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Excerpt:Those employees who had already been fired as a result of the reduction-in-force order were required to be reinstated, Joun ruled.
A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from firing thousands of Department of Education workers and from carrying out an executive order President Donald Trump signed in March, directing the Secretary of Education to take all steps to bring the department to an end.
US District Judge Myong Joun blocked the Trump administration from carrying out a March 11 reduction in force, Trump’s March 20 executive order directing the Secretary of Education to take “all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education,” and Trump’s March 21 order directing the transfer of federal student loan management to the Small Business Administration.
Those employees who had already been fired as a result of the reduction-in-force order were required to be reinstated, Joun ruled.
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U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson pulled off what many believed impossible, passing President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” omnibus bill in dramatic fashion early Thursday morning.
A 215-214 vote, largely on party lines, sends the signature tax cut legislation to the U.S. Senate where it will almost certainly go through extensive edits before being passed back down to the House for final passage.
Despite the hurdles ahead, Thursday’s passage is the latest sign that Johnson has proven to be the most adept Republican speaker in years, horse-trading with conservatives and blue-state Republicans over Medicaid cuts and SALT deductions with little room to spare. Still, he called in President Trump at the eleventh hour to promise swift retribution against anyone who tried to tank the bill.
“Don’t f**k with Medicaid,” Trump allegedly told the GOP caucus in a Wednesday meeting, Politico reported. The threat was largely directed at fiscal hardliners who told Johnson they planned to oppose the bill unless cuts were upped beyond the hundreds of billions of dollars already on the table.
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If the election for governor of New York were held today, there’s a very good chance that the state’s most MAGA congresswoman would defeat Democratic incumbent Kathy Hochul.
That’s the indication in a new poll out this week pitting Hochul against Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the proud proselytizer of President Donald Trump’s agenda who last month withdrew from consideration to serve as the administration’s U.N. ambassador. Ever a team player, Stefanik went along with the desires of Trump and U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to stay in her seat and help secure the GOP’s razor thin majority.
But if the 2026 map of favorable House seats were to expand, Stefanik — who has indicated she’s interested in moving on from Congress — would immediately top the polls against Hochul.
Only 43% of New Yorkers said they would vote to reelect Hochul compared to 42% who sided with Stefanik, a disastrous result for the Democratic incumbent who took over from disgraced Andrew Cuomo in 2023. About 15% of likely voters are undecided, according to the right-leaning survey on a hypothetical 2026 race.
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Republican leaders made major last-minute changes to the tax and spending megabill that passed early Thursday. In most cases, the bill was altered to win the votes of holdout members of the party.
Here’s the rundown of significant late alterations made to secure passage of the bill, which would enact much of President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda.
The bill increased households’ ability to deduct state and local taxes from their federal taxable income. This revision was made to win over Republicans from high-tax states, such as Rep. Mike Lawler (NY), who had insisted on lifting a $10,000 cap on SALT deductions, which was implemented as part of the 2017 GOP tax overhaul.
Initially, the GOP megabill introduced earlier this month raised the cap to $15,000 for individuals and $30,000 for couples. The added cap would have phased down for couples earning more than $400,000.
The revised version lifts the cap to $20,000 for individuals and $40,000 for couples, and implements a phase-down starting at $500,000 for couples.
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A new memo from the U.S. Army asserts that transgender soldiers’ birth records will now only show their sex at birth.
“Commanders will take immediate measures to update personnel records and administrative systems to reflect biological sex for all individuals,” the memo declares, adding that pronoun use “must reflect their biological sex,” Reuters reported. The memo avers that a person’s sex is “unchanging during a person’s life,” echoing a February 26 Defense Department memo that stated, “The Department only recognizes two sexes: male and female. An individual’s sex is immutable, unchanging during a person’s life. All Service members will only serve in accordance with their sex.”
Access to “intimate spaces” will be determined by the biological sex of the soldier; “Commanders will ensure all such shared intimate spaces will be clearly designated for either male, female, or family use,” the document stated. Additionally, commanders must address troops as “sir” or “ma’am.”
On May 6, the Supreme Court stayed an order from U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle in Washington state, who issued an injunction barring the Trump administration from prohibiting transgender people in the military.
Multiple people on private plane that crashed into San Diego neighborhood are dead, authorities say – AP News– news.google.com
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A private jet crashed into a neighborhood of U.S. Navy-owned housing in San Diego during foggy weather early Thursday, igniting cars and homes and killing two people while injuring multiple others, authorities said.
The plane could hold eight to 10 people but it’s not yet known how many were on board, Assistant San Diego Fire Chief Dan Eddy said at a news conference. Authorities couldn’t say definitively if both of the dead were on the plane.
The aircraft crashed just before 4 a.m. into the U.S. military’s largest housing neighborhood. Eddy said at least one home was destroyed and 10 others suffered damage along with half a dozen vehicles that ignited. The destroyed home had a partially collapsed roof.
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The Trump administration has said it is halting Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students.
On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration notified Harvard about its decision following ongoing correspondence regarding the “legality of a sprawling records request”, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The records request comes as part of an investigation by the homeland security department in which federal officials are threatening the university’s international student admissions.
The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, posted a copy of the letter on X, formerly known as Twitter. In it Noem said: “I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked.”
Exclusive: Ukraine pitches tougher Russia sanctions plan to EU as US wavers – Reuters
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President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is launching a criminal investigation into former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, accused of lying about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington opened the inquiry into Cuomo close to a month ago after senior officials in the DOJ called for the corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams to be dismissed, The New York Times reported.
The inquiry followed a call from Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, to prosecute Cuomo over statements he made to the committee investigating his management of the pandemic when the virus was running rampant in nursing homes.
In accordance with a Cuomo directive, more than 9,000 recovering COVID-19 patients were released from hospitals into nursing homes in New York state.
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio didn’t just show up to Tuesday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing; he came loaded for bear. Ostensibly there to discuss the FY26 State Department budget, Rubio instead delivered a scathing indictment of China’s global con game and exposed shocking failures in America’s foreign aid system. What unfolded wasn’t routine testimony; it was a political thunderclap and a long-overdue reckoning.
As I’m sure you recall, Democrats have been having hissy fits over USAID cuts. They claim that the Trump administration was axing vital humanitarian aid when in reality, it was targeting waste, fraud, and abuse.
Just how bad is the waste, fraud, and abuse? Rubio revealed that under the old USAID model, only 12 cents of every dollar made it to the intended recipients. “That means that in order for us to get, you know, aid to somebody, we had to spend all this other money supporting this foreign aid industrial complex,” he said. In other words, U.S. taxpayers were funding bloated overhead while struggling nations got table scraps.