Highlights for May 29, 2025
- A federal appeals court is allowing Trump’s tariffs to stay in place, issuing a stay of a U.S. court ruling yesterday that blocked several of the tariffs from going into effect. The U.S. Court of International Trade ruled yesterday that he had exceeded his authority in imposing the tariffs on U.S. trading partners.
- Israel has accepted a U.S. ceasefire proposal to end the conflict in Gaza, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a daily news briefing this afternoon. The proposal is under discussion with Hamas, Leavitt said.
- A second federal court blocked the Trump administration from collecting tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, ruling that it doesn’t allow Trump to collect them. The Trump administration is appealing the ruling, which the judge had paused for two weeks to allow for appeals.
- Elon Musk said on X last night that he is leaving the administration, capping his tenure targeting wasteful federal government spending under the Department of Government Efficiency.
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Inside the scramble to keep FEMA alive ahead of hurricane season
Publicly, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said the Federal Emergency Management Agency needs to be reoriented or even done away with altogether.
“We are eliminating FEMA,” Noem said at a televised meeting of Trump’s Cabinet in March.
But with hurricane season about to start, Noem has been quietly pushing behind the scenes to keep key employees in place and to approve reimbursements to states previously hit by disaster, sources familiar with the situation told NBC News.
Trump himself talked about possibly “getting rid of” FEMA shortly after he was inaugurated for his second term, while he was touring North Carolina to see areas of the state damaged by Hurricane Helene. There has been no public indication that his administration, including Noem, is reconsidering that stance — indeed, the administration’s original acting FEMA administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was removed from the job one day after he testified at a congressional hearing that he does not think “it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate” FEMA.
Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, has told NBC News that the move was not a response to his testimony.
Senate Judiciary Republicans to hold hearing on alleged Biden cognitive decline
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee plan to hold a hearing next month to probe "who was running the country" while President Joe Biden was allegedly experiencing cognitive decline, according to a news release.
Sens. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, will co-chair a hearing on June 18.
“Our Republic depends on having a President who has the mental capacity to do the job, and it’s clear that President Biden did not, so we must use this hearing to uncover the facts,” Cornyn said in a statement.
Biden has denied allegations of cognitive decline during his term.
Witnesses for the hearing have not been announced.
10 times Trump has threatened, then backtracked on, tariffs as ‘TACO trade’ jab gains traction
Tariffs were a defining promise of Trump’s campaign, and they have been a defining feature of his second term in office. But just over five months in, many of his tariff proclamations haven’t turned into reality.
While Trump has imposed a number of sweeping tariffs that have been driving up costs for American businesses and consumers buying goods from overseas, he has threatened far more tariffs than he has carried through on.
That has created a climate of uncertainty that has caused some businesses to lay off workers and delay investments, as well as led to volatility in the stock market. Some financial analysts have taken to calling Trump’s on-again, off-again moves TACO trade or the TACO theory — an acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” (Asked by a reporter about the phrase, Trump called the question “nasty” and said, “It’s called negotiation.”)
Top House Judiciary Democrat asks Trump for crypto dinner guest list
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called on Trump to release a list of guests invited to attend his gala dinner last week for crypto investors.
In a letter dated Wednesday, Raskin asked Trump for a full list of the dinner's mostly anonymous attendees and for details "about the source of the money they each used to buy $TRUMP coins, so that we can prevent illegal foreign government emoluments from being pocketed without congressional consent."
"Publication of this list will also let the American people know who is putting tens of millions of dollars into our President’s pocket so we can start to figure out what—beyond virtually worthless memecoins—they are getting in exchange for all this money," Raskin added.
NBC News previously reported that crypto investors who were top holders of the $TRUMP coin attended the event at Trump National Golf Club in northern Virginia.
Trump administration unveils 'merit hiring plan' for federal government
The White House Domestic Policy Council and the Office of Personnel Management said today they would implement a "merit hiring plan," following up on one of Trump's executive orders from the first day of his second term.
The executive order was one of many that Trump signed to gut diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the federal government at the beginning of his administration.
In a news release, the Domestic Policy Council and OPM said the plan's key reforms "include decreasing time-to-hire to under 80 days, leveraging data analytics to track trends and compliance, and involving agency leadership in implementation."
It also calls for monthly progress reports to OPM and the Office of Management and Budget on recruitment, time-to-hire and the elimination of what they call "discriminatory practices."
Elon Musk’s top deputy at DOGE departs
Steve Davis, president of Musk’s Boring Company and Musk's top deputy at DOGE, has left the DOGE team, a White House official confirmed to NBC News.
Davis reportedly handled most of the day-to-day operations, agency deployments and hirings and firings within DOGE. For example, in a court declaration, Tiffany Flick, former acting chief of staff for the then-acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, detailed how Davis demanded that the SSA give a young DOGE software engineer access to sensitive SSA data, a request she called “unprecedented.”
Katie Miller, who was an adviser and spokeswoman for DOGE — and is the wife of White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller — is also leaving her role as a special government employee, according to a White House official.
State Department reorganization would affect 45% of domestic offices, mean cuts of around 3,500 personnel
The State Department hopes to eliminate or merge more than 300 bureaus and offices by July 1 as part of a large-scale overhaul of the agency, according to documents submitted to Congress today and obtained by NBC News.
The restructuring proposal includes eliminating 3,500 personnel from the civil service and foreign service domestic workforce, according to the proposal, including up to 1,575 who previously volunteered to depart.
In total, the massive reorganization would affeact 45% of domestic agencies in the department. No reductions in personnel are planned for locally employed staff member or direct-hire personnel posted overseas, according to the documents. The State Department has more than 270 missions overseas.
"The plan submitted to Congress was the result of thoughtful and deliberative work by senior department leadership,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement today, adding that the feedback of lawmakers, bureaus and long-serving employees was also taken into account. “The reorganization plan will result in a more agile Department, better equipped to promote America’s interests and keep Americans safe across the world.”
The bulk of personnel cuts come from the office of management, but more than 500 people are also being eliminated from offices focused on humanitarian assistance and justice. That is in part because of the hacking of the office of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, which will be “reorganized into a leaner subject-matter model,” according to one document. which “will ground the Department’s values-based diplomacy in traditional Western conceptions of core freedoms.” That new office will be led by a senior official with a new title — deputy assistant secretary for democracy and Western values.
“Many functional bureaus and offices under the U/S for Civilian Security, Human Rights, and Democracy (J) will become redundant,” the State Department notification to Congress said. “These offices, which have proven themselves prone to ideological capture and radicalism, will be either eliminated, with their statutory functions realigned elsewhere in the Department, or restructured to better reflect their appropriate scope and the Administration’s foreign policy priorities.”
The proposal would also merge the office of the Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts — or CARE — under the Afghanistan Affairs office. Established in 2021 after the U.S. withdrawal, the office was created specifically to help Afghan citizens who were eligible to come to the United States as refugees for their role in aiding the U.S. military during the 20-year war.
Since its inception, the office has helped relocate 76,000 people, but there are still an estimated 212,000 people somewhere in the visa process inside Afghanistan and tens of thousands more stranded across 75 countries, according to AfghanEvac, a coalition of U.S. veterans and advocacy groups.
“This is not streamlining. This is deliberate dismantling,” Shawn VanDiver, the president of #AfghanEvac, said in a statement today. “The CARE Office was established to fix the failures of the U.S. withdrawal. Eliminating it — without public explanation, transition planning, or reaffirmation of mission — is a profound betrayal of American values and promises."
House Oversight Committee in communication with former Biden aides as part of probe
Former aides and staffers to then-President Joe Biden have made contact with the House Oversight Committee and are negotiating transcribed interviews with the committee, a committee aide confirmed to NBC News.
Attorneys for Neera Tanden, Anthony Bernal, Annie Tomasini and Ashley Williams, as well as former White House physician Kevin O’Connor, have contacted the Oversight Committee after they received a letter from Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., about the committee’s investigation into Biden’s fitness for office.
NBC News reported last week a focal point of that investigation will be Biden’s use of an autopen for official business.
“There was more activity in the last 100 days of the Biden administration than in the first 3½ years,” Comer said during an interview on Fox News last night. “Many of the far-reaching executive orders were signed in the last 100 days, and they were signed by the autopen. We don’t believe that you can sign a legal document with an autopen.”
A Justice Department office of legal counsel memo on the topic in 2005 concluded that the practice was legal. A federal appeals court ruled as recently as last year that “the absence of a writing does not equate to proof that a commutation did not occur” when it relates to the use of a presidential autopen.
Comer said he plans to be aggressive in his questioning of the aides.
“Now , the four staffers that we’ve asked to come in for transcribed interviews, they have all lawyered up, they are taking this seriously, and this is going to be a battle to get to the truth,” he said.
The committee aide also said Comer is prepared to issue subpoenas if necessary to compel the former White House staffers’ testimony.
Appeals court pauses ruling halting Trump tariffs
A federal appeals court this afternoon paused rulings by a panel of judges that halted several of Trump's tariffs on international trading partners.
The "request for an immediate administrative stay is granted to the extent that the judgments and the permanent injunctions entered by the Court of International Trade in these cases are temporarily stayed until further notice while this court considers" whether the rulings should be paused for a longer period, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said in a brief ruling.
The decision pauses the lower court's decision until at least June 9, when both sides will have submitted legal arguments about whether the case should be paused while the appeals courts weigh the issues in the case.
An attorney for the plaintiffs, Jeffrey Schwab of the Liberty Justice Center, said in a statement that the ruling is "merely a procedural step as the court considers the government’s request for a longer stay pending appeal."
"We are confident the Federal Circuit will ultimately deny the government’s motion," Schwab said.
In their judgment yesterday, the U.S. Court of International Trade judges found that the decades-old International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a federal law that Trump cited in many of his executive orders, did not “delegate an unbounded tariff authority to the President.”
Whitmer jokes about the criticism she's received for her outreach to Trump
In a speech at the Mackinac Policy Conference in Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., appeared unfazed by the criticism from fellow Democrats that she's too cozy with Trump.
“I want to talk about Selfridge,” Whitmer said, referring to her work with Trump to bring a new series of fighter jets to Selfridge Air National Guard Base.
Whitmer displayed on a screen two pictures of herself with soldiers at the air base and joked, “We didn’t put a picture of me and my new bestie up there, did we?”
As the crowd laughed, she covered her face with her paper speech, an apparent reference to the viral photo of her covering her face with a binder in the White House.
