u/John3262005

When Kenni Miller started as a shift manager in his local Sheetz convenience store in Altoona, Pa., he felt something that he rarely had as a Black man in the workplace.

He felt trusted. He felt appreciated.

When he was fired a few weeks later, in the summer of 2020 after a background check, Mr. Miller, then 27, was devastated. A nonviolent, felony drug conviction from his teenage years had never caused him to be denied a job before. And he already proved he could do the work.

“I was well spoken,” Mr. Miller told The New York Times in an interview. “They had me running the cash register, talking to people, all the customers. I’m doing these things, learning the whole store, so I’m equipped for the job. That’s not the issue here, right?”

In 2024, Mr. Miller was part of a class-action lawsuit against Sheetz filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that the company’s criminal background checks disproportionately screened out applicants of color.

But soon after President Trump took office, the E.E.O.C. abruptly dropped the case.

The agency cited an executive order by Mr. Trump that directed federal agencies to “deprioritize” cases like Mr. Miller’s, in which companies are scrutinized not for intentional discrimination, but for having policies that have an unintentional, “disparate impact” on minority applicants.

The result has been an abandonment of civil rights cases across the federal government, in departments including education, housing, trade, justice and the E.E.O.C. There is no public accounting of exactly how many cases have been closed, but legal advocates describe a generational void in civil rights enforcement.

“It is absolutely widespread, and it is absolutely devastating,” said Dariely Rodriguez, chief counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “We know a lot of time with discrimination, there’s rarely a smoking gun. A lot of people don’t know that they’re being subjected to discrimination. We need our federal agencies to look into that hidden discrimination.”

For Mr. Trump, the directive against disparate impact litigation is part of a broader push to eradicate “diversity, equity and inclusion” — a catchall term increasingly used to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male — from every part of American life.

He and other opponents of the cases argue that employers should not be penalized for the mere implication of discrimination, usually shown through statistics. Instead, they say, the focus should be directed at explicit and intentional discrimination.

Nick Ruffner, a spokesman for Sheetz, declined to comment on the E.E.O.C’s decision to dismiss its lawsuit. But he said in a statement, “Sheetz does not tolerate discrimination of any kind,” and the company wanted “to reaffirm our commitment to fairness, inclusivity, and treating every team member and customer with respect.”

The impact of the decision to abandon discrimination cases has been felt acutely by those who have turned to the E.E.O.C., the nation’s top enforcer of workplace discrimination laws.

Under its new chair, Andrea Lucas, the agency has aggressively prioritized Mr. Trump’s goals, such as pursuing cases of white men who believe they have been discriminated against.

The agency declined to comment on specific lawsuits. But in a statement, Ms. Lucas said “rooting out race and sex discrimination has always been central to the E.E.O.C.’s mission.”

The test of disparate impact liability was established in 1971 and has been the legal theory crucial to enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned racial discrimination by employers and other institutions.

One widely cited example of disparate impact has been the Jim Crow-era literacy tests that some states created as a condition to vote. The tests did not ask about race and so seemed neutral on their face. But they disproportionately prevented Black people from voting because they had long been forced out of schools.

Amalea Smirniotopoulos, senior policy counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which successfully argued the first disparate impact case at the Supreme Court, said the legal theory is a recognition of the remnants of state-sanctioned discrimination.

“We didn’t just want to take down the ‘Whites only’ signs,” Ms. Smirniotopoulos said. “Fundamentally, the civil rights movement was fighting for the ability for people to actually get living wage jobs, and housing, access to mortgages, and all of the things that actually make for an equal society.”

The measure was codified by Congress in 1991, and upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as 2015. Because disparate impact remains codified in law — which the president cannot erase unilaterally — Mr. Trump could only demand that agencies stop making the cases a priority.

The agencies have taken heed.

The Education Department, which has severely drawn back its civil rights investigations, stopped pursuing disparate impact investigations in areas like school discipline.

The Department of Housing withdrew guidance for how the agency would assess disparate impact in enforcing fair housing laws, including redlining, and began dropping housing discrimination cases from its docket. In one instance, a public housing authority found to have favored white applicants withdrew a settlement two days after its offer, citing Mr. Trump’s order, according to an investigation by ProPublica.

The Federal Trade Commission dismissed its claims of discrimination it had brought against three Texas car dealerships for discriminating against Black and Latino consumers in charging more for add-ons.

The Department of Justice also dropped several high-profile cases predicated on disparate impact theory, including several lawsuits against police and fire departments whose hiring policies and exams were found to be discriminatory. It also recently terminated the first-ever environmental justice settlement in which Alabama officials were supposed to provide septic tanks to Black residents. The Trump administration called the plan “illegal D.E.I.” and scrapped the deal. The agency also issued a rule that eliminated disparate impact from its enforcement of Title VI.

And the Office of Management and Budget, which sets policy for the entire federal government, proposed a sweeping new regulation that prohibits the use of federal funds to “promote or support theories of disparate-impact liability” for all agencies.

The rule could ban federal funding for studies, litigation or other activities predicated on the idea that certain policies and practices could disproportionately harm certain groups — which could affect everything from the study of maternal mortality disparities at the Department of Health and Human Services to grant-funded organizations that tackle issues like housing.

Filling in the gaps are legal advocacy groups that are trying to keep cases going. Mr. Miller, with the help of a team of private attorneys, decided to become a named plaintiff in the Sheetz case, to take the place of the E.E.O.C. in the lawsuit.

“What the administration or folks who support dropping disparate impact say is that they want people to be judged by their merits,” said Pooja Shethji, a lawyer at Outten & Golden LLP, one of the lawyers representing Mr. Miller, “and that’s exactly what Mr. Miller wants — to be judged by the work, and his qualifications.”

The request is still pending before a judge, and a ruling could come down any day.

Mr. Miller said he has found a new job, but the shame he felt walking down the road with his nametag after he’d been abruptly let go still weighs on him. He said he felt compelled to stand up for Black men in America, who are often overlooked and over-incarcerated.

The E.E.O.C. found that Sheetz background check resulted in 14.5 percent of Black job applicants being denied employment, while 13 percent of Native American applicants and 13.5 percent of multiracial candidates were screened out. The denial rate for white applicants was less than 8 percent.

“The average me doesn’t come back from a situation like that,” Mr. Miller said. “I want to be the one who speaks up for this situation — which is life after having a job — and make sure jobs are held accountable.”

While Mr. Trump’s order specifically took aim at race-based cases, it has broad consequences for other groups, including women, L.G.B.T.Q. people and people with disabilities.

When Leah Cross started training for a new job as an Amazon delivery driver, her female colleagues gave her a piece of advice that they said would “help her keep up with the boys.”

She should purchase a “Shewee,” they told her, the camping device used by women to urinate in the woods, or in otherwise remote areas. It would help her meet her delivery quotas and avoid being punished for straying from her route for a bathroom break — a predicament her male colleagues rarely found themselves in because they could easily urinate in bottles.

Ms. Cross felt up to the challenge. When she landed a job at the world’s biggest online retail giant in August 2022, she felt like she had made it.

“Getting a leg into that industry, I saw it as, like, working for Google,” Ms. Cross recalled in an interview. “I know it’s not amazing, but I was just kind of like, ‘Hey, I’m part of something.’”

But by the end of her four-month stint she felt she was part of a humiliating trend. Like her female colleagues, she was relieving herself in her delivery van several times a day. She had received phone calls from her manager when he was notified that she deviated from her route, often to find a bathroom to use sanitary products. In November 2022, she was fired for “failure to perform.”

Ms. Cross was among three former Amazon workers who filed a grievance against Amazon in 2023, alleging the company violated wage laws by introducing strict delivery quotas and monitoring drivers with GPS tracking and surveillance cameras that alerted supervisors if a driver went off route for a bathroom break.

Ms. Cross went further, also filing a discrimination charge with the E.E.O.C. that year, alleging that women suffered disproportionately from Amazon’s strict policies because women could not urinate in bottles as easily as men and are more likely to need access to bathrooms to take care of menstruation needs.

A spokeswoman for Amazon declined to comment on Ms. Cross’s complaint. The company has maintained that workers are allowed to take bathroom breaks, and that its delivery app shows where public bathrooms are.

“You don’t see a lot of females to look up to when you’re starting this position, because it takes a lot for females to meet these working conditions,” Ms. Cross said.

In December 2024, the E.E.O.C. contacted Ms. Cross, stating that it was “very interested in moving forward with Ms. Cross’s case.”

“I kind of accepted at that time that there wasn’t a whole lot that I could do based on my standing, and financial background,” Ms. Cross said. “But I saw hope.”

But last fall, the agency notified Ms. Cross that it would no longer be investigating her case, citing Mr. Trump’s directive. Ms. Cross, with the backing of three legal advocacy groups, unsuccessfully sued the E.E.O.C. last year over its withdrawal from disparate impact cases. A judge dismissed her case.

The case illuminated the difficult path ahead for many Americans, particularly for those who don’t have the resources to take on big companies and for whom the federal government has been their only recourse.

And civil rights attorneys say that because of the administration’s attacks on D.E.I., it is getting harder to find people willing to be the face and name of private lawsuits.

“It takes a lot of bravery in this moment,” Ms. Smirniotopoulos said, “considering what it means to have the president and the federal government saying that discrimination doesn’t exist.”

The Trump administration is scrapping more than three dozen firearms regulations, abandoning a crackdown on illegal sales, restoring gun rights to some people with mental illness and loosening oversight of private weapons transactions.

The drastic retrenchment at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency responsible for enforcing the nation’s gun laws, was not entirely unexpected: President Trump campaigned as a champion of gun rights.

In the view of critics and even some A.T.F. veterans, the agency, in closely mirroring the demands made by gun owners and manufacturers to lighten their regulatory burden, is enacting changes at the expense of public safety. The moves, they worry, come as the bureau has already been weakened, with hundreds of its officials diverted to immigration enforcement.

Proponents of the changes point out that some of the reversals would return regulations to what they were only a few years ago, before President Joseph R. Biden took office. After a series of deadly mass shootings, Mr. Biden signed into law gun control measures, ending nearly three decades of gridlock over whether and how to regulate firearms.

The divisiveness illustrates the complicated landscape for gun policy.

“With the Biden regulations that we got and put in place, we advanced the ball,” said Kris Brown, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the country’s biggest gun control organizations.

But the Trump administration’s approach “takes us back 100 years,” she said. “It’s really decimating A.T.F.’s ability to regulate this industry.”

A White House official said the administration’s policies reflected Mr. Trump’s commitment to ensuring that Americans could exercise their Second Amendment rights, accusing the Biden administration of bypassing Congress and using the regulatory process to restrict gun rights.

Mark Oliva, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry’s trade association, said the changes were meant to clarify gun regulations.

“We want clarity to know how we’re going to be able to conduct business,” he said, “to be able to produce and to be able to sell firearms in accordance with the laws and regulations that govern our industry.”

Already, the administration has done away with major policies, including a zero-tolerance approach toward gun dealers who repeatedly broke the law. The more than three dozen rules that it has moved to eliminate would raise the legal threshold for revoking a dealer’s license; extend gun rights to buyers who had faced restrictions because of mental illness or inability to manage their own finances; and end extra scrutiny of stabilizing braces, gun accessories that have been used in mass shootings to lethal effect.

The administration is now targeting gun regulations that Democrats have passed at the state and local levels. It has challenged bans on semiautomatic rifles in Colorado, the District of Columbia and Virginia. On Wednesday, it sued California for its restrictions on the sale of Glock and Glock-style handguns, and Virginia for limits on the sale of semiautomatic rifles, hours after both laws went into effect.

Since his first run for office, Mr. Trump has positioned himself as an ardent supporter of gun rights. In the run-up to the 2024 election, he vowed to be “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House.” Days after being inaugurated, he signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to scrutinize what he described as “ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.”

By May 2025, the A.T.F. had overturned its “zero-tolerance” policy, which had empowered its inspectors to revoke the licenses of federal gun dealers who were known to have broken the law. Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, said it had “unfairly targeted law-abiding gun owners and created an undue burden.” The policy increased the chances that dealers who had falsified business records, skipped background checks or otherwise sold guns to people prohibited from owning them would face consequences. The agency ultimately revoked more than 600 licenses. But critics say that the new standards seriously curb the agency’s ability to do so.

It is a part of a broader bid across government to enact changes in line with the president’s directive. The Veterans Affairs Department in February removed the requirement that veterans who require a fiduciary to manage their benefits be prohibited from buying firearms, and veterans who were previously reported to the F.B.I. were being removed from its list. The Health and Human Services Department slashed funding for research into gun violence prevention. The U.S. Postal Service has proposed allowing people to ship handguns in the mail, upending a nearly century-old law.

In realigning the Justice Department’s priorities to bolster Mr. Trump’s agenda, the agency said in December that it would balance defending the right to own a gun with ensuring the public’s safety.

But when the A.T.F. announced in April nearly three dozen changes, the administration’s own analyses acknowledged the pitfalls to public safety.

The A.T.F.’s director, Rob Cekada, defended the agency’s approach. In a statement, he said that it reflected an effort to be as explicit as possible about “the full range of costs and benefits, including even remote scenarios.”

“This was an honest attempt to fully and transparently inform the public and is exactly the kind of analysis the comment period exists to test,” he said.

In unveiling more changes on Friday, including eliminating fingerprinting requirements for certain firearms applications, Mr. Cekada again asserted that the agency was committed to public safety, pointing to a news release that heralded how its shift in priorities had led to the seizure of nearly 50,000 firearms and the handling of nearly 950,000 gun trace requests. Still, the data is far from a complete picture because it does not reflect all the policies the Trump administration has rolled back and because many of its proposals have yet to go into effect.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, in announcing the proposals in April, said that the moves struck a careful balance between the interests of the gun industry and gun owners, as well as public safety. “For too long, regulations were written without any real understanding of how firearms businesses operate, how lawful gun owners actually handle their firearms or what truly improves public safety,” he said.

One proposed change allowing more people with a history of mental illness to have a gun would mean that the public safety risk could range from minimal to considerably greater, “up to and including potential mass casualty events,” according to a cost analysis by the agency. For instance, people involuntarily committed to a mental health institution would still be barred from owning a gun, whereas those who voluntarily enter those facilities would not. The rule also seeks to extend the Veterans Affairs Department’s policy to ensure that all Americans unable to manage their financial affairs, not just veterans, are not automatically prohibited from buying a gun.

In the analysis of another proposal, seeking to undo a Biden-era rule intensifying scrutiny of the use of stabilizing braces, the agency acknowledged that the gun accessory to create “dangerous, easily concealed weapons would pose an increased public safety problem.”

The agency is also proposing a higher bar to revoke a federal gun dealer’s license, instead requiring evidence that the dealer knew that it was violating the law. The agency said in its analysis that it expected the number of federal firearms licenses it revoked to drop “considerably” both under the new rule and “shifting enforcement priorities.”

Another rule would reinstate the so-called gun show loophole, which required background checks for gun shows and certain private sales as a way to crack down on straw purchasers, or people who illegally buy guns on behalf of another.

Critics warned of the potential consequences. The rapid changes under the Trump administration flew in the face of its vow to be tough on crime, they said, crediting the Biden-era measures for helping to bring down the murder rate after coronavirus pandemic highs, though experts have suggested that a number of factors could have contributed to the drop.

“These guns are going to start to percolate back out into the community over the next couple of years,” said Marianna Mitchem, a former A.T.F. official who now advises Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit advocacy group founded by Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.

She added, “I sadly expect that we will see an increase in violent crime.”

Even as the proposals have yet to take effect, some supporters of gun rights are pushing for the regulations to be loosened even further.

Erich Pratt, the senior vice president of Gun Owners of America, one of the country’s largest gun advocacy groups, said it was not enough to simply revert to regulatory standards on the books before the Biden administration.

His group, for instance, opposes the Justice Department’s approach to a 2022 rule directing federal licensed gun dealers to hold on to records indefinitely, reducing the amount of time that gun dealers have to keep records of sales. It has argued that the administration should eliminate the requirement altogether.

“The A.T.F. proposals are a mixed bag,” he said, adding, “Gun owners would expect better from our Republican Justice Department.”

The closely watched jobless rate for the post-9/11 generation of veterans bumped up from 4.1% in May to 4.8% in June as the nation’s ability to create new jobs took a nosedive, according to a monthly jobs report released Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The report also showed an increase in the unemployment rate for all veterans from a remarkably low 3.2% in May to 4.1% in June, despite the continued strong showing of women veterans in the labor market.

The BLS data showed that the jobless rate for women veterans has come down from 7.1% in March to 4.4% in April and 3.3% in May before ticking up to 3.6% in June, which was still well below the month’s unemployment rate for the general population (4.1%).

For many analysts, the most concerning figures in the BLS report were the weak numbers on job creation. Total nonfarm payroll employment changed little in June by adding 57,000 jobs, about half of what analysts predicted.

A main concern was the hiring slowdown in the healthcare sector, which has consistently been setting the pace for adding jobs through both the Biden and Trump administrations.

The BLS report said that employment in healthcare added 22,000 jobs in June, “but at a slower pace than the average monthly gain over the prior 12 months of 38,000.”

Leisure and hospitality employment, meanwhile, usually a strong performer, declined by 61,000 jobs in June, “reflecting weaker than usual seasonal hiring,” the report said. Thus far in 2026, “employment in the industry has shown little net change.”

Overall, “it’s a pretty disappointing jobs report,” Heather Long, chief economist for the Navy Federal Credit Union, told Military Times in a phone interview.

“Tech is still strong,” she said, “but healthcare has cooled off a little bit,” and “wages are not keeping up with inflation.”

Long noted increases in the unemployment rates for veterans but added that the data is from a relatively small sample.

“That’s why you see a lot of movement” in the numbers for veterans, she said, adding that the “verdict is still out” on whether artificial intelligence will be the major job killer that many expect.

The AI impact on the jobs market is “not showing up in the data yet,” Natasha Sarin, a former assistant secretary at the Treasury Department under the Biden administration, told MS Now, which could be the result of new research showing that the expected impact of AI on white collar entry-level jobs may have been overstated.

The Trump administration sought to put the best face on the BLS report, showing a weakening labor market. Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, posted that the report “reinforces that the American labor market remains solid thanks to President Trump’s economic agenda.”

He called attention to the report that the nation added 3,000 manufacturing jobs in June, although that was down from 7,000 manufacturing jobs added in May.

New acting Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling stated that “Manufacturing employment, which was devastated under the Biden Administration, continues to grow as we secure historic investments and reshoring of critical industries,” despite the loss of 4,000 manufacturing jobs cited in the BLS report.

“President Trump’s America first agenda continues to provide greater wages for workers and certainty to the sectors which will fuel the next 250 years of U.S. economic security,” he added.

Despite the claims, the BLS data showed that wages were not keeping up with inflation. The report showed that wages rose 3.5% in June, while the annual inflation rate through May noted in a separate BLS report (the Consumer Price Index) rose by 4.2%.

The Trump administration plans to open a 528-bed holding facility for migrant families and unaccompanied children next to an airport hub, positioning itself to speed up deportations.

The location in Alexandria, Louisiana, would remove logistical headaches caused by wrangling children from foster homes and shelters across the country and not having anywhere to put them during final preparations for flight. Those obstacles were apparent last year when Guatemalan children were awoken at night and given almost no time to get to Harlingen, Texas, where they waited on an airport tarmac for hours.

A federal judge prevented their deportation, but the chaotic episode illustrated the challenges authorities face because they don’t have anywhere to put families and children near the airport. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is calling the Alexandria facility a “staging area,” not a detention center, and says people would only be there a few days at most.

However, several immigration advocates expressed concern that children could be held at the new facility for weeks or months, which happened at other federal immigration holding sites. These advocates are also concerned about oversight, and say the facility represents a departure from how the government manages those children.

“It’s an expansion of the deportation system in ways we haven’t seen before,” said Leecia Welch, chief legal counsel at the nonprofit Children’s Rights. “There’s just so much that could go wrong with this facility.”

Unaccompanied children who are in the U.S. without parents or close relatives are not taken to facilities overseen by ICE. Instead, the law says they must be swiftly placed in the care of state-licensed shelters and foster care programs.

Those are run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services. However, that agency isn’t involved in the Alexandria facility’s operation, according to a spokesperson at the airfield where it’s being built.

Instead, the facility would be run by a nonprofit arm of LaSalle Corrections, a private prison contractor, according to Ralph Hennessy, executive director of the England Airpark Authority. He said it could be operational as early as August.

ICE officials signed a contract late last month to build the facility at the former military base near Alexandria International Airport, roughly 175 miles (280 kilometers) northwest of New Orleans, Hennessy said.

It would operate as a 72-hour holding center for migrants awaiting deportation, according to records obtained by The Associated Press.

Compass Connections, a Texas-based nonprofit that runs shelters for unaccompanied immigrant children, had originally been tapped to help operate the facility and laid out plans during a public presentation in February.

But the company’s president, Sonya Thompson, told the AP last week that it was no longer involved. She did not elaborate.

In public board meetings, airpark officials said the facility is a “humanitarian effort” for families that are “self-deporting.” Immigration advocates say families and unaccompanied children sometimes make that decision under pressure or because they don’t understand their options.

“These are people that are volunteering to go back home and they’re going back home as a family unit,” Hennessy told the AP.

The facility would sit next to the nation’s largest hub for deportations. More than 4,400 immigration enforcement flights came into and out of the Alexandria International Airport in 2025, according to data from the ICE Flight Monitor, an initiative of Human Rights First. ICE planning documents say families and children at the facility “are in the legal custody of ICE and can only be released at the direction of ICE.”

The agency has instructed contractors that families at the facility cannot be referred to as prisoners, detainees or inmates, records show. The agency ordered contractors to not use bars or cages when transporting families and unaccompanied children. The facility will not be required to engage in headcounts and should allow families to “wear their own clothes,” the agency added.

Louisiana-based LaSalle Corrections runs a range of private prisons and federal immigration detention centers throughout the South, including the “Louisiana Lockup” inside the state’s maximum-security prison in Angola.

The official contractor for the new ICE holding facility will be the company’s nonprofit arm, the LaSalle Family Foundation. According to its tax records, the nonprofit provides chaplain services and educational programming in correctional facilities.

However, LaSalle Corrections itself will be involved in operating the holding facility and ensuring compliance, the company’s chief financial officer, Tim Kurpiewski, wrote in an email reviewed by the AP.

The deaths of two detainees have been reported since April at a LaSalle-run ICE facility in the state.

Winn Correctional Center was also found in June to have violated standards governing environmental health and safety, food service, use-of-force, medical care and other subjects, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has signed a new memo creating a Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager (DRPM) for autonomy, as part of a high-level effort to keep pace with adversaries’ drone programs, Breaking Defense has learned.

That role, which would report directly to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, would subsume a significant portion of unmanned systems efforts currently underway at the service level — including all ground vehicles, all small air vehicles and almost all sea vehicles — under one “czar.”

Known as DRPM-UxS, the job will serve as “the single joint integrator for all unmanned and autonomous system programs” within the Pentagon, per the memo, which was signed Monday and obtained by Breaking Defense. Hours after publication of this story, the Pentagon released the memo to the public.

“Adversaries collectively produce millions of unmanned systems each year across all Domains,” Hegseth wrote in the memo. “While global military unmanned systems production has skyrocketed over the last three years, the United States has been slow to field these capabilities at scale. Drones and autonomous systems are the most consequential battlefield innovation of this generation. The [Pentagon] must move at the speed this moment demands.”

President Donald Trump long ago left the Screen Actors Guild—which he joined in 1989 following his debut in the supernatural romcom Ghosts Can’t Do It—but he continues to receive a five-figure pension from the union, years after his departure.

The president’s mandatory financial disclosure for 2025 reveals he received $77,808 in pension funds last year, or about $6,484 monthly, from SAG. Trump became eligible for a pension through the union in 1992, the same year he had a cameo in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. He also received an $8,724 annual pension from the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which he likewise became a member of in 1989.

Trump reported residuals worth less than $201 each for appearances on programs and films including Zoolander, The Nanny, Sex & the City, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the Ellen Degeneres Show, and Little Rascals, according to the filings.

The payout is just a fraction of the more than $2.2 billion in income Trump disclosed in 2025—an amount far exceeding that of any other president and dwarfing the at least $622 million he pulled in prior to his second presidential term in 2024. That total includes $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures. White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly told Fortune in a statement that neither Trump nor his family has or even will engage in conflicts of interest.

Trump continues to receive SAG-AFTRA payments despite not being a member for five years. The president resigned from the union in 2021, following threats from SAG-AFTRA to expel him for his involvement in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Losing union membership does not prohibit anyone from performing, and under federal labor laws, vested members of the union are guaranteed retirement benefits, including a pension.

Weeks after the riot, SAG-AFTRA voted “overwhelmingly” that there was probable cause Trump had violated the union’s membership terms through his role on January 6, which the union called “a reckless campaign of misinformation aimed at discrediting and ultimately threatening the safety of journalists, many of whom are SAG-AFTRA members.” Trump was later indicted for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election that culminated in the siege, but the case was dismissed following his presidential victory in November 2024.

Prior to a disciplinary committee weighing his case, Trump stepped down from the union, writing in response to the hearing, “Who cares!”

“I no longer wish to be associated with your union,” Trump wrote in his resignation letter to the guild. “As such, this letter is to inform you of my immediate resignation from SAG-AFTRA. You have done nothing for me.”

Trump made hundreds of millions of dollars through his decades-long career in entertainment, including $427 million from The Apprentice, his reality-show vehicle that ran from 2004 to 2015. In 2024, Trump received $102,408 in pension funds from SAG-AFTRA, filings show.

The White House’s $88 billion emergency spending request is at risk on Capitol Hill as bipartisan frustration grows that the Pentagon has not been forthcoming with details about the $67.1 billion in defense dollars in the package.

Even key Republicans who want to pass an infusion of Pentagon money for the Iran war and backfilling munitions emerged from a closed-door briefing with Pentagon officials on Wednesday upset that all their questions were not answered.

And time is running out for Congress to approve any money, with Trump administration officials warning that key Pentagon troop pay funding will start to run out by August amid the cost of the war in Iran, according to four Republicans involved in the talks, who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive Hill negotiations.

“We need more information,” Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), chair of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, said leaving the briefing. “We recognize that the department needs more money fast, because we expend it a lot, and we’re going to have to fill the hole, so we got to figure out exactly how much that is, and we got to do that as fast as possible.”

Senior appropriator Steve Womack (R-Ark.) described the meeting as “a little tense at times” as lawmakers probed the Defense Department officials for information.

“I think the [deputy Defense] secretary and the [Joint Chiefs] vice [chair] are understanding the frustration that we have with the general flow of information and justification,” Womack told reporters as he exited the briefing.

One Republican in the room said lawmakers kept asking DOD officials questions about the specifics of the funding request, and they kept getting replies along the lines of “we’ll get back to you on that.”

Calvert, one of the top Republicans shepherding the supplemental, said Congress needed more information “by yesterday,” but said he expects to “have more information here shortly,” without giving other details on timing.

House appropriators were briefed by Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg and Marine Gen. Christopher Mahoney, the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs.

President Donald Trump formally sent Congress a nearly $88 billion supplemental funding request last week to cover the costs of the Iran war, aid farmers and combat the Ebola virus. The $67 billion Pentagon portion of the package includes $21 billion to replenish U.S. stockpiles of missiles that have been heavily expended in the Middle East conflict. House GOP leaders are aiming to incorporate at least the Pentagon portion into another party-line bill, which also faces a time crunch and long odds.

Not all Republicans in the room were unsatisfied. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) called Feinberg and Mahoney “very competent, very skilled and very forthcoming.”

Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.), another senior appropriator, stressed the urgency of moving quickly as he left the meeting. When asked when the Pentagon needed the money, he replied: “Now.”

“This is really really really crucial,” Díaz-Balart added.

Part of the pitch by the Pentagon officials to lawmakers on Wednesday was an overhaul of how contracts for restocking weapons and munitions are managed that they promise will save taxpayers money.

“They’re changing the way that DOD contracts with contractors and holding contractors more responsible for the costs that previously were borne by the American government, hence the American people,” Fleischmann said following the briefing.

Calvert argued lawmakers should pass supplemental funding before Congress leaves for its lengthy August recess. But the House is only in session for two weeks in July before adjourning until September, leaving an incredibly narrow window to advance legislation. Speaker Mike Johnson is also mired in a hardline blockade that’s tanked major bills for two weeks, including the GOP’s $1.15 trillion Pentagon policy bill.

Democrats shared the same frustrations as their Republican colleagues — vowing to only support a supplemental package if the Trump administration provides more information. Republicans acknowledge they won’t be able to pass the military funding package without at least seven Senate Democrats — who still need to be convinced.

“We need information and on time,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) said. “I think, generally speaking, everybody — Democrats, Republicans — said we need information on time.”

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said similarly: “We need more information before we move forward.”

“We need a hell of a lot more detail. I think that was the message loud and clear today,” Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.) said.

Lawmakers in both parties, though, have long criticized the Pentagon for not keeping Congress in the loop on key decisions, including not providing Congress with timely budget information.

That extends to the emergency war funding proposal, which Calvert and other spending leaders have urged the Trump administration to send over for months.

“Everybody’s aware of what is at risk here, and I think one of the messages was, ‘We’ve been asking for this for months,’” Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-Texas) said of the meeting. “The clock’s ticking, and we have bills to pay.”

Top Democratic Defense appropriator Betty McCollum of Minnesota said the panel is waiting to see if Pentagon officials quickly provide them with promised details.

“We are waiting for more information,” McCollum said. “And until they get [us] more information, no one’s promising anything.”

The top healthcare official at the Department of Veterans Affairs is stepping down after less than a year on the job.

Undersecretary for Health John Bartrum told staff in an email last night that he will resign from his position, effective July 6. In this role, he oversaw VA’s nationwide health care system, which serves more than 9 million veterans.

Bartrum joined the VA in the early days of the second Trump administration, and was confirmed as the undersecretary for health by the Senate in December 2025. In his email to staff, he wrote, “I am proud of what we have accomplished together.”

“The most vital resource we have within the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is its people. It has been my honor to lead these professional civil servants,” Bartrum wrote.

VA Press Secretary Quinn Slaven said the department will make an announcement in the coming days regarding interim VHA leadership.

“We thank John for his leadership of VHA and the many VA accomplishments he presided over during his 17 months of service at the department,” Slaven said.

As undersecretary for health, Bartrum played a leading role in the VA’s resumed rollout of its new Electronic Health Record. The VA started deploying the new system to medical centers in April, after a three-year hiatus to address persistent outages and usability issues. More rollouts are expected later this year.

The EHR modernization project is expected to make health records interoperable between VA and the Defense Department. DoD completed its rollout of the new EHR in March 2024. VA expects to complete its rollout of the new EHR as soon as 2031.

This EHR modernization project, which began under the first Trump administration, is one of the biggest IT contracts in the federal government.

Last summer, federal officials were considering the fate of more than 100 ruffed lemurs, a critically endangered species known for the fluffy fur around its neck.

4J Conservation Center, an animal breeding facility based in Florida, had applied to renew its permit to raise the lemurs in captivity. Without the permit, the business would be forced to pause operations or shut down.

The application landed on the desk of Jenifer Chatfield, a top wildlife regulator at the Interior Department. Dr. Chatfield knew the business well: Her family owns 4J Conservation Center, and its application listed her as one of its veterinarians.

Within a day, Dr. Chatfield advanced the application through the agency’s complex permitting process.

It was not the only time that Dr. Chatfield’s government role intersected with her family’s business, according to hundreds of pages of documents reviewed by The New York Times.

She also helped write a proposed rule this year that would cut costs for facilities like 4J Conservation Center while narrowing the reach of the Endangered Species Act, the bedrock environmental law intended to prevent animal and plant extinctions, the documents show.

Ethics experts told The Times that Dr. Chatfield’s actions appeared to pose a conflict of interest, even if they were not actually self-dealing.

“We expect the federal government to be impartial, to act in the public interest, not to use federal power to help a family business,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in government ethics.

Aubrie Spady, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, declined to make Dr. Chatfield available for an interview or to answer specific questions but defended her record.

“Dr. Jenifer Chatfield has demonstrated nothing other than professionalism and expertise during her dedicated service at the department,” Ms. Spady said.

Dr. Chatfield joined the Interior Department in May 2025 as a senior adviser. She is currently the deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks. In that role, she oversees the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the main federal agency tasked with protecting vulnerable plants and animals from threats like climate change and habitat destruction.

In April, Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee asked the Interior Department’s inspector general to investigate Dr. Chatfield for “potential ethics violations” and “family favoritism.”

Ms. Spady would not confirm whether the inspector general has opened an investigation but criticized the request. “It’s a shame that liberals would try to smear the reputation of a nationally known female veterinarian,” she said.

Established in 2007 in Dade City, Fla., 4J Conservation Center appears to be named after Dr. Chatfield and her immediate family members: her father, John Chatfield; her mother, Jeri Chatfield; and her twin brother, Jason Chatfield.

The center, which is not open to the public, has housed a variety of exotic animals, including colobus monkeys, red kangaroos and ruffed lemurs, according to its government filings. Most of the lemurs are kept in enclosures that measure 12 feet across, 12 to 24 feet long and 8 feet high, the filings show.

Some animal-rights activists and scholars have criticized such enclosures, noting that lemurs like to leap over long distances in their native habitat, the rainforests of eastern Madagascar.

“4J is effectively a puppy mill for lemurs; it’s a pretty bleak existence,” said Delcianna J. Winders, the director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, who reviewed the facility’s permit applications at the request of The Times.

Attempts to contact John Chatfield, who serves as the president of 4J, were unsuccessful. An email to the address that he listed on 4J’s registration permit application bounced back. A man who answered a call to the phone number listed on the form said it was a wrong number.

The center sells or loans some of its lemurs to individuals, zoos and amusement parks, according to its permit applications. From 2020 to 2025, it sent more than 40 lemurs to Jungle Island, an “eco-adventure” park in Miami where visitors can pay $85 to feed and play with the animals, the applications show.

To remain in operation, captive wildlife facilities like 4J are required to renew their registration permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service every five years. They must also obtain an import permit or export permit before moving an endangered species across international borders.

Renewing the registration permits is a multistep process. First, the government verifies that the application is complete and publishes a notice in the Federal Register to solicit public comments. Then, the government pores through the public comments and application materials in detail. Finally, the application is approved or rejected.

On July 30, 2025, Dr. Chatfield approved the publication of a notice for 30 permit applications, including 4J’s renewal request, according to the documents reviewed by The Times. In its submission, 4J listed Dr. Chatfield as one of its veterinarians and included a copy of her résumé.

It took Dr. Chatfield one day to approve the notice for 4J. For context, it took her an average of 12 days to approve nine similar notices around the same time, the documents show.

The longest it took her was 96 days in the case of a notice for Zoo Atlanta, which was seeking an import permit to transport two giant pandas from China.

That 96-day delay, combined with a 43-day government shutdown, forced Zoo Atlanta to postpone a carefully choreographed FedEx flight to take the pandas halfway around the world, according to the documents.

In December 2025, Dr. Chatfield was appointed the Fish and Wildlife Service’s “new primary dereg P.O.C.,” or primary deregulation point of contact, replacing an employee of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to the documents reviewed by The Times.

In one of the documents, she wrote that her “No. 1” priority was a proposed rule that would significantly weaken requirements for captive wildlife facilities under the Endangered Species Act.

Currently, such facilities must reapply for a registration permit every five years at a cost of $100. To obtain the permit, they must show that their activities “enhance propagation or survival of the affected species.”

To meet this requirement, the facilities must participate in breeding programs that help preserve genetic diversity and prevent inbreeding. They also must track animal births and deaths in meticulous detail.

Under the changes drafted by Dr. Chatfield in the proposed rule, however, captive wildlife facilities would receive lifetime registration permits for $100. They would no longer need to demonstrate every five years that they were promoting a species’ long-term survival.

To justify these changes, Dr. Chatfield added language to the proposal that said it “reduces paperwork and costs for regulated entities (particularly small breeders, zoos and conservation programs),” according to the documents reviewed by The Times. 4J is considered a small breeder.

In February, Dr. Chatfield sent a draft of the proposal to political appointees in the Interior Department’s Office of the Solicitor, asking for their input, the documents show.

“Attached is some updated language in the proposed rule — I tracked changes to make it easier to see the new stuff,” she wrote. “Looking forward to making the draft even better with you guys tomorrow!”

While Dr. Chatfield consulted with other Trump administration appointees, she bypassed the career lawyers, scientists and regulatory experts who typically played a role in the rule-making process, according to the documents.

In March, one of those career scientists added a comment to the draft saying she could not concur with Dr. Chatfield’s changes. The scientist also voiced concerns to political appointees that the changes lacked a legal basis and threatened the recovery of endangered species, the documents show.

It is unclear when or if the draft proposal will be publicly released.

Federal ethics laws require senior government officials to file financial disclosure reports that detail their income and assets.

Separately, the Interior Department also requires officials to sign ethics agreements that detail projects that pose conflicts of interest, or the appearance of them. Ethics officials then determine whether the officials should recuse themselves from these projects or obtain waivers to work on them anyway.

In response to a request for all ethics documents for Dr. Chatfield, the Interior Department provided one financial disclosure report stating that Dr. Chatfield stopped working at 4J in December 2023.

However, 4J listed Dr. Chatfield as a “veterinarian-in-charge” in a February 2025 document certifying that several lemurs had a clean bill of health, and as a “consulting veterinarian” in a November 2025 application for a permit to export lemurs to Mozambique — six months after she joined the government.

4J also listed Dr. Chatfield as an officer in an annual report filed with the Florida Division of Corporations in April 2025. But the next month, the company filed an amended report that removed her from the list of officers.

Ethics experts said the apparent discrepancies in the documents raised questions about whether Dr. Chatfield failed to disclose 4J as a more recent employer or client.

“It seems pretty clear that one of these documents must be misrepresenting Chatfield’s role, which itself is a problem,” said Cynthia Brown, a senior ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit watchdog group.

She added, “This scenario reasonably raises a serious question: Is this person using her government position to help her family’s business and financial interests, which she previously had a direct stake in?”

Ms. Brown said it was ultimately unclear whether Dr. Chatfield’s actions violated the federal criminal conflict-of-interest law. But, she said, they could erode the public’s trust in the government to act impartially, whether on endangered species or other matters.

President Donald Trump said Sunday he personally overruled a recommendation to cancel the July Fourth “Salute to America” event on the National Mall after approaching storms forced a chaotic evacuation of hundreds of thousands of revelers and triple-digit heat cast a sweltering pall over much of the day.

The president — who took the stage just after 11 p.m. Saturday after a more than three-hour delay in the planned programming — on Sunday declared the event a rousing success in a Truth Social post.

“When I heard that it was cancelled, I immediately overturned that decision,” he wrote. He congratulated law enforcement officials for quickly rescreening people who wanted to return once the storms passed.

Still, the crowd who witnessed his speech and the fireworks show was less than half than those who had arrived earlier in the day, Trump said.

A senior White House official said Sunday that “all the entities involved” had recommended calling the festivities off altogether after storms forced the exodus from the Mall.

“When POTUS heard this, he told all involved to invite everyone back in and the speech would take place, even if it meant waiting until 2 a.m.,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

In the end, Trump got the July Fourth rally and pyrotechnic show he wanted. And much like the event itself, which effectively supplanted earlier plans for Washington’s July Fourth celebrations that had been in the works for years, it happened primarily through his own sheer force of will.

A spokesperson for Freedom 250 — the White House-led organization that put together Saturday’s event — did not respond to questions about Trump’s account of a recommended cancellation.

Those involved in the planning acknowledged that the weather had presented challenges throughout the day, strained the patience of revelers, and drawn questions from critics about whether officials had adequately prepared for a weather forecast that days before the event had called for high heat and a strong chance of dangerous storms.

But officials maintained they had spent months planning for all manner of emergency contingencies — including an evacuation prompted by the weather — and that those plans were followed successfully Saturday.

“There’s never an event when you have to move more than 100,000 people on short notice, that it doesn’t cause some type of bump in the road,” said Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesperson for the U.S. Secret Service, which led security and emergency planning for the event.

Trump said the crowd at 7 p.m. was 422,000 people and that at least 150,000 returned after evacuating. Officials did not provide immediate confirmation of those figures.

A D.C. official involved in the event’s organization said the District had no direct knowledge of conversations that may have occurred between the event’s organizers and the White House about a potential cancellation on Saturday. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the internal deliberations.

Because of the president’s plans to speak at the event, the Mall’s Fourth of July festivities were designated for the first time in its history a National Special Security Event, a classification typically reserved for high-profile events such as presidential inaugurations, the State of the Union address or visits from foreign dignitaries.

The designation placed the Secret Service in charge of coordinating preparations for security and emergency scenarios in coordination with a host of federal and local agencies. It also added a layer of security screening — including magnetometers that made entering and exiting the Mall site more complicated than the usual July Fourth event there.

Even before Saturday evening’s evacuations, several complications arose.

Guglielmi said officials decided to push back the opening time for Mall events, in hopes of sparing people the worst of the day’s heat. And by midafternoon, Constitution Avenue was already river of sweat-drenched red, white and blue.

Thousands tried to navigate a maze of metal barriers that, they hoped, would eventually lead to an entrance for the National Mall. Occasionally, boos rippled through the crowd as onlookers called out people who appeared to try to cut the line.

Parents sought to pacify children with technicolor snow cones, and group of friends splintered as some agreed to hunt down refreshments while others maintained a base in the shade.

Hawkers peddled Gatorade, telling passersby: “Don’t let dehydration ruin your vacation.”

Trump boasted of the “incredible crowds” on social media and asserted the weather wasn’t as bad as predicted.

Inside the security perimeter, 34 people were transported to local hospitals, many for heat-related ailments, according to D.C. Fire and EMS. Another 58 sought medical attention on-site, officials said.

But as skies darkened, lightning flashed and gusting winds swept through the Mall just after 7 p.m., crowds of people refused to heed the calls to evacuate. Many had already waited for hours in security lines in the heat.

“Show is over. Please keep moving,” one officer shouted to stragglers. “Rally canceled,” shouted another.

Exits backed up. Some people complained that it was unclear where they should head, and the scene grew increasingly tense. Social media video showed people yelling back at security personnel and National Guard troops flipping over a table to try to convince people to flee.

Mary Collins, 68, and her daughter-in-law Gretchen, 30, found themselves caught in the confusion.

Mary, who suffers from a brain tumor, had long enjoyed watching D.C.’s Fourth of July celebrations on PBS and traveled from Indiana this year hoping to experience the event in person while she was still healthy enough to attend.

But as the evacuation began, the crush of people, maze of barricades and web of law enforcement made it hard for them to find their way out.

“If we asked them how to get out, they’d just yell at us to keep moving,” Gretchen said Sunday.

The pair eventually sheltered for almost two hours in the Natural History Museum — one of several sites organizers told people to head to wait out the storm.

Some of those sites, including the IRS building, quickly reached capacity and began turning people away. Organizers told people on X to head to other locations, including the Department of Education, Jefferson Memorial, National Museum of American History and the Ronald Reagan Building.

The shelter sites had been identified long before the event, said Lindsey Appiah, D.C.’s deputy mayor for public safety and justice.

“There are plans that are put into place for different weather contingencies — where would people go to? You have to have those facilities,“ she said. ”In the planning process ... there were weather plans put into place."

Though D.C. served only as a partner in the broader federal planning for Saturday’s event, Appiah said the sheltering plans worked largely as anticipated.

“I think it’s always going to be a challenge to move tens of thousands of people ... that’s just the reality of it,” she said. “It’s not an easy logistical thing to do. I don’t think there’s a single event we can do that we look at that is there something we can do better.”

Meanwhile, organizers continued to monitor the weather and how other cities hosting large July Fourth events were responding.

New York, Boston and Philadelphia all either delayed or advanced their planned programing or briefly evacuated their events. Philadelphia’s fireworks display did not launch until after 2 a.m. after a delay of more than three hours, officials there said.

Back in D.C., Trump was adamant his event would continue.

“Storms bring luck to whatever the occasion. They also make events a little bit more exciting! We will wait it out.... It’s Saturday night, LETS HAVE SOME FUN, even if we are out late tonight,” he posted to social media just after 9 p.m.

Crowds cheered as the security checkpoints on the Mall reopened and officials announced that the planned festivities would continue. Still, there were widespread reports of backups and long lines at entry checkpoints, including the VIP entry.

Some people said they were directed to checkpoints only to find them closed and then had to walk several more blocks to get to an entrance.

Trump eventually took the stage roughly two hours later, only an hour after he was originally scheduled to speak. But much of the programming that had been scheduled to precede him, however, was scuttled or had to be rearranged.

As he addressed the significantly smaller crowd gathered on the Mall, the president acknowledged advisers had suggested calling off the event and scheduling a make-up celebration in the future. That wouldn’t work, he said he insisted, because it was important to celebrate on July Fourth on its designated day.

In the end, Trump maintained Sunday, more than 150,000 people stuck through heat, storms, and security confusion to watch what organizers described as a record-breaking fireworks display with more than 850,000 pyrotechnics.

Afterward, Trump declared the display the “best fireworks show, EVER.”

Celine Turcotte, 30, and Trent Wood, 29, were among those who returned for the spectacle. The pair had been turned away from the security line during the evacuation earlier in the evening after traveling from Charlotte.

But they said they never considered giving up on the event or worried it would be called off. On Sunday, they praised the security staff and National Guard for the largely smooth reentry process they said they experienced, though they described flashes of impatience from the crowds waiting in line to be let back in.

“I think it went fantastic,” Wood said.

Mary Collins and her daughter-in-law, though, weren’t around to see it.

Unnerved by their experiences earlier in the day, they returned to their Airbnb in Northeast D.C. There, they spotted another fireworks display dazzle the night sky, offering the patriotic flashes of color they had hoped for.

A federal judge ordered the Pentagon to give Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. a reprieve from a law that caused all of its lobbyists to drop it as a client while she considers the constitutionality of the measure, in a case set to test the US’s ability to curtail Chinese companies’ activities.

Washington’s most powerful lobbying firms rushed to sever ties with Alibaba and other Chinese tech giants after a new law targeting entities allegedly aiding China’s military took effect last week, Bloomberg News previously reported.

The restriction bars the Defense Department from working with any company represented by lobbyists who also work for entities blacklisted by the Pentagon for allegedly aiding the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. In practice, the provision forced lobbyists to choose between the sanctioned Chinese companies and US defense contractors, causing them to abandon the former.

US District Judge Eumi K. Lee, who is overseeing a lawsuit by Alibaba challenging its inclusion on the list, on Sunday ordered the Pentagon not to treat Alibaba as a Chinese military company with respect to the lobbying restriction until she resolves the company’s motion on the matter or 60 days after a court hearing on it, whichever comes first.

The case will likely be closely watched as the Pentagon’s blacklist has emerged as a prominent tool for the US in its rivalry with China. On June 8, the Pentagon added Alibaba to its roster of Chinese military companies operating in the US known as the 1260H list, bringing the total number of designated Chinese military companies to 188 from 20 named under a preceding statute a few years ago. The roster spans key sectors including semiconductors, artificial intelligence, robotics and drones

Alibaba on June 23 sued the department seeking its removal from the blacklist, saying it doesn’t work with the Chinese military, followed by a June 30 motion for relief from the lobbying restrictions linked to the list the day they took effect.

Alibaba argued in a recent filing that these restrictions violate its freedom of speech, causing it to lose “its voice across the whole of its dealings with the federal government — on legislation, on regulation, on the policies that shape its business.”

No established lobbying firm would be willing to trade access to the tens of thousands of companies that contract with the Pentagon in order to be able to represent it, Alibaba has argued, noting in another filing that all of its more than two dozen registered lobbyists withdrew their registrations in recent weeks.

In a joint stipulation filed on Friday, Pentagon officials said they maintain the lobbying restriction “fully complies with the US Constitution but recognize that it will benefit both the parties and the court to enter into a stipulation for a limited period of time so the court can assess” the matter.

The Pentagon declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation. Alibaba didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

US House China select committee chief John Moolenaar and House intelligence committee member Elise Stefanik wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last month, urging strict implementation of the new restriction.

“It is critical that the department’s contractors avoid partnering with firms and lobbyists that simultaneously advance the interests of companies executing the military ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Karoline Leavitt can’t seem to shake her old campaign debt.

The White House press secretary’s 2022 congressional campaign still owes creditors more than $326,000, according to its most recent financial report, filed Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission.

Most of that debt — more than $210,000 — is attributable to unpaid refunds to donors who made excessive contributions to Leavitt’s campaign, in violation of federal limits.

Leavitt’s old campaign first disclosed the debt — first reported by NOTUS — in January 2025, more than two years after she lost her congressional race in New Hampshire in November 2022.

Plenty of political campaigns carry hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in debt for years after the election has ended. While federal law requires the campaigns to stay open and continue to file public reports disclosing the debt, there is often little chance that they actually make their creditors whole.

But the Leavitt campaign debt is different, since a significant portion requires refunds for contributions that exceeded the legal limit by hundreds or thousands of dollars.

When a congressional campaign receives an excessive contribution, the FEC guidelines state “the committee must not spend the funds,” which should be refunded or redistributed.

The Leavitt campaign report says it has no cash on hand, meaning there is no money in the bank to issue refunds. Leavitt could still legally raise money for the purpose of retiring the debts but has made no financial progress toward doing so, her committee’s filing indicates.

End Citizens United, a liberal watchdog group, filed a complaint with the FEC in November 2022 alleging Leavitt had accepted and failed to refund the excessive contributions.

An FEC spokesperson previously declined to provide an update on the complaint, which the agency declined to comment on. But the FEC has been unable to take enforcement action of any sort since May 1, 2025, when the campaign finance regulator entered a de facto shutdown after losing the minimum number of commissioners to perform such high level duties.

President Donald Trump nominated two Republican commissioners in February. If confirmed, the addition of the new commissioners would restore a quorum on the commission.

But their Senate confirmation hearings have not yet been announced, and it’s not clear if a quorum will be restored before the 2026 midterm election.

The agency also has a backlog of more than 250 enforcement cases whenever it does reopen, Democratic FEC Chair Shana Broussard wrote on BlueSky last month.

Less than halfway through Trump’s second term, the U.S. Department of Justice has authorized a rash of new death penalty prosecutions, already surpassing the total number of capital cases brought during Trump’s previous four years in office.

Since Trump returned to the White House, DOJ prosecutors have moved to seek the death penalty against at least 42 defendants in 34 cases, according to figures compiled by The Intercept, based on legal records and data from the Justice Department and Federal Capital Trial Project. In at least two additional cases, federal prosecutors have conveyed their plans to seek death but have not yet submitted a notice of intent — the formal legal filing telling the defense and presiding judge that the DOJ seeks to execute a defendant. By comparison, the DOJ authorized some 38 capital defendants total over the course of Trump’s first term.

Many of the new cases have originated in places where the death penalty has been abolished — states like New Mexico, Colorado, and Maryland — as well as jurisdictions where there is no history of capital punishment, like the U.S. Virgin Islands. More than 70 percent of the defendants are people of color, most of them Black.

The spike in new death penalty cases is a striking illustration of Trump’s longtime enthusiasm for capital punishment, which led him to carry out an unprecedented execution spree in the months before he left office in 2021. It’s also in stark contrast to the Justice Department under President Joe Biden, who put capital prosecutions almost entirely on hold — and whose attorney general, Merrick Garland, deauthorized dozens of pending death penalty cases upon taking office.

Trump’s ramped up authorizations won’t necessarily bring a wave of new death sentences. Only a relative handful of federal capital authorizations end up going to trial — and fewer still result in a death sentence. Although executions have been on the rise across the United States since Trump retook office, new death sentences have been on a consistent decline for decades. Prosecutors have become more reluctant to seek death sentences, and jurors have also been less and less willing to send defendants to death row.

“The American public has made a very, very decisive turn away from the death penalty during the last 20 years,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “Twenty years ago, we had five times the number of new death sentences than we had last year.” Although Trump’s DOJ “purports to be acting consistent with the will of the American people,” she said, “those are American juries that are making different decisions now.”

The Trump administration’s death penalty plans have already come apart in many cases. Since then-Attorney General Pam Bondi first started filing notices of intent last year, roughly a third of the defendants have seen the death penalty taken off the table. In numerous cases, the presiding judge has struck down the government’s authorizations. In one case involving two co-defendants, the DOJ has withdrawn its prior authorization. And two cases have been resolved with guilty pleas.

This still leaves at least 27 defendants currently facing capital trials. With Blanche, who was previously Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, vying to become attorney general, there is no reason to expect the push to send people to death row to slow down anytime soon.

The defendants facing the death penalty under Trump have been accused of grisly crimes, from mass shootings to gang murders. But if there’s one thing driving Trump’s escalating pursuit of new death sentences above all else, it is his sustained rage at Biden, who took the historic step of commuting 37 death sentences before leaving office, leaving three people on federal death row. Trump railed against the commutations in a Truth Social post on Christmas Day, wrongly referring to them as pardons and telling the commuted prisoners themselves to “GO TO HELL!”

Upon returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump immediately signaled his intent to repopulate federal death row, proclaiming in an executive order that his administration would “pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.” Framed as a rebuke to Biden’s act of clemency, which he derided as a “mockery of justice,” it also called on states to step up their own efforts to execute people — and to try to seek new death sentences at the state level against the 37 men whose federal sentences were commuted.

A month later, in February 2025, newly installed Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo to DOJ prosecutors directing them to seek death wherever possible. “Absent significant mitigating circumstances, federal prosecutors are expected to seek the death penalty in cases involving the murder of a law-enforcement officer and capital crimes committed by aliens who are illegally present in the United States,” Bondi wrote. She ordered prosecutors to prioritize capital cases involving gang members and people accused of international drug crimes. And in an unprecedented move, Bondi announced that the DOJ would review every decision in which the Biden administration declined to seek a death sentence to determine whether prosecutors should pursue the death penalty after all.

The attempt to turn Biden’s “no-seeks” into capital prosecutions has proven mostly unsuccessful. Of hundreds of cases reviewed by the DOJ, prosecutors ended up filing a notice of intent against 15 defendants who had previously been told they would not face the death penalty. One by one, the new capital authorizations were smacked down by presiding judges, several of whom scolded Trump’s prosecutors for their ham-fisted efforts to win death sentences in cases that, in many instances, were already set for trial. Currently three cases remain in which prosecutors are still seeking to move forward with a capital trial despite the Biden DOJ’s previous decision not to seek death.

It did not take long after Bondi was fired for her replacement, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, to make clear he intended to continue Trump’s death penalty push. In late April, he released a 48-page report by the Office of Legal Policy, which outlined in detail Trump’s plans to ramp up new death sentences and speed up executions. Titled “Restoring and Strengthening the Federal Death Penalty,” the document again framed Trump’s commitment to capital punishment as a response to Biden’s dereliction of duty — and in particular to his betrayal of victims’ families.

The report included a chart showing Biden’s DOJ’s rejection of capital cases, casting Garland as an outlier among other attorneys general. By contrast, the report devoted little space to Trump’s new authorizations, avoiding entirely its mostly failed attempts to reverse Biden’s “no-seeks.” Nor did it hint at the fact that Blanche, like previous attorneys general, would himself issue a flurry of no-seeks in death-eligible cases upon taking over — something that is standard practice at the DOJ. Death penalty cases are, after all, at least in theory, reserved for only the most serious crimes. “To pursue use of the death penalty in the manner that is set forth in Trump executive order would require an almost singular focus on seeking death sentences to the exclusion of so many other priorities,” Maher said.

While the Blanche report is certainly cause for concern, Maher said a lot of it read as a wishlist more than an achievable blueprint. “The majority of that report, I thought, reflected the Trump administration’s grievances about lawful decisions made by the previous administration,” she said. “To me it was more like a campaign website instead of a measured legal document by a government agency.”

“These executive orders, these memoranda — everything is changing by the day,” she said. “We just don’t know how this is all going to play out.”

What might be most sobering about Trump-era capital punishment is not the way it differs from past presidents but how it remains consistent. In the hands of an administration overtly committed to white supremacy, the defendants chosen by Trump’s DOJ for capital trials look a lot like the defendants who have always faced the federal death penalty.

More than 70 percent of Trump’s authorizations have been against people of color, most of them Black. This is strikingly consistent with the federal death penalty’s overall track record; according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 73 percent of capital defendants authorized for death penalty pros­e­cu­tions from 1989 to June 2024 were people of color.

The racial disparities in the federal system have been well-documented for decades. Yet, apart from the most high-profile cases, Americans are generally unaware of capital prosecutions brought at the federal level since most authorizations never lead to a death penalty trial — let alone a death sentence. This leaves the most dramatic racial disparities hidden from view. Data from the Federal Capital Trial Project shows that, in the state of Maryland, for example, which has sent only one person to federal death row since the late 1980s, DOJ prosecutors have authorized death penalty prosecutions against more than 30 people, the majority of whom were Black. The rest were Latino.

Trump’s recent authorizations replicate this trend, with DOJ prosecutors in Maryland filing notices of intent against four defendants, three of them Latino and one of them Black. (The former three, alleged MS-13 gang members from Baltimore, have since seen their authorizations thrown out by a judge.)

Since last year, Trump’s DOJ has also authorized death penalty prosecutions of four people in the Eastern District of Missouri, which is home to St. Louis. As with every other federal authorization from the same jurisdiction to date, all of them are Black. (Two of these defendants have since seen their authorizations withdrawn by the DOJ.)

Trump’s execution spree six years ago briefly put the racism of the federal death penalty on display. The eighth man put to death, Orlando Hall, had been sentenced to die by an all-white jury in Texas, where, according to his lawyer’s last legal filings, federal prosecutors were “nearly six times more likely to request authorization to seek the death penalty against a Black defendant than a non-Black defendant.” Co-defendants Christopher Vialva and Brandon Bernard, who were executed less than three months apart, were sent to death row by a federal prosecutor who openly told me that people considered him “crazy” for allowing a single Black man to serve on their jury.

At that time, the U.S. was experiencing a supposed reckoning over race, which made such cases all the more disturbing to those paying attention. Yet the executions had been made possible by a Democratic party that paved the way for Trump’s killing spree by expanding the death penalty in a way that was racially skewed from the start. That Trump’s aggressive death penalty push is no more racist than what came before speaks volumes about what capital punishment has always been.

Annual “religious liberty training” may soon be required for troops and commanders if the Pentagon adopts recommendations from a White House-directed commission of faith leaders and military advocates.

The recommendations, which Pentagon leaders said Tuesday they “welcome,” come from the Religious Liberty Commission, a 12-person committee established by President Donald Trump in May 2025 to develop policies across the federal government to “secure domestic religious liberty.”

Some of the witnesses who testified at commission meetings in 2025 and 2026 included former military chaplains and veterans. The commission’s primary members include a mix of activists, faith leaders and politicians. Chaired by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and former Trump cabinet member Ben Carson, the committee includes four Christian clergy, a Rabbi, several prominent figures in Christian activist and legal circles, and talk show host Dr. Phil McGraw.

The commission’s review of Pentagon policies emphasized expanding the presence of religion across the Defense Department.

“The more authority the military exercises over the lives of service members, the greater its obligation to ensure that those individuals can live in accordance with their sincerely held beliefs,” the commission wrote in its final report released last week.

The commission said the Pentagon should “standardize” so-called “religious liberty training” for “all levels” of the military, including commanders, judge advocate generals and recruiters.

The commission also suggested the military increase enforcement of existing federal religious freedom laws, endorsed legislation that would allow chaplains to advise on policy and command decisions, and called for military logos and emblems to be allowed for use on religious texts like the Bible.

The report also said the Pentagon should take another crack at producing a so-called spiritual fitness guide. A 2025 Army effort was scrapped by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just five months after it was launched. Hegseth noted the guide “mentions ‘God’ one time,” but “mentions ‘feelings’ 11 times.”

Left unclear was what annual religious freedom training regime would entail, but the report noted recent Supreme Court cases on religious expression and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Passed in 1993, that law prohibits government rules that “substantially burden” the exercise of religion. Critics of the law have argued that it has sometimes been used to “discriminate or to impose” religious beliefs onto others.

Mikey Weinstein, a former Air Force lawyer who heads the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said that the commission’s recommendations violate laws separating church and state. He cited a clause in the Constitution which prohibits the enforcement of religion tests for holding public office.

“Whenever you get into the business of trying to have a guide or a test, once again, you’re going back to clause three, article six,” Weinstein said. Military leaders, he said, have “no business in any way, shape, or form guiding anyone to figure out how they should view the metaphysical. Where do we come from? What are we doing here? Where do we go when we die? That is not anything that we should be doing.”

Another commission recommendation calls for the Pentagon to “restore the use of military emblems on religious texts and materials,” like Bibles and dog tags — an issue that has long sparked debates over trademark laws and church and state separations. Pentagon policy restricts the use of trademarked logos to promote “ideological movements” or “specific interpretations of morality.”

At one point, base exchanges sold Holman Bibles featuring logos from the services, Weinstein said. In 2012, the foundation took credit for the Pentagon pulling the Bible publishing company’s trademark authorization. Then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the plan “[conveyed] a message of endorsement of religion.”

“The whole idea is that it’s simply trying to make [religion] such a fundamental aspect, so inextricably intertwined into the mind of our military,” Weinstein said.

Pentagon officials did not immediately say what changes, if any, troops can expect from the report, but they signaled that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth supports the commission’s recommendations.

“From day one, Secretary Hegseth has been a continuous and fervent protector of religious freedom and a vocal advocate for First Amendment rights,” Acting Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez told Task & Purpose in a statement. “We welcome the recommendations and insights that the [commission] has provided to us.”

A federal judge has denied President Donald Trump’s last-ditch effort to delay a $5.8 million payout to E. Jean Carroll years after she won a civil defamation case against him related to sex-abuse allegations.

Trump has been trying to toss the 2022 verdict for years after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse against Carroll, a former Elle magazine writer. The president, who has consistently denied Carroll’s allegations and accused her of lying, was also found liable for defaming the writer in a separate case.

Lawyers for Trump argued the $5 million verdict in the sex-abuse and defamation case was unfairly brought and an attempt to hurt the president – despite the verdict occurring before Trump returned to the White House. An appeals court had already rejected the president’s argument, and the Supreme Court delivered the final blow this week by declining to review the case.

In a July 3 filing, Trump’s attorneys requested a delay in delivering payment to Carroll, arguing that his new lead counsel, Josh Halper, required more time “to become completely familiar with the facts and procedural circumstances” of the case. His former lead attorney, Justin Smith, left the case last month after taking up a position as a federal judge.

District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan denied the motion in a text-only order dated July 4, without further explanation.

Before the judge’s decision, Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, accused Trump of stalling “to buy time so he can try to concoct some new basis to put off paying” in a court filing.

Trump’s legal team had requested the court grant an extension of July 14 to respond to Carroll’s lawyers, arguing that the plaintiff “faces no risk of material harm as a result of granting this request.”

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, Trump vowed he would not give up his attempts to throw out the case.

“Surprisingly, the Supreme Court declined to ‘review’ a Fake Case brought against me by a woman I never met (Decades old celebrity photo line, standing with her husband, does not count!),” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday, once again elevating his claims of not knowing Carroll, despite being photographed with her.

Following the Supreme Court’s rejection Monday, Trump’s legal team said: “The American People stand with President Trump as they demand an immediate end to all of the Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll Hoaxes. President Trump will keep winning against Liberal Lawfare, as he continues to focus on his mission to Make America Great Again.”

“I will continue the fight against this Weaponization and Lawfare Case against me, including the ridiculous claim of Defamation, with all of my power and strength.”

Kaplan said the Supreme Court’s ruling backed the verdict.

“Today's Supreme Court decision affirms once and for all the jury's unanimous verdict that President Donald J. Trump sexually assaulted and defamed E. Jean Carroll. His multiple efforts to appeal that verdict have all failed and today's ruling ends his quest to avoid accountability for his actions,” Kaplan said in a statement, obtained by NBC News.

In a broadside posted to its website just as fireworks celebrating America’s 250th birthday were lighting up skies on Saturday, the White House condemned the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for what it said was a failure to celebrate the nation’s heritage, arguing it had become a political tool intent on denigrating the American story.

The 162-page report, by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, represents a sweeping attack on the museum’s presentation of American history. It is the latest step in the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure the Smithsonian into conforming to what President Trump has described as “patriotic” history.

While the report concludes that the broader Smithsonian Institution — which oversees 21 museums and the National Zoo — “has not met its obligations to the American people,” it places particular blame on the National Museum of American History.

Titled “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” the report accuses the museum of anti-white bias and of minimizing and distorting the nation’s founding. Those actions, the report asserts, have shifted the museum’s mission “from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”

The museum, it says, “no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens.”

The report takes issue with specific exhibits, such as an 1840 statue of George Washington that includes a depiction of Hercules. The work’s accompanying text describes “the perceived courage of the American people.” That language, the report says, “refuses to affirm the exceptional courage of the American people.”

But the report’s “main concerns” involve what is not there.

Visitors today, it says, “will find no major exhibit dedicated to America’s founding era, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, other founding fathers, the Continental Congress, the pilgrims, the Puritans or major moments of the American Revolution.” Instead, it claims, many founders are presented chiefly in terms of their connection to slavery.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Smithsonian, Julissa Marenco, said, “For more than 180 years, the Smithsonian has served the American public with nonpartisan and independent scholarship, and we remain committed to doing so.”

The Domestic Policy Council, which wrote the report, is a White House group tasked with developing the president’s domestic agenda and advising him on issues like education and health care. Its leader, Vince Haley, has spearheaded the administration’s commemoration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, including Mr. Trump’s plan to build a 250-foot arch in Washington. Mr. Haley has also been credited with the idea for a patriotic sculpture garden known as the National Garden of American Heroes.

The Smithsonian has long been regarded as independent of the executive branch. But in an effort to have much greater influence on cultural matters in Washington, Mr. Trump has focused on the Smithsonian since March 2025, when he issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

In that order, which calls on Vice President JD Vance to overhaul the Smithsonian with the help of Congress, the president described a “revisionist movement” across the country that “seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

Mr. Trump has since announced that he was dismissing the director of the institution’s National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, calling her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI.” (The Smithsonian did not follow through — publicly insisting it controlled personnel matters — but Ms. Sajet resigned, saying in a statement that her decision served the institution’s best interests.)

The White House also issued an ultimatum to turn over Smithsonian records or face potential budget cuts. In response, the Smithsonian’s secretary, Lonnie G. Bunch III, reasserted the institution’s independence but said materials had been submitted in an effort to be “transparent and open.”

Some 62 percent of the Smithsonian’s annual $1 billion budget is derived from federal sources, including funds directly appropriated by Congress. The Trump administration proposed cutting the Smithsonian’s budget by about 12 percent in the 2026 fiscal year, but Congress has maintained the institution’s federal funding.

Saturday’s report summons the specter of a funding withdrawal, citing how the president’s executive order directed Mr. Vance to work with the Office of Management and Budget to “prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy.”

Without specifying the exact remedy, the report says that “the president has a duty and obligation to seek reforms of the Smithsonian.”

The report criticizes the museum for viewing “traditional patriotic narratives” with suspicion or contempt. It says the museum endorses illegal immigration and advocates transgender issues, while it focuses on Christianity as “an instrument of conquest, exclusion or cultural erasure,” rather than its “constructive role” in “shaping the nation and its freedoms.”

It takes particular aim at the museum’s director, Anthea M. Hartig, saying she has advanced “an ideological agenda contradictory to the museum’s founding purpose of fostering patriotism.”

The story the museum tells, the report says, “is not one of ‘the victory of freedom and genius of our country’ but one of regret, tragedy and shame.”

The report immediately drew pushback from some in the historical profession, which has sharply criticized Mr. Trump’s efforts to enforce his view of history.

Sarah Weicksel, the executive director of the American Historical Association, the country’s largest group of history scholars, questioned the report’s claims that the museum neglects the nation’s founding and its founders.

“The museum has extraordinary objects that tell the history of the Revolution, including the newly restored Gunboat Philadelphia,” she said, referring to a Revolutionary-era warship. “Visitors also encounter George Washington, his leadership prowess and the American Revolution in ‘The Price of Freedom,’” another exhibition.

But some conservatives commended the report.

“The National Museum of American History is the tip of the iceberg,” said Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has called for Mr. Bunch’s dismissal. “It’s not the only museum that erases our history and our heritage — all the other museums do. We have to go back to celebrating our country and its great achievements.”

The report, which contains more than 30 pages of footnotes, also criticizes an exhibition called “Many Voices, One Nation” that it claims tries “to convince visitors that illegal aliens are entitled to citizenship, voting rights and ‘belonging’ in America.”

And it criticizes an exhibition that closed in November 2025, “The Electric Dr. Franklin,” for what it says was too heavy of an emphasis on Benjamin Franklin’s connection to slavery, including his ownership of slaves, and not enough on his work as an abolitionist.

The report comes as the Smithsonian faces potentially significant turnover in its governing Board of Regents, a 17-member panel that includes Democratic and Republican elected officials as well as nine citizens.

Mr. Bunch has led the Smithsonian since 2019, and his relationship with the White House is, at best, strained. He has enjoyed the support of the board in asserting that the Smithsonian is independent.

But the museum is working with a diminished board since the terms of two Smithsonian trustees ended in March. Their replacements have yet to be named as Mr. Trump’s efforts to gain control of the institution has slowed that process.

Over the past few months, the Smithsonian managed to avoid further confrontations with Trump officials, perhaps because it made tweaks like altering some wall text and because the president was focused on matters like the war in Iran.

But the new report makes clear that the White House is fed up with the Smithsonian.

“The serious concerns raised in this report are not about a few exhibits or a few controversial labels,” the report says. “As it stands today, it would benefit most Americans, especially parents bringing their children for a tour, if the Smithsonian’s flagship history museum had a label at every entrance that reads: ‘Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.’”

The morning after America’s 250th anniversary celebration and Washington, D.C.’s record-breaking fireworks show, the National Mall remained mostly closed down. Trash cans were overflowing, and National Guard members were stationed near large pallets of bottled water. National Park Service workers could be seen fishing debris out of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where some of the aerial pyrotechnics had been launched.

D.C. officials issued a Code Red air quality alert on Sunday, urging senior citizens, children and those with health conditions to take precautions.

The “general public may experience health issues. Limit time outside,” the alert said.

The threat of severe thunderstorms prompted the Secret Service and organizers of the July Fourth celebration on the National Mall to evacuate the crowd to nearby public buildings Saturday night, delaying President Donald Trump’s remarks and the fireworks show.

Soaring temperatures also disrupted Saturday’s planned celebrations, with the high setting a daily record of 103 degrees in D.C. Organizers canceled the Independence Day parade on Constitution Avenue, citing the extreme heat warning issued by the National Weather Service. Marching bands that flew in from Utah, Nebraska and Minnesota for that event found a new audience at the Capitol Hill parade on Barracks Row.

D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services reported 92 patient contacts and 34 patient transports from the National Mall on Saturday. George Washington University, the closest medical center to downtown D.C., reported 289 patient contacts as of 10 p.m. Saturday.

Inclement weather also delayed Fourth of July celebrations in Philadelphia, with the fireworks display finally launching just before 2:30 a.m. Sunday. In New York, a fire broke out around 10 p.m. on the Brooklyn Bridge, and while the cause was unclear, city officials said it was probably the fireworks display.

For many of the tens of thousands of spectators who flew or drove to D.C. from around the country to see a military air show and a sky lit up with pyrotechnic explosions, the celebration exceeded their expectations.

“I thought it was so patriotic. I loved it,” Kimberly Conn, who came from Seattle with her family, told NOTUS. “I just stood there for so long, and just watched all of it. It just felt really lovely, really wonderful, and I was so glad that I came.”

The Conn family mostly avoided the chaos of the weather delays by showing up around 10 p.m. and watching from the National Portrait Gallery steps.

“I wish they [the fireworks] would have been earlier, but you can’t do anything about the weather, so it turned out to be a much later night than we thought,” father Steve Conn said.

Sophia, the Conns’ 15-year-old daughter, said it was nice to see everyone singing along to “Y.M.C.A.,” one of the many songs performed by a military band during the fireworks.

“It felt like, oh, these are Americans — these are people together,” Sophia said.

Other visitors were captivated by the elaborate air show over the National Mall. Nine hours of fly-overs featured planes from every branch of the military, including the Air Force Thunderbirds, Navy Blue Angels as well as a NASA aircraft.

“It’s just the power,” said Jim Miller, visiting from Kansas City, Missouri. “It brings tears to your eyes.”

Miller and Debbie Addison watched the air show from a restaurant with a view of the fly-overs. They tried to enter the National Mall around 6 p.m. but abandoned the idea, describing the line to enter the cordoned-off security zone as “insane.”

“The bad thing is we kept getting bad information,” Addison said. “It was hard to know what line you were supposed to be in.”

Miller and Addison opted to watch the fireworks from their hotel, but the air show — billed as one of the largest military aviation demonstrations ever held over the nation’s capital — was an unforgettable experience for them.

“It just kind of makes you stop and just feel very patriotic,” Addison said.

Among many posts on Truth Social on Sunday, ranging from concerns about communism to marking a renovation of the White House’s columns, Trump thanked the July Fourth organizers for the show.

“I would like to congratulate Freedom 250, a Great White House Commission, and Pyrotecnico, on producing the Most Spectacular Fireworks Show I have ever seen, and I’ve seen them all,” Trump wrote.

The Navy on Sunday suspended the search for a crew member who has been missing since a MH-60 Sea Hawk helicopter crashed into the Arabian Sea on Wednesday.

Three other crew members aboard the Navy helicopter were rescued soon after the aircraft made an emergency landing in the water on July 1 during a routine patrol. The Navy said last week that the crew members were in stable condition aboard the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush.

Military officials have said the downing of the helicopter was not the result of hostile fire, and that the cause of the crash was under investigation. In a statement on Sunday, the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain said Navy and Air Force personnel searched over 14,000 square miles for more than 100 hours before calling off the rescue operation.

The death of the sailor, whose identity was being withheld pending the notification of family members, brought to 14 the number of service members who have died in the war against Iran.

Six service members were killed on March 1 by an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait’s Shuaiba port. Another service member died on March 8 following an attack by Iran on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

Six Air Force personnel were killed on March 12 when two Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft collided in midair and one of the planes crashed in western Iraq.

More than 400 U.S. service members have been injured in the Iran conflict, according to the military’s Central Command. Capt. Tim Hawkins, a Central Command spokesman, said more than 90 percent of those injured had returned to duty.

Two Tennessee National Guard members assigned by the Trump administration to a crime-fighting patrol in Memphis fatally shot a man Sunday who turned toward the soldiers with a gun during a downtown pursuit, authorities said.

The administration has ordered National Guard deployments in Memphis and five other Democrat-run cities, including New Orleans and Washington, D.C ., to confront what Trump has described as an out-of-control crime wave — though violent crime in dozens of cities led by Democrats is down significantly since a pandemic high. The Guard members in Memphis were part of a troop deployment the administration launched in Tennessee’s second-largest city last fall.

Local leaders in these cities have said they do not believe the federal intervention is necessary, and some have challenged the deployments in court.

The soldiers in Memphis were responding with local police to reports of gunshots around 4 a.m. when they began pursuing an armed man fleeing on foot, the city’s police department said.

The guardsmen opened fire after the man turned towards them with his weapon, the department said.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation identified the man as 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson and said it is investigating the circumstances of the shooting. No law enforcement officers were injured, the agency added.

Johnson died at the scene after two National Guard medical specialists attempted first aid, Guard spokesperson Lt. Col Darrin Haas said in a statement.

Johnson’s older cousin, Terracle Nelson, 46, told The Associated Press that he was “as good a boy as can be.” Johnson was living in Nashville, working in construction and taking university classes, she said. He had just had his first child earlier this year, she added.

Nelson was present with other members of Johnson’s family when authorities told them that Johnson had been shot twice in the chest.

“I just want to know, how they shot a 20-year-old twice in the chest, he hadn’t harmed anyone,” Nelson said.

Law enforcement authorities did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the number of shots fired. The TBI declined comment on Nelson’s account of the shooting.

Mayor Paul Young called the shooting an “unfortunate incident” and said he was waiting to see the results of the TBI investigation before commenting further, according to a statement provided by spokesperson Penelope Huston.

Federal troops have been patrolling the city since October over the objections of Young, a Democrat, but with the support of Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican. The troops are part of the Memphis Safe Task Force, convened by Trump and comprised of federal and local agencies.

For years, Memphis, whose population exceeds 600,000, has dealt with high violent crime , including assaults, carjackings and homicides. Both Democratic and Republican officials have noted decreases last year in some crime categories, preceding the deployment and paralleling trends across U.S. cities.

The deployments cost nearly half a billion dollars through the end of December and are expected to cost taxpayers more than $1 billion this year, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office .

In April, the Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled that state and local Democratic officials lacked standing to block the deployment of federal troops in Memphis.

In May, four Memphis residents filed a pending federal lawsuit seeking to block the federal task force from applying a law that bars residents from approaching within 25 feet of law enforcement officers to record their activities.

The residents, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, also alleged that task force members have engaged in a pattern of retaliating against them for filming their operations. They alleged they have been followed by law enforcement officers and that unmarked vehicles and individuals in tactical vests have showed up outside their homes after they observed the task force.

The White House lobbied Fifa to lift the US striker Folarin Balogun’s one-game ban for a red card received in the team’s win over Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Guardian understands, resulting in Sunday’s stunning announcement that he would be available for the cohosts’ last-16 clash against Belgium in Seattle on Monday night.

The decision gives the US a huge boost on the field as they attempt to reach the World Cup quarter-finals for the first time since 2002. Balogun has been a constant threat for the US so far this tournament, and has scored three goals in three starts.

Fifa has been approached for comment. Donald Trump thanked football’s world governing body for suspending the red card. “Thank you to Fifa for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!” President Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Fifa’s disciplinary committee said it made the decision in line with Article 27 of the Fifa disciplinary code, which allows it to suspend red cards so long as the discipline is not realted to match-fixing. Balogun will be on a probationary period of one year, meaning the red card technically still remains on his record. If, during that year, Balogun commits what the code refers to as “another infringement of a similar nature and gravity”, the striker will serve his one-game ban.

The Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA) said in a statement that it was “astonished” at the decision. The RBFA later pointed out that the suspension of the ban ran in contradiction to Fifa statutes governing the punishment for red cards, which carry a one-game ban “automatically”. The RBFA said it was “investigating all potential options”.

A US Soccer spokesperson said on Sunday that the federation was engaged in the process that ended up clearing Balogun for the last-16 game.

US players said they received news of Balogun’s availability on the team bus on the way to training.

“Some guys are playing Clash Royale, some guys were just in the back listening music, and then think somewhere in between that, we heard all the reports,” the defender Chris Richards said. “My family probably sent me eight tweets. I wasn’t sure, nobody told us ahead of time that this was happening. We weren’t quite sure if it was true or not. I think everyone knows with AI and with this and that, there can be a few question marks, but ultimately we found out through social media. It was just cool to finally get the confirmation that it was true.”

Richards said that about 10 minutes passed between the moment when the US players first started getting reports of Balogun’s availability, and getting official confirmation from a US Soccer official by the time they got off the bus for Sunday’s training session – the final one before the all-important Belgium matchup.

“He’s playing it Mr Cool right now,” Richards said of Balogun’s reaction to the news. “We look to Flo to kind of lead the front line, and he’s done it really well so far throughout the tournament, so think we’re really happy and excited that that’s been overturned … clearly they saw something in the decision that they thought deserved to be overturned.”

Richards, Christian Pulisic and Alex Freeman all said that Balogun’s suspension had slightly changed the team’s preparation or training sessions ahead of the Belgium game, and that the team had been prepared to turn out without him.