Supreme court clears way for Trump to gut education department
The supreme court has cleared the way for Donald Trump’s administration to resume dismantling the Department of Education, part of his effort to shrink the federal government’s role in education in favor of more state control.
In the latest high court win for Trump, the justices lifted a federal judge’s order that had reinstated nearly 1,400 workers affected by mass layoffs at the department and blocked the administration from transferring key functions to other federal agencies.
A legal challenge is continuing to play out in lower courts. The court’s action came in a brief, unsigned order. Its three liberal justices dissented.
Key events
Closing summary
We are wrapping up our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but we will be back at it early on Tuesday. In the meantime, here are some of the day’s main developments:
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The supreme court cleared the way for the Trump administration to fire 1,400 Department of Education employees, as it continues to dismantle the agency.
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Supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that allowing the education department to be gutted “will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended”.
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Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, thanked Donald Trump for saying that European nations, led by Germany and Norway, could purchase US-made Patriot missile air-defense systems on Ukraine’s behalf, to help defend the country against aerial bombardment by Russia.
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Donald Trump sowed widespread confusion when said that the US “would be doing very severe tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days” to halt Russia’s war on Ukraiune. “Tariffs at about 100%,” Trump added, “you’d call them secondary tariffs, you know what that means.” No one knew what that meant.
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A coalition of mostly Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit today challenging a move by Trump’s administration to withhold about $6.8bn in congressionally approved federal funding for K-12 schools.
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Trump continued his attacks on Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, calling the central banker a “stupid guy” and a “knucklehead” as the president called for interest rates to be lowered to 1% or less.
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As Trump faced blowback from supporters over his administration’s decision to not release more information about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, more attention was being paid to the president’s evasive answer on the subject during a portion of an interview with Fox News last year that was not broadcast.
Ro Khanna a California congressman, said in a speech on the House floor on Monday that he had introduced an amendment to demand the full release of the Epstein files. He called on the speaker’s rules committee to put the matter to a vote “tomorrow”.
“This is a question of whose side are you on. Are you on the side of protecting the rich and powerful,” Khanna said. “Or are you on the side of the people?”
Federal court pauses removal of legal status from Afghans who worked for US military
A US appeals court has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from removing the temporary protective status of thousands of Afghans in the United States, court documents showed on Monday.
An administrative stay on the termination of temporary protected status for Afghans will remain until 21 July, the US court of appeals for the fourth circuit said in an order granting a request from immigration advocacy organization Casa. The group had filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to challenge the terminations of the temporary protected status for Afghans and Cameroonians announced by the Trump administration in April.
In April when the Trump administration terminated temporary deportation protections for thousands of Afghans and Cameroonians, the department had said conditions in Afghanistan and Cameroon no longer merited the protected status.
The US evacuated more than 82,000 Afghans from Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover in 2021, including more than 70,000 who entered the US with temporary “parole”, which allowed legal entry for a period of two years.
News of the temporary pause on the administration’s drive to deport the Afghans was welcomed by Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran who founded the charity #AfghanEvac, “to ensure the United States keeps its promise to our Afghan allies”.
“This pause is not a victory—yet—but it gives us time to organize, advocate, and push for permanent solutions” VanDiver wrote on social media.
VanDiver has been trying to draw attention to the plight of Afghans who helped the US military during its decades in Afghanistan for months, since the Trump administration moved to remove their legal status to remain in the US. Last week, his media tour even brought him to the pro-Trump cable network One America News, where he was interviewed by the former far-right congressman Matt Gaetz, who was Trump’s first nominee to be his second-term attorney general.
Trump was evasive about releasing Epstein files in part of 2024 interview Fox News edited out
As Donald Trump faces intense blowback from supporters over his administration’s decision to not release more information about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, more attention is being paid to the president’s evasive answer on the subject during a portion of an interview with Fox News last year that was not broadcast.
In the interview, which was first broadcast in June 2024 as he campaigned for a second term, Trump was asked by Rachel Campos-Duffy, whose husband is now Trump’s transportation secretary, if he would pledge to declassify government documents related to the September 11 attacks and the assassination of John F Kennedy, both of which have been the subject of elaborate conspiracy theories. Trump said that he would.
“Would you declassify the Epstein files?” Campos-Duffy asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I would,” Trump answered.
In the version of the interview broadcast that week on the Fox & Friends Weekend show, the interview then cut to another question, from the show’s then co-host, now defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
However, as Max Tani reported for Semafor a few days later, Trump’s full answer, which was not broadcast on the network, but streamed later on the radio show of a third Fox host, Will Cain, was far more equivocal.
In that unedited exchange, the presidential candidate, a friend of the disgraced Epstein who was photographed socializing with him on more than one occasion, backed away from the answer moments later.
As Campos-Duffy said “All right” and prepared to move on, Trump added: “I guess I would. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would, or at least I – ”
“Do you think that would restore trust – help restore trust?” Campos-Duffy asked.
“Yeah. I don’t know about Epstein so much as I do the others,” Trump replied. “Certainly about the way he died. It’d be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn’t happen to be working, etc, etc, but yeah, I’d go a long way toward that one. The other stuff I would.”
As the NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik observed on social media on Monday: “These cuts by Fox in Trump interview on Epstein are more substantively consequential than those cited in Trump’s lawsuit against CBS (which basically included Harris’s full answer across 2 shows).”
Senate confirms first federal judge of Trump’s second term
The Senate voted 46-42 to confirm the first federal judge nominated by Donald Trump in his second term, putting Whitney Hermandorfer on the sixth US circuit court of appeals.
The confirmation of Hermandorfer, who worked for Tennessee’s attorney general, fills the first of 49 vacancies on the federal bench inherited by Trump. There are nearly 900 federal judgeships.
During Joe Biden’s term, the Democratic majority in the senate confirmed 235 federal judges, exceeding by one the 234 judges confirmed by the Republican majority senate in Trump’s first term.
Biden, who resisted calls from activists to rebalance the supreme court by expanding the number of justices, was only able to nominate one supreme court justice during his single term. Trump named three of the current justices during his first term, in part due to Republican obstruction in 2016, which prevented Barack Obama’s nominee to the high court, Merrick Garland, from even getting a confirmation vote.
Hermandorfer has defended many of Trump’s policies as director of strategic litigation for Tennessee’s attorney general, including his bid to end birthright citizenship. Democrats and liberal judicial advocacy groups criticized her as extreme on that issue and others, also citing her office’s defense of the state’s strict abortion ban.
Trump’s threat to impose ‘secondary tariffs’ on Russia sows confusion
Donald Trump sowed widespread confusion on Monday when he told reporters in the Oval office that he was so unhappy with Russia, for failing to halt its bloody assault on Ukraine, that the US “would be doing very severe tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days”.
“Tariffs at about 100%,” Trump added, “you’d call them secondary tariffs, you know what that means.”
But no one knew what Trump meant by the term “secondary tariffs” since it seems to have never been used in this context by anyone else.
Most financial journalists, as well as Trump’s commerce secretary and one of his closest allies in the senate, guessed that the president was talking about “secondary sanctions”, which is a mechanism for imposing financial penalties on nations or businesses that do trade with countries under US sanctions.
But a review of news archives for the past two decades suggests that only Trump has ever referred to secondary sanctions as “secondary tariffs”.
Struggling to make sense of the president’s vague threat, the CNBC Washington correspondent Megan Cassella told the financial network’s viewers, “secondary tariffs, we have to wait to see the fine print and the details but ostensibly these would be designed to punish any countries that are still trading with Russia”.
“I will caution, though, we’ve heard Trump talk about secondary sanctions,” Cassella added later in her report, “with regards to Venezuela that haven’t yet been imposed.”
She was referring to an executive order signed by Trump in March that threatened to impose a 25% tariff on imports to the US from countries, like China, India and Turkey, that still import Russian oil, despite US sanctions.
The week after he signed that order, NBC’s Kristen Welker reported that Trump told her that he could impose secondary sanctions on countries that do business with Russia, but he described them as “secondary tariffs”.
“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault, which it might not be, but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on all oil coming out of Russia,” Trump told Welker.
Given that backdrop, a reporter for the White House pool asked Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary: “Did he mean secondary sanctions or secondary tariffs?”
Lutnick seemed not to want to correct the president, but gave a reply that suggested secondary tariffs would be identical to secondary sanctions.
“You can do either one,” Lutnick replied. “To Venezuela, he said, ‘If you do business and you buy Venezuelan oil’, right, ‘I’ll put – your country will pay a tariff,’ right?”
“So it’s economic sanction, not a sanction, right? You could say, ‘I don’t want you to do it’, but you could also make an economic penalty. ‘If I catch you doing it, then you’ll have to pay, so why don’t you police yourself?”
Later on Monday, Trump senate ally, Lindsey Graham, issued a press release hailing Trump’s threat to impose “secondary tariffs on Russia” as identical to his bill, the Sanctioning Russia Act. The legislation introduced by Graham in the senate, and a similar bill in the House, calls for the imposition of sanctions on entities that do business with Russia. But on Monday Graham referred to the bill as a move to “impose secondary tariffs and sanctions on countries that continue to fund Putin’s barbaric war in Ukraine”.
Jessica Glenza
In what Trump administration officials dubbed a “major announcement”, health and agriculture department leaders said the US dairy industry agreed to voluntarily remove synthetic dyes from ice-cream.
The announcement continues the Trump administration’s pattern of voluntary agreements with industry – from health insurers to snack food makers.
“This is relevant to my favorite food, which is ice-cream,” said the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr. “Since we came in about five and a half months ago and started talking about eliminating dyes and other bad chemicals from our food, we’ve had this extraordinary response from our industry.”
Representatives of the dairy industry said that more than 40 ice cream companies agreed not to use synthetic dyes. Kennedy also alluded to the future release of new dietary guidelines, which would “elevate” dairy products, including full-fat dairy, to “where they ought to be in terms of contributing to the health of our children”.
Our colleague Robert Tait has written this profile of Dan Bongino, the FBI deputy director who told friends he was thinking about quitting his job over the Epstein Files.
It is not the first time Bongino has appeared unhappy in his work. In May he cried during a live appearance on Fox & Friends, lamenting that he “gave up everything” to take the FBI role.
Sam Levine
The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, fired the justice department’s top ethics adviser on Friday, the latest in a series of dismissals that comes as Donald Trump and allies have sought retribution against civil servants in the agency.
Joseph Tirrell, who had served as the head of the justice department’s ethics office, since 2023, revealed he had been fired in a post on LinkedIn. He shared Bondi’s letter to him, which misspelled his name and did not give a reason for his termination.
Neither Tirrell nor the justice department returned a request for comment.
“My public service is not over, and my career as a Federal civil servant is not finished,” Tirrell wrote in the post. “I took the oath at 18 as a Midshipman to ‘support and defend the constitution of the United States’. I have taken that oath at least five more times since then. That oath did not come with the caveat that I need only support the constitution when it is easy or convenient.”
Eric Berger
Andrew Cuomo, former New York governor, said on Monday that he will run as an independent in New York City’s mayoral race, after losing in the Democratic primary to Zohran Mamdani.
Many saw Cuomo as the favorite in the primary, but he ultimately lost to Mamdani, a current member of the New York state assembly, by more than 12 points.
Some corporate leaders, moderate Democrats and Republicans have expressed concern about Mamdani’s progressive policy platform and stance on issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Cuomo, who resigned as New York governor in 2021 after facing sexual harassment allegations, also faces competition from Republican Curtis Sliwa, and the current New York mayor, Eric Adams, who also decided to run as an independent following a federal indictment.
Allowing Trump to gut education department ‘will unleash untold harm’, Sotomayor warns in dissent
In an impassioned dissent, supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor warned on Monday that the conservative majority’s decision to allow the Trump administration to move ahead with dismantling the federal department of education, an independent agency that only congress has the power to close, will do lasting damage.
The court’s ruling allows the administration to immediately fire 1,400 employees of the department, overturning a lower court injunction that the mass layoffs should be put on hold until litigation to decide whether or not the administration is legally allowed to close the department continues.
“The relative harms to the parties are also vastly disproportionate. While the Government will, no doubt, suffer pocketbook harms from having to pay employees that it sought to fire as the litigation proceeds,” Sotomayor wrote, “the harm to this Nation’s education system and individual students is of a far greater magnitude.”
“The Department is responsible for providing critical funding and services to millions of students and scores of schools across the country”, she continued. “Lifting the District Court’s injunction will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended. The majority apparentlydeems it more important to free the Government from paying employees it had no right to fire than to avert these very real harms while the litigation continues.”
As our colleague Joseph Gedeon has explained, the department manages a budget of approximately $268bn and employs about 4,400 staff members and its core responsibilities have included distributing federal financial aid for education, collecting data on the US’s schools, identifying major educational issues and enforcing federal education laws prohibiting discrimination and implementing congressional education legislation.
“Investigating civil rights violations is a critical function of the department, carried out by their Office of Civil Rights (OCR)”, the Guardian’s Gloria Oladipo reported in January. “In 2023, OCR received a record 19,201 complaints, according to the department’s annual report, with 45% of complaints relating to sex discrimination. Amid an onslaught of legislation targeting transgender youth last year, the OCR fielded several complaints from LGBTQ+ students against their school districts.”
Eighteen percent of complaints in 2023 dealt with race and national origin discrimination, including bullying and racist harassment from school officials.
Leah Litman, a co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast and the author of “Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, & Bad Vibes”, pointed out the apparent hypocrisy of the court’s conservative majority for having previously ruled that a Democratic president, Joe Biden, did not have the authority to order his education department to cancel student loan debt, but a Republican president, Donald Trump, has the power to gut the whole department with approval from congress.
“Let’s take stock here” Litman wrote on Bluesky, “(Democratic) Presidents, via the Dept of Education, can’t cancel student debt because statutes don’t clearly authorize it. Republican Presidents can cancel/shut down the Dept of Education because, even though only Congress can shut down departments”.
Supreme court clears way for Trump to gut education department
The supreme court has cleared the way for Donald Trump’s administration to resume dismantling the Department of Education, part of his effort to shrink the federal government’s role in education in favor of more state control.
In the latest high court win for Trump, the justices lifted a federal judge’s order that had reinstated nearly 1,400 workers affected by mass layoffs at the department and blocked the administration from transferring key functions to other federal agencies.
A legal challenge is continuing to play out in lower courts. The court’s action came in a brief, unsigned order. Its three liberal justices dissented.
