Attention to the Unseen

Politico reports: Elon Musk’s efforts to disrupt and dismantle the federal government at the behest of Donald Trump have already sparked a legion of lawsuits. Now the legal challengers are setting their sights on a new target: Musk himself. Two new cases accuse the ultra-wealthy CEO of illegally amassing too much government power without the accountability typically required of high-level executive branch officials. They are seeking court orders that would force Musk to halt the cost-cutting and information-gathering activities he…

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Quinta Jurecic writes: During his first term in office, Donald Trump loved to complain about judges on social media. Reliably, whenever his agenda was held up in court or his allies faced legal consequences, he would snipe online about “so-called judges” and a “broken and unfair” legal system. Now, in Trump’s second term, this genre of cranky presidential post has returned. A judge who blocked the administration’s mass freeze of federal-grant funding is “highly political” and an “activist,” according to…

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The New York Times reports: Danielle R. Sassoon shot like a laser through the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, with stints fighting violent crime and securities fraud as well as handling appeals before she was elevated, at age 38, to be its interim head. There, just weeks into her tenure running the country’s most prestigious federal prosecutor’s office, she encountered an obstacle that threatened to stall her rapid rise: the desire of President Trump’s administration to drop corruption charges against New…

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Sarah Harrison writes: At the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, he and his administration have issued unprecedented directives to halt domestic and foreign spending in order to align that spending with his “America First” agenda. The orders have had immediate and sweeping impacts, including widespread confusion over exactly what funding must be paused, ensnaring billions of dollars in the freeze and ending the employment of federal workers and contractors necessary to execute on those funds. Although the White House Office of Management…

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  The New Republic: “Five inspector generals that were looking into Elon Musk’s companies were fired by the Trump-Musk administration,” said Texas Representative Greg Casar. “These inspector generals, who are independent, protected by law; they are the people that find the waste, fraud, and abuse … fired because they were looking into Elon Musk.” “You know what Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be looking into?” Casar continued. “His own contracts.” “Just last year, Elon Musk was promised $3 billion from…

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  The Trump administration has seen several of its executive orders frozen — from its campaign to end birthright citizenship to the destruction of USAID. Now a judge in Rhode Island has become the first to declare that the White House has disobeyed a court order. Could this signal the start of a constitutional crisis? Harvard law professor and Bloomberg columnist Noah Feldman joins Walter Isaacson to discuss.

The New York Times reports: President Trump has been in office less than a month, and Elon Musk’s vast business empire is already benefiting — or is now in a decidedly better position to benefit. Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man who has been given enormous power by the president, have been dismantling federal agencies across the government. Mr. Trump has fired top officials and pushed out career employees. Many of them were leading investigations, enforcement matters…

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Lawrence Hurley writes: Lawyers challenging President Donald Trump’s aggressive use of executive power in the courts are turning to a familiar weapon in their armory: an obscure but routinely invoked federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act. While lawsuits challenging such provocative plans as ending birthright citizenship and dismantling federal agencies raise weighty constitutional issues, they also claim Trump failed to follow the correct procedures as required under the wonky 1946 statute. Trump fell afoul of the law in some…

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The Verge reports: The Trump administration breached a federal privacy law by letting workers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access information on millions of government workers, privacy advocates including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) allege in a new lawsuit filed on behalf of two labor unions and a group of current and former federal employees. The groups allege that DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) violated the Privacy Act of 1974, which protects information maintained…

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The New York Times reports: A federal judge on Monday said the White House has defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, marking the first time a judge has expressly declared that the Trump White House was disobeying a judicial mandate. The ruling by Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island federal court ordered Trump administration officials to comply with what he called “the plain text” of an edict he issued on Jan. 29. That…

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By Jake Pearson and Anjeanette Damon This story was originally published by ProPublica When the federal courts first blocked the Trump administration’s funding freeze, Jessyca Leach was cautiously optimistic. For days, the pause had prevented her from accessing the money she needs for her Phoenix health clinic to serve thousands of at-risk people, most of them poor and many of them members of the LGBTQ+ community. Things had gotten so bad that she had to lay off three employees and…

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Politico reports: President Donald Trump has removed the director of the Office of Government Ethics, an official tasked with ensuring government workers comply with conflict of interest and ethics requirements. David Huitema was confirmed by the Senate in December for a five-year term. His dismissal was announced in one sentence on the OGE website, stating that the office had been notified that Trump is removing him as director. The website also said OGE will revert to an acting director: Shelley…

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