Trump’s Federal Worker “Buyout” Hits Yet Another Legal Hurdle

A federal judge has indefinitely extended the deadline for federal workers to accept Donald Trump’s buyout offer.

The president had posed a “fork in the road” ultimatum for federal employees via the Office of Personnel Management late last month: Either opt for a “deferred resignation” that would pay them through September, or face a possible furlough.

The temporary restraining order on the program put in place by U.S. District Judge George O’Toole will remain in place while the court weighs the legality of the buyout, reported CNN Monday.

Eligible federal workers had originally faced a midnight deadline on Thursday to accept or deny Trump’s offer. O’Toole imposed an initial restraining order, just hours before the offer expired, delaying the deadline to late Monday.

“The pressure that comes from that deadline where people have to make their choice about their livelihood,” argued Elena Goldstein, an attorney for the plaintiffs: “Irreparable harm will continue. They will be asking what they actually accepted. OPM is making it up as they go along.”

Unions for federal employees were behind the lawsuit, calling OPM’s “Fork Directive” a “sweeping and stunningly arbitrary action to solicit blanket resignations of federal workers,” according to court filings.

Attorneys for the Justice Department counterclaimed that Trump had “campaigned on reducing the federal workforce” and that the mass dismissal program should come as no surprise to Washington’s civil servants. The administration “knew they’d come to a disappointment to a lot of the workforce … so this would be an off-ramp for those employees,” said Justice Department attorney Eric Hamilton, per NBC News.

Vice President JD Vance is exactly as irrelevant to Donald Trump as he is to everyone else.

In an interview Sunday with Fox News’s Bret Baier, Trump threw Vance under the bus when asked about the future for the former never-Trump Republican who sold out his principles, his dignity, and even his own family, to boost Trump’s shot at unchecked power. His reward? Nothing, it seems.

“Do you view Vice President JD Vance as your successor, the Republican nominee in 2028?” Baier asked.

“No,” Trump replied. “But he’s very capable!

“I mean I don’t think that it—you know, I think we have a lot of very capable people,” Trump continued. “So far, I think he’s doing a fantastic job. It’s too early, we’re just starting.”

“But by the time you get to the midterms, he’s going to be looking for an endorsement,” Baier pressed.

“Yeah, a lot of people have said this has been the greatest opening, almost three weeks, in the history of the presidency,” Trump said, weaving into a rant about how amazing he is at being president.

It’s possible that Trump tried to sidestep answering because he already has a candidate in mind for 2028, and—spoiler alert—it’s not Vance. Although he isn’t allowed to run again, Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of doing so, both on the campaign trail and since winning the presidency. It doesn’t seem as if Trump cares very much about what is legal and what’s not.

In lieu of actually governing, Vance seems to be filling his empty hours posting on X about a range of random topics, including rubber-stamping the rehiring of a racist to DOGE, undermining the checks and balances that underpin our democracy, and complaining about dog cross-breeding.

Refugee resettlement organizations are suing the Trump administration for indefinitely pausing America’s refugee system. 

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Seattle Monday by a group of the country’s largest such organizations hoping to restart the program and the federal funding that allows refugees to be resettled in the United States. President Trump froze the admission of refugees on his first day in office as part of broader restrictions on immigration, ordering the leaders at the Departments of Homeland Security and State to recommend if refugee admissions should resume within 90 days. 

One of the organizations that filed the lawsuit said that Trump’s executive orders have “been sweeping and harmful for our refugee clients, our staff and our local faith community partners.

“These executive actions have abandoned refugee families both abroad and those who are already a part of our American communities,” Rick Santos, head of the Church World Service, said in a statement, citing a case in which two Afghan parents in Massachusetts were waiting for their children, who were supposed to arrive in January. 

“They now do not know if or when their children will be able to come home,” Santos’s statement said.

In the past, the U.S. refugee program enjoyed bipartisan support. That changed in 2017 when Trump was elected to his first term and began taking extreme measures to attack the refugee system and reduce refugee admissions his first week in office. By 2020, Trump proposed a record low of 15,000 refugee admissions, according to The New York Times. President Biden resuscitated the program, and in 2024, the U.S. admitted close to 100,000 refugees, the most in decades.  

Trump’s abrupt pause to resettlement and all related funding has had a ripple effect on organizations, as well as the more than 10,000 refugees on a path to enter the U.S. Refugee assistance organizations around the country may not be able to function without funding, and one refugee in Burma died after his U.S.-funded hospital was ordered to close. 

A telling description of Trump’s actions during his first term was coined by Atlantic writer Adam Serwer in a 2018 column: “The Cruelty Is the Point,” who argued that the president and his supporters took pleasure in the suffering of those they hate and fear. It appears that sentiment is back in full force for today’s Trump administration.

The Supreme Court’s decision to expand the definition of presidential immunity may have just caused a hiccup for Donald Trump’s administration.

A federal judge ruled Monday that Trump’s FBI must disclose records from its Mar-a-Lago case file, complying with a FOIA request by Business Insider’s Jason Leopold. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell decided that the Supreme Court’s decision—combined with his return to the White House and its executive privileges—has insulated Trump enough from further criminal prosecution to allow the release of documents.

“With the far dampened possibility of any criminal investigation to gather evidence about a president’s conduct and of any public enforcement proceeding against a president, the [Supreme Court’s] decision … has left a FOIA request as a critical tool for the American public to keep apprised of a president’s conduct,” Howell ruled.

Howell also ordered the FBI to provide a timetable of release for files pertaining to Leopold’s request, with a mandatory update required by February 20.

The FBI had used Glomar arguments to retain the privacy of the Mar-a-Lago case files, falling back on its typical refusal to “confirm or deny” a criminal investigation in order to safeguard ongoing investigations. But the decimation of any future case against Trump on the details of the case has completely undermined that argument, according to the judge.

“In these circumstances, defendants’ Glomar arguments crumble with no more weight than dust and just as little persuasiveness,” Howell wrote. “As plaintiff pointedly highlights, as to President Trump, ‘there is a reasonable argument that [he] is immune from prosecution for flushing his own records down the toilet while in office.’”

In a footnote, Howell torched the high court’s decision to grant Trump such sweeping protections, likening their actions to enablers of the fascist regime of Nazi Germany.

“Of course, while the Supreme Court has provided a protective and presumptive immunity cloak for a president’s conduct, that cloak is not so large to extend to those who aid, abet and execute criminal acts on behalf of a criminally immune president,” Howell wrote. “The excuse offered after World War II by enablers of the fascist Nazi regime of ‘just following orders’ has long been rejected in this country’s jurisprudence.”

Donald Trump is planning to pardon yet another convicted felon with a history of corruption, former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, a source told The Associated Press.

In 2011, Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years in prison on 18 felony counts, over charges that included attempts to sell former President Barack Obama’s Senate seat in 2008 and to shake down the CEO of a children’s hospital.

The Democrat turned MAGA politician served eight years before Trump commuted his sentence during his first term in 2020.

The two men’s history together runs deeper than politics: Blajogevich, commonly known as “Blago,” appeared on Trump’s reality TV show, Celebrity Apprentice, in 2010, two years after he was first arrested on corruption charges.

When Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts in the New York hush-money case, “Blago” defended his fellow convict. “I love Trump more today than ever! When you’ve lived through it yourself you recognize when they do it to someone else,” he wrote on social media in May.

If pardoned, Blagojevich will join some 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and were pardoned by Trump in one of his first executive orders as president, the more notorious of whom include former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right militia group Oath Keepers.

Politico reported Friday that Trump is considering nominating Blajogevich to be the U.S. ambassador to Serbia, a pick that would add to his already fraudulent Cabinet.

Donald Trump plans to make it legal for businesses to bribe foreign officials.

Bloomberg reports that the president will soon sign an executive order to pause the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, claiming that it hurts American businesses. The order will instruct Attorney General Pam Bondi to pause criminal prosecutions under the law until she issues new enforcement guidelines, according to a fact sheet on the order obtained by the news outlet. She will also be ordered to review current and past Justice Department actions under the law.

“U.S. companies are harmed by FCPA overenforcement because they are prohibited from engaging in practices common among international competitors, creating an uneven playing field,” the fact sheet states. A White House official confirmed the fact sheet’s veracity to CNBC, telling the network the move is “a pause in enforcement to better understand how to streamline the FCPA to make sure it’s in line with economic interests and national security.”

The FCPA, passed in 1977, specifically prohibits any person or company tied to the United States from paying money or offering gifts to foreign officials to help their business. In 1998, the law was amended to include foreign businesses, as well as people who facilitated such bribes in the U.S. The DOJ said there were 24 cases related to alleged violations of the law in 2024, and 17 in 2023.

This new order is a continuation from Trump’s first term, when he considered getting rid of the FCPA and called it a “horrible law.” It’s quite clear why Trump would seek to get rid of or soften the law. During his first term, he often looked the other way on possible illegal bribes and let American oil and gas companies keep their under-the-table payments to dictators of countries like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan secret, a practice that even Russian oil companies don’t engage in.

Trump may benefit personally from weakening or discarding the FCPA. The Trump Organization announced last month that it will no longer prohibit deals with foreign companies while he is president, and he might seek to “grease the wheels” on overseas deals without any restrictions.

The president’s family is also trying to reclaim the lease on their former hotel in Washington, D.C.—a hotbed of corruption, where foreign governments spent more than $750,000 during his first term. It looks like Trump is opening the doors for American companies and individuals, including himself, to pay off foreign officials to better line their pockets.

Elon Musk’s cringey tweet was cited in a federal court Monday, during a case trying to curb the Department of Government Efficiency’s access to American citizens’ private information.

Politico’s Kyle Cheney reported that litigants had cited an exchange Musk had on X with right-wing shill Ashley St. Clair earlier that very day.

“What the fuck do you think Elon Musk is going to do with your social security number???” St. Clair wrote in a post on X. “Tweet it???? Open a line of credit you don’t have??????”

Musk, who posts an unhealthy amount on the social media site he’s running into the ground, reposted St. Clair, acting as if suggestions of overreach were hysterical.

“Seriously 🤣🤣,” Musk wrote, demonstrating just how seriously he handles sensitive information. “And for damn sure, I’m 1000% more trustworthy than untold numbers of deep state bureaucrats and fraudsters who may be misusing your SSN right now.”

Musk, the unelected billionaire bureaucrat, has transformed himself into the deep state he pretended to rail against, and has gained sweeping access to sensitive information across a slate of federal agencies.

Over the weekend, a federal judge made a temporary ruling for 19 democratic state attorneys general preventing non–civil servants from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment systems, which distribute trillions of dollars annually. Trump’s Justice Department has already moved to lift the sweeping order.

Donald Trump is still stripping the security clearances of his political enemies, and this time, he’s doing it to people who still work for the government!

New York Attorney General Letitia James and District Attorney Alvin Bragg were the most recent targets of the president’s petty political games, and both saw their security clearances stripped over the weekend, according to an exclusive report from The New York Post, the president’s favorite tabloid. Trump also said last week that he would revoke President Joe Biden’s security clearance.

In addition to revoking their access to classified information, it theoretically bars them from entering federal buildings such as courthouses, prisons, the U.S. attorneys offices, or the FBI’s field office in New York. If enforced, it would be problematic, but in true Trump fashion, it seems like it’s more symbolic than consequential.

“It’s more an insult and a slap in the face than a real deterrent,” former Manhattan federal prosecutor Bob Costello told the Post. Costello testified as a witness for the defense in Trump’s hush-money trial.

Trump has targeted both James and Bragg for their roles in convicting him of, respectively, bank fraud and 34 counts for falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments made to keep an adult film actress quiet about his extramarital affair.

Since Trump entered office, James has continued to be a thorn in the president’s side. On Monday, she joined a coalition of 21 other attorneys general suing the Trump administration over its efforts to strip funding from the National Institutes of Health. A new NIH policy announced last week would cap “indirect cost” reimbursements, which cover all research expenses, at 15 percent for research institutions. The policy went into effect Monday.

“The administration’s decision to cap NIH reimbursement rates could force scientists to shutter their lifesaving research on cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, addiction, infectious diseases, and more,” James said in a statement. “My office will not stand idly by as this administration once again puts politics over science and endangers public health. We are suing to prevent this harmful policy from taking effect.”

Last week, James led a coalition of 22 states to file for a restraining order against Trump’s freeze on federal funding, and a coalition of 18 states seeking a restraining order against Elon Musk’s unfettered access to the private information of American citizens, which was then granted.

Former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, the warmonger who co-signed the U.S. support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, also had his security clearance revoked. While the principle behind it is still disturbing, that one seems more like a don’t-cry-over-spilled-milk situation.

But it doesn’t seem as if the president is done with his wrathful revocations that don’t mean anything! The New York Post also reported that up next on the president’s list for petty revenge is attorney Andrew Weissman, special counsel Robert Mueller’s deputy in the Russiagate probe; Mark Zaid, the attorney representing a whistleblower in the first Trump impeachment; and Norm Eisen, who served as special counsel to the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee during that impeachment.

A federal judge on Monday ordered Donald Trump to unfreeze funding for federal grant programs—and immediately release funds for key programs.

U.S. District Chief Judge John McConnell ruled that the Trump administration’s funding freeze is continuing to violate a temporary restraining order, or TRO, he issued last month that blocked Trump’s blanket freeze.

“The Defendants must resume the funding of institutes and other agencies of the Defendants (for example the National Institute for Health) that are included in the scope of the court’s TRO,” McConnell wrote in the ruling.

He also ordered the president to restore funds to the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Improvement and Jobs Act, both of which were enacted under Biden.

“The broad categorical and sweeping freeze of federal funds is, as the Court found, likely unconstitutional and has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm to a vast portion of this country,” McConnell wrote.

Last month, the Office of Management and Budget issued a two-page memo ordering a pause on all “disbursement of all federal financial assistance.” The budget freeze, which would affect more than 2,600 accounts across the government, sent the public sector into a frenzy. The memo was rescinded the next day, but the Trump administration maintained the freeze was still in place, which led to even more confusion and anxiety.

Despite last month’s court order, Democratic attorneys general from 22 different states warned that millions of federal funds, the majority of which came from the IRA and the IIJA, were still on hold. The states urged McConnell to enforce the TRO.

“While it is imaginable that a certain amount of machinery would need to be re-tooled in order to undo the breadth of the Federal Funding Freeze, there is no world in which these scattershot outages, which as of this writing impact billions of dollars in federal funding across the Plaintiff States, can constitute compliance with this Court’s Order,” they wrote in an emergency motion Friday.

“This Court should enforce the plain text of its temporary restraining order and order Defendants to immediately restore funds,” the motion reads.

This story has been updated.

Republicans may feel that they’re on the up and up, armed with Donald Trump in the White House and a trifecta at the federal level, but former insiders of the conservative party argue that the GOP’s inability to stand up to its executive leader is becoming an unsolvable problem.

Speaking with MSNBC on Sunday, former Florida Representative David Jolly claimed that Republicans have no targetable solutions for some of Congress’s chief jobs due to the legislative branch’s constant deference to Trump’s will.

“I don’t think Republicans in Congress know what they’re doing right now,” Jolly said. “They have a government funding cliff and a debt ceiling coming up in four weeks, and they don’t even know how to solve that.

“I think, Alex, that we’re in a constitutional crisis. I really believe that, people are tepid in saying that—but I would say not just because of Trump and [Elon] Musk, though they’re facilitating it,” Jolly continued. “The constitutional crisis is because the Republican Congress has collapsed.

“It is listless and meaningless, it is not providing the check that the Constitution suggests it should in this environment,” he said, arguing that the only existing check that remains on the “lawlessness and corruption” of Trump and Musk’s power is in the courts, which “takes time.”

“But the immediate ability to rush to the fire is the Congress, and they’ve just laid down and said ‘Hey, Donald Trump is running this place, and Elon Musk is as well, and we’re giving up any authority,’” Jolly said.

Jolly also had harsh words for the MAGA leader’s open-armed reception of the world’s richest man, whose spending-fixated department tapped into federal databases with info on hundreds of millions of Americans, including sensitive details such as Social Security numbers, home addresses, and medical histories.

“How do you think Elon Musk’s cover-boy treatment was received in the White House?” asked MSNBC’s Alex Witt, referring to the billionaire’s front-page spread on Time magazine’s February issue.

“Elon Musk is either a co-president or a first spouse right now, given the power that he’s wielding and the lack of accountability,” Jolly said.

Whether Musk even has the proper clearances to access such sensitive data has been an ongoing topic of discussion. Last week, Trump designated Musk a “special government employee,” which, per the Justice Department, is “anyone who works, or is expected to work, for the government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period.” But hours after the appointment, even top officials in the administration weren’t confident that Musk had cleared a background check to do the job.