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The Hill
an hour ago
- Automotive
- The Hill
Mace requests Trump to unfreeze Biden-era climate funding: Report
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) reportedly requested the Trump administration to unfreeze Biden-era climate funding in support of a car manufacturing plant in her southeastern district, which covers much of the Palmetto State's lowcountry region. In a Tuesday letter obtained by The Washington Post, Mace asked the Department of Energy (DOE) to release the funds for a Mercedes-Benz plant's refashioning to produce electric vehicles, stating the move would bring roughly 800 jobs to her district. The staunch Trump ally argued in the letter addressed to Energy Secretary Chris Wright, per The Post, that the grant would help 'ensure America-made options remain available in the commercial vehicle sector.' The project sought nearly $300,000 from the federal government. The report comes after Mace backed the House-passed spending and tax bill, which includes significant cuts to green energy tax credits. Many Republicans in the Senate, which is currently working through their own version of the legislation, voiced concern that renewable energy cuts may be too vast. President Trump, in his broad efforts to curb government spending and root out fraud and abuse, nixed the South Carolina grant program when he halted the disbursement of former President Biden's climate programs earlier this year. 'We strongly support President Trump's initiative to restore fiscal responsibility within the executive branch, particularly in reducing waste, fraud, and redundancies,' the letter reads, according to The Post. 'While we understand and support the necessity of such measures, we believe that federal investments should continue to prioritize projects with sustained economic growth.' Mace's office as well as the DOE did not respond to an immediate request for comment on the matter. As The Post noted, it is difficult to assess how much climate funding Trump has withheld after he signed an executive order on Inauguration Day rescinding funds disbursed through Biden's landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The move wasn't unexpected, however. On the campaign trail, he vowed to end the 'madness' of national emphasis on developing EVs and accompanying infrastructure and has continued to rail against green funding touted by his predecessor. Still, it drew widespread pushback from Democrats and imperiled billions of dollars, including projects in red states and districts, which sparked some concern from Republicans on Capitol Hill. It has even provoked a number of lawsuits against the Trump administration. In March, farmers and environmental groups sued over the grant pause, including the halting of a $300 million program seeking to aid farmers install renewable energy or efficiency upgrades. Earlier this week, a judge blocked the administration from withholding funds for EV charging infrastructure. Still, Trump has maintained his distaste for climate-related funding. This month, the president blasted green tax credits that were still included in the GOP's 'big, beautiful bill.' 'I HATE 'GREEN TAX CREDITS' IN THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL. They are largely a giant SCAM,' he posted last weekend. The Senate has taken a less aggressive approach to climate funding compared to their House counterparts. The upper chamber is expected to take up its own version on Saturday, after the text was unveiled overnight. The new bill text would still need House approval.
Metro
a day ago
- Politics
- Metro
What the US Supreme Court ruling means for Donald Trump's birthright citizenship
The US Supreme Court has issued a decision affecting President Donald Trump's bid to end birthright citizenship, and it is one of the most consequential in the country's modern history. Justices in a 6-3 vote along ideological lines on Friday morning granted Trump's request to narrow injunctions blocking his executive order to end birthright citizenship, or automatic citizenship rights. The ruling represents a major victory for Trump and allows his administration to push forward with its proposal to get rid of birthright citizenship – at least in states that challenged it. But the future of birthright citizenship was left unclear by the high court, and it remains possible that changes to it nationwide could stay blocked. Trump on his Inauguration Day signed an executive order to mandate that children born in America who do not have at least one parent who is a US citizen or lawful permanent resident, no longer receive citizenship automatically. It is aimed at curtailing children of illegal immigrants and people without temporary visas from receiving birthright citizenship rights dating back over a century. But several lower courts froze his plan from being implemented. Trump claimed that the courts overstepped their power with orders to block his policies, including his birthright citizenship plan, nationwide. The Supreme Court ruled that judges may only provide relief to individuals or groups bringing a lawsuit, and cannot extend the decisions to cover others without converting the suit into a class action. 'The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation's history,' stated Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the majority opinion. However, the high court did not rule on the constitutionality of Trump's birthright citizenship executive order. The three liberal justices said that Trump's order is illegal, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote on their behalf: 'The Court's decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law.' Trump hailed the decision in a Truth Social post immediately afterward: 'GIANT WIN in the United States Supreme Court! Even the Birthright Citizenship Hoax has been, indirectly, hit hard.' Then in a rare appearance in the White House briefing room, he called it a 'monumental victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law'. 'Big one, wasn't it? This was a big decision,' he said. 'Amazing decision, one that we're very happy about.' Trump also bashed 'the excessive use of nationwide injunctions to interfere with the normal functioning of the executive branch'. The ruling keeps Trump's birthright citizenship ban on hold for at least 30 days and sends cases to the lower courts to decide the next steps. More Trending Justices did not prevent challengers from continuing with their efforts to stop Trump's plan. The citizenship ban could go into effect in dozens of states that have not already filed lawsuits against Trump's order. Individuals and immigrants rights groups challenging Trump's order have urged a federal judge to certify a nationwide class including children already born or born after February 19, 2025, affected by the order. They have filed an updated lawsuit against Trump's order for the potential new class. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Teenager caught cowering in bushes after stabbing neighbour 51 times MORE: Urgent recall for hundreds of salads over killer cucumber fears MORE: Donald Trump is already selling 'Daddy' T-shirts for £20
Forbes
a day ago
- Politics
- Forbes
Supreme Court Doesn't Overturn Birthright Citizenship—But Otherwise Sides With Trump
The Supreme Court broadly gave President Donald Trump a win Friday in its first major case over his agenda, as the court limited lower court judges' ability to block his policies nationwide, though the court side-stepped the question of whether his policy restricting birthright citizenship is constitutional. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters on the South Lawn at the White House on June 15. Getty Images The Supreme Court issued its ruling in Trump v. CASA Inc., a case consolidating several lawsuits against Trump's executive order, which reverses longstanding Constitutional precedent to bar children born in the U.S. from automatically getting citizenship at birth if their parents aren't U.S. citizens or permanent residents. The president asked justices to more broadly rule on whether federal judges representing a single state or region can impose injunctions that block a policy nationwide, meaning courts would not be able to unilaterally block his agenda going forward unless the Supreme Court rules. The court punted on the question of whether the birthright citizenship rule is lawful, but ruled 6-3 that lower courts cannot block policies nationwide, saying 'Congress has granted federal courts no such power.' Trump's request to the court on nationwide injunctions comes as administration officials and allies have repeatedly complained about federal judges blocking the president's policies, claiming judges are abusing their power and are biased against him politically. This story is breaking and will be updated. The decision is the first major ruling by the Supreme Court on Trump's second-term policies. While justices have now issued a number of rulings regarding Trump policies on its 'shadow docket'—meaning it issues quicker rulings on issues without taking them up for oral argument first—the birthright citizenship dispute will mark the first time since Inauguration Day that justices held arguments regarding a Trump policy and then issued an opinion. But it's unlikely to be the last: hundreds of lawsuits have been brought against the Trump administration in the months since Trump took office, and the court is expected to make the final call in a number of major disputes on everything from immigration to the economy. A group of small businesses asked the court in mid-June to take up Trump's sweeping 'Liberation Day' tariffs and whether they're lawful, after lower courts blocked the tariffs but appeals courts then put them back into effect while the litigation moves forward. Plaintiffs have asked the Supreme Court to hold oral arguments over Trump tariffs right after its next term starts in the fall, and while the court rejected that request to expedite the case, it still could take up the dispute. Big Number More than 90. That's the approximate number of preliminary injunctions that have been issued against the Trump administration since Inauguration Day, including the ones on Trump's birthright citizenship order that prompted the dispute at the Supreme Court. That number only includes injunctions, which keep a policy on hold while a case moves forward, and does not include quicker temporary restraining orders, which judges use to immediately block a policy while they deliberate on whether to issue a more lasting order. Judges have also issued numerous temporary restraining orders against the Trump administration, which have similarly applied nationwide. While the Supreme Court has only issued one ruling on the Trump administration's policies after hearing oral arguments, the court's quicker 'shadow docket' rulings have largely come out in favor of the president. The court has so far ruled 14 times on Trump administration policies, not including the birthright citizenship case. Of those, the 6-3 conservative court has ruled in the Trump administration's favor nine times, while only three cases have come out against him. Another two rulings have been mixed, with aspects of it both for and against Trump. That being said, Trump has still stewed over the Supreme Court justices he appointed in his first term not being as favorable to him as he hoped, CNN reported in early June, with anonymous sources saying the president has expressed 'particular ire' at Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Trump's birthright citizenship order was one of the first the president issued after his inauguration, after Trump long suggested he could take aim at the policy as part of his wider immigration crackdown. The executive order sparked a number of lawsuits and the first district and appeals court rulings of Trump's second terms, with judges broadly decrying Trump's effort to change the longstanding Constitutional protection. 'The president cannot change, limit, or qualify this Constitutional right via an executive order,' Judge John Coughenour wrote in his ruling blocking the policy. As more court rulings against the president followed, with judges blocking other policies nationwide, the Trump administration and its allies increasingly started taking aim at judges, claiming they were abusing their authority to usurp the president's agenda and claiming judges have been harsher on Trump than courts were on other previous presidents. They also started specifically complaining about judges imposing orders that went beyond their districts: White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt decried Judge James Boasberg for blocking the Trump administration from halting deportation flights to El Salvador, for instance, claiming, 'A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft carrier full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from U.S. soil.' In addition to the Trump administration taking the issue to the Supreme Court, Trump's allies in Congress have also sought to solve the issue of lower courts issuing nationwide injunctions, introducing legislation that would prohibit judges' ability to issue orders beyond the region their court covers. That bill is unlikely to become law, however, given it would need 60 votes in the narrowly divided Senate. Further Reading: Forbes Supreme Court Suggests It Won't Allow Trump's Birthright Citizenship Ban—But Could Limit How Other Policies Can Be Blocked By Alison Durkee Forbes Can Trump End Birthright Citizenship? What To Know After Judge Blocks Executive Order By Alison Durkee
Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Inside the Trump administration's overhaul of organized crime investigations
Officials said the plan to bring law enforcement agencies together in the new Homeland Security Task Forces has been driven primarily by President Donald Trump's homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, who is closely overseeing the project's implementation. Advertisement Current and former officials said the proposed reorganization would make it easier for senior officials like Miller to disregard norms that have long walled off the White House from active criminal investigations. 'To the administration's credit, they are trying to break down barriers that are hard to break down,' said Adam W. Cohen, a career Justice Department attorney who was fired in March as head of the office that coordinates organized crime investigations involving often-competing federal agencies. 'But you won't have neutral prosecutors weighing the facts and making decisions about who to investigate,' he added of the task force plan. 'The White House will be able to decide.' The proposed reorganization would elevate the stature and influence of Homeland Security Investigations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement among law enforcement agencies, while continuing to push other agencies to pursue immigration-related crimes. Advertisement The task forces would at least formally subordinate the Drug Enforcement Administration to HSI and the FBI after half a century in which the DEA has been the government's lead agency for narcotics enforcement. Trump's directive to establish the new task forces was included in an Inauguration Day executive order, The new task forces will seek 'to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States,' the order states. They will also aim to 'end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children.' Since that order was issued, the administration has proceeded with considerable secrecy. Some Justice Department officials who work on organized crime have been excluded from planning meetings, as have leaders of the DEA, people familiar with the process said. A White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, did not comment on Miller's role in directing the task force project or the secrecy of the process. 'While the Biden Administration opened the border and looked the other way while Americans were put at risk,' she said, 'the Trump Administration is taking action to dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute immigration laws and to Make America Safe Again.' The task force project was described in interviews with current and former officials who have been briefed on it. ProPublica also reviewed documents about the implementation of the task forces, including a briefing paper prepared for Cabinet-level officials on the president's Homeland Security Council. Advertisement The Homeland Security Task Forces will take a 'coordinated, whole-of-government approach' to combatting transnational criminal groups, the paper states. They will also draw support from state and local police forces and U.S. intelligence agencies. Until now, the government has coordinated that same work through a Justice Department program established by President Ronald Reagan, the Known by the ungainly acronym OCDETF (pronounced 'oh-suh-def'), the $550-million program is above all an incentive system: To receive funding, different agencies (including the DEA, the FBI and HSI) must come together to propose investigations, which are then vetted and approved by prosecutor-led OCDETF teams. The agents are required to include a financial investigation of the criminal activity, typically with help from the Treasury Department, and they often recruit support from state and local police. The OCDETF intelligence center, located in the northern Virginia suburbs, manages the only federal database in which different law-enforcement agencies share their raw investigative files. While officials describe OCDETF as an imperfect structure, they also say it has become a crucial means of law enforcement cooperation. Its mandate was expanded under the Biden and first Trump administrations to encompass all types of organized crime, not just drug trafficking. As recently as a few months ago, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, declared that But just weeks after Blanche's announcement, the administration informed OCDETF officials their operations would be shut down by the end of the fiscal year in September. In a letter to Democratic senators on June 23, the Justice Department confirmed that the Homeland Security Task Forces would absorb OCDETF's 'mission and resources' but did not explain how the new structure would take charge of the roughly 5,000 investigations OCDETF now oversees. Advertisement 'These were not broken programs,' said a former Homeland Security official who, like others, would only discuss the administration's plans on condition of anonymity. 'If you wanted to build them out and make sure that the immigration side of things got more importance, you could have done that. You did not have to build a new wheel.' Officials also cited other concerns about the administration's plan, including whether the new task force system will incorporate some version of the elaborate safeguards OCDETF has used to persuade law enforcement agencies to share their case files in its intelligence database. Under those rules, OCDETF analysts must obtain permission from the agency that provided the records before sharing them with others. Many officials said they worried that the new task forces seem to be abandoning OCDETF's incentive structure. OCDETF funds are conditioned on multiple agencies working together on important cases; officials said the monies will now be distributed to law enforcement agencies directly and without the requirement that they collaborate. 'They are taking away a lot of the organization that the government uses to attack organized crime,' a Justice Department official said. 'If you want to improve something, great, but they don't even seem to have a vision for how this is going to work. There are no specifics.' The Homeland Security Task Forces will try to enforce interagency cooperation by a 'supremacy clause,' that gives task force leaders the right to pursue the cases they want and shut down others that might overlap. Advertisement The clause will require 'that any new or existing investigative and/or intelligence initiatives' targeting transnational criminal organizations 'must be presented to the HSTF with a right of first refusal,' according to the briefing paper reviewed by ProPublica. 'Further,' it adds, 'the supremacy clause prohibits parallel or competitive activities by member agencies, effectively eliminating duplicative structures such as stand-alone task forces or specialized units, to include narcotics, financial, or others.' Several senior law enforcement officials said that approach would curtail the independence that investigators need to follow good leads when they see them; newer and less-visible criminal organizations would be more likely to escape scrutiny. In recent years, those officials noted, both Democratic and Republican administrations have tried at times to short-circuit competition for big cases among law enforcement agencies and judicial districts. But that has often led to as many problems as it has solved, they said. One notable example, several officials said, was a move by the Biden administration's DEA administrator, Anne Milgram, to limit her agency's cooperation with FBI and HSI investigations into fentanyl smuggling by Los Chapitos, the mafia led by sons of the Mexican drug boss Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as 'El Chapo.' Although the DEA eventually indicted the Chapitos' leaders in New York, officials from other agencies complained that Milgram's approach wasted months of work and delayed the indictments of some traffickers. Later, when the FBI secretly arranged the surrender of one of the sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, DEA officials were not told about the operation until it was underway, officials said. (Guzmán López initially pleaded not guilty but is believed to be negotiating with the government. Milgram did not respond to messages asking for comment.) Advertisement As to the benefits of competition, prosecutors and agents cite the case of El Chapo himself. Before he was extradited to the United States in January 2017, Guzmán Loera had been indicted by seven U.S. attorneys' offices, reflecting yearslong investigations by the DEA, the FBI and HSI, among others. In the agreement that the Obama Justice Department brokered, three offices led the prosecution, which used the best evidence gathered by the others. Under the new structure of the Homeland Security Task Forces, several officials said, federal prosecutors will still generally decide whether to bring charges against criminal groups, but they will have less of a role in determining which criminals to investigate. Regional and national task forces will be overseen by 'executive committees' that are expected to include political appointees, officials said. The committees will guide broader decisions about which criminal groups to target, they said. 'The HSTF model unleashes the full might of our federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to deliver justice for the American people, whose plight Biden and Garland ignored for four years,' a Justice Department spokesperson said, referring to former Attorney General Merrick Garland. 'Any suggestion that the Department is abandoning its mission of cracking down on violent organized crime is unequivocally false.' During Trump's first term, veteran officials of the FBI, DEA and HSI all complained that the administration's overarching focus on immigration diverted agents from more urgent national security threats, including the fentanyl epidemic. Now, as hundreds more agents have been dispatched to immigration enforcement, those officials worry that the new task forces will focus on rounding up undocumented immigrants who have any sort of criminal record at the cost of more significant organized crime investigations. The first task forces to begin operating under the new model have not assuaged such concerns. In late May, On June 16, the Gulf of America Homeland Security Task Force, a new unit based in Alabama and Georgia, announced the arrests of 60 people, nearly all of them undocumented immigrants, at a cockfighting event in northern Alabama. Although cockfighting is typically subject to a maximum fine of $50 in the state, a senior HSI official claimed the suspects were 'tied to a broader network of serious crimes, including illegal gambling, drug trafficking and violent offenses.' Once again, however, no details were provided. It is unclear how widely the new task force rules might be applied. While OCDETF funds the salaries of more than a thousand federal agents and hundreds of prosecutors, thousands more DEA, FBI and HSI agents work on other narcotics and organized crime cases. In early June, five Democratic senators wrote to Bondi questioning the decision to dismantle OCDETF. That decision was first reported by Bloomberg News. 'As the Department's website notes, OCDETF 'is the centerpiece of the Attorney General's strategy to combat transnational-organized crime and to reduce the availability of illicit narcotics in the nation,'' In a June 23 response, a Justice Department official, Daniel Boatright, wrote that OCDETF's operations would be taken over by the new task forces and managed by the office of the Deputy Attorney General. But Boatright did not clarify what role federal prosecutors would play in the new system. 'A lot of good, smart people are trying to make this work,' said one former senior official. 'But without having prosecutors drive the process, it is going to completely fracture how we do things.' Veteran officials at the DEA — who appear to have had almost no say in the creation of the new task forces— are said to be even more concerned. Already the DEA has been fighting pressure to provide access to investigative files without assurances that the safeguards of the OCDETF intelligence center will remain in place, officials said. 'DEA has not even been invited to any of the task force meetings,' one former senior official said. 'It is mind-boggling. They're just getting orders saying, 'This is what Stephen Miller wants and you've got to give it to us.''
Dominion Post
3 days ago
- Business
- Dominion Post
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright visits NETL
dbeard@ MORGANTOWN – U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright toured the National Energy Technology Laboratory Morgantown campus on Tuesday, as part of his ongoing tour of all 17 Department of Energy National Laboratories. He saw the facilities – including the under-construction Computational Science and Engineering Center – met researchers and learned about their projects. He talked about the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' – the budget reconciliation bill working its way through Congress. 'It's critical for the energy world that I work in,' he said. There have been large distortions across the energy market, particularly electricity, and that needs to be reformed. 'Energy is about humans,' he said. 'We want to make people's lives better.' That means more energy, lower cost energy, jobs, and winning the Artificial Intelligence arms race. The bill's reforms on subsidies and penalties are key to getting the system going in the right direction. NETL is devoted to fossil fuel research, and coal and natural gas are the two biggest sources of electricity worldwide, he said. 'The things that are worked on here are big targets for big benefits to humanity.' Wright took time for a Q&A session with the press. The Dominion Post noted that in the 13-state PJM regional energy grid, 40% of New Service Requests are for solar projects, while only 6.7% are for natural gas and none are for coal. In that context, we asked if there is a future for coal. 'The future for coal is long and bright,' he said. It accounts for a third of all the electricity generated on the planet – more than wind and solar combined. And its available day and night. Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, was PJM's peak winter demand day, and gas and coal supplied 70% of the power, wind and solar just 3%. On Monday, in the sun and heat, wind and solar made up just 8%. Answering another question, he said that one of his secretarial powers is stopping the closure of power plants. Some should be retired, but so many have been closed that are still midstream in their lives and are critical to a secure grid. Growing demand for data centers for AI will increase the demand for electricity, he said. 'If you're going to add a lot of new capacity, the first thing you should do is stop shrinking the capacity you have.' About 40 coal plants are slated for closure this year. 'Our biggest impact is going to stop the closure of most of those.' Wright takes questions from the press. On the topic of AI and data centers, Wright talked about permitting hurdles and the need to make it easier to build them. The 17 national laboratories have a lot of land and are accepting proposals for data centers to be cited on those lands, possibly with cooperative agreements to allow the labs to tap into those centers' computational powers. 'You will see data centers built on national lab property.' He concluded, 'I think the future of energy here in West Virginia is super exciting.' The state has been an energy powerhouse across its history. Natural gas and natural gas liquids, oil and coal are the fastest growing power sources across the world. And West Virginia is a businesses-friendly state with cutting-edge industry such as Form Energy in Weirton – the iron-air battery manufacturing facility. 'I think the outlook for energy and industry in West Virginia is quite bright.'
