The Supreme Court Hits a Limit: Trump’s 13th Week, in Review

A late night judicial order makes clear that officials involved in the rendition of Abrego Garcia have skated on to thin ice. Plus, for those who make it to the end, a stock tip.

Welcome to the waning hours of the weekend. Here’s wishing a Happy Easter to those who celebrate, and a restorative Sunday to those who demonstrated yesterday. We’ll hop into the news with a few headlines — and then we’ll dig into the implications of the Supreme Court’s dramatic intervention in the Abrego Garcia case before we go into some highlights of the week that was.

Chart of the Week

We know you know this, but just to make it clear: “DOGE” is not, in fact, reducing the federal budget deficit. Former FiveThirtyEight editor G. Elliott Morris has done the math:

• Bonus content! Author and activist Jon Green has weighed in with a video that makes the exact same point: whatever Elon Musk says, the “Department of Government Efficiency” has not, in fact, brought efficiency to government. (Read on in this issue to see what “DOGE” is doing instead.)

The Rundown: Trump Versus …

Our Families

• The administration apparently placed the entire staff of the Interagency Council on Homelessness on administrative leave — effectively eliminating the ability of the agency, which was established by Congress in 1987, to optimize federal efforts to aid Americans without housing.
  
  Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-authored blueprint for much of the Trump administration’s agenda, called for ending efforts that prioritize putting people in homes and proposed emphasizing “mental health and substance abuse issues” instead. With its move to shut down the interagency homelessness panel, the Trump administration appears to be making good on that plan.

• Trump’s war on climate protection has thrown a wrench into the operations of school-bus fleets across the country. School systems relied on grants under the 2021 Inflation Reduction Act to purchase electric school buses — but since January, the Environmental Protection Agency has ghosted many school systems without delivering the promised money. According to the Associated Press, “more than 500 districts nationwide are still waiting on around $1 billion from the EPA to cover more than 3,400 electric buses … [sparking] panic and confusion in districts that must find other ways to cover the cost or delay or cancel their purchases.”

Our Health

• Republicans in Congress have begun to converge on a plan to pay for tax cuts for billionaires by slashing billions from Medicaid. The thrust of their efforts: winding down the federal 90-percent cost share for the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act while claiming that Medicaid was only “intended to help” certain low-income populations: “children, seniors, individuals with disabilities, and pregnant women.”
  
  Jonathan Cohn of The Bulwark writes that if carried out, the Republican plan would force state-level cuts that take Medicaid coverage away from a population that would “likely reach well into the millions and could easily exceed 10 million.” If this is what Trump meant in the 2024 presidential debate when he claimed to have “concepts of a plan” for health care, we don’t like it.

• A Trump administration budget proposal for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would slash the number of institutes under the NIH umbrella — each of which focuses on a specific scientific or health mission — by more than two-thirds: from 27 to 8. Two examples slated for elimination: The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and the National Institutes for Nursing Research. The Washington Post, which obtained a draft of the budget document, reports that the plan would cut the NIH budget by 40 percent.
  
  One key casualty in these proposed cutbacks: supports for health care for rural Americans, including state offices of rural health and grants to subsidize at-risk rural hospitals and rural-hospital residencies for young medical-school graduates. Who “voted” for that in November? Not many people.

• An analysis of staff changes at the NIH under Trump showed that 38 of 43 experts removed from the boards that review research findings in NIH labs are Black, Hispanic, or women.

• While the White House maintains that Trump wants Chinese leader Xi Jinping to give him a call and make a trade deal, COVID.gov — formerly a resource where people could learn about protective measures, immunization sites, and more — has been redirected to a White House web page promoting the conspiracy theory that the pandemic originated with a leak from a Chinese medical research lab. (With actions like these, we suspect the President will be waiting for that call for a long time.)

Our Leadership

• A leaked draft executive order proposes targeted — but deep — cuts at the State Department. The proposed restructuring would shutter all but “essential” embassies in sub-Saharan Africa; close the bureau of African affairs and shift policy for the region to an office of the National Security Council focused on “coordinated counterterrorism operations” and “strategic extraction and trade of critical natural resources”; eliminate offices within the department that address climate change, refugee, and human rights issues; end the foreign-service exam; reduce the U.S. embassy in Canada to a skeleton crew; and encourage reliance on “artificial intelligence” to help draft documents, develop policies, and assist in “operational planning.”

• In another look at the devastation left behind by the Trump administration’s destruction of U.S. instruments of soft power, The New York Times has a report on infants who starved to death in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum — cut off from food aid when American-funded soup kitchens that served civilians in besieged neighborhoods shut down.
  

  Worth noting that these two defunding efforts, in the course of destroying America’s reputation, have left doors wide open for China and Russia to increase their influence.

• The revolving door at the top ranks of the Pentagon has spun more like a centrifuge over the last week. Four officials in the office of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have been escorted out and placed on administrative leave, having fallen under suspicion during an investigation into leaks of classified information from Hegseth’s office. (If you’re thinking that maybe the leaker to worry about is Hegseth himself, we’re on the same page.)
  
  According to Politico, “the changes will leave Hegseth without a chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, or senior adviser in his front office.” Three of the four suspended officials have issued a statement to offer support for “the Trump-Vance administration’s mission to make the Pentagon great again,” despite not understanding why they were fired. We don’t get it either …

  (News broke as we prepared this email that Hegseth had participated in a second chat on Signal — a commercial chat app — where he leaked classified information in apparent violation of the Espionage Act. Hoooo, boy.)

Our Rights

The biggest news on this front is the Supreme Court’s intervention to stop the administration’s efforts to use a late-1700s law to expel undocumented Venezuelans to a prison-labor camp in El Salvador. We’ll expand on that news farther down, in our Big Picture section.

• Surfacing rumors that have swirled around progressive circles in Washington, Bloomberg News reports that the Trump administration has considered executive orders that would attempt to strip environmental nonprofits of tax-exempt status. The move — which would be timed for Earth Day on Tuesday — would come as a “strike against organizations seen as standing in the way of … Trump’s push for more domestic oil, gas, and coal production.” The Bloomberg story also warns of “possible investigations of environmental nonprofits’ activities.”

• In a panel hosted by a right-wing media personality with a history of promoting antisemitic rhetoric, Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed his deep concern that people in Western democracies are facing arrest (*ahem*) on the streets (*ahem*) simply for what they say (*cough*). You can watch for yourself in the clip below — but before you press play, we recommend putting “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette on a speaker in the background.
  

• The prying paws of Elon Musk’s “DOGE” want more of your data. Wired reports that “DOGE” is working to assimilate information from Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, and Department of Homeland Security files for the stated purpose of tracking undocumented immigrants. The “DOGE” project will need to take in and analyze data across the population, however, to isolate undocumented people — so in practice, the planned system would amount to a far-reaching surveillance tool. An attorney spoke to Wired about the risks inherent in the “DOGE” project:

“There's a reason these systems are siloed,” says Victoria Noble, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “When you put all of an agency's data into a central repository that everyone within an agency or even other agencies can access, you end up dramatically increasing the risk that this information will be accessed by people who don't need it and are using it for improper reasons or repressive goals, to weaponize the information, use it against people they dislike, dissidents, surveil immigrants or other groups.”

• Also sought by “DOGE”: access to what The Washington Post describes as a “sensitive Medicare database.” Here too, “DOGE” apparently seeks to use the data to help identify and assist in deportation of undocumented residents.

• One last piece of “DOGE” news: in a weird meeting reported early last week, members of Elon Musk’s group of government busybodies and meddlers met with the leaders of a legal-aid nonprofit. The “DOGE” emissaries expressed interest in installing members of “DOGE” as minders inside the nonprofit — and in fact mentioned, according to The Washington Post, plans of “assign[ing] members of its team to work at all institutes or agencies that receive federal funds.” We’re still waiting for that congressional subcommittee to do even the most basic oversight, rather than … whatever the heck this anti-trans hearing is.
  
  The meeting with the legal-aid group abruptly wrapped up after group leaders noted that their federal grants had been revoked. On a possibly related note, however, “DOGE” officials were reported to have met with officials of the National Gallery of Art last week to “[discuss] the museum’s legal status.”

Our Safety

• Cuts have left the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) so short staffed that the agency can no longer assist the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) in collecting data on car accidents, adverse drug reactions, and other sources of injuries. According to Reuters, a 47-year-old system maintained by the CDC has worked with CPSC since 2000 to collect injury data in support of the safety commission’s work. That arrangement ended last Friday — an “abrupt transition,” according to a CPSC email, because the layoffs left CPSC without “the resources to wind down [data program] in an orderly and structured manner.”

• The National Weather Service (NWS) prepared for “degraded” operations after staff cuts imposed under Trump and “DOGE.” Noting severe staffing shortages, an internal National Weather Service memo discussed austerity measures such as reduced weather-balloon launches, reducing the per-day number of forecast updates for the public, and allowing computer-generated predictions to go out to the public without a meteorologist's check for errors.
  
  The American Meteorological Society warned that the cutbacks may cause “almost certainly disastrous consequences for public safety and economic health.” The parent organization of NWS pushed back, however — insisting that concerns over cuts that had left some NWS offices without a third of their staff were “false and disrespectful.” (We’re no meteorologists, but we forecast a 100% chance of learning that Trump’s spokespersons for NWS were blowing sunshine from … well, you know.)

• The through line between the two stories discussed in this section: what ProPublica described in a feature last week as “Trump’s war on measurement.” In much the same fashion as the president, during the COVID pandemic in his first administration, urged government officials to “slow the testing down, please” because “when you test, you create cases,” Trump appears bent upon smothering data on harms from his policies to make those harms impossible to quantify or address.
  
  ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis wrote:

When an administration is making such a concerted effort to stifle assessments of government and society at large, it is hard not to conclude that it lacks confidence in the efficacy of its current national overhaul. As one dataset after another falls by the wayside, the nation’s policymakers are losing their ability to make evidence-based decisions, and the public is losing the ability to hold them accountable for their results. Even if a future administration seeks to resurrect some of the curtailed efforts, the 2025-29 hiatus will make trends harder to identify and understand.

Our Wallets

The president has apparently considered attempting to fire Federal Reserve Board chairman Jerome Powell. The president has no legal authority to remove a person from the role, but Trump reportedly feels frustrated that Powell has resisted lowering interest rates. Of course, Powell might feel more inclined to cut rates if tariffs weren’t raising concerns about inflation across the U.S. economy — and if the president’s erratic behavior weren’t making foreign buyers leery of purchasing the Treasury bonds that finance the U.S. national debt.

Anyway, Trump did what frustrated people the world round do when they can’t get what they want: he posted about it.

• Speaking of “erratic,” the Wall Street Journal reports that the ballyhooed tariff “pause” that helped stock markets recover from their sharp slide earlier in April was the result of a gambit by two Trump advisors to sneak into the Oval Office when tariff booster Peter Navarro was tied up by a meeting elsewhere on the White House grounds.

  The two men convinced Trump of the strategy to pause some of the tariffs and to announce it immediately to calm the markets. They stayed until Trump tapped out a Truth Social post, which surprised Navarro, according to one of the people familiar with the episode. Bessent and press secretary Karoline Leavitt almost immediately went to the cameras outside the White House to make a public announcement.

  
  “We needed everyone singing from the same song sheet,” a person familiar with the matter said.

  That’s strong, steady presidential leadership, folks. (*stares at 401(k) nervously*)

• For American consumers and workers, the winning as Trump wages a trade war against China just doesn’t stop:

  • Volvo announced the layoff of as many as 800 workers in its truck-assembly operations in the United States, and blamed the necessity of the move on new tariffs;

  • Mack Trucks announced layoffs for around 300 workers at its assembly operations in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania, and … blamed the necessity of the move on new tariffs;

  • Travel to the U.S. has fallen sharply versus rates of tourism at the same point in 2024 — potentially resulting in “billions of dollars in lost tourism revenue”;

  • China has stopped buying liquified natural gas from the U.S. — and has shifted its purchases of crude oil from the United States to Canada.

• In another example of Americans winning under Trump’s leadership, a federal judge threw out a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) rule that capped credit-card late fees at $8. The judge was left with little alternative because CFPB leadership, under Trump, switched sides to champion the interests of credit-card issuers and banks. (The administration attempted to fire most CFPB workers this week, but a federal judge blocked the move after it emerged that the officials who ordered the layoffs knew their action violated a federal court order.)

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The Big Picture: The Supreme Court Has a Limit

At about 1:30 a.m. on Saturday morning, unusual news dropped: the Supreme Court had intervened to block a rumored government plan to fly undocumented Venezuelans from the U.S. to a prison-labor camp in El Salvador.

A Supreme Court order issued a week or so before required that federal officials offer notice and due process — in other words, a chance to contest claims of criminal activity or gang membership — before proceeding to expel people, but developments last week raised concerns that the Trump administration planned to expel a group of detainees with scant notice.

The dramatic move by the Supreme Court dealt a blow to administration efforts to shrug off legal constraints to expel migrants. When it comes to blame for the setback, however, it’s hard to see how the administration can blame anyone but itself.

Consider: earlier in the week, the administration gloried in defiance of efforts to secure the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran resident of Maryland mistakenly snared by the administration’s effort to round up Venezuelans. Despite a Supreme Court order that the administration “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., the Department of Justice thumbed its nose at the district judge who required daily updates on the administration’s efforts — offering bare-bones filings that, day after day, delivered “no further updates” on Abrego Garcia’s status.

Not content to allow the Justice Department to defy the federal judiciary on its own, the White House publicly thumbed its nose at the court order to bring Abrego Garcia home — vowing, after Sen. Chris Van Hollen met with Abrego Garcia in El Salvador and provided pictures of him, that he would “never” return:

Again: the administration, on the date of that post to X, was under a court order to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. It’s hard to say a White House promise that he would “never” come home looks like even a cursory effort to do as the court said.

Vice President J.D. Vance also got in on the act, posting that people pressing for the return of the mistakenly deported Abrego Garcia were “obsess[ing] over an MS-13 gang member” and sought — pardon the offensive and false language, we’re just quoting here — “the ratification of Biden's illegal migrant invasion.”

Blah, blah, blah — this post ran about the length of a chapter of ‘Moby Dick,’ but you can read it here in full if you like.

Aside from the gratuitous meanness toward Abrego Garcia, what stands out here is the Trump administration’s rejection of any obligation to do as the federal judiciary — and the law — requires of it. As if to make that clear, Trump posted a doctored photo on Friday that purported to “prove” Abrego Garcia’s supposed ties to Salvadoran gang MS-13:

It’s little wonder that even a judge appointed by Ronald Reagan, J. Harvie Wilkinson — once revered as a conservative stalwart of what was for a time the judiciary’s most right-leaning court, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals — scorched the administration last week for its rejection of legal oversight. He wrote:

It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. … The Supreme Court’s decision does not, however, allow the government to do essentially nothing.

It feels tempting to regard the Supreme Court’s late-night intervention as a turning point. What we’ve learned, while perhaps more limited, is nonetheless valuable: there is a limit to how long the federal judiciary will allow the Trump administration to play in its face. Open, sustained defiance has now drawn an open rebuke.

Journalist Chris Geidner usefully emphasized what made the late-night order unusual:

Georgetown Law professor Marty Lederman added another notable detail: the appearance that the Supreme Court proceeded ahead of Justice Samuel Alito, who had purview over emergency filings from the state this case came from. (Alito filed his dissent from the court’s intervention late on Saturday, citing mostly procedural qualms.)

One last point that stands out is how the Supreme Court’s intervention resembles actions judges took during another time of massive government defiance of its rulings: the civil-rights movement. As non-practicing lawyer Will Stancil notes, dealing with government officials who acted in bad faith required judges to get specific — and thorough — in their directives to force compliance with the law.

We’ll see over the coming weeks whether — and how much — the administration persists in testing the Supreme Court’s patience.

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The Fight-Back Forecast

With Earth Day looming, environmental groups and others plan to go all out at events across the country. You can use this map to find a demonstration near you — or use the coalition’s website, which is linked above, to register to host a demonstration.

Also coming up: May 1, also known as International Workers’ Day or May Day around much of the world. The May Day Strong coalition — formed by MoveOn, Indivisible, and multiple labor unions and other groups — plans demonstrations across the country on May 1 against the Trump administration’s “war on working people.” The Mobilize app can help you find an event near you.

Saturday saw protestors hit streets across the country for a 50501 Coalition day of action — which was timed to fall on the date, April 19, that marked the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, which began the American Revolutionary War.

Looking Ahead

• A report on leading economic indicators — signaling the state of the American economy under the onslaught of Trump’s tariffs and indecision — comes out via the Conference Board on Monday, April 21.

• Congress remains on recess this week, with members of the House and Senate holding town halls in their districts and states. You can check for a town hall near you — or an empty-chair town hall for politicians who are too timid to face the public — at indivisible.org.

• Last, for those in need of an escape — we understand, truly — U.S. presales of the Nintendo Switch 2 console begin on April 24.

Waste, Fraud and Abuse Watch

The federal government is moving ahead with plans for a “Golden Dome” missile-defense system over the United States, and the leading contender to build and operate it appears to be — try to contain your surprise — Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Love to see the free market at work, folks.

In an unusual twist, SpaceX and its partners apparently propose to run the planned missile defense system as a … subscription service? Seems novel to us to pay for a national-security platform like everyday people might pay for Netflix, but … 🤷‍♂️.

Speaking of paying for things, Musk and Trump apparently seek to hand control of its expense-card system — which processes $700 billion worth of transactions per year — to a startup, named Ramp, backed by Trump ally and Musk friend Peter Thiel.

Walkback of the Week

The Trump administration sent a list of demands that the administration of Harvard University pointedly rejected — but now the White House wants the world to know that “whoops,” its letter to Harvard was sent by mistake. But $2 billion in grants were still canceled, so … oopsie doopsie, we guess.

Politicians Running Scared

From the comfort and security of his office, House Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) told CNN that the Americans confronting their elected officials are “paid protestors, they’re people who are professional protestors.”

Hard to believe, but people feel fired up to speak out against Trump’s attacks without getting a paycheck for it.

Politicians Standing Up

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) wins the award this week, hands down.

People Fighting Back

Constituents of two elected officials — Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — spared nothing last week to make their feelings about the Trump administration’s agenda crystal clear.

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And now, a tip on how to follow the stock market in these turbulent times, if you’re the type to only watch Fox News:

That’s all for now. Catch us on Bluesky and Facebook for updates throughout the week — and look for us in your inbox again on Sunday, April 27.

’Til then—

the TrumpVersusUS team