The Paper Trail: June 9, 2026

8,000 Federal Employees are Now “Schedule Effed”;
White House Seeks to Impose Political Test on Grantees;
Jan. 6 Rioter Appointed to Sensitive Government Job;
And More.

June 9, 2026

Announcements

Concurrent Congressional and Executive Investigations: The Whys, Whats, and Hows: POGO’s virtual training on how to conduct oversight when the executive branch is investigating the same matter will be Friday, June 12 at 12 noon ET. This event is only open to staff in Congress, GAO, and CRS. Register HERE.

The Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds is excited to announce its new training for Members of Congress, Working with Whistleblowers: A Primer for Members (Staff Academy). Members and their staff can ask questions and pick up the Office’s Guidance for Members on Working with Whistleblowers: How to Support Constituents and Sources at its pop-up table on June 10 from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. in the Longworth Cafeteria.

Top stories for June 9, 2026

A former GEO Group executive now runs ICE. The company’s government ties run deep: About a third of people in immigration detention are in facilities run by GEO Group. As former GEO Group executive David Venturella begins his tenure as acting director of ICE, the company and the agency appear more closely linked than ever. (Meg Anderson, NPR)

🔎 See Also: New Jersey sues over controversial Delaney Hall ICE detention center (Scott Fallon and Eduardo Cuevas, USA Today)

🔎 See Also: Mullin says ICE training going back to “regular standards” (Hamed Aleaziz, New York Times)

Mullin said he’s reviewing some contracts signed by Noem: Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Congress he’s reviewing some contracts pursued by his predecessor Kristi Noem and promised to turn over a list of contracts that have been canceled. (Rebecca Beitsch, The Hill)

Trump officials planned to mark 2.7 million living people as dead, whistleblower claims: Jeremiah Schofield, a former Social Security Administration executive, alleges the administration planned to falsely mark 2.7 million people as dead >as a way to pressure immigrants to leave the country. Schofield’s whistleblower complaint describes a tumultuous period inside Social Security as DOGE employees sought to use Social Security data to implement Trump’s immigration crackdown. (Meryl Kornfield, Washington Post)

IRS failed to match taxpayer records with ICE data accurately, report finds: The IRS failed to consistently and accurately match taxpayer information with records from ICE as the Trump administration accelerated its deportation efforts last summer, according to a government watchdog report released Monday. The report also found the IRS faced “challenges due to the lack of uniformity in the formatting of ICE data,” and that ICE didn’t meet IRS standards for safeguarding data. (Danny Nguyen, Politico)

Trump signs order moving thousands of federal employees into Schedule F: Roughly 8,000 career federal employees were stripped of their civil service protections last week, effectively making them at-will employees. They will no longer be able to challenge adverse personnel actions before the Merit Systems Protection Board, and their whistleblower complaints will be investigated by their own agency rather than the Office of Special Counsel. (Erich Wagner, Government Executive)

White House seeks to impose political test on billions in federal grants: The administration is seeking to exert more control over government grants, aiming to restrict a vast swath of funding so that it primarily serves the purposes and organizations politically aligned with President Trump. If finalized, the policy would require all federal grants to be approved by political appointees, who must ensure that the money would “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities.” (Tony Romm, New York Times)

Trump administration killed criminal investigation of GOP senator’s coal companies: The administration earlier this year killed a criminal probe into the coal empire owned by West Virginia Senator Jim Justice, a close ally of Trump. The case was shut down by the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, which was then headed by Todd Blanche. (Molly Redden and Avi Asher-Schapiro, ProPublica)

EPA’s research efforts are swayed by administration priorities, official says: The EPA’s reorganized research office is influenced by the Trump administration’s political appointees, the agency’s top science official confirmed to lawmakers last week. (Edward Graham, Nextgov/FCW)

Trump is eyeing control of Smithsonian’s budget: Experts say a directive the OMB issued last month will put the Smithsonian in a major bind, creating hurdles to access congressional funding. The directive compels the Smithsonian to spend congressionally appropriated funding in a way that’s “consistent with the FY 2026 President’s Budget” in order to receive it. (Torrence Banks, NOTUS)

Trump library says no Twitter DMs can be found, despite evidence he sent them: Records show that the first Trump administration opted not to save Twitter direct messages in its library archives, raising questions about compliance with the Presidential Records Act. (Nate Jones, Washington Post)

Analysis: FISA reform needs to happen now: The failure of Congress to keep up with massive leaps forward in technology has endangered the privacy rights of millions of Americans through the data broker loophole, which allows private companies to sell to the government troves of information about individual Americans. Now is the time to pass a reform bill that closes that loophole and requires a warrant for backdoor searches. (Don Bell, The Constitution Project at POGO)

Trump Anti-Weaponization Fund

Order shielding Trump family from IRS audits will remain, Blanche says: Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the DOJ would withdraw its proposal for the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” but will uphold a separate agreement shielding the president and his family from tax audits that potentially involve more than $100 million in penalties. (Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer, New York Times)

Iran War

Inspector general group announces pick to lead oversight of Iran war following senator’s questioning: Defense Department Inspector General Platte Moring was chosen to lead oversight of Operation Epic Fury. Moring’s oversight of the war in Iran will be supported by the IGs for the State Department and USAID. (Sean Michael Newhouse, Government Executive)

Prediction Markets

Kalshi and Polymarket crack down on paid influencers claiming election fraud: Kalshi and Polymarket are sponsoring content creators who spread election falsehoods. The Los Angeles mayoral race is the clearest example yet of how prediction market posts about changing betting odds for candidates are being used to sow doubt about the integrity of elections. (Bobby Allyn and Jude Joffe-Block, NPR)

Insurrection

Pentagon appoints convicted January 6 rioter to sensitive counter-terrorism role: The DOD appointed Elias Irizarry, a rioter convicted for his role in the insurrection, to a sensitive national security role dealing with counterterrorism, overriding insiders’ concerns about his past record. Irizzary pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor trespass charge in 2022 and was sentenced to 14 days in jail. He was pardoned by President Trump. (Robert Tait, The Guardian)

🔎 See Also: Video shows Pentagon counterterrorism hire clambering into Capitol on Jan. 6 (Joyce Sohyun Lee, Andrew Ba Tran, and Salvador Rizzo, Washington Post)

The Jan. 6 pardons: How many clemency recipients have faced other charges? At least 97 of the more than 1,500 individuals granted clemency by President Trump have been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of crimes separate from January 6 since their participation in the attack. Some of those crimes were actively enabled by the clemency. (Katherine Pompilio, Lawfare)

White House Ballroom

Ballroom donors won $50B in contracts after giving to Trump project, watchdog group finds: More than half of the publicly identified corporate donors to the White House ballroom project have won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion during the past six months, according to a report by Public Citizen. Lockheed Martin received nearly all of that total. Most of those companies are also facing federal enforcement actions over alleged wrongdoing or have had such actions suspended since the start of Trump’s second term. (Jonathan Edwards, Washington Post)

Defense and Veterans Affairs

The U.S. needs drones, not Trump-class battleships, Democrats argue: House Democrats say investing in Trump-class battleships would mean ignoring lessons learned from past Navy mistakes in which the service invested billions of dollars in ill-conceived procurement programs. Instead, lawmakers say the military should invest more in cheaper autonomous weapons systems. (Riley Ceder, Navy Times)

National Guard’s DC deployment has had no “measurable effect” on violent crime: According to a new report, the presence of more than 2,000 National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., since August 2025 has had “no measurable effect on violent crime.” The report described the deployment as “an expensive tool” used in “the wrong places for the wrong types of crime.” (Tanya Noury, Military Times)

Pentagon reworks “offensive” policy affecting LDS after Mormon lawmakers loudly protest: The Pentagon cut down the faith codes — the recognized faith groups meant to provide more accurate demographic data on service members’ religious beliefs — from 200 to just 30. Under the new list, service members can identify as various Christian sects or Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu, Bahá’i, and agnostic. Left off the list are atheist, Wiccan, pagan, and humanist. (Ellen Mitchell, The Hill)

Business and Finance

How Trump allies turned a consumer watchdog into a political weapon: The Trump administration came to Washington last year seeking to shutter the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Since then, the bureau has been remade to advance the president’s priorities: investigating “woke” nonprofit lenders, making it harder for immigrants in the country illegally to obtain mortgages and credit cards, and inviting consumers to complain if they have been refused service or “de-banked” for political or religious reasons. (Andrew Ackerman, Washington Post)

How Elon Musk’s friendship with the FCC smooths the way for SpaceX’s IPO: FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has lavished praise on Elon Musk, repeatedly expressing his admiration for the tech mogul. He has greenlighted a satellite request from SpaceX and changed some of the agency’s rules to benefit the company. The relationship between Musk and Carr is more important than ever as SpaceX prepares for an initial public offering this week. (Cecilia Kang, New York Times)

🔎 See Also: University endowments are about to strike it big on the SpaceX IPO (Juliet Chung, Wall Street Journal)

Fallen crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried applies for pardon: Bankman-Fried said he hasn’t personally had any conversations with the White House about the matter but declined to comment on whether his relatives or any associates have. (Declan Harty and Jasper Goodman, Politico)

Tech

Trump plan to test AI models has a problem — U.S. security teams were gutted by DOGE: Trump’s executive order expands the government’s efforts to conduct voluntary safety testing of frontier AI models. Critics say the order may be short-sighted, offering only performative reassurances that the government is actively monitoring for AI risks while changing very little about how and when models are deployed. (Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica)

“Teachers are going to hate it”: How social media apps hooked teens at school: Internal documents show how social media companies grab children’s attention throughout the school day, a strategy that administrators say undermines education. (Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, New York Times)

Health Care

Millions of kids could lose insurance as GOP healthcare cuts start to bite: More than 1 million children have lost insurance since President Trump took office in 2025. Another million could lose it amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and new Medicaid eligibility rules. (Julie Rovner, KFF Health News)

As Pennsylvania cracks down on AI, multiple chatbots continue to pose as doctors: A Pennsylvania task force has been working since February to identify AI chatbots posing as licensed professionals and misleading users. (Jaxon White, Associated Press)

This weight-loss drug hasn't been approved by the FDA. Doctors are prescribing it anyway: Touted as the next generation in the GLP-1 craze, Retatrutide is an experimental weight-loss drug that is not authorized outside of clinical trials. The FDA hasn't reviewed whether it’s safe and effective, yet Retatrutide is for sale all over the internet. (Daniel Gilbert, Adam Yamaguchi, and Laura Geller, CBS News)