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 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 Education Department said that the it “must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students.”
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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 1.
Deportation fight: A hearing is set for Friday afternoon to debate whether a federal judge in Washington acted correctly when he tried to temporarily stop the Trump administration from summarily deporting scores of Venezuelan immigrants under a powerful but rarely invoked wartime statute. Read more ›
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 1, 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.
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 hearing has been set for Friday afternoon to debate whether a federal judge in Washington acted correctly when he temporarily stopped the Trump administration last weekend from 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 put in 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 gas station near the Ukrainian border 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 station, which once pumped gas to Europe through Ukraine, with what appeared to be pipelines engulfed in flames.
Also on Friday, 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 limited 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 calls between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, and Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, 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. Mr. Zelensky 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 strategy 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 station fit neatly into this propaganda war.
The gas station 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 station 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 Russian “false flag” operation 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, in what he described as “significant” damage that could take several months to repair.
Ivan Nechepurenko and Arijeta Lajka 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.
Zach Montague
Reporting from Washington
A federal judge on Thursday issued a temporary restraining order barring the Social Security Administration from granting Elon Musk and members of his Department of Government Efficiency access to sensitive records stored in the agency’s systems, or from holding onto sensitive data they had already taken.
The order, issued by Judge Ellen L. Hollander of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, was the latest ruling aimed at preventing Mr. Musk’s team from sifting through an agency’s databases because of privacy concerns.
While Judge Hollander blocked Social Security’s top officials — Leland Dudek and Michael Russo — and the agency’s employees from granting Mr. Musk’s team of engineers entry to their systems, her order focused only on documents, such as tax records, that would allow Mr. Musk’s team to analyze people at an individual level. The order stated that the agency could provide Mr. Musk’s team with redacted or anonymized data that facilitated broader analysis without running afoul of federal privacy laws.
In other lawsuits challenging Mr. Musk’s aggressive incursions into the Treasury and Education Departments, judges have issued similar orders barring officials there from handing over sensitive data. As President Trump has escalated efforts to deport students and other foreign nationals, including some with valid visas, lawyers have argued that agencies’ data systems could be used to aid a broader immigration crackdown.
In sworn statements, Treasury officials have insisted that they have not given sensitive tax data stored in their systems to the Department of Homeland Security.
As in other cases, lawyers for the government had argued that the risks of data being improperly disclosed were still speculative, since the groups that filed the suits had not shown clear evidence that Mr. Musk’s team’s access to Social Security data had led to identity theft or political retaliation. The lawyers also argued that letting Mr. Musk’s team audit the agency’s books did not amount to an unlawful “disclosure,” such as a leak that could result in identity theft.
But Judge Hollander said in a 137-page opinion accompanying the order that the intrusion into Social Security data was concerning enough to justify the two-week restraining order while the lawsuit continued. She said that retirees, when submitting their bank information and other financial data to the agency to receive common benefits, had a reasonable expectation that their records would not be used to inform a governmentwide effort to slash spending.
“The unrestricted access to PII that SSA provided to the DOGE Team, without specified need, and/or without adequate training, detail agreements, and/or background investigations of all DOGE Team members,” she wrote, using abbreviations for personally identifiable information and the Social Security Administration, “would be highly offensive to an objectively reasonable person.”
She added: “The expectation of privacy shared by plaintiffs’ members is objectively reasonable. It is almost self-evident that, in our society, PII, such as SSNs, medical information, and certain financial records, are regarded as private, sensitive, and confidential information.”
Judge Hollander’s order came roughly a month after a coalition of labor unions sued to stop Mr. Musk, who has called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, from targeting the agency’s data. Mr. Musk has also backed cuts to the agency’s call centers, and other changes that critics have warned could make customer support less accessible, and even make it easier for fraudsters to impersonate Social Security beneficiaries.
The order will expire in 14 days. Judge Hollander asked both sides to file motions by March 27 so she can schedule the next steps, such as extending the injunction that would keep Mr. Musk’s team barred from accessing the databases.
Carl Hulse
Carl Hulse covers judicial issues on Capitol Hill and wrote a book about confirmation fights.
President Trump, Elon Musk and a handful of House Republicans have intensified their calls to impeach federal judges who have made rulings unfavorable to the Trump administration. But taking such a step over a court finding would break new ground in the relationship between the legislative and judicial branches, and draw condemnation as a violation of the separation of powers.
No federal judge has been impeached strictly for the outcome of a case. But the House does have broad power to act against federal judges.
House Republicans, facing demands from Mr. Trump, could press the Judiciary Committee to at least explore the idea. But Democrats and some Republicans are certain to resist. And even if the House were to summon the necessary majority to impeach a judge, persuading the required 67 senators to convict and remove a judge over a ruling would be highly unlikely.
Here is how the process works, and a sense of how the politics of the issue could play out.
The Constitution says that “civil officers” of the United States can be impeached for “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” some of which federal judges have previously been removed over.
But it is the more subjective high crimes and misdemeanors clause that impeachment advocates are pointing to as the basis for trying to remove James E. Boasberg, a veteran judge in the District of Columbia who temporarily blocked Mr. Trump’s plan for deportations under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law.
After Mr. Trump urged Judge Boasberg’s ouster, Representative Brandon Gill, a hard-right first-term Republican from Texas, filed articles of impeachment. Mr. Gill said the judge had used his position “to advance political gain while interfering with the president’s constitutional prerogatives and enforcement of the rule of law.”
Three other federal judges have also had articles of impeachment filed against them by House Republicans.
The Judiciary Committee would need to decide if articles of impeachment merited review by the panel. Representative Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who leads the panel, did not reject the idea of impeachment hearings in a recent appearance on CNN, saying “all options are on the table” with Judge Boasberg.
Mr. Jordan said the panel would take initial steps by convening hearings examining the breadth of judicial resistance to Mr. Trump’s actions in office so far. The impeachment of a federal judge would traditionally require an in-depth investigation and a hearing with an array of witnesses. Impeaching a judge would be decided by a majority vote on the House floor.
Yes, the Senate would have to act on the articles of impeachment in some way. It could simply dismiss them, a move that would most likely infuriate the White House and House conservatives.
Unlike presidential impeachments, for which the full Senate conducts a trial, lawmakers can organize a smaller panel to hold the proceeding and make a recommendation to the full body. A conviction would require 67 votes, or two-thirds of the Senate.
With Republicans holding only 53 seats in the Senate, it would be difficult to convict a judge over what Democrats would see as a legal dispute and an abuse of the impeachment process.
Senior Republican senators have been much less enthusiastic than their House counterparts about pursuing impeachments over judicial rulings.
Two senior Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, told The New York Times in interviews recently that they were opposed to the idea, and said that appeals were the proper way to challenge judicial rulings.
Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who leads the panel, had been quiet on the issue, but said on Sunday on social media that the committee would be “taking action.” It was unclear what action he meant.
Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah and another member of the committee, has endorsed the possibility of impeachment.
But with conviction unlikely, Senate Republican leaders would not relish devoting much time to the issue, which would be a distraction from other legislative issues. It would also cause a difficult political vote for Senate Republicans who don’t view impeachment as warranted.
Mr. Trump and others around him have a long history of assailing judges who rule against his interests. Many legal observers say that the current impeachment campaign is an attempt to cow judges and discourage them from taking on the administration while they face heightened security threats.
The push to impeach also keeps the public’s focus on the Trump administration’s efforts to deliver on the president’s campaign promises, such as mass deportations. It shows that Mr. Trump is forging ahead despite resistance from the judicial branch.
Fifteen federal judges have been impeached, the first in 1803. Eight have been convicted and removed, mainly for serious criminal acts such as bribery and conflicts of interest.
As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. suggested in an unusual rebuke of Mr. Trump and others calling for impeachments, there has been an accepted view in the United States for two centuries that disagreement over decisions is not grounds for impeachment.
The last judicial impeachment was of Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr. of Louisiana in 2010, on charges of bribery and perjury. He was convicted and removed. One impeached and convicted federal judge, Alcee L. Hastings of Florida, was later elected to the House of Representatives.
Yes. In his CNN interview, Mr. Jordan noted that other legislative remedies could emerge. He noted that his panel recently approved legislation that would prevent district court judges from issuing orders that extend beyond their jurisdiction. Mr. Jordan said that he hoped for a floor vote on the bill.
Others have pushed for restricting the ability of those going to court from so-called judge shopping, or the practice of steering cases to sympathetic judges in friendly jurisdictions. And some lawmakers have suggested that because Congress established the federal courts below the Supreme Court, it could abolish some districts.
Democrats and some Republicans would see those acts as gross violations of the constitutional separation of powers. Any legislation restricting the courts would have to clear a filibuster in the Senate, where Democrats could block it.
Ron Lieber
Ron Lieber has been writing about student debt since 2008.
President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday in an attempt to shut down the Education Department.
“We are sending education back to the states, where it so rightly belongs,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement after Mr. Trump signed the order.
But they are not about to let debtors off the hook. Those states, after all, are not banks, and the Education Department is a big bank in all but name. It lends tens of billions of dollars to students and parents each year and oversees the collection of roughly $1.6 trillion in outstanding loans for over 40 million borrowers.
The debt-ridden federal government isn’t going to give up that money. So if the Education Department closed, another federal entity would take the loan system over. In the short term, any agency inheriting the loan portfolio would need to keep the servicers that collect and track payments.
What else might change? Here are some possible answers.
Probably not. Congressional approval is needed to shut down a federal agency, as Ms. McMahon noted in her confirmation hearing.
“This is political theater, not serious public policy,” said Ted Mitchell, a former undersecretary of education who is now the president of the American Council on Education, a university membership group.
This could be true or largely so — unless the White House shuts the department down without congressional approval and tries to win the lawsuits that would most likely ensue. President Trump signaled Thursday that he may also ask Congress to act.
Some other federal entity will need to take over debt issuance and collection. Speaking to reporters in early March, Mr. Trump said that the Small Business Administration was one possibility. The Treasury Department is another, given that many student loan debtors must regularly verify their incomes and Treasury has that data.
In either instance, Education Department employees could change departments in order to preserve institutional memory on how to run the often complex loan programs and interpret their terms.
Pretty messy. The debt repayment system is complicated, with highly technical rules and repayment plans and many student loan servicers tracking and collecting payments. Borrowers should always maintain records of their loans and all previous payments.
It’s possible. Presumably, any new overseer would aim to make the transition orderly and schedule the handover during a part of the year when not many people were getting new loans.
On March 11, the Education Department sent layoff notices to over 1,000 employees as part of its effort to reduce its work force by half (including people who have already left since Mr. Trump’s inauguration).
While those layoffs are the subject of lawsuits, other employees with relevant student loan expertise may have already left or will walk out under their own volition. It could be difficult for borrowers to get a speedy resolution to many complicated issues for an indefinite period to come.
“Claiming that eliminating half the department won’t affect its services — without any clear plan to redistribute the workload — is, at best, naïve and, at worst, deliberately misleading,” said Beth Maglione, the interim president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “It also raises serious concerns about how billions of dollars in federal student aid will continue to be disbursed to students without interruption.”
Yes.
Read every communication from your loan servicer carefully, and follow instructions to the letter. Check your spam folders frequently, and double check to make sure the servicer has your correct paper mail address. If your servicer is no longer going to administer your debt, it should let you know months before any switch.
If the Education Department closes, some other department or entity could become the lender.
Republicans have made it a long-term goal to have private companies handle student lending, with the federal government as a kind of guarantor backstopping the debt.
All of these programs exist because of laws.
“We certainly should honor those programs,” Ms. McMahon said of Public Service Loan Forgiveness during her confirmation hearing. She also promised to maintain Pell grants and said she supported their expansion.
So presumably some governmental entity would continue to oversee each of them. But Congress may well try to alter or end any one of them.
Mr. Trump issued an executive order in an attempt to prevent borrowers enrolled in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program from having their loans canceled if they work for organizations disfavored by his administration.
This would include any entities supporting terrorism, “engaging in violence for the purpose of obstructing or influencing federal government policy,” child abuse “including the chemical or surgical castration or mutilation of children,” employers “engaging in a pattern of aiding and abetting illegal discrimination” and those that are violating state tort laws “including laws against trespassing, disorderly conduct, public nuisance, vandalism and obstruction of highways.”
Anything this sweeping is certain to trigger lawsuits. It is not clear how soon the Education Department will attempt to put any of it in place.
Allies of Elon Musk, who embedded themselves at Education Department headquarters soon after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, have also discussed using software-enabled chatbots to replace workers who help answer questions for parents and borrowers.
Michael C. BenderErica L. Green and Alan Blinder
Reporting from Washington.
President Trump on Thursday instructed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin shutting down her agency, a task that cannot be completed without congressional approval and sets the stage for a seismic political and legal battle over the federal government’s role in the nation’s schools.
Surrounded by schoolchildren seated at desks in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Trump signed a long-awaited executive order that he said would begin dismantling the department “once and for all.” The Trump administration has cited poor test scores as a key justification for the move.
“We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Mr. Trump said.
The department, which manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and supports programs for students with disabilities, was created by an act of Congress. That means, according to Article I of the Constitution, that only Congress can shut it down. That clear delineation of power, a fundamental component of democracy from the inception of the United States, underscores why no other modern president has tried to unilaterally shutter a federal department.
But Mr. Trump has already taken significant steps that have limited the agency’s operations and authority. Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, his administration has slashed the department’s work force by more than half and eliminated $600 million in grants. The job cuts hit particularly hard at the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which enforces the country’s guarantee that all students have an equal opportunity to an education.
Mr. Trump’s order contains potentially contradictory guidance for Ms. McMahon. On the one hand, the order directs her to facilitate the elimination of the agency. On the other, she is also mandated to rigorously comply with federal law. The order offers no guidance on how to square those two points.
Mr. Trump said Thursday that the department would continue to provide critical functions that are required by law, such as the administration of federal student aid, including loans and grants, as well as funding for special education and districts with high levels of student poverty. The department would also continue civil rights enforcement, White House officials said.
Mr. Trump called those programs “useful functions,” and said they’re going to be “preserved in full.” He added that some functions would be “redistributed to various other agencies and departments that will take very good care of them.”
Higher education leaders and advocacy groups immediately condemned the executive order.
“This is political theater, not serious public policy,” said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, an association that includes many colleges and universities in its membership. “To dismantle any cabinet-level federal agency requires congressional approval, and we urge lawmakers to reject misleading rhetoric in favor of what is in the best interests of students and their families.”
Lawyers for supporters of the Education Department anticipated they would challenge Mr. Trump’s order by arguing that the administration had violated the Constitution’s separation of powers clause and the clause requiring the president to take care that federal laws are faithfully executed.
These lawyers, who requested anonymity to describe private deliberations about impending litigation, have also discussed the possibility of using a Supreme Court ruling from June 2024 to block Mr. Trump’s action. That ruling, 6 to 3 with all the conservative justices in the majority, swept aside a long-established precedent by limiting the executive branch’s ability to interpret statutes and transferring power to Congress and the courts.
“See you in court,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the trade union for educators. Her group is among those that intend to sue.
While many conservatives support Mr. Trump’s desire to close the agency, the order presents a predicament for congressional Republicans, who must balance their eagerness to please Mr. Trump and their constituents’ wishes. Public opinion polls for the past two months have consistently shown nearly two-thirds of voters oppose closing the department.
While local education departments primarily control how their schools are run already, the federal department has been influential in setting academic standards, guiding schools through regulatory compliance and interpreting civil rights laws.
Mr. Trump told the audience, which included several Republican governors, that the order’s goal was to “return our students to the states.”
“Democrats want federal bureaucrats to control your child’s school,” Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said Thursday on social media. “Republicans want to give parents the choice to do what’s best for their children.”
Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who chairs the chamber’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he would submit legislation to eliminate the Education Department.
“I agree with President Trump that the Department of Education has failed its mission,” Mr. Cassidy said in a statement. “Since the department can only be shut down with congressional approval, I will support the president’s goals by submitting legislation to accomplish this as soon as possible.”
In remarks before signing the order, Mr. Trump signaled he might press lawmakers to move on the issue, adding that he hoped Democrats would join Republicans in supporting the department’s elimination.
But any Democratic support appears unlikely. And in the last session of Congress, one-fourth of House Republicans voted against a measure that would have eliminated the agency.
“I hope they’re going to be voting for it,” Mr. Trump said, “because ultimately it may come before them.”
Mr. Trump’s plans to gut the department have drawn fierce criticism from Democrats and education advocacy groups who say that the measure — even if largely symbolic — signals the federal government’s retreat from its duties of protecting and serving the most vulnerable students.
“Let’s be clear: Before federal oversight, millions of children — particularly those with disabilities and those from our most vulnerable communities — were denied the opportunities they deserved,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union.
Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who is the ranking member of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, urged his Republican colleagues to join him in opposing the changes in the order.
Mr. Trump, he said, was “implementing his own philosophy on education which can be summed up in his own words, ‘I love the poorly educated,’” Mr. Scott said in a statement, referring to a remark Mr. Trump made in 2016.
Mr. Trump has gone further than any president in seeking to overhaul what Republican administrations have long bemoaned as a bloated bureaucracy. Mr. Trump’s order also amplifies an argument that stagnant student test scores demonstrate that billions in federal spending have not yielded results.
“The status quo has very clearly failed American children and done little more than line the pockets of bureaucrats and activists,” Nicole Neily, president and founder of Parents Defending Education, said.
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 coronavirus pandemic.
Under the Biden administration, the department was fiercely criticized as being overly deferential to teachers’ unions and overreaching on certain issues, such as student loan forgiveness and its interpretations of civil rights laws on behalf of transgender students.
Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think-tank, said that he believes both the right and the left exaggerate the department’s influence, but that the order does little to address the issues like overreach and red tape that drove the movement to rein in the department.
“We’re going to have this whole huge national debate and not solve the practical problems along the way,” he said. “Because we’re so focused on the 30,000-foot conversation that we’re not changing, that we’re not fixing, the stuff that’s actually making life tougher for educators and parents.”
Sarah Mervosh contributed reporting.
Alan Feuer
A federal judge in Washington edged closer on Thursday to holding the Trump administration in contempt for possibly having violated his ruling pausing the deportation of scores of Venezuelans under a rarely invoked wartime statute.
In a sternly written order, the judge, James E. Boasberg, told the administration to explain to him by Tuesday why officials had not violated his instructions when they allowed two flights of immigrants to continue on to El Salvador even after he directed the planes to return to the United States.
Judge Boasberg also called out efforts by the Justice Department to repeatedly stonewall his attempts to get information about the timing of the flights over the weekend.
“The government again evaded its obligations,” he wrote, adding that the Justice Department’s most recent filing about the flights was “woefully insufficient.”
Judge Boasberg’s three-page order was a remarkable display of frustration with an administration that has sought not only to use the extraordinary powers of the wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to pursue its immigration agenda, but has also stubbornly refused to provide even the most basic information about the deportation flights.
In the past few days alone, Justice Department lawyers made a last-minute effort to cancel a hearing before Judge Boasberg in which they were expected to discuss the flights in court. They then took the highly unusual step of asking the federal appeals court sitting over him to remove him from the case altogether.
All of this has unfolded as leading officials, like Attorney General Pam Bondi, and legions of President Trump’s supporters have assailed Judge Boasberg as a hack, a Marxist and a terrorist sympathizer. Mr. Trump himself has also entered the fray, demanding this week that Judge Boasberg be impeached.
That prompted a rare public rebuke from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who released a statement on Tuesday saying that the appeals process, not impeachment, was the proper way to deal with unfavorable rulings.
The Trump administration, in several cases filed against it in the past two months, has faced accusations of having failed to comply with judges’ orders, but none of the proceedings so far has resulted in a finding of contempt. If a judge did find officials in contempt, it could lead to financial penalties or even, if the offense was serious enough, to the jailing of administration officials.
But in the end, judges have little actual authority to enforce their orders in the face of disobedience. And legal scholars have expressed concern that if a judge eventually accuses the White House of disobeying an order and the administration presses forward anyhow, it could lead to a constitutional crisis.
Judge Boasberg, the chief judge in Federal District Court in Washington, has been trying for days, and in various ways, to get the administration to tell him — under seal, if needed — what time the two planes carrying the Venezuelan immigrants departed the United States, what time they left American airspace and what time they landed.
He originally instructed the Justice Department to provide him with that data by noon on Wednesday. He then extended the deadline by another day after department lawyers asked for more time as they considered whether to invoke a rare doctrine called the state secrets privilege in an effort to get out of turning over the information.
On Thursday, the government finally filed court papers under seal to Judge Boasberg, but hours later, he revealed in his order that the papers “repeated the same general information about the flights” that department lawyers had already given him in previous court filings and hearings.
Appearing to reach the end of his patience, Judge Boasberg, who has a reputation for being a measured and understated jurist, gave the government a series of ultimatums.
He told the administration to submit a sworn declaration by Friday at 10 a.m. from someone “with direct involvement in the cabinet-level discussions regarding invocation of the state secrets privilege.” He also instructed the Justice Department to tell him by Tuesday if the administration intended to actually invoke the state secrets privilege.
The conflict over the flight data was only one of the disputes roiling the case, which has emerged in recent days as a flashpoint over the administration’s attempts to expand presidential powers and to question the ability of judges to challenge the decisions of the executive branch.
The Justice Department is also seeking in two separate courts to reverse Judge Boasberg’s initial order pausing the deportation flights under the Alien Enemies Act. Department lawyers will appear in court on Friday in front of Judge Boasberg and on Monday in front of an appeals court to debate the issue with lawyers for some of the Venezuelan immigrants.
Almost from the moment Judge Boasberg’s provisional decision was entered on Saturday, the White House and the Justice Department have accused him of overstepping his authority by effectively commandeering the president’s prerogative to conduct foreign affairs.
But the question that Judge Boasberg is actually considering is whether Mr. Trump himself overstepped his authority by failing to comply with several specific provisions laid out in the Alien Enemies Act. The statute, which was passed in 1798, gives the government wide latitude during an invasion or a time of declared war to round up and summarily remove any subjects of a “hostile nation” over the age of 14 as “alien enemies.”
The administration has repeatedly claimed that the immigrants in question are members of a violent street gang called Tren de Aragua and should be considered subjects of a hostile nation because they are closely aligned with the Venezuelan government. The White House has also insisted that the arrival to the United States of dozens of members of the gang constitutes an invasion.
But lawyers for the deported Venezuelans argue that their clients are actually not gang members at all and should have the opportunity to prove it. The lawyers also maintain that while Tren de Aragua may be a dangerous criminal organization, it is not a nation state. Even if the group’s members have come to the United States en masse, they say, that does not fit the traditional definition of an invasion.
Moreover, they point out that the Alien Enemies Act has been invoked only three times in American history, all of them during times of clear-cut war: once during the War of 1812 and then again during World War I and World War II.
In court papers filed late Wednesday night, the lawyers for some of the immigrants said that at least five of them who were flown without due process to El Salvador last weekend were apprehended in part because they had tattoos that federal immigration agents claimed indicated ties to Tren de Aragua.
But the lawyers said that one of the men got his tattoo — of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball — because it resembled the logo of his favorite soccer team, Real Madrid. Another got a similar crown tattoo, the lawyers said, to honor the death of his grandmother.
A third immigrant was identified as being a member of the gang because of a tattoo on his left hand of a rose with paper money as its petals. But according to a sworn declaration filed by the man’s sister, the tattoo had no connection to a gang.
“He had that tattoo done in Aug. 2024 in Arlington, Tex., because he thought it looked cool,” the sister wrote.
