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      Trump Argues That Courts Cannot Block Musk’s Team From Treasury Systems

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      Lawyers for the Trump administration argued late Sunday that a court order blocking Elon Musk’s aides from entering the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems impinged on the president’s absolute powers over the executive branch, which they argued the courts could not usurp.The filing by the administration came in response to a lawsuit filed Friday night by 19 attorneys general, led by New York’s Letitia James, who had won a temporary pause on Saturday. The lawsuit said the Trump administration’s policy of allowing appointees and “special government employees” access to these systems, which contain sensitive information such as bank details and social security numbers, was unlawful.Members of Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which is not actually a department, have been combing through the databases to find expenditures to cut. The lawsuit says the initiative challenges the Constitution’s separation of powers, under which Congress determines government spending.A U.S. district judge in Manhattan, Paul A. Engelmayer, on Saturday ordered any such officials who had been granted access to the systems since Jan. 20 to “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.”Judge Engelmayer said in an emergency order that the officials’ access heightened the risk of leaks and of the systems becoming more vulnerable than before to hacking. He set a hearing in the case for Friday.Federal lawyers defending Mr. Trump — as well as the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the Treasury Department — called the order “markedly overboard” and said the court should dismiss the injunction, or at least modify his order.They argued that the order violated the Constitution by ignoring the separation of powers and severing the executive branch’s right to appoint its own employees. The restriction, they wrote, “draws an impermissible and anti-constitutional distinction” between civil servants and political appointees working in the Treasury Department.The filing followed warning shots over the weekend. Vice President JD Vance declared that the courts and judges aren’t allowed “to control the executive’s legitimate power,” although American courts have long engaged in the practice of judicial review.On Saturday, Mr. Trump called the ruling by Judge Engelmayer a “disgrace” and said that “No judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of a decision.”This is a developing story and will be updated. More

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      Trump Orders Treasury to Halt Minting New Pennies to Cut Waste

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      President Trump said on Sunday night that he had ordered the Treasury secretary to stop producing new pennies, a move that he said would help reduce unnecessary government spending.“Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” he said in a post on Truth Social. He characterized the production of pennies, which “literally cost us more than 2 cents” each, as wasteful.This is a developing story. Please check here for updates. More

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      Court Blocks U.S. From Sending Venezuelan Migrants to Guantánamo

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      A federal judge barred the U.S. government on Sunday from sending three detained Venezuelan men to the Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to a lawyer for the migrants.Lawyers for the men, who are detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in New Mexico, asked the court on Sunday evening for a temporary restraining order, opening the first legal front against the Trump administration’s new policy of sending undocumented migrants to Guantánamo.Within an hour of the filing, which came at the start of the Super Bowl, Judge Kenneth J. Gonzales of the Federal District Court for New Mexico, convened a hearing by videoconference and verbally granted the restraining order, said Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is helping represent the migrants.Immigration and human rights advocates have been stymied in immediately challenging the Trump administration’s policy of sending migrants to Guantánamo, in part because the government has not released the identities of the roughly 50 men it is believed to have flown there so far.But the three Venezuelan men were already represented by lawyers, and their court filing said they had a credible fear that they could be transferred.According to the filing, the men are being held in the same ICE facility, the Otero County Processing Center, where previous groups of men who were flown to Guantánamo in recent days had apparently been held. The men recognized the faces of some of those detainees from government photographs provided to the news media, the filing said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Says He Might Use U.S. Transit Agency to ‘Kill’ Congestion Pricing

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      In an interview with The New York Post, President Trump said that congestion pricing hurt New York City but indicated that he was still talking with Gov. Kathy Hochul.President Trump said that he was considering using the federal Department of Transportation to “kill” congestion pricing, which he claimed was deterring people from coming into Manhattan.But Mr. Trump, in a weekend interview with The New York Post, was vague about how he might try to stop the program. Options could include withholding federal transportation funds or revoking a key federal authorization to toll drivers. He also said that he was still in discussions with Gov. Kathy Hochul about the future of congestion pricing and other matters.The president also vowed in the interview to eliminate bike lanes, which are approved by the New York City Department of Transportation. “They’re dangerous. These bikes go at 20 miles an hour. They’re whacking people,” he said.Charging most vehicles a $9 fee to enter Manhattan below 60th Street is “destructive” to New York, the president said.“If I decide to do it, I will be able to kill it off in Washington through the Department of Transportation,” Mr. Trump said.Mr. Trump, a lifelong New Yorker before he moved to Florida, maintains a deep interest in the city’s affairs and complained about trash and public safety in the subway, “sidewalks in the middle of the street” and New York’s sanctuary city policies during his interview with The Post.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      36 Hours After Russell Vought Took Over Consumer Bureau, He Shut Its Operations

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      The agency had been one of Wall Street’s most feared regulators, with the power to issue rules on mortgages, credit cards, student loans and other areas affecting Americans’ financial lives.The day before Linda Wetzel closed on her retirement home in Southport, N.C., in 2012 — a cozy place where she could open the windows at night and catch an ocean breeze — the bank making the loan surprised her with a fee she hadn’t expected. Ms. Wetzel scoured her mortgage paperwork and couldn’t find the charge disclosed anywhere.Ms. Wetzel made the payment and then filed an online complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bank quickly opened an investigation, and a month later, it sent her a $5,600 check.“My first thought was ‘thank you.’ I was in tears,” she recalled. “That money was a year or two of savings on my mortgage. It was my little nest egg.”Ms. Wetzel’s refund is a tiny piece of the work the bureau has done since it was created in 2011. It has clawed back $21 billion for consumers. It slashed overdraft fees, reformed the student loan servicing market, transformed mortgage lending rules and forced banks and money transmitters to compensate fraud victims.It may no longer be able to carry out that work.President Trump on Friday appointed Russell Vought, who was confirmed a day earlier to lead the Office of Management and Budget, as the agency’s acting director. Mr. Vought was an author of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for upending the federal government that called for significant changes, including abolishing the consumer bureau.In less than 36 hours, Mr. Vought threw the agency into chaos. On Saturday, he ordered the bureau’s 1,700 employees to stop nearly all their work and announced plans to cut off the agency’s funding. Then on Sunday, he closed the bureau’s headquarters for the coming week. Workers who tried to retrieve their laptops from the office were turned away, employees said.The bureau “has been a woke & weaponized agency against disfavored industries and individuals for a long time,” Mr. Vought wrote Sunday on X. “This must end.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Democrats Are in Disarray. Now What?

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      More from our inbox:Asheville’s ChallengesMental Health Intervention Can Save Lives Gus Aronson for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “How Democrats Can Reinvent Themselves,” by Doug Sosnik (Opinion guest essay, Feb. 1):Mr. Sosnik claims that Democrats focused too much on “elite” special interest groups and failed to address voter frustrations about the economy and crime. He then hearkens back 30 years ago and credits President Bill Clinton’s success to his avoidance of “divisive social issues.”This glosses over reality: Mr. Clinton bowed to right-wing messaging that embraced the idea of a burdened white taxpayer and scapegoated communities of color, resulting in policies like mass incarceration and a weakened social safety net. Today, Republicans have recycled the same playbook, this time demonizing D.E.I. initiatives and “woke” activists as modern-day villains responsible for all social problems and economic woes.Mr. Sosnik’s dismissal of advocates for social justice, L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, environmental protection and labor protections as “elite outsiders” fuels this false, harmful narrative. These groups aren’t elites, as Mr. Sosnik suggests they are. They are working people fighting to dismantle the root causes of economic insecurity and vast economic inequality — and protect our planet. The cost of silencing them will be steep.Jenice Rochelle RobinsonWashingtonTo the Editor:Please do not blame the Democrats’ situation on a failure of messaging. As any communications professional will tell you, organizations need to decide what they stand for and what their value proposition is before the experts can figure out how best broadcast them so they resonate with audiences. And it can’t just be, “We’re not that.”Democrats, there are plenty of communications and media relations experts, including me, who are distraught at what’s happening and more than willing to help you shape your messaging. But you need to figure out what you want to say before we can help you. Those conversations need to be more than just “What’s our message?”Keith BermanDenverTo the Editor:As a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, Doug Sosnik can perhaps be forgiven for failing to draw the solid line that leads from the Democrats’ 2024 losses straight back to Mr. Clinton’s failings more than 30 years ago — punitive criminal justice “reform,” weakening the social safety net and risky, Wall Street-favoring economic policies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Sunday Read: ‘Some Raw Truths About Raw Milk’

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      Listen and follow ‘The Daily’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube | iHeartRadioThousands of years ago, after domesticating cows and other ruminants, humans did something remarkable: They began to consume the milk from these animals.But living closely with animals and drinking their milk also presents risks, chief among them the increased likelihood that infections will jump from animals to people. Some of humanity’s nastiest scourges, including smallpox and measles, probably originated in domesticated animals. In the 19th century, health authorities began pushing for milk to be treated by heating it; this simple practice of pasteurizing milk would come to be considered one of the great public-health triumphs of the modern era.Today, however, a small but growing number of Americans prefer to drink their milk raw. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, now stands at the vanguard of this movement.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Frannie Carr Toth, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez, and Krish Seenivasan. More

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      The Populist Cure Is Worse Than the Elite Disease

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      Steve Bannon made me laugh out loud.I was listening to my colleague Ross Douthat’s excellent, informative interview with President Trump’s former chief strategist, and Bannon said this: “Trump came down in June of 2015, and for 10 years there’s been no real work done to even begin to understand populism, except that the deplorables are an exotic species like at the San Diego Zoo.”I’m sorry, but that’s hilarious. Ever since Trump began winning Republican primaries in 2016, there has been a desperate effort to understand populism. JD Vance is the vice president in part because of that effort. His book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which came out shortly after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, was a monumental best seller because so many Americans — including liberal Americans — wanted to understand the culture and ideas that brought us Trump.If you consume political media, you’ve no doubt seen the countless focus groups of Trump voters, and you’re familiar with the man-on-the-street” interviews with Trump supporters at Trump rallies. We’ve read books, watched documentaries and listened to podcasts.And if you live in Trump country, as I do, you’ll find that Trump voters are very eager to explain themselves. This is not a quiet movement. They don’t exactly hide their interests and passions.So, Mr. Bannon, we understand populism quite well. You’re the person who’s obscuring the truth. Regardless of how a populist movement starts, it virtually always devolves into a cesspool of corruption and spite.And that’s exactly where we are today.If you grow up in the rural South, you understand populism almost by osmosis. The region has long been populist territory, and sometimes for understandable reasons. The antebellum South was an extraordinarily economically stratified society, with a small planter elite that both owned slaves and exercised political and economic dominance over the yeoman farmers who made up the bulk of the white Southern population.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More