Elon Musk: Elon Musk had been expected to attend a briefing on Friday in a secure conference room with military leaders about the United States’ plans for any war that might break out with China. Instead, he had an 80-minute meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the secretary’s office, after The New York Times reported about the planned briefing. Later, President Trump told reporters of the plan, “I don’t want to show it to anybody.” He called the reporting a “fake story.”
Education Department: Mr. Trump announced that he would move core functions of the Education Department — the nation’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio and supervision of “special needs” programs — to other agencies. Since Mr. Trump took office, his administration has slashed the department’s work force by more than half and eliminated $600 million in grants. Read more ›
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F-47: Mr. Trump said the next-generation fighter jet would be called the F-47, a number clearly chosen to memorialize his presidency. The winning bidder, Boeing, is facing safety and production problems — including with President Trump, who has complained it is taking too long to deliver the next version of Air Force One.
Tony Romm
The Trump administration is weighing whether to offer economic aid to farmers that experience hardship as a result of President Trump’s upcoming tariffs, Brooke Rollins, the secretary of Agriculture, told reporters on Friday.
The aid, if implemented, could mirror the generous, multibillion-dollar bailout that Mr. Trump implemented in his first term, after the president’s trade war with China prompted Beijing to retaliate against U.S. soybeans and other products.
In less than two weeks, Mr. Trump is set to impose “reciprocal” tariffs globally, targeting countries that he believes have erected unfair barriers to U.S. trade. While the White House has shared few details about its exact plans, its April 2 deadline has spooked investors and consumers alike, raising fears that a protracted trade war could slow the nation’s economic growth and cause a spike in prices.
The president and his top advisers have not ruled out a potential recession stemming in part from their trade policies, though they argue any short-term economic pain would be offset by the new revenue and manufacturing jobs generated from their tariffs. Speaking with reporters, Ms. Rollins sounded a similar refrain, saying that farmers supported the president’s agenda and would understand any “short-term challenges with that.”
But the secretary also acknowledged the White House had asked her to “have some programs in place that would potentially mitigate any economic catastrophes that could happen to some of our farmers,” citing a similar effort from the president’s first term. Asked if that could include direct payments to producers, she added: “We’re working that out right now.”
Spokespeople for the White House and USDA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Tim Balk
The centuries-old wartime law invoked by President Trump to summarily deport Venezuelans accused of gang membership was contentious from the moment it was passed and has rarely been used in U.S. history.
Before this month, the law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, had been invoked just three times: in the War of 1812, World War I and, most memorably, in World War II, when it was used to justify the internment of Japanese, Italian and German immigrants. The extent of its considerable powers has not been reviewed by the Supreme Court in more than 70 years.
The law’s roots lie in an undeclared sea conflict between a young American nation and France.
President John Adams signed the Alien Enemies Act in July 1798 as the United States came to the brink of war with France.
One in a suite of four laws collectively known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Alien Enemies Act was a response to concerns that French immigrants might rise up against the U.S. government. An early draft of the act, rejected by lawmakers, would have punished U.S. citizens who harbored immigrants.
The law empowers the U.S. government to detain and even expel immigrants age 14 or older without a court hearing. It applies in times of declared war and when the United States faces the risk of invasion by a foreign nation — the Adams administration feared France would invade the United States by land.
Another law, the Sedition Act of 1798, cracked down on the press, making it a crime for newspapers to publish “false, scandalous and malicious” stories about the government. The Ipswich Journal of Suffolk, England, reported at the time that the passage of the laws “virtually declared” a war between the United States and France.
But a full-blown conflict did not materialize — the series of naval battles between the United States and France in the late 18th century became known as the Quasi-War. And in the years that followed, the three other components of the Alien and Sedition Acts lapsed.
The Alien Enemies Act, however, lacked a clause setting its expiration and remained on the books. So 14 years after its creation, President James Madison’s administration was able to summon the law to target British immigrants as the United States fought the War of 1812, a nearly three-year conflict over maritime rights.
In a declaration dated July 11, 1812, Mr. Madison’s secretary of state, James Monroe, decreed that “all the subjects of His Britannic Majesty, residing within the United States, have become alien enemies.” The federal government said British immigrants could be detained if they refused to move 40 miles from the coast, away from cities including Boston, New York and Washington.
The scope of the law’s use against British immigrants during the War of 1812 is unclear, because of holes in the historical record, said Katherine Yon Ebright, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice and an expert on the Alien Enemies Act.
“In fact, a copy of the president’s public proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act cannot be found,” she said of the law’s use in the War of 1812.
But there is a record of a ruling, by Chief Justice John Marshall, acting as a lower court judge, that ordered the release of a British immigrant. The ruling said the law should not have applied to immigrants who had not been instructed to relocate.
A century passed before the law was used again, this time by President Woodrow Wilson.
The Wilson administration applied the law from the opening days of World War I, requiring German immigrants age 14 or older to be entered into a registry, photographed, fingerprinted and, in some cases, detained, said Prof. Christopher Capozzola, a history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on the war.
“It was a pretty dusty statute in 1917,” Professor Capozzola said, but its application was far-reaching, authorizing the detention of some 6,000 Germans. There were no substantial legal challenges.
The law’s most well-known invocation came about a quarter-century later, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt summoned it in the hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese warplanes, an attack that killed more than 2,300 Americans and drew the United States into World War II.
The Roosevelt administration, citing an “invasion” by Japan and the threat of invasions by Germany and Italy, began to round up Japanese, German and Italian immigrants.
Roosevelt did not only rely on the Alien Enemies Act to support the internment camps: He also issued an executive order to support interning U.S. citizens. That executive order was upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States, a notorious 1944 decision that was overturned in 2018.
All told, more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent were forcibly interned in military facilities, gyms, jails, fair grounds and racetracks. Another 10,000 or so Germans and a few thousand Italians were also interned.
Roosevelt contemplated interning every German immigrant without citizenship in the United States, but was discouraged by his advisers, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy organization. He was less concerned about Italians, calling them “a lot of opera singers,” Attorney General Francis Biddle later recalled.
In 1948, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to President Harry S. Truman’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to expel a German immigrant in 1946, after World War II had ended. The ruling in the case, Ludecke v. Watkins, was 5 to 4.
Justice Felix Frankfurter, writing for the majority, said that war “does not cease with a cease-fire order” and that a president’s power under the Alien Enemies Act “begins when war is declared but is not exhausted when the shooting stops.”
Writing in dissent, Justice Hugo L. Black countered that it was “nothing but a fiction to say” that the United States was still at war with Germany, which had surrendered in 1945.
“The 1798 act did not grant its extraordinary and dangerous powers,” Justice Black wrote, “to be used during the period of fictional wars.”
Alan Feuer
Judge James E. Boasberg starts this afternoon’s hearing about the Trump administration’s use of a powerful wartime law to summarily deport Venezuelan immigrants last weekend with a bang.
He accuses the Justice Department of using “intemperate and disrespectful language” of a sort he’s never seen in recent filings. And he gets a Justice Department lawyer to admit that his order from Saturday ordering the return any planes of immigrants that were in the air that day was a binding one.
Alan Feuer
The hearing hasn’t even really started yet and Judge Boasberg has already sent a sharp warning. He tells the Justice Department lawyers in the room that they need to be careful how they act, cautioning them that their professional reputation is the most valuable thing they have.
Alan Feuer
Judge Boasberg also tries to clear up a lot of misinformation about his decisions regarding the deportation flights.
He asserts — and gets the government to confirm — that his order last weekend did not mean that any immigrants in U.S. custody had to be released. Nor did it stop the Trump administration from deporting people under normal immigration processes, only under the rarely invoked wartime statute known as the Alien Enemies Act.
Judson Jones
The National Weather Service, which is facing severe staffing cuts, said it is temporarily reducing balloon launches at a handful of its sites. The balloons are one way meteorologists collect the data that produces weather forecast models, but officials won’t speculate on the future impacts.
Zolan Kanno-YoungsTyler Pager and Hamed Aleaziz
Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Hamed Aleaziz reported from Washington, and Tyler Pager from New York.
U.S. immigration agents wearing masks arrested a Georgetown University academic outside his home in Virginia. They detained two German tourists for weeks when they tried to enter the country legally through the southern border. They knocked on doors at Columbia University apartments, searching for pro-Palestinian protesters.
The Trump administration has opened a new phase in its immigration agenda, one that goes well beyond the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
U.S. border officials are using more aggressive tactics, which the administration calls “enhanced vetting,” at ports of entry to the United States, prompting American allies like Germany to update their travel advisories. At the same, the administration is targeting legal immigrants who have expressed views that the government believes threaten national security and undermine foreign policy.
The tactics have unnerved foreign tourists and sent a chill through immigrant communities in the United States, who say they are being targeted for speech — not for breaking any laws.
“Whether it’s speech and criticism, green cards, they’re really taking it to a whole new level,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a former Customs and Border Protection commissioner and an ex-police chief of four cities. Recalling the anti-immigration agenda in Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Kerlikowske said that “it’s déjà vu all over again on steroids.”
The administration says the arrests and detentions are about protecting Americans.
“The Trump administration is enforcing immigration laws — something the previous administration failed to do,” Tricia McLaughlin, the spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said when asked about the recent arrests. “Those who violate these laws will be processed, detained and removed as required.”
Mr. Trump’s hard line on immigration has been a centerpiece of his political identity for years.
On his first day back in office, he signed an executive order that aimed to empower border officers by directing the administration to “identify all resources that may be used to ensure that all aliens seeking admission to the United States, or who are already in the United States, are vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”
Customs agents have wide latitude to search cellphones or computers of travelers crossing into the United States. According to Customs and Border Protection, however, such searches have typically been rare. In 2024, less than 0.01 percent of arriving international travelers had their electronic devices searched, the agency said.
Homeland security agents also have access to a large database called the National Targeting Center to detect risks among visitors to the United States. With the help of other nations sharing information about residents traveling to the United States, the database allows agents to flag visitors when they enter the nation’s ports.
It is not clear how much those tactics were used to pick up people in a string of recent cases in which visitors trying to enter the United States reported being turned back or detained. But two homeland security officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss the matter in detail, acknowledged that officers were acting more aggressively after Mr. Trump’s executive order.
Two German tourists said they were stopped separately at border crossings at San Diego and Tijuana and sent to a crowded detention center, where they reported being denied a translator and being put in solitary confinement. A Canadian national said she was detained and put “in chains” when officers flagged her visa paperwork.
Homeland security agencies have not answered questions about either case.
This month, a French scientist was prevented from entering the country. France’s minister for higher education said U.S. Border Patrol agents found messages in which he expressed his “personal opinion” to colleagues and friends about Mr. Trump’s science policies.
Ms. McLaughlin denied that and said the scientist had confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory, which he had taken without permission and tried to conceal.
The scientist was working for France’s publicly funded National Center for Scientific Research. Representatives for the center said he did not wish to speak to the media, but they did not immediately respond to the Homeland Security Department’s allegations against him.
In another case, the department stopped and detained Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University who was trying to return to the United States after visiting relatives in Lebanon. The administration deported Dr. Alawieh despite her having a valid visa and a court order blocking her removal. Federal authorities said in a court filing that they found “sympathetic photos and videos of prominent Hezbollah figures” in her phone and that she attended the funeral for the leader of Hezbollah in February.
When it comes to scrutinizing people already living in the United States, investigators for Immigration and Customs Enforcement who typically focus on long-term inquiries have been searching videos, online posts and news clippings of campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war. They have then compiled reports on their findings for the State Department.
The government also appears to be getting information from private groups like the Middle East Forum, a conservative think tank. The group said in a statement that it had more than 15 active investigations on “national security issues” and would share results about “terror-aligned individuals and organizations with the relevant government agencies.”
A spokesman for the forum declined to answer questions about its communication with the Trump administration. But the statement from the group said it had a “three-decade history of sharing the results of our work with the appropriate government and law enforcement agencies on all issues where U.S. national security is concerned.”
To deport people living in the United States with green cards or valid visas, the Trump administration has invoked a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives the secretary of state sweeping power to expel foreigners who are seen as a threat to the country’s foreign policy interests.
Using that authority, ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate who has Palestinian heritage and took on a prominent role in the pro-Palestinian protests at the school, and Badar Khan Suri, an Indian citizen who has been studying and teaching at Georgetown.
Mr. Khalil has a green card, which means he is a legal permanent resident. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, has accused him of “siding with terrorists.”
Ms. McLaughlin has accused Dr. Suri of “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media,” without providing evidence.
According to an official familiar with Dr. Suri’s case, the State Department justified his deportation by arguing that he engaged in antisemitic activity that would undermine diplomatic efforts to get Israel and Hamas to agree to a cease-fire. He is in the United States on a visa for academics.
Dr. Suri’s wife, an American citizen of Palestinian descent, is the daughter of Ahmed Yousef, the former adviser to a Hamas leader who was assassinated last year in Iran.
According to a court filing from his lawyers, Dr. Suri was surrounded by masked homeland security agents outside his home in Virginia on Monday night, arrested and placed in an unmarked S.U.V. A judge has temporarily blocked his removal from the country.
Lawyers for Mr. Khalil and Dr. Suri argue that the administration is punishing them for speaking out for Palestinians. Neither man has been charged with a crime. They are being detained while their lawyers fight against their deportations.
Chad Wolf, who served as the acting homeland security secretary near the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, defended the administration’s crackdown, contending that a visa is a discretionary benefit provided by the U.S. government.
“They’re going to use every lever that they have to protect the American people,” he said.
But free-speech advocates see a different dynamic at play. Will Creeley, the legal director for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said he believed the Trump administration’s “clear motivation here is to chill speech.”
“Simply saying someone is aligned to a terrorist organization does not exempt them from First Amendment protections,” Mr. Creeley said. “The administration has not produced any evidence that Mr. Khalil’s expressive activity falls into the narrow or carefully defined exceptions to the First Amendment.”
Mr. Creeley’s group and others have filed an amicus brief in support of Mr. Khalil.
Janet Napolitano, who served as homeland security secretary during the Obama administration, said Mr. Trump’s recent crackdown on immigrants with legal status ran “contrary to what the First Amendment is all about.”
“When the justification is ‘you’re a threat to national security’ and it’s like one individual, I mean come on,” Ms. Napolitano said. “Let’s be real.”
Eileen Sullivan
Top Senate Democrats on Friday asked the internal watchdogs of more than a dozen government agencies to investigate job cuts carried out at the direction of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency operation.
The request was made in a letter signed by 15 Democratic senators and one independent who serve on government oversight committees. The senators asked the watchdogs, known as inspectors general, to look at future job cuts as well.
Government human resources officials are currently contending with court orders to reinstate about 20,000 probationary employees who were fired in February. A pair of federal judges ruled this month that those firings were illegal, done at the direction of the Office of Personnel Management and members of Mr. Musk’s operation — neither of which have the authority to order personnel changes.
In addition, agencies are making plans for another round of massive cuts in order to shrink the size of government, per the instructions of President Trump and Mr. Musk, who is serving as a top adviser in the government-gutting effort.
Senators asked that the agency watchdogs review not just the probationary firings but all of the personnel actions of the Trump White House, including placing 75,000 employees on administrative leave and offering buyouts. Mr. Trump also fired 17 agency inspectors general just days into his second term in office. Now most of these offices are led by a deputy, assistant or acting inspector general.
Among the watchdogs the senators wrote to include those at the departments of Justice, Education and Treasury.
In addition, the senators want the inspectors general to “evaluate whether such actions violate agency policies or procedures, and whether these decisions could — contrary to the administration’s stated aim — create additional waste and inefficiency or allow fraud or misconduct in impacted federal programs to go unchecked,” Senators Gary Peters of Michigan, Ron Wyden of Oregon and others wrote.
Mr. Peters is the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Mr. Wyden is the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.
An earlier version of this article misidentified the state Senator Ron Wyden represents. It is Oregon, not Wyoming.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected] more
Erica L. Green and Karoun Demirjian
Reporting from Washington
President Trump announced Friday that the Education Department would no longer manage the nation’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio or oversee special education services in a major shake-up of an agency he has sought to eliminate.
Student loans will move under the Small Business Administration, while special education services, along with nutrition programs, will move under the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump told reporters gathered in the Oval Office that the moves would take place “immediately,” adding that he believed the restructuring would “work out very well.”
“You’re going to have great education, much better than it is now, at half the cost,” he added.
Mr. Trump laid the groundwork for his announcement on Thursday, with an executive order aimed at closing the Department of Education. The department cannot be closed without the approval of Congress, which created it. But since Mr. Trump took office, his administration has slashed the department’s work force by more than half and eliminated $600 million in grants. Reassigning its primary functions will further hollow out the agency.
In the order, the president compared the size of the federal student loan portfolio to that of Wells Fargo, the bank — noting that Wells Fargo had over 200,000 employees, while only 1,500 people worked in the Education Department’s Office of Federal Student Aid.
“The Department of Education is not a bank, and it must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students,” the order said.
The moves would transfer some of the largest programs handled by the Education Department into agencies that have had minimal involvement with schools and are going through staffing reductions themselves.
The Small Business Administration, headed by Kelly Loeffler, announced Thursday that it would cut 43 percent of its approximately 6,500 workers, while the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has offered buyouts to most of its approximately 80,000 employees.
Mr. Kennedy has campaigned for improving nutrition and removing ultra-processed food from school lunches.
But he has also made a number of polarizing statements blaming environmental toxins and a broken food system for the “epidemic” of chronic disease that has left America’s children among the sickest in the developed world.
He has also espoused fringe theories about the role that diet can play in preventing diseases such as measles, while casting doubt on the efficacy and safety of proven vaccines, arguing that they cause autism.
Erica L. Green
Trump declined to say whether he was still considering his threatened sanctions against Russia for continuing to attack Ukraine, and continued to avoid acknowledging the country as the invader in the war. He said “they’re fighting against each other,” and that he thinks there will be a cease-fire “pretty soon.” He added that contracts, aimed at “dividing up the lands,” were being negotiated.
Tyler Pager
Trump defended his executive orders stripping prominent law firms of security clearances, which would in effect cripple their businesses. He contended the firms “did bad things” and attacked him “ruthlessly, violently, illegally.”
Trump said the law firms now “want to make deals,” after he struck a deal with one of the firms, Paul, Weiss.
“They’re not babies,” he said. “They’re very sophisticated people.”
David E. Sanger
Trump is back at making the case for making Canada a state, saying the United States should not be protecting the country; both are part of NATO. “They trade very tough,″ he said, and would have lower taxes if they were part of the United States.
Tyler Pager
When asked if there’s anything China could do to get the U.S. to remove the tariffs, Trump says he will be speaking soon with President Xi. Trump did not provide any details on whether they have a call scheduled, but he continued to blame Biden for exacerbating a trade deficit.
Erica L. Green
Trump, asked whether he believed he had the authority to round up people and detain them without providing evidence against them to the courts, said he believed he did. “Well, that’s what the law says, and that’s what our country needs.”
He then pivoted to former President Biden, asking if he had the authority to allow millions of people to come into the country unvetted.
David E. Sanger
Both Trump and Hegseth denied the report in The New York Times, and confirmed by The Wall Street Journal, that the meeting at the Pentagon was intended to show Musk the war plan for potential conflicts with China. He called the Times report “such a fake story.”
David E. Sanger
“I don’t want anybody seeing potential war with China,” he said of the reports of a meeting that had been set at the Pentagon to share China war plans with Elon Musk. “Elon has businesses in China,” he said, suggesting “he would be susceptible, perhaps, to that.”
David E. Sanger
The winning bidder to make the F-47, Boeing, is a company facing huge problems — including with President Trump, who has complained it is taking too long to deliver the next version of Air Force One, which he wants to use in his term. In recent years it has had safety issues, production issues and increasing competition from Airbus.
Tyler Pager
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, standing next to Trump in the Oval Office, heaped praise on the president and called the F-47 announcement a “gift” for future generations of Americans.
“Under the previous administration, we looked like fools,” he said.
David E. Sanger
The aircraft is accompanied by drones, and Trump said that for five years a prototype has been tested, though he gave no details. Hegseth blamed the Biden administration for delaying a decision on the aircraft, which Biden officials said they would leave to the next generation.
Matthew GoldsteinJessica Silver-Greenberg and Ben Protess
The chairman of Paul Weiss sought to reassure employees at the giant law firm that the deal it reached with President Trump was consistent with principles that the 150-year-old firm has long stood by.
On Thursday evening, Brad Karp sent a firm-wide email, detailing the agreement he had reached with Mr. Trump, which allowed the firm to escape an executive order that could have cost it significant business.
The order, part of a broader retribution campaign against law firms, threatened to suspend the law firm’s security clearances, which would have made it virtually impossible for Paul Weiss to represent clients in cases involving the federal government.
In the email to the firm, which was viewed by The New York Times, Mr. Karp said that in reaching an agreement with Mr. Trump, he really just “reaffirmed” the firm’s statement of principles outlined in 1963 by one of Paul Weiss’s original named partners, Judge Simon H. Rifkind.
“The commitments reaffirmed today are consistent with Judge Simon H. Rifkind’s 1963 Statement of Firm Principles,” which states, among other things, that “we believe in maintaining, by affirmative efforts, a membership of partners and associates reflecting a wide variety of religious, political, ethnic and social backgrounds,” Mr. Karp wrote in the email.
Despite Mr. Karp’s assurances, the deal between Paul Weiss and the White House was causing concern among the broader legal community that large law firms were capitulating to Mr. Trump’s demands instead of fighting them in court.
At a meeting at the White House, Mr. Karp reached a deal with Mr. Trump in which the firm agreed to do $40 million worth of pro bono work on causes supported by the Trump administration, such as working with veterans and fighting antisemitism.
“Thank you all for your patience during this time,” Mr. Karp told the roughly 2,000 lawyers and support staff at the firm. “With this behind us, we can devote our complete focus — as we always do — to our clients, our work, our colleagues and our firm.”
Paul Weiss, formally known as Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison L.L.P., is one of three big law firms that Mr. Trump has targeted with executive orders that essentially restricted their security clearance — something that is often needed to review government contracts for corporate clients — and barred lawyers from federal buildings. The three firms represented either lawyers or prosecutors in the criminal cases that had been brought against him before the election.
Paul Weiss, based in New York, is one of the nation’s biggest law firms; it has offices around the world and represents some of the biggest corporations.
In the email, Mr. Karp included an attachment that outlined the five main points of the agreement with Mr. Trump. At the top of the list was an understanding that “the bedrock principle of American justice is that it must be fair and nonpartisan for all, including my representing clients across the political spectrum.”
Under the agreement, Paul Weiss reiterated its commitment to “merits-based hiring, promotion and retention.” The firm also said it would hire an outside expert, within 14 days, to conduct “a comprehensive audit of all its employment practices.” The agreement also outlined that Paul Weiss would contribute “$40 million in pro bono legal services over the course of President Trump’s term.” That sum represents a fraction of the roughly $200 million that the firm spends annually on pro bono work, according to a partner familiar with the matter.
Mr. Trump’s executive order had already begun rattling the law firm’s clients. Lawyers for Paul Weiss told a federal judge in New Jersey that Steven Schwartz, a former corporate general counsel who the firm was representing in a foreign corrupt practices case, had terminated Paul Weiss as defense counsel. Several lawyers at other big firms said Paul Weiss had no choice but to strike a deal with Mr. Trump as it risked losing big clients and some top moneymaking lawyers to other firms.
Paul Weiss had considered mounting a legal challenge to the executive order but felt the risk to its business were too great, said a person briefed on the matter.
David E. Sanger
President Trump announced that Boeing has won the contract for the next-generation fighter, which he said would be called the F-47 — a number clearly chosen to memorialize his presidency. He described it as a very stealthy fighter, though it has been highly controversial, in part because many experts believe that by the time it is fielded, manned fighters will be outdated and outmaenuvered by autonomous and semi-autonomous aircraft.
Erica L. Green
President Trump, at the top of his remarks from the Oval Office, just announced that he would move the nation’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio from the Education Department to the Small Business Administration. He had been considering the idea, and an executive order he signed Thursday to start the dismantling of the department said that it “must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students.”
Erica L. Green
President Trump also announced that he would move oversight of special education services from the Education Department, along with nutrition programs, to the Health and Human Services Department, which is also an extremely significant move. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made controversial statements linking vaccines to autism, and has blamed environmental toxins and a broken food system for an “epidemic” of chronic disease that has left America’s children among the sickest in the developed world.
Eric Schmitt
Outside the Pentagon, Musk and Hegseth shook hands as Musk told him, “If there’s anything I can do to be helpful, I’d like to see you.” Then Musk got into his black Suburban and drove off.
Eric Schmitt
Asked after Musk’s departure what the two discussed, Hegseth said, “Why would I tell you?” And then he walked inside.
Maggie Haberman
Elon Musk had been expected to attend a briefing in the Tank, a secure conference room in the Pentagon, with military leaders, as The Times reported last night. But that was called off after the Times article was published, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
Eric Schmitt
Elon Musk has just left the Pentagon. Asked about his 80-minute meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Musk said “Always a great meeting. I’ve been here before, you know.”
Eric Schmitt
Elon Musk is meeting with Pete Hegseth in the defense secretary’s third floor office at the Pentagon.
Glenn Thrush
Todd Blanche, the No. 2 official at the Justice Department, suggested in a federal court filing that he might invoke the state secrets privilege to avoid answering a federal judge’s questions about the decision to proceed with deportations to El Salvador despite a court order demanding that any flights return to the United States.
Blanche said the move, typically reserved for highly sensitive national security operations, was the subject of “cabinet-level” discussions, and he asked the court to defer its demand for answers until the White House made a decision.
Alan Feuer
A federal judge in Washington was hearing arguments on Friday over his temporary block last weekend on the Trump administration’s summarily deporting scores of Venezuelan immigrants under a powerful but rarely invoked wartime statute.
The hearing, scheduled for 2:30 p.m. in Federal District Court in Washington, could also include some discussion about the Justice Department’s repeated recalcitrance in responding to the judge’s demands. He has been requesting information about two deportation flights in particular, which officials say carried members of a Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua, to El Salvador.
The judge, James E. Boasberg, scolded the department in a stern order on Thursday for having “evaded its obligations” to provide him with data about the flights. He wants that information as he seeks to determine whether the Trump administration violated his initial instructions to turn the planes around after they left the United States on Saturday evening.
Most of the courtroom conversation, however, is likely to concern Judge Boasberg’s underlying decision to stop the White House for now from using the wartime law, known as the Alien Enemies Act, to pursue its immigration agenda. The statute, passed in 1798, gives the government expansive powers during an invasion or a declared war to round up and summarily remove any subjects of a “hostile nation” over the age of 14 as “alien enemies.”
Almost from the moment Judge Boasberg entered his provisional decision barring President Trump from using the law, the White House and the Justice Department have accused him of overstepping his authority by improperly inserting himself into the president’s ability to conduct foreign affairs.
But Judge Boasberg imposed the order in the first place to give himself time to figure out whether Mr. Trump himself overstepped by stretching or even ignoring several of the statute’s provisions, which place checks on how and when it can be used.
The administration has repeatedly claimed, for instance, that members of Tren de Aragua should be considered subjects of a hostile nation because they are closely aligned with the Venezuelan government. The White House, echoing a position that Mr. Trump pushed during his campaign, has also insisted that the arrival to the United States of dozens of members of the gang constitutes an invasion.
But lawyers for some of the deported Venezuelans dispute those claims, saying that their clients are not gang members and should have the opportunity to prove it. The lawyers also say that while Tren de Aragua may be a dangerous criminal organization, which was recently designated as a terrorist organization, it is not a nation state.
Moreover, they have argued that even if the members of the group have come to the United States en masse, that does not fit the traditional definition of an invasion.
Eric Schmitt
Elon Musk has arrived at the Pentagon, where he was met by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Matthew Goldstein
Freddie Mac, the government-controlled mortgage finance firm, announced a leadership shake-up in which Diane Reid is out as chief executive officer and will be replaced in the interim by Michael Hutchins, who will continue to serve as president of the company, according to a company-wide email. In addition, the head of human resources has left, with Hutchins picking up those duties as well.
Matthew Goldstein
The changes at Freddie come during a tumultuous week for Freddie Mac and its sister company, Fannie Mae. The housing regulator for both government-controlled firms ousted 14 board members at Fannie and Freddie, and F.H.F.A. Director William Pulte appointed himself as the chairman of the board of both mortgage firms.
Constant Méheut
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
As Ukraine and Russia prepare for talks that would place a temporary halt on strikes on energy infrastructure, each side has continued to accuse the other of fresh attacks on the power grid, underscoring the deep mistrust between them.
Overnight into Friday, part of a major Russian energy facility near the Ukrainian border that once pumped natural gas to western Europe was set ablaze in an attack that each country accused the other of launching. Videos shared by Russian military bloggers and verified by The New York Times showed a large fire at the gas metering station, with what appeared to be pipelines engulfed in flames.
Also on Friday, the Russian authorities in the southwestern Krasnodar region reported a secondary explosion at a fuel depot that had been burning for two days after a Ukrainian drone attack. Russian officials said the fire had spread to more than 100,000 square feet.
Kyiv and Moscow agreed this week to a 30-day cease-fire on strikes against energy infrastructure, the first major step toward de-escalation in more than three years of war. The agreement followed separate phone calls between President Trump and the Russian and Ukrainian presidents to broker the partial cease-fire.
But the details of how and when this partial truce would take hold remain unresolved and are expected to be hammered out in U.S.-mediated talks in Saudi Arabia on Monday. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said his country would draw up a list of infrastructure facilities that could be covered by the cease-fire to avoid misunderstandings.
Strikes on energy facilities have been central to each side’s efforts to weaken the other throughout the war. Russia has pounded Ukraine’s power grid, aiming to make life unbearable for civilians and hinder the country’s war effort. Ukraine’s strikes on Russian facilities focus on crippling its vast oil industry, cutting off revenues that finance its military operations.
On Wednesday, the Ukrainian national railway said its power system had been attacked. The same day, Russia said Ukrainian drones attacked the fuel depot in the Krasnodar region. Neither claim could be independently verified.
Both sides have an interest in blaming the other for violating the cease-fire before it even begins, seeking to portray their opponent as untrustworthy. Against that backdrop, Friday’s attack on the Russian gas facility fit neatly into this propaganda war.
On Friday, Mr. Trump declined to say whether he would impose sanctions he has threatened against Russia for attacks on Ukraine. He also avoided acknowledging that Russia had invaded Ukraine.
“They’re fighting against each other,” he told reporters, adding that he thought there would be a cease-fire “pretty soon.” He said that “contracts” aimed at “dividing up the lands” were being negotiated.
The gas facility that caught fire sits just across the border from Ukraine, near the town of Sudzha, in territory that Ukrainian forces seized during their incursion into Russia’s western Kursk region last summer. But recent Russian advances have pushed back Ukrainian troops in the area from all but a sliver of land, and it was unclear whether they still controlled the gas site as of Friday.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Ukraine had “deliberately” blown up the Sudzha gas metering station as its military retreated from the area. It called the attack “a deliberate provocation” designed to “discredit the peace initiatives of the U.S. president.”
The Ukrainian Army, though, suggested the explosion was a so-called false flag operation by Russia designed to put the blame on Ukraine. It said Russia had “repeatedly shelled” the station in the past as it counterattacked Ukrainian troops in the area.
“Russians continue to create numerous fakes and seek to mislead the international community,” the army said in a Facebook post.
Until recently, the station was the sole transit point for Russian gas to the European Union through Ukraine. It ceased operations on Jan. 1, after Ukraine refused to renew the transit agreement, part of a broader push by Kyiv and its allies to reduce reliance on Russian energy.
That means Friday’s attack on the station will not immediately affect Russian gas exports. But if the damage is severe, it could have long-term consequences and hinder a potential resumption of exports after the war.
Damien Ernst, an energy expert and professor at the University of Liège in Belgium, said videos of the aftermath of the attack suggested that some equipment, including pipelines, had been hit, causing what he described as “significant” damage that could take several months to repair.
In a separate attack on Thursday, Ukraine struck weapons warehouses at a military airfield deep inside Russian territory. Verified satellite images from after the attack showed multiple craters at the base and what looked like blown-up ammunition depots.
Ivan Nechepurenko, Arijeta Lajka and Malachy Browne contributed reporting.
Eric SchmittEric LiptonJulian E. BarnesRyan Mac and Maggie Haberman
The Pentagon was scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China, two U.S. officials said on Thursday.
Another official said the briefing would be China focused, without providing additional details. A fourth official confirmed Mr. Musk was to be at the Pentagon on Friday, but offered no details.
Hours after news of the planned meeting was published by The New York Times, Pentagon officials and President Trump denied that the session would be about military plans involving China. “China will not even be mentioned or discussed,” Mr. Trump said in a late-night social media post.
It was not clear if the briefing for Mr. Musk would go ahead as originally planned. But providing Mr. Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already extensive role as an adviser to Mr. Trump and leader of his effort to slash spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.
It would also bring into sharp relief the questions about Mr. Musk’s conflicts of interest as he ranges widely across the federal bureaucracy while continuing to run businesses that are major government contractors. In this case, Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, is a leading supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.
Pentagon war plans, known in military jargon as O-plans or operational plans, are among the military’s most closely guarded secrets. If a foreign country were to learn how the United States planned to fight a war against them, it could reinforce its defenses and address its weaknesses, making the plans far less likely to succeed.
The top-secret briefing that exists for the China war plan has about 20 to 30 slides that lay out how the United States would fight such a conflict. It covers the plan beginning with the indications and warning of a threat from China to various options on what Chinese targets to hit, over what time period, that would be presented to Mr. Trump for decisions, according to officials with knowledge of the plan.
A White House spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment about the purpose of the visit, how it came about, whether Mr. Trump was aware of it, and whether the visit raises questions of conflicts of interest. The White House has not said whether Mr. Trump signed a conflicts of interest waiver for Mr. Musk.
The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, initially did not respond to a similar email seeking comment about why Mr. Musk was to receive a briefing on the China war plan. Soon after The Times published this article on Thursday evening, Mr. Parnell gave a short statement: “The Defense Department is excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by Secretary Hegseth and is just visiting.”
About an hour later, Mr. Parnell posted a message on his X account: “This is 100% Fake News. Just brazenly & maliciously wrong. Elon Musk is a patriot. We are proud to have him at the Pentagon.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also commented on X late on Thursday, saying: “This is NOT a meeting about ‘top secret China war plans.’ It’s an informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies & smarter production. Gonna be great!”
Roughly 30 minutes after that social media post, The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Mr. Musk had been scheduled to be briefed on the war planning for China.
In his own post on social media early Friday, Mr. Musk said he looked forward to “the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT.”
Whatever the meeting will now be about, the planning reflected the extraordinary dual role played by Mr. Musk, who is both the world’s wealthiest man and has been given broad authority by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Musk has a security clearance, and Mr. Hegseth can determine who has a need to know about the plan.
Mr. Hegseth; Adm. Christopher W. Grady, the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, the head of the military’s Indo-Pacific Command, were set to present Mr. Musk with details on the U.S. plan to counter China in the event of military conflict between the two countries, the officials said.
The meeting had been set to be held not in Mr. Hegseth’s office — where an informal discussion about innovation would most likely take place — but in the Tank, a secure conference room in the Pentagon, typically used for high-level meetings of members of the Joint Chiefs, their senior staff and visiting combatant commanders.
Operational plans for major contingencies, like a war with China, are extremely difficult for people without extensive military planning experience to understand. The technical nature is why presidents are typically presented with the broad contours of a plan, rather than the actual details of documents. How many details Mr. Musk had wanted or expected to hear was unclear.
Mr. Hegseth received part of the China war plan briefing last week and another part on Wednesday, according to officials familiar with the plan.
It was unclear what the impetus was for providing Mr. Musk such a sensitive briefing. He is not in the military chain of command, nor is he an official adviser to Mr. Trump on military matters involving China.
But there is a possible reason Mr. Musk might have needed to know aspects of the war plan. If Mr. Musk and his team of cost cutters from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, want to trim the Pentagon budget in a responsible way, they may need to know what weapons systems the Pentagon plans to use in a fight with China.
Take aircraft carriers, for example. Cutting back on future aircraft carriers would save billions of dollars, money that could be spent on drones or other weaponry. But if the U.S. war strategy relies on using aircraft carriers in innovative ways that would surprise China, mothballing existing ships or stopping production on future ships could cripple that plan.
Planning for a war with China has dominated Pentagon thinking for decades, well before a possible confrontation with Beijing became more conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill. The United States has built its Air Forces, Navy and Space Forces — and even more recently its Marines and Army forces — with a possible fight against China in mind.
Critics have said the military has invested too much in big expensive systems like fighter jets or aircraft carriers and too little in midrange drones and coastal defenses. But for Mr. Musk to evaluate how to reorient Pentagon spending, he would want to know what the military intends to use and for what purpose.
Mr. Musk has already called for the Pentagon to stop buying certain high-priced items like F-35 fighter jets, manufactured by one of his space-launch competitors, Lockheed Martin, in a program that costs the Pentagon more than $12 billion a year.
Yet Mr. Musk’s extensive business interests make any access to strategic secrets about China a serious problem in the view of ethics experts. Officials have said revisions to the war plans against China have focused on upgrading the plans for defending against space warfare. China has developed a suite of weapons that can attack U.S. satellites.
Mr. Musk’s constellations of low-earth orbit Starlink satellites, which provide data and communications services from space, are considered more resilient than traditional satellites. But he could have an interest in learning about whether or not the United States could defend his satellites in a war with China.
Participating in a classified briefing on the China threat with some of the most senior Pentagon and U.S. military officials would be a tremendously valuable opportunity for any defense contractor seeking to sell services to the military.
Mr. Musk could gain insight into new tools that the Pentagon might need and that SpaceX, where he remains the chief executive, could sell.
Contractors working on relevant Pentagon projects generally do have access to certain limited war planning documents, but only once war plans are approved, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on defense strategy. Individual executives rarely if ever get exclusive access to top Pentagon officials for such a sensitive briefing, Mr. Harrison said.
“Musk at a war-planning briefing?” he said. “Giving the CEO of one defense company unique access seems like this could be grounds for a contract protest and is a real conflict of interest.”
Mr. Musk’s SpaceX is already being paid billions of dollars by the Pentagon and federal spy agencies to help the United States build new military satellite networks to try to confront rising military threats from China. SpaceX launches most of these military satellites for the Pentagon on its Falcon 9 rockets, which take off from launchpads SpaceX has set up at military bases in Florida and California.
The company separately has been paid hundreds of millions of dollars by the Pentagon that now relies heavily on SpaceX’s Starlink satellite communications network for military personnel to transmit data worldwide.
In 2024, SpaceX was granted about $1.6 billion in Air Force contracts. That does not include classified spending with SpaceX by the National Reconnaissance Office, which has hired the company to build it a new constellation of low-earth orbit satellites to spy on China, Russia and other threats.
Mr. Trump has already proposed that the United States build a new system the military is calling Golden Dome, a space-based missile defense system that recalls what President Ronald Reagan tried to deliver. (The so-called Star Wars system Mr. Reagan had in mind was never fully developed.)
Perceived missile threats from China — be it nuclear weapons or hypersonic missiles or cruise missiles — are a major factor that led Mr. Trump to sign an executive order recently instructing the Pentagon to start work on Golden Dome.
Even starting to plan and build the first components of the system will cost tens of billions of dollars, according to Pentagon officials, and most likely create large business opportunities for SpaceX, which already provides rocket launches, satellite structures, and space-based data communications systems, all of which will be required for Golden Dome.
Separately, Mr. Musk has been the focus of an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general over questions about his compliance with his top-secret security clearance.
The investigations started last year after some SpaceX employees complained to government agencies that Mr. Musk and others at SpaceX were not properly reporting contacts or conversations with foreign leaders.
Air Force officials, before the end of the Biden administration, started their own review, after Senate Democrats asked questions about Mr. Musk and asserted that he was not complying with security clearance requirements.
The Air Force, in fact, had denied a request by Mr. Musk for an even higher level of security clearance, known as Special Access Program, which is reserved for extremely sensitive classified programs, citing potential security risks associated with the billionaire.
In fact, SpaceX has become so valuable to the Pentagon that the Chinese government has said it considers the company to be an extension of the U.S. military.
“Starlink Militarization and Its Impact on Global Strategic Stability” was the headline of one publication released last year from China’s National University of Defense Technology, according to a translation of the paper prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Mr. Musk and Tesla, an electric vehicle company he controls, are heavily reliant on China, which houses one of the auto maker’s flagship factories in Shanghai. Unveiled in 2019, the state-of-the-art facility was built with special permission from the Chinese government, and now accounts for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries. Last year, the company said in financial filings that it had a $2.8 billion loan agreement with lenders in China for production expenditures.
In public, Mr. Musk has avoided criticizing Beijing and signaled his willingness to work with the Chinese Communist Party. In 2022, he wrote a column for the magazine of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s censorship agency, trumpeting his companies and their missions of improving humanity.
That same year, the billionaire told The Financial Times that China should be given some control over Taiwan by making a “special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable,” an assertion that angered politicians of the independent island. In that same interview, he also noted that Beijing sought assurances that he would not sell Starlink in China.
The following year at a tech conference, Mr. Musk called the democratic island “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China,” and compared the Taiwan-China situation to Hawaii and the United States.
On X, the social platform he owns, Mr. Musk has long used his account to praise China. He has said the country is “by far” the world leader in electric vehicles and solar power, and has commended its space program for being “far more advanced than people realize.” He has encouraged more people to visit the country, and posited openly about an “inevitable” Russia-China alliance.
Aaron Kessler contributed reporting.
Sarah Mervosh
The Trump administration’s plan to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education is based in part on claims that student outcomes have not improved since the department was founded more than 40 years ago.
Despite increases in student spending since 1979, “there has been virtually no measurable improvement in student achievement,” the administration said in a posting on the White House website on Thursday.
This claim is far from true.
While it is true that reading scores for 13-year-olds are about the same as they were in the 1970s and math scores are only slightly better, this is because of recent, sharp declines that accelerated during the pandemic.
For most of the last half-century, American student achievement had been steadily climbing. This is best seen in long-term national data testing of 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds, which tracks performance over time.
From the 1970s to the early 2010s, students made particularly strong progress in math, which many experts believe is more influenced by what happens at school. Reading, which can be more influenced by students’ home lives, saw smaller gains.
By 2012, the share of 13-year-olds who could do complex math problems had nearly doubled to 34 percent, up from 18 percent in 1978. Students at this level can find averages, compute with fractions and solve the area of a rectangle.
There are a number of factors that experts say helped boost student achievement during this time frame, including the racial integration of public schools, which peaked in 1988. During the 2000s, a push for school accountability during the No Child Left Behind era also coincided with a rise in test scores.
The White House release also noted that school spending has also increased significantly. (Only about 10 percent of funding for K-12 schools comes from the federal government.)
There are intense debates about whether spending more money on schools helps achievement. But a wide body of research has shown that increases in money spent per pupil is associated with test score gains and increases in going to college. It matters how money is spent, however. Investments in low-income students and teacher quality are associated with greater improvements.
In arguing that education reform is needed, President Trump pointed out that United States is not a top performer internationally. This is true.
The United States routinely underperforms peer countries in math, though it does slightly better in reading.
While there are many reasons for that, one problem is the wide variety in both funding and outcomes seen across different states and districts.
Mr. Trump’s vision would further empower states, which could lead to even more variation. On Thursday, he vowed that states like Texas, Florida and Iowa would have “education that will be as good as Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, those top countries,” while other states, he said, would be “laggards” that his administration would seek to help.
