Newsletter

The Paper Trail: March 18, 2025

White House, Court Fight Over Deportation Flights; Who’s Really Running DOGE?; Rich Homeowners Exploit Flood Insurance Program; And More.

Mar 18, 2025

Delivered Tuesdays and Fridays, The Paper Trail is a curated collection of the government news you need to know. Sign up to get this newsletter delivered to your inbox.

The Paper Trail

Announcements

Working with Whistleblowers on Oversight & Investigations: POGO’s virtual training on an introduction to oversight will be Friday, March 21 at 12 noon. This event is only open to staff in Congress, GAO, and CRS. Register HERE.

Top stories for March 18, 2025

Trump administration deports hundreds of immigrants even as a judge orders their removals be stopped: The administration over the weekend transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador despite a court order temporarily blocking the deportations. The immigrants were deported after President Trump’s declaration of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which was last used to justify the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II. (Nicholas Riccardi and Regina Garcia Cano, Associated Press)

🔎 See Also: Justice Department stonewalls federal judge over deportation flights (Alan Feuer and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, New York Times)

🔎See Also: Homan on deportation flights: “I don’t care what the judges think” (Lauren Irwin, The Hill)

Trump orders gutting of 7 agencies, including Voice of America’s parent: President Trump ordered the heads of the agencies to eliminate all functions that are not statutorily mandated. The targeted agencies include the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, and the Minority Business Development Agency. (Tyler Pager, New York Times)

🔎 See Also: Experts fear global media agency’s gutting will strip key tools against foreign propaganda (David DiMolfetta, Nextgov/FCW)

The Trump administration is taking steps to comply with court orders to reinstate tens of thousands of fired workers: The recently hired, or in some cases recently promoted or transferred, federal employees will not immediately go back to their jobs but will instead be placed on paid administrative leave. The more than 30,000 employees fired in recent weeks are impacted by two separate court rulings issued last week, which could lead to different outcomes for different workers. (Eric Katz, Government Executive)

Social Security employees warn of damage from DOGE: Experts warn that staff cuts at the Social Security Administration could create gaping holes in the agency’s infrastructure, destabilizing a program which keeps millions of people out of poverty and which a large percentage of retirees rely on for the bulk of their income. (Tara Siegel Bernard, New York Times)

Richest Americans, big businesses might welcome IRS cuts, officials say: Tax experts say the IRS’s layoffs will undermine the agency’s effort to more closely inspect the taxes of the country’s richest people and most powerful companies. (Shannon Najmabadi, Washington Post)

DOGE cuts reach key nuclear scientists, bomb engineers and safety experts In the past six weeks, the National Nuclear Security Administration has lost a huge cadre of scientists, engineers, safety experts, project officers, accountants, and lawyers — at a time when the agency is the busiest it’s been since the Cold War. There are concerns that the loss of staff will also hobble oversight of the more than 60,000 contract employees who carry out the agency’s work. (Sharon LaFraniere, Minho Kim, and Julie Tate, New York Times)

DOGE’s cuts at the USDA could cause U.S. grocery prices to rise and invasive species to spread: USDA food inspectors and dog trainers remain out of work, leaving food to rot in ports and invasive pests to proliferate. (Kate Knibbs, Wired)

Trump fired park rangers — but not the ones who tend to the White House: The administration exempted from mass firings National Park Service staffers that help manage the White House and President’s Park. (Jimmy Tobias, The Intercept)

🔎 See Also: Curious how Trump’s cost cutting could affect your national park visit? You might not get a straight answer (Anjeanette Damon, ProPublica)

Some federal office leases restored after pushback to Musk team’s cuts: The GSA will reverse more than 100 lease terminations, including an Energy Department office in New Mexico that manages a nuclear waste repository and an office used by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to respond to hurricanes in Florida. Congressman Tom Cole said that several offices located in Oklahoma included on a DOGE list of lease terminations would remain open. Officials declined to provide a full list of canceled leases. (Madeleine Ngo, New York Times)

🔎 See Also: Famous climate observatory’s lease may end because of DOGE (Austyn Gaffney, New York Times)

Draft list for new travel ban proposes Trump target 43 countries: The administration is considering targeting the citizens of 43 countries as part of a new ban on travel to the U.S. that would be broader than the ban imposed during Trump’s first term. A proposed “red” list of 11 countries whose citizens would be flatly barred from entering the U.S. includes Afghanistan, Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. For the 10 countries on an “orange” list, affluent business travelers might be allowed to enter but not people traveling on immigrant or tourist visas. (Charlie Savage and Ken Bensinger, New York Times)

Tulsi Gabbard launches investigation into leaks at spy agencies: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard ordered an investigation into “politically motivated leaks” from inside the intelligence community and is also probing internal chat rooms for misconduct or unprofessional behavior by employees. (Dan De Luce, NBC News)

Elon Musk & DOGE

Who’s running the DOGE wrecking machine: the world’s richest man or a little-known bureaucrat? Sources say that Amy Gleason is only in charge on paper, while Elon Musk’s top lieutenants really run the team with Musk occasionally issuing commands from his office next to the White House. (Christopher Bing, Avi Asher-Schapiro, and Annie Waldman, ProPublica)

Elon Musk’s Starlink expands across White House complex: Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by Elon Musk's SpaceX company, is now accessible across the White House campus. White House officials said that Starlink had “donated” the service and that the gift had been vetted by the lawyer overseeing ethics issues in the White House Counsel’s Office. (Maggie Haberman et al., New York Times)

DOGE staffer broke Treasury rules transmitting personal data: DOGE staffer Marko Elez, who resigned last month after his racist social media posts surfaced but was quickly rehired, violated Treasury Department policies when he emailed a spreadsheet containing personally identifiable information to two GSA officials, according to a court filing. Elez currently works with the DOGE team at the Social Security Administration. (Gregory Korte and Erik Larson, Bloomberg)

A close Elon Musk friend joins his effort on Social Security: Antonio Gracias, a private equity investor who is one of Elon Musk’s closest confidants, has taken a new role in the Social Security Administration as part of the DOGE-led cost-cutting effort. Nine DOGE members have arrived at the agency in recent days, including Gracias and two men who work at his investment firm. (Theodore Schleifer, Kate Conger, and Ryan Mac, New York Times)

Other DOGE News:

→ Musk’s team evicts officials at the U.S. Institute of Peace

→ Opinion: Musk said no one has died since foreign aid was cut. That isn’t true

→ Why the Arabic “Sesame Street” and other cuts are not really about fraud

Insurrection

Trump says Biden’s pardons are “void” and “vacant” because of autopen: President Trump announced Sunday on social media that he no longer considered valid the pardons President Biden granted to members of the House committee that investigated the insurrection and other people whom Trump considers his political enemies, because the pardons were signed using an autopen. (Shawn McCreesh, New York Times)

Dobbs Aftermath

The women most affected by abortion bans: According to a new study, abortion bans had the most pronounced effects among Black and Hispanic women, women without a college degree, and women living farthest from a clinic. (Claire Cain Miller and Margot Sanger-Katz, New York Times)

Russia-Ukraine War

U.S. to withdraw from group investigating responsibility for Ukraine invasion: The decision to withdraw from the International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, which the Biden administration joined in 2023, is the Trump administration’s latest move away from holding Vladimir Putin accountable for crimes committed against Ukrainians. (Glenn Thrush, New York Times)

Trump admin nixed contract helping kidnapped Ukrainian children: The State Department quietly terminated a contract that was in the process of transferring evidence of alleged Russian abductions of Ukrainian children — a potential war crime — to law enforcement officials in Europe. (Greg Sargent, The New Republic)

Political Misbehavior

Trump calls his opponents “scum" and lawbreakers in bellicose speech at Justice Department: For more than an hour on Friday, President Trump delivered an insult-laden speech that shattered the traditional notion of DOJ independence. He called his courtroom opponents “scum,” judges “corrupt,” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.” Attorney General Pam Bondi introduced Trump, pledging that she and others at the department are fully engaged in his mission. (Irie Sentner and Josh Gerstein, Politico)

Trump targets law firm Paul Weiss, restricting government access: Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison became the third law firm to have its lawyers’ security clearances suspended by President Trump. The executive order cited the activities of Mark Pomerantz, who retired from the firm in 2012 and went on to oversee the Manhattan DA office’s investigation into Trump’s business practices. This firm also has other high-profile Democrats among its ranks, including former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and was among the biggest donors to Democrats during the 2024 election. (Kelsey Walsh, ABC News)

🔎 See Also: Trump revokes Secret Service protection for Hunter and Ashley Biden (Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy, USA Today)

Police Misconduct

DEA insiders warned about legality of phone tracking program. their concerns were kept secret.: Watchdog findings released last week show that government officials had privately raised questions about the DEA’s mass phone data collection program, including a high-ranking DEA agent who expressed “major” concerns. The DEA’s “Hemisphere” project went ahead anyway — and continues to this day. (Matt Sledge, The Intercept)

LAPD surveilled Gaza protests using this social media tool: Between October 2023 and April 2024, Dataminr, a social media surveillance firm and “official partner” of X, alerted the Los Angeles police of more than 50 protests, including at least a dozen before they occurred. Privacy and civil liberties experts argue that police surveillance of First Amendment activity from afar has a chilling effect on political association, discourse, and dissent. There is also evidence that, despite Dataminr’s marketing claims of being a passive intermediary between public data and its customers, the company has at times demonstrated implicit biases in its work. (Sam Biddle, The Intercept)

Defense and Veterans Affairs

Black Medal of Honor recipient removed from Department of Defense website: The DOD web page celebrating Charles Calvin Rogers, an army general who served in the Vietnam war and was awarded the country’s highest military decoration, was removed and the letters “DEI” added to the site’s address. (Maya Yang, The Guardian)

VA leaders announce end to all transgender-related care for vets: The VA will phase out all medical treatments for gender dysphoria, including hormone therapy and surgical options for transgender veterans. VA leaders said the change “does not affect VA medical care for eligible veterans who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer.” They also promised care and treatment to veterans that are “compatible with generally accepted standards of medical practice and determined by appropriate health care professionals” but didn’t provide specifics of what those limits mean. (Leo Shane III, Military Times)

Business and Finance

SEC rule suspension is early gift for Trump’s oil and gas supporters: Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, who was formerly the CEO of an oil field services company, and two major Trump supporters won a big victory last week when the SEC backed off a rule requiring large companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions. The SEC’s retreat from the disclosure rule is among the first of many victories expected by the oil and gas industry. (Peter Whoriskey, Washington Post)

🔎 See Also: Trump overturned two Biden rules, Congress set to clear more for repeal (Sean Michael Newhouse, Government Executive)

Trump issues ethics waiver for his AI/crypto czar: The administration issued a blanket ethics waiver to venture capitalist David Sacks, now the president’s special adviser for artificial intelligence and crypto, clearing him to work on issues directly related to his financial holdings. Sacks, a crypto industry multimillionaire, has denied having any conflicts of interest. (Luke Goldstein, The Lever)

Trump says pressure on Columbia is only the beginning for college campuses: President Trump’s crackdown on alleged antisemitism on college campuses is alarming students and instructors who say the administration is trying to outlaw criticism of Israel and bend universities to his will. Trump says he’s just getting started. (Isaac Arnsdorf and Susan Svrluga, Washington Post)

🔎 See Also: “Colossally wasteful”: Trump’s cuts imperil medical research at Columbia (Joseph Goldstein, New York Times)

🔎 See Also: How a Columbia student fled to Canada after ICE came looking for her (Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Hamed Aleaziz, New York Times)

The working class is paying to insure beach mansions: A federal program providing insurance to homeowners when private insurers abandon their climate-battered locales was envisioned as a stopgap measure for the working class. But the wealthy are exploiting the program at the expense of low-income homeowners. (Lucy Dean Stockton and David Sirota, The Lever)

Health Care

States try to limit private equity in health care: While Congress and the FTC have increased scrutiny of private equity-fueled mergers in health care, especially involving hospitals, they have been reluctant to take action. States, meanwhile, are racing to put new checks on these deals. (Tina Reed, Axios)

ICYMI

Immigration and Border Security:

→ How Trump’s hard-line tactics are driving down migration

→ “Essentially cages”: ICE is using courthouse cells for lengthy detentions

→ Administration cancels translation services for those seeking to access or correct their immigration status

→ Pentagon deploys Navy destroyer for unusual U.S. border mission

→ Border patrol grabs Venezuelan parents in D.C., despite protected status

→ Brown University professor is deported despite a judge’s order

→ Green card holder from New Hampshire “interrogated” at Logan Airport, detained

Other News:

→ Kash Patel pushes command changes at FBI

→ Anti-abortion lawyer pushed out of FDA after Republican senator’s pressure campaign

→ Trump administration questions law firms over DEI employment practices

→ How Matt Gaetz poisoned the House Ethics Committee

→ Trump seeks more sway in picking Kennedy Center honorees

Upcoming Events

📌 What’s next for U.S. defense strategy and spending? Brookings Institution. Thursday, March 20, 10:00 a.m. - 11:15 a.m. ET, Falk Auditorium, 1775 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, D.C.

📌 NTSB Preliminary Report: The DCA Midair Collision. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation; Subcommittee on Aviation, Space, and Innovation. Thursday, March 27, 10:00 a.m., 253 Russell Senate Office Building.

Hot Docs

🔥📃 GAO - Small Business Contracting: National Nuclear Security Administration Needs Increased Contractor Oversight to Reduce Reporting Errors. GAO-25-106820 (PDF)

🔥📃 Media Matters for America: The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces. March 14, 2025

Nominations & Appointments

Nominations

Bill Bazzi - Ambassador, Tunisia
Lynda Blanchard - U.S. representative to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture
Michael George DeSombre - Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Department of State
Anji Sinha - Ambassador, Singapore

Appointments