AI
Monday, February 24, 2025 3:51:23 AM
Good. Some Trump Officials Push Back Against Musk’s Ultimatum to Workers
"Key federal agencies refuse to comply with Musk’s latest demand in his cost-cutting crusade"
Musk sure is enjoying center stage, pity him the fall inevitably on the way.
Feb. 23, 2025
Elon Musk has alarmed workers across the federal government by ordering them to summarize their accomplishments for the week,
warning that failure to do so would be taken as a resignation. Eric Lee/The New York Times
Where Things Stand
* Musk’s ultimatum: Even as Elon Musk ordered workers across the federal government to summarize in an email their accomplishments for the week or be removed from their positions, officials at some agencies — including the F.B.I., the State Department and the office coordinating America’s intelligence agencies — have told their employees not to respond. Those statements in effect countermanded Mr. Musk’s order in some sectors of the government, a move that challenges Mr. Musk’s broad authority from President Trump to scrutinize the federal bureaucracy. Read more ›
* Hegseth’s defense: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday backed Mr. Trump’s decision to dismiss the nation’s top military officer, saying that he was “not the right man for the moment.” Mr. Trump on Friday purged several military officers, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., as part of a pledge to fire “woke officers” and promote officers steeped in a “warrior culture.” Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Hegseth said “nothing about this is unprecedented,” adding that other presidents had also fired officers. A chairman of the Joint Chiefs had never been fired. Read more ›
* Gabbard’s accusations: In her first interview since being confirmed, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, accused security agencies of eroding privacy and civil liberties. Ms. Gabbard told Lara Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, on Fox News that the federal government had used security threats to undermine liberty, and that she would work to ensure that the intelligence collected on Americans would not be used improperly against them. Read more ›
Chris Cameron and Maggie Haberman
Reporting from Washington
Trump officials at several agencies defy Musk’s directive on summarizing accomplishments.
On Saturday, Elon Musk posted a demand on social media for government employees to summarize their accomplishments for the week,
warning that a failure to do so would be taken as a resignation. Eric Lee/The New York Times
Several Trump-appointed agency leaders urged federal workers not to comply with Elon Musk’s order to summarize their accomplishments for the past week or be removed from their positions, even as Mr. Musk doubled down on his demand over the weekend.
Their instructions in effect countermanded the order of Mr. Musk across much of the government, challenging the broad authority President Trump has given the world’s richest man to make drastic changes to the federal bureaucracy. The standoff serves as one of the first significant tests of how far Mr. Musk’s power will extend.
As the directive ricocheted across the federal government, officials at some agencies, including the F.B.I., the office coordinating America’s intelligence agencies and the Departments of Defense, State, Energy, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security, told their employees not to respond.
Mr. Musk’s email had even reached the inboxes of sitting federal judges — who are in the judicial branch, not the executive. The administrative office for the federal courts advised judges and staff that “this email did not originate from the judiciary or the administrative office and we suggest that no action be taken.”
The public pushback reflects a growing unease — and, in some cases, alarm — behind the scenes across the Trump administration about the perception of Mr. Musk’s unchecked power.
The unease runs from lower staff to some cabinet secretaries, who have tired of having to justify specific intricacies of agency policy and having to scramble to address unforeseen controversies that Mr. Musk has ignited.
Those officials are aware that he has influence over the president privately, and they fear him using X, the social media website he owns, to single out people he views as obstructing him, according to one senior administration official.
Hours after a senior Defense Department official publicly and firmly pushed back on Mr. Musk’s directive on Sunday afternoon, Mr. Musk singled him out for retribution, saying on X that “anyone with the attitude of that Pentagon official needs to look for a new job.”
One person who was quiet about the controversy throughout much of the weekend was Mr. Trump; after posting on social media on Saturday morning that he wanted Mr. Musk to be more “aggressive,” and then bragging about the purge of federal workers in a speech hours later, the president had remained mute on the subject for much of Sunday.
That afternoon, however, Mr. Trump posted a meme, which he said came from Mr. Musk, mocking federal workers who had to explain their duties and accomplishments, but he did not weigh in on the internal government conflict between his appointees.
Mr. Musk’s public statements about his cost-cutting effort, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, have often expressed an open contempt for the federal work force, which includes some of Mr. Trump’s supporters.
By Sunday afternoon, some of the pushback against Mr. Musk from administration officials — coming in large part from the national security apparatus and law enforcement agencies — had become public and explicit.
“The Department of Defense is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and it will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures,” Darin S. Selnick, the acting Pentagon official in charge of personnel, said in a statement, instructing Pentagon employees to “for now, please pause any response.”
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of the office of national intelligence, ordered all intelligence community officers not to respond, in a message to intelligence officials reviewed by The New York Times.
“Given the inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work, I.C. employees should not respond to the OPM email,” Ms. Gabbard wrote.
Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, wrote in an email to employees that “the F.B.I., through the office of the director, is in charge of all our review processes,” telling workers that they should “for now, please pause any responses.”
The F.B.I. headquarters in Washington last week. Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Senior personnel officials at the State and Homeland Security Departments also instructed their employees to not respond to the email.
At the Justice Department and F.B.I., the threatening signals from Mr. Musk were met with a mix of anger and amazement that anyone would issue such a blanket demand without consideration for sensitive areas such as criminal investigations, legal confidentiality or grand jury material.
Some law enforcement supervisors quickly told employees to wait for more guidance from managers on Monday before responding to the demand, according to current and former officials.
Other departments gave conflicting guidance. The Department of Health and Human Services told its employees on Sunday morning to follow the directive. An hour later, an email from the Trump-appointed acting director of the National Institutes of Health, a subordinate agency, told employees to hold off on responding. Hours later, the health department told all employees to “pause” responses to the ultimatum.
On Saturday, Mr. Musk posted a demand for government employees to summarize their accomplishments for the week, warning that failure to do so would be taken as a resignation. Soon after, the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal work force, sent an email asking civil servants for a list of accomplishments, but it did not include the threat of removal for not complying.
[Insert: crowin, Only a fool would believe you could get away with treating adult experienced, and loyal to democracy USA,
bureaucrats like they were 1st Grade children. Perhaps Musk, like Trump, hasn't evolved much since 1st Grade either.
No more - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175847103]
Unions representing federal workers suggested that Mr. Musk’s order was not valid. They advised their members to follow guidance from their supervisors on how, and whether, to respond to the email.
In a scathing letter on Sunday, Everett B. Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees — the largest federal employee union — told the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management that the email sent to federal employees was “plainly unlawful” and “thoughtless.”
Mr. Kelley demanded that the order be retracted, and noted, “By allowing the unelected and unhinged Elon Musk to dictate O.P.M.’s actions, you have demonstrated a lack of regard for the integrity of federal employees and their critical work.”
Multiple intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, had warned employees that responding could risk inadvertently disclosing classified work.
Although Mr. Musk’s original email told employees not to include classified material, current and former intelligence officials said that if an adversary gained access to thousands of unclassified accounts of intelligence officers’ work that it would be able to piece together sensitive details or learn about projects that were supposed to remain secret.
Representative Mike Lawler, a New York Republican whose seat may be among the most fiercely contested in 2026, raised doubt about the order even as he gave broader support to Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting effort.
“I don’t know how that’s necessarily feasible,” Mr. Lawler said of the ultimatum. “Obviously, a lot of federal employees are under union contract.”
Representative Mike Lawler, a New York Republican whose seat projects to be among the most contested next year, raised doubt about
the order but supported DOGE overall. Cindy Schultz for The New York Times
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, also criticized Mr. Musk’s order.
“Our public workforce deserves to be treated with dignity and respect for the unheralded jobs they perform,” she wrote in a statement on social media. “The absurd weekend email to justify their existence wasn’t it.”
It is unclear what legal basis Mr. Musk would have to justify mass firings based on responses to the email, and the White House and the Office of Personnel Management did not immediately answer questions about the threat of removal.
But Mr. Musk — who made similar unconventional demands during his takeover of Twitter, now known as X — insisted on Sunday morning that the order amounted to “a very basic pulse check.”
In a series of posts, Mr. Musk also promoted baseless claims of wage fraud — that a significant number of “non-existent” or dead people were employed in the federal work force, and that criminals were using the fake employees to collect government paychecks.
“They are covering immense fraud,” Mr. Musk said in response to a post by a supporter that said that “the left is flipping out about a simple email.”
His claims echo a similar one that tens of millions of dead people may be receiving fraudulent Social Security payments. A recent report .. https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf .. by the Social Security Administration’s inspector general — a watchdog that investigates the program for waste, fraud and abuse — found that “almost none” of the people in the agency’s database who had likely died were receiving payments.
Reporting was contributed by Julian E. Barnes, Hamed Aleaziz, Apoorva Mandavilli, Devlin Barrett, Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Ken Bensinger, Kate Conger, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Adam Goldman, Minho Kim, Kate Zernike, Lisa Friedman and Margot Sanger-Katz.
Feb. 23, 2025, 7:50 p.m. ET 5 hours ago
Carol Rosenberg
Trump administration moves more migrants to Guantánamo Bay.
The site the Trump administration prepared for housing migrants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Doug Mills/The New York Times
The military transported about 15 immigration detainees from Texas to the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Sunday, bringing in new migrants who have been designated for deportation days after it cleared the base of its first group of deportees.
No new migrants had been sent to the base since the Homeland Security Department cleared it of 178 Venezuelans on Thursday.
A brief announcement did not identify the nationalities of the newest arrivals. Nor did it give exact figures. But a government official said they were in the category of “high-threat illegal aliens,” and therefore were being held in Camp 6, a prison .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/us/politics/migrants-trump-guantanamo-prison.html .. that until last month housed detainees in the war on terrorism.
Last week, the Trump administration delivered 177 Venezuelan men who had been designated for deportation from Guantánamo to the Venezuelan government on an airstrip in Honduras.
It is unclear why those men had to be taken to Guantánamo on 13 military flights from El Paso from Feb. 4 to Feb. 17, and then shuttled to an air base in Honduras on two chartered U.S. aircraft. On Feb. 10, Venezuela sent one of its commercial airliners to El Paso for 190 other Venezuelan citizens the United States wanted to deport.
Juan E. Agudelo, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official who is based in Miami, said in a court filing on Thursday that the administration was using Guantánamo to “temporarily house aliens before they are removed to their home country or a safe third country.” Mr. Agudelo was unable to predict the length of the average stay for a migrant before deportation beyond “the time necessary to effect the removal orders.”
Sunday’s transfer happened without advanced notice. The U.S. government declined a request last week from a consortium of U.S. civil liberties lawyers that asked for 72 hours’ notice before more people in homeland security custody were sent there.
The government said in a filing that it had made arrangements for would-be deportees being held there to speak by phone with lawyers. Three of the men who were sent home on Thursday had one-hour calls with lawyers who had sued for access to the migrants and specifically named those three.
Feb. 23, 2025, 7:43 p.m. ET 5 hours ago
Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
President Emmanuel Macron of France landed at Joint Base Andrews Sunday night for talks with President Trump on Monday about the war in Ukraine, the French government said. Macron has been organizing the European response to the U.S. push for peace talks to end the war. Macron, according to French officials, shares the White House’s goal of ending the war and will present proposals to Trump. Macron worked with British officials to hammer out proposals that would continue support for Ukraine, ensure Ukraine is involved in peace talks and end the conflict, a French official said.
Feb. 23, 2025, 6:53 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Edward Wong
Reporting from Washington
Trump appointees fire 2,000 U.S.A.I.D. workers and put others on leave.
The mass firings are part of a series of layoffs of agency employees by the Trump administration during a broad effort to halt almost all U.S.
foreign aid using a blanket freeze. Eric Lee/The New York Times
Trump administration appointees in charge of the U.S. Agency for International Development sent employees an email on Sunday afternoon saying that they were firing 2,000 workers and putting up to thousands of foreign service officers and other direct hires around the world on paid leave starting that night.
The only exceptions to the leave would be people working on “mission-critical programs,” as well as “core leadership” and employees supporting “specially designated programs,” according to a copy of the email obtained by The New York Times.
The email said appointees running U.S.A.I.D. were firing 2,000 employees based in the United States using a mechanism called “reduction in force.” The mass firings are part of a series of layoffs of agency employees by the Trump administration during a broad effort to halt almost all
U.S. foreign aid .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/us/politics/trump-rubio-foreign-aid.html .. using a blanket freeze.
The moves came after a judge ruled on Friday that the Trump administration could proceed with plans to lay off or put on paid leave many agency employees and close down operations overseas, which means forcing employees based abroad to come back to the United States. Some of those employees say they expect to be fired once they return home.
The judge, Carl J. Nichols of the Federal District Court in Washington, had been reviewing a lawsuit that aimed to block Trump administration officials from enacting the layoffs at the aid agency, putting people on paid leave and compelling overseas employees to quickly return home.
Since late January, Pete Marocco .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/us/politics/foreign-aid-marocco-trump.html , a State Department political appointee who was a divisive figure in the first Trump administration, has overseen the dismantling of the aid agency, working alongside Elon Musk, the tech billionaire adviser to President Trump who has posted dark conspiracy theories about U.S.A.I.D.
Early this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was the new acting administrator of the agency and was appointing Mr. Marocco as his deputy.
The email on Sunday said employees taking the “voluntary” route to returning from overseas soon would have their travel paid for by the agency.
Last week, the appointees running the agency fired about 400 employees .. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/02/23/us/trump-news#usaid-urgent-aid-firings .. who work as contractors on urgent humanitarian assistance. That action added to an understanding among many employees that Mr. Rubio does not actually support such programs.
Late last month, Mr. Rubio promised that “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” programs could continue. But almost no programs have been able to operate because the agency’s payment system does not function, meaning partner groups cannot get funds.
[ The fallout from USAID cuts: Latin America faces a humanitarian and environmental crisis
By Edgar Maciel Feb 24, 2025
The closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is dealing a severe blow to essential programs in Latin America, threatening humanitarian aid in Colombia, conservation efforts in the Brazilian Amazon, and anti-narcotics initiatives in Peru. The freezing of international funds has already affected projects aiming to reduce hunger, corruption, and inequality and will impact millions across the region, experts and NGOs warn.
https://www.developmentaid.org/news-stream/post/191864/usaid-cuts-to-latin-america ]
Mr. Rubio has said some foreign aid will continue after a 90-day review process, but neither he nor Mr. Marocco, who oversees foreign aid at the State Department, have publicly explained the process, if there is one.
Feb. 23, 2025, 5:24 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Alan Feuer
An email making a bomb threat “to honor the J6 hostages” — referring to the people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — briefly interrupted a conference held on Sunday by Principles First, a conservative group that has emerged as a vocal critic of President Trump, according by remarks delivered by its founder, Heath Mayo. Mayo told attendees of the conference, which is being held at the JW Marriott Hotel in Washington, that organizers received the email on Sunday afternoon and that the police were investigating who may have sent it.
Feb. 23, 2025, 5:24 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Alan Feuer
The bomb threat came one day after Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, appeared at the event and heckled Michael Fanone and Harry Dunn, two former police officers who protected the Capitol during the attack by a pro-Trump mob.
Feb. 23, 2025, 3:21 p.m. ETFeb. 23, 2025
Eric Schmitt
Reporting from Washington
Trump’s frustration with generals resulted in an unconventional pick.
Lt. Gen. Dan Caine with an Iraqi general in Mosul, Iraq, in 2018. General Caine graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1990
with a degree in economics and became an F-16 pilot. Spc. Keisha Brown/U.S. Army
By late last week, President Trump had decided to fire Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and replace him with one of two very different candidates, according to two administration officials.
One was Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, a hard-charging Army four-star general who oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, one of the Pentagon’s highest-profile assignments.
The other was a little-known retired three-star Air Force officer, Dan Caine .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/us/politics/dan-caine-trump-joint-chiefs.html , with an unorthodox career path that included time as a fighter pilot, the top military liaison to the C.I.A. and an Air National Guard officer who founded a regional airline in Texas.
Mr. Trump and General Caine met for an hour at the White House on Feb. 14. The president largely made up his mind during a meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday, aides said.
And in a message on social media the next evening, Mr. Trump announced that he had picked General Caine, calling him “an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a ‘warfighter’ with significant interagency and special operations experience.”
When President Trump announced that he had picked General Caine, he called him “an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a ‘warfighter’ with significant interagency and special operations experience.” U.S. Air Force
The decision, part of an extraordinary purge at the Pentagon, resulted from intense deliberations over the past two weeks that were tightly held within a small group of senior administration officials, including Mr. Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance and Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions.
In Mr. Trump’s first term, he initially seemed to seek a close association with the military’s senior leaders, whom he frequently referred to as “my generals.” That soon gave way to frustration with them as he came to regard them as disloyal.
The president’s deep skepticism prompted him to pass over the more obvious choices, like General Kurilla, to replace General Brown and to pluck General Caine from relative obscurity. His choice, people familiar with his thinking said, was based in part on General Caine’s lack of clear association with the Biden administration and in part on a brief encounter with the general in Iraq six years ago that left Mr. Trump convinced he had the kind of can-do attitude the president sees as making the ideal military officer.
In recent years, Mr. Trump has publicly praised General Caine for telling him during that visit to Iraq that the Islamic State could be defeated far more quickly than more senior advisers had suggested.
Now their rekindled relationship will be tested not only by national security challenges like the war in Ukraine and a rising military threat from China, but also by whether General Caine can live up to Mr. Trump’s expectations of loyalty without politicizing the deliberately apolitical job of providing his best military advice to the commander in chief.
Mr. Trump has fixated on the position of the Joint Chiefs chairman since 2019, when he picked Gen. Mark A. Milley, General Brown’s predecessor. It was a decision the president came to regret.
The president saw General Milley as a grandstander and a traitor. General Milley had publicly apologized for walking with Mr. Trump across Lafayette Square for a photo op after the area had been cleared of peaceful demonstrators following the death of George Floyd in May 2020. The president had asked General Milley why he was not proud that he had accompanied “your president,” and it rankled Mr. Trump that the general swore allegiance to the Constitution, not to him. Their relationship was never the same.
President Trump and Gen. Mark A. Milley, right, walk to St. John’s Church after a night of unrest near the White House in June 2020.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
“Trump likes his generals up until the point he doesn’t anymore,” John R. Bolton, the national security adviser in Mr. Trump’s first term, said in an interview.
After Mr. Trump was elected to a second term, word soon spread that he would replace General Brown, a decorated F-16 fighter pilot who in October 2023 became only the second African-American to serve as chairman.
After Mr. Hegseth was narrowly confirmed as defense secretary last month, that likelihood became a near certainty, administration officials said. Mr. Hegseth had previously said General Brown should be fired because of what he called a “woke” focus on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the military. Mr. Hegseth also questioned whether the general was promoted because of his race, despite his 40 years of service.
Several weeks ago, the search for a new chairman began in earnest, administration officials. Adm. Samuel J. Paparo Jr., the head of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific, was briefly considered, among several other initial candidates.
But the list of finalists quickly shortened to General Kurilla and General Caine.
On paper and in conventional thinking, General Kurilla seemed to have the leg up. He was meeting regularly with Mr. Trump and other top national security aides to discuss military priorities in the Middle East. Moreover, General Kurilla, whose tenure at Central Command is expected to wrap up in the next few months, had expressed interest in the job, several current and former military officials said. In the end, General Kurilla seemed too similar to the officers whom Mr. Trump had soured on, aides said.
General Caine, on the other hand, had retired at the end of December after completing the final job in his military career — as the Pentagon’s liaison to the C.I.A. — and joined Shield Capital, a firm in Burlingame, Calif., specializing in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.
General Caine, 56, who graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1990 with a degree in economics, became an F-16 pilot — as his father had been — and was the lead aviator assigned to protect Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, after Qaeda hijackers slammed commercial jets into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
His career after that followed an unusual trajectory, as he parlayed one opportunity into another, picking up valuable new skills at each stop as well broadening his vast network of contacts. He was a White House fellow at the Agriculture Department and a counterterrorism specialist on the White House’s Homeland Security Council under President George W. Bush. He served in several highly secretive intelligence and special operations assignments, some in the United States and some overseas, all rare for an Air National Guard officer.
As a part-time Guard officer, General Caine was a co-founder of RISE Air, a regional airline, and managed other private businesses, according to his LinkedIn page and interviews with friends and former colleagues. In his C.I.A. job, he was keenly interested in the intersection of technology and national security, and kept close tabs on American companies that sold cutting-edge technology to Ukraine in its fight against Russia.
But what put him on Mr. Trump’s radar was the president’s short visit to Al Asad air base in western Iraq in late December 2018. In a briefing there, General Caine told the president that the Islamic State was not so tough and could be defeated in a week, not the two years that senior advisers predicted, Mr. Trump recounted in 2019.
And at a Conservative Political Action Conference meeting last year .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oKP_zi0XCY , Mr. Trump said that General Caine put on a Make America Great Again hat while meeting with him in Iraq.
[AH WELL, SLAM DUNK, that is newsworthy. Or is it...]
The details of these accounts have shifted over time in Mr. Trump’s frequent retelling of the stories. But Mr. Bolton, who accompanied Mr. Trump on the trip to Iraq, said that General Caine and another senior general briefed the president on a plan to defeat the last remnants of the Islamic State in two to four weeks, not one week. And at no time, he said, did General Caine ever put on a MAGA hat. “No way,” Mr. Bolton said.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/02/23/multimedia/23dc-caine-3/23dc-caine-3-jumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp
General Caine with Iraqi security forces in Mosul, Iraq, in 2018. SPC Keisha Brown/U.S. Army
In his social media message, Mr. Trump also noted General Caine’s nickname, “Razin,” recalling Mr. Trump’s obsession with former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s nickname, “Mad Dog,” a moniker Mr. Mattis hated.
General Caine’s nickname embodied the kind of hell-raiser warrior straight out of central casting that Mr. Trump was looking for in his top general, officials said. He fulfilled a fantasy vision the president has of what generals do, they added.
In his post on Friday, Mr. Trump again praised General Caine’s counterterrorism skills. “During my first term, Razin was instrumental in the complete annihilation of the ISIS caliphate,” the president said. “It was done in record setting time, a matter of weeks. Many so-called military ‘geniuses’ said it would take years to defeat ISIS. General Caine, on the other hand, said it could be done quickly, and he delivered.”
Mr. Trump revealed another reason for his unconventional choice. He said that General Caine had been passed over for promotion by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a claim that Biden officials said on Sunday they could not address. Aides say that in Mr. Trump’s mind, that perceived snub was a great endorsement, proof that General Caine has no specific loyalty to the previous administration. To Mr. Trump, who views most senior officers as incompetent and politically correct, it also suggests that General Caine has a different mind-set.
Friends and former colleagues say that General Caine, an intensely focused but low-key, self-effacing officer despite his nickname, has been uncomfortable with Mr. Trump’s characterization of his role in defeating the Islamic State. Friends who have known him for decades say they have no idea what his political affiliation is, explaining that the general does not talk about politics. General Caine did not respond to emails requesting comment on Sunday.
But when the White House called a couple of weeks ago as he was preparing to move to Dallas from Washington, friends of General Caine say, he did not hesitate to accept the meetings with Mr. Trump and his top aides, and ultimately the job — out of duty to the country.
Which raises perhaps the most important question for General Caine as he prepares to return to active duty as soon as this week, and get ready for what is expected to be a tough Senate confirmation hearing: Will he give his best unvarnished military advice to Mr. Trump, or tell the president what he wants to hear?
“He was always direct and candid in the interagency, which is no small feat,” Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., a former head of Central Command who dealt frequently with General Caine in his C.I.A. job, said on Sunday. “I never saw him as a yes-man.”
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview on Sunday that he would press General Caine in his hearing on that central point: “Will he have the ability to speak truth to power?”
Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Helene Cooper contributed reporting.
Feb. 23, 2025, 3:20 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Rebecca Davis O’Brien
In a scathing letter on Sunday, Everett B. Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees — the largest federal employee union — told the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management that the “What did you do last week?” email sent to federal employees on Saturday was “plainly unlawful” and “thoughtless.” Kelley demanded that the message be retracted, and noted: “By allowing the unelected and unhinged Elon Musk to dictate OPM’s actions, you have demonstrated a lack of regard for the integrity of federal employees and their critical work.”
Feb. 23, 2025, 3:20 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Rebecca Davis O’Brien
Kelley’s letter also said that responding to the email would “pull federal employees away from their critical duties without regard for the consequences,” giving hypothetical examples of a Veterans Administration surgeon and an air traffic controller who would have to turn their attention from their work. “This request, and the resulting confusion, is not just inappropriate—it is disruptive to essential government functions.”
Feb. 23, 2025, 2:16 p.m. ETFeb. 23, 2025
Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, ordered all intelligence community officers not to respond to the email from Elon Musk directing workers to detail their accomplishments of the week or risk losing their jobs. “Given the inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work, IC employees should not respond to the OPM email,” Gabbard wrote, referring to the Office of Personnel Management. Multiple intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, had already warned employees that responding could risk inadvertently disclosing classified work.
Eric Lee/The New York Times
Feb. 23, 2025, 2:17 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
Although Musk’s original email told employees not to include classified material, current and former officials said that if an adversary gained access to thousands of unclassified accounts of the work of intelligence officers they would be able to piece together sensitive details or learn about projects that were supposed to remain secret.
Feb. 23, 2025, 2:04 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Chris Cameron
As the conservative Christian Democrats appeared poised to win Germany’s parliamentary elections this evening, President Trump declared the election as a victory for his own conservative movement.
“Much like the USA, the people of Germany got tired of the no common sense agenda, especially on energy and immigration, that has prevailed for so many years,” Trump wrote on social media. “This is a great day for Germany, and for the United States of America.”
Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
Feb. 23, 2025, 11:49 a.m. ETFeb. 23, 2025
Minho Kim
Reporting from Washington
Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, said today on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the Friday dismissal of Gen. Charles Q Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent “a dangerous message to the military” that personal loyalty to the president mattered more than “independent expertise” or years of service. General Brown received broad, bipartisan support during his confirmation process in 2023.
Feb. 23, 2025, 11:32 a.m. ETFeb. 23, 2025
Minho Kim
Reporting from Washington
Senator Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma, said the United States should reevaluate whether to stay in NATO, the military alliance of 32 member countries. “NATO has not always been playing in our best interest,” he said on NBC. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing expecting different results.”
Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times
Feb. 23, 2025, 11:31 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Minho Kim
Reporting from Washington
Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat of the House Intelligence Committee, compared President Trump’s push for a deal on rare earth minerals in Ukraine in exchange for U.S. aid to mafia extortions. “It just looks like an episode of The Sopranos,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Give us your minerals, or we’re not going to help you fight a bloody butcher.”
Feb. 23, 2025, 11:31 a.m. ETFeb. 23, 2025
Minho Kim
Reporting from Washington
Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, responded to Himes on the same show, defending President Trump’s tactic as “a unique way of negotiating” that “typically gets results.” He referred to a shift in tone and some policy concessions that Mexico and Canada gave to the Trump administration after the president threatened the American neighbors with tariffs.
Feb. 23, 2025, 11:30 a.m. ETFeb. 23, 2025
Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
Hegseth defends Trump’s firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rejected criticisms of the administration’s decisions on Sunday. Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday defended President Trump’s firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top military officer, arguing that he was “not the right man for the moment.”
President Trump removed the chairman, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., on Friday and nominated a retired three-star general to replace him. Mr. Hegseth followed that announcement by removing the chief of naval operations and the Defense Department’s top military lawyers.
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Hegseth said “nothing about this is unprecedented,” adding that presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama have fired or dismissed officers. A chairman of the Joint Chiefs has never been fired, though when the position had two-year terms, the George W. Bush administration declined to renew the term of Gen. Peter Pace in 2007, citing opposition in Congress.
“This is a reflection of the president wanting the right people around him to execute the national security approach we want to take,” Mr. Hegseth said.
But Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said the series of firings “was completely unjustified.”
Mr. Reed said on ABC News’s “This Week” that the administration wanted the Defense Department to be beholden to the president. “They want everyone there to do what they’re told, regardless of the law,” he added.
[What else with the likely intent not to relinquish power
when this 2nd term of his is finished. At least i gotta have
guys here who i think may back me when the time comes,
Trump could be thinking.]
The firing of the lawyers, he added, was startling and had prompted some talented leaders to question if they should stay in the military.
“If you’re going to break the law, the first thing you do is you get rid of the lawyers,” Mr. Reed said.
Mr. Hegseth rejected the criticism, and said that traditionally senior military lawyers had been chosen by one another. But, he said, he wanted “fresh blood,” and that he would open up the positions to a broader candidate pool to find the best military lawyers to lead each of the armed services.
“Ultimately, we want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice and don’t exist to attempt to be roadblocks,” Mr. Hegseth said.
Mr. Hegseth was also pressed on the administration’s plans for the war in Ukraine, and Mr. Trump’s criticism of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
He praised Mr. Trump for bringing the Kremlin toward peace talks, and defended the bilateral negotiations between Russia and the United States. Democrats, Europeans and Ukrainians have criticized those talks for leaving out Ukraine.
“Standing here and saying, ‘you’re good, you’re bad, you’re a dictator, you’re not a dictator, you invaded, you didn’t’ — it’s not useful,” Mr. Hegseth said. “It’s not productive.”
In his interview Mr. Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said that Mr. Trump was essentially “surrendering to the Russians.”
“This is not a statesman or a diplomat,” Mr. Reed said. “This is just someone who admires Putin, does not believe in the struggle of the Ukrainians and is committed to cozying up to an autocrat.”
Feb. 23, 2025, 10:16 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
Gabbard accuses security agencies of eroding privacy and civil liberties.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, speaking with the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, in Washington, on Thursday.
Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has criticized security agencies for eroding privacy and civil liberties, and said she would work to ensure that intelligence collected on Americans would not be improperly used against them.
In her first interview since being confirmed in her role on Feb. 12, Ms. Gabbard told Lara Trump of Fox News that during the 2024 election campaign, she had been put on a Transportation Security Administration list called Quiet Skies that, she said, subjected her to federal surveillance.
Ms. Gabbard said that she was put on the list after she criticized Vice President Kamala Harris. U.S. officials told The New York Times .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/us/politics/tulsi-gabbard-trump-intel-pick-watch-list.html .. that Ms. Gabbard was added to the list after a European businessman who was on another federal watch list arranged for her travel to a conference in Rome.
But Ms. Gabbard said the experience of being subjected to extra scrutiny by federal air marshals was a clear example of the weaponization of government.
“It really speaks to how these institutions that exist to ensure the safety, security and freedom of the American people being weaponized against the American people actually creates a greater national security risk,” Ms. Gabbard told Ms. Trump in the interview, which aired on Saturday. Ms. Trump is President Trump’s daughter-in-law.
Ms. Gabbard said the federal government had for too long used security threats to undermine liberty, adding that it was her “essential” responsibility to better balance liberty and safety.
“For too long we have seen people in positions of great power say if we violate your freedom and civil liberties it’s OK because we are trying to keep you safe,” she said. “There is such a thing as threat to physical security, but our threat to our freedom and our liberty must be balanced right alongside that threat to our physical security.”
[ Gabbard’s sympathetic views toward Russia cause alarm as Trump’s pick to lead intelligence services
https://apnews.com/article/gabbard-trump-putin-intelligence-russia-syria-a798adaf9cd531a5d0c9329f7597f0f6 ]
Ms. Gabbard said the Biden administration had turned its focus away from the dangers of “Islamic terrorism” in the United States and was wrongly focused on domestic terrorism, putting its attention on “our fellow Americans.” An intelligence report delivered to Congress in 2021 by the Biden administration echoed earlier analyses by the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, and warned of the dangers of domestic terrorism .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/us/politics/homeland-security-threat.html .. from extremists and white supremacist groups, including after followers of Mr. Trump embraced his baseless claims of election fraud.
Ms. Gabbard said she was working with the White House to trim government spending. She noted that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was a small organization but claimed, without providing details, that the elimination .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/us/politics/trump-dei-diversity-officials-orders.html .. of diversity programs had saved $20 million. She added that she was “excited to be able to uncover more” spending cuts.
Feb. 23, 2025, 10:13 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Tyler Pager
Reporting on the White House
Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, said Sunday on CNN that he met with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a recent trip to Moscow. He said they had a “positive, constructive meeting,” which he attributed to the “positive relationship” between Putin and Trump during his first term.
“The only way you’re going to end the carnage is if you have a relationship with the leaders of both countries that are involved,” he said on CNN.
Feb. 23, 2025, 9:49 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Tyler Pager
Reporting on the White House
Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, said Sunday on CNN that he expected Ukraine to sign a deal this week to give the United States access to valuable minerals in Ukraine. The progress toward a deal comes after President Trump ratcheted up criticism on the country and its leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky, for initially rebuffing the United States.
Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
Feb. 23, 2025, 9:50 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Tyler Pager
Reporting on the White House
“He’s not wavering anymore,” Witkoff said of Zelensky. “I think there’s a reason he’s not wavering.
It’s because he realizes that we have done so much and that that agreement belongs being signed.”
Feb. 23, 2025, 9:41 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Tyler Pager
Reporting on the White House
Witkoff said Sunday that he still expected the second phase of the cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas to proceed after Israel delayed the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Still, he said, they would need to extend phase one of the deal — the initial six-week cease-fire. He said he planned to travel to the region this week to work on the negotiations.
Feb. 23, 2025, 9:35 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Robert Jimison
Robert Jimison, who covers Congress, reported from Trinity
County in the 17th Congressional District of Texas.
Republicans are facing angry voters at town halls, hinting at a broader backlash.
Representative Pete Sessions fielded a barrage of frustration from constituents at a town-hall meeting in Trinity, Texas, on Saturday. Mark Felix for The New York Times
Some came with complaints about Elon Musk, President Trump’s billionaire ally who is carrying out an assault on the federal bureaucracy. Others demanded guarantees that Republicans in Congress would not raid the social safety net. Still others chided the G.O.P. to push back against Mr. Trump’s moves to trample the constitutional power of Congress.
When Representative Pete Sessions, Republican of Texas, arrived at a crowded community center on Saturday in the small rural town of Trinity in East Texas, he came prepared to deliver a routine update on the administration’s first month in office. Instead, he fielded a barrage of frustration and anger from constituents questioning Mr. Trump’s agenda and his tactics — and pressing Mr. Sessions and his colleagues on Capitol Hill to do something about it.
“The executive can only enforce laws passed by Congress; they cannot make laws,” said Debra Norris, a lawyer who lives in Huntsville, arguing that the mass layoffs and agency closures Mr. Musk has spearheaded were unconstitutional. “When are you going to wrest control back from the executive and stop hurting your constituents?”
“When are you going to wrest control back from the executive?” Debra Norris, a lawyer who lives in Huntsville, asked Mr. Sessions.
Mark Felix for The New York Times
Louis Smith, a veteran who lives in East Texas, told Mr. Sessions that he agreed with the effort to root out excessive spending, but he criticized the way it was being handled and presented to the public.
“I like what you’re saying, but you need to tell more people,” Mr. Smith said. “The guy in South Africa is not doing you any good — he’s hurting you more than he’s helping,” he added, referring to Mr. Musk and drawing nods and applause from many in the room.
In Trinity and in congressional districts around the country over the past week, Republican lawmakers returning home for their first congressional recess since Mr. Trump was sworn in faced similar confrontations with their constituents. In Georgia, Representative Rich McCormick struggled to respond as constituents shouted, jeered and booed at his response to questions about Mr. Musk’s access to government data. In Wisconsin, Representative Scott Fitzgerald was asked to defend the administration’s budget proposals as voters demanded to know whether cuts to essential services were coming.
Many of the most vocal complaints came from participants who identified themselves as Democrats, but a number of questions pressing Mr. Sessions and others around the country came from Republican voters. During a telephone town hall with Representative Stephanie Bice in Oklahoma, a man who identified himself as a Republican and retired U.S. Army officer voiced frustration over potential cuts to veterans benefits.
“How can you tell me that DOGE with some college whiz kids from a computer terminal in Washington, D.C., without even getting into the field, after about a week or maybe two, have determined that it’s OK to cut veterans benefits?” the man asked.
Beyond town halls, some Democrats have organized a number of protests outside the offices of vulnerable Republicans. More than a hundred demonstrators rallied outside the New York district office of Representative Mike Lawler. Elected Democrats are also facing fury from within the ranks of their party. A group of voters held closed-door meetings with members from the office of Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, after a demonstration at his New York offices.
Some of the scenes recalled the raucous town-hall meetings of 2009 that heralded the rise of the ultraconservative Tea Party, where throngs of voters showed up protesting President Barack Obama’s health care law and railed against government debt and taxes. It is not yet clear whether the current backlash will persist or reach the same intensity as it did back then. But the tenor of the sessions suggests that, after a brief honeymoon period for Mr. Trump and Republicans at the start of their governing trifecta, voters beginning to digest the effects of their agenda may be starting to sour on it.
Representative Rich McCormick, a Republican from Georgia, also faced shouts and jeers from constituents at a meeting last week.
Valerie Plesch for The New York Times
Mr. Sessions, who was first elected to Congress nearly three decades ago and represents a solidly Republican district, appeared unfazed by the disruptions on Saturday. Some audience members laughed at him and retorted with hushed but audible expletives when he spoke about his support of some of Mr. Trump’s policy proposals and early actions.
And some of his constituents were plainly pleased by what they had seen so far from the new all-Republican team controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress. Several cheered an executive order barring transgender women and girls from participating in school athletic programs designated for female students, applauded plans to shrink the Department of Education and welcomed calls from Mr. Sessions to end remote work flexibility for federal employees.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to have a reduction in force,” Mr. Sessions told the crowd.
And while many in the room voiced displeasure over the sweeping changes underway in Washington, some were agitating for bolder action to address what they called government corruption — not for pumping the brakes.
As Mr. Sessions spoke about the administration’s efforts to streamline bureaucracy and root out wasteful spending, shouts erupted.
“Take care of it, Congressman,” one woman said, interrupting him.
“Do something about it,” another man added.
One man’s voice rose above the others railing against nongovernmental organizations that receive federal money: “They’re laundering money to NGOs. Who’s in jail?”
Still, much of the pressure came from constituents concerned about how he might be enabling Mr. Trump to enact policies that could hurt them.
Mr. Sessions did not promise that Social Security would be insulated from cuts when pressed by John Watt, left. Mark Felix for
The New York Times
John Watt, the chairman of the Democratic Party in nearby Nacogdoches County, asked for guarantees from the congressman that he would oppose any cuts to Social Security if Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk turned their attention to the entitlement program.
“Will you be courageous enough to stand up to them?” Mr. Watt asked.
Mr. Sessions spoke at length about his support for the program, but said he could not promise it would be insulated from the blunt cuts Republicans in Washington are seeking across the government. Instead, he said he supported a comprehensive audit of the program that could result in some cuts.
“I’m not going to tell you I will never touch Social Security,” Mr. Sessions said, parting ways with Mr. Trump, who campaigned saying he never would .. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/business/trump-social-security-benefits.html . “What I will tell you is that I believe we’re going to do for the first time in years a top-to-bottom review of that. And I will come back, and I will do a town-hall meeting in your county and place myself before you and let you know about the options. But I don’t know what they’re proposing right now.”
It was a nod to the uncertainty surrounding the Republican budget plan, even as House leaders hope to hold a vote on it within days. Already, the level of cuts they are contemplating to Medicaid has drawn resistance from some G.O.P. lawmakers whose constituents depend heavily on the program, raising questions about whether they will have the votes to pass their blueprint at all.
The public pushback could further complicate that debate, as well as efforts to reach a spending agreement as lawmakers return to Washington this week with less than three weeks to avert a government shutdown.
The tenor of the town-hall meetings, including Mr. Sessions’s, suggested that voters were beginning to digest the effects of the Republican agenda. Mark Felix for The New York Times
Republicans generally hold fewer in-person open town halls than their Democratic counterparts, opting instead for more controlled settings, such as telephone town halls, that minimize the risk of public confrontations. But even before last week, they had begun hearing frustration from voters, who have also expressed their discontent by flooding the phones of congressional offices.
With their already narrow majority in the House, G.O.P. lawmakers are in a fragile position. A voter backlash could sweep out some of their most vulnerable members in midterm elections next year. But the pushback in recent days has come not only in highly competitive districts but also in deeply Republican ones, suggesting a broader problem for the party.
And there is little sign that Mr. Trump is letting up. On Saturday, Mr. Trump said in a social media post that Mr. Musk “is doing a great job, but I would like to see him be more aggressive.” Mr. Musk responded by sending government employees emails that he said were “requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
“I have not yet begun to fight, and neither have you,” President Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday. .Maansi Srivastava for The New York Times
Hours later, during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Trump signaled that he was only just beginning to enact his agenda.
“I have not yet begun to fight, and neither have you,” Mr. Trump told a crowd of his supporters at the annual gathering outside in Washington.
Such remarks offer little cover for Republicans like Mr. Sessions facing tough questions from voters who are beginning to chafe at the changes Mr. Trump is pursuing.
But the congressman said that tense exchanges would not deter him from holding more events and seeking opportunities to communicate with his constituents, whether they agree with his positions or not. He said he would hold more events across the district next week, and hopes that after another week in Washington, he will be able to provide more clarity for those who show up.
“I heard them and they heard me,” he said of Saturday’s gathering. “And I don’t think there was a fight.”
Feb. 23, 2025, 9:23 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, said in an interview on Fox News Sunday defended the firing of Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the country’s top military officer, and other senior officers from military leadership on Friday. He said there was nothing unprecedented about President Trump’s ouster of the officers. Hegseth praised General Brown but said he was “not the right man for the moment.”
More - https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/02/23/us/trump-news
"Key federal agencies refuse to comply with Musk’s latest demand in his cost-cutting crusade"
Musk sure is enjoying center stage, pity him the fall inevitably on the way.
Feb. 23, 2025
Elon Musk has alarmed workers across the federal government by ordering them to summarize their accomplishments for the week,
warning that failure to do so would be taken as a resignation. Eric Lee/The New York Times
Where Things Stand
* Musk’s ultimatum: Even as Elon Musk ordered workers across the federal government to summarize in an email their accomplishments for the week or be removed from their positions, officials at some agencies — including the F.B.I., the State Department and the office coordinating America’s intelligence agencies — have told their employees not to respond. Those statements in effect countermanded Mr. Musk’s order in some sectors of the government, a move that challenges Mr. Musk’s broad authority from President Trump to scrutinize the federal bureaucracy. Read more ›
* Hegseth’s defense: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday backed Mr. Trump’s decision to dismiss the nation’s top military officer, saying that he was “not the right man for the moment.” Mr. Trump on Friday purged several military officers, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., as part of a pledge to fire “woke officers” and promote officers steeped in a “warrior culture.” Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Hegseth said “nothing about this is unprecedented,” adding that other presidents had also fired officers. A chairman of the Joint Chiefs had never been fired. Read more ›
* Gabbard’s accusations: In her first interview since being confirmed, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, accused security agencies of eroding privacy and civil liberties. Ms. Gabbard told Lara Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, on Fox News that the federal government had used security threats to undermine liberty, and that she would work to ensure that the intelligence collected on Americans would not be used improperly against them. Read more ›
Chris Cameron and Maggie Haberman
Reporting from Washington
Trump officials at several agencies defy Musk’s directive on summarizing accomplishments.
On Saturday, Elon Musk posted a demand on social media for government employees to summarize their accomplishments for the week,
warning that a failure to do so would be taken as a resignation. Eric Lee/The New York Times
Several Trump-appointed agency leaders urged federal workers not to comply with Elon Musk’s order to summarize their accomplishments for the past week or be removed from their positions, even as Mr. Musk doubled down on his demand over the weekend.
Their instructions in effect countermanded the order of Mr. Musk across much of the government, challenging the broad authority President Trump has given the world’s richest man to make drastic changes to the federal bureaucracy. The standoff serves as one of the first significant tests of how far Mr. Musk’s power will extend.
As the directive ricocheted across the federal government, officials at some agencies, including the F.B.I., the office coordinating America’s intelligence agencies and the Departments of Defense, State, Energy, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security, told their employees not to respond.
Mr. Musk’s email had even reached the inboxes of sitting federal judges — who are in the judicial branch, not the executive. The administrative office for the federal courts advised judges and staff that “this email did not originate from the judiciary or the administrative office and we suggest that no action be taken.”
The public pushback reflects a growing unease — and, in some cases, alarm — behind the scenes across the Trump administration about the perception of Mr. Musk’s unchecked power.
The unease runs from lower staff to some cabinet secretaries, who have tired of having to justify specific intricacies of agency policy and having to scramble to address unforeseen controversies that Mr. Musk has ignited.
Those officials are aware that he has influence over the president privately, and they fear him using X, the social media website he owns, to single out people he views as obstructing him, according to one senior administration official.
Hours after a senior Defense Department official publicly and firmly pushed back on Mr. Musk’s directive on Sunday afternoon, Mr. Musk singled him out for retribution, saying on X that “anyone with the attitude of that Pentagon official needs to look for a new job.”
One person who was quiet about the controversy throughout much of the weekend was Mr. Trump; after posting on social media on Saturday morning that he wanted Mr. Musk to be more “aggressive,” and then bragging about the purge of federal workers in a speech hours later, the president had remained mute on the subject for much of Sunday.
That afternoon, however, Mr. Trump posted a meme, which he said came from Mr. Musk, mocking federal workers who had to explain their duties and accomplishments, but he did not weigh in on the internal government conflict between his appointees.
Mr. Musk’s public statements about his cost-cutting effort, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, have often expressed an open contempt for the federal work force, which includes some of Mr. Trump’s supporters.
By Sunday afternoon, some of the pushback against Mr. Musk from administration officials — coming in large part from the national security apparatus and law enforcement agencies — had become public and explicit.
“The Department of Defense is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and it will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures,” Darin S. Selnick, the acting Pentagon official in charge of personnel, said in a statement, instructing Pentagon employees to “for now, please pause any response.”
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of the office of national intelligence, ordered all intelligence community officers not to respond, in a message to intelligence officials reviewed by The New York Times.
“Given the inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work, I.C. employees should not respond to the OPM email,” Ms. Gabbard wrote.
Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, wrote in an email to employees that “the F.B.I., through the office of the director, is in charge of all our review processes,” telling workers that they should “for now, please pause any responses.”
The F.B.I. headquarters in Washington last week. Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Senior personnel officials at the State and Homeland Security Departments also instructed their employees to not respond to the email.
At the Justice Department and F.B.I., the threatening signals from Mr. Musk were met with a mix of anger and amazement that anyone would issue such a blanket demand without consideration for sensitive areas such as criminal investigations, legal confidentiality or grand jury material.
Some law enforcement supervisors quickly told employees to wait for more guidance from managers on Monday before responding to the demand, according to current and former officials.
Other departments gave conflicting guidance. The Department of Health and Human Services told its employees on Sunday morning to follow the directive. An hour later, an email from the Trump-appointed acting director of the National Institutes of Health, a subordinate agency, told employees to hold off on responding. Hours later, the health department told all employees to “pause” responses to the ultimatum.
On Saturday, Mr. Musk posted a demand for government employees to summarize their accomplishments for the week, warning that failure to do so would be taken as a resignation. Soon after, the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal work force, sent an email asking civil servants for a list of accomplishments, but it did not include the threat of removal for not complying.
[Insert: crowin, Only a fool would believe you could get away with treating adult experienced, and loyal to democracy USA,
bureaucrats like they were 1st Grade children. Perhaps Musk, like Trump, hasn't evolved much since 1st Grade either.
No more - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175847103]
Unions representing federal workers suggested that Mr. Musk’s order was not valid. They advised their members to follow guidance from their supervisors on how, and whether, to respond to the email.
In a scathing letter on Sunday, Everett B. Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees — the largest federal employee union — told the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management that the email sent to federal employees was “plainly unlawful” and “thoughtless.”
Mr. Kelley demanded that the order be retracted, and noted, “By allowing the unelected and unhinged Elon Musk to dictate O.P.M.’s actions, you have demonstrated a lack of regard for the integrity of federal employees and their critical work.”
Multiple intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, had warned employees that responding could risk inadvertently disclosing classified work.
Although Mr. Musk’s original email told employees not to include classified material, current and former intelligence officials said that if an adversary gained access to thousands of unclassified accounts of intelligence officers’ work that it would be able to piece together sensitive details or learn about projects that were supposed to remain secret.
Representative Mike Lawler, a New York Republican whose seat may be among the most fiercely contested in 2026, raised doubt about the order even as he gave broader support to Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting effort.
“I don’t know how that’s necessarily feasible,” Mr. Lawler said of the ultimatum. “Obviously, a lot of federal employees are under union contract.”
Representative Mike Lawler, a New York Republican whose seat projects to be among the most contested next year, raised doubt about
the order but supported DOGE overall. Cindy Schultz for The New York Times
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, also criticized Mr. Musk’s order.
“Our public workforce deserves to be treated with dignity and respect for the unheralded jobs they perform,” she wrote in a statement on social media. “The absurd weekend email to justify their existence wasn’t it.”
It is unclear what legal basis Mr. Musk would have to justify mass firings based on responses to the email, and the White House and the Office of Personnel Management did not immediately answer questions about the threat of removal.
But Mr. Musk — who made similar unconventional demands during his takeover of Twitter, now known as X — insisted on Sunday morning that the order amounted to “a very basic pulse check.”
In a series of posts, Mr. Musk also promoted baseless claims of wage fraud — that a significant number of “non-existent” or dead people were employed in the federal work force, and that criminals were using the fake employees to collect government paychecks.
“They are covering immense fraud,” Mr. Musk said in response to a post by a supporter that said that “the left is flipping out about a simple email.”
His claims echo a similar one that tens of millions of dead people may be receiving fraudulent Social Security payments. A recent report .. https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf .. by the Social Security Administration’s inspector general — a watchdog that investigates the program for waste, fraud and abuse — found that “almost none” of the people in the agency’s database who had likely died were receiving payments.
Reporting was contributed by Julian E. Barnes, Hamed Aleaziz, Apoorva Mandavilli, Devlin Barrett, Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Ken Bensinger, Kate Conger, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Adam Goldman, Minho Kim, Kate Zernike, Lisa Friedman and Margot Sanger-Katz.
Feb. 23, 2025, 7:50 p.m. ET 5 hours ago
Carol Rosenberg
Trump administration moves more migrants to Guantánamo Bay.
The site the Trump administration prepared for housing migrants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Doug Mills/The New York Times
The military transported about 15 immigration detainees from Texas to the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Sunday, bringing in new migrants who have been designated for deportation days after it cleared the base of its first group of deportees.
No new migrants had been sent to the base since the Homeland Security Department cleared it of 178 Venezuelans on Thursday.
A brief announcement did not identify the nationalities of the newest arrivals. Nor did it give exact figures. But a government official said they were in the category of “high-threat illegal aliens,” and therefore were being held in Camp 6, a prison .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/us/politics/migrants-trump-guantanamo-prison.html .. that until last month housed detainees in the war on terrorism.
Last week, the Trump administration delivered 177 Venezuelan men who had been designated for deportation from Guantánamo to the Venezuelan government on an airstrip in Honduras.
It is unclear why those men had to be taken to Guantánamo on 13 military flights from El Paso from Feb. 4 to Feb. 17, and then shuttled to an air base in Honduras on two chartered U.S. aircraft. On Feb. 10, Venezuela sent one of its commercial airliners to El Paso for 190 other Venezuelan citizens the United States wanted to deport.
Juan E. Agudelo, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official who is based in Miami, said in a court filing on Thursday that the administration was using Guantánamo to “temporarily house aliens before they are removed to their home country or a safe third country.” Mr. Agudelo was unable to predict the length of the average stay for a migrant before deportation beyond “the time necessary to effect the removal orders.”
Sunday’s transfer happened without advanced notice. The U.S. government declined a request last week from a consortium of U.S. civil liberties lawyers that asked for 72 hours’ notice before more people in homeland security custody were sent there.
The government said in a filing that it had made arrangements for would-be deportees being held there to speak by phone with lawyers. Three of the men who were sent home on Thursday had one-hour calls with lawyers who had sued for access to the migrants and specifically named those three.
Feb. 23, 2025, 7:43 p.m. ET 5 hours ago
Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
President Emmanuel Macron of France landed at Joint Base Andrews Sunday night for talks with President Trump on Monday about the war in Ukraine, the French government said. Macron has been organizing the European response to the U.S. push for peace talks to end the war. Macron, according to French officials, shares the White House’s goal of ending the war and will present proposals to Trump. Macron worked with British officials to hammer out proposals that would continue support for Ukraine, ensure Ukraine is involved in peace talks and end the conflict, a French official said.
Feb. 23, 2025, 6:53 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Edward Wong
Reporting from Washington
Trump appointees fire 2,000 U.S.A.I.D. workers and put others on leave.
The mass firings are part of a series of layoffs of agency employees by the Trump administration during a broad effort to halt almost all U.S.
foreign aid using a blanket freeze. Eric Lee/The New York Times
Trump administration appointees in charge of the U.S. Agency for International Development sent employees an email on Sunday afternoon saying that they were firing 2,000 workers and putting up to thousands of foreign service officers and other direct hires around the world on paid leave starting that night.
The only exceptions to the leave would be people working on “mission-critical programs,” as well as “core leadership” and employees supporting “specially designated programs,” according to a copy of the email obtained by The New York Times.
The email said appointees running U.S.A.I.D. were firing 2,000 employees based in the United States using a mechanism called “reduction in force.” The mass firings are part of a series of layoffs of agency employees by the Trump administration during a broad effort to halt almost all
U.S. foreign aid .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/us/politics/trump-rubio-foreign-aid.html .. using a blanket freeze.
The moves came after a judge ruled on Friday that the Trump administration could proceed with plans to lay off or put on paid leave many agency employees and close down operations overseas, which means forcing employees based abroad to come back to the United States. Some of those employees say they expect to be fired once they return home.
The judge, Carl J. Nichols of the Federal District Court in Washington, had been reviewing a lawsuit that aimed to block Trump administration officials from enacting the layoffs at the aid agency, putting people on paid leave and compelling overseas employees to quickly return home.
Since late January, Pete Marocco .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/us/politics/foreign-aid-marocco-trump.html , a State Department political appointee who was a divisive figure in the first Trump administration, has overseen the dismantling of the aid agency, working alongside Elon Musk, the tech billionaire adviser to President Trump who has posted dark conspiracy theories about U.S.A.I.D.
Early this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was the new acting administrator of the agency and was appointing Mr. Marocco as his deputy.
The email on Sunday said employees taking the “voluntary” route to returning from overseas soon would have their travel paid for by the agency.
Last week, the appointees running the agency fired about 400 employees .. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/02/23/us/trump-news#usaid-urgent-aid-firings .. who work as contractors on urgent humanitarian assistance. That action added to an understanding among many employees that Mr. Rubio does not actually support such programs.
Late last month, Mr. Rubio promised that “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” programs could continue. But almost no programs have been able to operate because the agency’s payment system does not function, meaning partner groups cannot get funds.
[ The fallout from USAID cuts: Latin America faces a humanitarian and environmental crisis
By Edgar Maciel Feb 24, 2025
The closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is dealing a severe blow to essential programs in Latin America, threatening humanitarian aid in Colombia, conservation efforts in the Brazilian Amazon, and anti-narcotics initiatives in Peru. The freezing of international funds has already affected projects aiming to reduce hunger, corruption, and inequality and will impact millions across the region, experts and NGOs warn.
https://www.developmentaid.org/news-stream/post/191864/usaid-cuts-to-latin-america ]
Mr. Rubio has said some foreign aid will continue after a 90-day review process, but neither he nor Mr. Marocco, who oversees foreign aid at the State Department, have publicly explained the process, if there is one.
Feb. 23, 2025, 5:24 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Alan Feuer
An email making a bomb threat “to honor the J6 hostages” — referring to the people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — briefly interrupted a conference held on Sunday by Principles First, a conservative group that has emerged as a vocal critic of President Trump, according by remarks delivered by its founder, Heath Mayo. Mayo told attendees of the conference, which is being held at the JW Marriott Hotel in Washington, that organizers received the email on Sunday afternoon and that the police were investigating who may have sent it.
Feb. 23, 2025, 5:24 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Alan Feuer
The bomb threat came one day after Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, appeared at the event and heckled Michael Fanone and Harry Dunn, two former police officers who protected the Capitol during the attack by a pro-Trump mob.
Feb. 23, 2025, 3:21 p.m. ETFeb. 23, 2025
Eric Schmitt
Reporting from Washington
Trump’s frustration with generals resulted in an unconventional pick.
Lt. Gen. Dan Caine with an Iraqi general in Mosul, Iraq, in 2018. General Caine graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1990
with a degree in economics and became an F-16 pilot. Spc. Keisha Brown/U.S. Army
By late last week, President Trump had decided to fire Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and replace him with one of two very different candidates, according to two administration officials.
One was Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, a hard-charging Army four-star general who oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, one of the Pentagon’s highest-profile assignments.
The other was a little-known retired three-star Air Force officer, Dan Caine .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/us/politics/dan-caine-trump-joint-chiefs.html , with an unorthodox career path that included time as a fighter pilot, the top military liaison to the C.I.A. and an Air National Guard officer who founded a regional airline in Texas.
Mr. Trump and General Caine met for an hour at the White House on Feb. 14. The president largely made up his mind during a meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday, aides said.
And in a message on social media the next evening, Mr. Trump announced that he had picked General Caine, calling him “an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a ‘warfighter’ with significant interagency and special operations experience.”
When President Trump announced that he had picked General Caine, he called him “an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a ‘warfighter’ with significant interagency and special operations experience.” U.S. Air Force
The decision, part of an extraordinary purge at the Pentagon, resulted from intense deliberations over the past two weeks that were tightly held within a small group of senior administration officials, including Mr. Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance and Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions.
In Mr. Trump’s first term, he initially seemed to seek a close association with the military’s senior leaders, whom he frequently referred to as “my generals.” That soon gave way to frustration with them as he came to regard them as disloyal.
The president’s deep skepticism prompted him to pass over the more obvious choices, like General Kurilla, to replace General Brown and to pluck General Caine from relative obscurity. His choice, people familiar with his thinking said, was based in part on General Caine’s lack of clear association with the Biden administration and in part on a brief encounter with the general in Iraq six years ago that left Mr. Trump convinced he had the kind of can-do attitude the president sees as making the ideal military officer.
In recent years, Mr. Trump has publicly praised General Caine for telling him during that visit to Iraq that the Islamic State could be defeated far more quickly than more senior advisers had suggested.
Now their rekindled relationship will be tested not only by national security challenges like the war in Ukraine and a rising military threat from China, but also by whether General Caine can live up to Mr. Trump’s expectations of loyalty without politicizing the deliberately apolitical job of providing his best military advice to the commander in chief.
Mr. Trump has fixated on the position of the Joint Chiefs chairman since 2019, when he picked Gen. Mark A. Milley, General Brown’s predecessor. It was a decision the president came to regret.
The president saw General Milley as a grandstander and a traitor. General Milley had publicly apologized for walking with Mr. Trump across Lafayette Square for a photo op after the area had been cleared of peaceful demonstrators following the death of George Floyd in May 2020. The president had asked General Milley why he was not proud that he had accompanied “your president,” and it rankled Mr. Trump that the general swore allegiance to the Constitution, not to him. Their relationship was never the same.
President Trump and Gen. Mark A. Milley, right, walk to St. John’s Church after a night of unrest near the White House in June 2020.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
“Trump likes his generals up until the point he doesn’t anymore,” John R. Bolton, the national security adviser in Mr. Trump’s first term, said in an interview.
After Mr. Trump was elected to a second term, word soon spread that he would replace General Brown, a decorated F-16 fighter pilot who in October 2023 became only the second African-American to serve as chairman.
After Mr. Hegseth was narrowly confirmed as defense secretary last month, that likelihood became a near certainty, administration officials said. Mr. Hegseth had previously said General Brown should be fired because of what he called a “woke” focus on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the military. Mr. Hegseth also questioned whether the general was promoted because of his race, despite his 40 years of service.
Several weeks ago, the search for a new chairman began in earnest, administration officials. Adm. Samuel J. Paparo Jr., the head of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific, was briefly considered, among several other initial candidates.
But the list of finalists quickly shortened to General Kurilla and General Caine.
On paper and in conventional thinking, General Kurilla seemed to have the leg up. He was meeting regularly with Mr. Trump and other top national security aides to discuss military priorities in the Middle East. Moreover, General Kurilla, whose tenure at Central Command is expected to wrap up in the next few months, had expressed interest in the job, several current and former military officials said. In the end, General Kurilla seemed too similar to the officers whom Mr. Trump had soured on, aides said.
General Caine, on the other hand, had retired at the end of December after completing the final job in his military career — as the Pentagon’s liaison to the C.I.A. — and joined Shield Capital, a firm in Burlingame, Calif., specializing in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.
General Caine, 56, who graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1990 with a degree in economics, became an F-16 pilot — as his father had been — and was the lead aviator assigned to protect Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, after Qaeda hijackers slammed commercial jets into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
His career after that followed an unusual trajectory, as he parlayed one opportunity into another, picking up valuable new skills at each stop as well broadening his vast network of contacts. He was a White House fellow at the Agriculture Department and a counterterrorism specialist on the White House’s Homeland Security Council under President George W. Bush. He served in several highly secretive intelligence and special operations assignments, some in the United States and some overseas, all rare for an Air National Guard officer.
As a part-time Guard officer, General Caine was a co-founder of RISE Air, a regional airline, and managed other private businesses, according to his LinkedIn page and interviews with friends and former colleagues. In his C.I.A. job, he was keenly interested in the intersection of technology and national security, and kept close tabs on American companies that sold cutting-edge technology to Ukraine in its fight against Russia.
But what put him on Mr. Trump’s radar was the president’s short visit to Al Asad air base in western Iraq in late December 2018. In a briefing there, General Caine told the president that the Islamic State was not so tough and could be defeated in a week, not the two years that senior advisers predicted, Mr. Trump recounted in 2019.
And at a Conservative Political Action Conference meeting last year .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oKP_zi0XCY , Mr. Trump said that General Caine put on a Make America Great Again hat while meeting with him in Iraq.
[AH WELL, SLAM DUNK, that is newsworthy. Or is it...]
The details of these accounts have shifted over time in Mr. Trump’s frequent retelling of the stories. But Mr. Bolton, who accompanied Mr. Trump on the trip to Iraq, said that General Caine and another senior general briefed the president on a plan to defeat the last remnants of the Islamic State in two to four weeks, not one week. And at no time, he said, did General Caine ever put on a MAGA hat. “No way,” Mr. Bolton said.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/02/23/multimedia/23dc-caine-3/23dc-caine-3-jumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp
General Caine with Iraqi security forces in Mosul, Iraq, in 2018. SPC Keisha Brown/U.S. Army
In his social media message, Mr. Trump also noted General Caine’s nickname, “Razin,” recalling Mr. Trump’s obsession with former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s nickname, “Mad Dog,” a moniker Mr. Mattis hated.
General Caine’s nickname embodied the kind of hell-raiser warrior straight out of central casting that Mr. Trump was looking for in his top general, officials said. He fulfilled a fantasy vision the president has of what generals do, they added.
In his post on Friday, Mr. Trump again praised General Caine’s counterterrorism skills. “During my first term, Razin was instrumental in the complete annihilation of the ISIS caliphate,” the president said. “It was done in record setting time, a matter of weeks. Many so-called military ‘geniuses’ said it would take years to defeat ISIS. General Caine, on the other hand, said it could be done quickly, and he delivered.”
Mr. Trump revealed another reason for his unconventional choice. He said that General Caine had been passed over for promotion by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a claim that Biden officials said on Sunday they could not address. Aides say that in Mr. Trump’s mind, that perceived snub was a great endorsement, proof that General Caine has no specific loyalty to the previous administration. To Mr. Trump, who views most senior officers as incompetent and politically correct, it also suggests that General Caine has a different mind-set.
Friends and former colleagues say that General Caine, an intensely focused but low-key, self-effacing officer despite his nickname, has been uncomfortable with Mr. Trump’s characterization of his role in defeating the Islamic State. Friends who have known him for decades say they have no idea what his political affiliation is, explaining that the general does not talk about politics. General Caine did not respond to emails requesting comment on Sunday.
But when the White House called a couple of weeks ago as he was preparing to move to Dallas from Washington, friends of General Caine say, he did not hesitate to accept the meetings with Mr. Trump and his top aides, and ultimately the job — out of duty to the country.
Which raises perhaps the most important question for General Caine as he prepares to return to active duty as soon as this week, and get ready for what is expected to be a tough Senate confirmation hearing: Will he give his best unvarnished military advice to Mr. Trump, or tell the president what he wants to hear?
“He was always direct and candid in the interagency, which is no small feat,” Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., a former head of Central Command who dealt frequently with General Caine in his C.I.A. job, said on Sunday. “I never saw him as a yes-man.”
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview on Sunday that he would press General Caine in his hearing on that central point: “Will he have the ability to speak truth to power?”
Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Helene Cooper contributed reporting.
Feb. 23, 2025, 3:20 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Rebecca Davis O’Brien
In a scathing letter on Sunday, Everett B. Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees — the largest federal employee union — told the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management that the “What did you do last week?” email sent to federal employees on Saturday was “plainly unlawful” and “thoughtless.” Kelley demanded that the message be retracted, and noted: “By allowing the unelected and unhinged Elon Musk to dictate OPM’s actions, you have demonstrated a lack of regard for the integrity of federal employees and their critical work.”
Feb. 23, 2025, 3:20 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Rebecca Davis O’Brien
Kelley’s letter also said that responding to the email would “pull federal employees away from their critical duties without regard for the consequences,” giving hypothetical examples of a Veterans Administration surgeon and an air traffic controller who would have to turn their attention from their work. “This request, and the resulting confusion, is not just inappropriate—it is disruptive to essential government functions.”
Feb. 23, 2025, 2:16 p.m. ETFeb. 23, 2025
Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, ordered all intelligence community officers not to respond to the email from Elon Musk directing workers to detail their accomplishments of the week or risk losing their jobs. “Given the inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work, IC employees should not respond to the OPM email,” Gabbard wrote, referring to the Office of Personnel Management. Multiple intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, had already warned employees that responding could risk inadvertently disclosing classified work.
Eric Lee/The New York Times
Feb. 23, 2025, 2:17 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
Although Musk’s original email told employees not to include classified material, current and former officials said that if an adversary gained access to thousands of unclassified accounts of the work of intelligence officers they would be able to piece together sensitive details or learn about projects that were supposed to remain secret.
Feb. 23, 2025, 2:04 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Chris Cameron
As the conservative Christian Democrats appeared poised to win Germany’s parliamentary elections this evening, President Trump declared the election as a victory for his own conservative movement.
“Much like the USA, the people of Germany got tired of the no common sense agenda, especially on energy and immigration, that has prevailed for so many years,” Trump wrote on social media. “This is a great day for Germany, and for the United States of America.”
Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
Feb. 23, 2025, 11:49 a.m. ETFeb. 23, 2025
Minho Kim
Reporting from Washington
Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, said today on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the Friday dismissal of Gen. Charles Q Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent “a dangerous message to the military” that personal loyalty to the president mattered more than “independent expertise” or years of service. General Brown received broad, bipartisan support during his confirmation process in 2023.
Feb. 23, 2025, 11:32 a.m. ETFeb. 23, 2025
Minho Kim
Reporting from Washington
Senator Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma, said the United States should reevaluate whether to stay in NATO, the military alliance of 32 member countries. “NATO has not always been playing in our best interest,” he said on NBC. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing expecting different results.”
Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times
Feb. 23, 2025, 11:31 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Minho Kim
Reporting from Washington
Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat of the House Intelligence Committee, compared President Trump’s push for a deal on rare earth minerals in Ukraine in exchange for U.S. aid to mafia extortions. “It just looks like an episode of The Sopranos,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Give us your minerals, or we’re not going to help you fight a bloody butcher.”
Feb. 23, 2025, 11:31 a.m. ETFeb. 23, 2025
Minho Kim
Reporting from Washington
Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, responded to Himes on the same show, defending President Trump’s tactic as “a unique way of negotiating” that “typically gets results.” He referred to a shift in tone and some policy concessions that Mexico and Canada gave to the Trump administration after the president threatened the American neighbors with tariffs.
Feb. 23, 2025, 11:30 a.m. ETFeb. 23, 2025
Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
Hegseth defends Trump’s firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rejected criticisms of the administration’s decisions on Sunday. Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday defended President Trump’s firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top military officer, arguing that he was “not the right man for the moment.”
President Trump removed the chairman, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., on Friday and nominated a retired three-star general to replace him. Mr. Hegseth followed that announcement by removing the chief of naval operations and the Defense Department’s top military lawyers.
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Hegseth said “nothing about this is unprecedented,” adding that presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama have fired or dismissed officers. A chairman of the Joint Chiefs has never been fired, though when the position had two-year terms, the George W. Bush administration declined to renew the term of Gen. Peter Pace in 2007, citing opposition in Congress.
“This is a reflection of the president wanting the right people around him to execute the national security approach we want to take,” Mr. Hegseth said.
But Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said the series of firings “was completely unjustified.”
Mr. Reed said on ABC News’s “This Week” that the administration wanted the Defense Department to be beholden to the president. “They want everyone there to do what they’re told, regardless of the law,” he added.
[What else with the likely intent not to relinquish power
when this 2nd term of his is finished. At least i gotta have
guys here who i think may back me when the time comes,
Trump could be thinking.]
The firing of the lawyers, he added, was startling and had prompted some talented leaders to question if they should stay in the military.
“If you’re going to break the law, the first thing you do is you get rid of the lawyers,” Mr. Reed said.
Mr. Hegseth rejected the criticism, and said that traditionally senior military lawyers had been chosen by one another. But, he said, he wanted “fresh blood,” and that he would open up the positions to a broader candidate pool to find the best military lawyers to lead each of the armed services.
“Ultimately, we want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice and don’t exist to attempt to be roadblocks,” Mr. Hegseth said.
Mr. Hegseth was also pressed on the administration’s plans for the war in Ukraine, and Mr. Trump’s criticism of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
He praised Mr. Trump for bringing the Kremlin toward peace talks, and defended the bilateral negotiations between Russia and the United States. Democrats, Europeans and Ukrainians have criticized those talks for leaving out Ukraine.
“Standing here and saying, ‘you’re good, you’re bad, you’re a dictator, you’re not a dictator, you invaded, you didn’t’ — it’s not useful,” Mr. Hegseth said. “It’s not productive.”
In his interview Mr. Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said that Mr. Trump was essentially “surrendering to the Russians.”
“This is not a statesman or a diplomat,” Mr. Reed said. “This is just someone who admires Putin, does not believe in the struggle of the Ukrainians and is committed to cozying up to an autocrat.”
Feb. 23, 2025, 10:16 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
Gabbard accuses security agencies of eroding privacy and civil liberties.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, speaking with the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, in Washington, on Thursday.
Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has criticized security agencies for eroding privacy and civil liberties, and said she would work to ensure that intelligence collected on Americans would not be improperly used against them.
In her first interview since being confirmed in her role on Feb. 12, Ms. Gabbard told Lara Trump of Fox News that during the 2024 election campaign, she had been put on a Transportation Security Administration list called Quiet Skies that, she said, subjected her to federal surveillance.
Ms. Gabbard said that she was put on the list after she criticized Vice President Kamala Harris. U.S. officials told The New York Times .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/us/politics/tulsi-gabbard-trump-intel-pick-watch-list.html .. that Ms. Gabbard was added to the list after a European businessman who was on another federal watch list arranged for her travel to a conference in Rome.
But Ms. Gabbard said the experience of being subjected to extra scrutiny by federal air marshals was a clear example of the weaponization of government.
“It really speaks to how these institutions that exist to ensure the safety, security and freedom of the American people being weaponized against the American people actually creates a greater national security risk,” Ms. Gabbard told Ms. Trump in the interview, which aired on Saturday. Ms. Trump is President Trump’s daughter-in-law.
Ms. Gabbard said the federal government had for too long used security threats to undermine liberty, adding that it was her “essential” responsibility to better balance liberty and safety.
“For too long we have seen people in positions of great power say if we violate your freedom and civil liberties it’s OK because we are trying to keep you safe,” she said. “There is such a thing as threat to physical security, but our threat to our freedom and our liberty must be balanced right alongside that threat to our physical security.”
[ Gabbard’s sympathetic views toward Russia cause alarm as Trump’s pick to lead intelligence services
https://apnews.com/article/gabbard-trump-putin-intelligence-russia-syria-a798adaf9cd531a5d0c9329f7597f0f6 ]
Ms. Gabbard said the Biden administration had turned its focus away from the dangers of “Islamic terrorism” in the United States and was wrongly focused on domestic terrorism, putting its attention on “our fellow Americans.” An intelligence report delivered to Congress in 2021 by the Biden administration echoed earlier analyses by the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, and warned of the dangers of domestic terrorism .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/us/politics/homeland-security-threat.html .. from extremists and white supremacist groups, including after followers of Mr. Trump embraced his baseless claims of election fraud.
Ms. Gabbard said she was working with the White House to trim government spending. She noted that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was a small organization but claimed, without providing details, that the elimination .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/us/politics/trump-dei-diversity-officials-orders.html .. of diversity programs had saved $20 million. She added that she was “excited to be able to uncover more” spending cuts.
Feb. 23, 2025, 10:13 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Tyler Pager
Reporting on the White House
Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, said Sunday on CNN that he met with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a recent trip to Moscow. He said they had a “positive, constructive meeting,” which he attributed to the “positive relationship” between Putin and Trump during his first term.
“The only way you’re going to end the carnage is if you have a relationship with the leaders of both countries that are involved,” he said on CNN.
Feb. 23, 2025, 9:49 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Tyler Pager
Reporting on the White House
Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, said Sunday on CNN that he expected Ukraine to sign a deal this week to give the United States access to valuable minerals in Ukraine. The progress toward a deal comes after President Trump ratcheted up criticism on the country and its leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky, for initially rebuffing the United States.
Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
Feb. 23, 2025, 9:50 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Tyler Pager
Reporting on the White House
“He’s not wavering anymore,” Witkoff said of Zelensky. “I think there’s a reason he’s not wavering.
It’s because he realizes that we have done so much and that that agreement belongs being signed.”
Feb. 23, 2025, 9:41 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Tyler Pager
Reporting on the White House
Witkoff said Sunday that he still expected the second phase of the cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas to proceed after Israel delayed the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Still, he said, they would need to extend phase one of the deal — the initial six-week cease-fire. He said he planned to travel to the region this week to work on the negotiations.
Feb. 23, 2025, 9:35 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Robert Jimison
Robert Jimison, who covers Congress, reported from Trinity
County in the 17th Congressional District of Texas.
Republicans are facing angry voters at town halls, hinting at a broader backlash.
Representative Pete Sessions fielded a barrage of frustration from constituents at a town-hall meeting in Trinity, Texas, on Saturday. Mark Felix for The New York Times
Some came with complaints about Elon Musk, President Trump’s billionaire ally who is carrying out an assault on the federal bureaucracy. Others demanded guarantees that Republicans in Congress would not raid the social safety net. Still others chided the G.O.P. to push back against Mr. Trump’s moves to trample the constitutional power of Congress.
When Representative Pete Sessions, Republican of Texas, arrived at a crowded community center on Saturday in the small rural town of Trinity in East Texas, he came prepared to deliver a routine update on the administration’s first month in office. Instead, he fielded a barrage of frustration and anger from constituents questioning Mr. Trump’s agenda and his tactics — and pressing Mr. Sessions and his colleagues on Capitol Hill to do something about it.
“The executive can only enforce laws passed by Congress; they cannot make laws,” said Debra Norris, a lawyer who lives in Huntsville, arguing that the mass layoffs and agency closures Mr. Musk has spearheaded were unconstitutional. “When are you going to wrest control back from the executive and stop hurting your constituents?”
“When are you going to wrest control back from the executive?” Debra Norris, a lawyer who lives in Huntsville, asked Mr. Sessions.
Mark Felix for The New York Times
Louis Smith, a veteran who lives in East Texas, told Mr. Sessions that he agreed with the effort to root out excessive spending, but he criticized the way it was being handled and presented to the public.
“I like what you’re saying, but you need to tell more people,” Mr. Smith said. “The guy in South Africa is not doing you any good — he’s hurting you more than he’s helping,” he added, referring to Mr. Musk and drawing nods and applause from many in the room.
In Trinity and in congressional districts around the country over the past week, Republican lawmakers returning home for their first congressional recess since Mr. Trump was sworn in faced similar confrontations with their constituents. In Georgia, Representative Rich McCormick struggled to respond as constituents shouted, jeered and booed at his response to questions about Mr. Musk’s access to government data. In Wisconsin, Representative Scott Fitzgerald was asked to defend the administration’s budget proposals as voters demanded to know whether cuts to essential services were coming.
Many of the most vocal complaints came from participants who identified themselves as Democrats, but a number of questions pressing Mr. Sessions and others around the country came from Republican voters. During a telephone town hall with Representative Stephanie Bice in Oklahoma, a man who identified himself as a Republican and retired U.S. Army officer voiced frustration over potential cuts to veterans benefits.
“How can you tell me that DOGE with some college whiz kids from a computer terminal in Washington, D.C., without even getting into the field, after about a week or maybe two, have determined that it’s OK to cut veterans benefits?” the man asked.
Beyond town halls, some Democrats have organized a number of protests outside the offices of vulnerable Republicans. More than a hundred demonstrators rallied outside the New York district office of Representative Mike Lawler. Elected Democrats are also facing fury from within the ranks of their party. A group of voters held closed-door meetings with members from the office of Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, after a demonstration at his New York offices.
Some of the scenes recalled the raucous town-hall meetings of 2009 that heralded the rise of the ultraconservative Tea Party, where throngs of voters showed up protesting President Barack Obama’s health care law and railed against government debt and taxes. It is not yet clear whether the current backlash will persist or reach the same intensity as it did back then. But the tenor of the sessions suggests that, after a brief honeymoon period for Mr. Trump and Republicans at the start of their governing trifecta, voters beginning to digest the effects of their agenda may be starting to sour on it.
Representative Rich McCormick, a Republican from Georgia, also faced shouts and jeers from constituents at a meeting last week.
Valerie Plesch for The New York Times
Mr. Sessions, who was first elected to Congress nearly three decades ago and represents a solidly Republican district, appeared unfazed by the disruptions on Saturday. Some audience members laughed at him and retorted with hushed but audible expletives when he spoke about his support of some of Mr. Trump’s policy proposals and early actions.
And some of his constituents were plainly pleased by what they had seen so far from the new all-Republican team controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress. Several cheered an executive order barring transgender women and girls from participating in school athletic programs designated for female students, applauded plans to shrink the Department of Education and welcomed calls from Mr. Sessions to end remote work flexibility for federal employees.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to have a reduction in force,” Mr. Sessions told the crowd.
And while many in the room voiced displeasure over the sweeping changes underway in Washington, some were agitating for bolder action to address what they called government corruption — not for pumping the brakes.
As Mr. Sessions spoke about the administration’s efforts to streamline bureaucracy and root out wasteful spending, shouts erupted.
“Take care of it, Congressman,” one woman said, interrupting him.
“Do something about it,” another man added.
One man’s voice rose above the others railing against nongovernmental organizations that receive federal money: “They’re laundering money to NGOs. Who’s in jail?”
Still, much of the pressure came from constituents concerned about how he might be enabling Mr. Trump to enact policies that could hurt them.
Mr. Sessions did not promise that Social Security would be insulated from cuts when pressed by John Watt, left. Mark Felix for
The New York Times
John Watt, the chairman of the Democratic Party in nearby Nacogdoches County, asked for guarantees from the congressman that he would oppose any cuts to Social Security if Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk turned their attention to the entitlement program.
“Will you be courageous enough to stand up to them?” Mr. Watt asked.
Mr. Sessions spoke at length about his support for the program, but said he could not promise it would be insulated from the blunt cuts Republicans in Washington are seeking across the government. Instead, he said he supported a comprehensive audit of the program that could result in some cuts.
“I’m not going to tell you I will never touch Social Security,” Mr. Sessions said, parting ways with Mr. Trump, who campaigned saying he never would .. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/business/trump-social-security-benefits.html . “What I will tell you is that I believe we’re going to do for the first time in years a top-to-bottom review of that. And I will come back, and I will do a town-hall meeting in your county and place myself before you and let you know about the options. But I don’t know what they’re proposing right now.”
It was a nod to the uncertainty surrounding the Republican budget plan, even as House leaders hope to hold a vote on it within days. Already, the level of cuts they are contemplating to Medicaid has drawn resistance from some G.O.P. lawmakers whose constituents depend heavily on the program, raising questions about whether they will have the votes to pass their blueprint at all.
The public pushback could further complicate that debate, as well as efforts to reach a spending agreement as lawmakers return to Washington this week with less than three weeks to avert a government shutdown.
The tenor of the town-hall meetings, including Mr. Sessions’s, suggested that voters were beginning to digest the effects of the Republican agenda. Mark Felix for The New York Times
Republicans generally hold fewer in-person open town halls than their Democratic counterparts, opting instead for more controlled settings, such as telephone town halls, that minimize the risk of public confrontations. But even before last week, they had begun hearing frustration from voters, who have also expressed their discontent by flooding the phones of congressional offices.
With their already narrow majority in the House, G.O.P. lawmakers are in a fragile position. A voter backlash could sweep out some of their most vulnerable members in midterm elections next year. But the pushback in recent days has come not only in highly competitive districts but also in deeply Republican ones, suggesting a broader problem for the party.
And there is little sign that Mr. Trump is letting up. On Saturday, Mr. Trump said in a social media post that Mr. Musk “is doing a great job, but I would like to see him be more aggressive.” Mr. Musk responded by sending government employees emails that he said were “requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
“I have not yet begun to fight, and neither have you,” President Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday. .Maansi Srivastava for The New York Times
Hours later, during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Trump signaled that he was only just beginning to enact his agenda.
“I have not yet begun to fight, and neither have you,” Mr. Trump told a crowd of his supporters at the annual gathering outside in Washington.
Such remarks offer little cover for Republicans like Mr. Sessions facing tough questions from voters who are beginning to chafe at the changes Mr. Trump is pursuing.
But the congressman said that tense exchanges would not deter him from holding more events and seeking opportunities to communicate with his constituents, whether they agree with his positions or not. He said he would hold more events across the district next week, and hopes that after another week in Washington, he will be able to provide more clarity for those who show up.
“I heard them and they heard me,” he said of Saturday’s gathering. “And I don’t think there was a fight.”
Feb. 23, 2025, 9:23 a.m. ET Feb. 23, 2025
Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, said in an interview on Fox News Sunday defended the firing of Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the country’s top military officer, and other senior officers from military leadership on Friday. He said there was nothing unprecedented about President Trump’s ouster of the officers. Hegseth praised General Brown but said he was “not the right man for the moment.”
More - https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/02/23/us/trump-news
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