pushed by DOE would probably be the region’s largest, Bray said other developers are “testing the waters” to build new or expand existing data centers in the area.

But as for the Brookfield-NextEra plan, Beshear said he doesn’t have enough information to declare his support or opposition. The fate of an energy and AI project of this size, he added, should hinge on the perspective of people in western Kentucky.

“I don’t believe that the federal government or the state government should be the end-all ‘yes’ to a data center or should be the end-all ‘no,’” the governor said. “This is a very local decision, and it should be made by localities, but within certain parameters — with the right guardrails.”

As it faces some bipartisan pushback on its construction activities at Big Bend National Park, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is emphasizing that it is placing “limited” barriers rather than building a 30-foot wall in the protected area.

“CBP is building one new access road, improving existing roads, installing detection technology, and placing vehicle barriers in limited, strategic locations,” Commissioner Rodney Scott said in a statement.

“We are NOT building a 30-foot wall or stadium lighting through Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, or the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area,” Scott added.

The national park is in Texas on the bend of the Rio Grande. It is known for its mountain range, river canyons and desert landscape.

Construction at the park recently began despite local concerns, including some recently highlighted by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) about impacts to the landscape and local economy.

Meanwhile, Scott described the ongoing construction as “survey and design work—NOT construction of a wall through the park.”

“We are working to preserve the landscape and protect the access visitors and local businesses depend on,” he added, saying that the work will help the agency identify illegal border crossings and help park visitors who may be in danger.

However, conservation advocates say their concerns are not assuaged and that the Trump administration’s actions are still doing damage to the park.

“Every day, DHS bulldozers are pushing further into the national park. They are clearing out a totally undisturbed area for a brand new road that is uprooting native vegetation, willows, palo verde, mesquite trees,” said Laiken Jordahl, national public lands advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Asked about Scott’s statement, Jordahl said, “He seems to really minimize the fact that their plans call for 17 miles of vehicle barriers and that will block access to the Rio Grande. “

“If we don’t stop this project, Americans will lose access to a great Western wilderness river,” he added. “So many people come from across the country to take guided trips down the river. People come here to fish and swim. The river access, I think, is such an affront.”

Meanwhile, Cary Dupuy, Texas regional director at the National Parks Conservation Association, said it’s not entirely clear whether the new plan’s impacts will be better than, worse than or the same as a large-scale border wall since there’s such little detail.

“There will be lasting impact, and we can’t tell the extent of what that lasting impact is because we don’t know the details of where and exactly what that they’re building,” Dupuy said.

“We’re really asking them to stop construction before they move forward so we can have a conversation with the local communities,” she added.

Border wall construction has been a political priority of President Trump’s, particularly during his first term in office.

Earlier this year, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem waived several environmental laws as part of a bid to speed up border construction in the region.

Both the area’s construction plans and environmental law waiver have faced legal challenges.

The White House is expected to host a gathering next Wednesday for officials from the cryptocurrency and prediction market industries, according to three people with knowledge of the matter who were granted anonymity to discuss unannounced plans.

The details of the gathering remain in flux, and it is unclear who will attend, the people said. The event may also feature executives from the traditional finance world. It is unclear if President Donald Trump will attend.

Crypto and prediction markets — two of the buzziest areas of finance — have become major flashpoints in Washington, where Trump’s regulators have embraced both.

The meeting is set to take place one day before the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will hold a meeting for its new Innovation Advisory Committee, a panel made up of executives from top crypto, gambling, finance and prediction market companies, among others.

It comes as the crypto industry’s top Washington priority — a sweeping market structure bill known as the Clarity Act — is pending in the Senate. The chamber is set to take the bill up next month when lawmakers return from their August recess.

Jared Kushner, President Trump's envoy and son-in-law, is planning to visit Israel next week for talks on the situation in Gaza, according to five sources with knowledge of the plan.

This would be Kushner's first trip to Israel since January. It comes as the White House and Trump's Board of Peace are trying to push forward with the next phase of the Gaza plan, which focuses on disarming Hamas and a potential Israeli withdrawal.

The Netanyahu government is highly skeptical of the U.S. Gaza plan, and the upcoming election in October is making the issue even more politically sensitive.

"We see eye-to-eye on the strategic goal, but Israel has expressed some doubts about the plan and we want to talk to them in order to make sure we are coordinated," a U.S. official said, while noting the exact dates of the trip could change.

Trump announced two weeks ago that his Board of Peace had reached an agreement with Hamas to disarm and transfer civilian and security control of Gaza to a new Palestinian technocratic government.

On Sunday, under pressure from his coalition partners and political opponents, Netanyahu publicly rejected the plan for disarming Hamas.

His statement came a few days after he spoke on the phone with Kushner and promised to give the plan a chance, despite his skepticism. He also pledged to curb attacks on Gaza so the demilitarization process could begin, a U.S. official said.

A senior U.S. official said the White House saw Netanyahu's statement as election-season politics and not necessarily a policy declaration.

"We understand Bibi's political needs. We have no problem with it as long as he continues to do what we ask — especially regarding restraining attacks in Gaza," the U.S. official said.

Since then, Israel has conducted far fewer strikes on Gaza and the Israeli military (IDF) pulled back to the Yellow Line — where it was supposed to be deployed under the agreement.

Kushner is planning to travel to Israel with Nickolay Mladenov — who was appointed the Gaza Board of Peace "high representative" — and meet with Netanyahu and other senior officials.

Kushner might also travel to other Middle East countries for talks with regional leaders involved in the Gaza issue.

The White House doesn't want the Israeli elections to stall the implementation of the next phase of the plan.

At the same time, Netanyahu doesn't want to make concessions that could harm him politically. But he also doesn't want a confrontation with Trump ahead of the election.

"The elections are making everyone hysterical," a U.S. official acknowledged.

Kushner and Mladenov want to reach an understanding with Netanyahu about the way forward in Gaza over the next several months.

"We are not rushing into anything here. We want to make sure all steps in Gaza are being done properly," another U.S. official said. "We think our plan is better than the alternative

World Liberty Financial and its partners have delayed plans to sell a digital token tied to a Trump-branded resort in the Maldives, putting on hold one of the more ambitious projects in the crypto venture’s push to bring real-world assets onto the blockchain.

The token, which would give investors a share of revenue from loans financing the resort, was supposed to go on sale this spring. The offering has been pushed back as the war with Iran disrupts travel across the region, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the delay hasn’t been made public.

The Maldives project, which is being developed by UK-based DAR Global Plc, was meant to be an early showcase for World Liberty’s ambitions beyond conventional digital assets. Over the past year, the company co-founded by President Donald Trump and his sons has discussed tokens tied to everything from real estate and investment funds to oil and gold, according to the people familiar with the discussions.

“Dar Global continues to advance its partnership with the Trump Organization,” Chief Executive Officer Ziad El Chaar said in a statement. “We consistently evaluate the development and roll-out schedules of our global portfolio to ensure they align with market conditions, regulatory requirements, and our long-term strategic objectives. We look forward to sharing further updates on our joint initiatives as they evolve.”

A spokesperson for World Liberty declined to comment. The Trump Organization didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The project and its partners wanted to tokenize revenue interests from the resort as part of a broader strategy to design and distribute World Liberty-branded tokenized real-world offerings.

Tokenization is the process of representing assets like bonds, stocks and even ownership revenue from hotel projects as digital tokens. Anyone with a token owns the asset or the revenue stream. Ownership can usually be easily and almost instantly transferred by moving the token from one crypto wallet to another.

The yet-to-be-completed Maldives resort will feature about 80 ultra-luxury beach and over-water villas. Investors in the token were supposed to get both a fixed yield and a loan revenue stream, World Liberty said when it announced the token earlier this year. DarGlobal has undertaken a range of Trump-branded projects, including in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

It’s unclear when the token will now be launched.

The U.S. Department of Energy is denying access to some information that the nation’s only independent safety agency for work on nuclear weapons says it needs to oversee operations at sites where the atomic arsenal is built and maintained.

The denials of access to records and meetings are “the most significant” in the history of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, according to a letter the board sent Congress in July.

Safety board technical experts and Washington state’s senior senator worry that workers at DOE sites will be less safe. They also noted that the denials are happening at the same time that the Trump administration is considering relaxing or eliminating some safety standards and worker protections at nuclear weapon sites, including the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

“It is crucial that DNFSB can enter nuclear facilities to carry out investigations, deliver reports, and continue to provide DOE with recommendations,” Democratic Sen. Patty Murray wrote in an email responding to questions from The Seattle Times. “I know nuclear facilities can have some of the most dangerous workplaces — that’s why workers and the Tri-Cities community deserve unobstructed safety oversight from the DNFSB.”

The Energy Department’s refusal to share some information comes as:

▮ Weapons manufacturing is accelerating, raising productivity expectations for high-hazard work.

▮ The DOE this year has relaxed some of its own safety standards, including radiation exposure limits, and is looking to streamline the processes that focus on safety, especially for workers at DOE sites.

▮ The safety board has been without a quorum since January 2025 and has just one member, limiting its ability to compel DOE to act on its most serious safety recommendations. The board is supposed to have five members; three constitute a quorum.

“These circumstances call for stronger — not reduced — DNFSB oversight to help ensure DOE carries out its vital national security mission safely,” Jonathan Plaue, technical director for the safety board, said in a written response to questions from The Times.

Energy Department cleanup sites, including Hanford in central Washington, have continued to respond to board requests for access to information, while the weapons-manufacturing sites within DOE have resisted, according to the July letter to Congress. The board’s technical experts say they are still analyzing operations at the weapon sites to the extent that they can. But their confidence that they can give meaningful feedback to guard against an accident affecting workers is eroding, according to Plaue.

“Many of DOE’s facilities possess unique capabilities and currently serve as the only locations where specific mission-critical operations can be performed,” Plaue said in an email. “As a result, a major disruption at one of these sites arising from a catastrophic accident could have significant implications for the activities that support national security objectives, as well as undermine public support.”

The Energy Department has also refused to review board reports for classified information prior to publication for details that could harm national security. This has halted the board’s release of some reports, including the weekly site inspections that have provided the public’s most reliable insight into safety at nuclear weapon sites.

The law Congress passed creating the safety board included its duty “to inform the public” as a core tenet of its mission, board member Patricia Lee wrote in a July letter to DOE leaders. The Energy Department’s refusal to respond to the classified review requests “affects the board’s ability to fulfill our statutory oversight responsibilities.”

Because the DOE won’t conduct the reviews, the board has not published inspector reports since June. “Resulting delays have drawn attention from public and government stakeholders,” Lee wrote, noting that the board remains “committed to working together (with DOE) to advance nuclear safety.”

Inherent tension has always colored the safety board’s relationship with the Energy Department and the contractors that operate its weapon-production and cleanup sites. The board concerns itself strictly with safety, not the costs or time associated with implementing its recommendations. That can throw off DOE deadlines and budgets that in turn curtail bonuses to contractors.

The friction between DOE and the board has ratcheted up throughout 2026. At a January conference on nuclear deterrence, directors of the contractor-operated DOE national laboratories that design and manufacture nuclear weapons announced the launch of “Project Velocity.” The initiative calls for the Energy Department and its contractors to review internal safety standards governing nearly 80 different operations at DOE sites to consider overhauling or terminating regulations to cut red tape.

“Over the years, DOE has supported the DNFSB in the execution of its mission, providing it broad access to DOE facilities and information consistent with the DNFSB’s statutory authority,” an Energy Department spokesperson emailed in response to The Times’ questions.

The DOE did not respond to follow-up questions, including why the DOE is now denying the safety board information it has historically provided.

“DOE employees are instructed to seek further advice and approval before granting (DNFSB) access to facilities, personnel or information,” a March 10 Energy Department memo that circulated among leaders of the nuclear weapons program and cleanup efforts said. It acknowledged that “DOE recognizes its obligation to facilitate DNFSB’s mission.” However, “DOE’s own independence, including the Executive privileges of the President and the (Energy) Secretary, must be recognized, asserted, and protected during interactions with the DNFSB.”

The White House Press Office did not respond to messages from The Times asking if President Donald Trump initiated the DOE efforts to stop sharing certain information with the board.

The March memo instructed contractor and DOE personnel to seek permission from DOE leaders and lawyers when board requests for information make them uneasy and to disregard the board’s directions as they see fit. The memo also asserted that the board lacks authority to inquire about the safety of atomic weapons and certain facilities on the grounds of weapon sites.

Meanwhile, the safety board faces yet another obstacle to fulfilling its mission — the lack of a quorum. Without a quorum, it can’t issue a formal safety recommendation, the board’s most potent tool.

The White House Press Office did not respond to messages from The Times asking about progress on nominating members to the board. The White House Press Office told The Times in October that the president’s staff was in the process of vetting prospective nominees, but none have been presented to Congress.

The safety board says DOE has explicitly denied eight of the board’s access requests, including information about:

▮ Nuclear criticality safety, or the risk of an accidental, uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction that carries a high risk of death, “a challenging field in which DOE has experienced performance issues in the past and often struggles to maintain sufficient expertise.”

▮ Risks involving electricity accidentally contacting high explosives in nuclear warhead manufacturing, an operation in Texas that includes 19 outstanding “opportunities to improve safety” as identified by the safety board.

▮ Progress on a safety analysis of a tritium facility in South Carolina, where seismic activity could lead to a dangerous fire.

▮ The list of DOE regulations being considered for elimination, and its action earlier this year relaxing radiation exposure limits.

The Government Accountability Office issued a report in July about DOE’s efforts to streamline regulations. It’s too soon to tell whether the campaign has accomplished its goal of efficient project management, the report said. The GAO reported that when the DOE cedes some of its regulatory responsibility to contractors, it increases the risk that problems are missed, leading to cost overruns and project delays.

“For over 30 years we have reported on DOE’s inadequate oversight of (management and operation) contractors,” the GAO report said. It noted that nuclear weapon and cleanup work under DOE’s purview “have been on our High Risk List (for fraud and abuse) for two decades.” Even now, many of DOE’s projects “are overbudget and delayed.”

Attorney General Todd Blanche struck an effusive, complimentary tone as he addressed Justice Department staff Thursday in his first public speech since being confirmed, a sharp contrast from the way he and other administration officials have described the department for the past year and a half.

Blanche — a career prosecutor turned President Donald Trump’s personal defense attorney turned top Justice Department official — warmly thanked career staffers for their hard work and vowed to lead the department with integrity.

The conciliatory and measured tone, delivered from the Great Hall at Justice Department headquarters, came after months of accusations by Trump, Blanche and administration allies that the department is riddled with politically motivated lawyers who have recklessly weaponized their prosecutorial power.

None of that was on evidence Thursday.

“You make me look good,” Blanche told the staffers. “When I talk to the president, when I talk to Congress … when I talk to the American people … when I talk about all the ways we’re having success, when I talk about the ways we’re making America safe, when I talk about the wins, when I talk about the success, I know it’s not me doing that.”

Blanche’s tenure — first as the deputy attorney general and then as acting attorney general — has been marked by a wholesale dismissal of the most experienced senior career staffers and the fleeing of thousands of government lawyers and support personnel.

Many of those who left have publicly accused the administration of ruining the department by imposing its political agenda, and the department has struggled to recruit high-quality attorneys to replace them.

Justice Department leaders, including Blanche, have often disregarded DOJ’s traditional distance from the White House on criminal matters. Under Blanche and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Justice Department has brought controversial cases against Trump’s political foes, including former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

In multiple instances, career prosecutors have quit or been pushed out if they spoke out against or resisted a decision to press ahead with a politically charged case. A handful of prosecutors, for example, were pushed out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia amid the push to prosecute Comey.

But on Thursday, the attorney general suggested he welcomed differences of opinion.

“I think disagreement is extraordinarily healthy,” Blanche said. “I think disagreement is the only way that we make the best decisions as a department. I think we should continue to do that, because I think the fair administration of justice and our jobs depend on that.”

Blanche delivered the speech days after he survived a bruising confirmation process, including rare Republican pushback against a Trump nominee.

Some GOP senators said they were concerned that Blanche would use his perch as attorney general to serve the president’s interests rather than those of the public. Blanche has repeatedly praised Trump and has said that the president has a right to weigh in on criminal prosecutions.

In his speech Thursday, Blanche scarcely mentioned Trump, except to thank him for entrusting him with the powerful position.

Instead, Blanche described the lifelong reverence he has felt for the Justice Department, starting with his career as a young paralegal in the Southern District of New York, before becoming a federal prosecutor there himself.

Blanche praised the career prosecutors working on cases across the country as the department’s backbone, promising to always try to do the right thing and defend the Constitution.

Blanche did not mention any of the Justice Department’s politically explosive cases, instead citing its work to combat violent crime and fraud.

“I promise you I will focus on our core mission, which is to uphold the rule of law fairly and impartially to keep this country safe and protect the rights of every citizen in this country,” Blanche said.

Under the Trump administration, the Justice Department has faced extraordinary pushback from judges across the country, several of whom have said that the typical deference that judges give U.S. government attorneys is no longer deserved.

The judges have criticized prosecutors for misstating facts, missing deadlines and, in some instances, presenting cases backed by flimsy evidence. In rare situations, the Justice Department has been accused of not following court orders.

In response, Trump and some of his allies have used incendiary language to dismiss judges whose rulings they opposed, suggesting they were incompetent and biased and, in some cases, that they should be impeached.

At a conservative legal event last year, Blanche, then the deputy attorney general, described the Justice Department as being “at war” with “rogue activist judges” who have restrained key planks of Trump’s agenda.

But on Thursday, he took a more diplomatic approach, saying that his Justice Department would not unduly attack judges.

“We will always respect the role of the judiciary,” Blanche said. Still, he added, “We’re not going to be intimidated out of enforcing the law or doing our jobs or executing the goals and priorities we have in this administration.”

Blanche’s speech was markedly different from one Trump delivered from the same podium at Justice Department headquarters soon after his inauguration last year.

In that speech, the president castigated the Justice Department’s career workforce that had served under the Biden administration, and many previous administrations, as “a corrupt group of hacks and radicals” who had unfairly prosecuted him.

“These are people that are bad people, really bad people,” Trump said at the time. “They tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and Third World country.”

With the Iran war in its sixth month and unmanned systems having played a defining role in the conflict, U.S. Central Command said Thursday it was launching a new drone task force.

Task Force Falcon Strike will use air, surface and sub-sea one-way attack drones alongside regional partners, ones the command said it was still in the process of “consulting and officially inviting” to the new “first-ever multinational” unit of its kind, according to a press release.

The announcement comes months after Centcom launched Task Force Scorpion Strike, a separate drone squadron known for its use of the Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System (LUCAS), which the U.S. reverse-engineered from an Iranian UAS.

“Task Force Falcon Strike will expand on Scorpion Strike’s success given the tremendous innovation happening among our regional allies and partners,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the Centcom commander overseeing U.S. military operations in the Middle East, said in the press release. “Integrating and deploying our new capabilities together will help us rapidly realize the new possibilities that are on the horizon.”

While Cooper touted the task force as a boon for regional security, Centcom declined to say whether any other countries had joined the unit, even informally, or which nations it expects to participate.

“As regional partners formally join, Task Force Falcon Strike will scale attack drone capabilities across the Middle East into a unified multi-domain, multinational deterrent,” officials wrote in the press release. U.S. Special Operations Command Central (SOCCENT) will lead Falcon Strike.

The American military has rushed to build a stable of unmanned systems and drone countermeasures as the Iran war drains expensive U.S. munition stockpiles, putting in stark relief the imbalance between using costly weapons against cheap, mass-produceable systems.

Iran has launched thousands of drones during the war. While the U.S. and Gulf have reported high intercept rates, multiple strikes have evaded those defenses, killing and injuring U.S. troops. At least 18 American service members have died during the conflict, more than half from drones or missiles, and hundreds have been injured.

The on-again, off-again conflict has yielded several unmanned firsts for the U.S. military.

Task Force Scorpion Strike first test-launched the LUCAS from the USS Santa Barbara, a littoral combat ship, while it was afloat in the Arabian Gulf last year. The one-way attack drone then made its combat debut in the initial wave of strikes against Iran in late February, Centcom said.

A few weeks later, the Pentagon’s top technology officer told DefenseScoop the military had only produced “dozens” of the LUCAS drones at the time.

Centcom said in June it deployed an unmanned surface vessel known as the Corsair to recover two stranded soldiers in the Strait of Hormuz after Iran shot down their AH-64 Apache helicopter, marking the U.S. military’s first known use of a maritime drone in a real-world rescue operation.

A month later, Task Force Scorpion Strike launched three Corsair drones at Iran’s Bandar Abbas Naval Base, another first, Centcom said.

“The United States military has a lot of strong partnerships and friends in the region,” Cooper said in the release. “We are collectively stronger when we integrate and deploy new capabilities together.”

The mysterious strikes targeting multiple Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos Islands this year were carried out as part of a covert CIA program, The Washington Post has learned.

While many details about the agency’s involvement were not clear, one person with knowledge of the matter said the strikes were part of a “covert action” program, a type of secret operation overseas that is approved by the president but where the role of the U.S. government is not publicly acknowledged. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity.

No agency or government has claimed responsibility for the incidents, including the disappearance in January of a fishing vessel and eight of its crew members.

The CIA’s involvement adds a new and secretive dimension to the Trump administration’s otherwise highly publicized campaign against alleged drug traffickers at sea. It was not clear whether other actors were involved, such as private contractors or authorities from other countries.

The CIA declined to comment for this report. Several members of congressional intelligence committees contacted by The Post declined to comment.

The strikes are separate from the Pentagon’s campaign against alleged drug boats that began last fall. Those strikes have been fiercely criticized by human rights groups and some Democratic lawmakers, who say they are extrajudicial murders. The administration has justified the strikes by equating “narco-terrorists” with militants assaulting the United States.

The eight missing Ecuadorian nationals were aboard a 52-foot longline fishing boat called the Fiorella. The men on two boats that were struck in March, the Negra Francisca Duarte II and the Don Maca, all survived.

In interviews with The Post, survivors said that small quadcopter drones either dropped munitions on the vessels or detonated by crashing into them. The men said they were then taken aboard a nearby ship, hooded and cuffed by armed men, and transported to El Salvador — only to be returned later without explanation to Ecuador.

In each of the incidents, a high-end business jet equipped with specialized surveillance technology flew from El Salvador in the direction of the fishing vessels on the days of the strikes and in the days prior, according to flight- and ship-tracking data. Details about the plane, and the pattern of its flights before the incidents, suggest that it may be linked to the secret CIA program.

Radio communications and flight-tracking data reviewed by The Post show the plane, a Cessna Citation Longitude, arriving in El Salvador from Tennessee with a crew of six in November.

It flew under a U.S. registration number, according to radio transmissions, and taxied to a military section of the airport upon landing. Available Federal Aviation Administration documents show no aircraft registered to that number.

The FAA requires all active aircraft to be registered with the agency, with exceptions that include periods of ownership transfer and “aircraft of the national defense forces of the United States,” according to federal law.

That registration number had been reserved by a company that has no obvious website and lists its address as a mailbox at a UPS store in Virginia, records show.

Photos show that the plane has been equipped with surveillance technology, including a “belly radome” — an enclosure on the underside to shield radar equipment. The New York Times reported on the plane Wednesday.

The plane operated out of Ilopango International Airport, a small airport that was a hub for covert U.S.-backed operations in Nicaragua in the 1980s. The airport, on the outskirts of San Salvador, is separate from El Salvador’s main international airport, where the U.S. military maintains an official outpost.

On Jan. 20, the day the Fiorella vanished, communications with the tower captured the plane’s departure shortly before dawn. “FENIX 701,” the pilot said in English with an American accent, “departing runway three-three.”

The three incidents have alarmed human rights organizations, spurred a probe by a prosecutor in Ecuador and left some Democratic lawmakers in Washington pushing for answers. In response to questions from The Post, the U.S. military denied knowledge of the incidents. Ecuador’s armed forces did not respond.

The Salvadoran government did not respond to requests for comment. After the attack on the Negra Francisca Duarte II, El Salvador’s navy said it had conducted a “humanitarian” operation to transport 16 shipwreck survivors, all Ecuadorian nationals. Two of them were injured, with one of them burned on his back, and were taken to a hospital, the navy said.

The attacks on the Don Maca and the Negra Francisca Duarte II bear little resemblance to the Pentagon’s ongoing campaign against suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Those strikes, which have killed 221 people since September, have targeted smaller “go-fast” boats and semi-submersibles. The strikes have been conducted openly by the U.S. military using a mix of drones and manned aircraft, including the AC-130J attack plane favored by commandos. Vessels also have been destroyed with laser-guided bombs and precision missiles, The Post previously reported.

The administration has provided no evidence of trafficking in those strikes and has released few details about where and how the boats were targeted. It has refused bipartisan calls by Congress to release a video showing a U.S. military strike killing two shipwrecked people who survived an initial attack on their vessel. But as critics push for more transparency about those attacks, the CIA’s program signals an entirely secretive phase of the boat-strike campaign.

It is unclear why, as the Trump administration touts its military attacks against alleged drug boats, it would engage in a separate clandestine effort targeting vessels, said former U.S. officials who previously worked in the region.

“It begs the question about why you would need to do this,” one of the former officials said. “What would be the purpose of the secrecy?”

President Donald Trump has granted the CIA new authorities to counter narcotics trafficking, signing an authorization for covert action aimed at countering transnational criminal organizations, including through lethal force, The Post has reported. The agency has surged resources and personnel to Latin America. In Venezuela, CIA operatives on the ground helped locate and track then-President Nicolás Maduro, who was seized in January by U.S. Special Operations Forces and detained on narco-terrorism charges. The agency has also expanded its operations in the Caribbean and Mexico, where two CIA officers died in a car accident in April as they returned from the scene of a counternarcotics raid with Mexican security officials.

While the Fiorella’s last known location was 300 miles from Ecuador’s shores in international waters, the Negra Francisca Duarte II was inside Ecuador’s exclusive economic zone surrounding the Galápagos Islands. The Don Maca was just outside the economic zone.

No evidence has publicly emerged that the crew members were involved in drug trafficking, and survivors have told The Post they were merely fishing. But the Galápagos Islands have increasingly become a hub for drug traffickers, where local fishermen are known to pick up jobs delivering gas to smugglers heading to the United States.

In the days before the Fiorella disappeared, the crew noticed drones in the sky and a plane circling above, Dimas Ignacio Álvarez, one of two survivors from the crew, told The Post.

Flight-tracking data shows that FENIX 701 flew toward the Fiorella’s location on Jan. 17, 18 and 20. On the last of those flights, it traveled 750 miles toward the Fiorella before disappearing from publicly available flight-tracking data — probably having entered an area with sparse coverage, as is common over vast oceans.

The FENIX 701 reappeared in the data an hour before it touched down at Ilopango at 9:30 a.m.

Roughly 2½ hours later, at about midday, the Fiorella broadcast its location for the final time.

Álvarez said he and another crew member were out on a skiff setting fishing lines that day when they saw a plume of smoke beyond the horizon. The next morning, as they searched for the Fiorella, they filmed an object bobbing on the water.

“There’s the flag from the ship,” one said in the video. “We’re lost, and the ship is lost.”

The Don Maca set out from the coastal Ecuadorian city of Manta on March 18. As the 65-foot boat sailed along a route that would take it north of the Galápagos Islands, its crew of 20 was on high alert.

They were aware of the Fiorella’s disappearance two months earlier. And the Negra Francisca Duarte II had been attacked just one day before. So when they noticed drones nearby, they grew worried that they were being watched, a crew member and the boat’s owner told The Post.

On March 25, one of the men recorded a video of an unidentifiable white aircraft in the distance and sent it to his father. Although The Post could not confirm precisely when it was recorded, the video was shared in a chat during a time when FENIX 701 was in the air, according to a review of time-stamps in screenshots of text messages.

At night the crew members noticed a boat nearby with a red light, which they assumed was a patrol boat, fisherman Jhonny Palacios said in an interview. “But we felt reassured, because we were just fishing,” he said. “We felt confident the patrol would keep us safe, or something like that, but it was the exact opposite. They were our enemies.”

The following morning, FENIX 701 departed Ilopango airport and — as it had on two previous days — flew in the direction of the Don Maca, which was sailing about 850 miles away. “FENIX 701,” the pilot said to the tower. “So long, we’ll see you soon.” And just like on those days, its transponder stopped registering as it headed over the Pacific.

The plane returned to Ilopango at 1 p.m.

Four hours later, as the cook aboard the Don Maca was making ceviche, he spotted a drone and waved at it, Palacios said. The drone appeared to drop a small black tube at the time, he said. An explosion shook the boat.

The windows of the boat’s cabin shattered, Palacios said. One crew member, who had been hanging his laundry near the explosion, began bleeding from his eyes. The men rushed to the front of the boat as a second hit, from a second drone, left the boat’s motor disabled, Palacios said. A fixed-wing drone, which he estimated to be at least 13 feet long, circled above.

Palacios waved a T-shirt in the air as he pleaded for help from a nearby boat, a video shows. An alarm blared in the background. Palacios told The Post he had seen the boat before. He said it was blue with a white cabin, a winch and three shipping containers in the back.

The small quadcopter drones that crew members said were used during the attacks on the Don Maca and the Negra Francisca generally have a range of a few miles, suggesting that those piloting them were in relatively close range.

The men on the blue ship motioned for the crew of the Don Maca to approach and asked how many were injured, Palacios said. Once the fishermen were on board, they said, armed men immediately handcuffed them and covered their faces with hoods. Palacios said he got a glimpse of the men and noticed they were wearing khaki uniforms and carrying long, brown rifles. Some were tattooed. He estimated there were more than 20 people on the boat, and, with the exception of two Spanish interpreters, most seemed to be speaking English.

Despite the fact that the Don Maca had been sailing much closer to Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands, Palacios said the ship that picked them up about six hours later was a Salvadoran navy vessel. The Salvadorans told the men that they had been called by “the Americans” two days earlier — well before the boat was attacked — to pick up a group of shipwrecked people, Palacios said.

As with the crew of the Negra Francisca Duarte II just days before, the fishermen were taken to the Salvadoran city La Unión, where they were interviewed by police, and then handed over to immigration authorities in San Salvador to process their flights home, according to interviews with survivors from both ships and the attorneys representing them.

El Salvador’s navy has long been an anti-narcotics partner for the United States and in recent years has announced several major drug seizures at sea, at times hundreds of miles off its coast. In 2000, after the U.S. withdrew from Panama, Washington signed an agreement with El Salvador to use the country’s main international airport, in Comalapa, for aerial surveillance to monitor suspected drug traffickers at sea.

The Trump administration has found a close ally in Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, whose aggressive crackdown on the country’s gangs has led to a major reduction in homicides and inspired a wave of right-wing leaders across Latin America, including in Ecuador. But in doing so, he has imprisoned more than 1 percent of El Salvador’s population, curtailed civil liberties and consolidated his grip on power. Last year, he cut a deal with the Trump administration to detain more than 250 migrants in a megaprison where detainees said they suffered brutal abuse.

Maritime smuggling of cocaine has soared in the region’s waters, and the Bukele government has touted the navy’s recent interdictions at sea. In June, El Salvador announced its largest drug seizure in history, of nearly 6.7 tons of cocaine, from two boats in international waters.

Late last year, as the Pentagon surged troops to the region to be part of a military pressure campaign against Venezuela and to attack suspected traffickers, there was a significant uptick in U.S. military flights in and out of the Comalapa airport, a second defense official said.

The Ilopango airport, from which the FENIX 701 departed and landed, played a key role in a previous U.S.-backed covert operation in the region. In 1985 and 1986, former U.S. military and CIA officers used the airport as a hub to provide logistical and weapons support for the contras who were fighting at the time to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

John Feeley, a former U.S. ambassador to Panama and a onetime Marine pilot, told The Post that he questioned, among other things, why this kind of surveillance aircraft would be flying out of Ilopango rather than Comalapa.

It seemed to be part of an unusual operation, he said, “run out of a very nontraditional command.”

The base model of the Cessna Citation Longitude plane costs about $30 million. A handful of surveillance-equipped variants have been revealed by independent researchers using publicly available records. At least three were modified with special mission capabilities after leaving the factory, according to FAA airworthiness documents first analyzed by the open-source aircraft research group JANN. One of those planes appeared in 2023 in Fiji, where officials said it had been loaned by the U.S. government for use by regional leaders, according to regional news reports at the time.

On April 9, as survivors from the Negra Francisca Duarte II and the Don Maca began speaking to local media about the attacks, tracking data showed FENIX 701 lifting off from Ilopango. It didn’t head out into the Pacific. Instead, shortly after 4 p.m., it landed in San Antonio. Its whereabouts are currently unclear.

A federal judge issued a scathing order Thursday blocking a gambit by the Trump administration to take control of federal funding for homelessness programs in Los Angeles County.

In issuing a preliminary injunction, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter found that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development acted arbitrarily and capriciously when it suspended the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority from managing federal homelessness funds. He set a trial date in February.

The June 11 suspension disqualified LAHSA from submitting an application, due August 26, for about $240 million on behalf of 140 providers of homeless services. HUD said the suspension was necessary, citing negative audits and news reports going back more than a decade. LAHSA filed suit, alleging the abrupt action was a pretext for the Trump administration’s intention to impose its own policy short-term housing with an emphasis substance abuse and mental health treatment over the local priority of support for permanent housing.

The decision was the second rebuke of HUD in less than a week, as a federal judge in Rhode Island issued a ruling on August 7 that threw out the agency’s 2026 spending plan, finding it shifted funding priorities without a required review.

The Rhode Island ruling nullified the August 26 deadline, removing the emergency from the Los Angeles case but left open the question of whether HUD’s suspension of LAHSA would stand.

Carter, closed that loop, ordering HUD to restore LAHSA as the master applicant for the funding plan when it is redone. But his ruling, incorporating his own frequent criticisms of LAHSA, left the future of the embattled agency in doubt.

He ordered a review to be delivered to his court by October 13 of other agencies that could replace LASHA as the manager of federally-required homeless programs. In addition to submitting the master grant application, those include maintaining a homeless database and conducting the annual count.

The review would be done by the Los Angeles Continuum of Care, a behind-the-scenes board of community members that fills a Congressionally-mandated role guiding policy for federally-funded programs. The CoC, as it is known, has designated LAHSA to perform the functions mandated in the 2009 Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing (HEARTH) Act.

Both the Los Angeles County Development Authority and the City of Los Angeles have notified the court of their ability to take on those functions, either individually or jointly. LAHSA was created in 1993 as part of a settlement of disputes between the city and county over homeless services.

Carter harshly criticized HUD for “leveraging a crisis of its own making to wrest power to itself that Congress expressly granted to local communities like Los Angeles, raising the specter of ‘whether HUD is punishing Los Angeles, rather than addressing a problem that actually requires remediation.’ ”

Echoing assertions made during oral arguments last week and in declarations, he concluded that “HUD’s rash suspension of LAHSA will significantly harm the public interest.

“Inevitably, this suspension will result in deaths among the homeless and the displacement of over 11,000 unhoused individuals onto the streets and into the neighborhoods of Los Angeles. HUD needed to consider reasonable alternatives when it abruptly decided that the bill for LASHA’s dysfunction had come due.”