HAPPENING SOON: A federal judge in Boston will hold a hearing over the Trump administration’s deferred resignation/buyout offer for federal workers at 2 p.m. after staying the original deadline for the program until midnight tonight.
Also happening today … Washington is bracing for President Donald Trump to formally announce new 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports today. The move recalled policy moves from his first administration “that pleased domestic metal makers, but hurt other American industries and ignited trade wars with allies on multiple fronts,” NYT’s Ana Swanson reports.
President Donald Trump’s sweeping push to upend the administrative state is the major throughline of a number of big stories today. | Anna Rose Layden/UPI
ROOT AND (EXECUTIVE) BRANCH — Trump’s sweeping push to upend the administrative state is the major throughline of a number of big stories today across the nation’s capital. Here’s the latest:
— In the courts:“Trump’s power to fire executive branch officials will be tested in another lawsuit,” by POLITICO’s Josh Gerstein: “[Hampton] Dellinger was appointed by President Joe Biden to lead the Office of Special Counsel … Dellinger sued Monday in federal court in Washington after being sacked Friday in an email sent by Sergio Gor, director of the Presidential Personnel Office in the White House.” The suit is a test of “the president’s power to fire officials across the executive branch despite federal laws that seek to protect those officials from politically motivated firings.”
— USDA: Despite the White House’s assurances that the federal funding freeze would not affect money for “individuals,” farmers across the country report that they are missing millions of dollars in funding on projects they were promised would be financed, WaPo’s Daniel Wu, Gaya Gupta and Anumita Kaur report.
— CFPB: In an email this morning to employees of the Consumer FInancial Protection Bureau, acting CFPB chief (and OMB Director) Russell Vought told staffers to “stand down from performing any work tasks” and remain at home this week, CNN’s Matt Egan reports.
— USAID: The embattled agency sent out a note to its remaining staff today telling employees to telework since staff can’t go to the “former” offices, per WSJ’s Alex Ward, who reports that multiple staffers have “reached out saying they aren’t allowed into their offices, blocking them from getting computers to telework at home.”
— Treasury: “The Trump administration is making an urgent push to end a court order barring top officials’ access to the federal government’s massive payment system operated by the Treasury Department, saying the ‘remarkable intrusion’ is unconstitutional and should be ‘dissolved immediately,’” per POLITICO’s Kyle Cheney.
On Saturday, in response to a lawsuit by several states claiming that Elon Musk and his allies at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency could be exposing the database to hacking, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer barred “system access to all but career employees who had taken proper trainings.”
Now, “Justice Department lawyers say they are negotiating with the states to come up with a quick agreement to narrow Engelmayer’s order. Early Monday, [U.S. District Judge Jeannette] Vargas said that if they failed to reach an agreement by 5 p.m. she would demand an expedited review of the matter by late Monday night.”
Related read: In a rare joint NYT’s op-ed, former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew and Janet Yellen warn against allowing DOGE to access to Treasury’s payment system, noting Musk and his team “have not been subject to the same rigorous ethics rules as civil servants.” The group also emphasized that Musk’s threats to cease certain congressionally approved payments “would be unlawful and corrosive to our democracy.”
Good Monday afternoon. Thanks for reading Playbook PM. Drop me a line at birvine@politico.com.
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Democrats are facing mounting pressure from constituents to ramp up their efforts against Donald Trump and Elon Musk. | Francis Chung/POLITICO
1. THE LOYAL OPPOSITION: Democrats are facing mounting pressure from constituents to ramp up their efforts against Trump and Musk despite their limited political leverage in the Republican-controlled Congress.
In the Senate: “Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sent a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter to his caucus on Monday that detailed four strategies to counter Trump: investigations, litigation through the courts, legislation and party messaging,” POLITICO’s Jordain Carney reports.
Not on the table: A shutdown fight. “Schumer pushed back against recent rumblings that Democrats might walk away from the negotiating table on spending bills, saying his party wants to avoid a ‘Trump shutdown’ and supports bipartisan negotiations to try to find a funding deal,” Jordain writes. Read Schumer’s “Dear Colleague” letter
Seeding the clouds: Senate Democrats today launched an online portal for federal workers to submit any reports of what they see as unlawful activities in their respective agencies,” WaPo’s Mariana Alfaro reports.
In the House: Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced the launch of the “Rapid Response Task Force and Litigation Working Group" in a letter to his colleagues today, POLITICO’s Nicholas Wu reports. The task force is part of a “multifaceted struggle to protect and defend everyday Americans from the harm being inflicted by this administration," Jeffries wrote.
2. MIDDLE EAST LATEST: Hamas announced today that it’s delaying the hostage release that is scheduled for this Saturday until further notice, claiming Israel violated the terms of the fragile cease-fire agreement multiple times over the last three weeks, per the AP. Both sides have carried out five separate prisoner swaps since the deal went into place last month, with a planned upcoming Saturday release that would exchange “three Israeli hostages for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.” A Hamas spokesman did not specify the length of the delay, but said Israel’s violations include “delays in allowing displaced Palestinians to return to northern Gaza, targeting them with airstrikes and gunfire across various areas of the Strip, and failing to facilitate the entry of humanitarian aid as agreed.”
Hamas’ statement comes just hours after Fox News released part of an interview with the president in which he said that Palestinians in Gaza would not have a right to return under his “takeover” proposal, despite officials claiming he was calling for the temporary relocation.
3. IMMIGRATION FILES: An estimated 1,000 migrant families that were separated under the first Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy have yet to be reunited. And though the second Trump administration is required by a 2023 court decision to continue reunification efforts, the president’s team “is still debating how to abide by that settlement — and whether it will at all,” WSJ’s Elizabeth Findell reports.
Hours into office, Trump eliminated the task force designed to reunite and provide benefits for separated families. For the families that have yet to be reunited, hope is fading. And even for those that have been, anxiety is high as they wait “to see how Trump will handle settlement provisions to allow them to keep living in the U.S.,” while attorneys “are waiting for DHS to outline its process for carrying out the settlement requirements without the task force.”
Meanwhile, as Trump’s crackdown on immigration and Mexican drug smuggling continues, U.S. spy planes have drastically increased their surveillance efforts in recent weeks, “flying at least 18 missions over the southwestern US and in international airspace around the Baja peninsula,” CNN’s Avery Schmitz, Katie Bo Lillis, Priscilla Alvarez and Natasha Bertrand report.
4. TRAINING TROUBLES: “They trained on diversity under Trump. Now he’s punishing them for it,” by WaPo’s Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson: “[D]ozens of employees who attended [an Education Department] diversity program — many during Trump’s first term — have been placed on leave because of it … [DOGE staff] had combed through employees’ files to uncover and target staffers who had taken single diversity trainings, sometimes years before.”
5. KNOWING EMIL BOVE: Former federal prosecutor Emil Bove’s stalled career in private practice was revived after he joined Trump’s defense team in 2023. Now, the “normally reserved” acting deputy AG has been shoved “to the center of Trump’s combative agenda” as he upends the DOJ, WSJ’s Corinne Ramey writes in a new profile.
In the past, Bove’s “relentlessness helped him prosecute terrorists, build high-level narcotics cases and earn top marks at the annual athletic competition at his local CrossFit gym. But in New York, his brusque, fist-pounding approach at times stymied his career.”
Now, he’s Trump’s enforcer at DOJ. “He sent FBI leaders packing. He ordered agents to work immigration cases. And when the feds conducted their first immigration raid of the new Trump era, he flew to Chicago to watch the arrests himself.”
6. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE: Among the lesser-publicized casualties of the early Trump 2.0 era is a “first-of-its-kind assessment of nature across the United States,” which was nearly ready for submission before Trump abruptly ended the Biden-era effort via executive order, NYT’s Catrin Einhorn reports. Now, the team of more than 150 researchers behind the National Nature Assessment are looking into ways to finish the report and publish it without federal funding.
What it is: “The study was intended to measure how the nation’s lands, water and wildlife are faring,” with volunteers outside the federal workforce making up the majority of the authors.
One big hurdle: Now they face “perhaps the trickiest question: How can the report maintain the stature and the influence of a government assessment now that it won’t be released by the government?”
PLAYBOOK TRAFFIC REPORT — “D.C. managed to avoid return-to-office chaos over Navy Yard parking shortage,” by WaPo’s Rachel Weiner: “At 5 a.m. Monday, cars were backed up all the way across the 11th Street Bridge. But by 7 a.m. traffic had cleared up. Most arrivals came by foot from the Navy Yard Metro station. A few traveled by bike.”
TRANSITIONS — Daniel Kritenbrink is now a partner at The Asia Group (TAG). He previously was the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. … Julie Edelstein is now a partner at Wiggin and Dana LLP. She most recently was principal deputy chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section in DOJ’s national security division.
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