The Paper Trail: July 1, 2025

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The Paper Trail

Editor’s Note

Starting next week, The Paper Trail will be coming from a new address so lookout for [email protected]

Announcements

Applications are now open for a two-day intensive Boot Camp on the art and practice of oversight and investigations hosted by POGO, the Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy, and The Lugar Center. This training is only open to staff in Congress. Apply at THIS LINK by July 21.

Top stories for July 1, 2025

Supreme Court limits nationwide orders that have blocked Trump’s birthright citizenship ban: The Supreme Court backed President Trump’s request to scale back nationwide injunctions blocking his ban on automatic citizenship for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. The court didn’t directly address the constitutionality of the president’s order ending birthright citizenship. (Ann E. Marimow, Washington Post)

🔎 See Also: DOJ announces plans to prioritize cases to revoke citizenship (Jaclyn Diaz and Juliana Kim, NPR)

Mass layoffs likely to remain blocked, for now, thanks to a Supreme Court footnote: The Supreme Court’s decision on universal injunctions left in place some carve outs, including one that could — at least temporarily — protect a judge’s ruling blocking the Trump administration from carrying out widespread layoffs. (Eric Katz, Government Executive)

Morale craters at State Department as mass layoffs loom: The plan for mass layoffs at the State Department has left much of the workforce exasperated and embittered, tanking morale as extra demands are made to assist U.S. citizens seeking to flee the Middle East. (Adam Taylor, John Hudson, and Hannah Natanson, Washington Post)

USAID cuts may cause 14 million more deaths in next five years, study says: The study, published in the Lancet, estimated that 91 million deaths in low- to middle-income countries were prevented between 2001 and 2021, owing to USAID. The study estimated that more than 14 million preventable deaths could occur by 2030, including 4.5 million deaths among children under 5, if cuts continue. (Kelsey Ables, Washington Post)

🔎 See Also: Bush, Obama — and singer Bono — fault Trump’s gutting of USAID on agency’s last day (Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press)

The first rule in Trump’s Washington: Don’t write anything down: Across the Trump administration, a creeping culture of secrecy is overtaking personnel and budget decisions, casual social interactions, and everything in between. No one puts anything in writing, meetings are conducted in-person behind closed doors, workers prefer to talk outdoors, and communication has increasingly shifted to the encrypted messaging app Signal, with messages set to auto-delete. (Hannah Natanson, Washington Post)

Kristi Noem secretly took a cut of political donations: A dark money group paid $80,000 to the Homeland Security secretary’s personal company when she was governor of South Dakota. She didn’t include this income on her federal disclosure forms — a likely violation of ethics requirements, experts say. (Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski, ProPublica)

Elon Musk & DOGE

DOGE has the keys to sensitive data that could help Elon Musk: In at least seven major departments or agencies, DOGE secured the power to view records that experts say could benefit Musk’s businesses for years. The data could help Musk’s companies expand into new industries, win additional government contracts, or identify employees who reported unsafe working conditions to federal investigators. (Desmond Butler et al., Washington Post)

🔎 See Also: Trump suggests DOGE look at subsidies for Musk’s companies to save money (Nandita Bose, Kritika Lamba, and Shubham Kalia, Reuters)

DOGE loses control over government grants website, freeing up billions: DOGE lost the power to control federal grants website grants.gov, which serves as a clearinghouse for more than $500 billion in annual awards. A senior administration official said DOGE will continue to “facilitate the review of grants, working alongside agency secretaries to determine which grants should continue, which should be terminated, and which require further scrutiny.” (Dan Diamond and Hannah Natanson, Washington Post)

DOGE now has approval authority for defense IT, consulting contracts: DOD agencies and components must now obtain approval from DOGE before they make new unclassified awards for IT consulting, management services, and advisory and assistance support work. (Ross Wilkers, Government Executive)

Weaponization of the Government

University of Virginia president resigns under pressure from Trump administration: James Ryan said he will resign as the university’s president in the face of demands by the DOJ, which threatened to strip the school of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding unless it complied with President Trump’s executive order eliminating DEI programs. (Michael S. Schmidt and Michael C. Bender, New York Times)

Harvard is the wealthiest U.S. university. Can it survive a Trump standoff?: The attacks on Harvard are part of a wider battle the Trump administration is waging against universities it says have allowed antisemitic behavior on campus. (Danielle Douglas-Gabriel and Susan Svrluga, Washington Post)

Reproductive Freedom

HHS eliminates CDC staff who made sure birth control is safe for women at risk: HHS fired a team of workers at the CDC who issued guidelines for clinicians on how to prescribe contraception safely for women with underlying medical conditions including heart disease, lupus, sickle cell disease, and obesity. (Rachana Pradhan, CBS News)

Defense and Veterans Affairs

U.S. Air Force uses leftover ICBM funds to revamp Qatar plane: The Air Force plans to use leftover funds from the LGM-35A Sentinel nuclear missile program to help pay for refurbishing a Qatari-donated plane into a new Air Force One. (Stephen Losey, Air Force Times)

Military requesting to pull 200 troops back from California protest duty: The commander in charge of the troops in L.A. asked the defense secretary if 200 of those forces could be returned to wildfire fighting duty. (Tara Copp, Associated Press)

Health Care

Feds investigate hospitals over religious exemptions from gender-affirming care: One of the most recent actions by HHS targets the University of Michigan Health System over a former employee’s claims that she was fired for requesting a religious exemption from providing gender-affirming care. Two other cases HHS announced in recent months involve ultrasound technicians who didn’t want to be involved in abortion procedures and a nurse who asked for a religious exemption to avoid administering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children. (Kate Wells, KFF Health News)

ICYMI

Immigration and Border Security:

→ Concerns grow over dire conditions in immigrant detention

→ Trump officials to end deportation protections for Haitian immigrants

→ Air Force to manage new militarized zone along U.S.-Mexico border

→ ICE is arresting migrants in worksite raids. Employers are largely escaping charges

→ Trump administration sues Los Angeles over sanctuary city policy

→ The first American “scientific refugees” arrive in France

→ U.S. soldier’s son, born on Army base in Germany, is deported to Jamaica

→ Bob Vylan’s Israeli military chant prompts U.S. visa cancellation and UK criminal probe

Other News:

→ Supreme Court sides with religious parents seeking to opt out of LGBTQ storybooks

→ DOJ announces takedown of record $14.6B in health care fraud

→ EPA employees go public with opposition to Trump policies

→ SBA to audit 8(a) contracting program

→ At some federal beaches, surf’s up but the lifeguard chair’s empty

→ Mail-in voting rates dropped but early in-person voting is a hit, a federal report shows

→ Private jet carbon emissions are soaring. Here’s who pollutes the most