Cyprus Mail 21 January 2025 - by Reuters News Service
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| President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attend the Commander in Chief Ball in honor of his inauguration in Washington |
U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday issued a flurry of executive orders and directives as he sought to put his stamp on his new administration on matters ranging from energy to criminal pardons and immigration.
Here are some of the key executive orders signed on Trump’s first day back in office:
PARDONS
Trump pardoned about 1,500 people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a sweeping gesture of support to the people who assaulted police as they tried to prevent lawmakers from certifying his 2020 election defeat.
“We hope they come out tonight, frankly,” Trump said. “We’re expecting it.”
The far-reaching action also cuts short the sentences of 14 members of the far-right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers organizations, including some who were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
The document also directs the U.S. attorney general to drop pending cases related to the riot.
Trump pardons nearly all charged with Jan 6 US Capitol riot
President Donald Trump on Monday pardoned nearly everyone criminally charged with participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, in a show of solidarity with supporters who stormed the seat of American power in his name.
The act effectively wipes away legal consequences for all but 14 of the nearly 1,590 people charged over the riot. The exceptions, members of the far-right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers organizations, had their sentences ended early and will be released from federal prison.
Trump also directed the U.S. attorney general to drop all pending cases related to the riot.
“These people have been destroyed,” Trump, a Republican, said shortly after returning to the Oval Office for the first time since the end of last year. “What they’ve done to these people is outrageous.”
The moves fulfill a campaign promise by Trump to aid supporters who were charged and in many cases imprisoned for crimes committed during the riot, a failed attempt to stop the congressional certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
A White House proclamation called the investigation into the riot a “grave national injustice” and said the pardons would begin a “process of national reconciliation.”
Some federal inmates serving Jan. 6-related sentences could be released as soon as Monday, a Bureau of Prisons spokesperson said.
Thousands descended on the Capitol in 2021 following an incendiary speech by Trump, tearing down barricades, fighting police and sending lawmakers and Trump’s vice president Mike Pence running for their lives as they met to formalize the election result.
The list of pardon recipients include Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, who was sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy, the longest of anyone criminally charged in the riot. Tarrio was found guilty of plotting to violently oppose the transfer of power after the 2020 election.
Others pardoned include people convicted of using pipes, poles and chemical spray to assault the police officers who guarded the Capitol. About 140 law enforcement officers were injured in the violence.
Four people died during the chaos, including a Trump supporter who was shot dead by police. Five police officers died of various causes after the attack.
Stewart Rhodes, the former leader of the Oath Keepers militia, was not pardoned, but had his 18-year prison sentence commuted and is set to be released.
Other members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers also had their sentences cut short. Prosecutors accused both groups of mobilizing for violence after Trump lost the 2020 election and playing a leading role in instigating the breach of the Capitol.
Grant Tudor, a policy advocate at the advocacy group Protect Democracy, said the pardons sent the message that “if you engage in violence on behalf of the cause, Trump will protect you.”
“These pardons will license future lawbreaking, including violence,” Tudor said.
PARDONS, COMMUTATIONS
More than 600 people were charged with assaulting or obstructing police during the riot, according to U.S. Justice Department figures.
The presidential clemency power includes the ability to remove legal consequences of a conviction through a pardon or to cut short or modify a sentence through a commutation.
The U.S. Constitution gives presidents broad pardon power and there is no legal mechanism for challenging a presidential pardon.
Key Trump allies in recent weeks said they did not expect pardons of people who engaged in violence.
Likewise, Vice President JD Vance in an interview with Fox News earlier this month said, “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
AN EXTRAORDINARY COMEBACK
Trump’s decision ends what officials have called the largest investigation in the Justice Department’s history. The FBI and federal prosecutors spent the last four years tracking down and charging people they said participated in a violent attempt to stop the transfer of power after Trump lost the 2020 election.
Trump’s grants of clemency are another indication of his extraordinary political comeback. In the days following the riot, Trump was condemned by his fellow Republicans, banished from prominent social media sites and impeached by the House of Representatives, though he was later acquitted by the Senate.
Trump also faced criminal charges over his efforts to undo his 2020 election loss, a case that sought to hold him responsible for the violence at the Capitol. The charges were dropped after Trump won last year’s election.
Charges against Capitol riot defendants ranged from low-level trespassing offenses to seditious conspiracy against the leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers groups, who were found to have plotted to use violence to stop the transfer of power.
More than 1,000 people pleaded guilty to federal charges, including 327 who admitted to felonies and 682 who committed misdemeanor offenses. A further 221 were found guilty following a trial, according to Justice Department figures.
About 1,100 were sentenced, including 667 defendants who were sent to prison, according to the data.
Trump’s move came after Biden made aggressive use of the pardon power in his final weeks as president. He pardoned his son, Hunter, who had been convicted on gun and tax charges, and later other members of his family.
Biden on Monday issued preemptive pardons for some top targets of Trump and his supporters including Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and members of the congressional panel that investigated the Capitol riot.
IMMIGRATION
Trump signed orders declaring illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border a national emergency, designating criminal cartels as terrorist organizations, and targeting automatic citizenship for U.S.-born children of immigrants in the country illegally.
Trump’s order dealing with U.S. refugee resettlement will suspend the program for at least four months and will order a review of security to see if travellers from certain nations should be subject to a travel ban, the official said.
“The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants,” the order said.
Trump launches sweeping border crackdown, mass deportation push
President Donald Trump on Monday kicked off his sweeping immigration crackdown, tasking the U.S. military with aiding border security, issuing a broad ban on asylum and taking steps to restrict citizenship for children born on U.S. soil.
Declaring illegal immigration a national emergency, Trump ordered the Pentagon to provide support for border wall construction, detention space, and migrant transportation, and empowered the secretary of Defense to send troops to the border as needed.
Trump called for his administration to reinstate his “remain in Mexico” program, which forced non-Mexican migrants to wait in Mexico for the resolution of their U.S. cases.
Shortly after the inauguration, U.S. border authorities said they had shut down outgoing President Joe Biden’s CBP One entry program, which had allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to enter the U.S. legally by scheduling an appointment on an app. Existing appointments were canceled, leaving migrants stunned and unsure of what to do.
Trump, a Republican, recaptured the White House after promising to intensify border security and deport record numbers of migrants. Trump criticized Biden for high levels of illegal immigration during the Democrat’s presidency, but as Biden toughened his policies last year and Mexico stepped up enforcement, the number of migrants caught crossing illegally fell dramatically.
Republicans say large-scale deportations are necessary after millions of immigrants crossed illegally during Biden’s presidency. There were roughly 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally or with a temporary status at the start of 2022, according to a U.S. government estimate, a figure that some analysts now place at 13 million to 14 million.
“As commander-in-chief, I have no higher responsibility than to defend our country from threats and invasions, and that is exactly what I am going to do,” Trump said in his inaugural address.
Trump’s critics and immigrant advocates say mass deportations could disrupt businesses, split families and cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars.
The American Civil Liberties Union said in a federal court filing on Monday that Trump’s decision to end the CBP One program removed the only avenue to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, an opening salvo by the civil rights group to fight Trump’s agenda in court.
Americans have grown less welcoming toward immigrants without legal status since Trump’s first presidency, but remain wary of harsh measures such as using detention camps, a Reuters/Ipsos poll in December found.
BIDEN ENTRY PROGRAM SHUT DOWN
In several Mexican border cities, migrants saw their appointments on Biden’s CBP One app canceled just after Trump took office. Some 280,000 people had been logging into the app daily to secure an appointment as of Jan. 7.
Migrants waiting in Ciudad Juarez scrambled to find short-term rentals, buy bus tickets and call family members back home.
Daynna del Valle, a 40-year-old Venezuelan, spent eight months in Mexico waiting for an appointment that would have arrived on Tuesday. In that time, she worked at a nail salon but earned so little that she barely managed to send any money back to her mother in Colombia, a cancer survivor who needed medical treatment for her blood pressure.
“I’m lost,” she said. “I don’t know what to do, where to go.”
Denia Mendez, a Honduran sitting in the courtyard of a migrant shelter in Piedras Negras – across from Eagle Pass, Texas – opened her email inbox 30 minutes after Trump became president. She stared at an email for several minutes, reading it over and over, before her eyes welled up.
“They canceled my appointment,” she said. Several other migrants, who just minutes ago were laughing as they fed potato chips to pigeons, huddled around her phone, their faces suddenly grave.
Mendez’s 15-year-old daughter Sofia kept trying to get into the CBP One app.
“They’re not going to let you into the app, baby,” her mother told her softly.
BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP TARGETED
In his order focused on so-called “birthright citizenship,” Trump called on U.S. agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of U.S.-born children without at least one U.S. citizen or permanent resident parent, applying the restrictions in 30 days.
His order prompted the swift filing of a lawsuit in federal court in New Hampshire by the ACLU and other groups, who argued that Trump’s order violated the right for anyone born in the United States to be considered a citizen enshrined in the Citizenship Clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
“Denying citizenship to U.S.-born children is not only unconstitutional — it’s also a reckless and ruthless repudiation of American values,” Anthony Romero, the ACLU’s executive director, said in a statement.
In other orders, Trump suspended U.S. refugee resettlement for at least three months and ordered a review of security to see if travelers from certain nations should be subject to a travel ban.
The Republican president rolled back existing guidance for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers that prioritized serious criminals and broadened the scope of their enforcement, including targeting migrants with final deportation orders, a move that could help ramp up removals.
The nascent Trump administration took steps to gain control of the U.S. Justice Department immigration courts, firing four top immigration court officials, three sources familiar with the matter said.
Trump also kicked off a process to designate criminal cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and to utilize a 1798 law known as the Alien Enemies Act against foreign gang members.
UNDOING BIDEN ACTIONS
At a rally at a sports arena, Trump revoked 78 executive actions of the previous administration.
“I’ll revoke nearly 80 destructive and radical executive actions of the previous administration,” Trump said.
Trump also said he will sign an order directing every agency to preserve all records pertaining to “political persecutions” under the Biden administration.
The rescission applied to executive orders spanning from former President Joe Biden’s first day in office in 2021 to as recently as last week, and covered topics from COVID relief to the promotion of clean energy industries.
DIVERSITY
Trump also rescinded executive orders that had promoted diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and promoted rights for LGBTQ+ people and racial minorities, fulfilling promises to curtail protections for the most marginalized Americans.
Among the 78 repealed executive orders signed by Biden, including at least a dozen measures supporting racial equity and combating discrimination against gay and transgender people.
Trump curtails protections around diversity, LGBTQ rights
The United States will recognize only two sexes, male and female, that are unchangeable, President Donald Trump ordered on Monday as he moved to quickly end a range of policies aimed at promoting racial equity and protecting rights for LGBTQ+ people.
The order requires the government use the term “sex” rather than “gender”, while mandating that identification documents issued by the government, including passports and visas, be based on what it described as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.”
Hours after taking office, Trump quickly moved to fulfill campaign promises to roll back policies put in place by the Biden administration, which prioritized implementing diversity measures across the federal government.
Trump repealed 78 executive orders signed by Joe Biden, including at least a dozen measures supporting racial equity and combating discrimination against gay and transgender people.
Among the rollbacks, Trump rescinded two orders that Biden signed on his first day in office four years ago, one advancing racial equity for underserved communities and another combating discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.
Trump repealed other orders aimed at helping Black, Hispanic, Native American and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
“This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life,” Trump said in his inaugural address.
“We will forge a society that is color blind and merit-based. … As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” Trump said.
Trump’s moves to scrap many diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and sharply curtail transgender rights coincided with this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday commemorating the civil rights leader.
Civil and human rights advocates and groups immediately vowed to protect minorities and challenge Trump’s agenda.
“We refuse to back down or be intimidated. We are not going anywhere, and we will fight back against these harmful provisions with everything we’ve got,” Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ rights advocacy group in the U.S., said in a statement.
Rights advocates have said any DEI and transgender rights rollbacks implemented by Trump would be a blow to hard-fought efforts to secure equitable policies and undermine progress made to address systemic prejudices that have deprived equal opportunities for marginalized groups for decades.
“We will continue our relentless efforts to protect immigrant rights, combat voter suppression, and confront hate and discrimination in all its forms,” Asian Americans Advancing Justice said in a statement.
Many corporations have distanced themselves from DEI measures, with some rolling back DEI initiatives and programs in recent weeks. Meanwhile, companies such as Costco COST.O and Apple AAPL.O have remained resolute in maintaining their commitment to DEI.
As part of the executive orders, federal funds will not be used to promote “gender ideology,” a loose term often used by conservative groups to reference any ideology that promotes non-traditional views on sex and gender. Rights and advocacy groups view the term as an anti-LGBTQ trope and dehumanizing.
The Trump administration will also seek to limit the scope of a major victory for transgender rights under the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling of Bostock v Clayton County, in which the high court found that civil rights protections against discrimination “on the basis of sex” applied to sexuality and gender identity.
The attorney general would provide explicit guidance on how to apply Bostock.
Transgender rights have become a contentious political topic in recent years. During November’s election season, many Republicans campaigned on reversing transgender laws with a particular focus on transgender women participating in sports.
During a pre-inauguration rally on Sunday, Donald Trump said that he will take action to “keep all men out of women’s sports.”
TIKTOK BAN
Trump signed an order to delay a ban for 75 days of popular short-video app TikTok that was slated to be shuttered on Jan. 19. The order directs the attorney general to not enforce the law “to permit my administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course of action with respect to TikTok.”
REGULATORY, HIRING FREEZES
Trump signed orders freezing government hiring and new federal regulations, as well as an order requiring federal workers to immediately return to full-time in-person work.
“I will implement an immediate regulation freeze, which will stop Biden bureaucrats from continuing to regulate,” Trump said, adding he will also “issue a temporary hiring freeze to ensure that we’re only hiring competent people who are faithful to the American public.”
The move would force large numbers of white-collar government employees to forfeit remote working arrangements, reversing a trend that took off in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some of Trump’s allies have said the return-to-work mandate is intended to help gut the civil service, making it easier for Trump to replace long-serving government workers with loyalists.
Trump says he’ll roll back Biden executive actions, freeze government hiring
Donald Trump said on Monday he will revoke nearly 80 executive actions of the administration of former Democratic President Joe Biden, with the Republican U.S. president adding he will also implement an immediate freeze on new regulations and hiring.
“I’ll revoke nearly 80 destructive and radical executive actions of the previous administration,” Trump told a cheering crowd at Washington’s Capital One Arena after his inauguration on Monday.
“I will implement an immediate regulation freeze, which will stop Biden bureaucrats from continuing to regulate,” Trump went on, adding he will also “issue a temporary hiring freeze to ensure that we’re only hiring competent people who are faithful to the American public.”
In an executive order issued late on Monday, the White House said that within 120 days of the order, government officials will develop and send to agency heads a federal hiring plan that will “restore merit to government service.”
The announcements – which had been telegraphed for months – are one of many efforts to gut the federal workforce and kneecap the previous administration’s efforts.
Earlier on Monday, Trump officially announced the creation of an advisory group aimed at carrying out sweeping cuts to the U.S. government and wholesale cancellations of government agencies, a move that attracted immediate lawsuits challenging its operations.
The government hiring freeze is being paired with a return-to-office order which would see many government teleworkers forced to commute to work five days a week.
Experts say the new restrictions on hiring, flexible work, and the pressures around cost-cutting will drive exasperated federal workers out of government.
Tesla TSLA.O CEO Elon Musk – who chairs Trump’s advisory body on shrinking government – recently predicted that revoking “the COVID-era privilege” of telework would trigger “a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”
Among the Biden-era actions that were being rescinded included Biden’s executive order concerning risks of artificial intelligence technologies. Other actions which the Trump administration said it was rolling back included executive orders to do with climate change, fighting health threats, and lowering prescription drug costs.
INFLATION
Trump ordered all executive departments and agencies to deliver emergency price relief to the American people and increase the prosperity of the American worker. Measures include cutting regulations and climate policies that raise costs, and prescribe actions to lower the cost of housing and expand housing supply.
“Over the past 4 years, the Biden Administration’s destructive policies inflicted an historic inflation crisis on the American people,” the order said.
CLIMATE
Trump also signed a withdrawal from the Paris climate treaty, including a letter to the United Nations explaining the withdrawal.
The announcement, which has been widely expected ever since Trump won the Nov. 5 presidential election, further threatens the central goal of the agreement to avoid a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius, a target that appears even more tenuous as last year was the planet’s hottest on record.
“It is the policy of my Administration to put the interests of the United States and the American people first,” the order said.
He repealed a 2023 memo from Biden that barred oil drilling in some 16 million acres in the Arctic, saying government should encourage energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters, and eliminated an electric vehicle (EV) mandate.
Trump says to unleash American fossil fuels, halt climate cooperation
President Donald Trump on Monday laid out a sweeping plan to maximize oil and gas production, including by declaring a national energy emergency to speed permitting, rolling back environmental protections, and withdrawing the U.S. from an international pact to fight climate change.
The moves signal a dramatic U-turn in Washington’s energy policy after former President Joe Biden sought for four years to encourage a transition away from fossil fuels in the world’s largest economy. But it remains to be seen if Trump’s measures will have any impact on U.S. production, already at record levels as drillers chase high prices in the wake of sanctions on Russia after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
“America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have: the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth,” Trump said during his inauguration speech.
“And we are going to use it.”
Trump later signed executive orders declaring a national energy emergency and withdrawing the United States from the 2015 Paris climate deal, the international pact to fight global warming. He also signed orders aimed at promoting oil and gas development in Alaska, reversing Biden’s efforts to protect Arctic lands and U.S. coastal waters from drilling, revoking Biden’s target for EV adoption, suspending offshore wind lease sales, and lifting a freeze on LNG export permitting.
Trump said he expects the orders to help reduce consumer energy prices and improve U.S. national security, by expanding domestic supplies and also bolstering allies.
“We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top, and export American energy all over the world,” he said.
Environmental groups have said they intend to challenge the executive orders in court.
The Biden administration had seen electric vehicle and wind energy technologies as crucial to efforts to decarbonize the transportation and power sectors, which together make up around half of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.
Biden’s administration sought to encourage electric vehicle use by offering a consumer subsidy for new EV purchases, and by imposing tougher tailpipe emissions standards on automakers. It also sought to encourage clean energy technologies like wind and solar through tax credits that have drawn billions of dollars in new manufacturing and project investments.
The Democratic National Committee called Trump’s day one agenda a “disaster for working families”.
“Killing manufacturing jobs and giving a free pass to polluters that make people sick is hardly putting ‘America first,'” said Alex Floyd, DNC spokesperson.
POWER INDUSTRY OVERHAUL
Trump had said repeatedly during his campaign he intends to declare a national energy emergency, arguing the U.S. should produce more fossil fuels and also ramp up power generation to meet rising demand.
U.S. data center power use, a major driver of growing electricity demand, could nearly triple in the next three years, and consume as much as 12% of the country’s power to fuel artificial intelligence and other technologies, according to the Department of Energy.
Trump’s declaration seeks to ease environmental restrictions on power plants to meet that demand, speed up construction of new plants, and ease permitting for transmission and pipeline projects.
“It allows you to do whatever you’ve got to do to get ahead of that problem,” Trump told reporters while signing the order. “And we do have that kind of an emergency.”
Sam Sankar, senior vice president for programs at Earthjustice, a non-profit group which is gearing up to fight Trump policies in the courts, said the declaration of an energy emergency in a non-war period is rare and untested, creating a potential legal vulnerability.
The first Trump administration had considered using emergency powers under the Federal Power Act to attempt to carry out a pledge to rescue the declining coal industry, but never followed through.
Trump’s promise to refill strategic reserves, meanwhile, has the potential to lift oil prices by boosting demand for U.S. crude oil.
After the invasion of Ukraine, Biden had sold more than 180 million barrels of crude oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a record amount.
The sales helped keep gasoline prices in check, but sank the reserve – designed to buffer the United States from a potential supply shock – to the lowest level in 40 years.
HEALTH
Another order withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization, saying the global health agency had mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic and other international health crises.
The plan, which aligns with Trump’s longstanding criticism of the U.N. health agency, marks a dramatic shift in U.S. global health policy and further isolates Washington from international efforts to battle pandemics.
Trump has nominated several critics of the organization to top public health positions, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who is up for the post of secretary of Health and Human Services, which oversees all major U.S. health agencies including the CDC and FDA.
Trump orders US exit from the World Health Organization
The United States will leave the World Health Organization, President Donald Trump said on Monday, saying the global health agency had mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic and other international health crises.
Trump said the WHO had failed to act independently from the “inappropriate political influence of WHO member states” and required “unfairly onerous payments” from the U.S. that were disproportionate to the sums provided by other, larger countries, such as China.
“World Health ripped us off, everybody rips off the United States. It’s not going to happen anymore,” Trump said at the signing of an executive order on the withdrawal, shortly after his inauguration to a second term.
The WHO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
When asked about Trump’s decision and remarks, China’s foreign ministry told a regular press briefing on Tuesday that the role of the WHO in global health governance should only be strengthened, not weakened.
“China will continue to support the WHO in fulfilling its responsibilities, and deepen international public health cooperation,” said Guo Jiakun, a ministry spokesperson.
The move means the U.S. will leave the United Nations health agency in 12 months’ time and stop all financial contributions to its work. The United States is by far the WHO’s biggest financial backer, contributing around 18% of its overall funding. WHO’s most recent two-year budget, for 2024-2025, was $6.8 billion.
The U.S. departure will likely put at risk programs across the organization, according to several experts both inside and outside the WHO, notably those tackling tuberculosis, the world’s biggest infectious disease killer, as well as HIV/AIDS and other health emergencies.
Trump’s order said the administration would cease negotiations on the WHO pandemic treaty while the withdrawal is in progress. U.S. government personnel working with the WHO will be recalled and reassigned, and the government will look for partners to take over necessary WHO activities, according to the order.
The government will review, rescind, and replace the 2024 U.S. Global Health Security Strategy as soon as practicable, the order said.
The next-largest donors to the WHO are the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, although most of that funding goes to polio eradication, and the global vaccine group Gavi, followed by the European Commission and the World Bank. The next-largest national donor is Germany, which contributes around 3% of the WHO’s funding.
Trump’s withdrawal from the WHO is not unexpected. He took steps to quit the body in 2020, during his first term as president, accusing the WHO of aiding China’s efforts to “mislead the world” about the origins of COVID.
WHO vigorously denies the allegation and says it continues to press Beijing to share data to determine whether COVID emerged from human contact with infected animals or due to research into similar viruses in a domestic laboratory.
Trump also suspended U.S. contributions to the agency, costing it nearly $200 million in 2020-2021 versus the previous two-year budgets, as it battled the world’s worst health emergency in a century.
Under U.S. law, leaving the WHO requires a one-year notice period, and the payment of any outstanding fees. Before the U.S. withdrawal could be completed last time, Joe Biden won the country’s presidential election and put a stop to it on his first day in office on Jan. 20, 2021.
GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY
Trump signed an executive action to create an advisory group called the Department of Government Efficiency aimed at carrying out dramatic cuts to the U.S. government, attracting immediate lawsuits challenging its operations.
The group – dubbed “DOGE” – is being run by Tesla TSLA.O CEO Elon Musk and has grandiose goals of eliminating entire federal agencies and cutting three quarters of federal government jobs.
Trump orders federal workers back to office, weakens job protections
President Donald Trump has ordered federal workers to return to the office five days a week and weakened job protections for civil servants, the first salvoes in his campaign to gut the federal bureaucracy.
The one-two punch would force large numbers of white-collar government employees to forfeit remote working arrangements, reversing a trend that took off in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
If upheld by the courts, the measures could also strip mid-level officials of the legal guarantees that generally keep them insulated from ideological purges.
Trump’s allies have said the return-to-work mandate and the stripping of civil service protections – widely known as “Schedule F” – is intended to help the president replace long-serving government workers with loyalists faithful only to his agenda.
In a brief statement posted to the White House website, Trump ordered all heads of departments and agencies to “take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary.”
A second statement said that any power government officials have “is delegated by the President, and they must be accountable to the President.”
It largely reinstates a late 2020 administrative order from Trump’s first term that Joe Biden rescinded when he took power and is almost certain to draw swift pushback and litigation.
The National Treasury Employee Union, a labor union that represents federal government employees in dozens of agencies, sued Trump in a federal court in Washington on Monday, aiming to block the “Schedule F” executive order.
The two orders are being paired with a hiring freeze and the creation of an advisory body – dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – which is meant to help Trump take huge chunks out of the federal government and eliminate some agencies wholesale.
Experts say the aggregate effect of the changes will be to drive frustrated government employees out of their jobs, a goal the Trump team is explicitly gunning for.
LOSS OF TOP TALENT
Tesla TSLA.O CEO Elon Musk – who chairs DOGE – recently predicted that revoking “the COVID-era privilege” of telework would trigger “a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”
Not all government workers would be covered by the return-to-office mandate. A quarter of the federal workforce is unionized and many are covered by bargaining agreements that allow for remote work or hybrid arrangements.
However, Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee for Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has hinted at efforts to unwind those deals, telling lawmakers that the agreements struck during the Joe Biden administration were “a concerning phenomenon, and one that we are looking at very closely.”
Republicans have spent decades lampooning federal employees as lazy bureaucrats; Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement has ratcheted the criticism to the next level, with the president calling federal employees “crooked” and “dishonest.”
There was sustained cheering when Trump signed the executive order ordering the workers to return to office. Trump held the document aloft with a wry smile as the applause rang out around the arena.
“The politics play well with the MAGA crowd, because work-from-home workers tend to be higher educated,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University who studies labor and management issues.
While Trump and other Republicans have suggested that remote work is rampant among federal employees, government data shows that it is more limited. About 46% of federal workers, or 1.1 million people, are eligible for remote work, and about 228,000 of them are fully remote, according to a report issued by the White House Office of Management and Budget in August.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a federal employee union, said hybrid working arrangements were a “key tool” for attracting America’s best employees.
“Restricting the use of hybrid work arrangements will make it harder for federal agencies to compete for top talent,” it said in an email.
Bloom said that the Trump administration’s efforts to coerce the federal workforce would likely spark lots of fights, dismissals and resignations – ultimately leading to a lower quality of government service for Americans across the board and potential failures of core safety and social security functions.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of problems with government services falling apart,” Bloom said. “God help anyone who’s interacting with the federal government.”
TARGETING THE ‘DEEP STATE’
The president signed a document “ending weaponization” of government against political opponents. The order directs the attorney general to investigate the activities of the federal government over the last four years, including at the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission during the prior administration.
It said the government will “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to the weaponization of law enforcement and the weaponization of the Intelligence Community.”
FREE SPEECH
Trump signed an executive order that he said was aimed at “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.”
“Under the guise of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens,” the White House said.
Trump and his Republican allies had accused the administration of Democratic former President Biden of encouraging suppression of free speech on online platforms.
Trump executive order on free speech draws criticism
U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order that he said aims to restore freedom of speech and end censorship, drawing fire from critics who point to his past actions threatening and suing journalists, critics and political opponents.
WHY IT MATTERS
Trump and his Republican allies have accused the administration of Democratic former President Joe Biden of encouraging suppression of free speech on online platforms.
Many of the accusations against the previous administration, however, have centered on government efforts against false claims about vaccines and elections.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the Biden administration’s contacts with social media companies did not violate America’s First Amendment protections around free speech.
CONTEXT
Trump, who took office on Monday, himself faced social media restrictions after an attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, following his loss in the 2020 election to Biden.
Trump has over several decades, however, threatened and sued his critics over comments they have made about him. In 2022, he unsuccessfully sued his former presidential campaign foe Hillary Clinton over her comments about his campaign’s links to Russia. The judge who threw out the case called it a misuse of the courts.
Trump has also referred to journalists as the “enemy of the people” and has sued five media companies, including the CNN, ABC News, CBS News, publisher Simon & Schuster and the Des Moines Register. The CNN suit was dismissed, ABC settled, and the other lawsuits are ongoing.
University of California, Irvine, Professor David Kaye said the federal government is already barred from interfering with its citizens’ First Amendment rights, so the order would not stop behavior that is already prohibited.
He criticised the the order as a “deeply cynical” public relations exercise.
KEY QUOTES
The White House said on Monday after Trump’s inauguration: “Over the last four years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, de-platform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve”.
Kaye, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on free speech issues, said: “You cannot on the one hand say, ‘The media is the enemy of the people,’ and at the same time say, ‘It’s the policy of the United States to secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech.’ Those two things don’t fit together”.
ENERGY
Trump declared a national energy emergency, promising to fill up strategic oil reserves and export U.S. energy all over the world.
He laid out a sweeping plan to maximize U.S. oil and gas production – including by declaring a national energy emergency, stripping away excess regulation, and withdrawing the U.S. from an international pact to fight climate change.
Trump said he expects the orders to help reduce consumer prices and improve U.S. national security. He also signed orders aimed at promoting oil and gas development in Alaska, reversing Biden’s efforts to protect vast Arctic lands and waters from drilling.
The U.S. also will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and end leasing to wind farms, according to the White House’s website. In addition, Trump said he would revoke what he has called an electric vehicle mandate.
The moves signal a dramatic U-turn in Washington’s energy policy after Biden sought to encourage a transition away from fossil fuels and establish the U.S. as a leader in combating global warming.
Trump lifts freeze on LNG export permit applications, stop buying oil from Venezuela
President Donald Trump issued an order on Monday for the U.S. to resume processing export permit applications for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects, part of an effort to raise U.S. energy output and dismantle his predecessor’s climate policies.
The Republican’s executive order, which was expected, effectively reverses a pause on permits for new projects that former President Joe Biden put in place in early 2024. Biden, a Democrat, paused the approvals so U.S. national laboratories could study the environmental and economic effects of the booming export industry.
U.S. shipments of LNG set a record in 2023 and the country is the world’s largest exporter of the product. Exports are expected to double by the end of the decade and could double again under existing authorizations, the Energy Department has said.
But the pause in new export permits had created uncertainty for a slew of projects in the works, many supplying Asia and Europe.
Plants in Louisiana awaiting approvals include Commonwealth LNG, Venture Global’s CP2, Cheniere Energy’s LNG.N expansion to its Sabine Pass facility and Energy Transfer’s ET.N Lake Charles terminal. In Texas, a second phase of Sempra’s SRE.N project Port Arthur LNG, awaits approval.
Trump’s incoming energy team will be tasked with executing his pledge to boost U.S. oil and gas output.
Chris Wright, his choice to run the Energy Department which would issue the LNG export permits, led oilfield service company Liberty Energy LBRT.N and told senators in his nomination hearing last week that his first priority is to expand domestic energy production including LNG and nuclear power.
Doug Burgum, former governor of oil producing state North Dakota and Trump’s pick for Interior Secretary, is expected to clear the way for more oil and gas leasing on federal lands. Burgum will head a national energy council to find ways to boost energy output.
Trump said on Monday that his administration would likely stop buying oil from Venezuela and was looking “very strongly” at the South American country.
“It was a great country 20 years ago, and now it’s a mess,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office hours after his inauguration. “We don’t have to buy their oil. We have plenty of oil for ourselves.”
Trump’s envoy for special missions, Richard Grenell, had earlier said he spoke with multiple officials in Venezuela and would begin meetings early Tuesday, days after the outgoing Biden administration imposed new sanctions on the government of President Nicolas Maduro.
“Diplomacy is back,” Grenell said in a post on X disclosing his initial calls. “Talking is a tactic.”
Grenell, who served as acting intelligence chief at the end of Trump’s first term, also planned to meet with Venezuelan opposition officials in Washington on Tuesday, a source familiar with the matter said.
No comment was immediately available from the Venezuelan communications ministry on Trump’s comments or the outreach from Grenell.
Venezuela’s oil exports to the U.S. soared 64% to some 222,000 bpd last year, making it its second-largest export market behind China, which took 351,000 bpd, down 18% compared to the prior year.
Since 2019, Venezuela’s oil industry has been under U.S. sanctions designed to curb its oil income.
However, Chevron CVX.N has been allowed since 2022 to ship Venezuelan oil to the U.S. to recoup unpaid dividends from joint venture partners.
‘A NEW START’
During his campaign, Trump called Maduro “a dictator” after he pursued a “maximum pressure” campaign against him during his first term from 2017 to 2021, including imposing harsh sanctions on the South American country and its oil industry.
Former President Joe Biden briefly rolled back some of the Trump-era restrictions following electoral promises from Maduro but then reinstated them, saying the Venezuelan leader had reneged on pledges for a fair democratic vote.
Maduro and his government have always rejected sanctions by the United States and others, saying they are illegitimate measures that amount to an “economic war” designed to cripple Venezuela.
Maduro and his allies have cheered what they say is the country’s resilience despite the measures, though they have historically blamed some economic hardships and shortages on sanctions.
Maduro has said Trump’s re-election offers “a new start” for bilateral relations.
One of Trump’s central campaign promises was the mass deportation of undocumented migrants, many of whom come from Venezuela. Sending them back likely would require cooperation from Venezuelan authorities.
In his announcement about Grenell’s nomination, Trump said he would work in hotspots around the world, including Venezuela and North Korea.Grenell served as Trump’s ambassador to Germany, a special presidential envoy for Serbia and Kosovo peace negotiations, and as acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s 2017-2021 term.
Grenell has had previous interactions with Maduro associates.
Reuters reported that in 2020 Grenell secretly met with a Maduro representative to try to work out the Venezuelan leader’s peaceful exit from power after his 2018 re-election was considered a sham by most Western countries, but no agreement was reached.
